"Bookish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of August, 1869. The family moved to Illinois the next year. His father was a lawyer, and the child had access to plenty of good books, which he read eagerly. In spite of his preoccupation with the seamy side of human nature, he is in reality a bookish poet, and most of his work—though not the best part of it—smells of the lamp. Fortunately for him he was brought up on the Bible, for even those who attack the Old Book are glad to be able to tip their weapons with biblical language. ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... house-organ called The Book Buyer, and, given a chance to help in this, Bok felt he was getting back into the periodical field, especially since, under Mr. Doubleday's guidance, the little monthly soon developed into a literary magazine of very respectable size and generally bookish contents. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... chuckle, sly as you, At gods that now I truckle to, To doubt the New Republic's bent, And jeer each bookish Supplement. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of it. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year were immature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at the passing of an Education Act. Not even an organisation for training those teachers comes to anything like satisfactory working ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... Cassio, "an arithmetician," But by "the bookish theoric"[333] it appears, If 't is summed up with feminine precision, That, adding to the account his Highness' years, The fair Sultana erred from inanition; For, were the Sultan just to all his dears, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... course you could. All fear is bookish talk Cooked up by writers out of literature, To give the shudder to dyspeptic girls. Dying is easy. Come along, my friend! A glass of port shall cure us of such fears; Moments like this ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... some things that would have been better away; but it is a book that might have stood its ground, even if it had stood alone, as containing unusually truthful observation of a sort of life between the middle class and the low, which, having few attractions for bookish observers, was quite unhackneyed ground. It had otherwise also the very special merit of being in no respect bookish or commonplace in its descriptions of the old city with which its writer was so familiar. It was a picture of every-day London at ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... was Kenyon in this line that he won for himself the title of "The Feeder of Lions." Now, John Kenyon—rich, idle, bookish and generous—saw in the magazines certain fine little poems by one Elizabeth Barrett. He also ascertained that she had published several books. Mr. Kenyon bought one of these volumes and sent it by a messenger with a little note to Miss Barrett telling ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... no children, I thought it only fair to agree. Cecil interested me very much at first, and he adored me, but I had a very dreary time with him. You know I'm not a bit literary, and he was so "precious" and bookish, he bored me to death. I was glad to leave him for Jack, my present husband, but Cecil's grief at parting was so frightful I shall never forget it, and when he died soon after I felt like ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... wearers thereof seemed to make any impression on Doctor John. Mrs. Riddell said that he was a born old bachelor; I suppose she based her opinion on the fact that Doctor John was always a quiet, bookish fellow, who didn't care a button for society, and had never been guilty of a flirtation in his life. I knew Doctor John's heart far better than Martha Riddell could know anybody's; and I knew there was ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... shouldn't wonder in the least! He's always seemed a belted earl sort of person, for all his other-worldly ways, hasn't he?" It was a relief to talk of him lightly and easily like this. "Or a Squire, at any rate! Something picturesque,—something story bookish!" ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... is largely determined by the man's habit of mind, the nature of his subject, and the character of his audience. Students often err in one of two directions, either by being too bookish in language or by allowing the other extreme of looseness, weak colloquialism in words, and formless monotony of sentence, with the endless repetition of the connective "and." Language should be fresh, vital, varied. It should ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... and poetry of this period there is lacking the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought, which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not without its attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished writer of {136} the time lent his pen ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of Thrace. His eyes to be picket out with pinnes for his so deadly belying of them, or worse handled if worse could be deuised. But will ye see how God raised a revenger for the silly innocent women, for about the same ryming age came an honest civill Courtier somewhat bookish, and wrate these verses against the whole rable of Monkes. O Monachi vestri stomachi sunt amphor a Bacchi Vos estos ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... spending much of his time that way to the neglect of his business. At one time, there came a man into the shop, and brought a book with him, and said to him, 'Here is a book for you, keep this till I call for it again;' and so went away. Mr. Sharp, after his wonted bookish manner, was eagerly affected to look into that book, and read it, which he did: but, as he read in it, he was seized on by a strange kind of horror, both of body and mind, the hair of his head standing up; and, finding these effects several times, he acquainted ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the seventh year after the reconciliation between the brothers, and Richard Waverley himself, who, after this event, resided more constantly in London, was too much interested in his own plans of wealth and ambition to notice more respecting Edward than that he was of a very bookish turn, and probably destined to be a bishop. If he could have discovered and analysed his son's waking dreams, he would have formed a very ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... after the departure of Flynn was tacitly ignored by both—was more Spanish than American. An early residence in Lower California, marriage with a rich Mexican widow, whose dying childless left him sole heir, and some strange restraining idiosyncrasy of temperament had quite denationalized him. A bookish recluse, somewhat superfastidious towards his own countrymen, the more Clarence knew him the more singular appeared his acquaintance with Flynn; but as he did not exhibit more communicativeness on this point than upon their ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... reading are looked upon to be the great helps of the understanding, and instruments of knowledge, as it must be allowed that they are; and yet I beg leave to question whether these do not prove a hindrance to many, and keep several bookish men from attaining to solid and true knowledge". Here, again, is his stern way of dealing with any author:—"To fix in the mind the clear and distinct idea of the question stripped of words; and so likewise, in the train ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... known. They also write reviews and literary articles, though the doyen in that department is Mr. James Smith, to whom the Argus pays a retaining fee of L500 a year. Art criticism is also in Mr. Smith's hands; and although all his work is essentially bookish and wanting in originality, he thoroughly understands his subjects, and his style ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Raven. "Old Crow was rather a bookish chap, I fancy, in a conventional way. I've got some of his stuff up in the hut: rather academic, the kind daguerreotyped young men with high stocks used to study by one candle. What do you suspect—a will, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... condescending but not unfriendly tone with Valence, his rough home-truths with the parasitical courtiers, and his frank confidence with Melchior, are admirably discriminated. Melchior himself, little as he speaks, is a fine sketch of the contemplative, bookish man who finds no more congenial companion and study than a successful man of action. His attitude of detachment, a mere spectator in the background, is well in keeping with the calm and thoughtful character of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... Sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipresence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer "bookish"—but practical, social, propagandist. It is full of life—but it is a dispersive, analytic, erratic form of vitality. It has a most fastidious taste in form—but it often flings the critical spirit aside in its passion for doing, in its ardour to convince and ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... me back in the Hall, and I should be as ignorant and as coarse as I am out here. A labourer is all I am and all I am fit to be. I once had a rather bookish ambition, you know, but that is over—I wanted to read Greek and translate 'The Iliad' and all that—and yet to-day I doubt if I could write a decent letter to save my soul. It's partly my fault, of course, but you can't know you could ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion—or political either for the matter of that!—so that finally I gave up fiction and resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of literature, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the same house with us. This gentleman, whose name was Bath, was of the rank of a major, and had so much singularity in his character, that, perhaps, you never heard of any like him. He was far from having any of those bookish qualifications which had before caused my Amelia's disquiet. It is true, his discourse generally turned on matters of no feminine kind; war and martial exploits being the ordinary topics of his conversation: however, as he had a sister ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... attempted in 'The Robbers' to depict human beings before he had seen any.[28] Aside from his acquaintance with Franziska von Hohenheim, and an occasional nearer view of the coy maidens of the ecole des demoiselles, the female sex and the grand passion were for him only bookish mysteries. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Paul stood motionless quite a minute after she had vanished, nor did he awaken from his reverie, until aroused by an appeal from Captain Truck, to sustain him, in some of his matter-of-fact opinions concerning England, against the visionary and bookish notions of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... my earliest conscious years, to have lived in a world of books; and yet my home was by no means "bookish." I was trained by people who had not read much, but had read thoroughly; who regarded good literature with unfeigned admiration; and who, though they would never have dreamt of forcing or cramming, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... it would be bigger than this,' Yule muttered, as he opened the volume in a way peculiar to bookish men. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... word into her talk now and then, and there is still a subtle foreign flavor or fragrance about even her exactest English—and long may this abide! for it has for me a charm that is very pleasant. Sometimes her English is daintily prim and bookish and captivating. She has a child's sweet tooth, but for her health's sake I try to keep its inspirations under cheek. She is obedient—as is proper for a titled and recognized military personage, which she is—but the chain presses sometimes. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of; undeceived. proficient with, versed with, read with, forward with, strong with, at home in; conversant with, familiar with. erudite, instructed, leaned, lettered, educated; well conned, well informed, well read, well grounded, well educated; enlightened, shrewd, savant, blue, bookish, scholastic, solid, profound, deep-read, book- learned; accomplished &c (skillful) 698; omniscient; self-taught. known &c. v.; ascertained, well-known, recognized, received, notorious, noted; proverbial; familiar, familiar as household ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the characters of Grandmother Garland and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection. Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts and ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... years that carried off his youth. The moment marked another tremendous epoch, for he was done with school. Now for all the years to come he could hear the bell sound its warning and feel no qualm; never again need sit confined in a stuffy room, breathing chalk dust, and compel his errant mind to bookish abstractions. He had graduated from the Newbern High School, respectably if not with distinguished honour, and the superintendent had said, in conferring his rolled and neatly tied diploma, that he was facing the battle of ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... systematically traducing our order of country gentlemen. His picture of Squire Western is not only a malicious, but also an incongruous libel. The squire's ordinary language is impossible, being alternately bookish and absurdly rustic. In reality, the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order in general—to peasants even more than to gentlemen—in our English plays and novels, is a childish and fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real breathing life; nowhere intelligible; ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sight of a binding or two as it lay open in Tithefields that made me curious to see it open again. He was only beginning to collect when we had parted at school, if 'collect' is not too sacred a word: beginning to buy more truly expresses that first glutting of the bookish hunger, which, like the natural appetite, never passes in some beyond the primary utilitarian stage of 'eating to live,' otherwise 'buying to read.' Three years, however, works miracles of refinement in any hunger that is at all capable of culture; and it was evident, when Narcissus ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... excursions to Italy, the Highlands, or the south of France, as one picture or another claimed their attention. Hildegarde was enjoying herself immensely, and did the honours with ardour, delighted to find that the "college girl" knew all about the things she loved, without being in the least bookish or prosy. ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... they have to do with Prince Caraccioli or his treason, sir? The old chap looks bookish; but he is not a priest; and, as to the girl, she is trim-built enough; I fancy the face is no great matter, however, or she would not take so much pains to ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... now given us a pleasant book, full of quaint anecdote, and of a lively bookish talk. There is a quiet humour in it which is very taking, and there is a curious knowledge of books which ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... sense. It is natural, limpid, free from all rhetorical flourishes and wordiness, placing the right word in the right place. Xenophon, Caesar, Goethe, come to mind in reading Moltke's descriptions, historical expositions, reflections. Bookish terms and unvisual metaphors, which occur in the preceding pamphlets, though rarely enough, are entirely absent. The tendency toward military brevity and precision is everywhere obvious. The omission of the cumbersome auxiliary, wherever permissible, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the use of it is known to every one; and even the lazy monks who take it, are no longer splenetic. In the west of England, the rocks are stripped of it with diligence; and every old woman tells you how charming that leaf is for bookish men: in Russia they use a plant of this kind in their malt liquor: it came into fashion there for the cure of this disease; which from its constant use is scarce known any longer; and they suppose 'tis added to ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... and a trifle bookish, like that of a man speaking a language he has learned in a school, which in truth was the case with the Onondaga. Like the celebrated Thayendanegea, the Mohawk, otherwise known as Joseph Brant, he had been sent to a white school and he had learned the English of the grammarian. ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... talks about books. Mrs. Wilmot has, I think, read everything that has been written, also she is very keen about poetry and has my gift—or is it a vice?—of being able to say great pieces by heart, so between us G. is sometimes just a little bored. You see, G. hasn't been brought up in a bookish atmosphere and that makes such a difference. The other night she was brushing her hair, unusually silent and evidently thinking deeply. At last she looked up at me in my bunk, with the brush in her hand and all her hair swept over one shoulder, and said in the most puzzled way, "What was that ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... tea—you must tell me if you like it weak, dear Lady Harriet, and I shall remember the next time you come. Yes, you find me all alone this afternoon. My eldest daughter, Edna, has gone to a lecture at her Mutual Improvement Society, on a German Philosopher called Nitchy, or some such name. She's so bookish and well-read, takes such an interest in all the latest movements—runs up to town for matinees of intellectual dramas—quite the modern type of girl. But not a blue-stocking—she's joined a Tango Class lately, and dances most beautifully, ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... man-hater produced upon George Clayton a far different effect from what Arabella had intended, and he often found himself thinking of the soft blue eyes of Mildred Graham. Unlike some men, there was nothing terrible to him in a bookish woman, and he might, perhaps, have sought another interview with Mildred, but for a circumstance which threw her entirely ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... some of his expeditions we see that he was a clear observer and an accurate reporter; far from bookish, but a careful penman, and conscious of the obligation laid upon him to acquire at least the minimum of polite knowledge which was expected of a country gentleman such ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Colden, it is true, was not a faultless or steadfast character. No gross or enormous vices were ascribed to him. His habits, as far as appearances enabled one to judge, were temperate and chaste. He was contemplative and bookish, and was vaguely described as being somewhat ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... bookish friend, "you should be thankful you did not find him with his nose in 'The Inside of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... was bookish, and much intent upon the fulfilling his ministry, yet he turned his thoughts to marriage, and did espouse a virtuous and excellent person Mrs. Barbara Simpson, daughter to Mr. James Simpson a minister in Ireland. ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... The "bookish theorick" who, with all the facts before him, revels in the fond delights of retrospective prophecy, will never understand how Lee succeeded in this enterprise, except by sheer good luck. Only those who themselves have groped their perilous way through the dense, distorting fog ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... the actual condition of the people, how they lived, and what they were thinking about, interested him deeply. He spoke to everybody he met, in the train, in the steamboat, or in hotels, in fluent if rather "bookish" German, in correct but somewhat halting French, or, if it was a Roman Catholic priest he had to deal with, in sonorous Latin. And, without anything approaching cant or officiousness, he always tried to bring the conversation ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... heard every word of the conversation, and her heart had warmed to the boy who spoke so glowingly of his uncle's work. Knight Judson was a manly young fellow, she concluded, the right sort to be among girls; the best of companions for the frail, bookish Eastern lad. ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... England, says Lowell, were the "two great distributing centers of the English race." The men who colonized the country between the Capes of Virginia were not drawn, to any large extent, from the literary or bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first settlers were gentlemen—too many, Captain Smith thought, for the good of the plantation. Some among these were men of worth and spirit, "of good means and great parentage." Such ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... at jars. Then will I raise aloft the milk-white rose, With whose sweet smell the air shall be perfum'd, And in my standard bear the arms of York, To grapple with the house of Lancaster; And, force perforce, I 'll make him yield the crown Whose bookish rule ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... his bookish lore, The bigot shrines, to pray before, His pulpit needs the orator; O Lord! I nothing ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... colonel talked about Crowborough and David Rosser; remembering whose vocation, he realized the desirability of giving the conversation a bookish turn. While he was remarking upon some of the most recent publications—quoted from advertisements, for he seldom opened a book—Knight and a small footman brought in the tea equipage. Colonel Faversham invited Bridget to officiate, ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... glided into my acquaintanceship; doubtless in some way too shy and elusive for remembrance. I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one did, but the intercourse between us was most cordial, and our chance meetings and bookish chats extended over a space of ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... president of the Dorcas Society, a gray-haired woman who had navigated home a full-rigged ship from the Gold Coast; there were grave-faced men who, among them, could have charted half the globe. In the pulpit was the same old-fashioned, bookish man, who, having led his college class, had passed his life in this unknown parish, lost in delight, in his study, in the great Athenian's handling of the presumptuous Glaucon, or simply ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... unavoidable. During the past eighteen years, the state of his health has exacted throughout an extreme caution in regard to mental application, reducing it at best within narrow and precarious limits, and often precluding it. Indeed, for two periods, each of several years, any attempt at bookish occupation would have been merely suicidal. A condition of sight arising from kindred sources has also retarded the work, since it has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest one should weep, as the old philosopher said, I had made some fun out of my quest, in the form of a paper for a bookish society to which I belonged, on "Woman as a Learned Pursuit." It is printed among the transactions of the society, and is accessible to the curious only by loan from the members, and I regret that I am unable to print any extracts here. Perhaps ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... other man has possessed it. He noted everything. So might another, but the superlative merit of Shakespeare's observation is that he noted all and always with humorous and universal sympathy, with an eye absolutely free from the jaundice of Carlyle, as it was free from the bookish astigmatism of Ben Jonson. His mental retina formed a perfect mirror to hold up to nature. Whether it be true or not that he had seen a veritable Dogberry at Grendon, Bucks, it is certain that he had seen the type somewhere. Best of all, he had not seen it in irritation ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... is so alive, it moves so rapidly, that it is never so precise, so varied in its choice of words, as written material. The phraseology of written discourse sounds slightly or markedly stilted, bookish, if repeated by the tongue. This difference—though it may appear almost trifling—is apparent to everyone. Its recognition can be partly illustrated by the fact that after President Lowell and Senator Lodge had debated on the topic, the League ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... may be open to criticism. We really do not aim to make this critical review an exhibition of scholarly attainments with all the necessary brevity, clarity, scientific restraint and etiquette. Such style would be entirely out of our line. Any bookish flavor attaching itself to our work would soon replace a natural fragrance we aim to preserve, namely our close contact with the subject. Those interested in the scholarly work that has been contributed to this cause are referred to modern men like Vollmer, Giarratano, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... man in his relations with other minds. Coleridge, to be sure, gave this name to a work of his, but he wandered from his apparent purpose into a world of alien disquisitions. The following pages are frankly bookish, and to the bookish only do they appeal. The habit of reading has been praised as a virtue, and has been denounced as a vice. In no case, if we except the perpetual study of newspapers (which cannot fairly be called ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... being likened to a Scottish divine, I made all kinds of inquiries—in vain. I abandoned hope of unearthing the top-hatted antiquarian and had indeed concluded him to be a myth, when a friend supplied me with what may be absurdly familiar to less bookish people: "The Nooks and By-ways of Italy." By Craufurd Tait Ramage, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... we should have grown like them, but our father was a bookish man, and with him we travelled; we went with Dickens and Thackeray and those fellows, and as we came to different places in the books, he told us all about them. He'd seen them all, so we got to know his country pretty well. Once he took us to Harrisburg, and by multiplying ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... figure as a sort of prodigy in my family," he said; "we're not bookish. The Jew goes in for French novels, but I don't intend to let Nell touch them, so you may be ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... prisoner of war has his compensations. Here I've come out of the turmoil of a life of the most intense nervous excitement, a life lived day to day with no thought of to-morrow, into this other life of unlimited bookish leisure. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... and patchy enough. He reminds us by turns of Chateaubriand's Rene and Rousseau's Bomston, both of whom Madame de Stael of course knew; of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, with whom she was very probably acquainted; but most of no special, even bookish, progenitor, but of a combination of theoretic deductions from supposed properties of man in general and Englishman in particular. Of Englishmen in particular Madame de Stael knew little more than a residence (chiefly in emigre ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... afternoon when she drove out to try the new carriage, she was in usual health; second, that Jamie was very well, but impatient for his uncle's return; third, that Juno was spending a few days in Orange, and that Bell had gone to pass the night with her particular friend, Mrs. Meredith, the bluest, most bookish woman in New York. ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... always chosen these low-lying sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they have done so? he wondered—and then came to a sudden mental stop, absorbed in a somewhat surprised contemplation of a new version of himself. He was becoming literary, historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open again, to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors. He had read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old book-shop! For many years that boyhood of eager concern in the printed page had seemed to him to belong to ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... has failed to answer the pertinent question: "Why, in spite of these defects, were Lowell's essays read with such pleasure by so many intelligent persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and why are they read still?" The answer is to be found in the whole tradition of the English bookish essay, from the first appearance of Florio's translation of Montaigne down to the present hour. That tradition has always welcomed copious, well-informed, enthusiastic, disorderly, and affectionate talk about books. It demands gusto ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... express woods, not on a plain, but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea,—the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre,—I know no other word in our language (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question), but hanging woods, the sylvae superimpendentes of Catullus; yet let some wit call out in a slang tone,—"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... eight miles from Jackson. I was greatly surprised when I won from my county and I went but didn't finish there. Then I went a little while to a small university near Lexington, called Allcorn University. I loved to go to school and was considered bookish. But my people died and I had to earn a living for myself and I couldn't find any way to use so much what I learned out of books, as far as making money was concerned. So I came to Texas, doing any kind of labor work I could find. Finally I married and went to farming 35 or 40 years ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... thought afterwards, I can only say that in the course of my reading and observation I have never met with any trace of them, and I am apt to suppose that, if they ever existed anywhere but in the imagination of bookish dreamers, their career must have been an exceedingly short one, since in the struggle for existence they would surely succumb to adversaries who tempered and directed the blind fury of combat with at ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Walpole, while justifying George II. against 'bookish men who have censured his neglect of literature,' says:—'In truth, I believe King George would have preferred a guinea to a composition as perfect as Alexander's Feast.' Reign of George ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... elsewhere. The essential element in the confidence Johnson inspired was not his seriousness: it was his sovereign sanity, the unfailing common sense, to which allusion has already been made. He was pre-eminently a bookish man, but he was conspicuously free from the unreality that is so often felt {30} in the characters of such men. He knew from the first how to strike a note which showed that he was well aware of the difference between literature and life and their ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps most often to Lucretius. For of all those who ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... my love with a B because he is brisk. I hate him with a B because he is bookish. He took me to the sign of the Beetle and treated me to biscuits and bovril. His name is Brian, and he ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... task she has laid upon my shoulders as any man alive. I have spent a great part of my life in action; and though the later part of it has been quieter and more peaceful than the earlier, and though I have enjoyed opportunities of study which I never had before, I am still anything but a bookish man, and I am not at all confident about such essential matters as grammar and spelling. The history I am called upon to tell is one which, if it were put into the hands of a professed man of letters, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Until about 1893 the only course given really serious attention in the high school was that of Ancient History in the classical course. The courses in General History, English History and American History were, for the most part, bookish, superficial, and devitalized. ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... who played in it her favourite character of a hoyden, and, after "interviewing" a number of suitors chosen by her father, finally ran away with Thomas the footman—a course in those days not without its parallel in high life, above stairs as well as below. It appears to have succeeded, though Bookish, one of the characters, was entirely withdrawn in deference to some disapprobation on the part of the audience; while the part of Wormwood, a lawyer, which is found in the latest editions, is said to have been ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... different, the manner was different. The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore—were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added—and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... way had become very rough and exceedingly thorny, and he had wished he knew how to bring up the subject of some new figures in the German. But he had not succeeded in doing this. She had been in a bookish mood, and the mood had lasted until she had ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... a practical soldier, will have none of the "bookish theoric." He cautions us here not to pin our faith to abstract principles; "for," as Chang Yu puts it, "while the main laws of strategy can be stated clearly enough for the benefit of all and sundry, you must be guided by the actions of the enemy in attempting to secure a favorable position in ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... have been bred up in: though amongst unthinking men, who examine not scrupulously and carefully their own ideas, and strip them not from the marks men use for them, but confound them with words, there must be endless dispute, wrangling, and jargon; especially if they be learned, bookish men, devoted to some sect, and accustomed to the language of it, and have learned to talk after others. But if it should happen that any two thinking men should really have different ideas, I do ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... scientist. Original men make books, they do not need to read them. Yet Huxley loved to read. He even in his old age studied Greek to read Aristotle and the New Testament in the original. But Huxley loved things even more than books. He had little respect for mere bookish knowledge. "A rash clergyman once, without further equipment in natural science than desultory reading, attacked the Darwinian theory in some sundry magazine articles, in which he made himself uncommonly merry at Huxley's expense. This was intended to draw the great ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... rebelled, and I vowed, as I straddled and spat about the stable-yard in feeble imitation of the coachman, that lessons might go to the Inventor of them. It was only geography that morning, any way: and the practical thing was worth any quantity of bookish theoretic; as for me, I was going on my travels, and imports and exports, populations and capitals, might very well wait while I explored the breathing, coloured ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... mad. On the other hand, the exhaustive mental search for them distracted my thoughts until the stars were back in the sky; and now I had a new occupation, saying to myself all the poetry I could remember, especially that of the sea; for I was a bookish fellow even then. But I never was anything of a scholar. It is odd therefore, that the one apposite passage which recurred to me in its entirety was in hexameters ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... prying curiosity, and now it would be useless to make a stir—what mischief is to be apprehended is already done. It was not done at Haworth. I know the people of the post-office there, and am sure they would not venture on such a step; besides, the Haworth people have long since set me down as bookish and quiet, and trouble themselves no farther about me. But the gossiping inquisitiveness of small towns is rife at Keighley; there they are sadly puzzled to guess why I never visit, encourage no overtures to acquaintance, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages and of two worlds—precisely in the moment when bookish literature was beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries? Before you how many singers not less truly poets than yourself—though less versatile not less passionate, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... cadences, in their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars. 'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing impetus ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... eccentric; but a wider knowledge of Provencal matters has convinced me that he is a type. Under his genial guidance it has been my privilege to see much of the inner life of the Provencaux, and his explanations have enabled me to understand what I have seen: the Vidame being of an antiquarian and bookish temper, and never better pleased than when I set him to rummaging in his memory or his library for the information which I require to make clear to me some curious phase of ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... "the climate is too comfortable and the soil too rich,—though I do not think it is entirely on their account that the people who enjoy them are so sadly in arrears to the civilized world." He blushed with the fear that his talk was bookish, and felt grateful to Clotilde for seeming to understand ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... "A mighty bookish place," took up the other neighbor "they say they are all bookworms that live there, and that they are as dry as bits of parchment. I shouldn't say that a bright little miss like you had any call to go near such ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... adoration paid to this glorious object, by some bookish pilgrim, who, as the evening sun reposes softly upon the hill, pushes onward, through copse, wood, moor, heath, bramble, and thicket, to feast his eyes upon the mellow lustre of its leaves, and upon the nice execution of its typography. Menalcas sees all this; ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... passionately preferred to leave it to the strong, capable granddaughter, who was already provided with a lover, who understood the land, moreover, and could earn and "addle" as he did, rather than to his bookish milksop of a second son, so richly provided for already, in his father's contemptuous opinion, by the small ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this bookish and solitary life was invaded by interest in a living, breathing figure. At church, I used to look around with a feeling of coldness and disdain, which, though I now well understand its causes, seems to my wiser mind as odious as it was unnatural. The puny child sought everywhere for the Roman ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... again, still more fiercely, and said quickly, "That's a nice name, only maybe it's a little—old fashioned." She was very sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish English, at that, one ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... supposed to have said that he would sooner have been remembered as the author of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" than as the conqueror of Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for the librarian of a circulating library: the safe pilot of middle class ladies through the ocean of new fiction which overwhelms the British Isles twice a year. His particular hobby was ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... describes him as 'a man that as much knowledge has of war as I of brewing mead—a bookish nursling of the monks—a meacock.' But when the last scene of all has closed his strange eventful history, the testimony of a nobler, wiser foe,[7] ascribes to him great gifts of courage, discretion, wit, an equal temper, an ample soul, rock-bound and fortified ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... one of his friends, a bookish chap, Replied, with a thoughtful frown, "You know to-day the publishers say That the short tale won't go down; And, upon my soul, I think on the whole, That the publishers' words are true. I should hate, good sir, to part my fur In the ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... of bookish subjects, but in his atmosphere, if one were no student, and didn't even try to keep up, or forge ahead, they would absorb much through association. Almost always he has been on the school board and selected ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... still on the sunny side of middle life, he was wearying of the cup of pleasure he had drunk so joyously, and was drawing away from the multitude and toward the companionship of those who loved books and bookish things, and who could sympathize with him in the aspirations for the better work, the consciousness of which had dawned. It was now that he began to apply himself diligently to the preparation for higher effort, and it is to the credit of journalism, which has so many sins to answer for, ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... has remained faithful to his principles.... The present condition of affairs can but strengthen them.' (Musa expressed herself quite differently now from in the old days in Moscow; there was a literary, bookish flavour in her phrases.) 'I don't know, though, whether I can rely upon you, and ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... sorry for you, my child, but I am very poor, I care nothing for bookish rubbish, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... an hour afterwards. The Bishop and he had had but two bookish evenings together since that rather bizarre one in Christmas week. They met cordially enough ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... other side of the castle, where was my lady's flower-garden, or what was to be made into one. Then he entered by French windows, from a terrace overlooking it, my lord's library, also incomplete. For the earl, who was by no means a bookish man, had only built that room since his marriage, to please his wife, whom perhaps he loved all the better that she was so exceedingly unlike himself. Now both were away—their short dream of married life ended, their plans and hopes crumbled into dust. As yet, no external changes had been ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... School-master and the Bibliomaniac had combined forces to give him a taste of his own medicine. The time had not yet arrived which showed the Idiot at a disadvantage; and the two boarders, the one proud of his learning, and the other not wholly unconscious of a bookish life, were distinctly tired of the triumphant manner in which the Idiot always left the breakfast-table to ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... personal development, which, even for a Roman Catholic, were effects of the Reformation, that there was so much in Montaigne of the "subjective," as people say, of the singularities of personal character. Browne, too, bookish as he really is claims to give his readers a matter, "not picked from the leaves of any author, but bred amongst the weeds and tares" of his own brain. The faults of such literature are what we all recognise in it: unevenness, alike in ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... celebrate her entrance Into society? Let others speak! These the remarks I had to overhear: 'She's rather pretty.'—'Pretty is the word.' 'But not so dashing as the elder sisters.' 'Cleverer though, perhaps,'—'She takes it coolly. Her heart's not in the ball; that's evident.' 'Where is it? Is she bookish?'—'So I've heard.' 'Unlike the rest, then.'—'That straw-colored silk Should have had flounces.'—'Is that hair her own?' 'I think so?'—'She's no dancer.'—'Apathetic As any duchess.'—'The young men seem shy; She doesn't put them at their ease, 'tis plain.' 'See, the old woman chides her; she ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... who, at all events, but rarely practised those Cadmean arts. Yet they could tell the time of day by the sun, and steer through the silent night by the stars; and each of them had—as Emerson, a very bookish person, has said—a dial in his mind for the whole bright calendar of the year. How racy was their talk; how wise their judgments on men and things; how well they did all that at the moment seemed worth doing; how universally useful ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... often expressed itself by accepting a verbal attack as justified, and elaborating it in a way to throw into shadow the assault of the critic. At a small and familiar supper of bookish men, when there was general dissatisfaction over an expensive but ill-made salad, he alone ate with apparent relish. The host, who was of like mind with his guests, said, 'The Bibliotaph doesn't care for the quality of his food, ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... might pass while I consorted with motors and mules, far from valets and civilisation, I was nevertheless toward enough to hint that Locker must be prepared for a wire at any time. I had often derived a quaint pleasure from the consciousness that he despised my bookish habits and certain unconventionalities not suited to a 'hearl'; but one must draw the line somewhere, and I drew it at the mule. I would give a good deal rather than Locker should suspect ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... continued his development under the intellectual influence of Goethe, wrote "Sartor Resartus" and conceived the idea of writing the story of the French Revolution. Those seven years, as you trace their influence during the rest of his life, will ever be a tribute to the concentrated, bookish labors of ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... little if any of that collar-work—that grinding "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will," and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to get out of ruts, kept out of them without the least trouble. He was as little of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and there was not a drop of bad blood in his veins. If ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... acquired an individual manner—the manner, say, of Germinie Lacerteux or Manette Salomon—but they never attained the formula which they had conceived as final. It was not given to them to realize their ambition—to write novels which should not contain a single bookish expression, plays which should reveal that hitherto undiscoverable quantity—colloquial speech, raised to the level of consummate art. The famous ecriture artiste remained an unfulfilled ideal. The ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt |
