"Tendril" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... culmination of Renaissance art, seems due to the impulse of Michael Angelo, and, through him, to the example of Signorelli. From the celestial horseman and bounding avenging angels of Raphael's Heliodorus, to the St. Sebastian of Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half concealing ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... thing small; and heaped with thick clusters of tendril curls, half overhanging the brows and delicate ears, it somehow reminded you of a classic vase, piled up ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... driven away an encircling collection of sand-dwelling scavengers, and what he was on his knees studying intently was an almost clean-picked skeleton of one of his own race. But there was something odd—Dalgard brushed aside a tendril of weed which cut his line of vision and so ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... had been pointed out, and the boatmen paused with their oars in the air; the image of a face on whose dark cheek the rose was burning, in whose dark eye a veiled lustre was shining, around whose creamy brow the raven hair escaped in countless tendril-like ringlets, and whose smile, as she seemed to speak to some one while she stood in the low sunset light, had a radiance of its own. As Lilian looked upon this dazzling picture, backed by the golden and rosy sky, the golden and rosy waters, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... admitted to the big Infirmary in Piccadilly. There he had lain for some six or eight weeks now, toiling no more, fretting no more, living on his mother's and Dora's visits, and quietly loosening one life-tendril after another. During all this time Dora had thought of him, prayed for him, taught ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of an immediate ordeal was the need of saying good-bye to Dorothy, and neither of them would fail to understand that it might be a last good-bye. There was no room for equivocation in this crisis, and as he gazed up into the full and peaceful shade over his head, a flood of little memories, bound tendril-like by sounds, sights, and fragrances to his heart, swept ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... after the spirit.' The beginning, then, of all true goodness is to be sought in receiving into our corrupt natures the uncorrupted germs of the higher life, and it is only in the measure in which that Spirit of God moves in our spirits and, like the sap in the vine, permeates every branch and tendril, that fruit to eternal life will grow. Christian graces are the products of the indwelling divine life, and nothing else will succeed in producing them. All the preachings of moralists and all the struggles after self-improvement are reduced ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... A single tendril shot up through the sand, and then another. Within seconds, a short, thick tree was growing in the Arena, sending out more roots and tendrils, and pulling all flesh, living or dead, into five small feeding-mouths which circled the base of the trunk. This was ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... a tendril of the vine that touched his cheek gently? He started, his face toward the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... toward me, a fluttering white flame in the dimness of the tree-room. A tendril flicked out from among her petals, wrapped itself about my arm. It felt cool, gentle as a woman's hand. I felt ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... coverture For dainty toying. Cupid, empire-sure, Flutter'd and laugh'd, and oft-times through the throng Made a delighted way. Then dance, and song, 940 And garlanding grew wild; and pleasure reign'd. In harmless tendril they each other chain'd, And strove who should be smother'd deepest ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... Saviour once went up Vesuvius and stood in mute astonishment at the beautiful landscape surrounding the Bay of Naples, He also wept from grief over this home of sin and vanity; and where His tears moistened the ground there grew up a tendril which has not its like ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... pair of spectacles with round glasses for all the world like the two wheels of a miniature silver chariot, and proceeded to read the letter, holding it out at the full stretch of his arm. The windows giving on the garden stood open, and a tendril of wild vine hung down on to the desk at the foot of a crucifix of old ivory, while a light breeze set the papers on it fluttering ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... mighty impulse the vines took deep hold of the treasure in the storehouse beneath, spending it prodigally for sap to be poured into these waiting goblets of emerald and pearl. All the hoarded strength of leaf and tendril was caught up by the current, and swept blindly onward to its ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... fireside. She expended much art and ingenuity in piling the wood high on the fire-dogs, grasping the heavy tongs in both hands and leaning her head slightly back to avoid the sparks. Her hands were small and very supple, with that tendril-like flexibility, so to speak, of a Daphne at the very first onset of the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... talked. He had the air of a monarch displaying his kingdom. On one side was a bit of moss worthy of the closest attention; on another, a vine that carried allurement in every tendril. Here was a flower that was like a story for interest, and there was a bush that bore a secret worth the telling. Even Simeon Holly glowed into a semblance of life when David had unerringly picked out and called by name the spruce, and fir, ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... the reason to tell, Lord King," she said, "it is because I love him." As he sat regarding her, she put out her hand and played with a tendril of wild grapevine that hung from the tree beside her, her eyes following her fingers. "I do not know why I should be ashamed of the state of my feelings. I should not be able to stand alive before you if he had not been ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... ornamental design, being one of the most subtle characteristics of the work of the good periods. We take, for instance, a bar of ornament between two written columns of an early fourteenth century MS., and at the first glance we suppose it to be quite monotonous all the way up, composed of a winding tendril, with alternately a blue leaf and a scarlet bud. Presently, however, we see that, in order to observe the law of principality, there is one large scarlet leaf instead of a bud, nearly half-way up, which forms a center to the whole rod; and when we begin ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... sometimes, and then he liberated her and they laughed. A trailing bough of deadly nightshade was hanging from the broken head of an old ash stump, whose wasted feet were overgrown by two scarlet-tipped toadstools, and she plucked a long tendril of it and wound it about her head, tipping her sun-bonnet back, and letting the red berries droop over her dark hair to her face. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... to Aldous he began worming his long, lean body ahead of them. An instant Joanne's face was very close to Aldous', so close that he felt her breath, and a tendril of her hair touched his lips. In that instant her eyes looked into his steadily, and he felt rush over him a sudden shame. If she was seeking and expecting, it was to him more than ever that she was now looking for protection. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... through our affections, and here we are confronted with a real and crucial difficulty. Are we to hold ourselves in, to check the impulses of affection, to use self-restraint, not multiply intimacies, not extend sympathies? One sees every now and then lives which have entwined themselves with every tendril of passion and love and companionship and service round some one personality, and have then been bereaved, with the result that the whole life has been palsied and struck into desolation by the loss. I am thinking ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hearts stirred and quickened with that incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink cheek on which she had been sleeping. Somehow that inconsequent small tendril roused in Billy a thrill of absurd tenderness and delight.... She was so very small and childish, sitting there ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... in a ragged cleft of the desert, with shelving rock and giant bowlder on every side, without a sign of leaf, or sprig of grass, or tendril of tiny creeping plant, a little party of haggard, hunted men lay in hiding and in the silence of exhaustion and despond, awaiting the inevitable. Bulging outward overhead, like the counter of some huge battleship, a great mass of solid ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... evening sunlight like a sheet of molten gold between the dark blue mountains. There, where Hannibal defeated Flaminius, the grape vines clung to each other with the friendly grasp of their green tendril fingers; while, by the wayside, lovely half-naked children were watching a herd of coal-black swine under the blossoms of fragrant laurel. Could we rightly describe this picturesque scene, our readers would exclaim, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... flowers with a hammer. To apply your proverbs to yourself would be to realise this proverb of ours. Can you not let me pet and spoil my little flower-bird at least till I have tamed her, and trust me to chastise her as soon as she shall give reason—if I can find a tendril or flower-stem light enough for ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... common significance. Their renewal at this day seemed to disturb the organist as she turned the bouquet slowly in her hand and perceived how the old arrangement had been adhered to, from passion-flower to camellia, whitest white lily, and most delicate of roses; moss and vine-tendril, jessamine, heliotrope, violet, ivy: it was a work of Art consummating that of Nature, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... again came to mind the comparison of the entire colony or army with a single organism; and now the home, the nesting swarm, the focus of central control, seemed like the body of this strange amorphous organism—housing the spirit of the army. One thinks of a column of foragers as a tendril with only the tip sensitive and growing and moving, while the corpuscle-like individual ants are driven in the current of blind instinct to and fro, on their chemical errands. And then this whole theory, this most vivid ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... innocent of the means of grappling, succeeds in overtopping tall trees and smothering them with a mass of interwoven leafage. Each of its narrow leaves ends in a spiral tendril, sensitive but tough, which entwines itself about other leaves and twigs. Feeling their respective ways, the tender tips of leaves of the one family touch and twist, and the grasp is for life. Though not of such extravagant character ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... there, and at last, perhaps, coming out at the top, and overhanging the edge with a canopy of green leaves and pretty white flowers. A very different sort of life from yours, with a gardener always after you, trimming you in one place, fastening up a stray tendril in another, and fidgeting you all along—a sort of perpetual 'mustn't go here'—'mustn't go there.' Poor thing! I quite feel for you! Still I must say you make me smile; for you look so proud and self-conscious of beauty all the time, that one would think you did not ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... (Nepentheae) is found in the warmer parts of the old world, and some of them are occasionally cultivated in greenhouses. In these the pitchers are borne at the tips of the leaves attached to a long tendril. ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... and what she felt and thought she hardly knew herself. A certain link was to be snapped asunder, which, like some growing tendril, had spread itself over and seemed to unite ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... genus of perennial old world tendril-bearing vines (family Cucurbitaceae) having large leaves, small flowers, and red or black fruit; Dried root of a bryony (Bryonia alba or B. dioica) used ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... frowned; Idly, for instant upon him my bright-speared chivalry sallied, Smote and far into the North swept him discomfited forth, Therefore, from root unto hole, from hole into burgeoning branches, Tendril and tassel and cup now let the ichor leap up: Therefore, with flowering drift and with fluttering bloom avalanches, Snowdrop and silver thorn laugh baffled winter to scorn; Primrose, daffodil, cowslip, shine back to my shimmering sandals, Hyacinth host, o'er the green flash your cerulean sheen, ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... do not know anything about our purpose in regard to them. They merely seek to follow the law of Nature to propagate themselves, first by seeds which, strictly speaking, are the fruit, and then by runners. These slender, tendril-like growths begin to appear early in summer, and if left unchecked will mat the ground about the parent with young plants by late autumn. If we wish plants, let them grow by all means; but if fruit is our object, why should we let them grow? "Because ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... thorns,' because it is surrounded on all sides by wooded hills. [64] There are Bagri Jats and Bagri Rajputs, many of whom are now highly respectable landholders. Bawaria or Baori is derived from banwar, a creeper, or the tendril of a vine, and hence a noose made originally from some fibrous plant and used for trapping animals, this being one of the primary occupations of the tribe. [65] The term Badhak signifies a hunter or fowler, hence a robber or murderer (Platts). The Bagris and Bawarias are sometimes ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... matter of course, with the possession of all the female virtues, intensified to such a degree that they were covered with burning blushes most of the time. Languor, hysteria and general debility were regarded as the outward indications of a sweet and gentle character. Woman was a tendril clinging to the strong oak of masculinity. Modesty was her cardinal virtue. One is, of course, entitled to speculate on the probable contemporary causes for the seeming overemphasis placed on this admirable characteristic. Perhaps feminine honesty was so rare as to be at ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... lie—the lovelier for that tendril of sunny brown hair upon it. How it falls and rises! Which is the hair? which ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... found that this procedure was carrying him magically up the stairs. The Colonel, like a drowning man, clutched feebly for the straw of the great stair-rail—and missed it. He would have gone under, but that Aaron's hand gripped his arm. So, orientating once more like a fragile tendril, he reached again for the banister rail, and got it. After which, lifting his feet as if they were little packets of sand tied to his trouser buttons, he manipulated his way upwards. Aaron was in that pleasant state when he saw what everybody else was ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped—not a sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if there ever was one. We should have seen the yard before they had taken it in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the weeds and the brambles—well, look at it now. We ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... a species of palm, found in most parts of the East and West Indies. The trunk is large, straight, and lofty, tapering insensibly to the top, whence the fruit hangs in bunches united by a tendril, not unlike the twig of a vine, but stronger. The flowers are yellow, resembling those of the chesnut. As it produces new bunches every month, there are always some quite ripe, some green, some just beginning to button, and others in full flower. The fruit is three-lobed and of a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... lacunae, and spaces of shadow. And a peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,—as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... ventured to put forth a tender green tendril and clasp her kind friend's helping hand, which, if rough and thorny, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... heart like the tendril accustomed to cling, Let it grow where it will cannot flourish alone, But must lean to the nearest, loveliest thing It can twine itself round, and ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... delicate tendril of the mind, and the most fascinating gift which nature can give us. The most precious associations of the human heart cluster around the word, and we love to remember those who have sorrowed with us in sorrow, and rejoiced ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... face, too, is visible—her countenance careless and pensive, and musing and mirthful, and mocking and tender. Not fearing the dew, she has not covered her head; her curls are free—they veil her neck and caress her shoulder with their tendril rings. An ornament of gold gleams through the half-closed folds of the scarf she has wrapped across her bust, and a large bright gem glitters on the white hand which confines it. Yes, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... bring For her the unnam'd progeny of spring; 565 Attendant Nymphs her dulcet mandates hear, And nurse in fostering arms the tender year, Plant the young bulb, inhume the living seed, Prop the weak stem, the erring tendril lead; Or fan in glass-built fanes the stranger flowers 570 With milder gales, and steep with warmer showers. Delighted Thames through tropic umbrage glides, And flowers antarctic, bending o'er his tides; Drinks the new tints, the sweets ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more strictly geometrical. The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal. My own belief is that the trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Sweet music to the magic of the scene: The little crimson-breasted Nonpareil Was there, his tiny feet scarce bending down The silken tendril that he lighted on To pour his love notes; and in russet coat, Most homely, like true genius bursting forth In spite of adverse fortune, a full choir Within himself, the merry Mock Bird sate, Filling the air with melody; and at times, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... now to suffer terribly from hunger. His stomach, less resigned than he was, rebelled, and he was obliged to fasten a tendril of wild-vine tightly about his waist. Fortunately, he could quench his thirst at any moment, and, in recalling the sufferings he had undergone in the desert, he experienced comparative relief in his exemption from that ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... him, and hiding my face in Celestino's tendril-like curls, I replied, "Yes, but I wonder whether he would have been hungry enough to eat crumbs that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... goodness so dreary and cold, His tendril-like will lost its poor little hold On the new better life he was longing to reach, And slipped back to the dust. Oh! to love, not to preach. Is a woman's true method of helping mankind. The sinner is won through his heart, not his ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to be cut." She stopped and unfastened a long tendril of intertwined honeysuckle and bridal-wreath which had caught her hair. "Everything ought to ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... to steer. The blazing of the resinous fuel lights up the forest for long distances in every direction, and, as may easily be imagined, the effect is wonderfully beautiful. When the fire blazes high the scene is like an illuminated lacework of tree-trunks, vines, leaves, and twigs, the smallest tendril shining out bright and distinct; while through it all the river gleams like a band of glittering silver. Then, as the pine-knots gradually burn out, the illumination fades and fades away until we think the whole glorious scene is about to melt into nothing, when more ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket to let me see it: she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine-leaves, tied around with a tendril: on opening it, I saw an S. marked in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various |
