"Theatrically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whip it into shape to fit the exigencies of the approaching occasion. He derived considerable comforting consolation from the reflection that Gotown was virgin soil upon which he was called upon to operate theatrically. As the result of pondering with his brain and manipulating with his pen, he succeeded in evolving a draft of a programme as mixed and varied as might be expected from the all-star company gathered together at short notice for a benefit or testimonial for some popular unfortunate player—with ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... stored on shelves—so there was no lack of fruit; while, much to our surprise, several excellent plats were served for supper, the master of the house uniting the offices of chef de cuisine and garçon. On our praising his dishes,—“Ah,” said he, rather theatrically, “Je n'ai pas toujours rempli un tel métier!”—“How so?”—“Sirs, I am a Roman exile; I have fought for liberty; I was a Colonel in the service of the republic,—and now I make dishes in Sardinia! But a good time is coming; before long, I shall be recalled, and then”—there would ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... citizen, whom Illinois delighted to honor, was present, and that he should be invited to a place on the stand; and at once, amid a tumult of applause, Lincoln was lifted over the heads of the crowd to the platform. John Hanks then theatrically entered, bearing a couple of fence rails, and a flag with the legend that they were from a "lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom, in the year 1830." The sympathetic roar rose again. Then Lincoln made a "speech," appropriate ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Mr. Badgely started theatrically. He was clad in white flannels and a white silk shirt; a golden-brown tie matched the brown of a dreaming fire in his eyes, and there were brown silk socks upon his shapely calf-skinned feet. The Pawkets, even in their absorption, noted that, if not really young, the architect suggested something ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... scene of special interest. I was early initiated into all the forms and ceremonies of the House; the manoeuvres of the mace, the obeisances to the Chair, the rap of "Black Rod" on the locked door, the daily procession of Mr. Speaker and his attendants (which Sir Henry Irving pronounced the most theatrically effective thing of its kind ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... crimson shiny face, and the vermilion rims round his unsteady eyes, and his elephant ears, and the absurd streaming of his white whiskers, and his multitudinous noisiness, and his black kid gloves, strode half theatrically ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... but a sovereign prince," cried Casanova, somewhat theatrically, as was his wont when strongly moved. "Had I but the power to commit men to prison, to send them to the scaffold. But I am nothing. A beggar, and a liar into the bargain. I importune the Supreme Council for a post, a crust of bread, a home! What ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... the head of some other animal (sometimes man) and wings. It was a symbolical figure. The most famous example is of course the gigantic Sphinx near the Pyramids in Egypt, which has proved to be an inexhaustible theme for speculation and for poetry.... The theatrically tragic mood of Byron is contrasted with the easy-going, somewhat cynical epicureanism of Horace.... Don Giovanni (1787) the greatest opera of the great composer Mozart (1756-1791), tells the same story told by Moliere and so many others. The French composer, Gounod, said ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the Duke of Turniptop. Or, if he is an insouciant sort of person, he would more properly be titled, Prince Don't-Kar-a-toff. Unfortunate name, too, is Boris Ivanitch. Perhaps a Big Bore is Ivanitch; and as to the family title, Ivanitch—well, considered theatrically, it sounds unpleasantly like belonging to a scratch company. There's a bomb in it, which, we were informed, in a D. T. note, "appears as part of the furniture of a drawing-room." The entire furniture-covering is made, we are privately informed, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... important tributary impulses are given toward the following development. Unfortunately, the third act, dramatically considered, is concerned chiefly with details. It suffers, even more than the first act, from a certain prolixity which is not wholly made good by its theatrically effective ending. However bright and skillfully wrought in the incident of the fraudulent miracle, it might well be spared, with a view for the whole. And the same is true of a considerable part ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... managed to have apparently a very good time in the new land, both in sinning and repenting. When he stood up on the church-seat before the horrified, yet wide-open eyes of pious Boston folk, in his studiously and theatrically disarranged garments, and blubbered out his whining yet vain-glorious repentance, he doubtless acted his part well, for he had twice before been through the same performance, supplementing his second rehearsal by kneeling down before an injured husband in the congregation, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... with pathos, paused, and was theatrically distressed. Buckingham was seated in one of the boxes. He rose, all eyes were fixed upon a face well known in all gay assemblies, in a tone ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Stumps did not move. He stood there with his eyes riveted on the pavement, and his lips tightly compressed. Evidently the drowning plan had been abandoned for something else—something that caused him to frown, then to smile, then to grow slightly pale, and then to laugh somewhat theatrically. While in this mood he was suddenly pushed to one side by some one ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... theatrically, pointing at Etchepare] Now, Etchepare, that condemns you. I know that you went out that night. When you were arrested you said to your wife, "Don't for the world admit that I went out last night." Come, I must tell you everything. Someone saw you—a ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... the maid declared there was no fuel; and, though the hostess denied this and promised us a fire the next night, she forgot it till nine o'clock, and then we would not have it. The cold abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm (which had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke during the first night, and the day followed with several intervals of sunshine, which bathed us in a glowing-expectation of overtaking the fugitive summer ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... has all his life long cherished a youthful love, the thought of which, and not his supernatural vocation, has sustained him, so I understood him to say, throughout his priestly career. All very pretty and "pale young Curatey," and theatrically sentimental, but don't put this man forward as the self-sacrificing hero of a Melodrama. No; the subject is best let alone. Mr. GRUNDY seems to have rushed in where wiser men have feared to tread, and thoroughly to have "put his foot in it," all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... for the total effect of a tragedy; but it is not always necessary or desirable to consider it when the question is merely one of construction. And this is natural. The play is meant primarily for the theatre; and theatrically the outward conflict, with its influence on the fortunes of the hero, is the aspect which first catches, if it does not engross, attention. For the average play-goer of every period the main interest of Hamlet has probably lain in the vicissitudes of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... picturesqueness—his own picturesqueness—made him walk rather theatrically as he passed through the groups of humble onlookers outside the picket fence. Many of these turned to stare at the belated guest, and William was unconscious of neither their low estate nor his own quality as a patrician man-about-town ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... sprang from side to side, marshaling the men; Anton and the bailiff led the way. As they reached the corner of the market-place, scythes were crossed; and the leader of the party cocked his gun, and said theatrically, "Why do you wish to leave, my fine sir? Take arms, ye people; to-day ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... spoken. Beginning with the babies, I put a bit of candy upon each greedy palm, bidding my pensioners wait until I gave the signal to eat it. Then I took a pink cube between my thumb and finger, waved it theatrically above my head, and popped it into my mouth. Every other ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... confined to the blood of the plebs. Colonel Rocas ascended the steps and laid his sword theatrically at young Ramon Olivarra's feet. Four members of the cabinet embraced him. Captain Cruz gave a command, and twenty of El Ciento Huilando dismounted and arranged themselves in a cordon about the steps ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... We know the majestic murderess of Aeschylus, so strong as to be actually beautiful, so fearless and unrepentant that one almost feels her to be right. One can imagine also another figure that would be theatrically effective—a 'sympathetic' sinner, beautiful and penitent, eager to redeem her sin by self-sacrifice. But Euripides gives us neither. Perhaps he believed in neither. It is a piteous and most real character that we have here, in this sad middle-aged woman, whose ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... dominant blue. A monstrous black banner jerked its way to the right. He perceived a blue-clad negro, a shrivelled woman in yellow, then a group of tall fair-haired, white-faced, blue-clad men pushed theatrically past him. He noted two Chinamen. A tall, sallow, dark-haired, shining-eyed youth, white clad from top to toe, clambered up towards the platform shouting loyally, and sprang down again and receded, looking backward. Heads, shoulders, hands clutching weapons, all were ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Grossensteck himself, he ought really to have known better, and it makes me flush even now to recall his monstrous perversion of the truth. He called me a hero to my face. He invented details to which my dry clothes gave the lie direct. He threw fits of gratitude. His family were theatrically commanded to regard me well, so that my countenance might be forever imprinted on their hearts; and they, poor devils, in a seventh heaven to have him back safe and sound in their midst, regarded and regarded, and imprinted and imprinted, ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... Guest, with another forced laugh, as he glanced uneasily at Stratton; "it did look suspicious, and you worked it all up so theatrically that I was a ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... in a voice soft and moved, "I understand." And while he spoke thus aloud, though his emotion was genuine, and his desire to comfort and sustain her genuine, and his admiration for her genuine, he thought to himself: "How theatrically she told it! Every effect was studied, nearly every word. Well, she can't help it. But does she imagine I can't see that all the casualness was deliberately ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... down the basement stairs, Mr. Feuerstein appeared. At sight of her he started back. "Hilda!" he exclaimed theatrically, and frowned. ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... more typical than the others,—indeed it is rather less so,—but it is extremely striking, and most conspicuous. There is, in the minds of the hypercritical, the sneaking suspicion that the Black Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of Montmartre; it is Bohemianism just a shade too much conventionalised. Just the same, it is fascinating. From the moment you pass the outer, polite portals and intermediate anterooms and enter the big, smoke-filled, deafening room at the back, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... of Goethe's productions have taken the dramatic form; yet he cannot be said, theatrically speaking, to have been, like Schiller, a successful dramatist. His plays, with the exception of "Egmont" and the First Part of "Faust," have not commanded the stage; they form no part, I believe, of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... "adapted to representation" in their original state. Does Mr. Crummles know better than Master Shakespeare knew how "Romeo and Juliet" should be ended with the best effect,—not only to the ear in the closet, but theatrically on the stage? The story was not a new one; and the dramatist deliberately followed one of two existing versions rather than the other. In Boisteau's translation of Bandello's novel, Juliet wakes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... other legislators have used to render it holy and honorable. By a strange, uncalled-for declaration, they pronounced that marriage was no better than a common civil contract. It was one of their ordinary tricks, to put their sentiments into the mouths of certain personated characters, which they theatrically exhibited at the bar of what ought to be a serious assembly. One of these was brought out in the figure of a prostitute, whom they called by the affected name of "a mother without being a wife." This creature they made to call for a repeal of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which, as is usual in Italy, turned mostly upon 'le bellezze delle donne.' I remember that once an animated discussion about the relative merits of blondes and brunettes nearly ended in a quarrel, when the youngest of the whole band, a boy of about seventeen, put a stop to the dispute by theatrically raising his eyes and arms to heaven and crying, 'Tu sei innamorato d' una grande Diana cacciatrice nera, ed io d' una bella Venere bionda.' Though they were but village lads, they supported their several opinions with arguments not unworthy of Firenzuola, and showed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... out to see her. But it struck him that the remote seat he could afford—for it would not do to spend a week's wage on the mere chance—would be too far off for precise identification, especially as she would probably be theatrically transmogrified. No, a wiser as well as a more economical plan would be to meet her at the stage-door, as he used to meet Gittel. He would hang ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... arrival in London, Garrick entered himself at Lincoln's Inn, and he also put himself under the tuition of Mr. Colson, an eminent mathematician at Rochester. But as he applied himself little to the study of the law, his proficiency in mathematics and philosophy was not extensive. His mind was theatrically led, and nothing could divert his thoughts from the study of that to which his genius so powerfully prompted him. He had L1,000 left him by his uncle at Lisbon, and he engaged for a short time in the wine trade, in partnership with his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... theatrically; "for by my halidom, sirs, I said not a syllable in disparagement of the house yelept Doree! Is it not there that we eat of the crab of Bordeaux, succulent and roseate? Is it not there that we drink of Veuve Cliquot the costly, and of that Johannisberger, to which all other ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards |
