"Centenarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a semi-natural Ziarat, formed by a much contorted centenarian tamarisk tree of abnormal proportions, were also to be seen here. The branches had been twisted to form a low doorway leading to a huge grave in the centre of the enclosing oval formed by the old tree and some ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... There was Mr. Alexander Hamill, the father of Congressman Hamill of Jersey City, a student of Queen's College in Ireland and who afterward taught in the National Schools of Ireland, a well-read, highly cultured, broad-minded man of affairs; and dear Uncle Jimmie Kelter, almost a centenarian, whose fine old gray hair gave him the appearance of a patriarch. Uncle Jimmie nightly revelled in the recital to those who were present as ready listeners, his experience when he was present at a session of the House of Parliament ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... the Comic treating this theme, and particularly the argument on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of THE CENTENARIAN, with choric praises of heroical early death, and the same of a stubborn vitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand question for contention in dialogue, as to the exact age when a man should die, to the identical ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mystery fills your mind, and you think no more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your life afford mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the licentious days of Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but for all that, I am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare, and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance has made me learned. I will tell you in a few words the great secret of human life. By two instinctive ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the meaning of the universal or almost universal inevitableness of death? A Sequoia or "Big Tree" of California has been known to live for over two thousand years, but eventually it died. A centenarian tortoise has been known, and a sea-anemone sixty years of age; but eventually they die. What is the meaning of this apparently ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... on the earth, the youth was able to follow him with his eyes for some distance. The sight was curious, as he dodged from tree to tree, his body bent over like a centenarian under the weight ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... personage was a counterpart of the first to every particular, save that while one was more than a semi-centenarian to years, the other was barely twenty. The same faultless elegance in dress, the same elaborate display of jewels, and the same haughty, aristocratic bearing produced in one was mirrored to ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... ended on the field of Waterloo. He was born before Napoleon had been heard of. He went through a battle before the death of Nelson. He outlived Wellington by forty years. His name stood on the Active List for all but the final decade of the nineteenth century. And, as an honoured centenarian, he is vividly remembered by many who were still called young a century after the battle that ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... so bad as that, but lunettes, in order to accommodate the text to his eyes, and finds at the conclusion of an article such a passage as the following: "Beneath that knoll, at the foot of that weeping ash, side by side, in the bosom of one grave lie Reginald and Charlotte de Conrci"—when a semi-centenarian meets such a passage in such a situation, it is a loss of time for him to turn back and threading way through the mazes of the story.'] such as one found in the keepsakes and other gift books of those days. The first magazine of ability in the West appears to have been the Canadian Magazine, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... afraid of the white old lady, and Rita said frankly that she did not like old people, and saw no reason why she should put herself out, simply because her uncle, whom she had never seen, had chosen to saddle himself with the burden of a centenarian. But to-day, Rita was shaken and softened out of all her waywardness, and she readily admitted the propriety of telling Mrs. Cheriton what ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... his last visit he had told Paul Hayne that he did not wish to live to be old—"an octogenarian, far less a centenarian, like old Parr." He hoped that he might stay until he was fifty or fifty-five; "one hates the idea of a mummy, intellectual or physical." If those coveted years had been added to his thirty-eight beautiful ones, a brighter radiance might have crowned our literature. Or, would the vision ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... if she died in 1778, would only bring her age to ninety-one. But Mr. Haliwell, who examined the register at Paul, found that Dolly Pentreath was baptized in 1714; so that, unless she was baptized late in life, this supposed centenarian had only reached her sixty-fourth year at the time of her death, and was no more than sixty when Dr. Borlase supposed her to be eighty-seven. Another instance of extraordinary old age is mentioned by Mr. Scawen (p. 25), about a hundred years earlier. "Let ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... lips, and the certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust. Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past, hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet with the pathos sanctifying ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... wonder about the origin of the phrase 'an old identity.' Surely no man, however old, can be an identity? An entity he is, or a nonentity; an individual, a centenarian, or an oldest inhabitant; but identity is a condition of sameness, of being identical with something. One can establish one's identity with that of some one who is being sought or sued, but ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... white wine. In a corner of the room, during the whole course of his dinner, two young Mexicans (one of whom was astonishingly handsome, after the melodramatic fashion of his race) and an old fellow! the centenarian of the town, decrepit beyond belief, sang an interminable love-song to the accompaniment of a guitar and ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... unexpected call, there presently appeared an Indian who looked as if he might have been contemporary with Methuselah. No wrinkled leaf that had been blown about the earth for centuries could have appeared more dry and withered than this centenarian, whose hair drooped from his skull like Spanish moss, and whose brown hands resembled ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... tidings will be received with respectful regret of the death of Nono, a noted pensionary of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, at the ripe age of more than a hundred years. To have achieved the celebrity of being the oldest inmate of that institution was no despicable distinction, but the venerable centenarian had other claims to honor. A native of the Marquesas Islands, he was brought by Bougainville in 1776 to the Royal Museum, afterward known as the Jardin des Plantes. It has frequently been alleged that parrots may live a hundred years: Nono has established the fact by living still longer. As he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... speculations—from the negro centenarian, who didn't nurse General Washington, down to the Bearded Woman of Genoa—there was not one which required the exercise of so much humbuggery as the Jenny Lind concerts; and I verily believe there is no man living, other than yourself, who could, or would, have risked the ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... in my tent, which is to be shared with Anthony when he arrives. I feel years older than when we started this morning. Middle age seems to have overtaken me. If I keep on at this rate, shall be a centenarian by the time we ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... rare in a man of his age. Even to the last his strength seemed unimpaired, and he succumbed to a chance attack of bronchitis, but for which his constitution seemed to possess sufficient stamina to have made him a centenarian. He died at his residence on the 15th of February, 1873, being ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... mention the Blot in future, you'll know what it is. When I'm very desperate, I may just fling a drop of ink on the paper to relieve my feelings, and that will mean the same thing. The Blot puts on an air of the most exaggerated respect for Sir Lionel. You'd fancy he was talking to a centenarian. Horrid, pert little pig! (I think pigs run in their family.) I know he does it on purpose to be nasty, and make Sir Lionel feel an old stager. Do you remember the pig-baby in ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... touched his head gently; but by and by her eyelids drooped, and her whole face took the expression of sweet dreaminess again. Tired with the strain upon her clouded memory, looking still into the bright dreamland of the past, the centenarian had fallen asleep—touched, as it were, by a gentle ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... into a ravine, crossed a dry brook, all overgrown with scrub-willows, ascended the hill, and drove into the forest. The road in front of me wound along among thick clumps of hazel-bushes, and was already inundated with gloom; I advanced with difficulty. My gig jolted over the firm roots of the centenarian oaks and lindens, which incessantly intersected the long, deep ruts—the traces of cart-wheels; my horse began to stumble. A strong wind suddenly began to drone up above, the trees grew turbulent, big ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... seventy to a hundred years. Yet not one of them was idle. They were all engaged in plaiting chip-mats, baskets, hampers and other useful articles that could be made out of reeds or cane. The oldest man among them, a centenarian, was employed in plaiting ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth |
