"Childishly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... addressing me gave me constantly that feeling. So much the more affecting was it, when the sanity of his perceptions and his remembrances returned; but these intervals were of slower and slower occurrence. In this condition, silent or babbling childishly, self- involved and torpidly abstracted, or else busy with self-created phantoms and delusions, what a contrast did he offer to that Kant who had once been the brilliant centre of the most brilliant circles for rank, wit, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... capacity of man; but man has not known that this capacity was his defining mark. We must notice the strange fact that, from the engineering point of view, humanity, though very developed in some ways, is childishly undeveloped in others. Humanity has some conceptions about dimensions and talks of the world in which we live as having three dimensions; yet even in its wildest imagination it can not picture tangibly a fourth dimension; nay, humanity has not learned to grasp the ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... her hands together childishly, trying to understand the thing that had fallen upon her; then suddenly ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... itself is but one part of reason, and that rectilinear mentality, in philosophy at any rate, will never do. Though each one may report in different words of his rotational experience, the experience itself is almost childishly simple, and whosoever has been there instantly recognizes other authentic reports. To have been in that eddy is a freemasonry of which the common password is a "fie" on all the operations ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... German, and Polish churches to liberate those peoples from the domination of Roman priests. The Pontiff was terrified, and hastened to yield the most pressing demands made in the message which he had himself received, among them the nomination of a negotiator. But he childishly refused the letter of the Emperor's demand, and commissioned, not the French cardinal legate at Paris, but an Italian cardinal. Napoleon notified the See that he would treat only with Bayanne, the French cardinal at Paris, and that longer dallying would compel him ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... a long cane chair under the trees; then the book would drop on his knees, and blowing smoke in curling wreaths, he lost himself in dramatic meditations. It was pleasant to see that Emily had grown innocently, childishly fond of her cousin, and her fondness expressed itself in a number of pretty ways. 'Now, Hubert, Hubert, get out of my way,' she would say, feigning a charming petulance; or she would come and drag him out of ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... little pearl-grey kid, redolent of Lubin's "violet," and spread out the almost childishly small fingers on his own broad palm, which suddenly closed over it like a vice; then with a half smile of strange tenderness, in which all the stony sternness of lips and chin seemed steeped and melted, he drew the glove softly, caressingly ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... moonshine, dew, and spring perfumes, are the element of these tender spirits; they assist nature in embroidering her carpet with green leaves, many-coloured flowers, and glittering insects; in the human world they do but make sport childishly and waywardly with their beneficent or noxious influences. Their most violent rage dissolves in good-natured raillery; their passions, stripped of all earthly matter, are merely an ideal dream. To correspond with this, the loves of mortals are painted as ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... perceived that he and Byron had very little in common. Byron disliked his familiarity and his airs of equality; while he himself was not long in discovering Byron to be egotistical to the verge of insanity, childishly vain of his rank, ill-natured, jealous, coarse, inconsiderate, disloyal, a blabber of secrets, mean, deceitful. But the glamour of Byron's fame, the romance that surrounded him, his rank, which Leigh Hunt valued almost pathetically, kept the amiable invalid—for such Leigh ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... by-product we don't know what to do with. Put it into lashes." Her hands were white and exquisitely cared for, and she wore no wedding ring. Lydia noted that, with an involuntary glance, but strangely it did not move her to any access of indignation. Anger she did feel, but it was, childishly, anger over the candied fruit. "How can you lie there and eat," she wanted to cry, "when ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... she took her first quick survey of the room she knew so well. Her preoccupied maid was childishly questioning the busy Israel as he and the man out on the basement ladder removed bricks from the edges of the ragged opening ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... altogether sorry to see it. In fact, my reader, I must just uncover my sin, and say that I felt a little jealous of Mr. Percivale. The negative reason was that I had not yet learned to love him. The only cure for jealousy is love. But I was ashamed too of Wynnie's behaving so childishly. Her face flushed, the tears came in her eyes, and she rose, saying, with a little choke in ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the time came for him to negotiate the needle's eye. For a prelate to withstand such a contention was more than difficult.... Yet if the patient spoke to the point, it was by accident. His thoughts were elsewhere. Childishly excited, he was wanting to use his wand. Ridiculously enough, his romping brain could not furnish a wish to be converted.... Suddenly an idea came to him. His dog, his little faithful dog, had gone in need of a ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... were gentry, a cut above. Yet Dorcas continued to believe he might have consorted with them, if he chose, and her manner to him had a softer friendliness because he was so kind. And when she could forget her old-fashioned gown, she was quite childishly content. At the gate that night he thanked her profusely for the pleasure of ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... been merely from the force of his first swipe, or he might have slipped—but Shabako staggered drunkenly and barely avoided falling. With an oath, he came erect and once more charged at the American. It was easy for Wes to avoid his thrust; it would have been childishly easy to drive his blade through the Pharaoh's unguarded chest. But somehow Craig withheld his attack, and only peered more closely at the other. He rubbed his hand across his eyes. What he ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... two miles she sang lustily, childishly, with the complete abandon of a girl without a burden. Daddy Skinner was coming home, and God had given her back the student. The remembrance of his eyes thrilled her ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... of today. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when our ship left those shores each knew that the other went to his state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite childishly. ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... Christians were so childishly simple that they would believe almost any thing that was told them. In a time when such nonsense could be written, it is no great wonder there should be many who could ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... stones in my rescue. While gathering fruit, they found me asleep, went home, held a council, came the next day with their elephants and horses, overwhelmed the few giants watching me, and carried me off. Jubilant over their victory, the smaller boys were childishly boastful, the bigger boys less ostentatious, while the girls, although their eyes flashed more, were not so talkative as usual. The woman of Bulika no doubt ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... have been asked to the wedding. Marcia never liked her very much, but now, with the uncertain, dim future it seemed pleasant and home-like to think of a visit from Mary Ann and she nodded and said childishly: "Sometime, ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... half over he was playing with Phoebe and her toys quite as childishly and gleefully as she, his heart in the fun she was having, his mind almost wholly cleared of the bitterness and rancour that so recently had filled ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... the book which, though a celestial revelation to past ages, was but a voice from a lower sphere as regarded the present race of man? It was done! Upon the blazing heap of falsehood and worn-out truth—things that the earth had never needed, or had ceased to need, or had grown childishly weary of—fell the ponderous church Bible, the great old volume that had lain so long on the cushion of the pulpit, and whence the pastor's solemn voice had given holy utterance on so many a Sabbath day. There, likewise, fell the family Bible, which the long-buried patriarch ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... clasped beneath her head, she lay staring fretfully at the globe of electric light which hung from the centre of the embossed and gilded ceiling. Seen thus, with the soft curves of throat and arms revealed, and her face childishly set in a cloud of loosened hair, she looked no older than Cicely—and, like Cicely, inaccessible to grown-up arguments and the stronger logic ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... eaten with little conversation, the Professor being the only one who showed conversational powers of any note. With the notebook already partly filled he felt certain of a niche in the Pantheon of Fame, and he could not resist a desire to prattle childishly about the sensation which his discoveries would cause. It's a terrible thing for a man to get the applause craving in its worst form. It is liable to make him do things which no craving for treasure would allow him to do, no matter how badly he ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... I had walked across the meadows by that path on several occasions, and in the dead silence of the brilliant night vivid recollections of a warm summer's evening long past came back to me—sweet remembrances of days when we were childishly happy in each ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... weaned, although the breast be rub'd with wormwood or mustard, they will either wipe it off, or else suck down sweet and bitter together; so is it with some Christians, let God embitter all the sweets of this life, that so they might feed upon more substantiall food, yet they are so childishly sottish that they are still huging and sucking these empty brests, that God is forced to hedg up their way with thornes, or lay affliction on their loynes, that so they might shake hands with the world before it bid ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... He saw now something childishly sweet and pure in the face that smiled welcome to him as he came noisily through the snow-crust; and something, too, in the colonel's face, which reached out and gripped at his very heartstrings, and filled him ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... as a conqueror or liberator on February 22, 1495. He was welcomed and feted by the Neapolitans, than whom no people are more childishly delighted with a change of masters. He enjoyed his usual sports, and indulged in his usual love-affairs. With suicidal insolence and want of policy he alienated the sympathies of the noble families by dividing the titles, offices, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... I was in total ignorance of what you tell me. I don't see how, under the circumstances, you can do anything. I was never more surprised in my life, in fact, than when I read your letter. The whole thing is too childishly preposterous. ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... carrying any plan to completion. Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy Monarch acts; and the acts are wonderful. To criticise these acts exists a wild-cat Press, liable to suppression at any moment, as morbidly sensitive to outside criticism as the American, and almost as childishly untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its growth, and pitiable in its unseasoned rashness. Backers of this press in its wilder moments, lawless, ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student class, educated in the main at Government expense, and a thorn in the side of the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... childishly pleased at everything she saw whilst accompanying the admiral around the decks, twitching at his arm incessantly that she might indulge her curiosity as to hatchways, stoke-hole gratings, and so on; clapping her hands continually in ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... have for breakfast, and in my hurry I happened to answer: "A bread and a slice of egg." Thomas Glahn was sitting in my room at the time—he lived in the attic up above, just under the roof—and he began to chuckle and laugh childishly over my little slip of the tongue. "A bread and a slice of egg!" he repeated time over and over, until I looked at him in surprise and ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... such a step would definitely deprive him of Chris for ever; and therein he charged himself with offences that his nature was above committing. Then he burst into bitter blame of Will, and at a weak moment—for nothing is weaker than the rare weakness of a strong man—he childishly upbraided the farmer with that fateful advice concerning Clement, and called down upon his head deep censure for the subsequent catastrophe. Will, as may be imagined, proved not slow to resent such an attack with heart and voice. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Gerald woke late. He had slept heavily. Pussum was still asleep, sleeping childishly and pathetically. There was something small and curled up and defenceless about her, that roused an unsatisfied flame of passion in the young man's blood, a devouring avid pity. He looked at her again. But it would be too cruel to wake her. He ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Palla gaily; but her childishly lovely mouth was working, and she clenched her hands in her ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... was over, and the jury had retired, Edward Newbury took his father to the carriage which was waiting. The old man, so thin and straight, from his small head and narrow shoulders to his childishly small feet, leaned upon his son's arm, and apparently saw nothing around him. A mostly silent throng lined the lane leading to the farm. Half-way stood the man who had come down to lecture on "Rational Marriage," surrounded by a group of Martover Socialists. ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seem to be so, but now no ridiculous school miss of romance could be more given to the vapours. You will absolutely destroy the remaining respect I have for you, unless you tell me the truth, and what is underneath in your mind influencing you to behave so childishly." ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... standard. And then the uniform! It was the outward symbol of the lost selfishness and the cleaner honour. It hadn't been paid for; it wouldn't be paid for till I had lived in the trenches. I was childishly anxious to earn my right to wear it. I had said "Good-bye" to myself, and had been re-born into willing sacrifice. I think that was the reason for the difference of spirit in which I read the two headlines. We've all gone through ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... to salute the members of the Government, and to exchange a few words with General Botha, when we had to "quit." For eight days we wandered round with Colonel Bullock at our heels, always remaining, however, in the same neighbourhood. This officer's tactics in trying to capture us were childishly simple. During the day there would be skirmishes between the enemy and General Botha's men, but each evening the former would, by retiring, attempt to lull us into a sense of security. But as soon as the sun had set, they would ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... crossed behind them with a mighty rumble. When all was still he spoke again, and the tone of his voice was childishly wistful. ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... looked very steadily at her child. Vere's eyes did not fall, but met hers simply, fearlessly, yet not quite childishly. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... not even admit that Solon made the campaign against the Megarians, which we have related; but Poplicola both by strategy and personal valour won many great battles. As a statesman, Solon seems to have acted somewhat childishly in pretending that he was mad, in order to make his speech about Salamis, while Poplicola ran the very greatest risks in driving out the tyrant and crushing the conspiracy. He was especially responsible ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... treasured his second-hand stereophonic unit and collection of tapes. He too was a classicist in his way, and there was many a long winter night when Harry sat there listening to ancient folk songs. The quaint atonalities of progressive jazz and the childishly frantic rhythms of "cool sounds" were somehow soothing and reassuring in their reminder of a simple heritage from a ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... shamelessly prolific. Harrietta thought, suddenly, of her green-painted flower boxes outside the eleventh-story south window in the New York flat. Outside her window here a great scarlet hibiscus stuck its tongue out at her. Harrietta stuck her tongue out at it, childishly, and turned away. She liked a certain reticence in flowers, as in everything else. She sat down at the desk, took up a sheet of lavender and gold paper and the great lavender plumed pen. The note she wrote to Ken was the kind of note that only Ken would understand, unless you've ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... to any one, trusting to the puppy's own attractions to plead for it. It had seemed to Benjamin that nobody could resist that puppy. But Grandfather Wellman had all his life preferred cats to dogs, and now he was childishly fond of Seventoes. Benjamin's mother often said that she didn't know what grandsir would do if ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... she had refused to travel in Touraine with Balzac, as she considered that a journey with him in France would compromise her; but, apparently, in Italy this objection did not apply. She travelled in man's clothes, as Balzac's page, and both he and she were childishly delighted by the mystification they caused. Comte Sclopis, the celebrated Piedmontese statesman, who acted as their cicerone in Turin society, was much fascinated by the charming page. The liking was evidently mutual, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the reply. "But what does that matter? He'll be sound asleep, and to-morrow we shall be a couple of thousand francs the richer. It is childishly easy, my ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... its grace even in the huddled-up attitude. The face hidden in the chair, childishly, as though a child suffered pain, was lifted as Lady O'Gara touched the bronze-brown head. The misery of Stella's wide eyes shocked her. Stella's face was stained and disfigured by tears. The soft close hair, which she had taken to wearing plaited about ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... this glimpse of a woman's nature in the spoilt child, though for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her as she childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the handkerchief at her eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her to a seat hard by, under ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... drove him childishly frantic. He wanted to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption. He was saying this over and over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... principii of childhood, which Billy, secure in his cohort from bloody nose, felt justified in making. And Paul Kegworthy, the rag of a newspaper crumpled tight in his little hand, would watch them disappear and wonder at the paradox of life. In any sphere of human effort, so he dimly and childishly realized, he could wipe out Billy Goodge. He had a soul-reaching contempt for Billy Goodge, a passionate envy of him. Why did Billy hold his position instead of crumbling into dust before him? Assuredly he was a better man than Billy. When, Billy duce ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of the Countess shone keenly between their heavy black fringes during a silent moment of inspection, which must have shown her Virginia divinely young, and childishly innocent of guile. At the end ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... three steps toward her. Her thin little chest heaved up and down, and she spoke in a strange un-childishly ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to spend hours over her instructions in chess on that pleasant balcony in the shade of the house. Though really only a year older than Dennet Headley, she looked much more, and was so in all her ways. It never occurred to her to run childishly wild with delight in the garden and orchard as did Dennet, who, with little five-years-old Will Streatfield for her guide and playfellow, rushed about hither and thither, making acquaintance with hens and chickens, geese and goslings, seeing cows and goats milked, watching butter churned, bringing ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... I write?" he asked. She had never called upon him for proof of his scholarship, and he was childishly eager to reveal to the woman he loved attainments of ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... knew her, and for some time after, she was childishly untidy and negligent in her dress: her frocks were tossed on, as if buttons and strings were unnecessary incumbrances,—one sleeve off the shoulder, the other on,—and her soft, silky hair brushed 'any how': but Miss Emma Roberts, whose dress was always in good taste, determined ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... board—the poor old fellow was not only in feeble health, but was childishly anxious to, as he said, 'smell the smell of a big town again'—we left Strong's Island for Sydney. From the very first Gurden became weaker, and on the fourth or fifth day out he told us that he did not believe he would live through the night. We tried to cheer him up, ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... antique influence cannot be conceived as absent in the history of Italian painting. So far, as a study of the impossible, the speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... that of the typical Anglo-Indian. The special character of the mouth was hidden by a fine black moustache, but his prevailing expression varied between irritability and a kind of plaintiveness. The conspicuous blue eyes were as a rule melancholy; but they could be childishly bright and self-assertive. There was a general air of breeding about Richard Boyce, of that air at any rate which our common generalisations connect with the pride of old family; his dress was careful and correct to the last ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... conscience to yield. But even now Faber had not the most distant intention of forsaking her; only why should he let her burden him, and make his life miserable? There were other pleasures besides the company of the most childishly devoted of women: why should he not take them? Why should he give all his leisure to one who gave more than the half of it ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... teaching of mine, I pay no attention to them, even to the extent of despising their judgment as rash. For it is not unknown that Lactantius, a writer of prominence in other lines although but little versed in mathematics, spoke very childishly about the form of the earth when he ridiculed those who declared that it was spherical. Hence it should not seem strange to the learned if some shall look upon us in the same way. Mathematics is written for mathematicians, to whom these labors of ours will seem, if I mistake not, to add ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... trial of strength or struggle for supremacy between the North and South. The war sprang from the inherent antipathy between two forms of political organization radically hostile to each other. Is the war over, will it ever be over, if we allow the incompatibility to remain, childishly satisfied with a mere change of shape? This has been the grapple of two brothers that already struggled with each other even in the womb. One of them has fallen under the other; but let simple, good-natured Esau beware how he slacken his ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... unfailing delight, used to call him, "Codd Colonel." "Tell little F——, that Codd Colonel wants to see him;" and the little gown-boy was brought to him; and the Colonel would listen to him for hours; and hear all about his lessons and his play; and prattle almost as childishly about Dr. Raine, and his own early school-days. The boys of the school, it must be said, had heard the noble old gentleman's touching history, and had all got to know and love him. They came every day to hear ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he looked out over the village, his fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent, longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing what cue ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not made my way alone. Starling was the chief attraction, but I, too, was the centre of a curious, chaffering crowd. The braves were unwontedly good-humored, childishly pleased with the evening's excitement, and I amused them still further by shrugging at them and making great faces of contempt. When one offered me a meal cake I kicked at him and trampled the food into the ground, and as I swaggered away I heard him tell ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... smiling, childishly lady-like way in which the little girls exchanged their greetings and then intertwined their little arms as they proceeded on their way together, Sadie's ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... kindness had seemed to him the pledge of the Heavenly Father's forgiveness; and he added, perhaps a little childishly, that it had been his impulse to promise never to touch a card again, but that he dreaded the only too familiar reply, 'What availed ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... others; but failed to detect in Dick's effusive greeting, or the Dona's coquettish smile of recognition, any suggestion of previous confidences. It was rather to Cecily that Dona Felipa seemed to be characteristically exuberant and childishly feminine. Both mother and stepdaughter spoke a musical infantine English, which the daughter supplemented with her eyes, her eyebrows, her little brown fingers, her plump shoulders, a dozen charming intonations of voice, and a complete vocabulary in ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... came to him again. He was somewhat fretful from his illness. A gentleman[538] asked him, whether he had been abroad to-day. 'Don't talk so childishly, (said he.) You may as well ask if I hanged myself to-day.' I mentioned politicks. JOHNSON. 'Sir, I'd as soon have a man to break my bones as talk to me of publick affairs, internal or external. I have lived to see things all as bad ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... pretend I am at my rooms reading a story which is very hard to pretend as I never read in my rooms and then I look up and exclaim "Hello, I'm not in New York, that's Algiers." The thing that has impressed me most is how absolutely small the world is and how childishly easy it is to go around it. You and Nora MUST take this trip; as for me I think Willie Chanler is the most sensible individual ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... roll back on us every week, like the stone of Sisyphus, and need to be won over again next week, the mistakes of a censorship that was absolutely right as a military measure, but may have been unintelligently, not to say childishly, conducted—all these are beside the real question. They must not obscure the duty of restoring order in the regions where our troops have been assailed, or prejudice ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... the corner, circled a block, and met her. She was childishly swinging the basket on her arm and humming a song. She smiled vacantly into his face. He caught the look of shrewd intelligence and saw through her masquerade. A single word from her lips now would send her to the gallows and certainly lead ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... honestly and childishly pleased to see him that I ought to have been disarmed. She went off with him to the bookstall, while I looked after her luggage, and they stood there chattering and laughing until I joined them, and then ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in the preparation. Vada dictated to her father with never flagging tongue, and Jamie carried everything he could lift to and fro, regardless of whether he was bringing or taking away. Vada chid him in her childishly superior way, but her efforts were quite lost on his delicious self-importance. Nor could there be any doubt that, in his infantile mind, he was quite assured ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... amount of anxiety. It was the second week of July, 1870; and the destinies of France trembled, as upon a cast of the dice, in the hands of a few presumptuous incapables. Was it war with Prussia, or was it peace, that was to issue from the complications of a childishly astute policy? ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... may revive a good and expressive phrase of the period, hastily and unskilfully slubbered up: Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate example of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer of Moll's regard from him to his friend is both childishly conceived and childishly contrived. On the whole, a second-rate play, with one or two first-rate scenes and passages to which Lamb has done perhaps no more than justice by the characteristic and eloquent cordiality ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Then, childishly, half ashamed, she begins to "pretend." She snatches off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train, casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber chief, flinging herself ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed by Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly unconcealed. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... season, recalling the homage of the younger for the elder brother, a worship as natural as pagan adoration of the sun. From the sanguine fore-time to the dead present lay a bridge of darkness. With honor within grasp, deliberately he had sought dishonor, little recking of shame and murder, and childishly husbanding green, red ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... also a great student. To think profoundly, it is indispensable that a man should have read down to his own starting point, and have read as a collating student to the particular stage at which he himself takes up the subject. At this moment, for instance, how could geology be treated otherwise than childishly by one who should rely upon the encyclopaedias of 1800? or comparative physiology by the most ingenious of men unacquainted with Marshall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen? In such a condition of undisciplined ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... his heroics in peace. He would find an excuse; meanwhile, give him quiet and solitude to digest his bitterness. He cursed himself for the unworthiness of his thoughts. What a pass had he come to when he grudged a little kudos to a rival, grudged it churlishly, childishly. He flung from him the self-reproach. Other people would wonder at his ungenerousness, and his sulky ill-nature. They would explain by the first easy discreditable reason. What eared he for their opinion when he knew the far greater shame in ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Thus, it seemed, childishly almost, had Cavalcanti vented his terrible rage, and I could well conceive what would have befallen any of the Duke's people upon whom in that hour he had chanced. I did not know then that the poor pimp who had acted as our guide was hanging from the balcony dead, nor that his ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... using that vague, commonplace language—which I never thought to hear from you—I wish you would tell me exactly what you mean. What things do I see in an ideal light? That means, I suppose, that I am childishly ignorant of common evils in the world. You couldn't speak otherwise if I had just come out of a convent. And, indeed, you don't believe what you say. Speak more simply, Reuben. Say that you ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... I have not been treated well. Did you really think that I was so childishly crazy to get away from home that I would leave my nice plank house,"—it rose into palatial splendor when compared with the floorless shanty, less comfortable than a Yankee farmer's barn, in which she was standing,—"with its noble fireplace, nice board floor, two ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... an empty head, indeed, but an innocent heart. Now both self-seeking and vanity were being scourged out of her by force of the love which she had learnt to feel. She was little changed in manner, and an observer might have said that she was as childishly pleased as ever with a new gaud or a pretty toy; but behind the self-sufficiency of her demeanor, and the frivolity of her tastes, there was something new—something more real and living than mere self-indulgence and conceit. The faculty of ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... you startled me! I did not dream there was any one in the room. It was so naughty in you," said she, childishly, as he pushed back the curls from her face and kissed her. "When ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... far the supreme lyrical defense has not been forthcoming. Perhaps Poetry feels that it is beneath her dignity to attempt a utilitarian justification for herself. Yet in the verse of the last century and a half there are occasional passages which give the impression that Poetry, with childishly averted head, is offering them to us, as if to say, "Don't think I would stoop to defend myself, but here are some things I might say for myself, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... became suddenly and unaccountably swollen with rage; she became primordial; she wanted to hurt, maim, kill. Childishly she stooped and picked up heavy stones which she hurled into the water. The instinct to live flamed so strongly in her that the crust of civilization fell away like mist before the sun, and for a long time the pure ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... his one hand, he inclosed her two clasped ones within it, as the little voice ran over an utterly unintelligible form of childishly clipped Latin, sounding, however, sweet and birdlike from the very liberties the little memory had taken in twisting its mellifluous words into a rhythm of her own. And there was catchword enough for Richard to recognize and follow it, with bonnet doffed, ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... anger seemed to die out of her, and she looked at him as she did in the days before Rudyard Byng came across her path—eagerly, childishly, eloquently, inquiringly. He was the one man who satisfied the intellectual and temperamental side of her; and he had taught her more than any one else in the world. She realized that she had "Tossed him violently like a ball into a far country," and that she had not now a vestige of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... view of Lord Granville's proposals was that they were childishly insincere. Europe would not be deceived into believing them to be anything more than a proposal to restore the old system in its entirety, with an English nominee as controller in place of the dual control. Nothing, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... of serving the purposes of the Tory party, they had brought that party over to the side of Whiggism. It must indeed be admitted that, though both the King and the Prince behaved in a manner little to their honour, though the father acted harshly, the son disrespectfully, and both childishly, the royal family was rather strengthened than weakened by the disagreement of its two most distinguished members. A large class of politicians, who had considered themselves as placed under sentence of perpetual exclusion from office, and who, in their despair, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... affected her worse than any one else, first because the ridicule and fault-finding to which her brother had always treated her were tripled in their amount and quality, and yet as she was dependent upon this childishly weak brother she must endure the treatment. Secondly, she was reminded that her age was somewhat near Mark Constantine's age and perhaps a similar fate lay in store for her. Lastly, it tied her down—propriety demanded that someone be in the sick room ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... respectful, love-letter. I don't recall the words now, but I remember well that through the high-flown phrases there was apparent a genuine feeling, which cannot be feigned. When I had finished reading it I met her glowing, questioning, and childishly impatient eyes fixed upon me. She fastened her eyes upon my face and waited impatiently for what I should say. In a few words, hurriedly, but with a sort of joy and pride, she explained to me that she had been to a dance somewhere in a private house, a family of "very nice people, WHO KNEW NOTHING, ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... I knelt down before her as I used to do when a child, and, taking both her hands, I covered them with kisses. Again, at this solemn hour, my lips were met by that golden wedding-ring which I hated like a living person; yet the feeling did not hinder me from speaking to her almost childishly. "Ah," I said, "you have troubles, and to whom should you tell them if not to me? Where will you find anyone to love you more? Be good to me," I went on; "do you not feel how dear you are ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... holiness, who should suddenly see a bevy of grand folks come up to their door: the miraculous was here. The spiritual glory was of course on the side of the family of Joseph; but the temporal glory, the glory that delighted Gentile, that went to his brain and made him childishly happy, was with the kings and their retinue. That retinue—the trumpeters prancing on white horses, with gold lace covers, the pages, the armour-bearers, the treasurers, the huntsmen with the hounds, the falconers with the hawks, winding for miles down the hills, and expanding into the circle ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Eclair Picture Palace?" she mimicked. Both seemed almost childishly relieved. So in spite of his successful-business-man mouth, he wasn't the kind that is less a husband than a telephone-receiver, especially at home. Still, she would have made a difference even to telephone-receivers, that could be felt ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... gasped, "but cannot you see that the mischief is done! You behave shamefully, and now you talk childishly. You have made these children disloyal, and what hold can I have on them except through their loyalty? You have thrown me back at the start—I cannot bear to think how far—and you talk as if some foolish violence could mend this for me! Please—please ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which their newspapers offer them, and they digest them without a qualm. While they expect the provinces to come to their aid, they are almost angry that they should venture to act independently of their guidance. They are childishly anxious to send out commissaries to take the direction of affairs in Normandy and Touraine, for the provincials are in their eyes slaves, born to serve and to obey the capital. Indeed, they have not yet ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... know every word I have written," he said, childishly pleased. "Decidedly, you must translate me. You shall be my apostle to the heathen. You are good apostles, you English. You turned Jews under Cromwell, and now your missionaries are planting our Palestinian doctrines in the South Seas, or amid the josses ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... very well without the icy cold that assailed my legs, and I saw nothing in reach to cover me. I said to myself, "Captain, the position is not tenable," when at length I perceived on the couch—One sometimes is childishly ashamed, but I really dared not, and I waited for a long minute struggling between a sense of the ridiculous and the cold which I felt was increasing. At last, when I heard my wife's breathing become more regular and thought that she must be asleep, I stretched out my ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... exactly as the Indians arrived at the notion of electricity (not so called by them, of course) as the cause of the Aurora Borealis. But, just as the Indians thought that the cosmic lights were caused by the rubbing together of crowded deer in the heavens (a theory quite childishly absurd), so the savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as to the existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men, surviving death, and he has peopled with his ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious retreat was situated. It was thought "very English" to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of distinction to what was ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... spite of his passionate gratitude to her, he must needs ask himself, did she suppose that a man or a marriage was to be remade in a month, even by her plastic fingers? Women envisaged these things so easily, so childishly, almost. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... supposed in the college to be insensible to the softer emotions. Love wrought no external change upon her. It made her believe that she had left her girlhood behind her and was now a woman with a newly-developed heart capacity at which she would childishly have scoffed a little while before. She felt ashamed of the bee on the window pane, although it somehow buzzed as frequently as before in spite of her. Her calendar, formerly a monotonous cycle of class times, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... meant to reproach me for you know,—and of that, I am not guilty at all. I never could think of 'making conversation' in a letter to you—never. Women are said to partake of the nature of children—and my brothers call me 'absurdly childish' sometimes: and I am capable of being childishly 'in earnest' about novels, and straws, and such 'puppydogs' tails' as my Flush's! Also I write more letters than you do, ... I write in fact almost as you pay visits, ... and one has to 'make conversation' in turn, of course. But—give me something to vow by—whatever you meant in the 'Vivian Grey' ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... subject. "I hear—they tell me—that you read her all that nonsense aloud? Stupid @ bosh it was—written in delirium. And I can't understand how anyone can be so I won't say CRUEL, because the word would be humiliating to myself, but we'll say childishly vain and revengeful, as to REPROACH me with this confession, and use it as a weapon against me. Don't be afraid, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... pale blue eyes and hair the colour of wet straw. She had the slender, shapely feet of the French cocotte. Her stockings were of thin pink silk. Her slender, soft fingers were without a ring. Her jewelry, no doubt, had long since gone to the money lender. She seemed childishly happy because I sat and talked to her. Poor little Gabrielle! Her tragedy was one of genuine bereavement, or perhaps the worst of all tragedies—loneliness. I shall never think again of Vienna without ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... little, and just awash, the conning tower of the submarine showed up out of the sea about half a mile away, and suddenly Vane heard a voice beside him cursing it bitterly and childishly. He turned, to find one of the smoking-room patriots shaking his fist at it, while the weak tears of rage poured down his face. Afterwards, on thinking the experience over, Vane decided that that one spectacle had made it almost worth while. . ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... so childishly as to misuse their arms, they must be placed under tutelage. Moreover, our enemies have acted so dishonourably that it is only just that rights of citizenship should be denied them.... When they can no longer bear arms, they cannot make any new ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... melancholy satisfaction; for it seemed to me that destiny itself had determined to contribute towards my aim and desire, and to forward me freely in the erratic progress, which, in a gloomy mood, I had most desperately and, perhaps, childishly undertaken." ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... for at a still earlier hour the Latimer girls had been flying in and out of their respective rooms in a perfectly aimless, joyous, childishly happy fashion, like a flock of white pigeons. And the sum of their conversation was simply this: "Oh, what a day! what a glorious day!" Yet it sufficed for a Babel of bird-like voices. At last one more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... always glad to escape. On this day the prisoners were taken into the exercise yard to meet their wives and children. On these occasions when supplies of food were brought in, some very heart-rending scenes were witnessed, the little toddlers clinging to their fathers' coat-tails and childishly urging them to come home, while the women's ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... I have undone my self, And with my own hand turn'd my fortune round, That was a fair one: I have childishly Plaid with my hope so long, till I have broke it, And now too late I mourn for't; O Spaconia! Thou hast found an even way to thy revenge now, Why didst thou follow me like a faint shadow, To wither my desires? But wretched fool, ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... spring; and the inherent love of life breeds in me a physical fear of it as of a subtle enemy. For even if the soul is brave, the body dreads to die, and seems at moments to possess a second soul, purely physical, that cries out childishly against pain, ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... of science study to a ridiculous extent. Things have altered very much at the Royal College of Science, no doubt, since my student days, but fifteen years ago the courses in elementary physics and in elementary geology were quite childishly silly in this respect. Both these courses seemed to have been inspired by that eminent educationist, Mr. Squeers, and the sequel to spelling "window" was always to "go and clean one." The science in each course in those days could have been acquired just as well ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... time the strange man offered one hundred and fifty dollars for him), and certainly he was not the hound that whipped the big bulldog at Monroe, Louisiana, two years ago. He did not see me as I came up back of him, and as he had not even heard my voice for over one year, I was almost childishly afraid to speak to him. But I finally said, "Hal, you have not forgotten your old friend?" He turned instantly, but as I put my hand upon his head there was no joyous bound or lifting of the ears and tail—just a look of recognition, then a raising ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... read to the Earl of Essex, and on the evening before his appointed execution, the Countess of Shrewsbury paid his lordship a visit, and found him, as it appeared, toying childishly with a ring. The diamond, that enriched it, glittered like a little star, but with a singular tinge of red. The gloomy prison-chamber in the Tower, with its deep and narrow windows piercing the walls of stone, was now all ...
— Other Tales and Sketches - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was so childlike and her face so childishly beautiful that we all smiled with amusement and pleasure. Yolanda saw the smiles and turned on us, pouting though almost ready to laugh. She rose from her chair, stamped her foot, stood irresolutely for a moment, and then breaking into a laugh, drew her chair ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... ablest of them napping; for they are so subtle that they will sometimes tell you the truth because they think you will suppose it to be a lie. I do not wish to catch them napping, however; I cling to the wisdom of ignorance, and childishly enjoy the way in which things work themselves out— the cul-de-sac resolving itself at the very last moment into a promising corridor toward the outer air. At every rebuff it is my happiness to be hopelessly bewildered; and I gape with admiration when the Gordian knot is untied. If the author be ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... scrape together the money for a cow, we must cut expenses somehow. Perhaps you could stop stuffing your nostrils with that dirty snuff? And you ought at any rate to be able to sell that fancy fox skin you play with so childishly. ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... the marine reporters should have more money," Cappy suggested wearily. His old hand reached out gropingly, closed over Mr. Skinner's and held it a moment childishly. "You're a very great comfort to me, Skinner—very great indeed! And you'll come home with me to-night, won't you, Skinner? I'm a little afraid—I want you near me, Skinner—in case I can't get ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... take care what you say. Girls are so heedless. I tell you it is very dangerous to make such broad statements. You do not know what harm you may do by a single word when you are so childishly outspoken." Mrs. Millar felt bound even yet to give her own words the timid qualification, though she was forced to add the next moment, "Your father has suspected things were going wrong for some time, and spoken of his suspicions to me repeatedly. He has just come back from ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... remarkable specimens that the world could show of perverse absurdity. Each of them considered his darling form of ecclesiastical polity, not as a means but as an end, as the one thing needful, as the quintessence of the Christian religion. Each of them childishly fancied that he had found a theory of civil government in his Bible. Neither shrank from the frightful consequences to which his theory led. To all objections both had one answer,—Thus saith the Lord. Both agreed in boasting that the arguments which to atheistical politicians ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... feebly groped her way to her sister's side, and throwing her shrunken arms about her, tried to win her back to consciousness by childishly ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... are such creatures of habit, my love, that, though I cannot say I was sorry, childishly so, for your going, when I knew that you were to stay such a short time, and I had a plan of employment, yet I could not sleep. I turned to your side of the bed, and tried to make the most of the comfort of the pillow, which you used to tell me I was churlish about; but all would ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell |
