"Obese" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most satisfactory settlement of her difficulties. She is, I quite agree with you, a very attractive person. Now, there is the Duke of Panama already, Lady Adeline says—but she seems to have an objection to princes, especially if they are at all obese. I do not like obese people myself. Now, do you ever ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... is over and I have alternated a contemplation of the loves and fears, the tremors and triumphs of some obese stage princess with a lusty entr'-acte excursion into Culmbacher and the cheese sandwich, served, as is the appealing custom, in the theatre promenade. And thus fortified against the night, I pass again into the thoroughfares still a-rattle with ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... My imagination returns to her last hours, gropes for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they torture me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my doubts resolved. At last, this morning, I took my courage in both hands. Again I see the hospital, again I see the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life as one reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning light falls upon the pale ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... one morning of last summer, in the Green Park. Though short, even insignificant, in stature and with an obvious tendency to be obese, he had that unruffled, Olympian air, which is so sure a sign of the Blood Royal. In a suit of white linen he looked serenely cool, despite the heat. Perhaps I should have thought him, had I not been versed in the Almanach de Gotha, a trifle older than he is. He did not raise his hat in answer ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... Puffyloaf are taking today what may be the ultimate step toward purity: we are aerating our loaves with the noble gas helium, an element which remains virginal in the face of all chemical temptations and whose slim molecules are eleven times lighter than obese carbon dioxide—yes, noble uncontaminable helium, which, if it be a kind of ash, is yet the ash only of radioactive burning, accomplished or initiated entirely on the Sun, a safe 93 million miles from this planet. Let's have a cheer ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... brandy-ball brooch, a light shawl waistcoat, and a rhubarb-coloured coat of the sort which, I believe, are called Taglionis, and which have no waist-buttons, and made a pretence, as it were, to have no waists, but are in reality adopted by the fat in order to give them a waist. Nothing easier for an obese man than to have a waist; he has but to pinch his middle part a little, and the very fat on either side pushed violently forward MAKES a waist, as it were, and our worthy perfumer's figure was that of a bolster cut almost in ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... affair of the chickens I was more than once surprised by the extent of his information and the subtlety of his insight. His wits were tacked on to a number of remote supports. In our day, when each science has become so complicated, so obese, that a man's lifetime may be spent in exercising round one of them, there are hardly any generalizers or observers fit to estimate their relativity, except among the two classes called by the world idlers and ignorants—the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... the combustion, seems to add to it. Gin is particularly rich in inflammable, empyreumatic oils, as they are called, and in most cases it is recorded that the catacausis took place among gin-drinkers, old and obese. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... hope which is the challenge that youth flings to destiny. Life rose before her, not as she had found it, but as she had once believed it to be. The days when little things had not filled her thoughts returned in the fugitive glow of her memory—for she, also, middle-aged, obese, cumbered with trivial cares, had had her dream of a love that would change and glorify the reality. The heritage of woman was hers as well as Virginia's. And for the first time, standing there, she grew dimly ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... arrived at the kraal, they were ushered into the outer circle, where, in a hut considerably larger than those inhabited by the common people, they found the king seated on a pile of mats, he being utterly unable to squat down in the fashion of his less obese subjects. Hendricks saluted him in due form, and Crawford and Percy imitated their leader as well as they could. They then arranged themselves so as to form part of a circle on one ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... wore on and the sun now shone only in a narrow space; and this the canon perambulated, smoking the end of a cigarette, the delectable frivolity of which contrasted pleasantly with his great age. He nodded affably to other priests as they passed, a pair of young men, and one obese old creature with white hair and an expression of comfortable self-esteem. He removed his hat with a great and courteous sweep when a lady of his acquaintance crossed his path. The priests basking in the warmth were like four great black cats. It was indeed a pleasant ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... severe. Mr. Mellasys was also considered a very unscrupulous person in financial transactions,—indeed, what would be named in some communities a swindler; and I have heard it whispered that the estimable, but somewhat obese and drowsy person who passed as his wife was not a wife, ceremonially speaking. The dusky hues of her complexion were also attributed to an infusion of African blood. There was certainly more curl in her hair than I could have wished; and Saccharissa's wiggy looks waged an irrepressible conflict ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... very old man, corpulent and red-faced, plethoric and apoplectic looking, a man so obese that he seemed bursting out of his skin. He had belonged to one of the suppressed religious orders; he talked only of religious matters; and from the very first manifested the most profound contempt for Pepe Rey. The latter ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... have done better to go to Cornwall with Timmy Durrant. ... "O—h," Jacob protested, as the darkness began breaking in front of him and the light showed through, but the man was reaching across him to get something—the fat Italian man in his dicky, unshaven, crumpled, obese, was opening the door and going off to ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... generation if she did not resent the trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—and she knows it faces—the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their legitimate successors, take up the old ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... A big, obese, middle-aged civilian dressed in a hideous greenish suit, and wearing a pancake cap, sat opposite me in the compartment I had chosen. There was a hard, unfriendly look in his large, fat-encircled eyes, a big mustache curved ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... then Turn on a languid fin, and dip down, down, Into unplumbed, vast, oozy deeps of dream. His stomach was his master, and proclaimed it; And never were such meagre puppets made The slaves of such a tyrant, as his thoughts Of that obese epitome of ills. Trussed up he sat, the mockery of himself; And when upon the wan green of his eye I marked the gathering lustre of a tear, Thought I myself must weep, until I caught A grey, smug smile of satisfaction smirch His pallid features at his misery. And laugh ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... forms a considerable portion of the London basin. It is characterised by its coarseness of texture, and a conglomeration of the parts of speech. Its animal remains usually consist of retired licensed victuallers and obese tallow-chandlers, who are generally found in beds of soft formation, separated from superincumbent layers of Marseilles quilts, by interposing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... and bathed in cold water; even then it seemed to him that his flesh was heavy and dull and yellow, that he was growing obese and out of all condition. He put on a clean shirt and collar, sat down on his bed and tried to think the thing out. To whomsoever he had done harm in the past he would now spare Maggie and his father. He was surprised at the rush ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... round, prominent eyes. He was clad in the usual Eastern robes, richly worked, over which he wore a shirt of chain-mail, and on his head a helmet, with mail flaps, an attire that gave the general effect of an obese Crusader of the early Norman period without ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... breastplate, a newly-scoured brass porringer on his head, a large pewter platter instead of a buckler, and a spit with a bung at the point, to prevent mischief, in place of a lance. The Duke's jester was an obese little fellow, and his appearance in this warlike gear was so eminently ridiculous, that it provoked roars of laughter, while Archie was scarcely less ridiculous. After curveting round the arena in imitation of knights of chivalry, and performing "their careers, their prankers, their false trots, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Conceive a monomaniacal obese old English citizen, given to lift hand and eye and address the cornices, claiming to be an Illustrious Boy, and calling on a beautiful historic mother and unfortunate Royal sire to attest it! No wonder the table was shaken with ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... taught men how to cook; Fo, with long eyes closed in meditation, and lips smiling the mysterious smile of Supreme Beatitude; Cheou-lao, god of Longevity, bestriding his aerial steed, the white-winged stork; Pou-t'ai, Lord of Contentment and of Wealth, obese and dreamy; and that fairest Goddess of Talent, from whose beneficent hands eternally streams the iridescent ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... According to Calabressa's account, the mere mention of the name was to act as a talisman which would work wonders for her. This obese person merely stood there, awaiting what she ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... did not drive me crazy, you obese, misshapen wine skin! you bloated, blue-faced sot!" said the woman. "I deserted young Hilsenhoff for you, Hilsenhoff with his delicate cheeks and his soft yellow hair, and he is mine and I am his ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... said of him that he is volatile; that he flies from one task to another, finishing nothing; that his artistic tastes are the extravagant dreams of a Nero; that he loves publicity as a worn and obese soprano loves the centre of the stage; that his indiscretions would bring about the discharge of the most inconspicuous petty official. Others speak and write of him as a hero of mythology, as a mystic and a dreamer, looking ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... Mr. Thompson, urging the prosecutor, was alarmed. The folds of his obese neck lying above the collar of his coat took on a deeper color, and his mouth visibly sagged as with some unexpected emotion. He felt that he was becoming entangled in some vast, invisible net spread about him by this girl who had appeared as if by ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... less noteworthy—unpleasantly so, I am obliged to add. One was red-faced and obese; the other was tall, thin, and wiry, and showed as many seams in his face as a blighted apple. Neither of the two had anything to recommend him either in appearance or address, save a certain veneer of polite assumption as transparent as it was offensive. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... been in this hospital for the past eight months. We do not believe him sick, or that he has been sick, but completely worthless. He is obese and a malingerer to such an extent that he is almost an imbecile—worthlessness, obesity, and imbecility and laziness. He is totally unfit for the Invalid Corps or for ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... his plump hands upon his widespread knees, and leaned as far forward, in his eager anxiety, as his obese ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... world to do so, I can get but a meagre view of the latter. The room is altogether rather dark, it being one of our manners and customs not to throw much light on prayers, and he has chosen the darkest corner of it. I only vaguely see the outline of a kneeling figure, evidently neither bulky nor obese, of a flat back and vigorous shoulders. His face is generally hidden in his hands, but once or twice he lifts it to scan the proportions of my late grandfather's preposterously fat cob, whose portrait hangs on the wall above ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... into immediate flight, and keeping himself free from all possible incitement to be anything but good, were a face, head and neck shaped not unlike an old-fashioned water-pitcher, and a form suggestive of an obese lobster balancing on an upright horse-shoe. His nose was too high up; his mouth and chin bulged too tremendously; his neck inside a whole mainsail of shirt-collar was too much fluted, and his eyes were as much too small and oyster-like as his ears ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... hidden gains of the whole race of pirates, past, present, and to come. Think of those bones with all the original muscle upon them! Why, they would outweigh all the worthy members of the Boston Society of Natural History together, unless they are uncommonly obese. Where could Noah have stowed a pair of such enormous beasts, supposing that they existed as late as when the ark was launched? Sloth, indeed! I am inclined to think the five or six tons of flesh these bones must have carried round might reasonably permit the bearer to rank, on a priori ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... plum, which fruit, in color and texture, it mightily resembled. Strange to say, also, for one of that lithe race, his person was heavy and hebetudinous; the consequence, no doubt, of habitual intemperance. Like Cribb, he waxed obese upon the championship. There was a kind of mock state in his carriage, as he placed himself before Turpin, and with his left hand twisted up the tail of his dressing-gown, while the right thrust his truncheon into his hip, which ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hereditary, that it runs in families, there is no question whatsoever. And, while with great care as to the diet and by proper exercise, obesity may, as a rule, be avoided in those predisposed, it none the less often will develop in spite of all measures taken against it. Some very obese people eat only one-half or less of what many thin people do; but in the former, everything ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... without the remnants of a smile—a smile, though, which was not remarkable for its sincerity. Still, it had its value,—in the market,—for it was a commercial smile. A pair of small gray eyes were almost hidden by the obese curves of his cheeks; but you learned in a very short time that they kept a sharp and shrewd lookout from behind those ramparts. The two men sat down at opposite sides of the table, the owner guessing ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... had obtained from some Irish emigrant on the road. He was a German; and his name, he told me, was Karl Klitz. The shortest of the party, Barnaby Gillooly, was also by far the fattest; indeed, it seemed surprising that, with his obese figure, he could undergo the fatigue he must constantly have been called upon to endure. He seemed to be a jolly, merry fellow notwithstanding, as he showed by breaking into a hearty laugh as Klitz, stumbling over a log, fell with his long neck and shoulders on the one side, and his heels ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... following the advice of the numerous laymen who write eat-and-grow-thin menus is that they advise the elimination of all fats, sugars and starches. They lose sight of the fact, or they do not know, that the obese individual—I dislike that term—will have to have a balanced diet even while reducing if he is to maintain his health. One will lose weight on these menus, but as very many can testify they lose their health also. One cannot live on an unbalanced diet for any length of time ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... effect of a Utopian population is vigour. Everyone one meets seems to be not only in good health but in training; one rarely meets fat people, bald people, or bent or grey. People who would be obese or bent and obviously aged on earth are here in good repair, and as a consequence the whole effect of a crowd is livelier and more invigorating than on earth. The dress is varied and graceful; that of the women reminds one most of the Italian fifteenth century; they have an abundance ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... clear," cried they, "our Mayor's a noddy; And as for our Corporation,—shocking To think we buy gowns lined with ermine For dolts that can't or won't determine What's best to rid us of our vermin! You hope, because you're old and obese, To find in the furry civic robe ease? Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking To find the remedy we're lacking, Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing." At this the Mayor and Corporation ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to say, brother," said Father Johannes, "that in my profane and worldly days I tried that experiment on a dog, and the poor brute died in five minutes. Ah, brother," he added, observing that his obese companion was now thoroughly roused, "you see before you the chief of sinners! Judas was nothing to me; and yet, such are the triumphs of grace, I am an unworthy member of this most blessed and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... with lobsters, and ever kind to crabs, And be not disrespectful to cuttle-fish or dabs; Chase not the Cochin-China, chaff not the ox obese, And babble not of feather-beds in company with geese. Be tender with the tadpole, and let the limpet thrive, Be merciful to mussels, don't skin your eels alive; When talking to a turtle don't mention calipee— Be always kind to ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... An obese nymph pictured in the foam of a beer sign, apparently elaborated with a whitewash brush and finished in the throes of an epileptic fit, solicited a share of ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... accustomed to think of the Germans as an obese race, swinging big paunches in front of them; but in that army the only fat men we saw were officers, and not so many of them. On occasion, some colonel, beefy as a brisket and with rolls of fat on the back of his close-shaved neck, would be seen bouncing by, balancing his ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Mastai Ferretti, born the 13th May, 1792, and elected Pope the 16th June, 1846, under the name of Pius IX., is a man who looks more than his actual age; he is short, obese, somewhat pallid, and in precarious health. His benevolent and sleepy countenance breathes good-nature and lassitude, but has nothing of an imposing character. Gregory XVI., though ugly and pimply, is said to have ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... shall require a specimen of the lady's signature," he said as he produced an amazingly obese ledger and indicated where Suzanne was to sign her name. "Remove the glove, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... make a suitable reply, when she was interrupted by the appearance of one of Mr Mould's assistants—his chief mourner in fact—an obese person, with his waistcoat in closer connection with his legs than is quite reconcilable with the established ideas of grace; with that cast of feature which is figuratively called a bottle nose; and with a face covered all over with pimples. He had been a tender plant once upon a time, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... sit on one side Ecstasy, Enthusiasm, Romance—the frenzy of joy; on the other side, Fierceness, Rage, and Tumult. The professional gamester schools himself into apparent quietness. The keepers of gambling rooms are generally fat, rollicking, and obese; but thorough and professional gamblers, in nine cases out of ten, are pale, thin, wheezing, tremulous, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... can live it! And all the time, all the time while poor, dear youth is hurtling through it, there's age, instead of streaming sympathy like oil upon those boiling waters, standing in slippered safety, in buttoned dignity, in obese repose, bawling at tumbling youth, "Why can't you settle down! Why can't you settle down! Why do you behave like that? Why can't you do as I do? Why can't you be like your wise and sober Uncle Forty? Or like ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... as the morning paper. No, he could not dream. Let the younger races dream; the oldest of races knew better. The race that was first to dream the beautiful dream of a Millennium was the first to discard it. Nay, was it even a beautiful dream? Every man under his own fig-tree, forsooth, obese and somnolent, the spirit disintegrated! Omnia Vanitas, this ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... do, because nations are composed of very different individuals, and I know only one to the million; but I do take on me to say that the individual Herr who executed Doctor Faustus at Homburg that night had everything to learn, except what he had to unlearn. His person was obese; his delivery of the words was mouthing, chewing, and gurgling; and he uttered the notes in tune, but without point, pathos, or passion; a steady lay-clerk from York or Durham Cathedral would have done a little better, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... guards stepped outside and closed the door as Gibson greeted the obese man sitting across the button-studded expanse of desk. The scientist was under no illusion as to the vagueness of the title "Chairman." He was facing the absolute power of the Centaurian planets—which, in a few months' time, would be the same as saying the ...
— Irresistible Weapon • Horace Brown Fyfe
... with more brutality. There are others who,—adding the low cunning of the monkey to the vanity of the peacock,—seek no other object but the furtherance of their own designs, which are always petty even when not absolutely mean. There are obese women whose existence is a doze between dinner and tea. There are women with thin lips and pointed noses, who only live to squabble over domestic grievances and interfere in their neighbours' business. There are your murderous women with large almond eyes, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... friendship is impossible. Such a one, in George's opinion, was this gurgling excrescence underneath the silk hat. He comprised in his single person practically all the qualities which George disliked most. He was, for a young man, extraordinarily obese. Already a second edition of his chin had been published, and the perfectly-cut morning coat which encased his upper section bulged out in an opulent semi-circle. He wore a little moustache, which to George's prejudiced eye seemed more a complaint than ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... fro, to and fro. Here and there a draped figure, dwarfed by the bare walls, remained without stirring amongst the rows of empty benches, as if absorbed in pious meditation. The plaintiff, who had been beaten,—an obese chocolate-coloured man with shaved head, one fat breast bare and a bright yellow caste-mark above the bridge of his nose,—sat in pompous immobility: only his eyes glittered, rolling in the gloom, and the nostrils dilated and collapsed violently ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... see distinguished club-men, whom I only know by sight, Old, obese, and scarlet-coated, playing golf with ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... Soloviev, well-grown and already obese, with a broad, ruddy Volga face and a light, scandent little beard, belonged to those kindly, merry and simple fellows, of which there are sufficiently many in any university. He divided his leisure—and of leisure he had ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... present difficulties. Now he understood, and a burning desire swept over him to shoot the man down where he sat. Then a revulsion of feeling came to him and he saw the ludicrous side of the situation. He gazed at Lablache, that obese mountain of blubber, and tried to think of the beautiful, wild Jacky as the money-lender's wife. The thing seemed so preposterous that he burst ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... days since, to see, among several admirable and very spirited pictures of Campagna life and incidents, a very striking portrait of Beefsteak. He was sitting in a straw-bottomed chair, as we have so often seen him in the Lepre, calm, dignified in his deportment, and somewhat obese. The full brain, the narrow, fastidious nose, the sagacious eye, were so perfectly given, that I seemed to feel the actual presence of my old friend. So admirable a portrait of so distinguished a person should not be lost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... brought them quickly to the hotel. Mr. Ducksmith bolted like an obese rabbit into the salon. A few moments afterwards Aristide, entering, found them locked ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... a brown coat, a black cravat, and a very high hat, which the justice, who loved correctness in details, thought it his duty to don whenever called upon to perform his judicial functions. The clerk, Seurrot, more obese, and of maturer age, protuberant in front, and somewhat curved in the back, dragged heavily behind, perspiring and out of breath, trying to keep up with his patron, who, now and then seized with compassion, would come to a halt ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... occupants! Shakespeare's "glass wherein the noble youth did dress themselves" was not so practical a possession as this. Surely, hereafter those who would divest themselves of their lean and hungry look may grow obese at will, and turn the scale at the very pound required; and this, too, by no such regimen as the Oriental one of rice and indolence, but merely by passing a season under a violet dome or a blue crystal green-house. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... be provided for all the company, and our obese friends shall be provided with stuffed chairs, for the survey of the river scenes; but carriages can be used in some parts of the city, though what you will desire to see can best be observed from the river; and ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... collect a sweet liquor which forms pearly drops on certain galls of oak leaves. These drops, elaborated into honey, gradually fill the crop, distending it and pushing back neighbouring organs until it receives its globular form. When they have arrived at this obese condition, the heavy honey ants no longer leave the nest. They remain without movement, hanging by their legs to the roof or lying against the walls of a room. The workers who have remained slender come and go, attending to their usual ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Peter left his obese mother and hurried to the corner, Dawson Bobbs, the constable, had handcuffs on Tump's wrists, and stood with his prisoner amid a crowd of ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... animal, whose dim eyes took his master for a stranger, was warning the world against him. Jolyon gave his special whistle. Even at that distance of a hundred yards and more he could see the dawning recognition in the obese brown-white body. The old dog got off his haunches, and his tail, close-curled over his back, began a feeble, excited fluttering; he came waddling forward, gathered momentum, and disappeared over the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wore a woman's bodice, though half the buttons were burst; and a sun-bonnet, with strings still knotted about his throat, dangled at the back of his shoulders like a hood. He was a full-blooded man, slightly obese, with a villainous pair of eyes that blinked in the sudden lamp-light. He was dangerous, too, between anger and terror. But Mrs Tresize gave him ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... had on a lilac dress with gold spots on it, and there was something Oriental about it that suited her Jewish face. Rosa, the Jade, had on a pink petticoat with large flounces, and looked like a very fat child, an obese dwarf; while the two pumps looked as if they had cut their dresses out of old, flowered curtains, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... humorous character sketches, had been left entirely in Sam's hands and consisted of a trilogy representing the characteristics as popularly conceived of the French Canadian habitant, the humorous Irishman and the obese Teuton. Sam's early association with the vaudeville stage had given him a certain facility in the use of stage properties and theatrical paraphernalia generally, and this combined with a decided gift of mimicry ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... invalids of both sexes and all conditions; take the waters inside and out; but my friend told me of another cure not less remarkable. Soil of Homburg composed of Fuller's-earth, warranted to absorb superfluous grease from cloth substances. Obese Englishman hearing this on arrival, asked why this quality should be confined to application to cloth? if Fuller's-earth took superfluous fat from piece of cloth, why not from body of stout Englishman? Decided to solve question; dug hole in back-garden; lay in it for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... the search for beauty," drawled Simonoff. "This is the dance of Greek maidens at the sacrificial rites to Demeter. The Grand street thing is a contortion before the obese complacency of the great god Jazz. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "you take no more exercise than I do, and probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet,"—and he smiled ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... spoken of the impression of flabbiness which this man Blessington conveyed. As he dangled from the hook it was exaggerated and intensified until he was scarce human in his appearance. The neck was drawn out like a plucked chicken's, making the rest of him seem the more obese and unnatural by the contrast. He was clad only in his long night-dress, and his swollen ankles and ungainly feet protruded starkly from beneath it. Beside him stood a smart-looking police-inspector, who was taking notes ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... to us and we ventured into the garden. Coming down a pathway we saw an austere, swarthy, obese man of the middle height. He was white-gloved, and wore a red fez, a sort of Zouave upper garment of blue, with burnous, baggy trousers, white stockings, and Turkish slippers. It was the Shereef. I had agreed ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... resolved itself into that of a middle-aged man of the laboring class, slow, heavy, and obese. In his rather bovine countenance hardly any spark of intelligence shone. He did not appear to have seen the others as he approached, but evinced neither surprise nor interest ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... with two doors, and my hostess and I had not crossed the vestibule leading to the inner one, when the knocker fell on the outer door, with a force that fairly startled the obese Teresa. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the mellow, slightly mournful voice, looking at this rotund, dark, spectacled face, at the short body, obese to the point of infirmity, thought that this man of delicate and melancholy mind, physically almost a cripple, coming out of his retirement into a dangerous strife at the call of his fellows, had the right to speak with the authority of his self-sacrifice. And yet she was made ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... a gust of wind upon the living embers of his fears. It blew them into a blaze of wrath, sudden and terrific as that of such a man at bay could be. He advanced upon her with the rolling gait of the obese, his cheeks purple, his arms waving wildly, ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... The obese boy sat in Leh Shin's shop, fiddling sometimes with his ears and sometimes with the soles of his bare feet. He found life just a little dull, and had he been able to express himself as "bored," he would doubtless ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... birth, he interviewed a certain bishop, who waived the matter thus: "Surely what difference does it make, since he had no business to be born at all?"—a very Milesian-like reply. Houssaye is too sensible a man to waste words with the spiritually obese, and so merely answered in the language of Terence, "I am a man and nothing that is human ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... the mildewed clothes and tried to remember, but he failed to be explicit, and the greasy, obese creature, still chewing, was recalled to assist his master's memory. He spoke in a high chirping voice, and looked at Hartley with angry eyes as he asserted that his master had been ill upon the evening mentioned and that he had closed the shop ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... a pompous Spaniard, obese, with bristling brows and moustaches, who wrinkled his forehead and winked ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... celebration of one of their holidays; negroes from the English possessions; coppery Hindus with drooping mustache and white trousers, so full and short that they looked like aprons; Jewesses from Gibraltar, dressed in white with all the correctness of the Englishwomen; old Jewesses from Morocco, obese, puffed out, with a many-colored kerchief knotted about their temples; black cassocks of Catholic priests, tight frocks of Protestant priests, loose gowns of venerable rabbis, bent, with flowing beards, exuding grime and sacred wisdom... ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... sweetness from the lips of an obese lady, after one has assured her of the arrival of a double chin, always ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... the next half-hour in issuing invitations, and at half-past three every chair was filled by fellow-strikers. Three cans of beer, clay pipes, and a paper of shag stood on the table. Mr. Benjamin Todd, an obese, fresh-coloured gentleman of middle age, took the easy-chair. Glasses and teacups ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... adoration of disciples, alcoholic and carnal debaucheries, had impaired his tough Monjik frame and blunted his wit, working havoc with that energy and peasant craftiness which once ruled an Emperor's Court. His body was obese. His mind was in a state of advanced putrefaction. Even his personal cleanliness left something to be desired. Sitting there, puffy and pasty, in a darkened room, he looked more than ever like some obscene vegetable that has grown up ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room—an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women's Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn "the demon rum," but because the sickish smell of the alcohol ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Butterby, aged 40 years; a licensed broker; nativity, American; temperament, sanguine; habit, slightly obese; constitution, robust. History of the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... crowded as a bee-hive. Happy, dirty, big-eyed children played in the gutters while their obese mothers squatted untidily on the stoops. No lack of the zest of life here. It shamed the ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments that, taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... The obese Spider is gravely devouring something in the midst of a circle of onlookers. And what? The remains of a Lycosa a little smaller than herself, the remains of her male. It is the end of the tragedy that concludes the nuptials. The sweetheart ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... conjurer claimed to bear a mission high: Mysterious omens of the earth and sky He knew to read; his medicine could find In time of need the buffalo, and bind In sleep the senses of the enemy. Perhaps not wholly a deliberate cheat, And yet dissimulation and deceit Oozed from his form obese at every pore. Skilled by long practice in the priestly art, To chill with superstitious fear the heart, And versed in all the legendary lore, He knew each herb and root that healing bore; But lest his flock might grow as wise as he, Disguised their use with ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... eye the wee animal coming out of the egg, endowed with sufficient power of motion not to dread a walk and with sufficient slenderness to glide into the smallest crevices. Once in the presence of the larva on which it is to feed, it doffs its travelling dress and becomes the obese animal whose one duty it is to grow big and fat in immobility. This is all very coherent; it is all deduced like a geometrical proposition. But to the wings of imagination, however smooth their flight, we must prefer the sandals of observed facts, the slow ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... Cai, genuinely surprised; for, in his experience, this bird was remarkable, if at all, for an obese lethargy. It could talk, to be sure. Now and again it would ejaculate "Scratch Polly," or "Polly wants a kiss," in a perfunctory way; but on the whole he had never known a more comfortable or ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... however. Nor did the arrival of so many new scholars put the main idea in her mind aside. This troubling thought was of Miss Picolet and the sound of the harp on the campus at midnight. The absence of the French teacher from the dormitory, the connection of the little lady with the obese foreigner who played the harp on the Lanawaxa, and the sounding of harp-strings on the campus in the middle of the night, were all dovetailed together in Ruth Fielding's mind. She wondered ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... away my evening as I had done the others of my first week's "cure" in Bath, making a fair division of it between the dining-room, the smoking-room and the reading-room. I did not go near the drawing-room; its occupants consisted solely of a few obese ladies of the type referred to by the gentleman with the glass eye, wearing such palpable wigs that my artistic susceptibilities were sorely wounded at the mere sight of them, and my sense ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not overclean black frock coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top hat and a faded brown overcoat ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... asleep, and shivering with cold under their wraps. They could see one another but indistinctly in the darkness, and the mountain of heavy winter wraps in which each was swathed made them look like a gathering of obese priests in their long cassocks. But two men recognized each other, a third accosted them, and the three began to talk. "I am bringing my wife," said one. "So am I." "And I, too." The first speaker added: "We shall not return to Rouen, and if the Prussians approach Havre we will ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... ancients prove Responsive to your spell, Or, riveted to Reason's groove, Against your charms rebel. And yet some senator obese, In Rome long years ago, May have misnamed a masterpiece De ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... married? You're just the kind of girl I like—tip-top, you know. I like a girl with style about her. Come, say yes." And here the crude outlines of something like a joke, for the first time in Mr. Margent's history, began to be visible to him in the dim recesses of his obese mind. "Let's make it buyer sixty days," and he laughed until his ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... and "spooks," just as do some countries that do not believe in such things. One of the spectres troubles a steep slope near Lihue, Kauai. An obese and lazy chief ordered one of his retainers to carry him to the top of the slope on his shoulders. It was a toilsome climb, the day was hot, hence it is no wonder that just before he gained the summit the man staggered, fell, and sent his dignified and indignant ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the contents of his large snuff-mull forced into his eyes, ere twenty strokes were struck. He ran roaring and prophecying, like blind Tiresias, among both parties, and, as a prophet, we respected him. The French master being very obese, was soon borne down, and there he lay sprawling and calling upon glory and la belle France, whilst both sides passed over him by turns, giving him only an occasional kick when they found him in their way. It is said of Mr Simpson, the mathematical ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... There was another Napoleon, who, I am informed, slid down the Alps into Italy; the present descendant did not slide so far, and he shook himself, after the manner of a dog. I remarked with some surprise, that he was growing obese; whereas, the active labors of the campaign had reduced the dimensions of most of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... and made thee obese and Primmins-like. They have taken too good care of thy creature-comforts, O sensual Mauritanian! Still, in that mystic intelligence we call instinct thou art chasing something that years have not swept from thy memory. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his feelings. But on the evening of a certain day when, from the balcony of a great house, I had been made to witness a huge mingled procession of the church and the army—priests with relics, and soldiers with weapons, an obese and aged archbishop, habited in cambric and lace, looking strangely like a grey daw in bird-of- paradise plumage, and a band of young girls fantastically robed and garlanded—then I spoke my ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte |
