"Bookish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... select number was Mrs. Anna Greyfield, at whose home among the foot-hills of the Sierras in Northern California, I had spent one of the most delightful summers of my life. Intellectual and intelligent without being learned or particularly bookish; quick in her perceptions and nearly faultless in her judgment of others; broadly charitable, not through any laxity of principle on her own part, but through knowledge of the stumbling-blocks of which the world is full for ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... of this Almagest are for the exceptional hour; but daily, as one bookish from the nursery, I read much in many directions. For if books are called the best friends of happy men, to the sad they are saviours also. And when I remember too clearly what I am, I turn perhaps most often to Lucretius. For of all those who have taken up the pen to assuage ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Waverley himself, who, after this event, resided more constantly in London, was too much interested in his own plans of wealth and ambition to notice more respecting Edward than that he was of a very bookish turn, and probably destined to be a bishop. If he could have discovered and analysed his son's waking dreams, he would have formed ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... stood motionless quite a minute after she had vanished, nor did he awaken from his reverie, until aroused by an appeal from Captain Truck, to sustain him, in some of his matter-of-fact opinions concerning England, against the visionary and bookish notions ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... dreadfully in love with the Adriatic lady whom I spake of in a former letter, (and not in this—I add, for fear of mistakes, for the only one mentioned in the first part of this epistle is elderly and bookish, two things which I have ceased to admire,) and love in this part of the world is no sinecure. This is also the season when every body make up their intrigues for the ensuing year, and cut for ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... as the author of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" than as the conqueror of Quebec. Mr. Cromering would sooner have been the editor of the English Review than the chief constable of Norfolk. His tastes were bookish; Nature had intended him for the librarian of a circulating library: the safe pilot of middle class ladies through the ocean of new fiction which overwhelms the British Isles twice a year. His particular hobby was paleontology. He was the author of The Jurassic ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... little learning went a long way, and whatever the Norman Conquest did for England (and it did a great deal), it certainly was not an event calculated to increase the love of study, or likely to make men bookish pundits. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... taught, in all the common things a man should learn, at a good quiet school at Frisco, which distinguished itself from all other schools by not calling itself a college. And when he was leaving to begin home life, with as much put into him as he could manage—for his nature was not bookish—when he was just seventeen years old, and tall and straight and upright, but not set into great bodily strength, which could not yet be expected, a terrible fire broke out in a great block of houses newly occupied, over against the school-house front. Without waiting for master's ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... (a Little embarrassed, I fancy), resides in the family place in Cornwall, of course; 'Papa is in business,' Mary informs me; He's a good sensible man, whatever his trade is. The mother Is—shall I call it fine?—herself she would tell you refined, and Greatly, I fear me, looks down on my bookish and maladroit manners; Somewhat affecteth the blue; would talk to me often of poets; Quotes, which I hate, Childe Harold; but also appreciates Wordsworth; Sometimes adventures on Schiller; and then to religion diverges; Questions me much about Oxford; and yet, in her ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... personage is there in Shakespeare who shows these traits or some of them? He should be bookish and irresolute, a lover of thought and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that "Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... was not a proper person for the position he held, being far too impulsive in speech for a bookish man; but then Wells had been sorely tried. He told Cranston something of it as they walked away together after loading Mart with provisions and fruit at the corner grocery. Together they stopped to see Dr. ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... languages ever left unburied, had put a considerable fortune into his hands, and into his brain the dream of a life-work—even the building of a great university in the West. For the Wreams were a stubborn, self-willed, bookish breed, who held that salvation of souls could come only through possession of a college diploma. Young Fenneben had come to Kansas with all his youth and health and money, with high ideals and culture and ambition for success and dreams of honor—and, hidden deep down, ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... boy blushed, but the next moment his face resumed its usual pallor. He was tall for his fourteen years, but evidently not particularly strong. He had, in truth, somewhat of a bookish look, and his rounded shoulders already told of much poring over a student's tasks. Fairburn, on the other hand, though less tall, carried in his face and form all the ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... thus much, the small natural man in me rebelled, and I vowed, as I straddled and spat about the stable-yard in feeble imitation of the coachman, that lessons might go to the Inventor of them. It was only geography that morning, any way: and the practical thing was worth any quantity of bookish theoretic; as for me, I was going on my travels, and imports and exports, populations and capitals, might very well wait while I explored ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... Worldly knowledge and bookish knowledge were acquired by Lloyd George during the next few years while he was going through his law course in the office of a firm of solicitors in the neighboring little town of Portmadoc. While there he had further opportunity for developing his natural powers ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the degree was different, the manner was different. The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore—were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added—and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet steady and penetrating greenish grey ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... ignorant at first of bookish subjects, but in his atmosphere, if one were no student, and didn't even try to keep up, or forge ahead, they would absorb much through association. Almost always he has been on the school board and selected the ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... an hour afterwards. The Bishop and he had had but two bookish evenings together since that rather bizarre one in Christmas week. They met cordially ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... suffered from bad digestion, and had a tendency to 'run to head,' he determined to select as his wife a 'daughter of the soil,' to use his own phrase, above the average height, with a vigorous constitution and plenty of common sense. She need not be bookish, 'he could supply all that himself.' Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn. His mother and Mrs Caffyn had been early friends. He was not mistaken in Sarah. She was certainly robust; she was a shrewd housekeeper, and she never read anything, except now and then a paragraph ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... often witnesses the adoration paid to this glorious object, by some bookish pilgrim, who, as the evening sun reposes softly upon the hill, pushes onward, through copse, wood, moor, heath, bramble, and thicket, to feast his eyes upon the mellow lustre of its leaves, and upon the nice execution of its typography. Menalcas ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 'Letters by Eminent Wits,' which proved of more advantage (or disadvantage) to his nephew than to himself, for it inspired the lad with a desire to excel in epistolary writing. Not long after this Robert's early tutor Murdoch returned to Ayr, and lent him Pope's Works; a bookish friend of his father's obtained for him the reading of two volumes of Richardson's 'Pamela' and another friendly soul the reading of Smollett's 'Ferdinand Count Fathom,' and 'Peregrine Pickle.' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... so sure! I read a great deal more than I used to—getting ready for my bookish days when I'll have to do something solid in the evenings and won't be asked to dance any more, even by the very youngest boys who think it's a sporting event to dance with the oldest of the 'older girls'. The name of the grove was ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... single ideal—to kill—which they follow with men as single-minded as themselves. Battlefield tactics do not exist; when a whole nation goes to ground there can be none of the "victories" of the old bookish days. But there is always the killing—the well-schemed smashing of a full trench, the rushing out and the mowing down of its occupants; the unsuspicious battalion far in the rear, located after two nights' extreme risk alone among rubbish of masonry, and wiped out as it ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... papers, crucifixes, bulls and prayer-books; as he did not have for ideal and prototype the tanned and vigorous laborer, but the aristocratic lord, carried in a luxurious litter, the result was that the imitative people became bookish, devout, prayerful; it acquired ideas of luxury and ostentation, without thereby improving the means of its subsistence to a ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... unnoticed. But Hester was inclined to think that Robert Vail surpassed Ralph in every particular. Helen had told her much of this one cousin who took the place of brother to her. He was in his last year in medical college, and had led his class for three full years. Yet he was not a bookish man. He was of a social nature, fond of company, and outdoor life, taking as much interest in cross-country walks and athletics as he did in his studies. Hester was thinking of these matters while Helen and Robert were talking. She had been sitting with her eyes upon the floor, listening in ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... returned to St Petersburg, Bering was again ordered to prepare to carry out the dead emperor's command—'to find and set down reliably what was in the Pacific.' The explorer had now to take his orders from the authorities of the Academy of Sciences, whose bookish inexperience and visionary theories were to hamper him at every turn. Botanists, artists, seven monks, twelve physicians, Cossack soldiers—in all, nearly six hundred men—were to accompany him; and to transport this ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... shreddy and patchy enough. He reminds us by turns of Chateaubriand's Rene and Rousseau's Bomston, both of whom Madame de Stael of course knew; of Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, with whom she was very probably acquainted; but most of no special, even bookish, progenitor, but of a combination of theoretic deductions from supposed properties of man in general and Englishman in particular. Of Englishmen in particular Madame de Stael knew little more than a residence (chiefly ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... at all in Elgin, but this was the Murchisons' case. They had produced nothing abnormal, but they had to prove that they weren't going to, and Stella was the last and most convincing demonstration. Advena, bookish and unconventional, was regarded with dubiety. She was out of the type; she had queer satisfactions and enthusiasms. Once as a little girl she had taken a papoose from a drunken squaw and brought it home for her mother to adopt. Mrs Murchison's reception of the suggested duty may be imagined, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... once wrote a charming booklet entitled Wheel Magic, which was all about his rambles on the machine and its effect on him. He is not an athlete—on the contrary he is a bookish man who has written books enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to do with books all his life that one might imagine he had by some strange accident been born in the reading-room of the British Museum; ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... fiercely, and said quickly, "That's a nice name, only maybe it's a little—old fashioned." She was very sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish English, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... Spoils of Poynton" has given me a foretaste of the pleasure I'm to have. A prisoner of war has his compensations. Here I've come out of the turmoil of a life of the most intense nervous excitement, a life lived day to day with no thought of to-morrow, into this other life of unlimited bookish leisure. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... to a more or less ornamental and somewhat projecting top, terminating several feet from the ceiling. On this top a bust or so of an author may be appropriately placed, or copies of an ancient statue, and on the wall above, between the cases of shelves, may hang a few pictures, not necessarily bookish in suggestion, but reposeful in subject and tone, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... girls married to foreigners? Not a blessed one. Two were bookish and called literary, but not enough to break out into anything; they didn't agree with society (had impossible foreheads that ran nearly back to their necks, and thin hair); they went to college just to get the name of it and to kill time, but when they got ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... his mind showed the same blending of child's ignorance with surprising knowledge which is oftener seen in bright girls. Having read Shakespeare as well as a great deal of history, he could have talked with the wisdom of a bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock and were held unfortunate in consequence, being under disadvantages which required them to be a sort of heroes if they were to work themselves up to an equal standing with their legally born ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... colour what he saw and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the abominable things—superior knowledge and superior scholarship—upon them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was never in the least a pretentious ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... favourite character of a hoyden, and, after "interviewing" a number of suitors chosen by her father, finally ran away with Thomas the footman—a course in those days not without its parallel in high life, above stairs as well as below. It appears to have succeeded, though Bookish, one of the characters, was entirely withdrawn in deference to some disapprobation on the part of the audience; while the part of Wormwood, a lawyer, which is found in the latest editions, is said to have been "omitted in representation." The comedy, entitled The Universal Gallant; ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... render the language of the tales simple and free from bookish artifice, I have not felt at liberty to retell the tales in the English way. I have not scrupled to retain a Celtic turn of speech, and here and there a Celtic word, which I have not explained within brackets—a practice to be abhorred ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... phrased it, one has failed to answer the pertinent question: "Why, in spite of these defects, were Lowell's essays read with such pleasure by so many intelligent persons on both sides of the Atlantic, and why are they read still?" The answer is to be found in the whole tradition of the English bookish essay, from the first appearance of Florio's translation of Montaigne down to the present hour. That tradition has always welcomed copious, well-informed, enthusiastic, disorderly, and affectionate talk about books. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... to a class noticed, I doubt not, by every acute observer of provincial life in this country. In backwoods and out-of-the-way communities literary culture produces marked eccentricities in the life. Your bookish man at the West has never learned to mark the distinction between the world of ideas and the world of practical life. Instead of writing poems or romances, he falls to living them, or at least trying to. ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... asked Raven. "Old Crow was rather a bookish chap, I fancy, in a conventional way. I've got some of his stuff up in the hut: rather academic, the kind daguerreotyped young men with high stocks used to study by one candle. What do you suspect—a will, or a love-letter slipped in behind a cover and forgotten? It can't be a will. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... couple of hours talked ceaselessly, relating the course of his adventurous life; an entertaining story, told with abundant vigour, with humorous originality. Though he had in his possession scarce a dozen volumes, Alexander was really a bookish man and something of a scholar; his quotations, which were frequent, ranged from Homer to Horace, from Chaucer to Tennyson. He recited a few of his own poetical compositions, and they might have been worse; Piers made him glow and ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... Jasper, is a bookish fellow, and, as I have said, a fool where anything else is in question; if this meeting is allowed to take place, I feel that he will most certainly be killed, and his death would mean a new life—more ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... fine, With shells about her neck; moccasins neat Were drawn, like gloves, upon her little feet, Adorned with scarlet quills of porcupine. Innocent of the niceties refined That to the toilet her pale sisters bind, Yet much the same beneath the outer rind, She was, though all unskilled in bookish lore, A sound, sweet ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... in D with considerable misgivings. Everything depends on how one evaluates elements like -al in national, -te in bonte, or re- in retourner. They are common enough, but are they as alive, as little petrified or bookish, as our English ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... washing, one is struck by the way in which these cadences, in their unending, ever-varying flow, seem to harmonise with the rhythm of the sea. Here one finds, at least, and it is a great thing to find, a rhythm inherent in nature. A mean, or merely bookish, rhythm is rebuked by the sea, as a trivial or insincere thought is rebuked by the stars. 'We are what suns and winds and waters make us,' as Landor knew: the whole essence of Swinburne seems to be made by the rush and soft flowing impetus of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... in love with another woman. He was mad about her, and asked me to release him. As I had no children, I thought it only fair to agree. Cecil interested me very much at first, and he adored me, but I had a very dreary time with him. You know I'm not a bit literary, and he was so "precious" and bookish, he bored me to death. I was glad to leave him for Jack, my present husband, but Cecil's grief at parting was so frightful I shall never forget it, and when he died soon after I felt like ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... been bred up in: though amongst unthinking men, who examine not scrupulously and carefully their own ideas, and strip them not from the marks men use for them, but confound them with words, there must be endless dispute, wrangling, and jargon; especially if they be learned, bookish men, devoted to some sect, and accustomed to the language of it, and have learned to talk after others. But if it should happen that any two thinking men should really have different ideas, I do not see how they could discourse or argue ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... and scholarly productions, not open to the mere bookish mind, but more akin to the primitive utterances and oracles of historic humanity. A literary age like ours lays great stress upon the savor of books, art, culture, and has little taste for the savor of real things, the real man, which we get ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... am not, like Cassio, "an arithmetician," But by "the bookish theoric"[333] it appears, If 't is summed up with feminine precision, That, adding to the account his Highness' years, The fair Sultana erred from inanition; For, were the Sultan just to all his dears, She could ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... prosperous, with all the glamour of Austrian civilization resting on them. On the one side of the old frontier the wild homelessness of the mountains, on the other side park-like country, model towns, and broad, fruitful plains. Hard-bitten, bookless Serbs, and softened bookish Croats. As a responsibility of the peace Serbia has taken over large tracts of smitten Austria. Looking at the new territory, one might reckon it a rich spoil of war. But comparing Serbia as she is with this ex-Austria, one cannot but be struck ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... man. He had received a liberal education, and had graduated at a city college. He had developed into one of the best products of metropolitan life, and his defects were chiefly due to the circumstances of his lot. During his academic course he had been known as an athletic rather than a bookish man, and had left his Alma Mater with an Apollo-like physique. At the same time he had developed fine literary tastes, and was well informed, even if he had not gone very deeply into the classics and the sciences that were remote from the business career which he had chosen. ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... replied Peaks, as he turned partly round, so that he could see the craft. "That's a 'mofferdite brig; or, as bookish people would say, an hermaphrodite brig—half brig and half schooner. You must call things, especially vessels, by their right names, or you will ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... During the past eighteen years, the state of his health has exacted throughout an extreme caution in regard to mental application, reducing it at best within narrow and precarious limits, and often precluding it. Indeed, for two periods, each of several years, any attempt at bookish occupation would have been merely suicidal. A condition of sight arising from kindred sources has also retarded the work, since it has never permitted reading or writing continuously for much more than five minutes, and often has not permitted them at all. A previous work, "The Conspiracy ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... systematically traducing our order of country gentlemen. His picture of Squire Western is not only a malicious, but also an incongruous libel. The squire's ordinary language is impossible, being alternately bookish and absurdly rustic. In reality, the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order in general—to peasants even more than to gentlemen—in our English plays and novels, is a childish and fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real breathing ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... years. He worked hard at school, became a first-rate classical scholar, winning the Newcastle Scholarship in 1841, and being elected Scholar of King's in 1842. He seems to have been a quiet, retiring boy, with few intimate friends, respected for his ability and his courtesy, living a self-contained, bookish life, yet with a keen sense of school patriotism—though he had few pleasant memories ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... to my mother's peace of mind, that she had guided my inclinations in the peaceful direction of the library, hoping not to suffer for the son such alarms as she had undergone for the husband. I had grown up, therefore, a musing, bookish youth, rather shy and solitary in my habits: and this despite the care taken of my education in swordsmanship, riding, hunting, and other manly accomplishments, both by my father and by his old follower, Blaise Tripault. I acquired skill enough to satisfy these well-qualified ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... near me as we pulled down the volumes. My heart beat wildly as she sat by my side, while I mechanically turned the pages. The brush of her garments against my sleeve quite maddened me. I had not dared to look into her eyes, as I talked meaningless, bookish words. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... house with us. This gentleman, whose name was Bath, was of the rank of a major, and had so much singularity in his character, that, perhaps, you never heard of any like him. He was far from having any of those bookish qualifications which had before caused my Amelia's disquiet. It is true, his discourse generally turned on matters of no feminine kind; war and martial exploits being the ordinary topics of his conversation: however, as he had a sister with whom Amelia was greatly pleased, ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... I a buyer of old books. I admit a bookish quirk maybe, a love of the shelf, a weakness for morocco, especially if it is stained with age. I will, indeed, shirk a wedding for a bookshop. I'll go in "just to look about a bit, to see what the fellow has," and on an occasion I pick ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... be picket out with pinnes for his so deadly belying of them, or worse handled if worse could be deuised. But will ye see how God raised a revenger for the silly innocent women, for about the same ryming age came an honest civill Courtier somewhat bookish, and wrate these verses against the whole rable of Monkes. O Monachi vestri stomachi sunt amphor a Bacchi Vos estos Deis est restes ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... library, and he was certainly a sedentary, reading man. There was already a report in the town that he was engaged in some stupendous literary work, and the men and women generally looked upon him as a disagreeable marvel of learning. Dillsborough of itself was not bookish, and would have regarded any one known to have written an article in a magazine almost ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from the one as from the other—no more readily from this than from that—easily from either. Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and her conversational manner are identical. Here is a passage from her 'Summer on ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic, whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, and by 'old gradation' too ought to have been preferred. Most or all of this is repeated by some critics as though it ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... husband's bookish friend, "you should be thankful you did not find him with his nose in 'The Inside ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... manners of the royal pages, led a life of dissipation barely interrupted by a few hours of attendance at the academic classes. From the ill-effects of such surroundings Odo was preserved by an intellectual curiosity that flung him ravening on his studies. It was not that he was of a bookish habit, or that the drudgery of the classes was less irksome to him than to the other pupils; but not even the pedantic methods then prevailing, or the distractions of his new life, could dull the flush of his first encounter ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... bookish phraseology came smoothly from his tongue. He knew no other. It drew a murmur of amusement from the room and a ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... mind, who powerfully impressed and influenced others by the sheer force of his own benevolent nature—when drawing up the conditions of the annual prize to be given by Her Majesty at Wellington College, to determine that it should be awarded, not to the cleverest boy, nor to the most bookish boy, nor to the most precise, diligent, and prudent boy,—but to the noblest boy, to the boy who should show the most promise of becoming ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... of his time that way to the neglect of his business. At one time, there came a man into the shop, and brought a book with him, and said to him, 'Here is a book for you, keep this till I call for it again;' and so went away. Mr. Sharp, after his wonted bookish manner, was eagerly affected to look into that book, and read it, which he did: but, as he read in it, he was seized on by a strange kind of horror, both of body and mind, the hair of his head standing up; and, finding these effects several ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... unhappy a thing, Sir, for you, as it was fortunate for Letters and for Scotland, that you were born at the meeting of two ages and of two worlds—precisely in the moment when bookish literature was beginning to reach the people, and when Society was first learning to admit the low-born to her Minor Mysteries? Before you how many singers not less truly poets than yourself—though ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying; it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of it. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year were immature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at the passing of an Education Act. Not even an organisation ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... fond of rough jokes of his own making, and thinks that giving people material things makes them happy," she continued in her bookish manner. "I remember just such another man as him, a boisterous sort of man, whose old father was dying, who took the old man out to look at a new grand-stand they were making. Poor old man! It was pitiful to see him in the presence of eternity, ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... in my last about the good-looking doctor. What she sees in him puzzles me. He is handsome but as dull as all the proverbs. Can't be original even in his love affairs—otherwise he would hardly select his best friend's bride—so bookish! Why doesn't someone fall in love with the wife of his enemy? It seems to have gone out since Romeo's time. (Now don't write and tell me ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... remember Robert Baillie's description of Dr. Twiss, the Prolocutor of the Westminister Assembly: "The man, as the world knows, is very learned in the questions he has studied, and very good—beloved of all, and highly esteemed—but merely bookish ... and among the unfittest of all the company for any action." In this respect Dr. Owen was a great contrast to his studious contemporary; for he was as eminent for business talent as most ministers are conspicuous for the want of it. It was on this account that he was selected ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... whether in the house of the old President, the tavern, the hut, or the outdoor encounters of the lovers and rivals, is strongly reminiscent of Scott, the management being entirely in his manner; its low-life tragedy, its romantic scenery, and its bookish humor, as well as the characterization in general, are also from Scott; in fact, notwithstanding what Hawthorne had taken from his own observation and feelings, this provincial sketch, for it is no ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... of Thomas Love Peacock still find admirers among cultured readers, but his extravagant satire and a certain bookish awkwardness will never appeal to the great novel-reading public. The son of a London glass merchant, Peacock was born at Weymouth on October 18, 1785. Early in life he was engaged in some mercantile occupation, which, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... the throng below. Waked out of this dim, twilight existence, and startled with the passing scene, I have felt a wish to descend to the world of realities, and join in the chase. But I fear too late, and that I had better return to my bookish chimeras and indolence once more! Zanetto, lascia le donne, et studia la matematica. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... cobbler, who was with me,—it was a fete day—Bac, he said, 'Do you not believe that, Bebee? they only muddle folk's brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch an upper-leather, were it ever so.' But I do not believe that Bac said right. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... comfortable and the soil too rich,—though I do not think it is entirely on their account that the people who enjoy them are so sadly in arrears to the civilized world." He blushed with the fear that his talk was bookish, and felt grateful to Clotilde for seeming to understand ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... The student needs his bookish lore, The bigot shrines, to pray before, His pulpit needs the orator; O Lord! I nothing crave ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... Burton has now given us a pleasant book, full of quaint anecdote, and of a lively bookish talk. There is a quiet humour in it which is very taking, and there is a curious knowledge of books which ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... out, and so I could demand a high rate of wages and support my demands with logic. My midnight studies had not been in vain. It all came back in cash to the working man; and yet it was my own pals who had rebuked me for being too bookish. This did not make me sour. I loved the fellows just the same, and when they showed their faith in me, it more than ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere vehicle of thought; it has become part of it, its very flesh and blood. The pleasure it gives us is unmixt, direct, like that from the smell of a flower or the flavor of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his little pitfalls of bookish association for the memory. I know that Milton's manner is very grand. It is slow, it is stately, moving as in triumphal procession, with music, with historic banners, with spoils from every time and every region, and captive epithets, like ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... sorry for you, my child, but I am very poor, I care nothing for bookish rubbish, I shall not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... significance of the changed aspect of things. It had come, at last, love had come, when I least expected it and under the most forbidding conditions. Of course, my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of the love-call sooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... characters of Grandmother Garland and Grandmother McClintock, we held them both in almost equal affection. Serene, patient, bookish, Grandmother Garland brought to us, as to her neighbors in this rude river port, some of the best qualities of intellectual Boston, and from her lips we acquired many of the precepts and ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... The Book Buyer, and, given a chance to help in this, Bok felt he was getting back into the periodical field, especially since, under Mr. Doubleday's guidance, the little monthly soon developed into a literary magazine of very respectable size and generally bookish contents. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought, something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited, or any great wonder that always, where two or three met together, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... know why as a rule Bookish learning marks the fool? 'Tis because, though once befriended, Learning's pact with wisdom's ended. No philosophy e'er throve In a nightcap by the stove. Who the world would understand In the world must ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Professor entered the dining room at this moment, and the Professor held in his hand a copy of the current issue of The Literary Man, Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick's fortnightly publication, a periodical having to do wholly with things bookish. ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... residence in Lower California, marriage with a rich Mexican widow, whose dying childless left him sole heir, and some strange restraining idiosyncrasy of temperament had quite denationalized him. A bookish recluse, somewhat superfastidious towards his own countrymen, the more Clarence knew him the more singular appeared his acquaintance with Flynn; but as he did not exhibit more communicativeness on this point than upon their own kinship, Clarence finally concluded that it was due to the dominant ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... like it weak, dear Lady Harriet, and I shall remember the next time you come. Yes, you find me all alone this afternoon. My eldest daughter, Edna, has gone to a lecture at her Mutual Improvement Society, on a German Philosopher called Nitchy, or some such name. She's so bookish and well-read, takes such an interest in all the latest movements—runs up to town for matinees of intellectual dramas—quite the modern type of girl. But not a blue-stocking—she's joined a Tango Class lately, and dances most ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... The "bookish theorick" who, with all the facts before him, revels in the fond delights of retrospective prophecy, will never understand how Lee succeeded in this enterprise, except by sheer good luck. Only those who themselves have groped ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest one should weep, as the old philosopher said, I had made some fun out of my quest, in the form of a paper for a bookish society to which I belonged, on "Woman as a Learned Pursuit." It is printed among the transactions of the society, and is accessible to the curious only by loan from the members, and I regret that I am unable to print any extracts here. Perhaps when I am dead the society ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... as she is noticeably different from other people she is less bound by convention. She has the courage of her metaphors and lets them take her skyward when we poor self-conscious folk would think them rather too bookish for ordinary conversation. She always says exactly what she thinks, without fear of the plain truth; yet no one is more tactful and adroit than she in turning an unpleasant truth so that it will do the least possible hurt to the feelings of others. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... was greatly surprised when I won from my county and I went but didn't finish there. Then I went a little while to a small university near Lexington, called Allcorn University. I loved to go to school and was considered bookish. But my people died and I had to earn a living for myself and I couldn't find any way to use so much what I learned out of books, as far as making money was concerned. So I came to Texas, doing any kind of labor work I could find. Finally I married and went to farming 35 or ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... have continued this normal barbaric life Carol would have been the most enthusiastic citizen of Gopher Prairie. She was relieved to be assured that she did not want bookish conversation alone; that she did not expect the town to become a Bohemia. She was content now. She ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... "the pride of the intellect" lifts its lonely column over the desolation of every page. The man of the academy is here, as in the prose, after all. He reveals himself in the literary motive, the bookish atmosphere of the verse, in its vocabulary, its elegance of structure, its precise phrase and its curious allusions (involving footnotes), and in fact, throughout all its form and structure. So self-conscious ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... good fortune ever befell a bookish man, I should choose this lodge for my own residence, with the topmost room of the tower for a study, and all the seclusion of cultivated wildness beneath to ramble in. There being no such possibility, we drove on, catching glimpses of the palace in new points of view, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... 'We bookish people have our connotations for the life we do not live. In time I came to see London with my own eyes, but how much better when I saw it with ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... about books. Mrs. Wilmot has, I think, read everything that has been written, also she is very keen about poetry and has my gift—or is it a vice?—of being able to say great pieces by heart, so between us G. is sometimes just a little bored. You see, G. hasn't been brought up in a bookish atmosphere and that makes such a difference. The other night she was brushing her hair, unusually silent and evidently thinking deeply. At last she looked up at me in my bunk, with the brush in her hand and all her hair swept over one shoulder, and said in the most puzzled ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... something mysterious were going to happen right away—'by the pricking of my thumbs,'" said Anne, as they went up the slope. "It's a nice story-bookish feeling. Why—why—why! Priscilla Grant, look over there and tell me if it's true, ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... archangelic as I am myself! But when it comes to people!... Well, that is 'living,' then! The art of life, the art of extracting all its power from the human machine, does not lie chiefly in processes of bookish-culture, nor in contemplations of the beauty and majesty of existence. It lies chiefly in keeping the peace, the whole peace, and nothing but the peace, with those with whom one is 'thrown.' Is it in sitting ecstatic over Shelley, Shakespeare, ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... "in Gaza at the mill with slaves" which takes the spring out of all but the springsomest of men. He had widely varied experience of scene, occupation, personal society. He knew plenty of books without being in the least bookish; had, as the old saying goes, "wit at will," and, though he never made deliberate and affected efforts to get out of ruts, kept out of them without the least trouble. He was as little of a "poser" or of a "rotter" as he was of a prig, and ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... collectors as Ben. T. Cable, George A. Armour, Charles J. Barnes, James W. Ellsworth, Rev. Frank W. Gunsaulus, the Rev. Frank M. Bristol, the Rev. M. Woolsey Stryker, and others, some with ample wealth to indulge their extravagant tastes, but the majority with lean purses coupled with bookish tastes beyond the resources of a Philadelphia mint. Out of these daily meetings and mousings among books and prints was evolved in Field's fancy what he dubbed the "Saints' and Sinners' Corner." The "Saints" may be easily identified ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... seven he retired to the cellar and became as genuine a pawnbroker as could be found in London. Touching books he was easy enough to deal with, but a Shylock as regards jewels and money lent. With his bookish clients he passed for a dull shopkeeper who knew little about literature; but in the underground establishment he was spoken of, by those who came to pawn, as a usurer of the worst. In an underhand way he did a ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... physiological questionings to the neglect of his dissection, and that careful observation of form and mutual position which is the essential object of dissection. On the other hand, it is equally necessary— perhaps more so— to warn students against the bookish fallacy, and to assure them of the absolute impossibility of realizing biological facts from reading alone. Practical work can alone confirm and complete the knowledge to which the text-book is the guide. In scientific teaching it may sometimes be convenient for the thought to precede ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... took the chair opposite the bookish young man. He was also young—not more than thirty-three—and to Dickson's eye was the kind of person he would have liked to resemble. He was tall and free from any superfluous flesh; his face was lean, fine-drawn, ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... she said. "My mother and father were gentle, bookish creatures with no understanding of animals. Even if a pony had to be bought for us children, every male thing of the family—uncles, nephews, tenth cousins—was summoned from every corner of England for his advice ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Islands now, the use of it is known to every one; and even the lazy monks who take it, are no longer splenetic. In the west of England, the rocks are stripped of it with diligence; and every old woman tells you how charming that leaf is for bookish men: in Russia they use a plant of this kind in their malt liquor: it came into fashion there for the cure of this disease; which from its constant use is scarce known any longer; and they suppose 'tis added to their liquor ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... on thy dreaming and thy bookish phantasies!" roared Hopkins kicking the smouldering log upon the hearth until a river of sparks flowed up and out of the wide chimney. "Dost thou agree to putting fish to decay amid the corn we are to ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... "I was never a bookish man; I care for no books but play-books and these I carry here," and he beat his brown forehead. "But you may nose out some theologies in odd corners, as a ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... they have to do with Prince Caraccioli or his treason, sir? The old chap looks bookish; but he is not a priest; and, as to the girl, she is trim-built enough; I fancy the face is no great matter, however, or she would not take so much ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it. To supply any deficiencies on the shelves, a hundred pounds, Madame D'Arblay states, was placed at Johnson's disposal to expend in books; and we may take it for granted that any new publication suggested by him was ordered at once. But a bookish couple, surrounded by a literary set, were surely not exclusively dependent on him for this description of help, nor laid under any extraordinary obligation by reason of it. Whilst the "Lives of the Poets" was ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... are of no great value. At school, where (as we have seen) the boys get little enough general information, the girls have hitherto got less, instruction in needlework and cookery being given to them in preference to certain more bookish lessons that the boys get. They leave school, therefore, intellectually most ignorant. Then, in domestic service, again it is in cookery and that sort of thing that they are practised; there may be culture of thought and taste ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... mother country. When we recall the scanty term of years within which was produced the literature of the age of Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to insist that America has not yet had time to learn or recite her bookish lessons. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... litigation and appeals to the Pope, and many serious 'unpleasantnesses;' but as time went on, Abbot William had won the allegiance of all the convent, and they were proud of him. He was a man of books, among his other virtues, and had an eye for bookish men; and when he deposed Roger de Wendover from being Prior of Belvoir with a somewhat high hand, and brought him back to St. Alban's, he doubtless did so because he knew that at Belvoir he was a square man in a round hole, while in the scriptorium of the Abbey he would be in his right ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... who by some means or other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught and held from substantial service to their fellows." The academic teaching which is accessible to workingmen through University Extension lectures and classes at settlements, is usually bookish and remote, and concerning subjects completely divorced from their actual experiences. The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end of a hard day's work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mental exertion. ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... methods of bookish preparation for preaching. He preached as the Old Testament men did, to the occasion and to the event. He spoke to the community as being a man himself immersed in the same life as theirs. On a recent occasion when ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... young man was a boarder in the home of Mrs. Porter, when her husband was alive, and the husband and boarder had been fast friends—drawn together by a bookish bias. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... All fear is bookish talk Cooked up by writers out of literature, To give the shudder to dyspeptic girls. Dying is easy. Come along, my friend! A glass of port shall cure us of such fears; Moments like this make mirth in ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... school at the time; but I believe about a year before he married Mary. I wish she had accepted him. We should all have liked her a great deal better; and papa and mamma always think it was her great friend Lady Russell's doing, that she did not. They think Charles might not be learned and bookish enough to please Lady Russell, and that therefore, she persuaded ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... to depict human beings before he had seen any.[28] Aside from his acquaintance with Franziska von Hohenheim, and an occasional nearer view of the coy maidens of the ecole des demoiselles, the female sex and the grand passion were for him only bookish mysteries. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... old man had passionately preferred to leave it to the strong, capable granddaughter, who was already provided with a lover, who understood the land, moreover, and could earn and "addle" as he did, rather than to his bookish milksop of a second son, so richly provided for already, in his father's contemptuous opinion, by the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... class—a position of little dignity and deep loneliness. I had grown a tall, square-set lad, and my prowess at Rugby football was renowned beyond the parishes of Kirkcaple and Portincross. To my father I fear I was a disappointment. He had hoped for something in his son more bookish and sedentary, more like his gentle, ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... often expressed itself by accepting a verbal attack as justified, and elaborating it in a way to throw into shadow the assault of the critic. At a small and familiar supper of bookish men, when there was general dissatisfaction over an expensive but ill-made salad, he alone ate with apparent relish. The host, who was of like mind with his guests, said, 'The Bibliotaph doesn't care for the quality ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... besides having a superficial acquaintance with Polish and Russian. There can be no doubt, however, that he was well taught, and that he possessed a remarkable facility in acquiring languages. For all that, he was far from being a bookish boy. In riding, fencing, and all chivalrous accomplishments he took a lively interest and exhibited much skill. It was in stormy times that his boyhood fell, Sweden being at that time involved in frequent wars, and his father, in order to train ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... to be the great helps of the understanding, and instruments of knowledge, as it must be allowed that they are; and yet I beg leave to question whether these do not prove a hindrance to many, and keep several bookish men from attaining to solid and true knowledge". Here, again, is his stern way of dealing with any author:—"To fix in the mind the clear and distinct idea of the question stripped of words; and so likewise, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... Put me back in the Hall, and I should be as ignorant and as coarse as I am out here. A labourer is all I am and all I am fit to be. I once had a rather bookish ambition, you know, but that is over—I wanted to read Greek and translate 'The Iliad' and all that—and yet to-day I doubt if I could write a decent letter to save my soul. It's partly my fault, of course, but you can't know ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... 'Yes; he is bookish without being quick. I don't expect he will be of much use just yet, but he is as steady as old Time; and though he and Lance would neither of them do alone, yet together I think ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... make themselves presentable. The professor brings in Gertrude. He is—if the word maybe applied to such a bookish man—inexpressibly jolly. Mrs. Grandon hardly knows how to take him, and is on her guard against some plot in the air. Violet laughs and parries his gay badinage, feeling as if she were in an enchanted realm. Floyd has a spice of amazement ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... walks about; a gentleman, not only in the broader and more generous sense, but also according to the narrower, conventional meaning of the term; plainly a scholarly man, fond of books, and knowing the best books; with that modest, diffident air which bookish men have; with a curious shyness, indeed, as of one who was not accustomed and did not like to come into too close contact with the every-day world: such Theodore Winthrop appeared to me. I recollect the surprise with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... "The crassest Toryism sweeping all before it, and everywhere depositing its mud—which chokes and does not fertilise. We have athletic clubs, we have a free library, we are better drained and cleaner and healthier and more bookish, with all, than in the old times; but for politics—alas! A base level of selfish and purblind materialism—personified ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... woods, not on a plain, but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea,—the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre,—I know no other word in our language (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question), but hanging woods, the sylvae superimpendentes of Catullus; yet let some wit call out in a slang tone,—"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces have had a decent run, only because nothing ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... man his own self-respect. He'll know himself his going looks bad without my telling him, and I would at least leave him the notion that we were blind to his weakness. After all it's not much of a weakness—the wish to save a wife and children from danger. Another bookish disease, I admit: their over-much study has deadened the man to a sense of the becoming, and in an affair demanding courage he acts like a woman, thinking of his household when he should be thinking of his clan. My only consolation is that after all (except for the look ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... and a trifle bookish, like that of a man speaking a language he has learned in a school, which in truth was the case with the Onondaga. Like the celebrated Thayendanegea, the Mohawk, otherwise known as Joseph Brant, he had been sent to a white school and he had learned ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... Miss Mitchell's success. She read good books early in life. She says: "We always had books, and were bookish people. There was a public library in Nantucket before I was born. It was not a free library, but we always paid the subscription of one dollar per annum, and always read and studied from it. I remember among its volumes Hannah More's books and Rollin's Ancient History. ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... languages, and at one time possessed the best collection of books on Oriental literature to be found in America. He was drenched in the English poetry of the seventeenth century. His critical essays in the "Dial," his letters and the bookish allusions throughout his writings, are evidence of rich harvesting in the records of the past. He left some three thousand manuscript pages of notes on the American Indians, whose history and character had fascinated him from boyhood. Even his antiquarian hobbies ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,—at least, endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... my Husband approves very well of it. But what Reason have you, why you would not have your Monks bookish? ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... integral part of education for all. All the interests and means of training that they represent, and others as well, need to be brought more into the daily routine; to some extent in place of the too exclusively literary, or at least bookish, training, that has hitherto been the staple of education, but more, perhaps, since it is not possible to include in the regular curriculum all that is of value, as optional subjects and free-time ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... to learn that John Shakespeare, the father of the world's greatest thinker and greatest poet, could not write his name! Such was undoubtedly the fact; and I take pleasure in noting it, as showing, what is too apt to be forgotten in these bookish days, that men may know several things, and may have witty children, without being initiated in the mysteries of pen and ink. In the borough records for 1565 is an order signed by nineteen aldermen and burgesses, calling upon John Wheler to undertake the office of Bailiff. Of these signers thirteen ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... distinguish," answered Gotthold, leaning back and joining the tips of his fingers. "There are various kinds of popularity: the bookish, which is perfectly impersonal, as unreal as the nightmare; the politician's, a mixed variety; and yours, which is the most personal of all. Women take to you; footmen adore you; it is as natural to like you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... days in this country the great majority of college teachers were clergymen, trained in most cases abroad. Later bookish graduates came to be the chief source of supply, their appointment in their own colleges, and infrequently in others, following close upon their graduation. Well into the third quarter of last century college faculties were selected almost exclusively from these two ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... who could neither read nor write, or who, at all events, but rarely practised those Cadmean arts. Yet they could tell the time of day by the sun, and steer through the silent night by the stars; and each of them had—as Emerson, a very bookish person, has said—a dial in his mind for the whole bright calendar of the year. How racy was their talk; how wise their judgments on men and things; how well they did all that at the moment seemed ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... little queasiness, such as we elder, bookish men are apt to get by ower-much application. Your Royal Highness is gracious to note my little ailments," said he ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Prishvin. He belongs to an older generation and attracted some attention by good work in the line of descriptive journalism before he came in touch with Remizov. A man of the soil, he was capable of following Remizov's lead in making his Russian more colloquial and less bookish, without slavishly imitating him. He was unfortunately too much absorbed by his journalistic work to give much time to literature. But he wrote at least one story which deserves a high rank in even the smallest selection of Russian stories—The ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... would have been better away; but it is a book that might have stood its ground, even if it had stood alone, as containing unusually truthful observation of a sort of life between the middle class and the low, which, having few attractions for bookish observers, was quite unhackneyed ground. It had otherwise also the very special merit of being in no respect bookish or commonplace in its descriptions of the old city with which its writer was so familiar. It was a picture of every-day London at its ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... depart from the educational conditions effective in the out-of-school environment, they necessarily substitute a bookish, a pseudo-intellectual spirit for a social spirit. Children doubtless go to school to learn, but it has yet to be proved that learning occurs most adequately when it is made a separate conscious business. When treating it as a business of this sort tends to preclude the social sense which ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... from all rhetorical flourishes and wordiness, placing the right word in the right place. Xenophon, Caesar, Goethe, come to mind in reading Moltke's descriptions, historical expositions, reflections. Bookish terms and unvisual metaphors, which occur in the preceding pamphlets, though rarely enough, are entirely absent. The tendency toward military brevity and precision is everywhere obvious. The omission of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... special natures; and accordingly teaching her, their open-eyed disciple, to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience, but, as she confesses, also doing her harm, since the child, fed with meat instead of milk, becomes too soon mature. For a few months, this bookish life was interrupted, or varied, by the presence of an English lady, whom Margaret invested with ideal perfections as her 'first friend,' and whom she worshipped as a star from the east—a morning-star; and at whose departure she fell into a profound depression. Her father ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various |
