"Childishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at once from his seat and limped forward. His unprepossessing face looked as if he pulled his childishness together with an ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wisdom, yet at times so helpless that he has to ask aid from the animals. Sometimes he sympathizes with the people, and at others, out of pure spitefulness, he plays them malicious tricks that are worthy of a demon. He is a combination of strength, weakness, wisdom, folly, childishness, ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... had pierced the clouds of the night, a sun as radiant as that of yesterday. Careful in his dress, the ends of his mustache turned up, proud in his demeanor, elegant, grave and handsome, he went at random, to see and to be seen, a little childishness mingling with his seriousness, a little pleasure with his distress. His mother ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... that could be, justly or unjustly, called superstition; and this therefore was not the answer that might have been expected of him. But he had begun with the symbolic and mystical in his reception of Annie, and perhaps there was something in the lovely childishness of her unconscious faith (while she all the time thought herself a dreadful unbeliever) that kept Thomas to the simplicities of the mystical part of his nature. Besides, Thomas's mind was a rendezvous for all extremes. In him they met, and showed that they ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... but heard nothing: the sound of the bell was smothered in a wilderness of stone walls. By and by, however, appeared an old servant, bowed and slow, with plentiful hair white as wool, and a mingled look of childishness and caution ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... hoods and all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery and Oriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become, so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement—with the childishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlying the majority even of well-bred English men and women—Mr. Oke himself doing the mountebank like ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... that better than you deserved," Harry said. "I wouldn't have believed that any man would have played such a fool's trick as to go meddling with the Mormons in their own country without any kind of reason. It war worse than childishness." ...
— In The Heart Of The Rockies • G. A. Henty
... have cheered her were not yet so very far distant. But in the frame of mind in which she had been since the end of the year she was no longer capable of laughing artlessly and merrily. Her face had taken on an entirely new expression, and her half-pathetic, half-roguish childishness, which she had preserved as a woman, was gone. The walks to the beach and the "Plantation," which she had given up while Crampas was in Stettin, she resumed after his return and would not allow them to be interfered with by unfavorable weather. It was arranged as formerly ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... like me, Howard?" She blushed at the childishness of her eager question. But she demanded the expected answer with the insistence of unsatisfied love. And when he failed to reply at the moment, surprised by her mood, she knelt by his chair and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... disappointment followed her first rapid success: she never could get them to take on the case-hardening needful for what she counted the final polish. They always retained a certain simplicity which she called childishness. It came in fact of childlikeness, but the lady was not child enough to distinguish the difference—as great as that between the back and the front of a head. As, then, the minister found him incapable of forming a style, though time soon proved him capable of producing one, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... they may say; "a man is really like a child." So he may be—so he often is childish, and sometimes childish in the extreme. But where could you find greater and more abject childishness than in a woman's ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... beside him, barely touching his arm with her hand. She seemed definitely to decide to put away her childishness. She treated him as though she had forgotten his supposed youth; she talked straightforwardly, with a certain dignity, about her childhood, about her amusing and pitiful experience as a third-rate little actress, and she asked him a question now and then half ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate childishness that went straight and true to her heart; 'I will be as good a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as you. And be a friend to me, please; I don't understand myself: and I want a friend who can understand me, very ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... looking, she lifted the hem of the sheet with her fumbling right hand and wiped her eyes. For the next few days she gained, and lost, and gained again. There were recurrent periods of lucidity, followed by the terrible childishness that had been the first indication of her condition. At the end of the next week she suddenly said, in a loud voice, "I won't stay in bed!" And despite Nannie's pleadings, and Miss Baker's agitated ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... wore merely the expectant expression of a summoned servant. The childishness of her behaviour confused ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the Drive he alighted and walked slowly toward the Bivens palace. He had never been there before. He had always avoided the spot. He smiled now at the childishness of his attitude toward Nan. It seemed incredible that a sane man should taboo one of the most beautiful spots in the city, merely because a woman lived in the neighbourhood who once professed her love ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... lyrical passion, such as music might better convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical, and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever; no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any moral interest ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Parham-Carter did not, of course, use such beautiful similes as these; he employed the kind of language customary to men who have received a public school and university education, half slang and half childishness; but he waved his hands at me and distorted his features, and conveyed, on the whole, the kind of impression I have ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... N. age; oldness^ &c adj.; old age, advanced age, golden years; senility, senescence; years, anility^, gray hairs, climacteric, grand climacteric, declining years, decrepitude, hoary age, caducity^, superannuation; second childhood, second childishness; dotage; vale of years, decline of life, sear and yellow leaf [Macbeth]; threescore years and ten; green old age, ripe age; longevity; time of life. seniority, eldership; elders &c (veteran) 130; firstling; doyen, father; primogeniture. [Science of old age.] geriatrics, nostology^. V. be aged ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... gloriously on our earth. It was a spark of that divine justice that, like electricity, has been stored for humanity from the beginning of things—abundant in quantity and power to bless all men—stowed away by the hand of God for us, awaiting only our awakening from the sleep of ignorance and childishness, to use and cherish it. It was an example of trust, a tribute to faith. It was a realization of poetry. It was in touch with the wishes, hopes and prayers of millions of humanity; of untold numbers of saints and martyrs of all nations and climes, and its mission was the highest ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... contempt of the notice taken of Woodhouse, the poetical shoemaker[372]. He said, it was all vanity and childishness: and that such objects were, to those who patronised them, mere mirrours of their own superiority. "They had better (said he,) furnish the man with good implements for his trade, than raise subscriptions for his poems. He may make an excellent shoemaker, but can never make a good poet. A school-boy's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... had an intense desire for clear guidance, and he waited for the heavenly spark to fall. He said to himself, before he made it plain to others, that if we are not guided by truth, we fall into the pit. There was a certain childishness in his attitude in this matter, for he was inclined to regard abstract truth as the only one worthy of pursuit. That he was advancing in breadth of view is shown by the fact that he cancelled in the second edition ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... was nothing approaching intimacy between them. To him, however he might adore her, she was always Mrs. Considine. In all their relations they preserved the convention that she was a creature of another world and of another age. No doubt his childishness made the illusion easy to him. With her there must surely have been moments of emotion when she realised that the barrier was artificial. It is impossible to say how soon the first of these ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... disgrace to be mixed up with the men then in power. He thought, therefore, that he could best serve his country by keeping himself in reserve. He realised the futility of small concessions, and the childishness of agitating to obtain them. He was the only strong royalist who understood how far reform must go when it once began—farther towards democracy than his own sympathies would have carried him. If you want to use a mill-stream you must let ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... gods and demigods. Perhaps its highest praise was sounded by Siegfried Wagner, son of Richard Wagner, who declared that "Hansel and Gretel" was the most important German opera since "Parsifal," notwithstanding its childishness and simplicity. ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... morning when he woke, free from pain and, except for a certain languor, quite himself again, he wondered at his childishness of the night before, though in spite of reason a certain sub-conscious ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... to have been—a protector! Sir Willmott, I cannot live very long; say only that you will treat her kindly. Whatever I have shall be yours: you will be kind, will you not?" And he looked at Sir Willmott with an air of such perfect childishness, that the knight imagined his mind had ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... disobeyed and bodies exhausted. The evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned, as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The delirium tremens of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than the second childishness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... just as well understand that, too. We'd had a great misfortune, he said, and it was nobody's fault. We had lost a man we all liked and respected, and he felt that everybody in the ship ought to be sorry for the man's brother, who was left behind, and that it was rotten lubberly childishness, and unjust and unmanly and cowardly, to be playing schoolboy tricks with forks and spoons and pipes, and that sort of gear. He said it had got to stop right now, and that was all, and the men might go forward. And ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... and sorrow—all official matters are, in comparison with Frankfort, changed from thorns to roses; whether they will ever blossom is, indeed, uncertain. The aggravations of the Diet and the palace venom look from here like childishness. If we do not wantonly make ourselves disagreeable, we are welcome here. Whenever the carriages are called here, and "Prusku passlanika" ("Prussian carriage") is cried out among those waiting, then all the Russians ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... statues at the corners, and even the 'scherzi d'acqua,' which are little surprises of fine water-jets that unexpectedly send a shower of spray into the face of the unwary. There was always an element of childishness in the practical jesting of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... was fond of his pretty wife, and proud of her, I believe; but when once she was away from the whirl and bustle of the London that she loved, it was a relief to him, I fancy, to pursue his work alone, unhampered by her restless and querulous childishness. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... garniture of flesh than it had ever before worn. His thin cheeks became round; his delicate little hand, so spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew plumper than the hand of a thriving infant. His aspect had a childishness such as might have induced a stranger to pat him on the head—pausing, however, in the act, to wonder what manner of child was here. It was as if the spirit had gone out of him, leaving the body to flourish in a ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... certainly noble, and his eyes superb. In his appreciation of jams and pickles, in his delight in the reverberating mirrors of the dining cabin, and consequent endless repetition of Moipus and Mata-Galahis, he showed himself engagingly a child. And yet I am not sure; and what seemed childishness may have been rather courtly art. His manners struck me as beyond the mark; they were refined and caressing to the point of grossness, and when I think of the serene absent-mindedness with which he first strolled in upon our party, and then recall him running on hands ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nations use the same language. To ask that one group of forty or seventy or ninety million people shall by some sort of magic all find their way to a saner doctrine before such doctrine has affected other groups is to talk the language of childishness. Things do not happen in that in human affairs. It is not in that way that opinion grows. It did not grow in that way in any one of the steps that I have mentioned—in the abolition of religious persecution, or ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... cheerful acquiescence in all suffering and sorrow, appear to be in fact only the simple and practical expression of his belief. If, believing all this, he still murmers and rebels at the trials and contrarieties of his lot, he is of the childishness of the infant which quarrels with the medicine that is to lead it back to health ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... Belzoni, I say, and his bull neck, I would have much preferred to see a real bull or the Darlington ox. The sum of the matter is this: all men, even those who are most manly in their style of thinking and feeling, in many things retain the childishness of their childish years: no man thoroughly weeds himself of all. And this particular mode of childishness is one of the commonest, into which they fall the more readily from the force of sympathy, and because ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Addison showed by his criticism of Chevy Chase for its simple version of a heroic theme. Goldsmith tried his hand at a ballad about the same time with Percy, and both showed that they were a little too much afraid that simplicity might degenerate into childishness, and gain Johnson's contempt. But there was nothing in the old school incompatible with a rather patronising appreciation of the popular poetry. It gained fresh interest when the historical tendency gave a newer meaning to the old society in ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... to cruel dooms. Who labor all the livelong day; Who stand beside the roaring looms Nor ever turn their eyes away; Like parts of those machines of steel: Like wheels that whirl, like shuttles thrown; Without the power to dream or feel; With all of childishness. ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... needs: for what else, I repeat, can he pray? Let a man cry for that in whose loss life is growing black: the heart of the Father is open. Only let the man know that, even for his prayer, the Father will not give him a stone. But let the man pray, and let God see to it how to answer him. If in his childishness and ignorance he should ask for a serpent, he will not give him a serpent. But it may yet be the Father will find some way of giving him his heart's desire. God only knows how rich God is in power of gift. ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... seriously considered, there are many points to be urged. But the Mensur serves no good purpose whatever. It is childishness, and the fact of its being a cruel and brutal game makes it none the less childish. Wounds have no intrinsic value of their own; it is the cause that dignifies them, not their size. William Tell is rightly one of the heroes of the world; but what should we think of the members of a club of fathers, ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... once of the negativism which is so like that of a perverse child and of the unconventional, personal habits to which these patients cling so stubbornly. Masturbation, for instance, is quite frequent, while willful wetting and soiling is still more common. We sometimes meet with childishness, both in vocabulary and mode of expression. In one case there was evidently a delusion of a return to actual childhood, for she kept insisting that ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... at sweetmeats, and mock at their childishness thereby: they cling to their straw of life, and mock at ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... far than seeing a little child die! It is worse to see it change. To see the innocence pass from the eyes, and the childishness grow into wickedness, and to know, without being able to stop it, just what is ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... fascination in his admixture of childish simplicity and varied knowledge. None, indeed, could resist his gracious humor and old-world courtesies. The old man could be simple and ingenuous, too; but only when it pleased him so to be; and it was not the second childishness of age, for his intellect remained keen and moved far more swiftly than any at Chadlands. But he was modest and loved a jest. The hand of time had indeed touched him, and sometimes his memory broke down and he faltered with a verbal difficulty; but this only appeared to ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the extravagance of wasting a new gown on him, and he now perceived that the change lay deeper than any accident of dress. At the same time, he noticed that she betrayed her consciousness of it by a delicate, almost frightened blush. It was one of the compensations of Mrs. Lethbury's protracted childishness that she still blushed as prettily as at eighteen. Her body had been privileged not to outstrip her mind, and the two, as it seemed to Lethbury, were destined to travel together through an ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... every opportunity of twirling plump little Mrs Mayhew almost off her feet. Both laughed inordinately at each repetition of the mild joke: and if the C.B. blazing on the General's mess-jacket, and the little lady's full-grown daughter contrasted oddly with their passing display of childishness, both were serenely ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... said D'Holbach, 'is but a child when he quits physical science, to lose himself in the imaginary regions of theology.' He failed, nevertheless, to achieve the favour, or escape the wrath, of thorough-going theologians who were in ecstacies at his childishness, but bitterly detested him, as they detested every man who had the audacity to open up new, and widen old fields, of investigation; to reject chimera and hold fast by fact in the pursuit of knowledge, and to teach a series of scientific ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... have portrayed a negro in fiction, but Harris did a more original work by creating his Brer Rabbit. In the adventures of this happy-go-lucky creature, with his childishness and humor, we have the symbol not of any one negro but of the whole race of negroes as the author knew them intimately in a condition of servitude. The creation of these two original characters, as real as Poor Richard or Natty Bumppo and far more ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... what he wants, and holds it by right of his strength. In primeval times we used fists and clubs. Now we hit with brains and words or hard cash. That is all the difference. The strong man is still the one who takes what he wants, and keeps it. And I want you, Hal. It is mere feebleness - childishness - to be thwarted by convention and circumstance. Hoodwink convention, and stamp on circumstance. Go through stone walls with a battering-ram. As long as the world doesn't know - who cares? Those are my sentiments. They have been for years. When ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... "The deaf and dumb," says Andral, "presents, in intelligence, character, and the development of his passions, certain modifications, which depend on his state of isolation in the midst of society. He remains habitually in a state of half childishness, is very credulous, but, like the savage, remains free from many of the prejudices acquired in society. In him the tender feelings are not deep; he appears susceptible neither of strong attachment nor of lively gratitude; pity moves him feebly; he has little emulation, few ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... a rare and surprising moth, the dancing-girl from the other compartment, the child who wore the horrible mask. No doubt she wishes to have a look at me. She rolls her eyes like a timid kitten, and then all at once tamed, nestles against me, with a coaxing air of childishness, which is a delightfully transparent assumption. She is slim, elegant, delicate, and smells sweet; drolly painted, white as plaster, with a little circle of rouge marked very precisely in the middle of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... that all his ideas of marriage, all his dreams of how he would order his life, were mere childishness, and that it was something he had not understood hitherto, and now understood less than ever, though it was being performed upon him. The lump in his throat rose higher and higher, tears that would not be checked ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... rest, Byron has more passion and intensity, Shelley more fancy and music, Coleridge could see further into the unseen, and not one of those poets has insulted his own genius by the production of whole poems, such as I could name of Wordsworth's, the vulgarity of which is childish, and the childishness vulgar. Still, the wings of his genius are wide enough to cast a shadow over its feet, and our gratitude should be stronger than our critical acumen. Yes, I will be a blind admirer of Wordsworth's. I will shut my eyes and be blind. Better so, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... who are disposed to attribute any fear of Roman Catholicism in the United States to bigotry or childishness. Such see nothing in the character and attitude of Romanism that is hostile to our free institutions, or find nothing portentous in its growth. Let us, then, first compare some of the fundamental principles of our government with ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... man of candour and of true understanding is never hasty to condemn. He can censure an imperfection, or even a vice, without rage against the guilty party. In a word, they are the same folly, the same childishness, the same ill-breeding, and the same ill-nature, which raise all the clamours and uproars both in life and on the stage. The worst of men generally have the words rogue and villain most in their mouths, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... childishness, my dear fellow; you ought to talk about it—it will do you good. And really, I'm not at all sure, after all, that we have not both of us had a fortunate escape. One is very apt to—er—overrate the fascinations of persons one meets abroad. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... what am I in comparison with you? And what is my art against yours? And yet I too had some fine ideas in my head. Don't laugh at me, dear Reinhold; but, look you, I thought what a grand thing it would be to model Rose's lovely figure and cast it in the finest silver. But that's all childishness, whilst you—you—Oh! how sweetly she smiles upon you, and how delightfully you have brought out all her beauty. O Reinhold! Reinhold! you happy, happy fellow! Ay, and it has all come about as you said long ago. We have both striven for the prize and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Mackhai. "You young idiots, you don't know what you've done,—you do not, Kenneth. As for you, you young viper, are you as cunning as you are high, or is this childishness and—" ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... childishness and real cunning he was not sufficiently on his guard, had often the art of drawing him into conversation about his visits. She ran into her father's parlour; but she knew, the moment she saw his face, that it was no ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... Her childishness of manner did not seem at all incongruous to him. She was comfortably ageless so far as he was concerned, a drab figure with a pleasant voice who treated him as though he were a human being instead of a sick ogre. In some mysterious way her attitude ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... shoulders. "Why this is mere childishness," said he. "The marriage is a most suitable one, and it is my desire ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... can be no spiritual understanding, is at once evident; while without spiritual understanding, that is, without a knowledge and a study of God's will, there can be no spiritual life. And therefore childishness and unthoughtfulness cannot be light evils; and if I have rightly traced the prevalence of these defects to its cause, although that cause may seem to some to be trifling, yet surely it is well to call your attention to it, and to remind you that in reading works ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... unsparingly, if it found out, and he could not justify his own conduct, even to himself; but Lalage never seemed to consider the moral aspect of the question, that curious element of irresponsibility, almost childishness, which he had marked at the very outset, was now more ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... himself for his show of feeling. He was a silly, sentimental old fool, inflicting his childishness upon a gentlemanly young fellow who was too kind and sportsmanlike to show distaste or offense. But why should any one else be interested in his, Carrington R. Davies' feelings, or the fact that, twenty years before, he ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... hose well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big, manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound; Last scene of all That ends this strange, eventful history In second childishness, and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... am I to save her?" exclaimed Valentine. He could not contemplate the subject in its broad social aspect; he could only think of this one dear life at stake. "To send this Dr. Jedd might be to hasten her death; to send a less efficient man would be mere childishness. WHAT shall I do?" ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... a girl likely in such a matter to bestow confidence on any one. She was one who could hold her heart full, and yet not speak of her heart's fulness. Her mother had called her a child, and in some respects she then was so; but this childishness had been caused, not by lack of mental power, but want of that conversation with others which is customary to girls of her age. This want had in some respects made her childish; for it hindered her from ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... This grown-up childishness, to which he felt so superior, exercised a peculiar and almost mesmeric effect on Soames, for he had never felt anything like it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... also, as she gazed at him full in the face; answering seldom, but listening with her whole soul, more and more astonished and more and more drawn towards him. What a mixture of untamed roughness and caressing childishness he was! His earnest voice, short and blunt towards others, became softer and more and more tender as he spoke to her; and for her alone he knew how to make it trill with extreme sweetness, like the music of a stringed instrument with ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... were fed on nothing but bread and water in prison." "No," said Mr. ——, "I had soup in the middle of the day, and coffee and bread at night, and in the morning." "Then why do you tell lies!" Such utter childishness, to believe every ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... a girl of to-day. I have got over all those absurd affectations of childishness which used to be thought feminine long ago. The gambols of the kitten were once thought the most attractive thing on earth, and they are very interesting: but for the full-grown cat to pretend that it is perfectly happy with a ball of worsted, when all the ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... half-ashamed of his own childishness, and crossing the stream by some boulders, he brushed away the earth and weed from the top of the great stone. Then he retraced his steps and gathered a handful of bleached twigs that the winter floods had left stranded along the margin of the stream. These ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... old fossil," she said, with a touch of bitterness in her voice. "Oh, he'll never wreck her through rashness, rest assured of that; but he's timid to childishness, and timid skippers lose just as many vessels as rash ones. Some day, Kinross will lose the Martha because there'll be only one chance and he'll be afraid to take it. I know his sort. Afraid to take advantage of a proper breeze of wind that will fetch him ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... trying to believe that it would be a snowy flower in two weeks. In two weeks my cousin Annie Ware was to be married: if my white chrysanthemums would only understand and make haste! I was childish enough to tell them so; but the childishness came of love,—of my exceeding, my unutterable love for Annie Ware; if flowers have souls, the ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... December a violent epidemic of childishness is apparent in the streets. Wagons pass, laden with gilded drums, wooden horses, playthings by the score. In the manufacturing districts, from top to bottom of the five-story buildings, former palaces of the Marais, where the shops have such lofty ceilings and stately double ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... chill of early morning, when with the approach of the sun a cold, uncomfortable sweat rises heavily from the earth and water, Jeanne had drawn one of the bearskins closely about her. Her head was bare. Her hair, glistening with damp, clung in heavy masses about her face. There was a bewitching childishness about her, a pathetic appeal to him in the forlorn little picture she made—so helpless, and yet so confident in him. Every energy in him leaped up in defiance of the revolution which for a few moments had stirred within him. And Jeanne, as though she had read the working of his mind, looked ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... I can't help it. I think I ought to know all about it,' said Nuttie gravely, putting away her childishness and sitting down by her aunt. 'I did not think so much of it when mother told me they eloped, because, though I know it was very wrong, people do do odd things sometimes when they are very much in love (she ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be a hardened nature which can be unmoved by the soft touch, the playful childishness, and the hundred ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... hast no heed of mine, To take so little of this life of thine I gave and would not see thee cast away For childishness in childhood, though it shine For me sole comfort, for my lord Locrine Chief ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... reply to any questions. One of us thereupon remarked that he was no doubt of the school of Pythagoras, and there was a shout of laughter. The new boy was thenceforth Pythagoras through all his life at the college. At the same time, Lambert's piercing eye, the scorn expressed in his face for our childishness, so far removed from the stamp of his own nature, the easy attitude he assumed, and his evident strength in proportion to his years, infused a certain respect into the veriest scamps among us. For my part, I kept near him, absorbed in ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... sixteen, well grown for her age, and dressed in coarse woolen homespun, while beneath her short skirt, appeared a pair of heavy shoes, which evidently bore very little relation to the shape of the feet within them. Her eyes were gray and frank, and the childishness, which the rest of her face was outgrowing, still lingered in the pout of ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the gallery, Madame de Maintenon, in despair, her eyes full of tears, had to make an effort not to weep. With that wit of which she is so proud, she should have been the first to laugh at this piece of childishness, which was not particularly new. The embarrassment, the torture in which I saw her, filled me with a strong desire to laugh. It was noticed; it was held a crime; and his Majesty himself was kind enough to scold me ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... informed as to their frequency and humiliating character will for a moment doubt. Upon our arrival in the city I flattered myself that such demonstrations would excite in me no sentiment more serious than pity for the childishness that prompted them; but I confess, that, after a day or two, the sneers and contortions of countenance, the angry withholding of the dress from contact with my person, and the abrupt departure from the sidewalk to the middle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... plaids, Scotch snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams, The Dee, the Don, Balgounie's brig's black wall, All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams Of what I then dreamt, clothed in their own pall, Like Banquo's offspring;—floating past me seems My childhood in this childishness of mine: I care not—'t is a glimpse ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... light much younger than Stacey thought her. She was not eighteen, but her supple and splendid figure was fully matured. Her hair hung down her back in a braid, which gave a distinct touch of childishness to her. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... girl stood and watched. The minutes lengthened interminably while the light for which she waited failed to show through the dark, until a dead white, living fear began to creep across her face—a fear that wiped the last trace of childishness ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... prisons preparing for the ordeal, had so excited him that he could not calm down. On returning home he immediately brought forth his unused diary, read some parts and made the following entry: "For two years I have kept no diary, and thought that I should never again return to this childishness. But it was no childishness, but a discourse with myself, with that true, divine I which lives in every man. All this time this I was slumbering and I had no one to discourse with. It was awakened by the extraordinary ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... in all the people from the city a certain childishness, for which she had the indulgent smile of an elderly person; but at the same time she was touched and joyously surprised by their faith, the profundity of which she began to realize more and more clearly. Their visions of the triumph of justice captivated ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... developed in myself towards him. How could he, who knew nothing at all of women, hope to manage that self-willed, eager, independent girl? Why, why, why had she engaged herself to him? I fancied that very possibly there were qualities in him—his very childishness and helplessness—which, if they only irritated an Englishman, would attract a Russian. Lame dogs find a warm home in Russia. But did she know anything about him? Would she not, in a week, be irritated by his incapacity? And he—he—bless his innocence!—was so confident as though ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... hastened her steps homeward, with lips compressed, and black, fierce eyes. Then after shutting the gate, she perhaps cast one long glance at the gang of urchins. She would have become vicious, have lapsed into fierce pariah savagery, if her childishness had not sometimes gained the mastery. Her extreme youth brought her little girlish weaknesses which relieved her. She would then cry with shame for herself and her father. She would hide herself in a stable so that she might sob to her heart's content, for she knew that, ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... indeed if he had not noticed—although always in his resigned fashion—the dull green stagnation of the life around him, or when not accepting it as part of his trouble he had not chafed at the arrested youth and senile childishness of the people. Stranger still if he had not at times been startled to hear the outgrown superstitions and follies of his youth voiced again by grown-up men, and perhaps strangest of all if he had not vaguely accepted it all as the hereditary curse of that barbarism under which ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of royal dignity with pure childishness is a unique subject for art, and one which few have had the genius to portray. Two great painters are famous in history for their remarkable success in this line of work,—Van Dyck, of ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... humble meal shared together! But what if there be no bread in the cupboard? The innocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a man's poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none of the least frightful features in that condition, that there is no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not bring up their children; they drag them up. The little careless darling of the wealthier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a premature reflecting person. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... so, in the contrary extreme, when it is buoyed up by folly, it becomes incapable of exerting them, and dwindles into imbecility. It is impossible that a mind employed upon ribbands and titles can ever be great. The childishness of the objects consumes ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Miacca, in which "little Tommy couldn't always be good and one day went round the corner," is a giant tale which could be used with young children because it is full of delightful humor. Because of the simplicity of Tommy's language and his sweet childishness it appeals to the child's desire to identify himself with the character. Tommy is so clever and inventive and his lively surprises so brimful of fun that the final effect ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... and I followed; but, just as his hand was on the knocker of the door, the Emperor came out. It was then already broad daylight, and the Prince informed him of our anxiety, and the reflections we had made upon his rashness. "What childishness!" said his Majesty; "what is there to fear? Wherever I am, am I ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... like thee commit themselves to acts contaminating alike body, speech, and heart, and destructive of virtue? Thou knowest not what virtue is, neither hast thou taken council of the wise. And therefore it is that from ignorance, and childishness thou destroyest the lower animals. Say, who art thou, and what for hast thou come to the forest devoid of humanity and human beings? And, O foremost of men, tell thou also, whither thou wilt go to-day. Further it is impossible to proceed. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... blue sky, Daniel, and the white, white snow, and did you see the little snow-birds, whirling by like brown leaves?" Mrs. Francis asked with an air of great childishness. ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... observant of recent comings and goings, was standing at the door of the shop, and missed no item of this dumb show. He raised both hands in silent condemnation of Elkin's childishness, whereupon the horse-dealer jerked a thumb toward Grant's retreating figure, and went through a rapid pantomime of the hanging process. His crony disapproved again, and went in. Now, both those men were on the jury ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... The sketches of Bret Harte, Hayes, and Miller have not exhausted this field by any means. It is interesting to note the extremes possible in one and the same character: harshness and gentleness, manliness and childishness, apathy and fierce endeavor. Men who, twenty years ago, would not cease their shoveling to save their lives, now play in the streets with children. Their long, Micawber-like waiting after the exhaustion of the placers has brought on an exaggerated form of dotage. I heard a group of brawny ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... with a fancy, gained after one accidental interview, that nevertheless, considering his tastes and traits, Sophia's child should have been a girl. Later, as Ivan began to emerge a little from utter childishness, his father had resorted occasionally to his school-room to search the little dweller there for certain longed-for signs of temperament. Not finding them, he once more put his son away, this time furiously raging that he should have been given a Blashkov heir. Nevertheless, because Ivan was his all, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in his making her a long speech, in which he said a good deal of his own justice and forbearance, and something also of her frivolity and childishness. He told her that his only complaint of her was that she was too young, and, as he did so, she made a little grimace,—not to him, but to herself, as though saying to herself that that was all he knew about it. He did not notice it, or, if he did, his notice did not ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... many questions which pressed for a solution, but for which my friends at Oxford seemed either indifferent or unprepared. My practical religion was what I had learnt from my mother; that remained unshaken in all storms, and in its extreme simplicity and childishness answered all the purposes for which religion is meant. Then followed, in the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, the purely historical and scientific treatment of religion, which, while it explained many things and destroyed many things, never interfered with my early ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... sand-hills sometimes seemed lonely and bare. He often found himself trying to reconstruct, from the grave features of Charles, the little boy whom he but dimly remembered in the past, and of whom lately he had been thinking a great deal. He believed this to be a sign of impending old age and childishness; but coming, one day, in his formal drawing-room, upon a child of one of the servants, who had strayed therein, he would have taken him in his arms, but the child fled from before his grizzled face. So that it seemed eminently ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is totally absent. Those who care for the delicately poised balance of classical taste, for wit and brilliance of dialogue, will be disconcerted by childishness or fierce passion. It is an abrupt literature, but spontaneous and sincere, which has not been spoilt by formalism and scepticism, but which has not acquired, from a purely technical point of view, the perfection of the French. Having remained inarticulate during ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... Spectacles on Nose, and Pouch on Side; His youthful Hose, well sav'd, a world too wide For his shrunk Shank; and his big manly Voice Turning again tow'rd childish treble Pipes, And Whistles in his Sound. Last Scene of all, That ends this strange eventful History, Is second Childishness and meer Oblivion, Sans Teeth, sans ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... Caesar went to Egypt; but in Egypt sixteen is a riper age than it is in England. The childishness I have ascribed to her, as far as it is childishness of character and not lack of experience, is not a matter of years. It may be observed in our own climate at the present day in many women of fifty. It is a mistake to suppose that the difference ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... and contrasts occur so frequently in the same man, on the other side of the Rhine, that anything less than all the quotations which we have given would have been insufficient to place before our readers a true idea of that character made up of artlessness and reason, childishness and strength, depression and enthusiasm, material details and poetic ideas, which renders Sand a man incomprehensible to us. We will now continue the portrait, which still wants a few ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... publishing the secret of his amour elicited from Kamehameha only the sarcastic remark, "Couldn't he eat his food and keep his mouth shut?" The lady herself took the same view of his action. There was no evasion in her reply; her only reproach was for his childishness in blabbing. ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... prices, and while they wrangled the goods became unsalable. Again, Gobseck had refused free delivery of his silver-plate, and declined to guarantee the weights of his coffees. There had been a dispute over each article, the first indication in Gobseck of the childishness and incomprehensible obstinacy of age, a condition of mind reached at last by all men in whom a strong passion survives ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... protected without the intervention of lawyers. The outside world to them was a world of pretty, laughing, ignorant children; and lawyers were the parents, guardians, pastors, and masters by whom the children should be protected from the evils incident to their childishness. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly, but to herself—to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... today with all the Pandavas. For, O Krishna, the sons of Pandu also, who disregarding the claims of all these kings, have worshipped thee who art no king, deserve to be slain by me along with thee. Even this is my opinion, O Krishna, that they who from childishness have worshipped thee, as if thou deservest it, although thou art unworthy of worship, being only a slave and a wretch and no king, deserve to be slain by me.' Having said this, that tiger among kings stood there roaring in anger. And after Sisupala had ceased, Krishna addressing all the kings ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Catharine learned, by long acquaintance with this people, that an outward manifestation of surprise [FN: See Appendix L.] is considered a want of etiquette and good breeding, or rather a proof of weakness and childishness. The women, like other females, are certainly less disposed to repress this feeling of inquisitiveness than the men, and one of their great sources of amusement, when Catharine was among them, was examining the difference of texture and colour of her skin ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill |
