"Personable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to come out with such a name. Knave in your teeth, Mr. Sheridan! 'tis both a shame and a sin; And the Dean, my master, is an honester man than you and all your kin: He has more goodness in his little finger than you have in your whole body: My master is a personable man, and not a spindle-shank hoddy doddy. And now, whereby I find you would fain make an excuse, Because my master, one day, in anger, call'd you a goose: Which, and I am sure I have been his servant four years since October, And he never call'd ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... He was a grave personable Moor of middle age, and full of the dignity that would seem to be the birthright of his race. His official position gave him a certain knowledge of political developments without affecting his serene outlook upon life. Whether he sat outside the Kasbah of his native ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... got out of the Broadway stage at Bowling Green, followed by Eustace Dolph. Eustace Dolph at twenty-two was no more like his father than his patrician name was like simple and scriptural Jacob. The elder Dolph was a personable man, certainly; a handsome man, even, who looked to be nearer forty than fifty-two; and he was well dressed—perhaps a trifle out of the mode—and carried himself with a certain genial dignity, and with the lightness of a man who has not forgotten that he has been a buck in his time. But Eustace ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... of his villeins, she knew much of the Abbot, and was of many minds concerning him. There was yet time; their colloquy was in secret; but now she tapped with her foot upon the stool, and the Abbot watched her narrowly. He was a tall and personable man, famous for his smile, stout and smooth, his skin soft as a woman's, his robe, his ring, his cross and mere slippers all ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay, they shall have perpetual Succession, and that they and their Successors, by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay, be, and at all Times hereafter shall be, personable and capable in Law to have, purchase, receive, possess, enjoy and retain, Lands, Rents, Privileges, Liberties, Jurisdictions, Franchises, and Hereditaments, of what Kind, Nature or Quality soever they be, to them and their Successors; ...
— Charter and supplemental charter of the Hudson's Bay Company • Hudson's Bay Company
... in spite of Burd's introduction, Mark Stratford proved to be a very personable young man and did not look at all the "sport." Jessie considered that Burd was very probably fooling them about Mark. The young folks were talking like old friends in five minutes. In five minutes more they had piled into the car for ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose
... seeing him of a personable body, and an ingenious aspect howsoever both were clouded under a rustick habit, began somewhat to commiserate his estate, and knocking for a servant had him take in that fellow and give him such victuals as the house for the present afforded, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... this ring were uncommonly strong, for no sooner had Bulbo put it on, but lo and behold, he appeared a personable, agreeable young Prince enough—with a fine complexion, fair hair, rather stout, and with bandy legs; but these were encased in such a beautiful pair of yellow morocco boots that nobody remarked them. And Bulbo's spirits rose up almost ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her, the slightest wayward impulse some lawless centaur came to know it, to exult over it, to make test of it. Her every word, her minutest expression of a natural coquetry was enlarged upon as a sign of weakness, of yielding. Every personable female was the focus of a natural desire, intensified by lonely brooding on ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... French as though it were his native tongue, was an element of sensation which, if adroitly used, could be of great service. It might even defeat Barode Barouche. In the first place, Carnac was young, good-looking, personable, and taking in his manner. Barouche was old, experienced, with hosts of enemies and many friends, but with injurious egotism. An interview was, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... leave their marks. His hair was grey at the sides, there were deep lines in his face, he seemed to her fancy to have shrunken a little during the last few years. He had still the languid, high-bred voice which she had always admired so munch, the same coolness of manner and quiet dignity. He was a personable man, but after all he was a failure. His career, so far as she could judge it, was at an end. She was a fool to imagine, even for a moment, that her whole ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... very like," said Mrs. Garth with affected sincerity. "Ye'll want to see him badly, lass; he's been lang away. Weel, it's nought but nature. He's a very personable young man. There's no sayin' aught against it. Yes, he's of the bettermer sort, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... bridegroom, dressed in a fine purple coat and gold-lace waistcoat, with as much other finery as the Puritan laws and customs would allow him to put on. His hair was cropped close to his head, because Governor Endicott had forbidden any man to wear it below the ears. But he was a very personable young man; and so thought the bridemaids ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... personable figure that suffered Lanyard's critical inspection. And an emergency is an emergency. Those readily serviceable clothes were of more value than the most superbly tailored garments that could possibly have been ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... admit him, Cozen, he's rich and personable, very good humour'd, and no Fool: His aspiring at me does indeed show a prodigious stock of Vanity; but 'tis a failing, People o'the best Sense are liable to, and I had rather prove a Man too ambitious than to have no spirit ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... became very uncomfortable. Simple souls, they could not understand how a personable youth and a charming girl should sit opposite each other with such wooden faces. Their feeling was that at quarters so close extra sociability was demanded, and the utter lack of it caused them to move uneasily in their ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Gargantua. Yea, said the monk, and to make shirts and smocks. Therefore was it ordained that into this religious order should be admitted no women that were not fair, well-featured, and of a sweet disposition; nor men that were not comely, personable, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... "Really a very personable young man," Mr. Fentolin remarked, studying him through his eyeglass. "Is it my fancy, I wonder, as an observant person, or is he just a little—just a little taken with you, Esther? A pity if it ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as to form or feature, there is every reason to suppose that the event, very near at hand, which altered every prospect in life, was influenced in degree, at least, by considerations slighted in later years, but having full weight with both. That Thomas Dudley was a "very personable man," we know, and there are hints that his daughter resembled him, though it was against the spirit of the time to record mere accidents of coloring or shape. But Anne's future husband was a strikingly ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... embraced Norman's steady opinion that George was a very wise man. If Norman was unconscious how much he contributed to these compositions, he knew far less how much was Flora's. In his ardour, he crammed them both, and conducted George when Flora could not be at his side. George himself was a personable man, wrote a good bold hand, would do as he was desired, and was not easily put out of countenance; he seldom committed himself by talking; and when a speech was required, was brief, and to the purpose. He made a very good figure, and in the glory of victory, Ethel herself began to grow ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... three or four spun off and clattered to the stones. The sherbet-seller called on all the saints, and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket, tossed him a ducat by mistake for a sequin. The fellow's eyes shot out of their orbits, and just then a personable-looking young man who had observed the transaction stepped up to Tony ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... and looking rather foolish. His Scotch head had disapproved of what his good heart, of no nationality, had decided with regard to Bluebell. I am not sure now, though, that he did not think the money might be worse risked than in taking this personable lassie ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... last read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of American beginnings was made when Cromwell was forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom-house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice now on the site of whatever building then stood there, and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace, whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I did, first, or up at it from London ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... song, he had put on a blue frock-coat, dispensing with an overcoat, after sending Adolf down three times to make sure that there was not the least suspicion of east in the wind; and the frock-coat was buttoned so tightly around his personable form, that, if the buttons did not shine, they might pardonably have done so. Majestic on the pavement he fitted on a pair of dog-skin gloves; with his large bell-shaped top hat, and his great stature ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... later what the trouble was. The man who'd tried so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross's fiance. She had met this man during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks before her ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... special corps of servants for the performance of a conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred above women for services that bring them obtrusively into view. Men, especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and other menials should be, are obviously more powerful and more expensive than women. They are better fitted for this work, as showing a larger waste of time and of human energy. Hence it comes about that in the economy of the leisure class the busy housewife ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... looked up annoyed. Some one else, no doubt, to protest against the exclusion of Jesson's story. Rice was standing upon the threshold, and behind him a younger man, tall, with clustering hair and brilliant eyes, cheeks on which the tan still lingered, ill-clad but personable. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... Sofia at once took note of Lanyard, with wonder, some misgivings, and a hint of admiration. For he was not only a personable person in those days, with a suggestion of devil-may-care in his air that measurably lifted the curse of his superficial foppishness, but he was putting a spoke in Prince Victor's wheel. And whosoever did that, by chance, out of sheer voluptuousness, or with malice ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... seemed thick and plenteous, but this effect was given by the coarseness of the hairs, not by their number; the moustache was long and exiguous. His blue eyes were never still, and they always avoided any prolonged encounter with other eyes. He was a personable specimen of the clever and successful manufacturer. His clothes were well cut, the necktie of a discreet smartness. His grandfather had begun life as a working potter; nevertheless John Stanway spoke easily and correctly in a refined variety of the broad Five ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... of five hundred pounds for him, and his brother offered to take him into his firm as partner; but O'Mooney preferred, he said, going to try, or rather to make, his fortune in England, as he did not doubt but he should by marriage, being, as he did not scruple to acknowledge, a personable, clever-looking man, and a great favourite ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... man, it is worth while to ask whether his father and mother were of one aspiration. Might not the fact that their marriage did not go deep enough, that father and mother were not of one mind, only of one body, serve to account for the rude results of some marriages of personable people? At the same time we must not forget the endless and unfathomable perpetuations of ancestry. But however these things may be, those two men, brothers born, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... young, according to the severe standards of that time of early marriages and correspondingly early "old-maidenhood," but so much the better, as she was therefore of suitable age for the elderly though spruce and prosperous widower. She was, withal, a decidedly personable woman with the elegant manners and conversation of the inner circles of the exclusive, stately society in which she had been nurtured—just the woman, the fair prophetesses said, to rule over John Allan (for everybody knew that a man who ruled his first wife ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... doubt it was this talent of his which first sowed the seeds of love in the heart of Millicent Boyd. Women are essentially hero-worshippers, and when a warm-hearted girl like Millicent has heard a personable young man imitating a bulldog and a Pekingese to the applause of a crowded drawing-room, and has been able to detect the exact point at which the Pekingese leaves off and the bulldog begins, she can never feel quite ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... personable man, apparently about five-and-thirty years old: he wore a little powder in his hair, black silk stockings, and knee-breeches. In this I consider Doctor Plausible was right; the above look much more scientific than Wellington trousers; and much depends upon the exterior. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... They attended promptly, three personable young men in irreproachable afternoon dress, overjoyed to find the Cousin as pretty as her voice was musical, and as entertaining as her skillful jolly of the Boston Lamb had led them to expect. In ten minutes the flock was hers to command. The Philadelphia ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... the portraits by a hat. We must think of Raleigh at this time as a tall, somewhat bony man, about six feet high, with dark hair and a high colour, a facial expression of great brightness and alertness, personable from the virile force of his figure, and illustrating these attractions by a splendid taste in dress. His clothes were at all times noticeably gorgeous; and to the end of his life he was commonly bedizened with precious stones to his very shoes. When he was arrested in 1603 he was carrying ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... himself as dressed. Barefoot, bare-chested, radiant and personable against the shadowy woods, ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the buzzing little audience gathered, boys climbed up telegraph poles with the stickers "We Want Hanna," and a small, pale-faced man with a protruding jaw was the center of a political argument for Hanna. At last the brake arrived. The major, a tall, personable man, stood up in the cart. But all the good old Ulster rallying cries he used, ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... us set foot within. I have never seen anywhere, either on benefit or farewell night, a cordiality to be compared with that which presided over our own theatre in Tiverton Hall. Mr. Van Rensellaer Wilde himself stood within the doorway, to greet us as we came; a personable man, with the smooth, individual face of his profession, a moist and beery eye, a catholic smile, tolerant enough to include the just and the unjust, a rusty, old-fashioned stock, and the very ancientest brown Prince Albert coat still in reputable existence,—a strange historical epitome of brushings ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... their kind, they always flew away, and whose mere presence in the shop sufficed to make every bird ruffle himself and to chirp angrily in his cage. Yet Herr Strauss was most agreeable in his manners, and was a very personable young man. As for his riches, they spoke for themselves in his fine attire and in his fine gold watch and chain; and he also spoke for them, making frequent allusions to his comfortable present position in the world as his father's partner, and to his ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier |
