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Curio   Listen
noun
Curio  n.  (pl. curios)  Any curiosity (3) or article of virtu; any object esteemed for its unusual nature. "The busy world, which does not hunt poets as collectors hunt for curios."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Curio" Quotes from Famous Books



... curio they promised us to drive a lover crazy, With little soft canoodling ways, and sweetness of a daisy. We read of thee in tea-house neat, in cherry-blossomed pages, But find a girl of gin-saloon ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various

... published, soon after his return from Leyden (1745), his first collection of odes; and was impelled by his rage of patriotism to write a very acrimonious epistle to Pulteney, whom he stigmatises, under the name of Curio, as the betrayer of his country. Being now to live by his profession, he first commenced physician at Northampton, where Dr. Stonehouse then practised, with such reputation and success, that a stranger was not likely to gain ground upon him. Akenside tried the contest a while; and, having ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... been my cold nerve that won Cap.'s regard, for he placed me as 'curio hall' lecturer and advertising man ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various

... honeycombed with rock-cut tombs, which form a fascinating and inexhaustible field of study. Unfortunately all that are in the least degree visible have long ago been rifled, and in recent years those pests, the curio-hunting tourists, have done incalculable harm by stimulating ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... a gold sovereign in mere exchange value. From the kinky locks of one of the naked young men he drew a hand-carved, fine-toothed comb, the lofty back of which was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which he later sold in Sydney to a curio shop for eight shillings. Nose and ear ornaments of bone and turtle-shell he also rifled, as well as a chest-crescent of pearl shell, fourteen inches across, worth fifteen shillings anywhere. The two spears ultimately fetched him five shillings each ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... that he became utterly and hopelessly ruined; or, rather, he would have been so, had he not, by the influence of that magic power of fascination which such characters often possess, succeeded in gaining a great ascendency over a young man of immense fortune, named Curio, who for a time upheld him by becoming surety for his debts. This resource, however, soon failed, and Antony was compelled to abandon Rome, and to live for some years as a fugitive and exile, in dissolute wretchedness and want. During all the subsequent vicissitudes ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott

... later followed by his slave in crime entered the curio shop and passed through with great dignity into ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... overbearing influence of Dr. Stonehouse, a long-established practitioner, and partly to his violent political zeal, he did not prosper. While residing there he produced his manly and spirited "Epistle to Curio." Curio was Pulteney, who had been a flaming patriot, but who, like the majority of such characters, had, for the sake of a title—the earldom of Bath—subsided into a courtier. Him Akenside lashes with unsparing energy. He committed afterwards an egregious blunder in reference to this ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian, Coelius Secundus Curio, "De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei;" St. Austin's great work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "De Carne Christi," in which the paradoxical sentence "Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... his elbow on the corner of my table he knocked off some books for review, "I went to a dime museum for an hour that I had between two appointments, and I must say that I never passed an hour's time more agreeably. In the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it—they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars' caps and gowns—there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... to disarm Caesar by unfair means. They had the power to shorten or lengthen the year as they pleased, and announced that that year would end on November 12, and that Caesar must resign his authority on the 13th. Curio, a tribune of Rome and Caesar's agent, said that it was only fair that Pompey also should give up the command of the army which he had near Rome. This he refused to do, and Curio publicly declared that he was trying to make ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... curio-shop he halted and consulted a card. Then, satisfied that he had found his destination, he picked up a wicker carrying-case that for the moment he had placed on the curb ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... about Akenside, which I must clear up for his credit, and for mine. You are confounding the Ode to Curio and the Epistle to Curio. The latter is generally printed at the end of Akenside's works, and is, I think, the best thing that he ever wrote. The Ode is worthless. It is merely an abridgment of the Epistle executed ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... century had leaned across the bridge of time to shake hands with the sixteenth. A new statehouse had been built after the fashion of new Western commonwealths, and the old Palace was now given over to curio stores and offices. Everywhere the new era compromised with the old. He passed the office of the lawyer he had come to consult, and upon one side of ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... fortune pricked him to this war, Infringing all excuse of modest shame, And labouring to approve[599] his quarrel good. The angry senate, urging Gracchus'[600] deeds, From doubtful Rome wrongly expell'd the tribunes That cross'd them: both which now approach'd the camp, 270 And with them Curio, sometime tribune too, One that was fee'd for Caesar, and whose tongue Could tune the people to the nobles' mind.[601] "Caesar," said he, "while eloquence prevail'd, And I might plead and draw the ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... coffin. Popular vote retires the inferior judge, a fashionable funeral retires the supreme judge, but the robe is left as the imperial emblem. It seems to me it is time to abolish the life tenure of office with our Supreme Court, and it is entirely fitting that their robes be hung in the curio hall of some popular museum, as a souvenir of a ridiculous custom no longer desirable in a popular government. Let me here drop a thought. You may have it for what you think it is worth. The expressed will of a majority of the people should be the Supreme Court ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... warm, but dead beyond all question, and, once convinced of this, he forbore to draw the dagger from the wound, though he did not fail to give it the most careful attention before turning his eyes elsewhere. It was no ordinary weapon. It was a curio from some oriental shop. This in itself seemed to point to suicide, but the direction in which the blade had entered the body and the position of the wound were not such as would be looked for ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green

... I followed the curio dealer through the bric-a-brac of his shop, and across a paved yard into an unusually large go-down(1). Like all go-downs it was dark: I could barely discern a stairway sloping up through gloom. ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... had not heard there was a Grand Canon going on regularly in that vicinity or he may have thought it was open only for matinees and evenings. So I took him by the hand and led him over to the curio store and let him look at the Mexican drawnwork. It seemed to satisfy him, too—until by chance he glanced out of a window and discovered that the Canon was in the nature of a ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb

... sent his soldiers to vote in the elections, but by private pecuniary applications, corrupted many of the magistrates. Paulus the consul was of the number, and he had one thousand five hundred talents for changing sides. So also was Curio, one of the tribunes of the people, for whom he paid off an immense debt, and Mark Antony, who, out of friendship for Curio, had stood engaged with him for ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... places which Elaine had down on her shopping list was a small Chinese curio shop on ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... would be safe, she told herself. So she frankly welcomed his every appearance, sung to him, played to him, and took long walks with him to see some wonderful bracelet or necklace that he had discovered in a dingy little curio-shop. ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter

... Austria, was further excited by the arrival of malcontent Moslems from the annexed provinces, who had thrown up their businesses and emigrated to the Young Turks. A curio-dealer from Mostar, whom I knew, was among them He and his friends had all believed that the Turkish revolution meant that Bosnia-Herzegovina would be the Sultan's once more. I asked why there had been no ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... which I remember so well in days gone by and especially at the home Gouverneur Kemble in Cold Spring, where it was passed around and freely used by both men and women, now commands no respect except as an ancestral curio. Dryden, Dean Swift, Pope, Addison, Lord Chesterfield, Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Keats, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Walter Scott and Darwin were among the prominent worshipers of the snuff-box and its contents, while some of them indulged ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... sees the extraordinary prevalence amongst them of the art of graphic delineation displayed in bold etchings of incidents of the chase upon their implements and weapons (though not upon the articles made by the dozen for the curio-venders at Nome and Saint Michael) without dreaming that some day an artist will come from out that singular and most interesting people who shall teach the world ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... Decease, we learn that Buddha admonished his disciples to "dwell as lamps unto yourselves." Another symbol used throughout Japan as a means of teaching the masses the essential doctrines of "The Compassionate One," has become familiar to occidental people as a sort of "curio." It is that of the three monkeys ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... peace two clicked together as a musical instrument, as a war weapon, and as a weapon in the chase. Its last and rapidly approaching use will be as a curio for collectors. ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... the curiosity bazars, or curio-shops, as they are called, is one of the first excursions of the newly-arrived tourist. The Japanese have quickly discovered to what European and American tastes run, and they can manufacture antiquities as rapidly as ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... people, or that he finds the spirit is dead; it has been killed by a more powerful spirit of its class, which is in the pay of some enemy of yours. In all cases the little thing you kept the spirit in is no use now, and only fit to sell to a white man as "a big curio!" and the sooner you let him have sufficient money to procure you a fresh and still more powerful spirit— necessarily more expensive—the safer it will be for you, particularly as your misfortunes distinctly point to some one being desirous of your death. You of course grumble, but seeing the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... who would stammer as I had heard them stammer in the old days when I had seen them trafficking things they had been donated by officials desirous of cultivating their friendship, in the mysterious curio shops beyond the great Ch'ien Men Gate. Nor was I wrong. Stammering, they replied by asking how it was that orders had been broken. Stammering, they said that all the great generals had promised that the inner Palaces were to be kept ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... which it was thickly coated, having done which he found himself in possession of an ornament so massive in material and so elaborate and unique in workmanship that he felt certain it must be worth quite a little fortune to any curio collector. It was, or appeared to be, a collar or necklace, a trifle over two feet in length, the ends united by a massive ring supporting a medallion. The links, so to speak, of the necklace consisted of twelve magnificent emeralds, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... little man behind the counter, not with the frailness that belongs to human age, but with that weathered, polished hardness which time brings to antiques of wood and metal. Indeed, he appeared so like a carved idol in a curio shop that Flora was a little startled to find that he was looking at her. Chinamen had always seemed to her blank automatons; but this one looked keenly, pointedly, as if he personally took note. She told herself whimsically that perhaps it was his extraordinary glasses ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain

... Bradley been here?" he asked, thinking some Chinese curio had been shipped over. Consul Bradley was a Chinese consular agent, a man of considerable wealth, with a large knowledge of the world, and a friend of the Van ...
— Little Sky-High - The Surprising Doings of Washee-Washee-Wang • Hezekiah Butterworth

... folk the poet's use of vulgar slang upbraid, But, when I'm speaking by the card, I call a spade a spade; And I, who have been touched of that same mania, myself, Am well aware that, when it comes to parting with his pelf, The curio collector is so blindly lost in sin That he doesn't spend his ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field

... authorities. Perhaps I attached too great a value to what may have been a delusion; perhaps my theory rested upon no more solid foundation than the belief that I had seen Karamaneh in the shop of the curio dealer. If her appearance there should prove to have been phantasmal, the structure of my theory would be shattered at its base. To-night I should test my premises, and upon the result of my investigations determine my ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... one side of a small sheet of paper. "Visit immediately number 87, Rue de Richelieu," they said. "It is a small curio shop. Monsieur Dufrenne, the proprietor, expects you, and will join you at once. Proceed without delay to London and report to Monsieur de Grissac, the French Ambassador. He has lost an ivory snuff box, which you must recover ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks

... that her lover was safe restored the sparkle to Irene's eyes and the color to her wan cheeks. Fenshawe, indeed, had not given her the full measure of Abdur Kad'r's breathless recital. Recent events had led the old curio-hunter to view life in less ultra-scientific spirit than was his habit. Perhaps he had re-awakened to the knowledge that the hearts of men and women are apt to be swayed by other impulses than his dry-as-dust interest in dead cities and half-forgotten races. Most certainly he was shocked ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... were not to go with us to The Hague. This was the morning for opening the curio cabinets in the drawing-room, and washing the contents, and the girls were expected to help their mother. As the glass doors are never opened, unless that some guest may carefully handle a gold snuff-box, a ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... high card for you. It would fill your hand. So I must sit here idle. But some day, maybe, I'm going to come upon you with no circumstances to hinder. And if I do I'm going to change you. You do not please me, as you are. Some day I hope to alter you so that you will be a curio, even to your own best friends. . . ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... wanted the beasts for the show which he would have to exhibit. Cicero must not forget to look after them as soon as he hears of the election. "In nearly all my letters I have written to you about the panthers. It will be discreditable to you, that Patiscus should have sent to Curio ten panthers, and you not many times more. These ten Curio gave me, and ten others from Africa. If you will only remember to send for hunters from Cibyra, and also send letters to Pamphylia (for there, I understand, more are taken than elsewhere), ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church

... social diversions the town folk tended always more and more to ape the ways of the East. Local colour, they thought, was all right in its place, which was a curio store or a museum, but they desired their town to be modern and citified, so that the wealthy eastern health-seeker would find it a congenial home. The scenery and the historic past were recognized as assets, but they should be the background for a life of "culture, refinement ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... faded water-colours, portraits, old seals, snuff-boxes, and lockets, attract the curio-hunter. Here is a Prayer Book with massive silver clasps, inscribed, "Dearest Mary, on our wedding day, June 4th, 1847, from Gilbert." There, in a red morocco case, is a miniature of a handsome naval officer. At the back, under glass, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... it was, the raid on the Hep Sing joint had been carefully prepared by O'Connor. The house we were after was one of the oldest of the rookeries, with a gaudy restaurant on the second floor, a curio shop on the street level, while in the basement all that was visible was a view of a huge and orderly pile of tea chests. A moment before the windows of the dwellings above the restaurant had been full of people. All had faded away even before the axes began to ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... everything to me. He looks bewildered when anyone tells a funny story, and sometimes asks for an explanation. He has been around the world twice, and is now going to China for three years for the Society of Scientific Research. He seems to think I am the greatest curio he has ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... else. No, don't apologize! these things will happen, and I'm not deeply hurt, for I refuse to call sibb with a Moss-Morley. I should never foreclose on any one's mortgage. My mother was an Englishwoman and my father was a Levantine—half Jew, half Greek. Have you never heard of Andrew Hyde the big curio dealer in New Bond Street? He was commonly known as old Hyde-and-seek. The Hyde galleries are famous. As I remember him he was a common-looking little old man ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... box of tobacco. He hugged himself for joy, and after a decent lapse, during which he acted the part of the virtuous who had relieved another's necessities out of sheer goodwill (for the pearl was only a curio, was it not?), he set sail ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... curio in the form of a Phoenix, I dare say the Board—' said the nice gentleman, as Robert began to fumble with ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... Wants to look over his nearest jay neighbor, I should imagine, and see what sort of a curio he is. He thinks it may be necessary to put up ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... merely remarked its beauty and quaintness and massiveness and general artistry. My host expressed pleasure at my appreciation of its qualities and volunteered the information that it was a little thing he had picked up in a curio shop on Regent Street, London, last summer. He had acquired it in perfect good faith. What its history had been from the time I lost it until then, I am not aware, but there it was, and under circumstances of such a character that ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs

... manner, form a middle age in the history of Roman eloquence. But it was in that which immediately followed that the art was adorned by an assemblage of orators, which even Greece will find it difficult to match. Of these Caesar, Cicero, Curio, Brutus, Caelius, Calvus, and Callidius, are the most celebrated. The talents, indeed, of Caesar were not more conspicuous in arms than in his style, which was noted for its force and purity.[264] Caelius, whom Cicero brought forward into public life, excelled in natural quickness, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... houses, of such marvelous cleanly whiteness inside, are black outside, time-worn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous masks laughing in the shop fronts of the innumerable curio-shops; in the grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols, cruel, suspicious mad;—it is even found in the buildings: in the friezes of the religious porticos, in the roofs of the thousand pagodas; of which the angles and gable-ends ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... continued, and the plebeians suffered much. To the evils of debt and want were added about this time the horrors of pestilential disease, which visited the Roman territory several times at that period. In one year (B.C. 464) the two consuls, two of the four augurs, and the curio Maximus, who was the head of all the patricians, were swept off—a fact which implies the death of a vast number of less distinguished persons. The government was administered by the plebeian aediles, under the control of senatorial interreges. The Volscians and Aequians ravaged ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... according to rumor, a member of the secret service. Concession-hunters and business men sit about in groups, representatives of great commercial and banking firms from all over the world. A minister from some legation drops in; there are curio-buyers from Europe, with a sprinkling of tourists, and a tired-looking, sallow group of anemic men and women who have just come up from Manila ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... loelych werkkes; [Sidenote: He has a wife, and many concubines.] & hade a wyf forto welde, a worelych quene, & mony a le{m}man, neu{er} e lat{er}, at ladis wer called. 1352 In e clernes of his {con}cubines & curio{us} wede[gh], [Sidenote: The mind of the king was fixed upon new meats and other vain things.] In noty{n}g of nwe metes & of nice gettes, Al wat[gh] e mynde of at man, o{n} misschapen i{n}ges, Til e lorde of e lyfte ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... work he substituted high talk of Art in the studios of his friends. The gay little suppers in their own rooms were famous; nine at table, mostly men, entranced by Valentine's beauty and her wit. Charming were their afternoons among the curio shops, and their return, laden with loot too precious to wait over night for delivery. Glorious were their holidays in Paris and Vienna; wonderful nights in Venice! Always together! To their sudden migration to Egypt, whence he returned with a portfolio of ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens

... mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, a sower of dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all over wounds; and Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out for advising Caesar to cross the Rubicon; and Mosca de' Lamberti, an adviser of assassination, and one of the authors of the Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... early an age. He became bright and clever, but unruly and dissipated. Cicero, however, loved him well. He always liked the society of bright young men, and could forgive their morals if their wit were good. Clodius—even Clodius, young Curio, Caelius and afterward Dolabella, were companions with whom he loved to associate. When he was in Cilicia, as Proconsul, this Caelius became almost a second Atticus to him, in the writing ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope

... houses of its rich citizens—new, smug, complacently commonplace—but within, like the house again, it is filled with rare bits gathered out of every age and country and jumbled together in utter confusion. If you ride down Seventh street in a horse-car, you are in a psychological curio-shop. On one side, very likely, is a Russian Jew just from the Steppes; on the other, a negro with centuries of heathendom and slavery hinting themselves in lip and eye; the driver is a Fenian, with the blood of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various

... Bullinger (1504-1575) at Zuerich and Th. Beza at Geneva. On his return to Basel, Grynaeus, desirous that the services of so promising a scholar should be secured to the university, procured him a situation as tutor in the family of Leo Curio, son of Coelius Secundus Curio, well-known for his sufferings on account of the Reformed faith. At the instance of Grynaeus, Buxtorf undertook the duties of the Hebrew chair in the university, and discharged them for two years with such ability that at the end of that time he was ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... moment call to mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with which he had expanded and remodelled the Rape of the Lock, made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope would, once in his life, be able to do what he could not himself do twice, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... steel springs to make them go when you look at their course. Still I have been only in autos, of which there are not many here. I get tired with the excitement of the constant amusement. This morning a man came out of a curio shop. Bow. "Exguse me, madame, is this not Mrs. Daway? I knew you because I saw your picture in the paper. Will you not come in and look at our many curios? I shall have the pleasure of bringing them to your hotel. What ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey

... particular pebble on a beach as for a single individual in all that throng. Remembering Grim's disguise when I first saw him, I naturally had that picture of him in mind. But all the Bedouins looked about as much alike as peas in a pod. They stared at me as if I were a curio on exhibition, but they did not like being stared ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... yet gone when they met again in a Medicine Bend street. Glover, leaving the Wickiup with Morris Blood, ran into Gertrude Brock coming out of an Indian curio-shop with Doctor Lanning. She began at once to talk to Glover. "Marie was regretting, yesterday, that you had not yet found your way to ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman



Words linked to "Curio" :   knickknack, showpiece, bric-a-brac, nicknack, peculiarity, curiosity, object, oddment, whatnot



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