"Childishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mortal that he had ever come across. She was very tiny, not taller than many children of eight, and so slight and fragile that she looked as if a breath might blow her away. But if in figure she looked eight, in face she looked fifty. In that face there was no childishness whatever. It was a thin, peaked, sallow face, with a discontented expression; her features were small and pinched, her hair, which was of inky blackness, fell on her shoulders in long, straight locks, without a ripple or a wave in them. She looked like an elf, but still this elfish ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... gaze was already fixed on the distant hill-tops of fame. There was nothing in his countenance or manner that gave this impression, but my own morbid sensitiveness. The dawning feelings of womanhood made me blush for the plainness and childishness of my dress, and then I was ashamed of my shame, and blushed ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... conceit, half-ashamed of his own childishness, and crossing the stream by some boulders, he brushed away the earth and weed from the top of the great stone. Then he retraced his steps and gathered a handful of bleached twigs that the winter floods had left stranded along the margin of the stream. These he arranged methodically on ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... this quite French childishness. I get off and walk through the midst of a hedge of smiling, kind faces of sailors, ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... too. We'd had a great misfortune, he said, and it was nobody's fault. We had lost a man we all liked and respected, and he felt that everybody in the ship ought to be sorry for the man's brother, who was left behind, and that it was rotten lubberly childishness, and unjust and unmanly and cowardly, to be playing schoolboy tricks with forks and spoons and pipes, and that sort of gear. He said it had got to stop right now, and that was all, and the men might go ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... with the elixir of love, Esther succumbed to the first notes of the church music. Tears of peaceful delight stood in her eyes. She glanced up towards her Cecilia on the distant wall, wondering at its childishness. How deep a meaning she could give it now, and how religious ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... year we anticipate much pleasant intercourse with our young friends. We thank them heartily for the favors already received, which from their genuine childishness we know have come direct from their own little hearts and hands. Our paper is received by children who live in all parts of this country, in England, Germany, France, South America, Cuba, and Mexico; and we would like to offer them a ...
— Harper's Young People, January 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... and about her pet's jetty for, Agatha sat silent, until slowly there grew a thoughtful shadow in her eyes, a forewarning of the gradual passing away of that childishness, which in her, from accidental circumstances, had ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... change what the good God has once fashioned," said Malvina. She spoke very gravely. The childishness seemed ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... years I have never written a billet-doux.—Are we saved?" asked Diane, who hid her curiosity under this childishness. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... grumbling and unrest. Natural for your sister, but why should you? You've got everything a woman needs, husband, children, a perfectly splendid home, clothes, good jewels and plenty of them, respect! Why should you want to go out after things? It's mere spoilt-childishness. Of course you want to wander out—and if there ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... for his show of feeling. He was a silly, sentimental old fool, inflicting his childishness upon a gentlemanly young fellow who was too kind and sportsmanlike to show distaste or offense. But why should any one else be interested in his, Carrington R. Davies' feelings, or the fact that, twenty years before, he ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... had stood up during the brief altercation, sat down slowly and picked up his cup of coffee. But his eyes didn't leave the unconscious man sprawled across the table. "How could you be so sure, Commander? About his actions, I mean. About his childishness." ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Amusement Bluebell, Sorrowful Regret Bonus Henricus, Goodness Borage, Bluntness Box Tree, Stoicism Bramble, Lowliness Broom, Neatness Buckbean, Calm repose Buglos, Falsehood Bulrush, Indiscretion Bundle of Reeds, Music Burdock, Touch me not Bur, You weary me Buttercup, Childishness Butterfly Orchis, Gaiety Butterfly Weed, Let me go Cabbage, Profit. Gain Cacalia, Adulation Cactus, Warmth Calycanthus, Benevolence Camellia, Red, Excellence Camellia, White, Loveliness Camomile, Energy in adversity Carnation, Striped, Refusal Carnation, Deep Red, Poor me Cardamine, Paternal error ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... streaks of decidedly black anger in that scheme of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely sorry for him—almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even then I had quite found him out. I knew him to be weaker than myself; his incurable, irresponsible childishness was as clear to me then as it was on his deathbed, his redeeming and excusing imaginative silliness. Through some odd mental twist perhaps I was disposed to exonerate him even at the cost of blaming my poor old mother who had left things in his ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... cannot be reckoned by years. I am glad to see you have developed a certain amount of half-real and half-assumed youthfulness lately, but when the novelty of your present life wears away, your old mature nature will be there, so it is of no use feigning childishness. Harold Beecham is not given to speech—action with him is the same thing. Can you look at me straight, Sybylla, and say that Harold has not extended you something more ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... walked swiftly on, till only faint sounds came to him from the riverside. In the letter he had written to Hylda, which was the turning-point of all for her, he had spoken of these "key-thoughts." With all the childishness he showed at times, he had wisely felt his way into spheres where life had depth and meaning. The desert had justified him to himself and before the spirits of departed peoples, who wandered over the sands, until at last they became sand also, and were blown ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... opposition. Five years have already passed since the friendly Powers accorded their recognition of the Chinese Republic and if we think we could afford to amuse ourselves with changes in the national fabric, we could not expect foreign powers to put up with such childishness. Internal strife is bound to invite foreign intervention and the end of the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... silent did the maid appear As in the timid forest deer, Even beneath her parents' roof Stood as estranged from all aloof, Nearest and dearest knew not how To fawn upon and love express; A child devoid of childishness To romp and play she ne'er would go: Oft staring through the window pane Would she in ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Chopin stopped, much disturbed; Madame Cavaignac, leaning towards her son, anxiously interrogated him with her eyes. He made an effort to become self-possessed; he attempted to smile, and with a feeble voice said, 'Do not be uneasy, mamma, it is nothing; real childishness...Ah! how beautiful music is, understood thus!' His thought was—we had no difficulty in divining it—that he would no longer hear anything like it in this world, but he ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... age ceases when second childishness and oblivion begin; therefore we thanked God for His goodness in taking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... delighted with everything, and the childishness of the little maid who took charge of our hats before we went in to the opera charmed me. My hat was heavy and hot, and I particularly disliked it, owing to the weight of the seagull which composed one entire side of it, and always pulled it crooked on my head. The little maid took the hat in both ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... Thee in death, And Thou rememberest of what toys We made our joys, How weakly understood Thy great commanded good, Then, fatherly not less Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 'I will be sorry for their childishness.' ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... that serious childishness which always accompanies a hopeless search, he took the knapsack by the two ends, and shook it vigorously; nothing came out. The orphans looked on with uneasiness, not understanding his silence or his movements, for his back was turned to them. Blanche ventured to say to him in a timid ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... her old doll, the companion of so many years. She laughed a happy little laugh. She had grown up. The doll was only a doll now. But she kissed it, because she loved it still. And she put it carefully away in a drawer, lest the sight of a childishness offend ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... my childishness. I must tell you how she was dressed. After that weird night she never wore that costume again, and yet I can remember it so exactly. It is a long, long time ago. But were I to live as long as I have already lived again, I should ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... therefore from whence arise all they endeavours, zeal, and labour, to accomplish divisions among the godly: let Paul or Cephas, or Christ himself, be the burthen of thy song, yet the heart from whence they flow is carnal; and thy actions, discoveries of childishness. But, doubtless when these contentions were among the Corinthians, and one man was vilified, that another might be promoted; a lift with a carnal brother, was thought great wisdom to widen the breach. But why should ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... childishness in a man! I found it necessary to reprimand you. You'll probably know your place after this." He ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle; a vehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more freely that he inherited a religion still plastic and conscious of its poetic essence, and did not have to struggle, like his modern disciples, with the arrested childishness of minds that for a hundred generations have learned their metaphysics in the cradle. His ideas, although their natural basis was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they always represented meanings ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... childishness and real cunning he was not sufficiently on his guard, had often the art of drawing him into conversation about his visits. She ran into her father's parlour; but she knew, the moment she saw his ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... believed himself their inferior, but only for a moment; then he remembered that they had not the vaguest idea of how an Egyptian camp was fortified. The thought gave him back his self-respect, and he wondered how it was possible that people could be so degraded as to find pleasure in such childishness. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... might do when she was absent, though they surveyed her with silent attention. Catharine learned, by long acquaintance with this people, that an outward manifestation of surprise [FN: See Appendix L.] is considered a want of etiquette and good breeding, or rather a proof of weakness and childishness. The women, like other females, are certainly less disposed to repress this feeling of inquisitiveness than the men, and one of their great sources of amusement, when Catharine was among them, was examining the difference of texture and colour of her skin and ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... at the corners, and even the 'scherzi d'acqua,' which are little surprises of fine water-jets that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the face of the unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical jesting ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... age, no longer expects from her lover. He treated her as if she were a young girl, and begged her to give him a ring which she always wore, and which had been one of her confirmation presents. He put up with all the childishness and coquetry which was so ridiculous in the passion of this mother of a family, and he encouraged it all without a sign of impatience on his face or a shade of mockery in his voice. At the same time he made himself entirely master of ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... irresponsible childishness came out now and then in her talk, as in this last question; it was the more noticeable for the air of maturity and self-possession which on the whole characterised her. She continued to talk with much vivacity, making at the same time a hearty meal. Her place at the ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... change lay deeper than any accident of dress. At the same time, he noticed that she betrayed her consciousness of it by a delicate, almost frightened blush. It was one of the compensations of Mrs. Lethbury's protracted childishness that she still blushed as prettily as at eighteen. Her body had been privileged not to outstrip her mind, and the two, as it seemed to Lethbury, were destined to travel together ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... to the unresponsive Geeka. Then the old man coughed. With a start the child glanced quickly up over her shoulder. Korak could see her full face now. It was very beautiful in its sweet and innocent childishness—all soft and lovely curves. He could see her great, dark eyes. He looked for the happy love light that would follow recognition; but it did not come. Instead, terror, stark, paralyzing terror, was mirrored in her eyes, in the expression of her mouth, in the tense, cowering attitude of ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thought—she looked at me and I thought her eyes looked different—not like the eyes of a child. I wondered then ... but ... oh, no, she couldn't think I meant the things I said. Once or twice I have felt exasperated at what I thought was her childishness, her ignorance of the world, and I've said things now and again, unkind things, even cruel things sometimes ... but I've been secure all the time in the thought that she ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... making a sound like the blast of a trumpet, and waking the echoes. Not even that could he do quietly, she thought, her new sense of proprietorship oddly irritated by a nose being blown so aggressively in her house. Besides, they were her echoes that he was disturbing. She smiled at her own childishness. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree as capricious as life itself. Like life it ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Caesar went to Egypt; but in Egypt sixteen is a riper age than it is in England. The childishness I have ascribed to her, as far as it is childishness of character and not lack of experience, is not a matter of years. It may be observed in our own climate at the present day in many women of fifty. It is a mistake to suppose that the difference between wisdom and folly has anything ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... them about until he found their nest. Climbing the tree he put the birdlings back where they belonged. After an hour Mr. Lincoln caught up with his companions, who laughed at him for what they called his "childishness." He ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... at night, kneeling, great waves of religious emotion going over me. And when my father saw me praying by the bedside, I felt awkwardly, shamefully happy that he saw me. And I took to posing a childishness, an ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... them for childishness, She cries at them for carelessness Who see her going loverless Yet sing and chatter Just as when he was not a ghost, Nor ever ask her what she has lost ...
— Last Poems • Edward Thomas
... children of your own, treat her kindly: be to her what I ought to have been—a protector! Sir Willmott, I cannot live very long; say only that you will treat her kindly. Whatever I have shall be yours: you will be kind, will you not?" And he looked at Sir Willmott with an air of such perfect childishness, that the knight imagined his mind ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... from feeling satisfied with any explanation, scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me, that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the universe. To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing—that we know nothing. What! Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings? What is all ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... doubt there are times and seasons in the lives of most reading men when they rebel against the dust of libraries and kick against the pricks of these monstrously accumulated heaps of words. We all know 'the dark hour' when the vanity of learning and the childishness of merely literary things are brought home to us in such a way as almost to avail to put the pale student out of conceit with his books, and to make him turn from his best-loved authors as from a friend who has outstayed his welcome, whose carriage we wish were at the door. In these unhappy moments ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... neither the agencies of destruction nor those of obstruction preserve the same heroic proportions which they are wont to assume in their day. They seem to be engaged in a sort of by-play, and wear an unmistakable aspect of childishness. Lo! Mankind has been a long time on his way, and endures hardily the prospect of endless leagues to go. He is the Patient Plodder, symbol of mature intelligence. And he has in his company two small ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... for Martin's return our childishness increased, and on the last day of all we carried on such a game together as must have made the very Saints themselves look ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... dignity with pure childishness is a unique subject for art, and one which few have had the genius to portray. Two great painters are famous in history for their remarkable success in this line of work,—Van Dyck, of Belgium, and Velasquez, ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... of an exceedingly small party located apparently a hundred miles from anywhere. Their nearest neighbours were a tribe of Indians, whose mixture of childishness and cunning shrewdness made them an interesting study. These gave little trouble; they had more or less accepted the fact that the white man was now in possession of the domains of their forefathers, and that their best course was to behave themselves. ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... entirely from the class of historical records. The outcry which we sometimes hear against that scepticism which has resulted from later and more severe investigations into the nature of historical evidence, and the loss thereby sustained of many a popular tale, is—need we insist upon it?—mere childishness. It is never found that we lose any thing by truth, and certainly not here. The popular tale, legend, or myth, may be displaced entirely from the records of the past, (for what it contains, or may be supposed to contain, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of the Storm-scenes, though he thinks of his master alone, we perceive from his words that the cold and rain are almost more than he can bear. His childishness comes home to us when he runs out of the hovel, terrified by the madman and crying out to the King 'Help me, help me,' and the good Kent takes him by the hand and draws him to his side. A little later he exclaims, 'This cold night will turn us all to fools ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... "You young idiots, you don't know what you've done,—you do not, Kenneth. As for you, you young viper, are you as cunning as you are high, or is this childishness and—" ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... me, Howard?" She blushed at the childishness of her eager question. But she demanded the expected answer with the insistence of unsatisfied love. And when he failed to reply at the moment, surprised by her mood, she knelt by his chair and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... impudence in his case," said Mr. Havisham. "I can scarcely describe what the difference is. He has lived more with older people than with children, and the difference seems to be a mixture of maturity and childishness." ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... very trifling, and mere childishness? The message may be mine, it seems, if it be of a lofty character: it may not be mine if it be of a homely, ordinary kind!—I send a message by my Servant, and he delivers it faithfully: but whether it is to be called my message, or is not to be called my message, is to ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... but remained kneeling and praying all night, examining her innocent conscience, and going over a world of resolutions and forms of preparation, which she believed were necessary to be got through in the time. It was a child's simple thought;—we love Dominica all the better for the childishness that forgot that its excellent resolve was an impossible one for flesh and blood to keep;—for very often the poor little girl was conquered by weariness, and fell asleep in the midst of her long ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... one moment full of childishness and tender wisdom, the next moment scandalously gross. The shadows of the terra-cotta pillars lengthened, and tourists, flying through the Palazzo Pubblico opposite, could observe how the ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... divine justice that, like electricity, has been stored for humanity from the beginning of things—abundant in quantity and power to bless all men—stowed away by the hand of God for us, awaiting only our awakening from the sleep of ignorance and childishness, to use and cherish it. It was an example of trust, a tribute to faith. It was a realization of poetry. It was in touch with the wishes, hopes and prayers of millions of humanity; of untold numbers of saints and martyrs of all nations and climes, and its mission ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... learned in the Oriental languages, but he was a reckless and irreverent critic. He made light of many of the occurrences of the Old Testament, and whenever the students applauded one of his obscene jokes, he was tickled into childishness. He made no claim to an experimental acquaintance with the operations of the Holy Spirit, and used his position as theological professor and lecturer only as the stepping-stone to money and fame. He would make Moses a very good sort of statesman, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... be something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent men of our day are engaged one and all ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... little boy! Oh mischief, mischief!" and she scrapes one index finger over the other at him in a try for errant childishness. Then she and her perfume come closer and this time she looks around before she speaks and there is some little real concern ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... with benign loftiness, observing that his guests grew pale, and himself, though often weak to childishness, and morally wavering and irresolute,—still so far king and gentleman, that he knew no craven fear of the body. "Fear not for me, my fathers; humble as I am, I am strong in the faith ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... prayer—to save France. Now the past and the ignominy of the past might be merged in Judith's nobler guilt. But I must tell you that in the supreme hour, Destiny at her beck, her main desire was to slap the man for his childishness. Oh, he had no right thus to besot himself with adoration! This dejection at her feet of his high destiny awed her, and pricked her, too, with her inability to understand him. Angrily she flung away the baton. "Go! Ah, go!" she cried, like one strangling. "There has been enough of bloodshed, ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... tunnel might influence the fate of armies that were the last word in modern equipment. And men played at killing with a grand front of martial dignity, when such a little thing could turn the balance of slaughter! The ghosts in the dungeons seemed about as real as anything, except the childishness of adult humanity in organized mass. She laughed again, this time very softly, as she moved away from the panel door a few steps farther along the wall toward the entrance and again leaned back ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master of it—there are many instances,—but when he indulges in freaks, his childishness is incredible. His intention in such places is that the verses should be recited as running on without pause, and the rhyme occurring in their midst should be like a phonetic accident, merely satisfying the prescribed form. But his phonetic rhymes are often indefensible on his own principle. The ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... faculties abandoned her save songfulness, and none belied her, excepting a disposition to tartness almost venomous in the sarcastic shafts she let fly at friends interceding with Mr. Warwick to spare his wife, when she had determined to be tried. A strange fit of childishness overcame her powers of thinking, and was betrayed in her manner of speaking, though—to herself her dwindled humour allowed her to appear the towering Britomart. She pouted contemptuously on hearing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... slave, and his brain is in many respects the undeveloped brain of a child; in certain ways, however, his outward childishness conceals the subtlety of the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the soul of Admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process. When his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election. Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... can laugh when I recall the childishness of my actions, the outcome of the unreasoned promptings of my puerile jealousy. For when I came to the conclusion to avenge my sufferings upon the Motor Pirate, I suddenly became aware that it was pitch ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... sick boy, holding a glass of water to his lips; and as she looked round, Mr. Smith thought he had never seen a face so strangely and sadly altered as hers. It had lost nearly all its childishness—it looked so old, and womanly, with a weight of care in it that was pitiable to see; and yet, with all this, it was so calm and still, so composed, that any one would have imagined that her one thought was how to nurse her patient. And so it was. Madge felt that a great deal depended ...
— The Boy Artist. - A Tale for the Young • F.M. S.
... youthful hose well say'd, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... look at each other and kiss without interference, and say what ever they pleased. There Mary could tell her as much as she dared of the events in their little circle, but the lively and sometimes hoydenish little girl was often withheld from confessing a misdemeanor, or even an inoffensive piece of childishness, by sheer admiration for one who to her appeared nobler, greater and loftier ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... decaying, perishing, reviving and rolling again, and so onward forever through the same course; and thus even would seem to revolve the mysterious mechanism of human events and actions. Age, ere it returns to "the second childishness, the mere oblivion" from which it passes to the grave, returns also to the memories and the thoughts of youth: its buried loves arise; its past friendships rekindle. The wheels of the tired machine are past the meridian, and the arch through which they now decline has a correspondent likeness ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lived always with grown people, and seldom had had any thing to do with children. I was very small for my age, and a strange mixture of childishness and maturity; and, having the appearance of being absorbed in my own affairs, no one ever noticed me much, or seemed to think it better that I should not listen to the conversation. In spite of considerable curiosity, I followed an instinct which directed me never ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... beside him, barely touching his arm with her hand. She seemed definitely to decide to put away her childishness. She treated him as though she had forgotten his supposed youth; she talked straightforwardly, with a certain dignity, about her childhood, about her amusing and pitiful experience as a third-rate little actress, and she asked him a question now and then half diffidently, which ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... youth as childhood's an excuse for childishness. Youth, still, like childhood, but unlike maturity, can be lost in its emotions, absorbed in them to the exclusion of all else, abandoned to them with all else pitched away as a swimmer discards his every stitch and joyously plunges in the stream. Youth ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... is mere childishness; your weakness 200 Infects me, to my shame: but as all feelings Of yours are common to me, it affects me. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... nature which can be unmoved by the soft touch, the playful childishness, and the hundred little pranks ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... justified, and Rousseau seems from this point to have been successful in demolishing arguments which might hold of Greek tragedy at its best, but which certainly do not hold of any other dramatic forms. The childishness of the old criticism which attaches the label of some moral from the copybook to each piece, as its lesson and point of moral aim, is evident. In repudiating this Rousseau was certainly right.[350] Both the assailants and the defenders ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... founded on a praiseworthy desire to serve what he deems the best interests of the Association. Were Mr. Moitoret more in touch with the rising ideals of the newer United, he would realize the essential childishness of our "official business" as contrasted with the substantial solidity of our developing literature. Possibly the plan of Mr. Campbell, as experimentally tried during the present year, will alter Mr. Moitoret's present opinion. Taken altogether, we are ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... childishness or not in any other matters, Mr. Skimpole had a child's enjoyment of change and bright weather. In no way wearied by his sallies on the road, he was in the drawing-room before any of us; and I heard him at the piano while I was ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... censure of their subjects as to that of the universe. . . . France is undone if the present administration lasts."[4240]—When, under Louis XVI, a new administration proposes and withdraws feeble measures of reform, their criticism shows the same firmness: "Childishness, weakness, constant inconsistency," writes another,[4241] "incessant change; and always worse off than we were before. Monsieur and M. le Comte d'Artois have just made a journey through the provinces, but only as people of that kind travel, with a frightful expenditure and devastation ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Mr. Miacca, in which "little Tommy couldn't always be good and one day went round the corner," is a giant tale which could be used with young children because it is full of delightful humor. Because of the simplicity of Tommy's language and his sweet childishness it appeals to the child's desire to identify himself with the character. Tommy is so clever and inventive and his lively surprises so brimful of fun that the ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... He often found himself trying to reconstruct, from the grave features of Charles, the little boy whom he but dimly remembered in the past, and of whom lately he had been thinking a great deal. He believed this to be a sign of impending old age and childishness; but coming, one day, in his formal drawing-room, upon a child of one of the servants, who had strayed therein, he would have taken him in his arms, but the child fled from before his grizzled face. So that it seemed eminently proper to invite ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of the men there was one of a bishop that irritated him by its absurd childishness. He appeared almost his own age, an adolescent bishop, with imperious and aggressive eyes. These eyes used to inspire the sensitive lad with a certain terror, and he therefore decided to have done with them. "Take that!" and he ran his sword through the old ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... true," Jurgen protested. "What you have shown me is a pack of nonsense. It is the degraded lunacy of a so-called Realist. It is sorcery and pure childishness and abominable blasphemy. It is, in a word, something I do not choose to believe. You ought to be ashamed ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... life which had increased the general excitement of the period—notably the murder of Marshal Sebastiani's daughter, the poor duchesse de Praslin. Hermione could talk of these things with great spirit, but sometimes relapsed into her grown-up childishness. She talked, too, with animation of the freedom and happiness of her American girlhood. My sister Amy had always taken life au grand serieux; Ellen was a little too prompt to flirt with officers and gay young men, and needed repression; Laetitia went in for book-learning, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... I believe he would have gone. But these chivalrous manners are puerile in public matters." Bonaparte believes, and has had the art to persuade several of the Machiavelian apprentices of the new generation, that every generous feeling is mere childishness. It is high time to teach him that virtue also has something manly in it, and more manly than crime ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... you, Louis, that it is time to have done with childishness. Clara is growing up—I won't have you encourage her in all that wild flightiness—I didn't want to have had her here at all! If she is ever to be a reasonable, conformable woman, it is high time to begin. I can't have ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Nelson, for whom he had an affectionate regard, that "he was in many points a really great man, but in others he was a baby." No one who has studied his career will ever doubt his greatness, but his peevish childishness, even when he was responsible for the carrying out of great deeds that did not come so quickly as his eager spirit craved, ofttimes tried the patience of those who set high value on his matchless talents and his otherwise lovable disposition. He was ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... continually getting his feelings hurt over nothing, but this was the first time Mary had ever had an exhibition of his sensitiveness. Conscious that she had done nothing at which a reasonable person could take offence, she looked after him with a desire to shake him for such childishness. Then with a shrug of her shoulders ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... have made a noise—perhaps merely an intaking of breath inaudible even to themselves but clear to the ears of Joan. She was on her feet, with bright, wild eyes glancing here and there. There was no suggestion of childishness in her, but a certain willingness to flee from a great danger or attack a weaker force. She stood alert, rather than frightened, with her head back as if she scented the wind to learn what approached. ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea ceremony but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... was abominable, but her utter childishness palliated it. How was Tudor going to treat the matter? he wondered. What ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... (Fig. 4) is an early drawing of the myth, to which I shall have to refer afterwards in illustration of the childishness of the Greek mind at the time when its art-symbols were first fixed; but it is of peculiar value, because the physical character of Vulcan, as fire, is indicated by his wearing the [Greek: endromides] of Hermes, while the antagonism of Zeus, as ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... raillery is really aimed at is not Wagner's work, but the way in which his work was represented. The splendours of the setting do not hide the childishness of the ideas behind them: the dragon Fafna, Fricka's rams, the bear, the serpent, and all the Valhalla menagerie have always been ridiculous. I will only add that the dragon's failure to be terrifying was not Wagner's fault, for he never attempted to depict a terrifying dragon. He gave ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... There was childishness in the voice. "Like my baby. I baptized her before she went. Maybe I'm going to ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... talk of any woman-thing except the bride; and as I may perhaps never be anybody's real bride, I insisted on my rights. This carrying on of the Gretna Green game rather scandalized good Mrs. James, but when she scolded me gently for my "childishness," Sir S. said, "Do let her be a child as long as she can. It would be well for every one of us if we kept something of our childhood all our lives. Just now I'm finding childhood gloriously contagious. I don't know how many years I've thrown off ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... innocence, her enthusiasm, her childishness were too apparent for him to take her words for ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... face wore merely the expectant expression of a summoned servant. The childishness of her behaviour confused ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... seized me of writing a line to Hohenfels at Marly, actually dated from the grand duchy of Baden. Undoubtedly I should reach Marly before my letter, but the postal mark would be a good proof of the actuality of my wanderings. Clinging, then, to my childishness, as we do to most of our follies, with a fidelity which it would be well to imitate in our grave affairs, and feeling pressed for time, I looked eagerly around for a resting-place where I could procure ink and paper, and entered at the sign of the "Stork." I found a smoky crowd, peasants and military, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... said Oh Beechnut, he still had a secret conviction that what Beechnut had said was true. He was silent a moment, and then he asked what was the other childishness which Beechnut had seen within half ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott
... a certain naivete, a certain childishness, in my words even as I uttered them. In my thoughts I saw God as three supernal men, seated on three supernal thrones, enshrined in some vague celestial portion of space which I denominated Heaven. Between ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... much contempt of the notice taken of Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker[372]. He said, it was all vanity and childishness: and that such objects were, to those who patronised them, mere mirrours of their own superiority. "They had better (said he,) furnish the man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems. He may make an excellent shoemaker, but can never make a good poet. A school-boy's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Sally. Strange indeed if he had not noticed—although always in his resigned fashion—the dull green stagnation of the life around him, or when not accepting it as part of his trouble he had not chafed at the arrested youth and senile childishness of the people. Stranger still if he had not at times been startled to hear the outgrown superstitions and follies of his youth voiced again by grown-up men, and perhaps strangest of all if he had not vaguely accepted it all as the hereditary ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... out Southey, certainly the least eminent of the so-called school of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb, as the one writer of the set whose poetry deserves serious consideration; and, besides attacking Wordsworth's faults, his occasional flatness and childishness, selects some of his finest poems (e.g. the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality) as flagrant specimens ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... whole, then, the man of candour and of true understanding is never hasty to condemn. He can censure an imperfection, or even a vice, without rage against the guilty party. In a word, they are the same folly, the same childishness, the same ill-breeding, and the same ill-nature, which raise all the clamours and uproars both in life and on the stage. The worst of men generally have the words rogue and villain most in their mouths, as the lowest of all wretches are ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... courage behind her childishness, and accomplished her congratulations "You will be happy, I am sure. ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... childishness and impetuosity, Erica was womanly, too, as Charles Osmond saw by the way she waited on her mother, thinking of everything which the invalid could possibly want while they were gone, brightening the whole place with her sunshiny presence. Whatever else was lacking, there was no lack of love ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... go back at once to the hotel and reclaim the note, before Hugh could get it. Could anything have happened to her? Marishka wanted her—the sound of a voice, the touch of a feminine hand, her airs and graces—the foibles of a child perhaps, but intensely virile in their childishness and intensely human. It seemed that even Yeva was to be ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... spoke sharply, the sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly, but to herself—to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, she had ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... reasons why I was not invited there [Chelsea] as elsewhere. One reason was that I had avowed, in reply to urgent questions, that I was disappointed in an oration of Mr. Everett's; and another was that I had publicly condemned the institution of slavery. I hope the Boston people have outgrown the childishness of sulking at opinions not in either case volunteered, but obtained by pressure. But really, the subservience to opinion at that time seemed a sort ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... nineteenth, or to the fifteenth. The classical atmosphere of the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is totally absent. Those who care for the delicately poised balance of classical taste, for wit and brilliance of dialogue, will be disconcerted by childishness or fierce passion. It is an abrupt literature, but spontaneous and sincere, which has not been spoilt by formalism and scepticism, but which has not acquired, from a purely technical point of view, the perfection of the French. Having remained inarticulate during the two centuries of classical ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... character little known as yet. The sketches of Bret Harte, Hayes, and Miller have not exhausted this field by any means. It is interesting to note the extremes possible in one and the same character: harshness and gentleness, manliness and childishness, apathy and fierce endeavor. Men who, twenty years ago, would not cease their shoveling to save their lives, now play in the streets with children. Their long, Micawber-like waiting after the exhaustion of the placers has brought on an exaggerated form of dotage. I heard a group ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... mimesis, in my eyes, is a piece of childishness. Were I not anxious to remain polite, I should say that it is sheer stupidity; and the word would express my meaning better. The variety of combinations in the domain of possible things is infinite. ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... tell him this, could only stand before him—for they had come to a pause in the middle of the gravel sweep before the big hall door—with hanging head, pulling nervously at the stalks of her flowers, and repeat with a childishness he must despise, "I ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... said Pamela, "but it's the same with us older children. Apart from sin altogether, it must be hard for God to pardon our childishness ... But about the Miss Watsons—d'you think I might ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... just so plumb foolish that I began to laugh at him; and when I got to laughing I couldn't keep up being angry. It was ridiculous, his childishness and suspiciousness. Right there was ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington |
