"Gawky" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desirously, twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and, gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to tell you, Prissie," she said, addressing the tall, gawky girl, who stood with her hands folded in front of her— "it's only fair to tell you that hitherto I've just made two ends meet for one mouth alone, and how I'm to fill four extra ones the Lord knows, but I don't. Still, I'm going to try, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... of style, and who has a superb passion for beauty. Some of d'Annunzio's novels were a revelation, dazzling. And who that began even "Il Fuoco" could resist it? How adult, how subtle, how (in the proper signification) refined, seems the sexuality of d'Annunzio after the timid, gawky, infantile, barbaric sexuality of our "island story"! People are not far wrong on the Continent when they say, as they do say, that English novelists cannot deal with an Englishwoman—or could ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... the luck," remarked an enamelled dame, whose bridge and dressmakers' debts were on a par with those of her three daughters who had safely, oh! quite, but most unsuccessfully survived many seasons, "I wonder how Susie managed it? Gawky young miss, isn't she? Just out of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... hand on the collar of diamonds round her neck. "I'm glad you're not my cousin," she said; "I'm glad you're not really a relation. You're far dearer as it is. You're the best friend and truest gentleman I ever met in my life. Now I sha'n't thank you any more. Mind your dancing, and set to that gawky woman opposite. Isn't she ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... sleek and comely personage, on knock-knees, in torn shirt open at the throat, with apathetic, listless, unlighted face, stood the lean and gawky Beck. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Grown into a gawky chap of sixteen, Peter didn't impress people too favorably. They felt for him the instinctive distrust of the conservative and commercial mind for the free and artistic one. The Peter Champneyses of the world challenge the ideal of commercial success by their utter inability to ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen, Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if for ever during ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... an overgrown poor young thing you are! But we must all go through the gawky age; we must each of us take our turn. Maisie is just through her bad time, but when she was fourteen, wasn't she a show just! You're fourteen, ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... had moved his family down from Pierre to occupy the Irishman's shack, came to the school, bringing her son, a gawky, hangdog lad of twelve. While she recited a long account of his past experiences with teachers, and dictated her wishes as to his treatment by the little girl, he acted as interpreter. When she finally departed, with admonitions and sidewise wags of the head, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... we should find him too many for us all three, we were to demand the assistance of our competitors, who should be ready to enforce us, or oppose anything that might be undertaken for the master's relief. One of my principal assistants was called Jeremy Gawky, son and heir of a wealthy gentleman in the neighbourhood; and the name of the other, Hugh Strap, the cadet of a family which had given shoemakers to the village time out of mind. I had once saved Gawky's life, by plunging into a river and dragging him on shore, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... girl with the dark braids, going to England," she heard some man on the steamer say. The ranch, the chickens, weeds, and preserving, the dusty roads and shabby stores of Los Lobos were gone; she was no longer a gawky child; she was a young lady in a loose, soft, rough blue coat, with a black quill in her soft ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... with the two teams drove to the barn. Amy could just see their white, obscure figures through the blinding snow, Even old Mr. Clifford went out to question them. "Yes, Mr. Burt come up in de mawnin' an' stirred us all up right smart, slashed down a tree hisself to show a new gawky hand dat's cuttin' by de cord how to 'arn his salt; den he put out wid his rafle in a bee-line toward de riber. Dat's de last we seed ob him;" and Abram went stolidly on to unhitch and care for ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... voice and the other's, between the girl's laugh and the woman's! It was only very lately, indeed, that Fanny, when looking in the little glass over the Bows-Costigan mantle-piece as she was dusting it, had begun to suspect that she was a beauty. But a year ago, she was a clumsy, gawky girl, at whom her father sneered, and of whom the girls at the day-school (Miss Minifer's, Newcastle-street, Strand; Miss M., the younger sister, took the leading business at the Norwich circuit in 182-; and she herself had played for two seasons with some credit T.R.E.O., T.R.S.W., until ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bungling, maladroit, gawky, inelegant, ungainly, loutish, unskillful, unwieldy, uncourtly; embarrassing. Antonyms: graceful, dexterous, deft, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... hue, had a perfect healthiness and naturalness of expression, which insensibly gave confidence to his friends, although it aroused their irritation. A spirit of boyish rebellion and importance looked out of Ephraim's black eyes; his mouth was demure with mischief, his gawky figure perpetually uneasy and twisting, as if to find entrance into small forbidden places. There was something in Ephraim's face, when she looked suddenly at him, which continually led his mother to infer that ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... indeed, he seemed to be. He heaved a sigh and wiped his eye, and then he said to me: "Take your books and make your books companions—never toys; For they who so forsake their books grow into gawky boys." I don't know who he was. Do you? he snuffled at the end; And he said, "Mark—ME—boy! Your book ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... mother had arrayed him in a full suit of pepper-and-salt "figginy," an old Virginia fabric of silk and cotton. His shirt and shirt-collar were stiffly starched, and his coat-tail stood out boldly behind him. The dandy law clerks of metropolitan Richmond exchanged glances as this gawky figure entered, and took his place at a desk to begin his work. There was something in his manner which prevented their indulgence in the jests that usually greet the arrival of a country youth among city blades; and they ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... county. But her claim was not endorsed, even by the humbler gentry with whom she was forced to associate, while as for the county proper it is not too much to say that that august community had never even heard of her. The Miss MacTavishes, ranging in age from fifteen to five-and-twenty, were rather gawky young persons, with red hair and a perpetual giggle; in fact they could not speak without giggling, even if it was to tell you that somebody was dead. Every now and then Mrs MacTavish would proclaim, with portentous complacency, that Florrie, or Lizzie, or ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... and saw there a very tall, awkward boy, pouring over a badly worn book, and making notes on a slip of yellow paper. He wore glasses, and possessed that queerly undefinable personality, usually ascribed to the gawky boy, or he who ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... as impossible to put back British industrialism into the factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day, emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has never attained. Behind it is an idea, a new idea, the idea of the nation as one great economic system working together, an idea ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... an over-grown, gawky boy with a long, pinched face. He is dressed in sweater, fur cap, etc. His teeth are chattering with the cold and he hurries to the stove, where he stands for a moment shivering, blowing on his hands, slapping them against his sides, ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... gay and frivolous, no insignificant portion of a large court, at his feet through his wife,—it was observed that this timid, shy, self-concentrated prince, this precise (piece of) virtue, this (bit of) misplaced learning, this gawky man, a stranger in his own house, constrained in everything,—it was observed, I say, that he was showing himself by degrees, unfolding himself little by little, presenting himself to society in moderation, and that he was unembarrassed, majestic, gay, and agreeable ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Under the shade of an immense live-oak just west of the barn, the big waiter at the Miners' Home was running an opposition saloon to the one inside, with a plank on two kegs for a bar. The center of the barn was already filled with dark-skinned Senoritas and tall, gawky miners dancing to the ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... a dragon, but he was not at all like the dragons of our imagination. With his great bullet head and prick ears, his beetling brows and deep sunken eyes, his ferocious mouth and protruding tusks, his short thick neck and massive shoulders, his large, gawky, and misshapen trunk, coated with dingy brown fur, shading into dirty yellow on the stomach, his stout, bandy legs armed with curving talons, and his huge leathern wings hanging in loose folds about him, he looked more like an imp of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... eminent butcher in Clare-market, who had indeed from nature, the grace of being cross-eyed, now looked in ten thousand more various directions than she ever did before. Miss Prim, agitated in every limb, cracked her fan into twenty pieces. Miss Gawky, who had unfortunately been initiated by the chamber maid in the art of snuff-taking, plied her box with more zeal than ever. Miss Languish actually fainted, and was with some difficulty conveyed into the air. Such was the confusion occasioned in ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... said the stranger, raising his gaunt, gawky figure to a posture which, though far from erect, revealed a stature so much above the average height that the negro stepped back a few paces and stared with astonishment. Plutarch Byle's feet, hands and head seemed somewhat too large ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... and bowed. Sir Meeson Corby simulated a petrifaction of his frame at seeing the Countess of Fleetwood actually partly bent with her gracious acknowledgement of the tramp's gawky homage. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... single-barrelled shot-gun looked like a rifle. The revenue men halted at once. They suspected an ambuscade. Experience had taught them that the Moonshiners would fight when the necessity arose, and they held a council of war. The great gawky boy, with the curiosity of youth and ignorance combined, stood in the road and watched them. When they proceeded toward him in a compact body, he passed on across the road. Hearing a command to halt, he broke into a run, and endeavoured to make his way across a small ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... cream" were prescribed by the fairy godmothers of our childhood to stay the stature of those gawky youngsters who were shooting up into an ungainly development like "ill ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... ordered some of our cards at Black's, the stationers. I ordered twenty-five of each, which will last us for a good long time. In the evening, Lupin brought in Harry Mutlar, Miss Mutlar's brother. He was rather a gawky youth, and Lupin said he was the most popular and best amateur in the club, referring to the "Holloway Comedians." Lupin whispered to us that if we could only "draw out" Harry a bit, he would make us ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... the green, And plum-blooms scent the evening breeze, And robin's songs throb through the trees; And when the year is raw thirteen, And Spring's a gawky hoyden yet, The season mirrors in its mien And in its tom-boy etiquette, Maid ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... can't help you," answered Dickenson, a gawky lad, with a hopeless glance at his quadrant. "It seems a very useless expenditure of our valuable eyesight when it's the proper business of the master, and those fellows the master's assistants, to find out whereabouts the ...
— The Two Shipmates • William H. G. Kingston
... was the first of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... at anything—a harmless mafflin; he was a long gaumless gawky when he went awa," said Richard Turnbull. "The Feltrams and the Mardykes was sib, ye know; and that made what passed in the misfortune o' that young lady spoken of all the harder; and this young man ye speak of is a grandson o' the lad ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern. At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old original hairy ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... a French novel, but the place held me and I stayed. I sat down in an arm-chair before the fireplace and the stone birds. Very odd those gawky things, like prehistoric Great Auks, looked in the moonlight. I remember that the alabaster moon shimmered like translucent pearl, and I fell to wondering about its history. Had the old Sabaens used such a jewel in their rites in the Grove ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... tied round something which chinked as he pressed it in. Then he replaced the brick, and went to bed. He said nothing about the bank in the morning nor about the hole in the mill-wall; and he parried Mrs. Lake's questions with gawky grins and well-assumed bashfulness. ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... took it with me every Sunday for awhile, but I can't get screwed up to the point, somehow. People here are so stand-offish with strangers. I've gone pretty regularly, but nobody has spoken to me yet. I suppose they think that a gawky country boy doesn't belong in such a fashionable congregation. The minister doesn't come down after service to shake hands with people, as Doctor Meldrum does at home. They have a Christian Endeavour Society ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... tip evenly. The number of painters who have written of their art is not large, though what they have said is always pregnant. Critics outnumber them—though the battle is really a matter of quality, not quantity. There is Da Vinci. For his complete writings some of us would sacrifice miles of gawky pale and florid mediaeval paintings. What we have of him is wisdom, and like true wisdom is prophetic. Then there is that immortal gossip Vasari, a very biassed critic and not too nice to his contemporaries. He need not indulge in what is called the woad argument; we sha'n't go back ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... and I longed to take it; but,] my dear, what could I do? Did not Mrs. Catgut say it was the most fashionable; and if I had not taken it, was not that awkward, gawky Sally Slender ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... off again, lying in heaps on the ground in a mammoth circle. The ship was a skeleton, a long, gawky structure of naked metal beams. Even now a dozen men were scampering around the scaffolding, before Dan's incredulous eyes, and he saw some of the beaming coming off the body of the ship, being dropped onto the crane, ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... scarcely believe my eyes when she stepped down from the car platform, for the somewhat gawky maiden, as I used to term her in our not altogether infrequent playful differences of opinion, when similar compliments were common, had grown into a handsome woman, fair-skinned, but ruddy of color, as all of us were, and I was embarrassed when to the envy of the loungers she embraced me effusively. ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... contrast! Patty, dainty, graceful and sweet, was the very antithesis of tall, gawky Azalea, with her countrified dress and badly made black shoes. Her careless air, too, was unattractive,—for it was not the nonchalance of experience, but the unselfconsciousness of sheer ignorance of ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... He was a great gawky fellow, dry and bronzed, with a crooked nose, a long rat-tail moustache, two great yellow piercing and mocking eyes, under a large felt hat set off by a scarlet cock's feather. He was dressed in a green ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... girl, Lady Mabel," he said; "and remarkably clever. I never talked to a young woman, or an old one either, who knew so much about Ireland. She's engaged to that gawky ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... A gawky clerk, undoubtedly of the "cracker" persuasion, was waiting on several dusky customers, and vainly endeavoring to keep them in a clump, as if he feared to let the bunch scatter, lest certain unprotected articles vanish with ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... Lincoln's small boat seemed admirably placed to serve as a transport to a couple of gentlemen who came down to the shore to ship on the steamboat. Their trunks were taken out of their carriages, and they selected Lincoln's new boat among some others. In his homespun, the gawky youth looked what he was—not the owner of the craft and about to try a speculation on the river, but one of the "scrubs." The "scrubs," not from any relation with washing—quite otherwise—were those poor families on the outskirts of towns who lived ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... tongue began to wag, and he heard himself saying, in a stiff, stilted voice, "It was very nice in the Park this afternoon!..." Oh, banal fool, he thought, she will despise you now, as if you were a great, gawky lout.... ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... seemed to be any number of children, from an infant lying in a homemade cradle of boards, one of which displayed an advertisement of soap, to a bashful youth who looked at Hugo as if he worshipped him and a freckled, gawky and friendly-faced girl of fifteen who stood around, evidently delighted to see people and anxious ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... mother came along and took pity on me. It sets up a gawky fellow to find a girl who ain't ashamed to be seen walking with him Sundays. And I was grateful to your mother, and we got along first-rate. Only I couldn't say things to her—and she couldn't answer. Well—one day, a few months after ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... father are in perfect health, my sister is in perfect health, how are yours?" she said, as Puffy Ellis started to clear his throat. "No, no, don't sit down. You're much too imposing. Mr. Crocker, you take one side of the fireplace and Mr. Ellis the other, and please don't look so gawky. You aren't really afraid of one little girl, are you? And by the way, Charlie Lazelle, go out on the porch and ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... gown," said good-natured Mrs. Sedley. "What a gawky it was! And his sisters are not much more graceful. Lady Dobbin was at Highbury last night with three of ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray |
