"Dormouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ordered me to give the brute dinner, I now prepared to stop his mouth with cold chicken. While I was cautiously unfastening the hamper lid, Beauty remained quiet as a dormouse; and then he proceeded personally to assist the unfastening, with a vengeance. There was a bouncing volcanic eruption, a blood-curdling howl, a mixed-up whirling round the carriage, and then—smash!—bang through the window went Beauty!—leaving me doubled ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... towns in the wide world, the chief. Sitting on this hillock where a bastion used to be, and where a noisy fortress was, in the time of the old Roman station here, I became aware that I have never known till now, what it is to be lazy. A dormouse must surely be in very much the same condition before he retires under the wool in his cage; or a tortoise ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... And, but for this consideration, I must have striven harder against the stealthy approach of slumber. But even so, it was very foolish to abandon watch, especially in such as I, who sleep like any dormouse. Moreover, I had chosen the very worst place in the world for such employment, with a goodly chance of awaking in a bed of ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... mathematical genius, had been able to pay his way through Cambridge University by the scholarships and prizes which he had won. One beautiful little dark-eyed daughter of seven was playing in a West End Theatre as the dormouse in "Alice in Wonderland." She was second fiddle to Alice herself, also, and could sing all her songs. Her pay was some five pounds a week, poor enough for the attraction she proved, but more than all the rest of the family ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... the blue fly, Hum, quoth the bee, Buz and hum they cry, And so do we: In his ear, in his nose, thus, do you see? He ate the dormouse, else it was he. ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... another equally attractive, rapidly revolving machine in which the molasses, by centrifugal force, detaches itself from the sugar, and runs of its own accord down its appointed channels to the rum distillery, where Alice's Dormouse would have had the gratification of seeing a real treacle-well. In this latter place, where the smell of the fermenting molasses is awful, only East Indian coolies can be employed, a West Indian negro being unable ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... it would be quite as well if we could sometimes "sink the paternal," as Timon Croesus says. I suppose everybody has heard of the awful speech pa made in the parlor at Saratoga. My dearest friend, Tabby Dormouse, told me she had heard of it everywhere, and that it was ten times as absurd each time it was repeated. By the by, Tabby is a dear creature, isn't she? It's so nice to have a spy in the enemy's camp, as it ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... dusty road Strewed acorns on the lea; And one took root and sprouted up, And grew into a tree. Love sought its shade at evening-time, To breathe its early vows; And Age was pleased, in heights of noon, To bask beneath its boughs. The dormouse loved its dangling twigs, The birds sweet music bore— It stood a glory in its place, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... was so droll to go running about en chemise, like the girl in the tale of the 'Midsummer Eve,' where she pulls the Saint Johns-wort flower, and has her wish to hear all the creatures talk. I liked it much, and Yvon slept so like the dormouse that he never heard me creep in and out. It was hard to bring much water, but the poor cabbages were so glad, and Mother Lobineau felt that ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... in a duel of language—a combat with broadswords—and honours were fairly even. The short-sleeved Johnston Smyth had waged futurist warfare against the modernist Pyford, while the Honourable Miss Durwent sat helplessly between them, with as little chance of asserting her rights as the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea-party. The American had held his own in badinage with the daughter of Italy on one side and his hostess on the other, the latter, however, being too skilled in entertaining to do more than ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... act at sea, owing to the combined effect of wind and current, they concealed themselves on deck under a black tarpaulin—that is to say, it had been black, but wind and weather had reduced it to a dirty brown—and there, adopting for the occasion the habits of the dormouse, the bear, the caterpillar, and other ephemeral productions, they lay torpid. But the moment the vessel touched the quay, profiting by the commotion, they emerged, and signed certificates with chalk on my portmanteau; then vanished in the crowd. The Custom-house read the certificates, and seized ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... before either spoke. The old priest broke the silence. He was a gentle-faced old man, not unlike a very shrewd and wide-awake dormouse; and his white hair stood out in a mass beneath his biretta. But the words he used were ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... mice and such small deer there are only too many, though it is worth while to watch rats at play round a hay-rick on Sunday evenings, when they know they will not be persecuted, and sit up like little kangaroos. The vole, which is not a rat, is a goodly sight, and the smooth round dormouse (or sleep-mouse, as the children call it) is a favourite gift ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... still conscious that life has been throughout a puzzle and a game of chance, and that even in their case it might have turned out very differently, find themselves awaiting with a strange curiosity and anxiety the decision of some child of seventeen, knowing no more of the world than a baby dormouse. ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... Russian peasant is accustomed, and has been accustomed for hundreds of years, to perform prodigies of labor during two short periods of sowing and harvest, and to spend the immensely long and monotonous winter in a hibernation like that of the snake or the dormouse. There is a much greater difference between a Russian workman's normal output and that of which he is capable for a short time if he sets himself to it, than there is between the normal and exceptional output ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... suppressed, like the dormouse in Alice's teapot. There is very little left of me. I had no idea your niece had such a taste for argument, Cunliffe. I take it rather unkindly that I was not warned ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... service of the house for twenty-two years. He waited at table, groomed the mare, gardened, blacked the abbe's boots, went on errands, chopped the wood, drove the carriole, and fetched the oats, straw, and hay from Prebaudet. He sat in the antechamber during the evening, where he slept like a dormouse. He was in love with Josette, a girl of thirty, whom Mademoiselle would have dismissed had she married him. So the poor fond pair laid by their wages, and loved each other silently, waiting, hoping for mademoiselle's own marriage, ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... the journey. Madame Bonaparte, mere, supported the fatigues of this memorable day with the greatest courage; but Madame Bonaparte, Consulesse, did not show any. The two young ladies who sat in the dormouse, Mademoiselle Hortense and Madame Lavallette, were rival candidates for a bottle of Eau de Cologne; and every now and then the amiable M. Rapp made the carriage stop for the comfort of his poor little sick heart, which overflowed with bile: ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... sardines. Men were retching and groaning, cussing and growling. At last I found a coil of rope. It was a huge coil with a hole in the centre—something like a large bird's nest. I got into this hole and curled up like a dormouse. Here I did not feel the cold so much, and lying down I didn't feel sick. The moon glittered on the great gray billows. The cattle-boat heaved up and slid down the mountains. She pitched and rolled and slithered sideways down the wave-slopes. And ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... cut the cord, for this was a very hazardous enterprise, as the rays of the sun would burn up whoever came so near. At last the dormouse undertook it, for at this time the dormouse was the largest animal in the world" (the mastodon?); "when it stood up it looked like a mountain. When it got to the place where the sun was snared, its back began ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... a large pop-gun, a football, a dormouse in a cage, a punchball on a stand, a large box of "curios," and a buckskin which was his dearest possession and had been presented to him by an uncle ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... afterward, when, having become rich and the favourite of the Bey, he began to think of settling down, it was to her that his thoughts went. The child had grown into a fat young woman, heavy and white. Her intelligence, dull in the first instance, had become still more obscured through the inertia of a dormouse's existence, the carelessness of a father given over to business, the use of opium-saturated tobacco and of preserves made from rose-leaves, the torpor of her Flemish blood, re-enforced by Oriental indolence. Furthermore, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... humour, as if to say, 'There! that's what you trees get by having apples!'—at all these times he seemed less an individual than a blind force. For though his personality was strong, that of the place was stronger. Half out of the soil, minded like the dormouse and the beetle, he was, by virtue of his unspoken passion, the ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... with tea-cups, or I shoulder the fire-shovel. The two weeks drag themselves away, and the cry is still, "Unfinished!" To prevent petrifying into a fossil remain, or relapsing into primitive barbarism, or degenerating into a dormouse, I rouse my energies and determine to put my own shoulder to the wheel and see if something cannot be accomplished. I rise early in the morning and walk to Dan, to hire a painter who is possessed of "gumption," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... easy to satisfy with explanations when she finds me conversing with a lady unbeknown to her. The Earthquaker won't do you any harm; it's only for safe keeping I'll put you with him. Why, he don't waken, not once in fifty years. He's quite the dormouse. Turns on his bed now and then, and things upstairs get upset, more or less; but, as a rule, a child could play with ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... from side to side to try and discover where these words could come from, but he saw nobody. The donkeys galloped, the coach rattled, the boys inside slept, Candlewick snored like a dormouse, and the little man seated on the ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... and she only returned after some ten minutes. "Home," she then said to Burton, climbing heavily into the car. "Yes, there he was, sleeping as peaceful as a dormouse in his silk pyjamas," she remarked. "I startled him some, I reckon, when I waked him up. No, he don't know anything about her. Wanted to jump up and look for her when I told him she was missing. Keep still, Mercedes—what do you mean by bouncing about like that—folks ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... dormouse squats and eats Choice little dainty bits Beneath the spreading roots of a broad lime; Nibbling his fill he stops from time to time And listens where ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Septimus, and the door having closed behind Clem Sypher, he thrust the check beneath the bedclothes, curled himself up and went to sleep like a dormouse. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... champagne, he drank punch, an after that he slept like a dormouse; unfortunately, sleep dissipated his exhilaration, and when he awoke his gaiety had left him. He had the fatal custom of reflecting; his reflections saddened him; he was revenged, but what then? He thought for a long while of Mlle. Moriaz; he gazed with melancholy eye at his two hands, which ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... writing-desks of his literary friends, in the portfolios of his painters; vainly had he fancied that thereby he might be remembered. A peach—a blushing, rich-flavored fruit, nestling in the trellis work on the garden-wall, hidden beneath its long, green leaves,—this little vegetable production, that a dormouse would nibble up without a thought, was sufficient to recall to the memory of this great monarch the mournful shade of the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... regards to old Mr. John Taylor, Who "thinks he might pass as a dormouse," (Three years in ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter
... they jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads. The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms itself afresh into buzzing groups of energetic conversers. The dormouse-life of winter is over, and the spring and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. 'Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice; 'only, as it's asleep, I suppose it ...
— Alice's Adventures in Wonderland • Lewis Carroll
... wooing was very hopeless. And all the time he courted the imperious rose, who should be peeping at him from her home in the hedge but as plump and as sleek a little Miss Dormouse as ever you saw, and her eyes ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... did show favour to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valour, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver. You should then have accosted her; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from the mint, you should have banged the youth into dumbness. This was ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... a washed-out specimen, but, I say, that fat fellow looks rather a sport. You know, the man like a dormouse." ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... shadow that he may figure out how much longer he may sleep. But that I take to be a mere literary furnishing, like the chuck part of the animal's name, brought from England with the pioneers and adapted to use in this country. Probably it is said in England of the dormouse, which also sleeps winters, as does the woodchuck, though I believe lightly compared with our animal. The woodchuck is far too sound a sleeper to wake up on a February day, whatever ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse cages—white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner—boxes and boxes of things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it away"—boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of dried ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... acorns on the lea; And one took root and sprouted up, and grew into a tree. Love sought its shade, at evening time, to breath its early vows; And age was pleased, in heats of noon, to bask beneath its boughs; The dormouse loved its dangling twigs, the birds sweet music bore; It stood a glory in its place, a ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... silk pyjamas and the soft bed and the blazing fire in his room—he stripped back the light-excluding curtains forgetful of Defence of the Realm Acts, and opened all the windows wide, to the horror of Peddle in the morning—slept like an unperturbed dormouse. When Peddle woke him, he lay drowsily while the old butler filled his bath and fiddled about with drawers. At last aroused, he ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... Carlyle,—Two* unanswered letters filled and fragrant and potent with goodness will not let me procrastinate another minute, or I shall sink and deserve to sink into my dormouse condition. You are of the Anakim, and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution. Well, if you shame us by your reservoir inexhaustible of force, you indemnify and cheer some of us, or one of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... very fierce; and although they have no teeth, their jaws are so strong that they can bite a walking-stick in half. Land-tortoises are quite harmless; they only attack the insects they feed upon. They go to sleep, like the dormouse, in the winter, but they do not make a burrow; they cover themselves with earth by scraping it up and throwing it over their bodies. In doing this they would find their heads and tails very much in the way if it were not that they are able to draw them in between their shells. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... to be found in such a country as this?" inquired Harry Blount. "Look around you! There's nothing green but the sea itself. There isn't anything eatable within sight,—not so much as would make a dinner for a dormouse!" ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... his tea thoughtfully, "when we lived in the City as 'prentice lads together, we shared a room above the shop. He used to have a dormouse that he was very fond of. All his leisure time was spent in nursing the creature and cleaning its cage. It seemed to be his only pleasure in life. One night it was running across the floor, and I put my foot ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... him Sentronell? s'hart heele nod[119] presently: and he do not sleepe sitting upon the poynt of a Spanish needle, Dicke Bowyer's a very shittle-cocke. Nod! zounds, he is one of the nine sleepers, a very Dormouse: & I had a pageant to present of the seven deadly Sinnes[120], he should play Slouth; and he did not sleepe when he should speake his part I ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief—at least so it was conjectured from her always ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... eyes open at all. The stewardess—a colored woman—laughed when she saw the half-awake little passenger; but she was very good-natured, whipped off Eyebright's boots, hat, and jacket, in a twinkling, and tucked her into a little berth, where in three minutes she was napping like a dormouse. There was a great deal of whistling and screeching and ringing of bells when the boat left her dock, heavy feet trampled over the deck just above the berth, the water lapped and hissed; but not one of these things did Eyebright hear, nor was she conscious of the rock-ing ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... of which I have preserved in brandy. From the colour, shape, size, and manner of nesting, I make no doubt but that the species is nondescript. They are much smaller, and more slender, than the mus domesticus medius of Ray, and have more of the squirrel or dormouse colour; their belly is white, a straight line along their sides divides the shades of their back and belly. They never enter into houses; are carried into ricks and barns with the sheaves, abound in harvest; and build their nests amidst the straws of the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... like homeless children in a cellar,—then the money gained in the time of leaf and blossom was all needed to buy a black loaf and fagot of wood; and many a day in the little pink hut Bebee rolled herself up in her bed like a dormouse, to forget in sleep that she was supperless and as cold as ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... partner; afternoon farmer; truant &c (runaway) 623; bummer^, loafer, goldbrick, goldbicker, lounger, lazzarone [It]; lubber, lubbard^; slow coach &c (slow.) 275; opium eater, lotus eater; slug; lag^, sluggard, slugabed; slumberer, dormouse, marmot; waiter on Providence, fruges consumere natus [Lat.]. V. be inactive &c adj.; do nothing &c 681; move slowly &c 275; let the grass grow under one's feet; take one's time, dawdle, drawl, droil^, lag, hang back, slouch; loll, lollop^; lounge, poke, loaf, loiter; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the blue fly: Hum, quoth the bee: Buzz and hum they cry And so do we. In his ear, in his nose, Thus do you see? [They tickle them.] He ate the dormouse Else it ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... delivered in her politest manner, Fanny left the room with an elegant and cheerful air—to tear up-stairs with a flushed face as soon as she was out of hearing, pounce in upon her sister, call her a little Dormouse, shake her for the better opening of her eyes, tell her what had passed below, and ask her what ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the child should do it for her. Little Roger jumped up, boxed his brother's ears in a decided manner, and finally, burying his small hands in Edmund's light curly hair, gave him a dose of sensation which would have roused a dormouse. ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... in bedrooms. One diary, written in Marshfield, Massachusetts, tells of a basin of water standing on the bedroom hearth, in front of a blazing fire, in which the water froze solid. President John Adams so dreaded the bleak New England winter and the ill-warmed houses that he longed to sleep like a dormouse every year, from autumn to spring. In the Southern colonies, during the fewer cold days of the winter months, the temperature was not so low, but the houses were more open and lightly built than in the North, and were without cellars, and had fewer fireplaces; ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... too stupid, and am infinitely so to-day also. Only I must pray you to tell Sarah we all had elder wine to finish our evening with, and I mulled it myself, and poured it out in the saucepan into the expectants' glasses, and everybody asked for more; and I slept like a dormouse. But, as I said, I am so stupid this morning that——. Well, there's no "that" able to say how stupid I am, unless the fly that wouldn't keep out of the candle last night; and he had some notion of bliss to be found in candles, and I've no ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... soil; 205 Quick flies fair TULIPA the loud alarms, And folds her infant closer in her arms; In some lone cave, secure pavilion, lies, And waits the courtship of serener skies.— So, six cold moons, the Dormouse charm'd to rest, 210 Indulgent Sleep! beneath thy eider breast, In fields of Fancy climbs the kernel'd groves, Or shares the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... going home and was in a hurry to look at the invalid first. Razumihin informed him that Raskolnikov was sleeping like a dormouse. Zossimov gave orders that they shouldn't wake him and promised to see him ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to "Alice in Wonderland," Mr. Savile Clarke's play at the Prince of Wales's Theatre. The first act (Wonderland) goes well, specially the Mad Tea Party. Mr. Sydney Harcourt is a capital Hatter, and little Dorothy d'Alcourt (aet. 61/2) a delicious Dormouse. Phoebe Carlo is a splendid Alice. Her song and dance with the Cheshire Cat (Master C. Adeson, who played the Pirate King in "Pirates of Penzance") was a gem. As a whole the play ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... possible? I rise at five o'clock, winter and summer; I go to bed at ten or eleven; I eat to satisfy my hunger, which is not very great, it is true; I sing like a lark all day, and at night I sleep like a dormouse: I have a mind free, joyful, and contented, with the certainty of plenty of work, because my employers are pleased with what I have done. Why should I be sick! What an ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... was like a fairy dream to London-reared Inna; the lads showed her a squirrel or two, a dormouse not yet gone to its winter snooze, in its mossy bed-chamber. A snake wriggled past them, which made her shudder; frogs and toads leaped here and there in dark places. Then, oh, the whir and whisper of the autumn wind among the trees! the lights and shadows! ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... copyrighted material the authors and publishers express their indebtedness to The Independent for "Who Loves the Trees Best?" by Alice M. Douglas; to Oliver Herford and the Century Company for "The Elf and the Dormouse"; to the American Folklore Society for "How Brother Rabbit Fooled the Whale and the Elephant," by Alcee Fortier; to the Outlook for "Making the Best of It," by Frances M. Fox, and "Winter Nights," by Mary F. Butts; to Harper Brothers for "The Animals and the Mirror," ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... Steve boisterously. "Here, come out, you lazy old rascal; we're just going on a bit of a trip. Where are you? Oh, I say, you do like playing dormouse." ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... clearing: vig'rous stroke on stroke Striking, till, when he stopt, his back seem'd broke, And the strong arm dropt nerveless. What of that? There was a treasure hidden in his hat— A plaything for the young ones. He had found A dormouse nest; the living ball coil'd round For its long winter sleep; and all his thought As he trudged stoutly homeward, was of nought But the glad wonderment in Jenny's eyes, And graver Lizzy's quieter surprize, When he should yield, by guess, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... mite of seven, with eyes black and sparkling as those of a dormouse, had just seen Tantaine in the doorway and pointed him ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau |
