"Organ-grinder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them yourself,—and in the reluctant silver you pay the Irishman who splits your wood. Or if, suddenly reversing your line of argument, you plead that this would impoverish the Irishman, you can at least treat him as you do the organ-grinder, and pay him an extra fee to go on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... could stop the Americans and the English from going anywhere. He also comforted us with the assurance that we should find snow only six Swedish (forty English) miles further north. Lat. 60 deg. 35' N., the 17th of December, and no snow yet! In the streets, we met an organ-grinder playing the Marseillaise. There was no mistaking the jet-black hair, the golden complexion and the brilliant eyes of the player, "Siete Italiano?" I asked. "Sicuro!" he answered, joyously: "e lei anche?" "Ah," he said, in answer to my questions, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said, with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The Count shrugged his ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... Mr. Beecher with his correspondence; at the close of one afternoon, while he was with the Plymouth pastor at work, an organ-grinder and a little girl came under the study window. A cold, driving rain was pelting down. In a moment Mr. Beecher noticed the girl's bare toes sticking out of her ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... was driving out to Neuilly to make his adieux to his family, the horses of his carriage were startled by an organ-grinder on the Avenue de Neuilly. The duke, who was alone, tried apparently to jump out of the carriage. Had he remained seated, all would have been well. He fell on his head on the pave of the broad avenue, breaking the ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... on his garden wall, smoking a pipe in the evening, an Italian organ-grinder came round with a monkey on a string. The Doctor saw at once that the monkey's collar was too tight and that he was dirty and unhappy. So he took the monkey away from the Italian, gave the man a shilling ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... to take their color from the street she happened to be in. Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury, and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln's Inn Fields, she was cold and depressed again, and horribly clear-sighted. The dark removed the stimulus of human companionship, and a ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... sullenly complied, tossing our heads to show our sense of the indignity to which we had been submitted. Pennybet, meanwhile, continued to turn his handle in a leisurely fashion and touch his forehead like an organ-grinder. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... moving sadly toward the door some belated organ-grinder, in an adjacent street, began to play the weird refrain of that song which has touched the hearts of so many who ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ—and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the boys did not take as much interest in the game as they had expected to, for a rival attraction had unexpectedly appeared on the ground since recess: two rival attractions, more properly speaking, or perhaps three, for in a shady corner sat an organ-grinder, on the ground in front of him was an organ, and on top of this sat a monkey. Now to city boys more than ten years of age an organ-grinder is almost as uninteresting as a scolding; but Laketon was not a city, organ-grinders reached it seldom, and monkeys less ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of English had its immediate triumph. The countryside had expected that she would chatter Italian like a predatory organ-grinder, but around this picturesque naivete they clustered as they would around a lost child. Jessica Folsom met the architect's eyes triumphantly, but he edged to her side and bent to whiff the roses, muttering, "The worst is yet ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
