"Willowy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eyes, a mouth like a ripe tomato" (shouts from the table en masse, but Chuck ploughs along cheerily), "hair like the braided midnight" (cries of "What's that?" and "Hear! Hear!"), "a figure slim and willowy as a vaulting-pole" (a protest of "No track athletics at meals; that's forbidden!"), "and a voice—well, if you ever tasted New Orleans molasses on maple sugar, with 'that tired feeling' thrown in, perhaps you'll have a glimpse, a mile off, of what that voice is like." (Eager exclamations ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... south and east from the endless heaps of the world, that lifted themselves in all directions. Down their sides ran the streams, down busily, hasting away through every valley to the Daur, which bore them back to the ocean-heart—through woods and meadows, park and waste, rocks and willowy marsh. Behind the valleys rose mountains; and behind the mountains, other mountains, more and more, each swathed in its own mystery; and beyond all hung the curtain-depth of the sky-gulf. Gibbie sat and gazed, and dreamed and gazed. The mighty city that had been to him the universe, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... at me. My dear, I thought I'd die! But at least he had sense enough not to speak. She was one of those limp, willowy creatures with the greediest eyes that she tried to keep softened to a baby stare, and couldn't, she was so crazy to get her hands on those hats. I saw it all in one awful minute. You know the way I do. I suppose some people would call her pretty. I don't. And her color. Well! And the most ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... she murmured as she turned to watch the willowy youth and maid go through some very beautiful movements of the dance that was entirely unobjectionable. In two minutes she had turned her face, beaming with pleasure, so that Mr. Vandeford could see that all was well with her; and ten minutes later she giggled out loud ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... my eyes off her feet at first. Very few of our justly famous sex can afford to brave the public gaze without their stockings on. Vernabelle could ill afford it. She was skinny, if you know what I mean, lots of tendons and so forth, though I learned later that Vernabelle called it being willowy. She had slaty-gray eyes and a pale, dramatic face with long teeth and a dignified and powerful-looking nose. She was kind of hungry-looking or soulful or something. And she wore about two yards of crockery necklace that ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... the waters, and the spires of every church threw their delicate lines along the still expanse. The gigantic castle looked down from its height as if protecting all; and the few white motionless sails at a distance, pausing near the willowy islands, where not a leaf moved, made the whole like enchantment. I never beheld a more exquisite night, nor saw a ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Byzantine architecture; nor could we expect to see "lions" as historical as those which ornament the facade of Saint Mark's. However, as we glided up against the tide, in slow but steady progress, by willowy banks and osiered eyots, our boat yawning in and out and requiring a stiff weather helm to keep her course, we often caught glimpses of ivy-wreathed churches, charming villa residences and gothic summer-houses, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... leaped in his breast, and his nostrils widened with such a fierce joy as won him the undying respect of the sportsmen around him. Pushing past his comrades, he tore his way through the tangle of twining willowy arms and gained the side ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... beside the hill; A beehive's hum shall soothe my ear; A willowy brook that turns a mill, With many ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to each other. It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long, tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own, might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the colonel and his wife were childless, and the slender willowy figure I had seen across the garden wall was that of Lilian Roseblade, their niece and adopted daughter. She came into the room shortly afterward, and I felt, as I went through the form of an introduction, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... heave, the unbidden tear would flow; And when the dull and wearying round of Power Allowed Zorobabel one vacant hour, He lov'd on Babylon's high wall to roam, And stretch the gaze towards his distant home, Or on Euphrates' willowy banks reclin'd Hear the sad harp moan ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... came headlong down through the birchwood with the same leap and the same roar with which he still rushes to Loch Ness; and, in defiance of the sun of June, the snowy scalp of Ben Cruachan rose, as it still rises, over the willowy islets of Loch Awe. Yet none of these sights had power, till a recent period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wish men would not dance. It is the most unbecoming exercise which they can adopt. In women you have the sweep and wave of drapery, gentle undulations, summer-cloud floatings, soft, sinuous movements, the fluency of pliant forms, the willowy bend and rebound of lithe and lovely suppleness. It is grace generic,—the sublime, the evanescent mysticism of motion, without use, without aim, except its own overflowing and all-sufficing fascination. But when a man dances, it reminds me of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... if she was not useful. She was a perfect blonde, with a wealth of yellow hair, which she twisted round her head like a golden coronet. Her eyes were as blue as fresh spring violets, and her slight, willowy figure gave promise of much grace when fully developed. Her twin sister, Dexie, was much unlike her in every way, having dark brown eyes, while a mass of short, light-brown curls covered the well-poised head, giving her something of a boyish air. She had a clear complexion, but was ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... gazelle, too, for litheness and grace; the music of the Sirene had begun, and my arm had encircled my partner's willowy waist; when I felt her hang back, and saw on her fair face a distressed look of penitence and perplexity: "I'm so sorry," she murmured, "but I can't dance loose." Perfectly vague as to her meaning, I assured her that she should be guided ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... face was partly in shadow, and her figure foreshortened by her pose, which accentuated its rounded outline and concealed its willowy slenderness; but the broad white forehead and straight nose became visible when she moved her head a trifle, and a faintly humorous sparkle crept into the clear brown eyes. Possibly Maud Barrington looked her best just then, for the lower ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... feminine approval of success, couldn't imagine herself being as much interested in him—dangerously interested—as she knew her friend Mary Rochefort to be. How odd! From all the world to pick out a tall, blond, willowy man like Pollen! On the verge of middle age, too! Perhaps it was this very willowiness, this apparent placidity that made him attractive. This child, Mary Rochefort, quite alone in the world, largely untrained, adrift, imperiously demanding from an imperious husband ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... move, She, all the way, from disenchanted fount To seas unhallowed runs; the gods forsook Long since her trembling rushes; from her plains Disconsolate, long since adventure fled; And now although the inviting river flows, And every poplared cape, and every bend Or willowy islet, win upon thy soul And to thy hopeful shallop whisper speed; Yet hope not thou at all; hope is no more; And O, long since the golden groves are dead The faery cities ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pilgrim woodcut on the Quai Voltaire revealed the saint's identity. This ugly print informed the faithful that the "prodigious image" of Our Lady existed in the Church of the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale. One might distinguish at the extreme right of the five compartments a willowy St. Michael in armour, like Chaucer's Squire in a black-letter folio, or if the identification had been doubtful, there was the name below ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... to whom Dandelli now presented the two young ensigns, was a woman in the full flower of her beauty at twenty-five or so. Tall, willowy, with a perfect air, her wonderful eyes, in which there was a touch of Moorish fire, were calculated to set a young man's heart to beating responses to her mood. Attired in the latest mode of Paris, and wearing only enough jewels to enhance her great beauty, the Countess chose to be most gracious ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... white gallery, Mrs. Angier B. Duke (dressed as the bride), Mrs. Victor C. Mather, Mrs. A. J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., Mrs. Gurnee Munn, Mrs. Oliver E. Cromwell, Miss Eleanor B. Hopkins and Mrs. George Wharton Pepper, Jr., a tall and willowy auburn beauty and a bride herself only a few months before, while Wagner's immortal tones pealed ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... astonishing vocabulary, her ability to think and to express her thoughts concisely. He conceded that she was a remarkable young woman in that respect. It was not her intellectual capacity which concerned him greatly, but the sunny aureole of her hair, the smiling curve of her lips, the willowy pliancy of her well-developed body. Just to think of her meant a colorful picture, a vision that filled him with uneasy restlessness, with vague dissatisfaction, with ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... unattended by the usual guard of eunuchs, but that they walked in a painful, hesitating, and impeded manner. This walk was not the conventional, short, shuffling step that peculiarity of dress and shoe-wear imposes on the Japanese beauty, nor the willowy, swaying gait produced in the Chinese beauty by the lack of a sufficiency of foot; neither could it be ascribed to the presence of the ancient jingling chain of bells which induced the mincing steps of the virgins of Judea,—an invention which confined the lower ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... snowy white That loosely flew to left and right— The leaves upon her falling light— Thro' the noises of the night She floated down to Camelot: And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... Willowy billowy now they're bending, Low they're bending Down-dropt eyes; Stately measure and stately ending, Music sobbing, and a ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... was, in a measure, the key to her character. Not for nothing had Alice laughed at her sister's longing for a prince, on a milk-white steed, to come riding by. Ruth was tall, and of that desirable willowy type, so ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... of an illustrious House, that derived from both the royal lines of Valois and Bourbon, was a man in the prime of life, of a fine height, still retaining something of the willowy slenderness that had been his in youth, and of a gentle, almost womanly beauty ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... emotion were reached when the blushing bride elect burst her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders and flung herself upon the muscular bosom of him who was about to be launched into eternity for her sake. The hero folded her willowy form in a loving embrace murmuring fondly Sheila, my own. Encouraged by this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the decencies of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... ax him to wait," said Terry, who rolled over on the ground in the exuberance of his mirth, at the sight of his big friend going down before the lithe, willowy Shawanoe; "for since he's bound to do what he says, the sooner ye are out of yer suspinse, the sooner ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... he reached it. She was as willowy and alive as he remembered her, and a great deal more vital and beautiful. She put up her face to be kissed as soon as he was inside and his arms went around her soft angora sweater and he wondered a little ...
— A World Apart • Samuel Kimball Merwin
... slow its wending; But winning is sweet, but right is fine; And shoal of trout, or willowy bending— Though Law be ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... truly terrible," said Miss Brodie. "I wish I had known yesterday, but those men have spoilt it all. But here's 'Lily' Laughton," she continued hurriedly, "coming for his dance." As she spoke a youth of willowy figure, languishing dark eyes and ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... descend the Rhine in a boat from Strasbourg to Rotterdam, whence we might take shipping for London. During this voyage we passed many willowy islands and saw several beautiful towns. We stayed a day at Mannheim, and on the fifth from our departure from Strasbourg, arrived at Mainz. The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... voice—offered a rare fillip to his jaded appetite. The dusky, long-lashed eyes which always give a woman an effect of beauty, the splendid fling of head, and the piquant, finely cut features, with their unconscious tale of Brahmin caste, the long lines of the supple body, willowy and yet plump as a partridge—they went to his head like strong wine. Here was an adventure from the gods—a stubborn will to bend, the pride of a haughty young beauty to trail in the dust, her untamed heart to break if need be. ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... a striking couple; the tall, handsome man and the slight, willowy girl, with her beautiful face flushed with the exercise, and many were the enquiries made as to who and what they were. The dance over, Reg reserved for himself nine of the items on her card, leaving the remainder, as he laughingly said, ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... To be consum'd in vain. For shy the game, Nor easy of access: the fowler's toils Precarious; but inur'd to ev'ry chance, We urge those toils with glee. E'en the broad sun, In his meridian brightness, shall not check Our steady labour; for some rushy pool, Some hollow willowy bank, the skulking birds May then conceal, which our stanch dogs shall pierce, And drive them clam'ring forth. Those tow'ring rocks, With nodding wood o'erhung, that faintly break Upon the straining eye, descending ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... the pinkish sheen of its slip beneath, suited her slim shape to perfection and clung around her in lovely, filmy curves that made her look willowy and girlish. It was high-necked, just cut away slightly at the throat, and had great, loose, hanging frilly sleeves of lace. Jerry had shaken out her hair and piled it high on her head in satiny twists and loops, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... first met her at the home of Mrs. Storrs, I thought her one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen—of the Andalusian type—dark hair and lustrous starry eyes, beautiful features, perfect teeth, a slender, willowy figure, and a voice so musical that it would lure a bird from the bough. She had a way all her own of "telling" you a poem. She was perfectly natural about it, a recitative semi-tone yet full of expression and dramatic breadth, at times almost a chant. With those dark and ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and stood with the slanting rays of the sun full in her eyes, her arms stretched over her head. The artist noted every graceful line of her willowy figure. ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... childhood they were old, without exception; and stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of past decades was undone butlers: were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, is only a temporary setback. At the ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Oriental grace about Marsa, with her willowy figure, flexible as a Hindoo convolvulus, and her dark Arabian eyes fringed with their heavy lashes. Michel Menko took in all the details of her beauty, and evidently suffered, suffered cruelly, his eyes invincibly attracted toward her. In the midst ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... oars of Tamdka are ten, and but six are the oars of the Frenchmen, And the red warriors' burden of men is matched by the voyageur's luggage. Side by side, neck and neck, for a mile, still they strain their strong arms to the utmost, Till rounding a willowy isle, now ahead creeps the boat of Tamdka, And the neighboring forests profound, and the far-stretching plain of the meadows To the whoop of the victors resound, while the panting French ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... cot beside the hill; A bee-hive's hum shall soothe my ear; A willowy brook, that turns a mill, With many a fall shall ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... what their lives shall be when all is told; And, in the far-off glow of years called old, Those other eyes look back to catch a trace Of what was once their own unshadowed grace. But here in our dear poet both are blended— Ripe age begun, yet golden youth not ended;— Even as his song the willowy scent of spring Doth blend with autumn's tender mellowing, And mixes praise with satire, tears with fun, In strains that ever delicately run; So musical and wise, page after page, The sage a minstrel grows, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... of some half-dozen men and two very resplendent women. One of these was slight and little, very dark and vivacious with eyes full of a malicious humour. The other, of very noble proportions, of a fine, willowy height, with coiled ropes of hair of a colour such as I had never dreamed could be found upon human being. It was ruddy and glowed like metal. Her face and neck—and of the latter there was a very considerable ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... air nods Nora-Bamma. Nid-nods its tufted summit like three ostrich plumes; its beetling crags, bent poppies, shadows, willowy shores, all nod; its streams are murmuring down the hills; its ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... copious rains and swept with winds and clouds that come from the mountains and the sea. Every hidden nook in the depths of the woods is searched and refreshed, leaving no stagnant air; beaver meadows and lake basin and low and willowy bogs, all are kept wholesome and sweet the year round. Cloud and sunshine alternate in bracing, cheering succession, and health and abundance follow the storms. The outer sea margin is sublimely dashed and drenched with ocean brine, the spicy scud sweeping at times far inland over the bending ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir |
