"Lesbian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shall quite forget to sound The chord whose music is undying, if She do not strike it when Sam Patch is drowned. Leander dived for love. Leucadia's cliff The Lesbian Sappho leapt from in a miff, To punish Phaon; Icarus went dead Because the wax did not continue stiff; And, had he minded what his father said, He had not given a ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... black art? And yet many others have written such verse, although you may be ignorant of the fact. Among the Greeks, for instance, there was a certain Teian, there was a Lacedaemonian, a Cean, and countless others; there was even a woman, a Lesbian, who wrote with such grace and such passion that the sweetness of her song makes us forgive the impropriety of her words; among our own poets there were Aedituus, Porcius, and Catulus, with countless others. 'But they were not philosophers.' Will you then deny that Solon ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... of course I know there's Byron, Who by his own report could play the man; I seem to see him with his Lesbian lyre on, And brandishing a useful yataghan; Though never going altogether strong, he Managed at least to die ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... nasty diseases, which are looked upon as lightly and facetiously, just as simply and without suffering, as a cold would be; in the deep revulsion of these women to men—so deep, that they all, without conception, compensate for it in the Lesbian manner and do not even in the least conceal it. All their incongruous life is here, on the palm of my hand, with all its cynicism, monstrous and coarse injustice; but there is in it none of that falsehood and that hypocrisy before ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... the artist's meed, the ivy wreath Is very heaven: me the sweet cool of woods, Where Satyrs frolic with the Nymphs, secludes From rabble rout, so but Euterpe's breath Fail not the flute, nor Polyhymnia fly Averse from stringing new the Lesbian lyre. O, write my name among that minstrel choir, And my proud head shall strike ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... not implicated in the troubles, that he had not joined in the exactions of the rich, and was not involved in the necessities of the poor, pressed him to succor the commonwealth and compose the differences. Though Phanias the Lesbian affirms, that Solon, to save his country, put a trick upon both parties, and privately promised the poor a division of the lands, and the rich, security for their debts. Solon, however, himself, says ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... misprints catalogued in the tables of Errata, and I have silently corrected any other unless it might be mistaken for a various reading, when I have called attention to it in a note. Thus I have not recorded such blunders as Lethian for Lesbian in the 1645 text of Lycidas, line 63; or hallow for hollow in Paradise Lost, vi. 484; but I have noted content for concent, in At a ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Britain, our dear mother Isle, May boast one Maid, a poetess indeed, Great as th' impassioned Lesbian, in sweet song, And O! of holier mind, and ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... of man dissolved away in tenderness. Oh, sweet Theocritus! had I thine oaten reed, wherewith thou erst did charm the gay Sicilian plains; or, oh, gentle Bion! thy pastoral pipe wherein the happy swains of the Lesbian isle so much delighted, then might I attempt to sing, in soft Bucolic or negligent Idyllium, the rural beauties of the scene; but having nothing, save this jaded goose-quill, wherewith to wing my flight, I must fain resign all poetic disportings of the fancy, and pursue ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... extracts from the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, or ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Egypt. This was the most important trade. But a considerable commerce was carried on in ivory, tortoise-shell, cotton and silk fabrics, pearls and precious stones, gums, spices, wines, wool, oil. Greek and Asiatic wines, especially the Chian and Lesbian, were in great demand at Rome. The transport of earthenware, made generally in the Grecian cities; of wild animals for the amphitheatre; of marble, of the spoils of eastern cities, of military engines, and stores, and horses, required ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... o'er her loom the Lesbian maid In love-sick languor hung her head. Unknowing where her fingers stray'd, She weeping turned away and said,' Oh, my sweet ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... song That did thy sweet name sweet unwitting wrong, Nor ever have called thee nor would call for shame, Thou knowest, but inly by thine only name, Sappho—because I have known thee and loved, hast thou None other answer now? As brother and sister were we, child and bird, Since thy first Lesbian word Flamed on me, and I knew not whence I knew This was the song that struck my whole soul through, Pierced my keen spirit of sense with edge more keen, Even when I knew not,—even ere sooth was seen,— When thou wast ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... modern motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and very fascinating realisation of such a motive; the god of the bitterness of wine, "of things too sweet"; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup. Touched by the sentiment of this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in the range of Greek ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... "because, like the Lesbian Alcaeus, fighting for the liberty of his native Mitylene, he has sympathized with his native South, finds himself treated by Mr. DROOD with a lack of magnanimity of which even the renegade ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... lyre a mournful moan sends forth; the lips, Now lifeless, murmur plaintive; and the bank Echoes the lamentations. Borne along To ocean, now his native stream they leave, And reach Methymna on the Lesbian shore. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Greece having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own sex. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her passion is glowingly expressed ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... forming our judgment of human affairs, we must apply a "Lesbian rule," instead of one that is inflexible. Here it is that the line is drawn between science, and the wisdom which has for its object the administration of human affairs. The masters of science explore a multitude of phenomena to ascertain a single cause; the statesman and legislator, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... was spent, ere all had been finished. Then she ate hurriedly and with little appetite, drinking deeply of the Lesbian wine till her cheeks flushed through the rouge, and her eyes sparkled. Calavius had gone out, busy about affairs of state, and eager to collect the strained threads of his influence—threads that might be strengthened by their very straining, in the hands of a politician who realized how men were ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... rubbing. The Moslem Harem is a great school for this "Lesbian (which I would call Atossan) love "; but the motive of the practice lies deeper. As amongst men the mixture of the feminine with the masculine temperament leads to sodomy, so the reverse makes women prefer their own sex. These tribades are mostly known by peculiarities of form ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... B.C., and who has been styled the ardent friend and defender of liberty, more because he talked so well of patriotism than because of his deeds in its behalf. The poet AKENSIDE, however, calls him "the Lesbian patriot," and thus contrasts his style with that ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... ye been there, for what could that have done? What could the muse herself that Orpheus bore, The muse herself for her enchanting son, Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? Alas! what boots it with incessant care To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade, And strictly meditate the thankless muse? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... back East in an upper-middle class dysfunctional family. She was in her late twenties. She had been sexually abused by an older brother, was highly reactive, and had never been able to communicate honestly with anyone except her lesbian lover ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... Briseis was a non-Greek. Littera, she writes (v. 2), vix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu. According to recent authorities, she was a Lesbian girl. We know from Homer that Achilles was musical ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... ivy crown Exalts above a mortal fate; Me shady Groves, light Nymphs, and Satyrs brown, Raise o'er the Crowd, in sweet sequester'd state. And there is heard the Lesbian lute, And there Euterpe's Dorian flute; But, should'st thou rank me with the LYRIC CHOIR, To GLORY's starry heights thy ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... shall brim with wine 5 Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic; May not New England be divine? My ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... sailed and passed the barren spot Where sad Penelope o'erlooked the wave, And onward viewed the mount, not yet forgot, The lover's refuge and the Lesbian's grave. Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That breast imbued ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... whilst its sheep yielded wool of superior excellence; and, in those times of Roman conquest, slaves were often transported from the shores of Britain. The horses and chariots and fine linen of Egypt, the gums and spices and silk and ivory and pearls of India, the Chian and the Lesbian wines, and the beautiful marble of Greece and Asia Minor, all met with purchasers in the mighty metropolis. [146:2] As John surveyed in vision the fall of Rome, and as he thought of the almost countless ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... a sacrifice to god. Men speak of other gods: there is only Nile. I have prepared a sacrifice of wine—the Lesbian wine from fairy Mitylene—to mingle with your waters till you are drunken and go singing to the ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... charm the long ambrosial years The gods bring many gifts, and mine shall be— Immortal life in mortal agony— Vain longing, fanned by winged hopes and fears To inextinguishable flame—and tears Bitter as death, salt as the Lesbian Sea." ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... for the Lacedaemonians, which is a parody of the claims advanced for the Poets by Protagoras; the mistake of the Laconizing set in supposing that the Lacedaemonians are a great nation because they bruise their ears; the far-fetched notion, which is 'really too bad,' that Simonides uses the Lesbian (?) word, (Greek), because he is addressing a Lesbian. The whole may also be considered as a satire on those who spin pompous theories out of nothing. As in the arguments of the Euthydemus and of the Cratylus, the veil of irony is never withdrawn; and we are left in doubt ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... fireplace opening is faced beautifully with cut black marble brought from Scotland and outlined with a nicely chiseled ovolo molding in wood similar to the familiar egg and dart pattern, but incorporating the richer Lesbian leaf instead of the dart, a closely related reed-like motive replacing the conventional bead and reel. Two handsomely carved consoles resting on the fillet of this ovolo molding support the superb molded panel of ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins |
