"Climacteric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shocked by his visible preference of the other. I have seen a youthful beau kiss, with perfect devotion, a ball of cotton dropped from the hand of a lady who was knitting stockings for her grand-children. Another pays his court to a belle in her climacteric, by bringing gimblettes [A sort of gingerbread.] to the favourite lap-dog, or attending, with great assiduity, the egresses and regresses of her angola, who paces slowly out of the room ten times in an hour, while the door is held open by the complaisant Frenchman ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... guests. His apartments, though small, were somewhat gaudily painted and furnished, and his dining-room was decorated a la Turque. The party consisted-first, of a rich epicier, a widower, Monsieur Goupille by name, an eminent man in the Faubourg; he was in his grand climacteric, but still belhomme; wore a very well-made peruque of light auburn, with tight pantaloons, which contained a pair of very respectable calves; and his white neckcloth and his large gill were washed and got up with especial care. Next to Monsieur Goupille sat a very demure ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unprofessional persons, who choose to fancy that other diseases creep, but Insanity pounces, on a man; which he expressed thus neatly: "that other deviations from organic conditions of health are the subject of clearly defined though delicate gradations, but that the worst and most climacteric forms of cerebro-psychical disorder are suddenly developed affections presenting no evidence of any antecedent cephalic organic change, and unaccompanied by a premonitory stage, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... an' ag'in hit gits to pitchin'." The hired man must have been touching up mean whiskey himself. Meanwhile, Mart seemed to be having spells of troubled slumber. He would snore gently, accentuate said snore with a sudden quiver of his body and then wake up with a climacteric snort and start that would shake the bed. This was repeated several times, and I began to think of the unfortunate Tom who was "fitified." Mart seemed on the verge of a fit himself, and I waited apprehensively for each snorting climax to see if fits ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... the lady, who frequently declared herself a friend to the ceremonial of former times, when a lover might have sighed seven years at his mistress's feet before he was allowed the liberty of kissing her hand. 'Tis true Mrs. Margery was now about her grand climacteric; no matter: that is just the age when we expect to grow younger. But I verily believe there was nothing in the report; the curate's connection was only that of a genealogist; for in that character he was no way inferior to Mrs. Margery ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... my acquaintance having passed his twenty-eighth birthday, and wrongly imagining this date to represent the Grand Climacteric, went by night in some perturbation to an Older Man and spoke to ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... of those who feel that female dignity is compromised by it, I have here omitted a woman's flippant overestimate of the number of women in London society who suffer from nervous disorders at the climacteric [i.e. menopause]. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... development' has not destined the peoples of the earth to the melancholy fate of China. The climacteric of the present stage of progress is rapidly approaching, is even now touching with its finger the startled nations. When it shall have passed, the world will enter upon the third and final stage of civil progress, in which the organized power, social order, moral ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... is very much less effective. The secondary sexual characteristics have been already established and persist. It occasionally occurs that certain mental effects are produced. In women these resemble, generally speaking, those occurring at the climacteric. In both sexes, however, mental disturbances may ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... a noble self-abnegation, she derives a melancholy pleasure from the knowledge that she has utterly given up all she had formerly so zealously guarded, and she feels that her love has reached its grand climacteric when she abandons herself, without redemption, to the idol she has set up in the highest place in her soul. This heroic martyrdom is one of the recognizable causes of the immorality that insidiously permeates ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... chaotic climacteric, begun and ended in the same instant, as the crust of the chamber, no longer supported by the in-pent air, dissolved under the irresistible pressure ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the Satlaj to the Narbadda, acknowledged him as master, and he enjoyed an income equal to that of the present Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief of India combined; at this climacteric of his fortunes, when he was actually believed to have sent an embassy to the First Consul of the French Republic, instead of seriously and soberly seeking to consolidate his position, or resign it with honour, his insolence prepared ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... his eyes; he was well-nigh speechless but beat time with an intensity that carried his men along like chips in a high surf. The free-fantasia of the poem was reached, and, roaring, the music neared its climacteric point. "Now," whispered Pobloff, stooping, "when the pianissimo begins I shall watch for the Abysm." As the wind sweepingly rushes to a howling apex so came the propulsive crash of the climax. The tone rapidly subsided and receded; for the composer had so cunningly scored it that groups of instruments ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... months of 1888. The last of all contains a reference to Robert Elsmere. Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two years ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that child-voice passed, and it was a new music and a new joy. I can give the reader no notion of it, because there is not in nature anything with which I can compare it. The blackcap has a climacteric note, just before his song collapses and dies, so full of pathos and tenderness that often, when I had been sitting on a gate in Wilderness Road, it had affected me more deeply than any human words. But here was a note sweet and soft as that, and yet charged with a richness no blackcap's song ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... never been to, Yet more minute and vivid than remembrance, Of boyhood homes, sail between sleep and waking Like some mirage, refuting all experience With topsy-turvy ships, That steals by in dead calms through tropic haze: And many a man in his climacteric years, Thoughts and remembered words have roused from sleep With knowledge that he lacked on lying down: And I, lapped in a trance of reverie, doubt Some spore of episodes Anterior far beyond this body's birth, Dispersed like puffs of dust impalpable, Wind-carried ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... we to confine ourselves to the consideration only of the latest discoveries of Theban greatness after the expulsion of the Hyksos, we should be omitting much that is of interest and importance. For the Egyptians the first grand climacteric in their history (after the foundation of the monarchy) was the transference of the royal power from Memphis and Herakleopolis to a Theban house. The second, which followed soon after, was the Hyksos invasion. The two are closely connected in Theban ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... has not reached its grand climacteric; yet its earliest beginnings already seem centuries behind its present performances. The details of its gradual yet rapid improvement are of too technical a nature to find a place in these pages. Suffice it to say that the "dry-plate" ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... to the female organism have become almost universal among civilized races. Probably the majority of surgical operations are performed for so-called women's diseases. That women suffer untold agonies during menstruation, in childbirth and at the climacteric is looked upon as unavoidable and a ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... youth, usually ceasing at the climacteric. Social, financial and domestic worries are exciting causes, a happy marriage often curing, and an unhappy one greatly aggravating the complaint. It is most common among the races we usually deem "excitable", the Slavs, Latin races and Jews, and is often associated ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... and lectures Emerson left some poetry in which is embodied those thoughts which were to him too deep for prose expression. Oliver Wendell Holmes in speaking of this says: "Emerson wrote occasionally in verse from his school-days until he had reached the age which used to be known as the grand climacteric, sixty-three.... His poems are not and hardly can become popular; they are not meant to be liked by the many, but to be dearly loved and cherished by the few.... His occasional lawlessness in technical construction, his somewhat fantastic ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of a oneness, a centred wholeness, ultimate purpose, or climacteric result of the world, has wholly given way. Thought evolves no longer a centred whole, a One, but rather a numberless many, adjust it how ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... a fourth abused the fire-engine, and a fifth inquired where he got his glazed hat. He had an answer for them all, and a nod or a wink for every pretty maid that showed at the windows; for though past the grand climacteric, he still has a spice of the devil in him—and, as he says, "there is no harm in looking." The "Red Lion" at Smitham Bottom was the rendezvous of the day. It is a small inn on the Brighton road, some ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... not be fully accepted by the author himself, still only thirty-eight, and so Kareno steps down into the respectable and honoured sloth of age only to be succeeded, by another hero who has not yet passed the climacteric twenty-ninth year. Even Telegraph-Rolandsen in "Dreamers" retains the youthful glow and charm and irresponsibility that used to be thought inseparable ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... has elapsed, and to-night the star of Barnabas Beverley, Esquire, has indeed attained its grand climacteric, for to-night he is to eat and drink with ROYALTY, and the Fashionable World is to do ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but "giving back, as one that had received his mortal wound." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three and thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the crazy wretch this morning, with no other purpose but to rally him, under the pain and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... the housekeeper, was a good-tempered woman, long past the grand climacteric, and strongly attached to Forster, with whom she had resided many years. But, like all women, whether married or single, who have the responsibility of a household, she would have her own way; and scolded her ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... Cartagena some months before this narrative opens, he had gradually yielded himself to the restorative effects of changed environment and the hope which his uncle's warm assurances aroused, that a career would open to him in the New World, unclouded by the climacteric episode of the publishing of his journal and his subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of something like confidence, and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... instances of malingering for mercenary or other purposes, and some are calculated to deceive the most expert obstetricians by their tricks. Weir Mitchell delineates an interesting case of pseudocyesis as follows: "A woman, young, or else, it may be, at or past the climacteric, eagerly desires a child or is horribly afraid of becoming pregnant. The menses become slight in amount, irregular, and at last cease or not. Meanwhile the abdomen and breasts enlarge, owing to a rapid taking on of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the many princes of the power of the air have had time and chance of fighting their hardest against it. It is the turn which a man takes about the age of forty or five-and-forty that parts him off among the sheep on the right hand or the poor goats on the left. This is the time of the grand moral climacteric; when genial unvarnished selfishness, or coarse and ungenial cynicism, or querulous despondency, finally chokes out the generous resolve of a fancied strength which had not yet been tried in the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... (1713), in which Cato came upon the stage, was the grand climacteric of Addison's reputation. Upon the death of Cato he had, as is said, planned a tragedy in the time of his travels, and had for several years the four first acts finished, which were shown to such as were likely to spread their admiration. They were seen by Pope and by Cibber, who relates that ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... beholds her thirtieth birthday in sight, and girlhood gone, is approaching a climacteric in her career. Flaubert has named twenty-nine as the eventful year in the life of woman, and thirty-three for men. Every normal woman craves love and tenderness—these are her God-given right. If they have not come to her by the time the bloom is fading from her cheeks, there is danger ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... would but be making them stoop prematurely. If indeed we could put young hearts into old bodies occasionally, we might do some good; or if there could ever be combined in some fortunate individual, throughout his life, the good qualities peculiar to each successive climacteric; if we could mix just enough of the acid and the bitter, which are apt to predominate so unhappily after a long rubbing through the world, to qualify the fiery spirit of youth, and prevent its sweetness from cloying, the compound would undoubtedly be a very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... which was touched with red paint, and upon either side of the rock there were thrust into the ground a knife and two arrows. The inner circle was for the maidens, and the outer one for their grandmothers or chaperones, who were supposed to have passed the climacteric. Upon the outskirts of the feast there was a great public gathering, in which order was kept by certain warriors of highest reputation. Any man among the spectators might approach and challenge any young woman whom he knew to be unworthy; but if the accuser failed to prove his ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... patriotic, innocent-minded lovers of a Republican form of Government imagine, for an instant, that all danger to its continued existence and well-being has ceased to threaten?—that all the crises perilous to that beneficent popular governmental form have vanished?—that the climacteric came, and went, with the breaking out, and suppression, of the Rebellion?—and that there is nothing alarming in the outlook? Quite likely. The public mind has not yet been aroused to a sense of the actual revolution against Republican form of government that ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high, festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the company of senators and congressmen ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... witnessed climacteric scenes in the war dramas, east and west. The Federal victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, all-decisive in the history of the great American conflict, when considered in its entirety, had each ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... in the years to come. Thus circumscribed, it seems to me to be rounded and complete, a great work of art void of the dross, the mere debris which the true artist discards. But as it is, in all its lordly poetic strength and flagging impulse, is it not, after all, the true climacteric ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the same matter for astonishment as in Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of a century to be the world's conqueror, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... must not be stunned, you must act. This is a crisis for our party, but it is something more for you. It is your climacteric. They may lose; but you must win, if you will only bestir yourself. See the whips directly, and get the most certain seat you can. Nothing must prevent your being in the ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... shaking his head; "and I can't say that I am unselfish enough not to bear you a grudge for seeking to decoy away from me an invaluable servant,—faithful, steady, intelligent, and" (added Riccabocca, warming as he approached the climacteric adjective) "exceedingly cheap! Nevertheless go, and Heaven speed you. I am not an Alexander, to stand between man ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... turned of my great Climacteric, and am naturally a Man of a meek Temper. About a dozen Years ago I was married, for my Sins, to a young Woman of a good Family, and of an high Spirit; but could not bring her to close with me, before ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... only another day like the others, with nothing that hinted at a climacteric which would make the affairs of the mill office of the Morrisons ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... analyses of the types of delusion found in general paresis. Moreover, at a period subsequent to the analysis presented here, some work on fifth-decade insanities had been completed, and the delusional features constantly found in the functional cases of insanity developing at the climacteric, entered to modify our general ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... analytical nor introspective. How it came about he never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate fashion, that this scene of theirs, that this official assault and surrender, was in some way associated with the climacteric transports of camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers touched on in rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the final emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to the first aggressive tides of passion. What it ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... centre of life in the "Tatler," designed, as Sir Roger and his friends were designed, to carry the human interest of a distinct personality through the whole series of papers. The "Tatler's" personality was Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer; as to years, just over the grand climacteric, sixty-three, mystical multiple of nine and seven; dispensing counsel from his lodgings at Shire Lane, and seeking occasional rest in the vacuity of thought proper to his ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration: but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them,—nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics.[128] Si isti mihi largiantur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with a certain youthful expectancy, the air of one who confides, counting upon a delicate understanding. But Sam O'Neill, though perfectly willing to be delicate, could only say, after an anti-climacteric pause: "Is that right? Well, that bunch needed to grovel all right"—which was a little vague, say what you would of it, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... modernism achieved its grand climacteric in July, 1914, we had on the one hand an imperialism of force, in industry, commerce, and finance, expressing itself through highly developed specialists, and dictating the policies and practices of government, society, and education; on the other, a democracy of form ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... that had passed since the beginning of their acquaintance. Bassett had outwardly altered little as he crossed the watershed of middle life; but it seemed to Dan that the ill-temper he had manifested in the Thatcher affair had marked a climacteric. The self-control and restraint that had so impressed him at first had visibly diminished. What Harwood had taken for steel seemed to him now only iron after ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... criticism of the art productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the future." Their organ was the Athenaeum, established by Friedrich Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... decidedly promiscuous. Fortunately the innocence and ignorance of Swedenborg's speculations are proof in themselves that his entire life was absolutely above reproach. Swedenborg's bridal-chamber is the dream of a school-girl, presented by a scientific analyst, a man well past his grand climacteric, who imagined that the perpetuation of sexual "bliss" was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... paused for breath, the headlines of his great speech in tomorrow's paper dancing before his eyes: "THE CLIMACTERIC—EATS CAKE AND HAS IT—A GREAT CONCLUSION." The wind, which had risen somewhat during Mr. Lavender's speech, fluttered the farmer's garments at this moment, so that they emitted a sound like the stir which runs through an audience at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
