"Pythoness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you meet make instant observations of which you never can have thought previously. In like manner, the imagination foretells things. We spake anon of the inflated style of some writers. What also if there is an AFFLATED style,—when a writer is like a Pythoness on her oracle tripod, and mighty words, words which he cannot help, come blowing, and bellowing, and whistling, and moaning through the speaking pipes of his bodily organ? I have told you it was a very ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... men have writ and women have said they loved, but as the Pythoness stands by the altar, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... divine honours to an ancyle or a rusty nail; to the black stones at Delphi, or the gold-shrined bones at Aix; which yet sanctifies the chickens of the capitol, or the cock that startled Peter; which yet lets a wealthy sinner, by his gold, bribe the winking Pythoness, or buy dispensing clauses from "the Lord ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... priestesses, called Pythonesses,[16] sat, to fill themselves with the prophetic vapour, and to conceive the spirit of divination, with the fervor that made them know futurity, and foretel it in Greek hexameters. Plutarch says, that, on the cessation of oracles, a Pythoness was so excessively tormented by the vapour, and suffered such violent convulsions, that all the priests ran away, and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... of his present fortune—opened huge eyes when he heard the brilliancy of his future expectations; but when he expressed his intention to share them with Miss Rose Bradwardine, ecstasy had almost deprived the honest man of his senses. The Bailie started from his three-footed stool like the Pythoness from her tripod; flung his best wig out of the window, because the block on which it was placed stood in the way of his career; chucked his cap to the ceiling, caught it as it fell; whistled Tullochgorum; danced a Highland fling with inimitable grace and agility; and then threw himself exhausted ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... antagonism to the Gospel in Europe was purely mercenary. The pythoness's masters had no horror of Paul's doctrines. They were animated by no zeal for Apollo. They only saw a source of profit drying up. Infinitely more respectable was Jewish opposition, which was, at all events, the perverted working of noble sentiments. Zeal for religion, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... "the spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby," where she sits "nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from its cage"; or as Margaret Fuller, "her large, gray eyes Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness"? ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... romp perhaps and laugh, there was something terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a pythoness possessed by the demon, she inspired awe rather than pleasure. All changes, one after another, flashed like lightning over every mobile feature of her face. She might captivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Nature must "burst out with a kind of fine madness and divine inspiration." The madness must be fine. How can art aid it to this end? By knowledge of, by sympathy and emulation with, "the great poets and prose writers of the past." By these we may be inspired, as the Pythoness by Apollo. From the genius of the past "an effluence breathes upon us." The writer is not to imitate, but to keep before him the perfection of what has been done by the greatest poets. He is to look on them as beacons; he is to keep them as exemplars or ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... end of the republic those diviners appear to have enjoyed rather serious consideration at Rome. It was a pythoness from Syria that advised Marius on the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Shoreditch to the Gypsy Fair. At Goodwood, a few weeks after, you may see her in a beautiful half-riding dress, her hair fantastically plaited and adorned with pearls, standing beside the carriage of a Countess, telling the fortune of her ladyship with the voice and look of a pythoness. She is a thing of incongruities; an incomprehensible being! nobody can make her out; the writer himself has tried to make her out but could not, though he has spoken to her in his deepest Romany. It is true there ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... under subjection to both art and nature when she seemed to abandon herself the most absolutely to the whirlwind of her passion. There were no undue excesses of posture, movement, or tone. Her attitudes, it was once said, were those of "a Pythoness cast in bronze." Her voice thrilled and awed at its first note: it was so strangely deep, so solemnly melodious, until, stirred by passion as it were, it became thick and husky in certain of its tones; but it was always ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... songs which she is still obliged to learn indicate that she was originally offered to the gods as a bride. Even yet her touch is holy; the grain sown by her hand is blessed. At some time in the past she seems to have been also a pythoness: the spirits of the gods possessed her and spoke through her lips. All the poetry of this most ancient of religions centres in the figure of its little Vestal,—child-bride of ghosts,—as she flutters, [144] like some wonderful white-and-crimson ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... the Law [this communication was addressed to an Israelite] revive thy memory! Saul came to the Pythoness of Endor, and begged her to raise the spirit of Samuel; and the spirit of Samuel appeared, announcing to the King the nation's destiny and his own. (1 Samuel xxviii.) "The spirit [wind] bloweth where ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... to the spelling and grammar, our Parisian Pythoness stands, in the goodly fellowship, remarkable. Her style is a noble, and, as far as a foreigner can judge, a strange tongue, beautifully rich and pure. She has a very exuberant imagination, and, with it, a very chaste style of expression. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray |
