"Bookworm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recollect all now! I married her, that my old friend's child might have a roof to her head, and come to no harm. You see I was forced to do her that injury; for, after all, poor young creature, it was a sad lot for her. A dull bookworm like me,—cochlea vitam agens, Mr. Squills,—leading the life of a snail! But my shell was all I could offer to my ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... powerful, and would have as soon jailed a bishop or a judge as a pickpocket if he deserved it. Between them they knew more kinds of law than most of their professional brethren, and as Mr. Tutt was a bookworm and a seeker after legal and other lore their dusty old library was full of hidden treasures, which on frequent occasions were unearthed to entertain the jury or delight the bench. They were loyal friends, fearsome enemies, high chargers, and maintained their unique position ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... make the library a school for the young, a college for adults, and the constant center of such educational activity as will make wholesome and inspiring themes the burden of the common thought. He should be enough of a bookworm to have a decided taste and fondness for books, and at the same time not enough to be such a recluse as loses sight of the point of view of those ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... haunts. At Meadow's End, though he works in the garden in a dilettante sort of way with Lavinia, takes long walks with father, and occasionally ventures out for a day's fishing with either or both of my men, he is still the bookworm who dives into his library upon every opportunity and has never yet adapted his spine comfortably to the curves of a hammock! In short he seems to love flowers historically—more for the sake of those in the past ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the girl. "His brother told me." Then, for Montague's benefit, she explained, "Jack Audubon is the Major's nephew, and he's a bookworm, and spends ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... Mouillard's visit. But he doubtless reflected that Jeanne knew nothing of the old lawyer's proceedings, that we were far from Paris, that the opportunity was not to be lost; and in the end his passion for numismatics conquered at once his resentment as a bookworm and ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... as I ever knew. Some of them I have not seen for more than forty years. Mentioning their names may serve to recall incidents connected with them: My two brothers, both graduates of Washington College; Berkeley Minor, a student at the University of Virginia, a perfect bookworm; Alex. Boteler, student of the University of Virginia, son of Hon. Alex. Boteler, of West Virginia, and his two cousins, Henry and Charles Boteler, of Shepherdstown, West Virginia; Thompson and Magruder Maury, both clergymen after the war; Joe Shaner, of Lexington, ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... that!" was sung out by some rare bookworm to rearward: but no Scot being present, no frenzy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... They may find enough of it, and to spare also, in Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' He, like Knox, and many another scholar of the 16th and of the first half of the 17th century, was unable to free his brain altogether from the idola specus which haunted the cell of the bookworm. The poor student, knowing nothing of women, save from books or from contact with the most debased, repeated, with the pruriency of a boy, the falsehoods about women which, armed with the authority of learned ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... which was about three miles off. On the way they dropped the red-faced farmer and his hands, who clearly regarded the professor as some sort of an amiable lunatic. But that worthy man, supremely happy despite his wet clothes, was quite contented, and from time to time dipped into his satchel, like a bookworm into a favorite volume, and drew out a particularly ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... years ago; and in due time they were united, to the astonishment of the little world they lived in, that had long since declared them both born to single blessedness; affirming it impossible that the pale, retiring bookworm should ever summon courage to seek a wife, or be able to obtain one if he did, and equally impossible that the plain-looking, plain-dealing, unattractive, unconciliating Miss Millward should ever find ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... through all in your library—at the time, and came out at the other side not much the wiser. I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. To be sure I have given up reading for a good many years—ever since I was made sexton.—There! I smell Grieg's Wedding March in the quiver of ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... little with the passing years. I remembered him as a sort of cut-and-dried school-man, bookworm and scientist, and, as I afterward learned, he was still all three of these. Partly because I was telling myself that it was safer for me to keep my distance from the girl who remembered the boy Bertrand, and partly because I wished to draw the assayer away from ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... neither material nor eternal, neither imaginative in any true sense, nor actual in any sense, that up to the present hour there was nothing in the bank, and only the money for impending needs in the house. He could not be called a man of learning; he was only a great bookworm; for his reading lay all in the nebulous regions of history. Old family records, wherever he could lay hold upon them, were his favourite dishes; old, musty books, that looked as if they knew something ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... "You're still just the same old bookworm as ever; an incorrigible old wool-gatherer! The object of the man[oe]uvres is the most deadly punctuality in the meeting of the two opposing parties, and not the training of young cavalry lieutenants in scouting. The object is attained by careful consultations beforehand. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... momentarily out of breath, then resumed: "He soon found me out and was sick of me in three weeks. He disliked dances, theatres, and smart society, and buried me alive in the country. We had nothing in common; he was just a bookworm, with a sarcastic tongue, who left me a beggar! Now I am free, I am going to be a rich woman, marry a man who understands me—and lead a ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... perfectly bowed down with remorse last time I saw him," said Will, regarding Tom with eyes full of fun, for Will was a boy as well as a bookworm, and relished a joke ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... the jailer had withdrawn, "I ask not wherefore thou hast fallen into the pit. It was my folly and thy weakness. What had I—a man of thought, the bookworm of great libraries—to do with youth and beauty like thine own? I might have known that in my long absence this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... 1702, and methinks I can see Lovecraft poring over these time-stained bits o' bookish lore as the monks of old followed the printed lines with quivering fingers in the taper's uncertain, flickering light. For Lovecraft appeals to me as a bookworm—one of those lovable mortals whose very existence seems to hang on the numbered pages ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... well and wisely, the girl should not turn into a bookworm. Unless our reading fits us for better thought and better action, we should examine into what we are reading and change it for something better. Reading should never be a hindrance to work, but a help. Nor should we put reading ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... book, led the way and soon he heard of the younger man's anxieties. But the bookworm increased ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... contention that the administration will be changed overnight for the better after a change in the form of the State is, if not a wicked untruth to deceive the common people, the ridiculous absurdity of a bookworm. Thus the theory that a constitutional monarchy will immediately follow, if the President consents to become a monarch, is ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... student was no mere bookworm. He was cheerful and full of life, and was very much liked by his fellow students. Among other friends made during his college days was the fun-loving Patrick Henry, who with his jokes and stories kept every one about him in good humor. In time their ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... Hawthorne Cottage.' The Hawthorne Cottage stood half a mile out of Stockbridge on the road to Lenox. It was burned two months ago. It was a little red story-and-a-half house on a lonely farm, and an old farmer, himself somewhat of a bookworm, dwelt in it with his family at the time it mysteriously took fire. The cottage was a landmark, because Nathaniel Hawthorne dwelt therein in 1850 and 1851 for a year and a half. A great many people go out to see ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... bookworm, for he seemeth Much too martial—nor a soldier Either, as he looks too modest; He may be a necromancer, An adept in all dark witchcraft, Alchemy, and other black arts. Wait, I'll catch thee;" and he turned their ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... women. Their general appellation was the bulldogs of England. What must have been Petrarch's horror at these unkennelled hounds! In one of his letters he vents his indignation at their atrocities; but, by-and-by, in the same epistle, he glides into his bookworm habit of apostrophizing the ancient heroes of Rome, Brutus, Camillus, and ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... of Killarney, Moriarty put down Fenianism with no light hand, preaching, as I have already shown, in the most manly and emphatic style—which could have been emulated with advantage in other Episcopacies in my country. MacCarthy was a bookworm from Maynooth, who played the deuce with the diocese, allowing all the priests to run wild, and by his laxity becoming criminally responsible for much of the terrible condition of Kerry. Higgins was the nominee of a friend of Moriarty, and he worked hard to suppress outrages, by which course ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... man I was before I left England. The stage I had then reached was the result of a slow and elaborate building up; I could look back and see the processes by which I had grown from the boy who was a mere bookworm to the man who had all but succeeded as a novelist. It was a perfectly natural, sober development. But in the last two years and a half I can distinguish no order. In living through it, I have imagined from time to time that my powers were coming ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... complain of it as a nuisance. Since the disappearance of my valet I have been travelling in my own yacht. I reached England the day before the trial. 'No. I never read the newspapers. Thank goodness I am no bookworm.' ...
— Much Darker Days • Andrew Lang (AKA A. Huge Longway)
... need to feign to be subdued; but I counterfeited to be older than I was in all respects (Heaven knows! my heart being all too young the while), and feigned to be more of a recluse and bookworm than I had really become, and gradually set up more and more of a fatherly manner towards Adelina. Likewise I made my tuition less imaginative than before; separated myself from my poets and philosophers; was careful to present ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... see more of Willy [1] before I ventured to express a prediction, Till yesterday I had barely seen him,—Virgilium tantum vidi; but yesterday he gave us his small company to a bullock's heart, and I can pronounce him a lad of promise. He is no pedant nor bookworm; so far I can answer. Perhaps he has hitherto paid too little attention to other men's inventions, preferring, like Lord Foppington, the "natural sprouts of his own." But he has observation, and seems thoroughly awake. I am ill at remembering other people's bon mots, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Faust opposite me," said Pasquale, raising his champagne glass. "Hasn't he been transformed from the lean and elderly bookworm into the gay, young gallant about the town? Once one could scarcely drag him from his cell to the quietest of dinners, and now—has he told you of his dissipations this past ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... success, followed up his alphabet, which appeared January 21st, 1893, and within a year had placed to his credit three-score contributions, most of them in verse—rather a remarkable achievement for one heretofore considered a mere bookworm ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... rarely found in our busy land) crooning over a strange black-letter folio, and laughing to himself with a sort of invisible chuckle. The unseen in that volume was revealed to us through that laugh of the old bookworm, and quite unseen we partook of his amusement. Another alcove was vacant; a crabbed manuscript, just laid down by the writer, was on the desk. He was invisible; but the watchful guardian at the head of the room ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate[20] with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... have attended the Conference in person, not being willing to afford the luxury of allowing a Prime Minister to neglect home affairs. It would have been a pretty gathering, Constantine Porphyrogenitus the bookworm probably as president, AEthelstan of England, Charles the Simple of France or as much as his neighbours allowed him, that doughty poacher Henry the Fowler, German King, and Pope Leo not on speaking terms with him, St. Wenceslaus of Bohemia trying to make ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... news to bookworm Ernest who was never so happy as when lost in a book. The lad was immensely proud of his school standing, too, and he chafed sadly at ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... quite well for her. Madame has added a few incomparable toilet touches. Floyd is attentive to her, and Prof. Freilgrath takes her to supper, promenades with her, and is quite delightful for an old bookworm. Mr. Latimer talks to her and finds her a great improvement on Marcia, but the German keeps thinking over her poor little story. If there was something for her to do! and he racks his brain. There are no crowds of nephews and nieces, there is no house ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... in the space left for it between the bookshelves. Books continued to flow in; books of all sorts—science and art, history and biography, poetry and general literature. And Lois would have developed into a bookworm, had not the piano exercised an almost equal charm upon her. Listening to Mrs. Barclay's music at first was an absorbing pleasure; then Mrs. Barclay asked casually one day "Shall I ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... uninteresting grub, Whether he's all alone or in a club. Of stupid books which seem to us a bore, The Bookworm will devour the very core. Did Solomon or somebody affirm The ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... in 1843, being then thirteen years of age, and became at once prominent as a scholar among the two or three hundred other lads from all parts of the country. He was also a leader in athletic sports. He was not a bookworm, but he was a close student and possessed the happy faculty of assimilating knowledge from books and tutors far more easily and quickly than most of his fellows. In debating-societies he held his own well, and was conspicuous by his ability ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... not have been better to have confined himself to the dative case! Such minutiae of erudition might be fascinating to others; it was not for him. His large-heartedness, his sympathy, his wealthy and generous spirit could not be condensed into a bookworm, or a recluse. They rather equipped him to become a watchman, that he might declare what he saw. He needed the whole Republic to range up and down in. His ringing words might be heard on our Western frontier; but before their echoes had ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... Mr. Cannon," said Mr. Haim in his most courteous style, coming softly into George's room. And George looked up at the old man's wrinkled face, and down at his crimson slippers, with the benevolent air of a bookworm permitting himself to be drawn away from an ideal world into the actual. Glasses on the end of George's nose would have set off the tableau, but George had outgrown the spectacles which had disfigured his boyhood. As ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... this old bookworm," murmured the frightened girl in a strange repulsion, as she fled away to her room. It was a grateful relief when the servant maid announced that the travelers would be ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... for a flood! Let a tempest come out of the west! Let the chimney roar as it were a lion! And if there must be a clearing, let it hold off until the late afternoon, lest it sow too early a distaste for indoors and reading! There is scarcely a bookworm who will not slip his glasses off his nose, if the clouds break at the hour of sunset when the earth and sky are filled with a green and golden light. I took the book off the library shelf and timidly glancing across my shoulder for fear that some one might catch me, I looked along the pages. There ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the younger. "The mob, meanwhile, just stood there, dumb,—mutes and audience, you know. All at once, the hindmost began squalling 'Foreign Dog,' 'Goat Man.' We stepped outside, and there, passing, if you like, was that gentle bookworm, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... country? Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to get more. Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... examinations. Many papers had to be prepared, and poor Tom often wondered how he would ever get through with any satisfaction, either to himself or his instructors. With Sam, the task seemed much easier, for, as Dick had once declared, Sam was "a regular bookworm," and no studies seemed to worry him ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield
... MAGLIABECCHI, an inordinate bookworm, born in Florence; became librarian of the Grand-Duke; his book-knowledge was as unbounded as his avidity for knowledge; his memory was extraordinary; he carried in his head the page of a passage in a book as well as the passage itself in the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is he anything else than a king. The one sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things; the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance—the very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to outlive old ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson |
