"Raconteur" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he, in turn, lunched with the patrons of the place—a valuable recruit for those who haunted the cafe, folks oppressed by the tedium of a country life, for whom the arrival of that new-comer, past master in all games, and an admirable raconteur of his wars and his loves, was a true stroke of good-fortune. The Captain himself was delighted to tell his stories to folks who were still ignorant of his repertoire. There were fully six months before him in which to tell of ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... where a dozen celebrated singing satirists entertain an appreciative audience in the stuffy little hall serving as an auditorium. Here, nightly, as the piece de resistance—and late on the programme (there is no printed one)—you will hear the Bard of Montmartre, Marcel Legay, raconteur, poet, musician, and singer; the author of many of the most popular songs of Montmartre, and a veteran singer in ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... read. To that brother, Mr. William Le Fanu, Commissioner of Public Works, Ireland, to whom, as the suggester of Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Phaudrig Croohore' and 'Shamus O'Brien,' Irish ballad literature owes a delightful debt, and whose richly humorous and passionately pathetic powers as a raconteur of these poems have only doubled that obligation in the hearts of those who have been happy enough to be his hearers—to Mr. William Le Fanu we are indebted for the following extracts from the first of his works, which the boy-author seems to have ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... "Then were there two traitors?" but Mexia, who by now was somewhat in love with his part of raconteur, had a grim smile. "There was one Don Luiz de Guardiola.... Oh, I will tell you what you wish to know, senors! Be not so impatient. It was without the room where lay his prisoner that he gathered from Desmond news indeed; and it was from that ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... The raconteur suddenly stopped short, while the group remained silent in expectancy. The camp-fire, with its elastic, leaping flames, had bepainted the darkening avenues of the russet woods with long, fibrous strokes of red and yellow, ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... and Ladies and Gentlemen," said the famous raconteur as he arose, "Before this dinner Mark Twain and myself made an agreement to trade speeches. He has just delivered my speech, and I thank you for the pleasant manner in which you received it. I regret to say that I have lost the notes of his speech and cannot remember anything ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... flirting with revolutionarism, he never displayed great originality or depth of thought. He was simply an extraordinarily gifted author, a perfect versifier, a wondrous lyrist, and a delicious raconteur, endowed with a grace, ease and power of expression that delighted even the exacting artistic sense of Turgenev. To him aptly applies the dictum of Socrates: "Not by wisdom do the poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... Tribunal at Paris. Triumph of President Cleveland and Secretary Olney. Men whom I met in Washington. Lord Panncefote. Secretary Carlisle, striking tribute to him by an eminent Republican; his characteristics. Vice-President Stevenson; his powers as a raconteur. Senator Gray and Mr. Olney. Visit with the American Geographical Society to Monticello; curious evidences there of Jefferson's peculiarities; beauty of the place. Visit to the University of Virginia. My increasing respect for the qualities of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... because of the light they throw on his own character at the beginning of his diplomatic career; we must not take them all too seriously. He was too good a raconteur not to make a good story better, and too good a letter-writer not to add something to the effect of his descriptions; besides, as he says elsewhere, he did not easily see the good side of people; his eyes were sharper for their faults than their ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the way he usually wound up his reminiscences. Another would draw his picture of the firing on Fort Sumter, and would assert that the battle of Antietam in which he took part was the hottest of the war. The favorite topic of the third raconteur was the flush times on Oil Creek in the early '60's, when he had drilled a dry hole near "Colonel Drake's" pioneer venture. And so it would go till it was time to "douse the glim." One thing they all agreed on—that the whiskey was good but ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... motto of the artist. He lived to paint and he painted much after his paralytic seizure. He was a brilliant raconteur, and, as Degas said, was at one time as well known in Paris as Garibaldi, red shirt and all. The truth is, Manet, after being forced with his back to the wall, became the active combatant in the duel with press and public. He was unhappy if people on the boulevard ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... delectation Alan spun long thrilling tales, many of them based on personal experience in his wide travels in many lands. He was a magnificent raconteur and Dick propped up among his pillows drank it all in, listening like another Desdemona to strange moving accidents of fire and flood which his scribbling ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... educated Londoner and the Egyptian fellah meet on common human ground. The passion for a story has no more died out than curiosity, or than the passion of love. The truth is not that stories are not demanded, but that the born raconteur and story-teller is a rare person. The faculty of telling a story is a much rarer gift than the ability to analyze character and even than the ability truly to draw character. It may be a higher or a lower power, but it is rarer. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... other subjects, all included in the vulgar term "shop." We spent the whole of one evening debating thus, in the smoke-room; whilst the following night we went to an entertainment given by that charming reciter and raconteur, Miss Lilian North, who, apart from her talent, which, in my opinion, places her in the first rank of her profession, is the possessor of extraordinary personal attractions, not the least remarkable of which are her hands. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... was relating, after dinner, the story of our afternoon promenade. A burly personage is the Major, with hooked nose and black moustache and twinkling eyes—retired, now, from a service in the course of which he has seen many parts of the world; a fluent raconteur, moreover, who keeps us in fits of laughter with naughty stories and imitations of local dialects. "We must be nice with them, and always offer them cigarettes. What say you, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... It was frankly a charity job, but Kitty was never to know that because she fell into the newspaper game naturally; and when they discovered her wide acquaintance among theatrical celebrities they switched her into the dramatic department, where she had astonishing success as a raconteur. She was now assistant dramatic editor of the Sunday issue, and her pay envelope had four crisp ten-dollar notes in ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... an excellent raconteur with a vivid imagination, and it did not trouble his conscience because the narratives he imparted to this ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... can be enjoyed by only a few, and those who are too far away to hear, or who are just near enough to hear a part but not all, are likely to feel aggrieved. They cannot hear what is amusing the rest, while the talk elsewhere prevents their talking as they would if there were no interruptions. A raconteur generally monopolizes half the company, and leaves the other half out in the cold. This might be avoided if talkers were engaged to entertain the whole company during dinner, as pianists are now sometimes engaged to play to them after dinner. Or, the entertainment might be varied by engaging ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... off my shell-back trip through the hype, we'll stage the fanciest wedding this old space base ever goggled its eyes over. I'll even see to it, the chaplain samples the spiked punch. And you remember what a raconteur the padre proved to be when Light-Colonel ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... Major Clowes' cousin, let's beguile him into the gooseberry bushes and make him tell us all about it! Val is very dear to his family, but no one, however tenderly attached to him, could call him a brilliant raconteur. Now Mr. Hyde won't have any modest scruples. Val, if there is a slug in that lettuce I wish you would say so. It would hurt my feelings less than for you to sit looking at it in a stony ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and to restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge of self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though in the main ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson |
