"Wild oats" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shaping the worldly history of their fellow-beings and leaving the non-worldly to take care of itself; soldiers illustrious in the army and navy; hale country gentlemen who took the lead in the country's hardy sports and pleasures; all sowing their wild oats early in life with hands that no power could stay; not always living to reap, but always leaving enough reaping to be done by the sad innocent who never sow; fathers of large families; and even when breaking the hearts of their wives, never losing ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... foregathered with Mrs. Quickly and haply with Doll Tearsheet. All the whimsical miscellany of the Bohemians must have been known to him. We need not doubt that he had sowed wild oats. Doubtless, if he lived the same life now, he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, and so did not, like some of his brilliant contemporaries, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... keep a clerk, Richard Swiveller was chosen to fill the place; and be it known to whom it may concern, that the said Richard was the merriest, laziest, weakest, most kind-hearted fellow who ever sowed a large crop of wild oats, and by a sudden stroke of good-luck found himself ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... comparative failure; but that description of oats, called wild oats, promises well in the neighbourhood of Oxford. Turn-ups have had a favourable season at the ecarte tables of several dowagers in the West-end district. Beans are looking poorly—particularly the have-beens—whom we meet with seedy frocks and napless hats, gliding about late in the evenings. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... are poor ignorant creatures, and, maybe, the blessings we long for will turn to a curse in the end. I doubt whether our little cottage will be the restful place it was before Uncle Mat came home. He has gone to a bad school to learn manners; and wild oats and tares and the husks that the swine did eat are poor crops, after all, Miss Ross,' finished ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... waters of the river spread out wide at every high tide over marshes and meadows, turning them twice a day for a few hours into lakes, grown up in summer with red and yellow flowers and the graceful wild oats, or reeds, tasseled like ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... James Wilson has spoken of thee often. To be loved of such a man is much. I hear that thou hast been led to think with us, and that, despite those wicked wild oats, thou art a young man of parts and good feelings, ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... regularly, and you'll knock the man down that brushes your wife too closely in a crowd, and because of your attitude toward all but your own women you'll suspect every man who even approaches your daughter. In the eyes of the world you're entitled to your wild oats. That's what I am, a wild oat to be sown at your pleasure. If you haven't any letters, Mr. Visigoth, I'm ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... record. How he set about it, in a place where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the board at the best inn comes to little more than a shilling a day, is a problem for the wise. His son, ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of father and son mark an epoch in the history of centralization in France. Not until the latter had got into the train was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stretches its dusty, hot, and interminable length along the valley, at a point where the heat and dust have become intolerable, the monotonous expanse of wild oats on either side illimitable, and the distant horizon apparently remoter than ever, it suddenly slips between a stunted thicket or hedge of "scrub oaks," which until that moment had been undistinguishable above the long, misty, quivering level of the grain. The thicket rising gradually ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... unabashed affirmative. "Nice, comfortable, elevating palliness with you; and a right down rollicking bust-up occasionally with the ladies of the unpretending school of wild oats." ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... did not mind James doing the bad things he did with Ben, for he said, "If the two get into a scrape, Farmer Grey must get Ben out of it for the sake of his nephew. Young men must sow their wild oats, and may be he won't make the worse husband to Mary ...
— Taking Tales - Instructive and Entertaining Reading • W.H.G. Kingston
... ravages today make Great Britain seem to the acute diagnoser of political health to be like a fruit—ruddy without, but eaten away within and rotten at the core. One expects disease in old age, but not in youth. We expect young countries to sow their wild oats, to have a few revolutions before they settle down to national housekeeping; but we are not moved by these troubles—the result of excessive energy—as we are by symptoms of premature decay. No nation can be regarded as unhealthy when a virile peasantry, contented with rural employments, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... I, "it is a long lane that has no turning. I will not keep from you that I have heard something of this poor fellow, Chrystal Croftangry. He has sown his wild oats, as they say, and has settled into a steady, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... quite worthy of his name, the county discovered in a day, almost in a moment, that he was very much improved. He had always been clever enough, they said, for anything, and now that he had sown his wild oats and learned how to conduct himself, and attained an age when follies are naturally over, there was no reason why he should not be received with open arms. Such a man had a great many more experiences, the county thought with a certain pride, than ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... things that they were doing when they were fifteen and twenty and twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true career of a human nature, are the true entrance into human life? The miserable talk about sowing wild oats, about getting through the necessary conditions of life before a man comes to solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having passed through the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life, has not carried out of them an absolute shame for ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats,'' afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), she narrated, with a delicate humour, which showed what her literary powers might have been if freed from drudgery, the experiences of her family ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... larger than the Coscumnes. The soil of the bottom appears to be very rich, and produces the finest qualities of grasses. The grass on the upland is also abundant, but at this time it is brown and dead. We passed through large tracts of wild oats during the day; the stalks are generally from three ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... old Mosey's cabin was a mass of purple lupine. Behind the house the wild oats were dotted with brodiaea, waving on long, glistening stems. The California lilac was in bloom on the trail, and its clumps of pale blossoms were like breaks in the chaparral, showing the blue ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... old man wailed out of the chimney-corner: "Why did they ever send Hereward away? I warned the good Earl, I warned my good lady, many a time, to let him sow his wild oats and be done with them; or they might need him some day when they could not find him! He was a lad! He was a lad!" and again he whined, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... days for California. The vagrant keels of prying Commerce had not as yet ruffled the lordly gravity of her bays. No torn and ragged gulch betrayed the suspicion of golden treasure. The wild oats drooped idly in the morning heat or wrestled with the afternoon breezes. Deer and antelope dotted the plain. The watercourses brawled in their familiar channels, nor dreamed of ever shifting their regular tide. The wonders of the Yosemite and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... in all parts of the country that were invaluable to me in after days, and though I had not finished sowing my wild oats I think the folly of it all had begun to dawn on my mind as I saw player after player disappear from the arena, the majority of them being men who had given promise of being shining lights in ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... worthily in these brief limits. When, encouraged by the unprecedented popularity of this venture, I prepare an encyclopaedia of the "Wit and Humor of American Women," I can do justice to such writers as "Gail Hamilton" and Miss Alcott, whose "Transcendental Wild Oats" cannot be cut. Rose Terry Cooke thinks her "Knoware" the only funny thing she has ever done. She is greatly mistaken, as I can soon prove. "Knoware" ought to be printed by itself to delight thousands, as her ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... to turn over a new leaf, and become more frugal and respectable. He would not give up his social pleasures, but would stick to his business, and employ his leisure time in profitable reading. This, Mr. Parton calls his "regeneration." Others might view it as the completion of "sowing his wild oats." He certainly made himself very useful to the old visionary Keimer, who printed banknotes for New Jersey, by making improvements on the copper plate; but he soon left this employment and set up for himself, in partnership with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... licentiousness, which was formerly considered in young men as a venial frailty, is now no longer regarded in the husband and the father as compatible with the character of a decently religious man. The language is of this sort; "they have sown their wild oats, they must now reform, and be regular." Nor perhaps is the same manifest predominance of vanity and dissipation deemed innocent in the matron: but if they are kind respectively in their conjugal and parental relations, and are tolerably regular and decent, they ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... interests of the horse-community, and to promote any measure which might contribute to the increase of the consumption of oats, and improve the condition of his fellow quadrupeds. He considered the horse-interest greatly promoted by the practice of sowing wild oats, which he warmly commended. A HACKNEY-COACH HORSE declared himself in favor of the sliding-scale, which he understood to mean the wooden pavement. Things went much more smoothly wherever it was ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... that early marriages will tend to preserve youth from sowing wild oats. The woman who is the victim of this delusion will reap a harvest of discontent and misery. Any man who needs the sacrifice of a woman to cultivate the art of self-control is not a fit citizen, far less a fit husband or father. A man who is willing to bring children into ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... turtle, several species of snakes, broth made of deer's humbles, peas, beans, &c. They have no set meals: they eat when they are hungry, and drink nothing but water. Their bread is made of Indian corn, wild oats, or the seed of the sun-flower; they eat it alone, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... with a recollection of her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix. He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault. He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... plague or a fit of some malevolent disease which attacks even those who seem to be out of his reach. Remember this; all the indignities put on Greece by Sparta or ourselves were at least the work of genuine sons of the land; they may be likened to the wild oats of some heir to a great estate—if they were the excesses of some slave or changeling we all would have considered them monstrous and scandalous. But that is not our attitude to Philip and his diplomacy, though he is not a Greek or a relation; rather he is not born even of decent barbarian ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... dialect, full of broad oos and eternal zeds, supplies never-failing laughter when brought upon the stage. Even a cockney audience relishes the broad pronunciation of John Moody, in the Journey to London, or of Sim in Wild Oats. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... case has had time to assume permanently the horizontal posture,—namely, that knave of a builder, whose knaveries (gilded by that morning sun of June) were controlled by nobody; that sycophantish parson; that young gentleman of fifteen (now, alas! fifty- nine), who must long since have sown his wild oats; that unhappy pony of eighteen (now, alas! sixty-two, if living; ah! venerable pony, that must (or mustest) now require thy oats to be boiled); in short, one and all of these venerabilities—knaves, ponies, drunkards, receipts—have descended, I believe, to chaos ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... certainly I do," the old man said, shortly, with a quick gleam in his eyes; "a highly respected gentleman now, though he may have sown his wild oats like the rest. To be sure; of course I know all about it. His meaning was good, but he ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... this valley of San Gabriel was a long open stretch of wavy slopes and low rolling hills; in winter robed in velvety green and spangled with myriads of flowers all strange to Eastern eyes; in summer brown with sun-dried grass, or silvery gray where the light rippled over the wild oats. Here and there stood groves of huge live-oaks, beneath whose broad, time-bowed heads thousands of cattle stamped away the noons of summer. Around the old mission, whose bells have rung o'er the valley for a century, a few houses ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... persistent seekers after thrilling descriptions of war. "You never see the like. Across in them trenches there was real soda-water in bottles." To return to our lieutenant, he "simply can't help being a little sorry for the Boche now that his wild oats are coming home to roost." Even his poetic friends, formerly soulful and precious, take this restrained view. The Attributes of the Enemy are thus summed ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... be quite rich. If you care for him there is nothing against him as I can see. He is healthy, has a good character, and comes of a high family. Being a bit wild won't matter. Very often, after they sow their wild oats, some of those scampy young fellows settle down and marry a nice young girl and turn out ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... from his infancy; and his lightest whim was respected. The fact that he should have given the best part of his life since he left Oxford to roving about foreign countries was lamented; but this roving temper was regarded as only an eccentric manner of sowing those wild oats which youth must in some wise scatter; and it was hoped that with ripening years he would settle down and spend his days in the home of his ancestors. He might come home at any time, he had informed Mrs. Mawley in his last letter, received ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... strength in life depends upon habits formed in early life. The young man who sows his wild oats and indulges in the social cup, is fastening chains upon himself that never can be broken. The innocent youth by solitary practice of self-abuse will fasten upon himself a habit which will wreck his physical ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... washes and shaves, and such domestic duties as repairing rents in our breeches and tunics, and a little laundry work. Some of your "gentlemen rovers abroad" are finding that sewing the tears in one's tunic is a far different and more difficult matter than sowing one's wild oats at home. Owing to having baked the back of one of my boots in drying it at a fire, after my fourth immersion in a bog, I have had rather a bad heel, but am easier in that vulnerable part now, having cut out the back ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... friends say I'm losing an awful lot of money and am sowing an awfully big crop. And according to them, instead of practicing sensible crop rotation, I'm a foolish one-crop farmer—and my one crop is wild oats." ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... interest he took in church and Sunday school as proven by the regularity and punctuality of his going off to the services. Had Frank become a Christian like Mr. Lloyd? He would not be sorry if he had, although it was rather a pity that he had not waited until he had had his fling first, sowed a few wild oats, seen something of the world, and then settled down. Here was a good chance to find out. So with some relaxing of ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... the foolish boy had no love to his father to keep him from emigrating. He wanted to be his own master, and to get away into a place where he thought he could sow his wild oats and no news of it ever reach the father's house. He wanted to have the fingering of the money, and to enjoy the sense of possession. And so he went off on his unblessed road to the harlots and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... engaged to be married to a young German, a banker from philanthropic motives, for he has four millions; he is like a hero in a novel, a perfect Werther, charming and kind-hearted. He has sown his wild oats, and he is distractedly in love with Cecile; it is a case of love at first sight; and so much the more certain, since Cecile had all Pons' paintings of Madonnas for rivals," and so ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... and with my followers and instruments marched through the country of the Aroussi, much the most pleasant territory in Abyssinia, being finely shaded with forests of the Acacia Vera, the tree which produces the gum arabic. Below these trees grew wild oats of prodigious height and size. I often made the grain into cakes ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... in the young men. Believe me, it is necessary to manhood that men when they are young should drink a little, gamble a little, and sow a few wild oats—as necessary as that a nation should found itself by the law of the strongest. How else can we look for the moderation to follow with responsibilities? The vices that are more than excusable in the young, are very properly denied to the married man; the law for him is not the same as for the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... right, but I think I would have risked it. I don't think because Mr. Romaine drinks occasionally that I would have given him up. Oh young men will sow their wild oats." ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... that swift, searching glance of the brilliant blue eyes. "In plain English, then, it wouldn't matter in the slightest to me what the woman I loved had done in the past. She may have sown her little crop of wild oats if she likes. The past is hers. The future would be mine. And I'd take care ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... kind of possibility. Fortunately, moreover, MARGARET and H. DE VERE STACPOOLE have shown themselves not only fully alive to all the humorous chances of their theme, but inspired with an infectious delight in them. It is, for example, a singularly happy touch that the wild oats that Uncle Simon tries to retrieve are not of to-day but from the long-vanished pastures of mid-Victorian London. Of course such a fantasy can't properly be ended. Having extracted (as I gratefully admit) the last ounce of entertainment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... with moral sophistry. Vicious conduct in a woman, according to Stephanie's logic, is not more culpable or disastrous than vicious conduct in a man: the woman, equally with the man, should have a social license to sow the juvenile wild oats and effect the middle-aged reformation; and it is only because there are gay young men who indulge in profligacy that women sometimes become adventurers and moral monsters. All this is launched forth in speeches of singular terseness, eloquence, and vigour; but all this is specious and ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... less give you the education you're a-gettin' now. No, honey, I won't go up to the great house. If I'd a-done right when I was a boy I'd be sittin' right up there with the rest o' that bunch o' people this minute. But I was bound to have my fling, and sow my wild oats and now I can have the pleasure of harvestin' my crop. It ought to be thistles, for if ever there was a jackass that same ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... wish that our mass of celibates should sow their wild oats? And who is deceived on this point? as Figaro asks. Is it the governments or the governed? The social order is like the small boys who stop their ears at the theatre, so as not to hear the report of the firearms. Is society afraid ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... on both vegetable and animal food. During the months of September and October, the weeds and wild oats swarm with them. They feed on the nutricious seeds, small snail shells, worms and larvae of insects, which they extract from the mud. The habits of the Sora Rail, its thin, compressed body, its aversion to take wing, and the dexterity with which it runs or conceals itself among ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... more commonly known as Captain Walshawe, died at the age of eighty-one years. The Captain in his early days, and so long as health and strength permitted, was a scamp of the active, intriguing sort; and spent his days and nights in sowing his wild oats, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible stock. The harvest of this tillage was plentifully interspersed with thorns, nettles, and thistles, which stung the husbandman unpleasantly, and did not ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... was supposed that a shot from the gun-boat must have sunk her, and that the whole crew were drowned. Captain Wilson and Mr Sawbridge seriously regretted the loss of our hero, as they thought that he would have turned out a shining character as soon as he had sown his wild oats; so did Mr Asper, because our hero's purse went with him; so did Jolliffe, because he had taken an affection for him; so did little Gossett, because he anticipated no mercy from Vigors. On the other hand, there were some who were glad that he was ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pine in folly, rather choosing to die in my study amidst my books than to court it in Italy in the company of ladies.' He returns to Athens, applies himself to the study of philosophy, becomes public reader in the University, and, as crowning evidence that he has finished sowing his wild oats, produces three volumes of lectures. Realizing how much of his own youth has been wasted, he writes a pamphlet on the education of the young, a dialogue with an atheist, and these, with a bundle of letters, make up the ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... even good-naturedly tolerated. 'The Road to Ruin' has eclipsed 'Duplicity' and 'The Deserted Daughter.' We all know 'The Honeymoon,' but who has seen, how many have read, 'The Curfew' and 'The School for Authors'? We flock to 'Wild Oats,' but alas for 'The Agreeable Surprise'! 'The Man of the World' keeps Macklin's name before us, but we have said good-bye to ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... "The lad sowed wild oats sure enough, Mr. Moore, and good, tall ones, with full heads at that, but he's only an image o' his father, in that old John's recklessness runs to makin' money, and young John's to spendin'. It's not that I like bringin' up bygones, but the father was a bit loose in his day, too. I ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... tooth, fist and eye-gouging thumb. Then to these elections sometimes would come the Kentuckians from over the border to stir up the hostility between state and state, which makes that border bristle with enmity to this day. For half a century, then, all wild oats from elsewhere usually sprouted at the Gap. And thus the Gap had been the shrine of personal freedom—the place where any one individual had the right to do his pleasure with bottle and cards and politics and any ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown, plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... wiry, and 'peared like a young man what had parstured 'mongst wild oats. He seemed cut out for a gintleman, but run to seed too quick and turned out nigh kin to a dead beat. One-half of him was hanssum, 'minded me mightly of that stone head with kurly hair what sets over the sody fountin in the drug store, on Main Street. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... anonymous eulogist called him "kynde Kit Marlowe"; and Edward Blunt, his friend and publisher, said "the impression of the man hath been dear unto us, living an after-life in our memory." Assuredly Shakespeare's "dead shepherd" was no scamp. He apparently sowed his wild oats, like hundreds of other young men who were afterwards lauded by the orthodox. He was fond of a glass of wine in an age when tea and coffee were unknown, and English ladies drank beer for breakfast. And if he perished in a sudden brawl, it was at a time when everyone ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... must think it strange I never wrote to you since we parted, but you know I never was a very good correspondent; and as I had nothing to communicate advantageous to you I thought it a sort of insult to enlarge on my own happiness, and so forth. All I shall say on that score is, that I've sown my wild oats; and that you may take my word for it, there's nothing that can make a man know how large, the heart is, and how little the world, till he comes home (perhaps after a hard day's hunting) and sees his own fireside, and ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... south-east. It was a fine creek. These courses of water spread over a grassy plain a mile wide; the water holes were long and deep, with numerous plants growing on their banks, indicating permanent water. The wild oats on the bank of the creek were four feet high. The country gone over to-day, although stony, was completely covered with grass and salt bush; it was even better than that passed yesterday. Some of the grass resembled the drake, some the wild wheat, and some rye—the same as discovered ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... all holiday excursions in which Lord Cairnforth could not accompany him. It was only by great persuasion that he agreed to go for a week to Edinburg, to revisit his old haunts there, to look on the ugly fields where he had sown his wild oats, and prove to even respectable and incredulous Uncle Alick that there was no fear of their ever sprouting up again. Also, Lord Cairnforth took the opportunity to introduce his cousin into his own set of Edinburg friends, to familiarize the young man with the society ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Since the death of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which no one had quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide—the Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable to Soames. George, too, he knew, had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the joys of the table, eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight down, and owning, as he said, "just one or two old screws to give me an interest in life." He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window without the embarrassing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... your duty, young, woman—that's the main thing. I think you're wrong. But what you believe to be right you have to do. That's the way we learn my dear, that's the way we learn! Well—you've been a good child ever since I've known you. A remarkably good child. If you have to sow this kind of wild oats—" they both smiled at this, "I guess we can't stop you. I'll ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... procession wound past the tubs and crossing the road climbed up the hill to the little wooded cemetery of the early fathers, the cemetery where so many of those bright heads were to lie forgotten beneath the wild oats and thistles. ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... passion. This was the first of George Sand's errors, and it certainly was an immense one. She had imagined that happiness reigns in students' rooms. She had counted on the passing fancy of a young man of good family, who had come to Paris to sow his wild oats, for giving her fresh zest and for carving out for herself a fresh future. It was a most commonplace adventure, utterly destitute of psychology, and by its very bitterness it contrasted strangely with her elevated sentimental romance with Aurelien de Seze. That ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... come trickling down the stubble while we lie drenched on a bed of withered wild oats, by the side of a bushy hill, and the gathering in of the clouds, with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, enhance the sense of inward ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago—he was now barely twenty-six—he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... days dragging. The halt at Salt Lake, the transit of the dreary Alkali desert, even the wild passage of the Sierras, were but a blurred picture in his memory. The sight of eternal snows and the rolling of endless ranks of pines, the first glimpse of a hillside of wild oats, the spectacle of a rushing yellow river that to his fancy seemed tinged with gold, were momentary excitements, quickly forgotten. But when, one morning, halting at the outskirts of a struggling settlement, ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... And I dare assert that long before this he had learned to chuckle over his youthful follies, and had protested to his wife that La Beale Ysoude squinted, or was freckled, or the like; and had insisted, laughingly, that the best of us must sow our wild oats. And at the last it was his wife who mixed his gruel and smoothed his pillow and sat up with him at night; so that if he died thinking of Madame Palomides rather than of La Beale Ysoude, who shall blame him? Not I, for one," said John Bulmer, stoutly; "If it was not heroic, it was at ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the elder, Peter, the recognised heir to the rich bachelor uncle, who now made life gay for them with an allowance of two thousand a year each; but he was an autocrat and something of a tyrant, the old uncle, and his will had to be law. He did not mind their sowing of wild oats if they were what he called gentlemanly wild oats, and merely got them talked about as gay young dogs, and he was always generous with an extra cheque if they got into difficulties; but he would not have foolhardy, quixotic affairs at all. There he put his foot down. When the younger brother, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... enlarged a little, confessing that I had spent a little time on the way in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies. I did not want to present myself to the British Merchant Service in an altogether green state. It was no use telling him that my mysterious vocation was so strong that my very wild oats had to be sown at sea. It was the exact truth, but he would not have understood the somewhat exceptional psychology of ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... accidents; the grass, brightened by a spring which at a little distance plays a thousand pranks over the rocks, flourishes in rich luxuriance; the burdock, with large velvet leaves, the stinging nettles, the hemlock with greenish umbels; the wild oats—every weed prospers wonderfully. No stranger approaches the enclosure, whose denizens are two or three little deer with tawny coats gleaming through ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... Golden Ass' is very simple. Lucius of Madaura, a young man of property, sets out on his travels to sow his wild oats. He pursues this pleasant occupation with the greatest zeal according to the prevailing mode: he is no moralist. The partner of his first intrigue is the maid of a woman skilled in witchcraft. The curiosity of Lucius being ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... bark, to the two Portuguese factories, near Gambia, in the latitude of fourteen; and I, with two negroes which I kept with me, went away to Cape Coast Castle, where I got passage for England, and arrived there in September; and thus ended my first harvest of wild oats; the rest were not sowed to so ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... man, somebody's son, starts out with the determination that the world is indebted to him for a good time. "Dollars were made to spend. I am young, and every man must sow his wild oats and then settle down. I want to be a 'hail fellow well met' ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... two of you, poor Anthony (who, I am sure, was a most passive creature!) was so packed with principle and admonition that I vow and declare he reminded me of Issachar stooping between his two burdens. It washigh time for him to be done with your apron-string, my dear: he has all his wild oats to sow; and that is an occupation which it is unwise to defer too long. By the bye, have you heard the news? The Duke of York has done us a service for which I was unprepared. (More tea, Barbara!) George Austin, bringing the prince in his train, ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... these roads also stationing big repair plants at inland points, one at Calgary, the other supposed to be for Kamloops? It is not to help along the townsite lot booms in these places. No one deprecates these town lots running out the area of Chicago more than the railroads do. "Wild oats" hurt trade more than they advertise the legitimate ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... pretty well accustomed to the agricultural pursuits of sowing wild oats, Miss Sally, prudently considers that half a loaf is better than no bread. To be out of harm's way he prudently thinks is something too, and therefore he accepts your brother's offer. Brass, Mr ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... set—but I want to say that I've been cleaning house all the week, thinkin' of you. I'm to be a leading citizen from this day on. You won't need to apologize for me. I've never been a drinking man, but I have been a reckless devil. I don't deny that I've planted a wide field of wild oats. However, all that I put away from this hour. 'Tis true I'm forty, but that's not old—I'm no older than I was at twenty-one, sure—and, besides, you're young enough to make up." He smiled, and again she acknowledged ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... and the infinite murmur of the sea. All around Renee, and near to her, there seemed to be a great living peace, in which everything was being swayed—the gnat in the air, the leaf on the branch, the shadows on the bark of the trees, the tops of the trees against the sky, and the wild oats on each side of the paths. Then from this murmur came the sighing sound of a deep respiration, a breeze coming from afar which made the trees tremble as it passed them, while the blue of the heavenly vault above the shaking leaves seemed fixed and immovable. The boughs swayed slowly up and down, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... our spirits rose. We forgot our anxious figurings on ways and means, our too concentrated hopes of success, our feverish, intent, single-minded desire for gold. Three abreast we marched forward through the waving, shimmering wild oats, humming once more the strains of the silly little song to which the gold seekers ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... for the old squire. When Tom purchased his commission in the Guards, and when he opened a house like a palace, on his wedding with Lady Barbara, the old gentleman felt proud of his son's figure, and proud of his connections. "Ah," said he, "Tom's a lad of spirit; he'll sow his wild oats, and come to his senses presently." But when he fairly embarked for France, with a troop of servants, and a suite of carriages, like a nobleman, then did the old fellow fairly curse and swear, and call him all the unnatural and petticoat-pinioned ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... was in a state of tremor lest his vagaries should infect the beasts ridden by myself and the guide; but no, they were evidently elderly mules—bordering on a hundred they might have been, from their grey and mangy aspect. They had sown their wild oats years before, and all that they did was to trudge solemnly on, quiet and sure-footed, ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... had gone to the city, warm-hearted, young, venturesome, not vicious, had learned life in a heap, sowed his wild oats all at once, fallen among evil companions, and drifted by easy stages into an affair of inexcusable ugliness, whence he seemed unable to escape till a misplaced chivalry whispered him what to do. He had found himself like Lancelot with "his honor rooted ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... playwright. His pen was most prolific; he published a collection of over fifty pieces in 1798. His plays are mostly comic operas or farces, and some of them had great success. Lingo, the schoolmaster in The Agreeable Surprise, is a very amusing character. The Positive Man, The Son-in-Law, Wild Oats, Love in a Camp, and The Poor Soldier are among his compositions. His songs are well known, such as "I am a friar of orders grey", and there are few schoolboys who have not sooner or later made the acquaintance of his "Amo, amas, I loved a lass". For the last fifty-two years of his ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... life. He was just finishing a history of the family or something, which he had been working on for the last year, and didn't stir much from the library. He was rather a good instance of what they say about its being a good scheme for a fellow to sow his wild oats. I'd been told that in his youth Uncle Willoughby had been a bit of a rounder. You would never have thought it to ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... extremely agreeable young man when in possession of his proper faculties. He has large means and no near relatives; he comes of one of the best families in the county; and though he has, I surmise, sown his wild oats pretty freely, he was considered of unusual promise previous to this unfortunate illness. He is of an amiable and pleasant disposition, though at present, we fear, inclined to suicidal tendencies. I have no particular reason to think he is at all homicidal; still, you will see ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... as ever their life is destroy'd, their parts immediately shrivel, and lose their beauty; and so is it also with small Plants, as I instanced before, in the description of Moss. And thence also is the reason of the variations in the beards of wild Oats, and in those of Musk-grass seed, that their bodies, being exceeding small, those small variations which are made in the surfaces of all bodies, almost upon every change of Air, especially if the body be porous, do here become sensible, where the whole body is so small, that ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... out of his hands. He would have all the drunkards to become moderate drinkers, if not total abstainers; and all the sensualists to become, if need be, ascetics; and all those who had sowed out their wild oats to settle down as heads of houses, and members, if not ministers and elders, in his set-up church. But we are too well taught, surely; we have gone too long to another church than that which Diabolus ever sets up, to be ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... and wild oats and gama grass, mingled with flowers. Along the trickle were willows, too. With the aspens and the willows and the seed grasses and the water this was a fine place for grouse. I looked for sign, on the edge of the wetness, and I saw where birds had been scratching ...
— Pluck on the Long Trail - Boy Scouts in the Rockies • Edwin L. Sabin
... in the question, inasmuch as having lost my reputation for youth, I have never acquired one for wisdom—hereby raise my voice against the intolerable cant, which assumes every man to be a hare-brained scapegrace at twenty, and Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool," &c., (musty as the proverb is, it is rather from neglect than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... growth of timber, some quarter of a mile in width. Orange and lemon groves have been planted in favored localities on the bench lands, here and there, but not continuously. There is much hilly land back of the canyon proper, covered with wild oats and evidently devoted entirely to pasture. Shortly after our noon halt we came to the power plant of the Mount Whitney Power Company. Here they told us our journey would end twelve miles further up the stream. From this point the canyon narrowed rapidly until it became ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... in their sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in our own sight.' Ah, no! no stair is so steep as the stair of sanctification, no bread is so salt as that which is baked for a man of God out of the wild oats of his past sin and his present sinfulness. Even Joshua and Caleb, who brought back a good report of the land, did not deny that the children of Anak were there, or that their walls went up to heaven, or that they, the spies, were as grasshoppers ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... Nameless Dell Nora Queen Bess Ruby's Reward Sibyl's Influence Stella Rosevelt That Dowdy Thorn Among Roses, A Sequel to a Girl in a Thousand Thrice Wedded Tina Trixy True Aristocrat, A Two Keys Virgie's Inheritance Wedded By Fate Welfleet Mystery, The Wild Oats Winifred's ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... had for some time been shining from the high heavens upon the whole court, its sleeping folk, the thick clump of willows and the high wild oats in which was drowned the fence surrounding the court. Still she was sitting at the head-side of her darling boys, not taking her eyes off them for a moment, and not even thinking of sleep. The horses, already feeling the morrow, had all lain down in the grass, and ceased feeding. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... where, and served—no matter whom. There were three apprentices besides myself; and it seems necessary to say, that, at the time when the incident happened which I am about to relate, we had neither of us completed that branch of husbandry called the sowing of wild oats; and as the soil was very favorable for the development of that species of grain, we were perhaps a little too industriously engaged in its cultivation. We were in great haste to have the oats ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... little, but they have no mercy on such illnesses as fevers or catarrhs or lung diseases, which to us appear to be beyond the control of the individual. They are only more lenient towards the diseases of the young—such as measles, which they think to be like sowing one's wild oats—and look over them as pardonable indiscretions if they have not been too serious, and if they are atoned ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... were long and profitable in the land of the foot-hills. The mines yielded their abundance, the winters were singularly open and yet there was no drouth nor lack of water, and peace and plenty smiled on the Sierrean foothills, from their highest sunny upland to the trailing falda of wild oats and poppies. If a certain superstition got abroad among the other camps, connecting the fortunes of Rough-and-Ready with Daddy and Mammy, it was a gentle, harmless fancy, and was not, I think, altogether rejected by the old people. A certain large, patriarchal, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Eve," said her father. "He's a good sort; he idolizes you. Oh yes, I know you prefer Alan, that's perhaps natural, but he's not sown his wild oats yet and you'll have a long time to wait before you can get him to the post. You're young, marry William Chesney, and before the bloom's off your cheeks you'll be the richest and handsomest ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... this book is to impart the ideas which are most likely to be lacking in the conventional Englishman's equipment. I came by them myself much as Wagner did, having learnt more about music than about anything else in my youth, and sown my political wild oats subsequently in the revolutionary school. This combination is not common in England; and as I seem, so far, to be the only publicly articulate result of it, I venture to add my commentary to what has already been written by musicians who are no ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world, sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry, and preserved till nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy. So, to come rightly at the spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of sentiments which with most of us are over ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... and so to be serene. They look well in July; we will see them in December." An inhospitable December came upon the promising experiment, as it generally has upon all similar enterprises. Under the title Transcendental Wild Oats, in "Silver Pitchers," Miss Alcott gives a lively account of the varying humors of this ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... profligate life, and when Mr. Disraeli came to seek re-election as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer this tribune of the people produced at the hustings the Radical manifesto which Mr. Disraeli had issued twenty years before. "What do you say to that, sir?" "I say that we all sow our wild oats, and no one knows the meaning of that phrase ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... old Safford mutters about my making mouths at him when I haven't thought of him in a month! Present my compliments to the old gentleman and tell him one of 'the boys' thinks seriously of following his advice, which you know is 'to sow our wild oats and get a wife.' Do, pray, come, for I am only ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... Oxford might have done something for him; made a man of him, I mean. But he wouldn't go. I believe in wild oats to a certain extent. I have told him from the first he must look after himself and decide for himself. That's my theory. It makes a youngster self-reliant. He goes and comes as he likes. If he comes home late from hunting I ask no questions; I don't wait dinner. ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
