"Antic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Tiber's brink; Ye mighty names—what d'ye think? The Pope has sanctioned Railway Bills! And so the lofty Aventine, And your six other famous hills Will soon look down upon a 'Line.' Oh! if so be that hills could turn Their noses up, with gesture antic, Thus would the seven deride and spurn A Roman work so unromantic: 'Was this ...
— Scientific American magazine Vol 2. No. 3 Oct 10 1846 • Various
... neither spoke. Cornelia was seeing, as in a picture, the lonely ranch, with the solitary figure, sitting with his face towards the East, thinking, thinking. ... Guest was reflecting with amaze on the strange antic of fate, which ordained that it should be in the eyes of this Yankee stranger that he should see the first woman's tears shed on his behalf! She cried like a child; simply, involuntarily, without thought of appearance; the tears rising ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... "I will not; I will not skip like an antic, and show thee my poor little spindle legs. If I were a woman grown I should scarce show so much as the ankle of my foot. Besides, thou laughest at my hopping and jumping amongst these foolish woolly beasts, and I would not ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... blithe and antic, Of dimensions not gigantic, Though the moonshine mostly keep us, Oft in orchards frisk and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... occasionally happened—she became more quiet, placed herself beside him, stroked his face with caressing fondness, whispered something smilingly in his ear, and in this manner smoothed the wrinkles that were gathering on his brow. But the moment after, some wild whim would make her resume her antic movements; and all went worse ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced nonentity and art admired decay; The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay; Round us in antic order their crippled vices came— Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. Life ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... suffused with a grim and ghastly smile, which reminded us of Dante's devils. He immediately ascended the ladder, dragging his prey after him till they had nearly reached the top; he then placed the rope around the neck of the malefactor with many antic gestures and grimaces highly gratifying and amusing to the mob. To signify to the poor fellow under his fangs that he wished to whisper in his ear, to push him off the ladder, and to jump astride his neck with his heels drumming with violence upon his stomach, was but the work of an instant. ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... to the motion of the sea. There is a rhythm to this chaos of crossing, buffeting waves. I sense this rhythm, although I cannot solve it. But Mr. Pike knows it. Again and again, as we paced up and down this afternoon, when to me nothing unusually antic seemed impending, he would seize my arm as I lost balance, and as the Elsinore smashed down on her side and heeled over and over with a colossal roll that seemed never to end, and that always ended with an abrupt, snap-of-the-whip effect as she ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... bearing the mark of every age and nation, silly thoughts and wise thoughts, thoughts of people, of things, and of nothing, good thoughts, impish thoughts, and large, gracious thoughts. There they went swinging hand-in-hand in corkscrew fashion. An antic jester in green and gold led the dance. The guests followed no order or precedent. No two thoughts were related to each other even by the fortieth cousinship. There was not so much as an international alliance between them. Each thought behaved ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... abysmal slime, A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams, Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet, The afflicted city, prone from mark to mark In shameful occultation, seems A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting, With wavering gulfs and antic heights and shifting Rent in the stuff of a material dark Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale, Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale: Uncoiling monstrous into street on street Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, Where ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... all the characters. Still better puppets are doll heads and arms of various sorts, dressed in flowing robes and provided with holes for two fingers and a thumb of the operator, who moves them from below. They can be made to dance and antic as you like on a stage above the showman's head, as Punch and Judy have always done. The more elaborate marionettes are worked with strings from above, so that they can open and close their mouths ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... in the case of lions, tigers, leopards, by those who from long management of them possessed the same power over them as the groom over his horse, or else drawn along upon low platforms, upon which they were made to perform a thousand antic tricks for the amusement of the gaping and wondering crowds. Then came not many fewer than two thousand gladiators in pairs, all arranged in such a manner as to display to the greatest advantage their well-knit joints, and projecting ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... pleasant conceited Comedie," published in 1595, is a dramatized old wife's story told to three erring fancies, Frolic, Antic and Fantastic, quite in the style of a fairy tale, "always wavering in the peculiar twilight, between profound sense and nonsense, between childish play and matured humor." Two brothers who have lost their sisters appear, and then an insolent ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... airy, fantastic idea of irregular grace and bewildered melancholy any one can play Hamlet, as we have seen it played, with strut, and stare, and antic right-angled sharp-pointed gestures, it is difficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound, by the prompter's cue, to study the part of Ophelia. The account ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin |
