"Senile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fresh and sparkling, the professor had given him into the safe hands of Reed Opdyke. It was as he said: he was quite well aware that, although Reed had his sirens, they all were curiously clean ones; in short, that his young Mammon was nobler far than many a senile God. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... repeated in mild surprise. "Ah, yes; she has gone to New York to make our fortune with the system. You see," he continued with senile cunning, "she has taken away the system, and so I am not sure whether I can beat you. But make your play, monsieur." There was at least no indecision in the manner in which he set the ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... author treated at length—one of the most revolting transactions in history, especially as there is some reason to believe that the unfortunate girl was, when it was perpetrated, already attached to one of the sons of the loathsome, senile sensualist. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... of a divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precaution against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish "the conviction that the king must not be allowed to become ill or senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the fields, and man, stricken with disease, should die in ever-increasing numbers." To prevent these calamities it used to be the regular custom with the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... diet, a little roast mutton—not too much done, but not underdone? O dear, no. And a light pudding? what he would call—if he might be permitted to have his little joke—a nursery pudding." And then the old gentleman had indulged in a senile chuckle, and patted Charlotte's head with his fat old fingers. "And our dear young friend's room, now, was it a large room?—good! and what was the aspect now, south?—good again! nothing better, unless, perhaps, south-west; but, of course, everyone's rooms ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... than one, and does not mention Warner, or lead us to believe that he was sole editor. Only a small portion of this projected criticism seems ever to have been written. It appears to have been begun in senile peevishness, containing only a few prefatory remarks and discussing some algebraical questions with the fancied errors of the editors. No mention is made of the'Atomic Theory,'as promised on the title-page, which is here done into ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... destiny. That afternoon they had met at the coffin of a college friend whose mind had been a blank for the past three years. Some months previously they had called at the asylum to see him. His expression had been senile, his face imprinted with the record of debauchery. In death the face was placid, intelligent, without ignoble lineation—the face of the man they had known at college. Weigall and Gifford had had no time to comment ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... rate, dissembled his mirth to perfection. The look which he shifted from me to Susannah and back was eloquent of senile indecision. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... waitin' on Weir's daughter, down here—Becky. She goes to school to you, teacher," the old man added, presently, brightening with a senile predilection ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... higher and higher till it was well nigh a scream of agony. Strangely too, in spite of the fictitious youth that glowed in his veins and coloured his cheek, it sounded like a senile shriek. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... Jarom, Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, Nephi, Mormon, Ether, and Moroni. The language is quaint and simple in syllabic construction; but the book altogether is a mass of dreamy, puzzling history—is either a sacred fiction plagiarised, or a useless and senile jumble of Christian and Red Indian tradition. Smith, the founder of Mormonism, had only a rough time of it. His Church was first organised in 1830, in the State of New York. Afterwards the Mormons went into Ohio, then established themselves in Missouri, were next driven ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... to that? Was he born thus? To love is as natural as to eat and to drink. He is not a man. Is he a dwarf or a giant? What! always that impassive body? Upon what does he feed, what brew does he drink? Behold him at thirty as old as the senile Mithridates; the poisons of vipers are ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... The tone was senile, but it was the senility of an educated man, and as the cultivated accents wavered forth, my mind changed in, regard to the position he held in the house. Interested anew, I sought to give him another look, but he had already vanished through the doorway, and so noiselessly, ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... open antagonism, whereas their more intimate acquaintance with one another produced personal and national ill-will. The people of the West now appeared more than ever barbarous and overbearing, and the Court of Constantinople more than ever senile and designing. The crafty policy of Alexius Comnenus in transferring his allies with all speed into Asia, and declining to take the lead in the expedition, was almost justified by the necessity of delivering his subjects from these unwelcome ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... cried, seeing himself alone and the gift of prescience foretelling that he was to be henceforth and forever alone,—"senile fool! Dotard!" He beat about with his cane even as the Chevalier had beaten about with his sword. "Double fool! to lose him for the sake of a lie, a damnable lie, and the lack of courage to own to it!" A Venetian mirror caught his attention. He stood before it, and seeing his reflection ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... she began bathing Miss Matoaca's forehead with water which somebody had brought. The General, his eyes very red and bloodshot and his lower lip fallen into a senile droop, was trying vainly to fan ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... woman in the chair and turned away. She was past anything except waiting for death, and it was impossible to speak to her or question her. She was in the last stage of senile decay. He masked his disappointment with an effort, conscious that the eyes of the younger woman ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... looked up to Claire. He had thought her straight. And all the time that she had been saying those things to him that night of their last meeting she had been engaged to another man, a fat, bald, doddering, senile fool, whose only merit was his money. Scarcely a fair description of Mr Pickering, but in a man in Bill's position a little bias ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... muffled up figure, who preserved total silence—for excellent reasons. The doctor handed to Merton a sealed envelope, obviously the marquis's will. Merton looked closely into the face of the old marquis, whose eyes, dropping senile tears, showed no sign ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Crasweller that I must think,—not of Crasweller or of myself. How will the coming ages of men be affected by such a change as I propose, should such a change become the normal condition of Death? Can it not be brought about that men should arrange for their own departure, so as to fall into no senile weakness, no slippered selfishness, no ugly whinings of undefined want, before they shall go hence, and be no more thought of? These are the ideas that have actuated me, and to them I have been brought by seeing ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... to hide an obvious fact? Every person in Polktown who had arrived at the age of understanding and was not yet senile knew that Nelson Haley and Janice Day had "made a match of it." Only the girl's youth and the necessity for the young man to become established in his calling precluded the thought of matrimony for the present. But they were ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... at the knees and bright metal buttons at the top. They owned no pockets, and were, with the exception of the legitimate outlet, continuous in the circumference of the waistband. No dangling strings gave them an appearance of senile imbecility. Were it not for a certain rigidity, sternness, and mental inflexibility,—we will call it military ardour,—with which they were imbued, they would have created envy in the ...
— The Relics of General Chasse • Anthony Trollope
... flicker of grey fire Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames, Confessing; and its conjured image dire, Of love, the torrent on the valley dashed; The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force, Visioned to hold corrected and abashed Our senile emulous; which rolls its course Proud to the shattering end; with these few last Hot quintessential drops of bryony juice, Squeezed out in anguish: all of that once vast! And still, though having skin for man's abuse, Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath Shot skyward from a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this senile lover writes, "In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say: 'This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... least idea of what it all meant. But, like most fathers of his kind, he made no objection to the man's proposal, and told him his daughter was in the house. As Offitt walked away on the same quest where Bott had so recently come to wreck, Saul sat smiling, and nursing his senile vanity with the thought that there were not many mechanics' daughters in Buffland that could get two offers in one Sunday from "professional men." He sat with the contented inertness of old men on his well-worn bench, waiting to see what would be ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... has a fallacy somewhere at the root; whether it be useful and operative, as many a legal fiction is operative, for good; or senile, past service yet tyrannous by custom, and so pernicious; or merely foolish, as certain artistic conventions are traceable, when a Ruskin comes to judgment, back to nothing better than folly: and it becomes men of honest mind, in dealing ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... everything grows darker and darker.... The candle which has burned low begins to flicker; white shadows waver across the low ceiling; the frost creaks and snarls beyond the wall—and I seem to hear a tedious, senile whisper: ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... plucking in senile fashion at the loose ends which lay nearest her old hand, knotted two tightly together with a bit of rare golden strand she kept tucked away in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... think themselves poets, on account of the beautiful things that are only reflected into their minds from what is above? Besides the reflections, there were alligators in the bayou, trying to slip away before we could see them, and watching us with their stupid, senile eyes, sometimes from under the thickest, prettiest flowery bowers; and turtles splashing into the water ahead of us; and fish (silver-sided perch), looking like reflections themselves, floating through the flower reflections, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... section of the trilogy. But his resolution is taken. He has returned to his native land, and will claim his own. The land is now ruled by Harald Gille, who is, like Sigurd Slembe, an illegitimate son of Magnus Barfod, and who, during the last senile years of Sigurd Jorsalfar's life, had won the recognition that Sigurd Slembe might have won had he not missed the chance, and been acknowledged as the king's brother. When the king died, he left a son named Magnus, who should have been his successor, but whom Harald Gille seized, blinded, ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... our visit to the infirmary we found 5 patients in bed or crouched in the oriental manner upon their bedsteads; 1 suffering from senile paralysis, 2 from bronchitis, 1 from inflammation of the ears, ...
— Turkish Prisoners in Egypt - A Report By The Delegates Of The International Committee - Of The Red Cross • Various
... one hand on her arm; but as he left the gang-plank he freed himself, and moved a step or two away from his companions. He had seen Charity at once, and his glance passed slowly from her to Harney, whose arm was still about her. He stood staring at them, and trying to master the senile quiver of his lips; then he drew himself up with the tremulous majesty of drunkenness, and ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... host said to me in a low voice, "that the poor woman has fallen into senile imbecility, and that is the cause of her looks, which are so strange, considering the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Senile Dementia is a form which is incidental to aged persons, and commences gradually with such symptoms as loss of memory for recent events, dulness of perception, and inability to fix the attention. Later on the reasoning powers begin to fail, and finally, memory, reason, and power of attention, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... fine for the undeveloped man-animal, and that is the reason why man-made laws have been necessary. The objection to them is not in their original intention, but in their failure to die after they have become senile. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... destinies are now inextricably mingled with those of Seneca, was accompanied to the throne by the acclamations of the people. Wearied by the astuteness of an Augustus, the sullen wrath of a Tiberius, the mad ferocity of a Caius, the senile insensibility of a Claudius, they could not but welcome the succession of a bright and beautiful youth, whose fair hair floated over his shoulders, and whose features displayed the finest type of Roman beauty. There was nothing in his ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... for her there can be no resurrection here. If she dreams that I am in my dotage, and may relent, she strangely forgets the nature of the blood she saw fit to cross with that of a beggarly foreign scrub. Go back and tell her, the old man is not yet senile and imbecile; and that the years have only hardened his heart. Tell her, I have almost learned to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a lean-faced, unkempt and haggard waif, I drifted to Great Orme's Head and back again. Senile dementia had already laid its spectral clutch upon my wizened cerebellum when I was rescued by some kindly people, who tell me that they found me scorching down Hays Hill on a cushion-tired ordinary. They have since told ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... of Cosmas and his Christian System of the Whole World, Evolved out of Holy Scripture, he is of interest to us as the last of the old Christian geographers, closing one age which, however senile, had once been in the truest sense civilised, and preparing us to enter one that in comparison is literally dark. From the age of Justinian, and from the rise of Islam in the early years of the seventh century, the geographical ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... donkey-work again, when I knew it. So we talked it over, and he says I ought to do the Final next year. And then, Marcella, look out! I've told you I've laid down my challenge to sickness! I'll have it whacked before I die. I can't see why anyone should die except of senile decay or accident—and those we'll eliminate in time! I feel that there's only a dyke of matchboarding between me and the ocean of knowledge. One day it's going to break, and I'll be flooded with it. It's a most uncanny feeling, old girl. One of the chaps here—a rather mad American—says ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Spencer has made in Justice—(and, let us say between parentheses, this work, together with his "Positive and Negative Beneficence" furnishes sad evidence of the senile mental retrogression that even Herbert Spencer has been unable to escape; moreover its subjective aridity is in strange contrast with the marvelous wealth of scientific evidence poured forth in his earlier works)—is based on these two arguments: I. The present landed proprietors ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... other person, this senile self-conceit would have appeared intensely absurd to Daniel; in his Henrietta's father, it pained him deeply. The count actually noticed his downcast look, ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... usually fat with puffy eyelids. The skin is smooth and cool, marble-like often, poor in pigment and color. Sometimes it is sallow, wrinkled and senile in a man in his early twenties. At others, it is distinctly feminine in its hairlessness, and the delicate texture of the skin, as well as in the clean-cut patterning of the features. Every gradient between premature senility and sex inversion ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "Senile decay," I admitted, "may have paralyzed most of my faculties, but as a repeater of messages verbatim, I am faithful ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... voice, answered the questions. In his role as Third Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in silent glee and druled ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... colour of his face was yellow, of an earthy shade; the cheeks were sunken, the back long and narrow, and the hand upon which he leaned his hairy head was so lean and skinny that it was painful to look upon. His hair was already silvering with grey, and no one who glanced at the senile emaciation of the face would have believed that he was only forty years old. On the table, before his bended head, lay a sheet of paper on which something was written in ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... the judge, "I may almost claim to be a specialist (so far as a country practitioner is permitted to specialize) in senile and paretic dementia, since I had the honor to represent the proponents in the will case of Snoke versus Snoke. But it's only fair to say that I ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... incredible age. She was senile with age. Her cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... readily impress ninety summers. "Yes, I could have told yer that," assented the sage, with senile complacence. "My wife could have told yer that. Any smart girl ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... was dead silence between these two, the strings of whose lives Fate was inextricably mixing in her fingers, palsied by age, and fretted by the constant tugging and straining of those other threads which, in moments of senile anger or childishness, she gets into ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... won't live long enough,' I says, 'to use as an exhibit in your senile fireside mendacity. Your grandchildren will have to take your word for it. I'll give you one ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... writing, finds himself a little dazzled and bewildered in computing the effect, as it will appear to neutral eyes, of what he has produced. But the incapacitation which I speak of here as due to opium, is of another kind and another degree. It is mere childish helplessness, or senile paralysis, of the judgment, which distresses the man in attempting to grasp the upshot and the total effect (the tout ensemble) of what he has himself so recently produced. There is the same imbecility in attempting to hold things ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... hath all the good knights writing editorials this eve, from the hoary and senile Dock down to the knavish squire ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... rare and these few must be attributed to the wind which ascends from the plain bringing with it germs of infection. It is extremely seldom that a woman dies in child-birth, but a great many succumb to senile decay at ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... said furiously, "is why you have to lend yourself to this senile idiocy. Because some old women choose to sink themselves in a swamp is no reason why you ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mystification, joggled together in his brain and made there the subject of a thousand ruminations. They tantalised Pa's slowly revolving thoughts, and kept these moving through long hours of silence. Such notions preserved his interest in the world, and his senile belief in Magic, as nothing else could ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... by post a set of verses which bear quite a resemblance to the senile vivacity of the verses which the real Gladstone addressed to my illustrious example of autobiographical art. The verses I received were anonymous, and as a matter of fact the postmark on the envelope was Beaconsfield. Still, you never know, ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... such a long upgrade return of the blood, that the circulation in the lower extremities easily becomes sluggish. The flabby, relaxed tissues and the hardened blood-vessels allow the blood to stagnate. This is why senile gangrene is so common in the ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... reciprocal influences from one another, the literatures of modern Europe came into existence with composite dialects and obeyed confused canons of taste, exhibited their adolescent vigour with affected graces and showed themselves senile in their cradles." In the field of literature to-day the standards are more numerous, but more distinctive, than those of the Elizabethans. Our ideals are classified with almost scientific exactness, and we wear the labels proudly. But the very splendour of ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... should so far descend from argument, from discussion of law to unseemly banter on the question of sex; that it should so far stoop from a canvass of the most important trial that ever took place, to a senile jest on woman, must be matter of astonishment to every candid mind in the legal fraternity, and certainly has a tendency to convince the female portion of the country that the male man is fast losing his right to the definition of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... which is faintly tinged with violet, invading. Beside the stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with grasses, the ecru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... corrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek; imbecile pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables, exchanging stupid, drunken speech, uttering senile maxims ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... from the gap in the bulwark, where he stood waiting to descend into the small boat. The old man ran towards him in his senile haste, and stooped to get over the side into ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... peoples. Let a new messiah leap up with a new message in any part of the world, and at once there is a response from the two great free nations. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy asceticism made of catacomb Christianity and senile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with a perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the faubourgs; yet again came Rudolf Eucken and Pastor Wagner, with their middle-class beeriness and banality. The list need go no further. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... The senile mirth had left the trader's face, and his olive skin was ashen. "Next time," he moaned, "next time, Santa Maria, they will be in force and they—they will take the very horse ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... feeling that he had deserved it. He, however, was not abashed; but changed the conversation, dashing into city rumours, and legal reforms. The old man from time to time said sharp little things, showing that his intellect was not senile, all of which his son-in-law bore imperturbably. It was not that he liked it, or was indifferent, but that he knew that he could not get the good things which Mr. Wharton could do for him without making some kind of payment. He must take the sharp words of the old man,—and ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... a curious compound of affectionate reproach and a certain senile gratification at being made the object of the boy's condescending raillery crossed Droom's countenance. Without, however, answering his question, he slowly and carefully closed the door, tried it vigorously, ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,—that idea, I say, is pretty nearly worn out. Now when a civilization or a civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,—as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... liberate the individual, as well as the entire society of modern times, from the potentiated egotism which spurs man on in overhaste, and in all departments of mental and physical life, to a feverish activity, and then leads to an early senile decay of both body and mind; from that terrible materialism which causes the modern individual in every class of society to find satisfaction in over excited taste and ingenious luxury. It is necessary to strengthen more than has been done ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... by the civic authorities of Mr. Whistler's senile Carlyle renders it necessary for that section of the community who are not enamoured of Impressionism to watch with some vigilance the next steps taken by that body towards the formation of the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... long i is retained, and in disyllables the penultima is lengthened, as in 'anile', 'senile', 'virile'. There is no excuse for following the classical quantity in the former syllables of any of these words. As an English word 'sedilia' shortens the antepenultimate, like 'tibia' and the rest, the 'alias' rule not applying when the ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an aesthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as George Selwyn ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... persons whose parents have been similarly affected, and often at an earlier age in the children than in the parents. Occasionally more than one child in a family is thus afflicted, one of whose parents or other relations, presents the senile form of the complaint. When cataract affects several members of a family in the same generation, it is often seen to commence at about the same age in each: e.g., in one family several infants or young persons may suffer from it; in another, several persons of middle age. Mr. Bowman ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... a boyish vanity in work, this substitution of a senile vanity in indolence, this is the first respect in which the rich Englishman has fallen. He was more of a man when he was at least a master-workman and not merely a master. And the second important respect in which he was better at the beginning is this: that he did then, in some ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... known only as a horsebreeder until he began to write abrupt little letters about the Budget. He led the French Duke upstairs, talking trivialties in a hearty way, and there presented him to another and more important English oligarch, who got up from a writing-desk with a slightly senile jerk. He had a gleaming bald head and glasses; the lower part of his face was masked with a short, dark beard, which did not conceal a beaming smile, not unmixed with sharpness. He stooped a little as he ran, like some sedentary head clerk or cashier; ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Xaxaguana. "They are in complete agreement that the cause of death in each case was senile decay. They were both very old ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... o' that!" said the piping, silly voice of the old man. "But I mun' get to that there platform, I'm telling ye. I'm telling all of ye." He made a senile plunge against the body of the policeman, as against a moveless barricade, and then his hat was awry and it fell off, and somebody lifted it into the air with a neat kick so that it dropped on the barrow. All laughed. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... He leaned across the table. "You still don't believe we're near Sol, do you? You're getting senile, Hugh! You know the mathematics of our position as ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... I took up my hat and gold-headed cane and set out to interview and reprimand my curate. Clearly, something should be done, and done quickly. There was a good deal of talk abroad, and I was supposed to be sinking into a condition of senile incompetence. It is quite true that I could not challenge my curate's conduct in a single particular. He was in all things a perfect exemplar of a Christian priest, and everything he had done in the parish since his arrival contributed to the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... divided and paralysed that gallant clan. Montrose rode north, where, in February 1644, old Leslie, with twenty regiments of foot, three thousand horse, and many guns, was besieging Newcastle. With him was the prototype of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty, Sir James Turner, who records examples of Leslie's senile incompetency. Leslie, at least, forced the Marquis of Newcastle to a retreat, and a movement of Montrose on Dumfries was paralysed by the cowardice or imbecility of the Scottish magnates on the western Border. He returned, took Morpeth, was summoned by Prince Rupert, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... They exchanged one glance of consternation, and the fancied security in which they had dwelt, as fragile as a crystal sphere, was shattered in an instant. The old man was broken by his illness, his recent hardships. He was verging on his dotage. His senile folly might well cost them their lives ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... would find a great and fearful pleasure in stealing over the grass, in the black shadow of the house, until I had reached the hall window, where I would stand listening with bated breath to the snoring of the boy, to Foka's gruntings (in the belief that no one heard him), and to the sound of his senile voice as he drawled out the evening prayers. At length even his candle would be extinguished, and the window slammed down, so that I would find myself utterly alone; whereupon, glancing nervously from side to side, lest haply I should ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... chuckled and wagged his head in senile fashion. Balcom grabbed both his shoulders so that the old man was facing ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... charming city and sweep the vale of the Arno; reached the little square before the cathedral, and rested awhile in the massive, dusky church; then climbed higher, to the Franciscan convent which is poised on the very apex of the mountain. He rang at the little gateway; a shabby, senile, red-faced brother admitted him with almost maudlin friendliness. There was a dreary chill in the chapel and the corridors, and he passed rapidly through them into the delightfully steep and tangled old garden which ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... three systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable, and it was not possible in Rome as in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... stopped for a few minutes at the edge of this line of works, and an old citizen who had been surveying the scene with senile interest, tottered over to our car to take a look at us. He was a type of the old man of the South of the scanty middle class, the small farmer. Long white hair and beard, spectacles with great round, staring glasses, a broad-brimmed ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... beaked predatory monsters, dimly looming in the light of a slow fire where sat an ancient of the tribe of Somo at his interminable task of smoke-curing a bushman's head. He was withered, and blind, and senile, gibbering and mowing like some huge ape as ever he turned and twisted, and twisted back again, the suspended head in the pungent smoke, and handful by handful added rotten punk of wood to the ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... sonnet is a tour-de-force of symbolism, under which are veiled the symptoms of senile decay followed by death. It is very likely that some of the symbols may be lost; but it is not difficult to see, without straining, a possible interpretation for each; and some of them have passed into traditional use. The poetic beauty of ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... as well not have been written. Here is the full title of an example: An Aged Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the Western Plains in the Early Days. "Price 40 cents. Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas." It was printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed of intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee that the itcher has anything ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... Francaise revived "La Robe Rouge." The casting, owing to an effort to make it too good, was very bad; and the production was very bad, though Brieux himself superintended it. But, all allowances made for the inevitable turpitudes of this ridiculous national theatre, the was senile; it was done for! Certainly it exposes the abuses of the French magistrature, but at what cost of fundamental truth! The melodramatic close might have been written in ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... his broad nose. Then he wiped his beard on the palm of his hand, and his hand on his knee; whereafter, as he stretched forth the pair of senile, dark-coloured hands, and held them over the ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... childlike (Greek) expectation of happiness to be attained here, youthful (Christian) expectation of happiness to be attained hereafter, and adult expectation of happiness to be attained in the future of the world-development—and, finally, to teach it to know, in senile longing after rest, that only the doing away with this miserable willing, and, consequently, with earthly existence (through the resolve of the majority of mankind) can give the sole attainable blessedness, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... were blazing when he cried, furiously: "Cut that 'old' out, or I'll show you something. Your mind's gone— senile decay, they ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... idea that there shall come a time when death shall be overcome, is a persistent part of every prophecy, and of every religious cult. In these days we find that science is speculating upon the probability of discovering a specific for senile death, as well as for the final elimination of death from disease ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... as if expecting recognition. Concha threw away his cigarette and raised his hand to his hat. He had not lifted it except to ladies of the highest quality for some years, out of regard to symptoms of senile decay which had manifested themselves at the junction of the brim ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... sighed resignedly. "You cannot see—you cannot see. You would start that struggle all over again!" His voice continued in what Taj Lamor thought of as a senile drone, but the younger man paid scant attention. His eyes and thoughts were centered on that brilliant yellow star, the brightest object in the heavens. It was that star, noticeably brighter within a few centuries, that had awakened a few ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... biding his time, he bellowed, but it was the Comedie Francaise that was the loser, not the people, when he sailed away in his balloon, posed, squatting majestically as the god of war above the clouds of battle. And little Thiers, furtive, timid, delighting in senile efforts to stir the ferment of chaos till it boiled, he, too, was there, owl-like, squeaky-voiced, a true "Bombyx a Lunettes." There, too, was Hugo—often ridiculous in his terrible moods, egotistical, sloppy, roaring. The Empire pinched Hugo, and he roared; ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... tendency of the united republics to resume their independence. The central power, successively stripped of all its prerogatives, and reduced to impotence by tacit consent, would become incompetent to fulfil its purpose; and the second Union would perish, like the first, by a sort of senile inaptitude. The gradual weakening of the federal tie, which may finally lead to the dissolution of the Union, is a distinct circumstance, that may produce a variety of minor consequences before it operates so violent a change. The confederation might still subsist, although ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... Afterward, his senile emotions betraying him, he broke down completely and had to be led from the field. It is rumored he did not live long ...
— It's a Small Solar System • Allan Howard
... opened his eyes wide and sat blinking at him. "I've been asleep," he said, with a senile ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... dryly. "And I'm growing senile, too, I'm afraid. I went forward and wasted as much anathema on that skipper of mine as I would use up in putting through a half-million deal with an opposition traffic line. Next thing I know I'll be arguing with, the smoke-stack. But I must confess, gentlemen, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... her feet in a flash. The old man stood there smiling his senile smile and squinting out across the water, absorbed ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... still dim with sleep. Raffles had an ugly cut from the left nostril to the corner of the mouth; he had washed the blood from his face, but the dark and angry streak remained to heighten his unusual pallor. Levy looked crumpled and debauched, flabbily and feebly senile, yet with his vital forces making a last flicker in his fiery eyes. He was grotesquely swathed in scarlet bunting, from which his doubled fists protruded in handcuffs; a bit of thin rope attached ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... recollect that I was reversed and stretched across some one's knee, and that something happened, but I cannot now remember what it was. I think there was music; but it is all dim now and blurred by the lapse of time, and this may be only a senile fancy. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... opportunities there are in America. Really, as far as I am concerned, this is the best thing that could have happened. I have been getting abominably lazy. If I had gone on living my present life for another year or two, why, dash it! I honestly believe I should have succumbed to some sort of senile decay. Positively I should have got fatty degeneration of the brain! This will be the making ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... afraid I am going to tell a story. I feel as though I were, and I don't want to. It is one I heard years ago at a teachers' convention at Riverside, when I was a tender, unsuspecting young school teacher, so it is perfectly good, albeit senile—and it illustrates my point so well—so well—well, you have to put yourself in the place of the little chaps, Billie ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... developed strange timidities. The apprehension that the sky will fall—that acme of absurdity among the fears of our Gallic forefathers—has entered our own hearts. Does the rain-drop doubt the ocean? the ray mistrust the sun? Our senile wisdom has arrived at this prodigy. It resembles those testy old pedagogues whose chief office is to rail at the merry pranks or the youthful enthusiasms of their pupils. It is time to become little children once more, to learn again to stand with ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... inverted women Sakaltaves, homosexuality among Sappho Sapphism Savages, homosexuality among Schools and homosexuality Schopans Seoatra Secondary sexual-characters and inversion Seduction and inversion Senile homosexuality Sex, the theory of Sexo-esthetic inversion Sexual organs Sexual precocity of inverts Shakespeare Society and inversion Sodoma Sodomy, the term Soldiers, homosexuality among Sotadic zone, Burton's Spain, homosexuality among women ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a disease of the aged. Its windowed eyes are rheumy. It sags backward on gnarled joints. All its poor old bones creak when the winds shake it. To Average Jones' inquiring gaze on this summer day it opposed the secrecy of a senile indifference. He hesitated to pull at its bell-knob, lest by that act he should exert a disruptive force which might bring all the frail structure rattling down in ruin. When, at length, he forced himself to the summons, the merest ghost of a tinkle complained petulantly from within ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... at it—did you ever see such a beauty? Such firmness—roundness—such delicious smoothness to the touch?' It was as if he had said 'she' instead of 'it,' and when he put out his senile hand and touched the melon I positively had to look ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... and piratical pretentiousness of urchins. The kings called Napoleon's pistol a toy pistol even while it was holding up their coach and mastering their money or their lives; they called his sword a stage sword even while they ran away from it. Something of the same senile inconsistency can be found in an English and American habit common until recently: that of painting the South Americans at once as ruffians wading in carnage, and also as poltroons playing at war. They blame them first for the cruelty of having a fight; ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... particular ideas and intrigues, but crouching all together under the Tarter Wall and tremblingly awaiting with mock assurance the bursting of this storm? If you are so good as to see this you will realise the wonderful stage effects, the fierce Mediaevalism in senile decay, the superb distances, the red dust from the Gobi that has choked up all the drains and tarnished all the magnificence until it is no more magnificence at all—this dust which is such a herald of the coming storm—the new guns and pistols of Herr Krupp and the camels of the deserts and all ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... From what he had heard, old John was—or had been—the sort of man to accept a wedding invitation, go to the reception and eat his fill, and never send the bride so much as a black wire hairpin. And now, grown old, his conscience might be hurting him. He might be in that semi-senile state when restitution becomes a craze, and the ungiven wedding presents might press upon his conscience. It was not at all unlikely that he had chosen the un-burglary method of giving the presents at this late date. The form of the un-burgled goods—forks and spoons—and ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... called the ville septenaire; for it had, it is said, seven churches, seven fountains, seven mills, seven woods, seven vineyards, seven gates, and seven towers on the ramparts. It is another senile hamlet now, and imagination must do all the work. Even the cathedral has been altered, and in its large, rather plain interior are few relics of its earlier state, few marks to tell of the after-despoiled tombs of Henri ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... or temperance badges. It is our great national joke, which I presume gains point from the dignified and reticent character of General Washington, and from the fact that he would have been sincerely unhappy could he have foreseen the senile character of a jest, destined, through our love of absurdity, our careful cultivation of the inappropriate, to be linked forever with ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... And take the word of a senile old dotard, your young man, when you find him, will lack many of the attributes you require. On the other hand, there is always the possibility that these will develop as you jog along. The terrible pity of youth is that it has the habit ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... natural? A childish fancy on your part, a senile one on mine? A thing to—laugh at already! Oh, how can you ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... forest. America! He had chosen! Her youth called to his. He wanted to forget everything that had gone before, the horrors through which he had passed, both physical and spiritual,—the dying struggles of the senile nation, born in intolerance, grown in ignorance and stupidity which, with a mad gesture, had cast him forth with a curse. He had doffed the empty prerogatives of blood and station and left them in the mire and blood. The ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... he contemplated the reflection of his face in the small oval mirror which hung on the rough gray plaster wall opposite, just over the small, cheap, brown-stained wooden bureau. The sight of his countenance, as is the case with most of us who have not yet entered the limbo of senile decrepitude and still dare look ourselves in the face, was always a source of extreme satisfaction to him. He held it in the highest esteem as though it were the head of some beautiful antique Apollo, and in his, the Colonel's estimation, was the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... it with vague bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had annoyed her; he had even drawn her disdain, by his lack of initiative and male force in the incident of the senile Sunday School teacher. He had profoundly disappointed her. Now, she simply forgot this; the sinister impression vanished from her mind. She recalled her first vision of him in the lighted doorway of his father's shop. Her present vision confirmed that sympathetic vision. She liked the feel of ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... any kind; the undershot jaw became more intolerant. The personage made his opinion of the group disconcertingly plain, and the old boys understood that he knew them for a worthless lot of senile loafers, as great a nuisance in his building as was the snow without; and much too evident was his unspoken threat to see that the manager cleared them ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... a grey coat-sleeve, up to the elbow, beyond the elbow, extended tremblingly towards the tray. Its appearance was weird and nauseous, fantastic and silly. But instead of grabbing the bottle as Powell expected, this hand, tremulous with senile eagerness, swerved to the glass, rested on its edge for a moment (or so it looked from above) and went back with a jerk. The gripping fingers of the other hand vanished at the same time, and young Powell staring at the motionless ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... irony than promise! He, close on a hundred years old, with but one child, who was known not to be the heir, to be called the father of many! How often Canaanites and his own household would smile as they used it! What a piece of senile presumption it would seem to them! How often Abram himself would be tempted to think his new name a farce rather than a sign! But he took it humbly from God, and he wore it, whether it brought ridicule from others or assurance in his own heart. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... up on the clock," Lanyard replied stolidly in French. He turned and faced Bannon squarely, loosing a glance of venomous hatred into the other's eyes. "The longer I have to stop here listening to your senile monologue, the more you'll have to pay. What address, please?" he added, turning back to get a glimpse ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... observations. She had egged him on; she had flattered him; she had used every opportunity to fan the flames of his ridiculous hopes. Owing to this the confidence between the two had grown to considerable proportion; the man's senile madness, born of his love for Eleanore, had ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Disease Definition History Pathology Changes in the Bursa Changes in the Cartilage Changes in the Tendon Changes in the Bone Causes Heredity Compression Concussion A Weak Navicular Bone An Irregular Blood-supply to the Bone Senile Decay Symptoms and Diagnosis ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... fell short of Northern Germany in intellectual activity, the humiliation inflicted on its best elements by this life-destroying surveillance was keenly felt and bitterly resented. More perhaps by its senile warfare against mental freedom than by any acts of direct political repression, the Government ranged against itself the almost unanimous opinion of the educated classes. Its hold on the affection of the capital was gone. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... expensive obscurantism into free nurseries of humanitarian democracy. It was sad to see such a figure as that of Mr. Chumbleton, genial and hospitable, I admit, but utterly heedless of the trend of the times, hopelessly ignorant of the Progressive program, and deriving a senile satisfaction from memories of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various |
