"Gapes" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dig for him that be living yet, O'er this narrow gulf he shall never get; The mouth gapes wide that 'Enough' ne'er cries; Each clod that I fling on his bosom lies; In darkness and coldness it rests on thee, With the last stroke that ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Gervase impetuously. "Take the Arts. I, for example, dream of painting a picture that shall move the world to admiration,—but I seldom grasp the idea I have imagined. I paint something,—anything,—and the world gapes at it, and some rich fool buys it, leaving me free to paint another something; and so on and so on, to the end of my career. I ask you what satisfaction does it bring? What is it to Raphael that thousands of human units, cultured and silly, have stared at his 'Madonnas' ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... hedge-stake from the top of the bank, and wrenching the upper part of the dense hawthorn growth into a gap, through which he pulled the nest with its contents, four half-fledged birds, looking, with the loose down at the back of their heads, their great goggle eyes and wide gapes, combined with the spiky, undeveloped feathers and general nakedness, about as ugly, goblin-like creatures as ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... every hen egg will hatch; not a chicken will ever die with the gapes; they will all live on love, like herself, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... one bone would fain catch, But yet the third do them both deceive. Even so Hypocrisy for the pre-eminence doth snatch, Which Tyranny gapes for, ye may perceive: But I must obtain it; for of me they retain All kind of riches, their states to maintain, To yield to me, therefore, they must ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... will interest no one. Her hair she wore half in curls, according to the hideous custom of that day. Is it not always safe to abuse the old fashion? And at no time safer than the present, when the whole world gapes with its great, foolish mouth after every novelty. I remember that Lucille looked pretty enough; but you, mesdames, who laugh at me, are no doubt quite right, and a thousand times more beautiful ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... vessel, that by chance hath been Either of middle-piece or cant-piece reft, Gapes not so wide as one that from his chin I noticed lengthwise through his carcass cleft." ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... growing broad in the view, seems to cover the whole area of life: you set up your affections and your duties; you build hopes with fairy scenery, and away they all go, tossing like the relentless waters to the deep gulf that gapes a hideous welcome! You sigh at your weakness of heart, or of endeavor, and your sighs float out into the breeze, that rises ever from the shock of the waves, and whirl, empty-handed, to Heaven. You avow high purposes, and clench them with round utterance; and your voice, like ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks, and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth, and are With ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... while we follow Dr Senior among the peaks and passes of Switzerland (and remark, by the way, what a nice quiet boy Tom Senior is, when he has only his father and his mother to tempt him into mischief) can we possibly expect to regard very attentively the doings of Simon, as he gapes about before the London shop-windows, and jerks off a score or more stanzas of his "Hart's Earnings," which is ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... with bitterness and vexation and disappointment that he is but a sluggard, but a braggart, but one who is petty and weak and blinded with conceit and distorted with envy, but one between whose word and whose deed there gapes a disparity even wider and deeper than the disparity which divides the word from the deed of the man of winter, of the man who, though he be as tardy as a snail, at least is making some way in the world, in contradistinction from the failure ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... heaven when Sirius glares, And o'er Britannia shakes his fiery hairs; When no soft shower descends, no dew distills, Her wave-worn channels dry, and mute her rills; 365 When droops the sickening herb, the blossom fades, And parch'd earth gapes beneath the withering glades. —With languid step fair DYPSACA retreats; "Fall gentle dews!" the fainting nymph repeats; Seeks the low dell, and in the sultry shade 370 Invokes in vain the Naiads ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... upon his neck. OSORIO leaps out from the nook with frantic wildness, and rushes towards ALBERT with his sword. MARIA gapes at him, as one helpless with terror, then leaves ALBERT, and flings herself upon OSORIO, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... ordain'd To propagate the gospel—penn'd at Rome; Hawk'd through the world by consecrated bulls; And how illustrated?—by Smithfleld flames: Who plunge (but not like Curtius) down the gulf, Down narrow-minded self's voracious gulf, Which gapes and swallows all they swore to save: Hate all that lifted heroes into gods, And hug the horrors of a victor's chain: Of bodies politic that destin'd hell, Inflicted here, since here their beings end; And fall ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... our blood. Ay, and the time will come when there anigh, Heaving the earth up with his curved plough, Some swain will light on javelins by foul rust Corroded, or with ponderous harrow strike On empty helmets, while he gapes to see Bones as of giants from the trench untombed. Gods of my country, heroes of the soil, And Romulus, and Mother Vesta, thou Who Tuscan Tiber and Rome's Palatine Preservest, this new champion at the least Our fallen generation to repair Forbid not. To ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... sympathetic hearts but not too fecund intellects could devise, and as often as not it was sorry comfort enough. Some stood all but speechless, only gasping out at intervals, "Deary me." Others, again, seemed afflicted with what old Matthew Branthwaite called "doddering" and a fit of the "gapes." ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... transparent oblong body without any distinct organs, begins to develop rapidly. It elongates, forming a kind of cup-like base or stem, the upper end spreads somewhat, the depression at its centre deepens, a mouth is formed that gapes widely and opens into the digestive cavity, and the upper margin spreads out to form a number of tentacles, few at first, but growing more and more numerous till a wreath is completed all around it. In this condition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, I am proud of the exploit! The real journalist must be a man not of brass only, but bronze. Chapter IX. gapes for me, but I shrink on the margin, and go on chattering to you. This last part will be much less offensive (strange to say) to the Germans. It is Becker they will never forgive me for; Knappe I pity and do not dislike; Becker I scorn and abominate. Here is the tableau. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... living with a tradesman in town, but drank all I had there. Now I've come back to the village. I've no home, so I've gone into service. (Gapes.) Oh Lord! ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... not the most beautiful. There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish, before the victory is won; and—strange that it should be so—this is the highest life of man. Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose life has been other than this. They to whom ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth and are, With constant ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the rains Striped grey this piteous God of theirs; The face is full of prayers and pains, To which they bring their pains and prayers; Lean limbs that shew the labouring bones, And ghastly mouth that gapes ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave; which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won; and—strange that it should be so—this is the ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... frequently struck us as strange, the morbid avidity with which the world seizes upon the slightest evidence of abstraction in great men, to declare that their minds are fading, or impoverished: the public gapes for every trifle calculated to prove that the palsied fingers can no longer grasp the intellectual sceptre, and that the well-worn and hard-earned bays are as a crown of thorns to the pulseless brow. It was, in those days whispered in London ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... much more wonderful that water should be turned into wine, than that a little water and a little earth, under the rays of the sun, should be turned into the beautiful flowers and luscious fruits of our gardens and orchards? These same elements are even now maturing gapes, which, with a little management, under merely natural forces, directed by a human will, may produce wine fit for the wedding feast of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sick taste, and transient are they all; But this one sweet has such enchanting power, The more we take, the faster we devour: Nauseous to those who must the dose apply, And most disgusting to the standers-by; Yet in all companies will Laughton feed, Nor care how grossly men perform the deed. As gapes the nursling, or, what comes more near, Some Friendly-Island chief, for hourly cheer; When wives and slaves, attending round his seat, Prepare by turns the masticated meat; So for this master, husband, parent, friend, His ready slaves their various efforts blend, And, to their ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... purpose, you lie groaning. I could point out your actual inability to live, however basely—deprived of character and credit—devoid of any relics of your fortunes! weighed to the very earth by debts, the interest alone of which has swallowed up your patrimonies, and gapes even yet for more! fettered by bail-bonds, to fly which is infamy, and to abide them ruin! shunned, scorned, despised, and hated, if not feared by all men. I could paint, to your very eyes, ourselves in rags or fetters! our enemies ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Hill, London. A dishonest merchant, wealthy, vulgar, and purse-proud. He is invited to a soiree given by lord Abberville, "and counts the servants, gapes at the lustres, and never enters the drawing-room at all, but stays below, chatting with the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... which remains whole and standing, is frightful to behold. It represents a man of gigantic proportions, with a head three feet high; the expression of the countenance is ferocious, eyes of brilliant slaty black are set beneath gray brows, the large, deep mouth gapes immoderately, and reptiles have made their nest between the lips of stone; by the light of the moon, a hideous swarm is there dimly visible. A broad girdle, adorned with symbolic ornaments, encircles the body of this statue, and fastens a long sword to its right side. The giant has four extended ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... his glad coast from radiant zone to zone, Then Fortune's minion in a foreign clime, Cursed by his own and damned to later time, Of incest born and by the chances thrown A tainted alien on a ravished throne, Gapes the foul flatteries of a fawning train, And fatuous mock'ries, which themselves disdain, A fancied monarch, but the witless sport Of adulation, and a practiced court, Vaunts to his broad realms and Timour-like proclaims Illusive titles of barbaric names, Cheats his own nature, ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... deceased, am about to chronicle the events of one short year—a year in which was compressed the agony of a long and tortured life-time! One little year!—one sharp thrust from the dagger of Time! It pierced my heart—the wound still gapes and bleeds, and every drop of blood is ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... themselves no one knew. Arsinoe as she heard these tidings felt like a sailor whose vessel has grounded on a rocky shore, and who realizes with horror that every plank and beam be neath him quivers and gapes. As usual, when she felt too weak to help herself unaided, her first thought was of Selene, and she decided to hasten off to her and to ask her what she could do, what was to become of her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hinge. Markest thou what sentry is seated in [575-609]the doorway? what shape guards the threshold? More grim within sits the monstrous Hydra with her fifty black yawning throats: and Tartarus' self gapes sheer and strikes into the gloom through twice the space that one looks upward to Olympus and the skyey heaven. Here Earth's ancient children, the Titans' brood, hurled down by the thunderbolt, lie wallowing in the abyss. Here likewise I saw the twin Aloids, enormous of frame, who essayed ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... "was based on several facts. In the first place, a wound inflicted on a living body gapes rather widely, owing to the retraction of the living skin. The skin of a dead body does not retract, and the wound, consequently, does not gape. This wound gaped very slightly, showing that death was recent, I should say, within half an hour. Then a wound on the living body becomes ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... here and there a corner to which a poor friendless, moneyless, homeless, but unfallen girl can fly for shelter from the storm which bids fair to sweep her away whether she will or no into the deadly vortex of ruin which gapes beneath her. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the table beside her. Into it she deliberately slipped, her own; and then gazed—flushed and defiant, but proud and smiling—round a circle composed entirely of faces belonging to people suffering from the gapes. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... Mr. Fujinami stirs, gapes, stretches, yawns, rubs his lean fist in his hollow eyes, and stares at the rude incursion of daylight. He takes no notice of his wife's presence. She pours out tea for him with studied pose of hands and wrists, conventional and graceful. She respectfully requests him to condescend ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... not to black. In the Tarentino, black sheep are not injured by eating the Hypericum crispum—a species of St. John's-wort—which kills white sheep. White terriers suffer most from distemper; white chickens from the gapes. White-haired horses or cattle are subject to cutaneous diseases from which the dark coloured are free; while, both in Thuringia and the West Indies, it has been noticed that white or pale coloured cattle are much more troubled by flies than are those which are brown or black. The same ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... devouring a whole mouthful of gapes, I lowered the lamp, wet the captain's head, and sat down on a hard stool to begin my watch. The captain lay with his hot, haggard face turned toward me, filling the air with his poisonous breath, and feebly muttering, with lips and tongue so parched that the sanest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... weight in gold on account of her heterogeneity. Your Irish immigrant at eight and ten shillings a week has as often as not never been inside any other household than her native hovel, and stares in astonishment to find that you don't keep a pig on your drawing-room sofa. On entering your house, she gapes in awe of what she considers the grandeur around her, and the whole of her first day's work consists of ejaculating 'Lor' and 'Goodness!' We once had a hopeful of this kind who, after she had been given full ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... imagination we can see an indistinct form stealthily remove the floorboard of one of the stairs and creep beneath it. This particular step of a short flight running from the landing into a garret is, upon closer inspection, indeed movable, and beneath gapes a dark cavity about five feet square, on the floor of which still remains the piece of sedge matting whereon a certain Father Wall rested his aching limbs a few days prior to his capture and execution in ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... stand by Atkinson till he dozes. Atkinson is a fine, big fellow, and when he squats down his head is in a convenient position for observation. Presently he gapes; then his eyes shut, and his beak droops—just a very little. Then the beak droops a little more, and signs of insecurity appear about the neck. Very soon a distinct departure from the vertical ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... fierce ruin there Of the old wild princes' lair Whose blood in mine hath share Gapes gaunt and great Toward heaven that long ago Watched all the wan land's woe Whereon the wind would ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... little run she is in the pantry and back again. She planks down a cake before him, at sight of which he gapes. ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... "Elder Boone ain't begun the openin' prayer, though, or we should know it. You can hear him pray a mile away, when the wind's right. I do hate to be late to meetin'. The Elder allers takes notice; the folks in the wing pews allers gapes an' stares, and the choir peeks through the curtain, takin' notes of everything you've got on your back. I hope to the land they'll chord and keep together a little mite better 'n they've done lately, that's all I can say! If the Lord ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... also. As in the bottle of commerce, the bottom is re-entrant, and the shore-reef runs prominently forth into the basin and makes a dangerous cape opposite the fairway of the entrance. Danger is, therefore, on all hands. The entrance gapes three cables wide at the narrowest, and the formidable surf of the Pacific thunders both outside and in. There are days when speech is difficult in the chambers of shore-side houses; days when no boat can land, and when men are ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Hawkins look round sociably. Essie, with a gleam of interest breaking through her misery, looks up. Christy grins and gapes expectantly at the door. The rest are petrified with the intensity of their sense of Virtue menaced with outrage by the approach of flaunting Vice. The reprobate appears in the doorway, graced beyond his alleged merits by the morning sunlight. He is certainly the best looking ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island pineapples. Carl gapes at Panamanian nuns and Chilean consuls, French peasant laborers and indignant Irish foremen and German concessionaries with dueling scars and high collars. Gold Spanish signs and Spiggoty money and hotels ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... he stays his footsteps, fain to heed What signs they give, and whitherward their flight. Awhile they fly, awhile they stop to feed, Then, fluttering, keep within the range of sight, Till, coming where Avernus, dark as night, Gapes, with rank vapours from its depths uprolled, Aloft they soar, and through the liquid height Dart to the tree, where, wondrous to behold, The varying green sets forth the glitter ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... dearest, what is love? 'Tis a lightning from above; 'Tis an arrow, 'tis a fire, 'Tis a boy they call Desire. 'Tis a grave, Gapes to have Those poor ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... The tip of one wing is missing. The head of the eagle, originally proudly and defiantly erect, has been bent backward so that, instead of a level glance, it looks upward, and there is a deep dent in it, as from a blow. And right in the breast gapes a great ragged shot-hole, which pierces the heart of the proud emblem. The eagle has seen service. It has been in action. It bears its honorable wounds. No attempt has been made ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... thing," said Johnny Coe, who could think at times. "To be safe you should be a genius winged and flying, or a crawling thing that never leaves the earth. It's the half-and-half that hell gapes for. And owre ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown |
