"Red-letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... point, and Mr. Jewell, at that moment taking a seat behind, joined in with some heat. A more ardent supporter could not have been found, although his repetition of the phrase "May and December" revealed a want of tact of which the skipper had not thought him capable. What had promised to be a red-letter day in his existence was spoiled, and he went to bed that night with the full conviction that he had better ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... Last night was a red-letter day, for two plum puddings arrived from Rostrevor House, and also the refill for my battery before the old one ran out, so I am quite happy as to that point now. I have also written to Aunt B——. Many thanks ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... good-bye," so ran the message—"It is no red-letter day for me, but I wish you joy with all my heart. Spare a thought now and then for the good old times and the boy you left ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... friends picture us. They will guess that we are away on our sledge journey, and will perhaps think of us on plains of snow; but few, I think, will imagine the truth, that for us this has been the reddest of all red-letter days.' ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... with awe to tales of him; and the red-letter days of her childhood's calendar were the days upon which her father would take her down to the docks, past great windowless warehouses of concrete and sheet-iron, where big glossy horses stood harnessed to high-piled trucks—past great tiers of bales and boxes between which trotted hurrying, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... media, which grew in the midst of the rockery, and allowed me to examine him at near range with no appearance of fear. Naturally I made a note of the occurrence in my diary, and talked about it with my family when I got home. The seeing of a new bird always makes a red-letter day. ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... I live in Vienna, you will often visit me. Of course, no one need know anything about it, if you do not care that they should. But you may believe me—every day on which I may be allowed to see you will be a red-letter day for me and that, in all the world, there is nobody who loves you in such a true and life-long manner as ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... (repute) 873; weight &c (influence) 175; value &c (goodness) 648; usefulness &c 644. gravity, seriousness, solemnity; no joke, no laughing matter; pressure, urgency, stress; matter of life and death. memorabilia, notabilia^, great doings; red-letter day. great thing, great point; main chance, the be all and the end all [Macbeth]; cardinal point; substance, gist &c (essence) 5; sum and substance, gravamen, head and front; important part, principal part, prominent part, essential part; half the battle; sine qua non; breath of one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... of California, conjures up in the mind visions of gold; and the story of the gold excitement in both is very similar. January 24, 1848, was the red-letter day in California's history, and the news that transpired that day electrified the world. While constructing a saw-mill at Coloma Creek, a branch of the American River, John Marshall picked up a handful of gold nuggets in the mill-race. At once the gold fever seized all far and near. During ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... were produced these charming little miracles remains a red-letter day in our household. Who ever tasted anything, save a nut, half so sweet, or who ever anything so pure? We ate, lingered, and revelled in them, thus becoming epicures at once. It seemed as if all our lives we had been seeking something really recherche, and had just found ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... said Lyveden, "am Anthony—at your service. This with the hungry look"—he picked up the Sealyham—"is Patch. As the latter is convalescent, all his days lately have been red-letter, and celebrated by the addition to his rations of a small dish of tea. Whether such a scandalous practice is to be followed this afternoon must rest ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... glories and floral pageantries that seemed even more solemn and pathetic than the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality,—all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which else had been fitted only to interpose one transitory red-letter day in the calendar of a child, the shadowy power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams. This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which restores my father's image to me as a personal reality; ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... May in the year 1660 was indeed a red-letter day in the calendar of jovial fox-hunting Squire Jennings, of Sandridge, in Hertfordshire. It was the day on which his Royal idol, the second Charles, set out from Canterbury on the last stage of the journey to his crown. Mounted on his horse, ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... some natural phenomenon. The boom of the surf announced the end of the journey. As the Mountaineers left the canoes on the beach at Taholah, it was agreed that the trip down the Quiniault marked the red-letter day of the ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles
... Event; and it seemed to do him good, somehow or other—it would have been hard to say in what respect though, Toby! So wind and frost and snow, and perhaps a good stiff storm of hail, were Toby Veck's red-letter days. ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... A red-letter day indeed—for the King turned up here at 10:45 this morning and stayed quite a long time, inspecting detachments of the Indian Army Corps. He only crossed from England last night I believe, stayed with the General for breakfast, and saw us all before lunch, going on to the next ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... other apparent purpose than to smoke a pipe or so with Button at his headquarters in Nutter's Lane. If he sometimes chanced to furnish the caller with a dollar or two of "the sinews of war," it was nobody's business. The days on which these visits fell were red-letter days to ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... For this was a red-letter day in the eyes of the Jemadar, and of Fatma Bibi, his wife, who had spent a full hour in adorning her plump person, and emphasising its charms according to the peculiar methods of the East. That done, she came forth into the sunlight, attired as becomes a Mahomedan ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... "It was a red-letter day when I put Number One in the great glass case and took out the skeleton that I had bought from the dealer to occupy its place until it was ready. The substitute was no longer needed and I accordingly dismantled it and destroyed ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... assorting with the leisurely progress of other days than the notions of these progressive times. Yet it is a sight which may have inspired many a City apprentice, and spurred him onward to become an 'honourable of the land;' it is, moreover, the very type of this 'red-letter day' in the City; and, costly as it is, with its disappearance, even portly aldermen will vanish into ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... one more good time, for one more communion. With what pleasure I recall those few hours. How happy we were! How social and loving and dear we were to one another! In the many years passed since then, there is no red-letter day like that one. We were about twenty in number. There were fourteen of us between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one years. The remainder were older. We filled a table in the reading room. Little we cared if we ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... round and took up a collection. The men arranged a football match for our benefit, to show their gratitude, and played so well and were so picturesque that Sir John and other ardent sportsmen pressed more money upon them. It was altogether a red-letter day for the camel-boys, quite apart from the fact that they would get rid of their noble benefactors to-morrow; and by way of a climax they had what we supposed to be a ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... rewarded her with something akin to a fit of apoplexy, instead of a liberal tip. That day was a red-letter one for our photographers. They paid the price in the risks which constantly strained their nerves. But in it they garnered vastly more than in the fortnight they ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... A horse's great red-letter days Are days of hunting, when his ways Are often very wilful. Here See this John Gilpin in ...
— A Horse Book • Mary Tourtel
... little by little her sense of joy and contentment. Recalling the past and examining her own life, it seemed to her very monotonous in comparison to the life of the woman who had loved a god. Young and pious and a patrician, her own red-letter days were those on which she had eaten cakes with her girl friends. Visits to the circus, the love of Helvius and her needle-work also counted in her life. But what were these all in comparison to the ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... replied. "After that, we'll shut up shop. This is quite a red-letter day, Chetwode. I knew that we'd held our own, but I must confess that I found those figures most exhilarating. Our little bonus, too, will be ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... after him. People had missed their doctor, it seemed, and wanted him back. It was a real red-letter day when he could snap to the catches of his gloves again, and mount the step of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... humbly copied that precedent of despotism. It was very proper that the new tyranny growing up here, should select that anniversary to shoot down freedom of thought and speech among the subjects of the slave-power. I welcomed the omen. The Fifth of March is a red-letter day in the calendar of Boston. The Court could hardly have chosen a better to punish a man for a thought and a word, especially a Boston man, for such a word in Faneuil Hall—a word against man-stealing. But I knew the case would never come to trial on that day—of course ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... the foundation of their cocoons with a reddish silk, which looks as if it had been dyed in Bullock's blood; here are some whose cocoons are finished. There is plenty of everything, from the egg to the larva whose period of activity is over. I mark the 2nd of September as a red-letter day; it has given me the final key to a riddle which has kept me in suspense for nearly ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... reckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove equally epochal to the man himself. In a community where next to no note is ever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to the special significance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally creep into his own mind. While in regard to his death, although it may be highly flattering for him to know that he will certainly become somebody when he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody, such tardy recognition is scarcely timely enough to be properly ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... a red-letter day to us children when, about once a month, we were packed into a trap and driven with our parents to spend a day at Casa Antigua. The dinner at noon was the most gorgeous affair of the kind we knew. One of Mr. Royd's enthusiasms was cookery—the making of rare and delicate ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... understanding of a child, caught a notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men had lost their lives that the slaves might be free. At any moment the conversation of our elders might turn upon these heroic events; there were red-letter days, when a certain general came to see my father, and again when Governor Oglesby, whom all Illinois children called "Uncle Dick," spent a Sunday under the pine trees in our front yard. We felt on those days a connection with the great world so much ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... red-letter day for Bob when, once, Miss Elton happened to come along just where he was at work. He saw her coming some time before she recognized him, but when she stopped to speak to him he was so excited that he scarcely ...
— Willie the Waif • Minie Herbert
... the close of business, upon General and Mrs. Grant, whom he had met before, and who had expressed a desire to see his collection. It can readily be imagined what a red-letter day it made in the boy's life to have General Grant say: "It might be better for us all to go down to dinner first and see the collection afterward." Edward had purposely killed time between five and seven o'clock, ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... in his mind whatever that if Black Madge were in town that she would be one who would most certainly visit Mike Grinnel's dive Sunday night, for that was the red-letter night of the week at that place among the ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... a very memorable day for Jack. The day after a falling in love is always a red-letter day; but the day after the falling ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... reading, too, quite easily, and sat up with eye-glasses on his nose and a paper between his paws. It was, as you may well imagine, a red-letter day with me when Peter said his prayers for the first time; and I was better pleased when he put his little paws up and lifted his eyes up to the ceiling than with any other of his accomplishments, though they were more appreciated ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... up and fixing his eyes upon her lingeringly, "will be a red-letter day. I have no right to complain, whilst such good friends remain to ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... be a red-letter day in the lives of all Scranton's young people. They begrudged the passing minutes, because their period of enjoyment would be shortened just so much with the ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... spending her life in dingy Brixton, this afternoon was a red-letter day. The soft, clean air which blew in her face was different from the stagnant air of the Brixton streets; the scent of flowers was grateful after the odours of the City, and the vision, now and then, of the flashing river was a delight to eyes tired ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... which that noble instrument was extorted from King John at the point of the sword, England has been the pioneer to all the other nations of the earth in personal freedom, in public righteousness, in domestic stability, and in foreign influence and enterprise. Runnymede is a red-letter spot, and 1215 is a red-letter year, not only in the history of England, but in the history of the whole modern world. The keystone of all sound constitutional government was laid at that place on that date, and by that great bridge not England only, but after England the whole ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Lady Thesiger had arranged to come to Crown Anstey with Agatha, for the purpose of choosing from some very choice engravings that had been sent to me from London. I asked Sir John to accompany them and stay at lunch. It was always a red-letter day to me when my darling came to my house, and I remember this one—ah, me!—so well. It was fine, clear and frosty; the sky was blue; the sun shone with that clear gold gleam it has in winter; the hoar frost sparkled on the leafless trees and hedges; the ground was hard and seemed ...
— Coralie • Charlotte M. Braeme
... red-letter day, and all quiet in camp. Fitted rollers under my gun trails. News came that General French had relieved Kimberley, and there was much cheering ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... "You can't expect Cupid to know the difference! He's sent me some nice things. Aren't there any more saints in the calendar who bring presents? What's the next red-letter day?" ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... village and hamlet life, and to them it must be a great pleasure to resort to the gatherings of their people, where religion, business, and amusement are very happily combined, and where there is so much to interest, exhilarate, and gratify them. These times are to them the red-letter days of the year, without which life would be intolerably dull. Resort to these gatherings no doubt involves them in toil, in expense, and sometimes in great suffering; but they do not shrink from the cost, as they anticipate the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... longed with a longing that was like hunger for the companionship of young people such as he had known at home. There was a blur over one of the dates, the little square that marked the twenty-fifth of December. It was a red-letter day on the calendar, but in Alec's bare little room a holiday that dragged its dismal length out toward ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... not prevent the poorer man from spending a certain amount upon his love. Every now and then there will be special days when he will play the host, and they will be red-letter days to both. If she is going anywhere by his special invitation he would naturally defray her expenses; but on their weekly jaunts why should he be put to the double outlay when he wants to save all he can to start their home? Why should he reduce his balance at the bank by ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... The other red-letter day was one when the whole family was invited to tea at Miss Prue's. They went early, as was the fashion in Killamet, Morton stiff and conscious in his new suit, and baby filled with undisguised admiration for his own new shoes, while both girls looked so unusually "dressed-up" in their Boston ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... philosophy class was a red-letter day; he sported his first tall hat and smoked his first non-surreptitious cigarettes. He possessed a certain brilliancy of mind and a keen wit that amused his companions, whose superior he was ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... elevation and that high state of civilization which enable us in our day to see that the only true way to observe Thanksgiving is to shut up the churches and revel in the spiritual glories of the flying wedge and the triumphant touchdown. [Laughter.] Their calendar had three great red-letter days of celebration: Commencement day, which expressed and emphasized the foremost place they gave to education in their civil and religious polity; Training or Muster day, which illustrated the spirit and the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... for me, sir—one of the red-letter days of my life," he cried with many chuckles. "I have brought off a double event. I mean to teach them in these parts that law is law, and that there is a man here who does not fear to invoke it. I have ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... a red-letter day in the history of aviation, for it was then that Santos Dumont made his first little flight in an aeroplane. This took place at Bagatelle, not far ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... a great day for Brenton, a red-letter day, when first the child was laid across his blanket-covered knees, while the nurse stood by, uttering many cautions and forcibly adjusting the angles of the clerical elbows, the better to support their ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... in any other city of Europe. It is of this happy hunting-ground and those who haunt it—the book-hunters and the bookstall-keepers; the books they buy and the books they sell; whence they come and whither they go; the finds, the losses, the disappointments, and red-letter days—that M. Uzanne writes in this attractive volume, in that felicitous and suggestive manner which has made him so ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... May 7.—A big red-letter day; viz., the Lord Mayor's reception. The whole house upset. I had to get dressed at half-past six, as Carrie wanted the room to herself. Mrs. James had come up from Sutton to help Carrie; so I could not help thinking it unreasonable that ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith |
