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Gape   /geɪp/   Listen
Gape

verb
(past & past part. gaped; pres. part. gaping)
1.
Look with amazement; look stupidly.  Synonyms: gawk, gawp, goggle.
2.
Be wide open.  Synonyms: yaw, yawn.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Gape" Quotes from Famous Books



... rock, hollowed into caverns underneath, by the insidious beating of the trade wind waves. The chiseled doorways to those caves are rare specimens of Nature's mysterious work; some large, some small and of queer, fantastic shapes; that black-mouthed gape at chance passers, while towering high above, a roof of table land—arid, scorching pampas, is just as uninviting as the water way below. So desolate is that part of the coast that it is but little known. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... disputation. I could put the question in such a form as would bring the million to agree with me. Look, for instance, at the execution of a criminal. See the thousands that will assemble, day after day, after travelling miles for that single object, to gape and gaze upon the last agonizing pangs and paroxsyms of a fellow-creature—not regarding for an instant the fatigue of their position, the press of the crowd, or the loss of a dinner—totally insusceptible, it would seem, of the several influences of heat and cold, wind ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... state to my countrymen your explanation of a circumstance which has frequently caused them great perplexity. Oh! the English are a clever people, and have a deep meaning in all they do. What a vision of deep policy opens itself to my view! they do not send their fool to Vienna in order to gape at processions, and to bow and scrape at a base Papist court, but to drink at the great dinners the celebrated Tokay of Hungary, which the Hungarians, though they do not drink it, are very proud of, and by doing so to intimate the sympathy ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... full proportion and shape of an Estrich. On the breast of the horse were the forepartes of this greedie birde aduaunced, whence as his manner is, hee reacht out his long necke to the raines of the bridle, thinking they had beene yron, and styll seemed to gape after the golden bit, and euer as the courser dyd rayse or curuet, to haue swallowed it halfe in. His winges, which hee neuer vseth but running, beeing spreaded full sayle, made his lustie steede as proude vnder him as he had beene some other Pegasus, and so quieueringly and tenderly ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... the neophyte, was the pleasantest part of the evening. He seemed to hear of everything that was going on in London, and a good deal more besides. He was behind the scenes of all the commercial, social and political performances which were causing the vulgar crowd to gape. He discovered the true history of the hostility shown by So-and-so to the premier; he was told the little scandal which caused Her Majesty to refuse to knight a certain gentleman who had claims on the government; he heard what the duke really did offer to the gamekeeper whose ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... proud of her knowledge. This soon brought all the faire into a crowd to stare at the queen. Being thus discovered, they as soon as they could got to their horses; but as many of the faire as had horses, got up with their wives, children, sweetharts, or neighbours behind them, to get as much gape as they could till they brought them to the court gate. Thus by ill conduct was a merry frolick ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... a hill, and as soon as you pass along its green channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road, if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical in effect: it always reminds us of a ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... on dogs; citizens stand and gape, people come running up, others walk quietly to and fro, others play all sorts of pranks, ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... spear, And foaming torrents leapt, as he drew near The sandy slopes of Nigg. He climbed and ran Till high above Dunskaith he stood to scan The outer ocean for the Viking ships, Peering below his hand, with panting lips A-gape, but wide and empty lay the sea Beyond the barrier crags of Cromarty, To the far sky-line lying blue and bare— For no red pirate sought as yet to dare The gloomy hazards of the fitful seas, The gusty terrors, and the treacheries Of fickle April and its changing ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... thing is to see our steps as we take them—to understand them as we go. That, no doubt, I shall always do. I needn't be afraid of becoming too pliable; isn't it my fault that I'm not pliable enough?" It is said that imitation is the sincerest flattery; and if Isabel was sometimes moved to gape at her friend aspiringly and despairingly it was not so much because she desired herself to shine as because she wished to hold up the lamp for Madame Merle. She liked her extremely, but was even more ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... things and effects in Nature are not without charm and beauty, as the little cracks in the crust of a loaf, though not intended by the baker, are agreeable and invite the appetite. Thus figs, when they are ripest, open and gape; and olives, when they are near decaying, are peculiarly attractive. The bending of an ear of corn, the frown of a lion, the foam of a boar, and many other like things, if you take them singly, are far from beautiful; but seen in their ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... yesterday, he had been able to make neither head nor tail of it, and seeing lights in the house, he had just dropped in for a glass of porter—and at this point he became aware of the third person. Archie saw the cod's mouth and the blunt lips of Glenkindie gape at him for a moment, and the recognition ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a fish of the herring family, easily distinguished by its deeply-cleft mouth, the angle of the gape being behind the eyes. The pointed snout extends beyond the lower jaw. The fish resembles a sprat in having a forked tail and a single dorsal fin, but the body is round and slender. The maximum length is 8 1/8 in. Anchovies are abundant in the Mediterranean, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... of gorging the operatives with turkey and sheathing their offspring in red mittens? It was just like the end of a story-book with a pretty moral, and Amherst was in the mood to be as much taken by the tinsel as the youngest mill-baby held up to gape ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... little Bethel to faint with its crude "superstitions" and absence of meaningless and stupid dogma yet its grip of spiritual things and Divine Aid would make the ordinary "go to meeting" Christian gape with astonishment. The soldier's simple faith, his willing endurance, his quiet heroisms, his silent self-sacrifice, though they call for no louder name than duty, are just those chords which link him to the Great Heroism which saw its culmination in Calvary. After all, deeds only are ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... taken down. The windows gape into the darkness outside. The furniture has been covered in brown loose-covers and pulled forward. The flowers have been taken away, and the large black stove lit. The MOTHER is standing ironing white curtains by the light of a single lamp. There ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... alive With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit, —You touch the strange lumps, And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... are but base. A scarfe of maiden-blush did seeme to hide her, Wherein Diana when Acteon spide her, Herselfe had wrought, looking with such disdaine, As witnest well his after-following paine; One end whereof had yong Leanders shape, When through the swelling main (whose waues did gape) He sought his chastest Hero, beating from him The waues, which murmuring stroue for to com nere him: And at the other, matchlesse Hero stood Viewing Leander tossed by the flood, And how the ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale

... advice yo want, poor things, An' cannot do withaat it, Go arm yorseln to th' teeth, he sed, An' doant be long abaat it; Both rakes an' powls an' props an' ropes Yo cannot get ta sooin, An' take the Cowinheaders' plan When thay discovered th' mooin. Doant gape abaat, but when arm'd Tak each a different rowt, An' let yor cry be ivery man, Th' poor ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... had counted them. For they actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had decided that they must be. What can the fitness of things mean, if not their fitness to a man's expectations? Failing this, absurdity and atheism gape behind him. The collapse for Fred was severe when he found that he held no more than five twenties, and his share in the higher education of this country did not seem to help him. Nevertheless he said, with rapid changes ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... drawn from Nisa downe with Tigers, Curbing with viny rains their wilful heads Whilst some doe gape upon his Ivy Thirse, Some on the dangling grapes that crowne his head, All praise his beautie and continuing youth; So strooke amased India with wonder As Neroes glories did the Greekish townes, Elis ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... gape of the formidable Gulf, the waves increased in size, and coursed to all directions, as if distorted by the sunken reefs. The eastern jamb is formed by Trn Island; the western by the sandy Ras Nasrni, whose glaring tawny slope is dotted with ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the ears of corn bending down, and the lion's eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, and many other things,—though they are far ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... contemporary multitude. It is huge and good-natured and common. It likes big, unmistakable, knock-down effects; it likes to get its money back in palpable, computable change. It's in a tremendous hurry, squeezed together, with a sort of generalized gape, and the last thing it expects of you is that you will spin things fine. You can't portray a character, alas, or even, vividly, any sort of human figure, unless, in some degree, you do that. Therefore the theatre, inevitably accommodating itself, will ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James

... cut him short. "Ben, get the Matron, quick, and get a bed ready with warm blankets and hot water bottles. Go, man! Don't gape there!" ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... Osbaldistone," he said, "and we claim the refuge and protection of your roof till we can pursue a journey where dungeons and death gape ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... all those things go, do they not gape, and even with open mouth fix their eyes fast on her; and have not all men more desire unto her than unto silver or gold, or any ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous

... visioned Life as it might be, And from his dream forthright a picture grew, A painting all the people thronged to see, And joyed therein — till came the Man Who Knew, Saying: "'Tis bad! Why do ye gape, ye fools! He painteth not according ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... Woolcomb has observed a huge wound of the arm from which hemorrhage was similarly absent. Later observations have shown that in this accident absence of hemorrhage is the rule and not the exception. The wound is generally lacerated and contused and the mouths of the vessels do not gape, but are twisted and crushed. The skin usually separates at the highest point and the muscles protrude, appearing to be tightly embraced and almost strangulated by the skin, and also by the tendons, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... too much amazed to do aught but gape from each other to the dark window. We could now see the outlines ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... an immense, dilapidated shoe, patched and broken. The toe was about to gape open, though it was held here and there by a few threads. The laces were gone and the whole upper sprawled shapelessly. In brief, it was precisely like any old shoe you will see on a vacant lot, save for its ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge

... Saint George, our patron saint, 'twas a touching sight to see That iron warrior gently place the Princess on his knee; To hear him hush her infant fears, and teach her how to gape With rosy mouth expectant for ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... haunts, the waves beneath Sits the grim monarch of insatiate Death; The shark rapacious with descending blow Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below; The crawling crocodiles, beneath that move, Arrest with rising jaw the tribes above; 60 With monstrous gape sepulchral whales devour Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour. —Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish'd day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd, And one great Slaughter-house the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... Icteridae and Mniotiltidae—whence it may be perhaps inferred that the Emberizidae are of Transatlantic origin. The buntings generally may be also outwardly distinguished from the finches by their angular gape, the posterior portion of which is greatly deflected; and most of the Old-World forms, together with some of those of the New World, have a bony knob on the palate—a swollen outgrowth of the dentary edges of the bill. Correlated with this peculiarity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... denying that the procession looked strange. File clerks and receptionists stopped their work to gape at the four bedizened walkers and their plainly dressed satellites. Malone needed no telepathic talent to tell what they ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett

... for what he saw in her face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James

... Mr. Dockwrath found that the party was swelled to the number of eight, five other undoubted commercials having brought themselves to anchor at the Bull Inn during the day. To all of these, Mr. Kantwise introduced him. "Mr. Gape, Mr. Dockwrath," said he, gracefully moving towards them the palm of his hand, and eyeing them over his shoulder. "Mr. Gape is in the stationery line," he added, in a whisper to the attorney, "and does for Cumming and Jibber of St. Paul's Churchyard. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... has his orders. Manuel has made a song already. And do you know its burden, Senor? Killing is its burden. I would the devil had all these Improvisadores. They gape round him while he twangs and screeches, the wind-bag! And he knows what words to sing to them, too. He has ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... in a torrent of curses. He shrieked imprecation upon Burgess, Troke, and North. He cursed all soldiers for tyrants, all parsons for hypocrites. He blasphemed his God and his Saviour. With a frightful outpouring of obscenity and blasphemy, he called on the earth to gape and swallow his persecutors, for Heaven to open and rain fire upon them, for hell to yawn and engulf them quick. It was as though each blow of the cat forced out of him a fresh burst of beast-like rage. He ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... sing our 'Te Deum' or our 'Nunc Dimittis' in almost the same words. We are both of a carefully selected breed and of a diminished usefulness. But because of our high position we are fed and housed not merely in comfort but in luxury; and wherever we go crowds stand to gape at us and applaud when we nod our heads at them. We live always in the purlieus of palaces, and never have we known what it is to throw up our heels in a green pasture, nor in our old age are we turned out ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... she failed in having what she longed for now, while she still retained the glow of her Indian summer, she believed she would have nothing more at all, that all would be finally over for her, that the black gulf would gape for her and that she would vanish into it for ever. She was a desperate woman, beneath her mask of smiling calm, when the Loulia set sail and glided into the path of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... chances that he may be a man who knows nothing, and quite ignorant of how to deal with such souls, ends by unsettling them while he consoles them. Again, if demoniac attacks, so common in nunneries, occur, the poor man can only gape, gives all sorts of confused counsel, and hinders the energy of the abbess, who in such matters ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... expecting him every moment; he came near, and swallowed us up at once, ship and all; he did not, however, crush us with his teeth, for the vessel luckily slipped through one of the interstices; when we were got in, for some time it was dark, and we could see nothing; but the whale happening to gape, we beheld a large space big enough to hold a city with ten thousand men in it; in the middle were a great number of small fish, several animals cut in pieces, sails and anchors of ships, men's bones, and all kinds of merchandise; there was likewise a good quantity of land and hills, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian

... face the garment of rebellion With some fine colour, that may please the eye Of fickle changelings, and poor discontents, Which gape and rub the elbow at the news Of hurlyburly ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... Queen Mary, Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape The Cross's rigorous austerity, Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape. ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson

... any essential part of it, the ruin of the whole, or nearly of the whole, was, at some time or other, a certainty. For that reason I honor and shall forever honor and love you, and those who first caused it to stagger, crack, and gape. Others may finish; the beginners have the glory; and, take what part you please at this hour, (I think you will take the best,) your first services will never be forgotten by a grateful country. Adieu! Present my best regards to those I know,—and as many as I know in our country I honor. There ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... of orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances and the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sights that the pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel, what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats and haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about the packed tables in the restaurant! It is not easy for civilians to get to Chalons, and ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... three distinct species of worms (called the oyster-worm,) half an inch long, found in oysters, which shine in the dark like glow-worms. The sea-star, cockles, and muscles, are the great enemies of the oyster. The first gets within the shell when they gape, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various

... lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in front ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... based on several facts. In the first place, a wound inflicted on a living body gapes rather widely, owing to the retraction of the living skin. The skin of a dead body does not retract, and the wound, consequently, does not gape. This wound gaped very slightly, showing that death was recent, I should say, within half an hour. Then a wound on the living body becomes filled with blood, and blood is shed freely on the clothing. But the wound on the deceased contained only a little blood-clot. There was hardly ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... along and William, high up on the driver's seat, the reins held with ostentatious carelessness in one hand, the whip poised lightly in the other was in the seventh heaven of bliss. He was driving a caravan. He was driving a caravan. He was driving a caravan. The very telegraph posts seemed to gape with envy and admiration as he passed. What ultimately he was going to do with his caravan he neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was, it was a bright sunny morning, and all the others were in school, and ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton

... they are athirst being at a Hondrew's House, they may take his Pot, which hath a Pipe to it, and pour the Water into their mouths themselves: which none other of these inferior degrees may be admitted to do: but they must hold their hands to their mouths and gape, and the Hondrews themselves will pour the Water in. The Potters were at first denied this Honour, upon which they joyntly agreed to make Pots with Pipes only for themselves, and would sell none to the Hondrews ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... of them for the purpose of deception. She persuades him that a thing costs so much because he would kick up a row if its price were higher. And she always extricates herself from the difficulty cunningly by a means so simple and so sly that we gape with amazement when by chance we discover them. We say to ourselves in a stupefied state of mind 'How is it we did not see ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... touch them with a beechen bough. Since also Euphorion writes that in the isle of Samos, before Juno's temple was built there, he has seen some beasts called neades, whose voice made the neighbouring places gape and sink into a chasm and abyss. In short, since elders grow of a more pleasing sound, and fitter to make flutes, in such places where the crowing of cocks is not heard, as the ancient sages have writ and Theophrastus relates; as if the crowing ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... into a corner, and sprawled upon a chair before the stove, at which his devoted mother was already blowing her breath away in the endeavor to kindle a blaze. She stopped blowing to gape at his good news, turning up at him her low, skinny forehead, narrow nose, ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge

... good; but still, the picture as a whole, The values,—Pah! He never painted worse; Perhaps because his fire was lacking coal, His cupboard bare, no money in his purse. Perhaps . . . they say he labored hard and long, And see now, in the harvest of his fame, When round his pictures people gape and throng, A scurvy dealer sells this on his name. A wretched rag, wrung out of want and woe; A soulless daub, not David Strong a bit, Unworthy of his art. . . . How should I know? How should I know? ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... abstain from yawning, especially while with any one, or in conversation. For it is a plain sign of a certain dislike of those with whom you dwell. If you cannot keep from yawning, at least be careful not to speak while doing so, and not to gape excessively; press your mouth adroitly or n turning a little from ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway

... Cham. Gape, earth, and swallow me to quick destruction, If I forgive your house! Ye've overpower'd me now! But, hear me, heav'n!—Ah! here's a scene of death! My sister, my Monimia, breathless!——Now, Ye powers above, if ye have ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway

... soon as she was clear of the ship she was brought to the wind, under an enormous spread of exquisitely cut canvas, and away she went, close-hauled on the port tack, heading to the northward at a pace which made us gape with astonishment; while the ship, with squared yards, gathered stern-way and first fell broadside-on to us, then gradually paid off until she was before the wind, when down she came driving toward us, yawing ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... full of curtsies, as if I had been her godmother. The truth on't is, I did endeavour to make her look like a Christian—and she was sensible of it, for she thanked me, and gave me two apples, piping hot, out of her under- petticoat pocket. Ha, ha, ha: and t'other did so stare and gape, I fancied her like the front of her father's hall; her eyes were the two jut-windows, and her mouth the great door, most hospitably kept open for the entertainment ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve

... dresses; And by some devilish cantrip[78] slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light, By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table A murderer's banes in gibbet airns;[79] Twa span-lang, wee unchristened bairns; A thief new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab[80] did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars wi' murder crusted; A garter which a babe had strangled; A knife a father's throat had mangled, Whom his ain son o' life bereft— The gray hairs yet stack to the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... gateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its walls the eyeloops for arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers. Masses of building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of what once were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn cellars; mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure habitations. Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns the meaning of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... but think with yourself, with what a sting we read Plato's "Atlantic" and the conclusion of the "Iliad," and how we hanker and gape after the rest of the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for the sake of knowing. And the darkest and grimmest ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... large department store was reached and Mrs. Bobbsey let Freddie and Flossie take their time in looking into the several windows. One was full of dolls, which made the little girl gape ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope

... live in. Things turn out in a very odd manner. Every day produces something more wonderful than another. Earthquakes, murders, conflagrations, inundations, jubilees, operas, marriages, and pestilence, unite to make mortal men gape and stare. But your last letter and mine being wrote on the same day, astonishes me still more than all these things ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... shape sufficiently differing from those of a blew Fly, though indeed they seem to be both the same kind of Organ, and to serve for a kind of smelling; beyond these were two indented jaws DD, which he open'd side-wayes, and was able to gape them asunder very wide; and the ends of them being armed with teeth, which meeting went between each other, it was able to grasp and hold a heavy body, three or four times the bulk and weight of its own body: It had only six legs, shap'd like those of a Fly, which, as I shewed before, is an ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... brother!" Now looking on him as he stood all bowed and shaking, I saw that he was suddenly become an old man; his twisted frame seemed shrunken, while spade and mattock shook and rattled in his palsied hands. "Come, lad, come!" cried he querulously. "Why d'ye gape—bring along the body; 'tis nought else! Ah, God, how still now, she that was so full o' life! Bring her along to high water-mark and tenderly, friend, ah, tenderly, up wi' her to your heart!" So I did as he bade and followed Resolution's bowed and limping form till he paused well above where any ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... you was by a real templar saved, Is it the less a miracle? The greatest Of all is this, that true and real wonders Should happen so perpetually, so daily. Without this universal miracle A thinking man had scarcely called those such, Which only children, Recha, ought to name so, Who love to gape and stare at the unusual And hunt for ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

... yawning, or weary of it; but if the preacher—pardon my mistake, I would have said declaimer—as too often it happens, fall but into an old wives' story, they're presently awake, prick up their ears and gape after it. In like manner, if there be any poetical saint, or one of whom there goes more stories than ordinary, as for example, a George, a Christopher, or a Barbara, you shall see him more religiously worshiped than Peter, ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus

... conflict round the hero dead, And heaps on heaps by mutual wounds they bled. "Cursed be the man (even private Greeks would say) Who dares desert this well-disputed day! First may the cleaving earth before our eyes Gape wide, and drink our blood for sacrifice; First perish all, ere haughty Troy shall boast We lost ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... well, and she, therefore, divides everything among them, so that each has a bit in turn, and while she feeds them she begs the rest to be as patient as they can, and not flutter, and chirrup, and gape so widely, and above all things, to mind they do not tumble, or push each other, over ...
— The Goat and Her Kid • Harriet Myrtle

... of them all that is whole; their lips gape open for breath; They are clothed with sickness of soul, and the shape of the shadow ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn

... father himself could not well brook to hear the girl blamed, and both he and Humfrey could not help treating her with a kind of deference that made the younger brothers gape and wonder what had come to Humfrey on his travels "to make him treat our Cis as a ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the lazy sluttish beast lounging over the kitchen bench and doing nothing but gape through the window-panes at his boats, which lay down by the bridge laden with train-oil, he was downright furious. "Pack yourself off this instant!" ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie

... Bertram begins his incantations, recalling the erring nuns from the dead. Very slowly the tombs in the cloister open, and dim grey figures, barely visible in the darkness, creep silently out from the graves. Bertram waves his arms over the cloister-garth, and there, too, the tombs gape apart, and more shadowy spectres emerge. Soon the stage is full of these faint grey spectral forms. Bertram lifts his arms. The wicked nuns throw off their grey wrappers, and appear glittering in scarlet and gold; the ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... Soft as the nursling's nigh the grandsire's tomb That fell on sleep, a bird of rifled nest; Soft as the lips whose smile unsaid the doom That gave their sire to violent death's arrest. Even for such love's sake strong, Wrath fires the inveterate song That bids hell gape for one whose bland mouth blest All slayers and liars that sighed Prayer as they slew and lied Till blood had clothed his priesthood as a vest, And hears, though darkness yet be dumb, The silence of the trumpet of the ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... us out into the great hazardous unknown; the very folk who stand there in their fishing-boats and look wonderingly after the Fram as she slowly and heavily steams along on her northward course. Many of them wave their sou'-westers and shout "Hurrah!" Others have barely time to gape at us in wonderment. In on the point are a troop of women waving and shouting; outside a few boats with ladies in light summer-dresses, and gentlemen at the oars entertaining them with small-talk as they wave their parasols and pocket-handkerchiefs. ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... gaping mouths shrieked a shrill and hungry welcome. Then, back again—swift as an arrow from the archer's bow—noting, with bright eye, and head turned sidewise, that the hand resting on the coping had moved nearer; yet brave to take all risks for the sake of those yellow beaks, which would gape wide, in expectation, at sound of the beat of ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay

... shrieked the exquisite. 'S'death, sir! This toucheth mine honour very nearly! I have seen blood flow, yes, sir, and wounds gape on ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... to the divell: yea more earnestly he praied unto God never to forgive his soule than manie Christians doo to save theyr soules. These fearfull ceremonies brought to an end, I bad him ope his mouth and gape wide. He did so: as what wil not slaves doo for feare? Therwith made I no more adoo, but shot him ful into the throat with my pistol: no more spake he after; so did I shoote him that hee might never ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand

... counsels that he cease to sin against the Gods in the pride of his heart. And do thou that art his mother go to thy house, and take from it such apparel as is seemly, and go to meet thy son, for the many rents that he hath made for grief gape in his garments about him. Comfort him also with gentle words; for I know that 'tis thy voice only that he will hear. And to you old men, farewell; and live happily while ye may, for there is no profit of wealth in the grave whither ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church

... to and fro round the wheels of his carriage, whistling briskly, could only gape when he heard these words; while Arkady coolly pulled his luggage out of the carriage, took his seat beside Bazarov, and bowing politely to his former fellow-traveller, he called, 'Whip up!' The coach rolled away, and was soon out ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... could suggest any thing to suit, they all sat silent a few minutes. Suddenly Ned said, rather crossly, "I wish my shadow wouldn't mock me. Every time I stretch or gape it does the same, and I ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott

... you, I warned you. I left you alone for ten weeks; but could that make you doubt it was coming? Not for worlds, not for millions, shall you give yourself to that roaring crowd. Don't ask me to care for them, or for any one! What do they care for you but to gape and grin and babble? You are mine, you are ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... Cinque ace! well, curse it! the same throw over again! 'Tis too bad. I missed taking you last time, with that stupid blot you've covered—and now, by Jove, it ruins me. There's no playing when fellows are getting up every minute to gape after doctors' coaches, and leaving the door open—hang it, I've lost the game by it—gammoned twice already. 'Tis very pleasant. I only wish when gentlemen interrupt play, they'd be good ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... always enough of silly coxcombs, young and old, of high degree, to be allured by the siren smiles of his "Countess;" and dupes of both sexes everywhere, to swallow his yarns and gape at his juggleries. In the course of his rambles, he paid a visit to his great brother humbug, the Count of St. Germain, in Westphalia, or Schleswig, and it was not long afterward that he began to publish to ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... afternoon air was making him dull and inclined to gape, Captain Jack turned back from the beach. He sauntered along the road, and was about to cross it, when he heard a sharp snap. It was like a ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham

... a sword," he said. When the eagle had swallowed the twelve oxen she asked the soldier to kill one more for victuals on the journey. "Every time I gape you must be quick and fling a piece into my mouth," she said, "else I shall not be able to carry you ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen

... began Jo, who dearly loved to tell stories. "I was reading that everlasting Belsham, and droning away as I always do, for Aunt soon drops off, and then I take out some nice book, and read like fury till she wakes up. I actually made myself sleepy, and before she began to nod, I gave such a gape that she asked me what I meant by opening my mouth wide enough to take the ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... 'tis gone: and see, where God Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows! Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, And hide me from the heavy wrath of God! No, no! Then will I headlong run into the earth: Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me! You stars that reign'd at my nativity, Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist. Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud[s], That, when you[173] vomit forth into the air, My limbs may issue from ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe

... Chases were off—in a cab engaged by Max, in deference to Sally's wishes. Neil and Dorothy took a jocose farewell, the one declaring that their presence had stretched the apartment till it could be seen to gape at the seams, the other vowing that Sally must come to see her soon, in order to be able to take a full breath again. Then the ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond

... of death, the jaws Of hell against us gape. Who from peril dire as this Openeth us escape? 'Tis thou, O Lord, alone! Our bitter suffering and our sin Pity from thy mercy win, Holy Lord and God! Strong and holy God! Merciful and holy Saviour! Eternal God! Let us not ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... proud maid, for the grave doth gape, And strangely altered reflects thy shape; No dainty charms it doth disclose, Death will ravish thy beauty's rose; And all the rest will leave to thee When dug thy ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise

... and death over their slaves, and all low-born plebeians. They flay men alive, both piecemeal, and by stripping off the whole skin. No servant while waiting on them, or standing at their table, may gape, speak, or spit, so that their ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... yourself and for those like-minded with you. Sweet indeed is the community of interest, delightful the intercourse which a common foible begets; but correspondingly bitter and distressful is the forced union of nervous zeal and pitiless indifference. Spare us the so-called friends who come and gape and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin—the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer madness to ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... their disgrace. They both felt the reproach. How were they better than the rest of the neighborhood, who were content to gossip and gape and take the fortunes of the Tristrams as mere ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... wild words said, low drooped her head, and Ranulph's life-blood froze, For the earth did gape, as an awful shape from out its depths arose: "Thy prayer is heard, Hell hath concurred," cried the fiend, "thy soul is mine! Like fate may dread each dame shall wed with Ranulph ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... foot most light, Who are in the height now of your spring, Fly, fly, and ye will make us gape, If ye can scape ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... to him. What now? Od rot you, Antony, you'll see no money this month, you—" She became unprintable. As she took breath again, she saw Harry Boyce calmly contemplative. "You dog, who bade you stand and gape? Go, give a ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey

... railway terminus. Here we take up again the thread of the Route Thermale, dropped for the visit to Cauterets; and trend again up into a mountain valley, the Viscos now on the right. The valley soon becomes a gorge in its turn, but the sides gape more widely and the incline of the road is slighter than of the one we have left. At times the horses can trot without interruption. It is an aggressive, inquiring road, is the Route Thermale, and thinks nothing of heights and depths nor of stepping across the Gave to better its condition. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... all my assumed levity. O that I had, at this instant, dared to be myself! But my fear of ridicule was greater than my fear of vice. 'Bless me, my dear Lady Delacour,' whispered Harriot, as we left this house, 'what can make you in such a desperate hurry to get home? You gape and fidget: one would think you had never sat up a night before in your life. I verily believe you are afraid to trust yourself with us. Which of us are you afraid of, Lawless, or me, or yourself?' There was a tone of contempt in the last words ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... and eventually came to his distinguished descendant, Sir Joseph Banks; and on his death some of the Mareham land passed to the ancestors of the present Sir Henry M. Hawley. Other proprietors are now Major Gape, Messrs. J. R. Chapman, Joseph Lake, and ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... inside, and then the lead they pumped into the wrecked door was scandalous. Another panel fell in and Hopalong's "C" was destroyed. A wide crack appeared in the one above it and grew rapidly. Its mate began to gape and finally both were driven in. The increase in the light caused by these openings allowed Red and Lanky to secure better aim and soon the fire of the defenders ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford

... was rather more amusing than I expected. Martha liked it very much, and I did not gape till the last quarter of an hour. It was past nine before we were sent for, and not twelve when we returned. The room ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh

... earth Which men do gape for till thou cram'st their mouths And choak'st their throats for dust: O charme thy breast And let me sinke into thee. Look who knocks; Andrugio calls. But O, she's deafe and blinde. A wretch but leane relief on earth ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... smile). Hm! (To FINN.) Tell me—is there any way of leaving the castle but by the gate? Gape not at me so! I mean—can one escape from Ostrat unseen, while the castle ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen

... of the women were nearing. Some of the bent heads were lifted as we approached. Here and there a coif, or cotton cap, nodded, and the slit of a smile would gape between the nose and the meeting chin. A high good humor appeared to reign among the groups; a carnival of merriment laughed itself out in coarse, cracked laughter; loud was the play of the jests, hoarse and guttural the gibes that were abroad on the still ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... another! And here is a puzzle, for some of them have great big bodies, but small heads and tiny mouths; others have bodies like ribbons, but large heads and huge mouths, and some are such gluttons that they swallow fish twice their own size! This sounds absurd, but it is true. Their mouths gape open like trap-doors, and their stomachs are made to stretch, to hold their huge meals! There are other terrors of the deep with such big teeth that they cannot shut their mouths. No doubt the sea holds yet other weird fish ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith

... gate's in view, The cross looms dismal on the ground— The eager crowd gape murmuring round. His friend is bound the cross unto. . . . Crowd—guards—all bursts he breathless through: "Me! Doomsman, me!" he shouts, "alone! His life ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern and heath. Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like guardian serpents. In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to gape. In the shadow it looked a gnome world—a gnome or a dragon world. Then upon ledge or bank showed bells or disks or petaled suns of June flowers, rose and golden, white and azure, while overhead was heard the evening song of birds alike calm and merry, and through a cleft in the hills poured the ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... been told about these nomads and the whole population turned out to gape and wonder at them. Jeremiah directed them to the Temple, and hundreds of people ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman

... and the overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and manners. We long to take him by the hand and show him finer lights—eyes of but meaner range, after all, being adequate to the gape at the vertical business blocks and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We feel in a manner his sensibility wasted and would fain turn it on to the capture of deeper meanings. But we must leave him to himself and to youth's facility ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... plaine his wound smoothly with a sharpe knife: that done, cleaue him cleanly in the middle with a cleauer, and a knocke or mall, and with a wedge of wood, Iron or Bone, two handfull long at least, put into the middle of that clift, with the same knocke, make the wound gape a straw bredth wide, into which ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson

... wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell

... daily work over, of making pills and potions for his Majesty's unfortunate subjects, took to the trick of mounting a human skull, like that, upon springs, so that it could open its mouth, and setting it on a stand at the end of the counter, could make it gape, and turn from side to ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... in the unmeasured seas, The arms of men, and painted boards, and Trojan treasuries. And now Ilioneus' stout ship, her that Achates leal 120 And Abas ferried o'er the main, and old Aletes' keel The storm hath overcome; and all must drink the baneful stream Through opening leaky sides of them that gape at every seam. ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil

... legs indeed. Careful folk would warn you not to sit on it lest it should come to pieces. The music, I suppose, charms it, for it holds together in the most marvellous manner. Four people are sitting on it, four big ones, middle-aged, careful people; every moment the legs gape wide apart, the structure visibly stretches and yields and sinks in the pebbles, yet it does not come down. The stoutest of all sits actually over the lame legs, reading his paper quite oblivious of the odd angle his plump person makes, quite unconscious ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... do ye gape?" laughed Skallagrim, pointing with the spear. "Dead is Ospakar!—slain by the swordless man! Eric ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... attendants kneel and rise,—he lifts the Host, and the world prostrates itself. A great procession of dignitaries with torches bears a fragment of the original cradle of the Holy Bambino from its chapel to the high altar, through the swaying crowd that gape and gaze and stare and sneer and adore. And thus the evening passes. When the clock strikes midnight all the bells ring merrily, Mass commences at the principal churches, and at San Luigi dei Francesi and the Gesu there is a great illumination (what the French call un joli ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... now yawned with a completeness that revealed vastly more of red toothless mouth than one might have calculated his face could contain. "Some take it easier than others," he went on. "It's harder with young men like you." Again he opened his jaws in a gape as whole-souled as that of a house-dog before a kitchen fire. "It must be disagreeable to have a rope tightened around your neck. I don't know." He thrust his pipe-stem absently between his lips, closed his eyes, mumbled absently, "I don't know," and ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise? Is it that Thackeray has converted us? In part, surely, we are just as snobbish as ever, though the gods of our ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... harbour because New London had been a big whaling centre. She wouldn't have bothered with John Winthrop's historic mill, which has never been out of use from his day to ours. She wouldn't have rushed from Nathan Hale's schoolhouse to gape at the Perkins Mansion, where Washington and Lafayette stayed; or if she had she would have consented to go in the car. As it was, however, that girl's energy was frenzied, and her exertions were rewarded at last by the dropping out of Caspian from her train. He limped back to the hotel, furious, ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... matins, which one has to sit through, of course: the only good matter being the chants. I can sing out, and I do. Then come the sermon, which is unto me sore weariness, and I gape through it as I best may. Dear heart, what matter is it to me if Peter were ever at Rome or no, or if Saint James and Paul do both say the same thing touching faith and works? We have all faith—say we not the Creed every Sunday? and what would you have more? And as to ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... reproached to me by a kinsman, but a little before you came to me, that he had followed me to half a dozen shops to see when I would take notice of him, and was at last going away with a belief 'twas not I, because I did not seem to know him. Other people make it so much their business to gape, that I'll swear they put me so out of countenance I dare not ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry

... small attraction for a shark, but he took them on speculation. At one of the principal thunny fisheries near Catania, the fishermen have fixed upon poles, like English kites on a barn-door, pour encourager les autres, two immense sharks' heads as trophies—the jaws at full gape, exhibiting four sets of teeth as sharp as harrows, and as white and polished as ivory. They always wish to decline any dealings with this formidable foe, though his flesh is in repute in the market, and he weighs from two thousand five hundred to four thousand pounds. But Syracuse has no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... do?' prettily," she cries in a bantering tone, "and don't gape like an overgrown school-boy, if you love ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham

... aurei for this girl; art set there slave, to gape at the praefect, or to do thy duty to the State that employs thee? Is there a higher bid for the maid? She pleaseth me, and I'll give sixty or an hundred for her. This is a public auction as by law directed. I appeal to thee, oh Taurus Antinor, to give orders to thy slaves, ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... nation has been goaded into giving; of the thousands of lives lost in the building of these aqueducts; of the countless years and countless energy spent in devising and carrying out these schemes for royal aggrandizement and pleasure. We come here and gape and wonder at it all, and little think at what stupendous cost ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe



Words linked to "Gape" :   be, facial expression, stare, look, rictus, gawp, facial gesture



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