"Gray-headed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fellow traveller was thus talking, I had time to observe that the woman of the house was a cleanly-looking creature, with something of a sickly appearance. An old gray-headed man sat in something between a chair and a stool, formed of one solid piece of ash, supported by three legs sloping outwards; the seat of it was quite smooth by long use, and a circular row of rungs, capped by a piece of semicircular wood, shaped ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... followed by the rear guard bringing up about 2,000 stragglers. These stragglers wore a conglomeration of every trashy type to be found in the Yankee army. Foreigners of every tongue, mixed with every American type—old gray-headed men, beardless boys, big, greasy Negroes, etc., etc., all with battered and tattered clothing, some bareheaded and barefooted, and many without coats; some only had one pant leg on—all under a strong guard of peart-proud soldiers marching beside them with fixed bayonets. As they came along ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... proper temper in this unfortunate contest, because many professed Christians and ministers of the gospel at the North are breathing out, in their very prayers and sermons, threatenings and slaughter against us. Oh! how painful that a gray-headed pastor should publicly exclaim, "I would hang them as quick as I would ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... prison—for some one interfered, and paid that tax—I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a gray-headed man; and yet a change had come to my eyes come over the scene—the town, and State, and country, greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... I conversed with a gray-headed member of St. Peter's Presbyterian Church who, in his youth, listened to the sainted Robert Murray McCheyne. He spoke of him with the deepest reverence and love; but the one thing that he remembered after forty-six ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... banker, whose private bank, it was whispered darkly, was struggling in deep waters; Colonel Russell, who had come home from India on half-pay and his savings, which every year he found more inadequate for the expenses of an increasing family. All these gray-headed men, growing haggard and careworn, agreed that in the present depressed state of the commercial world, young Robinson was showing himself a sensible fellow and ought to be commended for his decision. They declared that ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... it, he was obliged to mount upon a stool, carried by his attendants for that purpose. As the discipline in the Swedish army required that the soldier should always uncover the head in speaking to his superior, gray-headed men came, cap in hand, to receive their instructions from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... same's it does you, Miss Kate. It doesn't seem more than five years ago, and what would I have thought if I had known 'he' and I were going to keep a lighthouse and be contented there, what's more, and sometimes not get ashore for a fortnight; settled, gray-headed old folks! We were gay enough in those days. I know old Miss Sabrina Smith warned me that I'd better think twice before I took up with Tom Kew, for he was a light-minded young man. I speak o' that to him in the winter-time, when he sets reading the almanac half asleep and ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... started to go to England, but the vessel went to smash and the crew went to the bottom. Poor gal, she always hated salt, but she's used to it by this time, I reckon. Then there was pap died next, but he was old and gray-headed, and sick-hearted like, and he wanted to go, but it made it jest as bad for me. Then ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... the Hall. It grew dark; but they could not go to their homes until they knew the result; but round and round the Hall, and through the avenues of the Park, they wandered, watching the dim light in the jury room, and wondering what the verdict would be. One of them stole up to the gray-headed constable who watched at the door, and inquired what the chance was; and as the old man shook his head, and muttered that they leaned toward a fatal verdict, he rubbed his hands with glee, and hastened to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... who went over the field of battle, saw a gray-headed soldier spreading the blanket over the corpse of a fallen comrade. "I rode up to him", wrote the reporter to his newspaper, "and asked him whether that was an officer. He looked up, and every lineament of his face betokening the greatest grief, replied, 'you never asked a question ...
— Old Fort Snelling - 1819-1858 • Marcus L. Hansen
... old family servant" carries with it a thousand kind associations, in all parts of the world; and there is no claim upon the home-bred charities of the heart more irresistible than that of having been "born in the house." It is common to see gray-headed domestics of this kind attached to an English family of the "old school," who continue in it to the day of their death, in the enjoyment of steady, unaffected kindness, and the performance of faithful, unofficious duty. I think such instances of attachment speak well for both master and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... hundred pounds. I don't know that I ever saw a sturgeon before. But we had other fish to fry; and so we went on. The first place we called at was a cellar in Nile Street. "Here," said my companion, "let us have a look at old John." A gray-headed little man, of seventy, lived down in this one room, sunken from the street. He had been married forty years, and if I remember aright, he lost his wife about four years ago. Since that time, he had lived in this cellar, all alone, washing and cooking for himself. But I think the last would ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... hand in hand they go in their fury and their force. Had they been called up but one week since, where would have been those who have now been, as it were, intrusted to my weak help? The father, the mother, the children, the infant at the breast, and I, the gray-headed old man, - all buried fathoms deep, awaiting our summons; but they were restrained by his will, and by his will we were saved. Will those timbers which bore us here so miraculously hold together till morning? I should think not. What are the iron bolts ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... when Paris dines, two lovers might fall out and exchange the earnest of reconciliation without fear of intruders. The only possible spoil-sport was the pensioner on duty at the little iron gate on the Rue de l'Ouest, if that gray-headed veteran should take it into his head to lengthen his monotonous beat. There, on a bench beneath the lime-trees, Etienne Lousteau sat and listened to ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glides away, the sons of men,— The youth in life's fresh spring and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, The speechless babe and the gray-headed man— Shall one by one be gathered to thy side, By those who in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... out of prison—for some one interfered, and paid that tax—I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene—the town, and State, and country—greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... very well the first ideas I had of God when a boy, which I derived from the preaching and praying of ministers. It was that God and our Lord Jesus Christ were two distinct Beings. We had for a time a venerable gray-headed old man who preached one Sabbath, and a young man who preached the next. I thought the old man represented God the Father and the ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... to-day,—speech demanding growth for a part of a country, denying it for the whole, speech ignoring the nationalist tendency so soon to overwhelm all bounds, all creeds in the making of a mighty America that should be a home for all the nations. But as the gray-headed old doctor went on he only voiced what was the earnest conviction of many of the ablest men of his time, both of ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... you!" she exclaimed; "in poverty and neglect?" She ran to seek the king, and asked for a pension for the poet of one hundred louis a-year from her privy purse. When Crebillon came to Versailles to thank her, she was in bed. "Let him come in," she exclaimed, "that I may see the gray-headed genius." At the sight of the fine old man—Crebillon was then eighty years of age—so poor and yet so proud, she was affected to tears. She received him with so touching a grace that the old poet was deeply moved. As he leaned over the bed to kiss her ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... lectures on science ever given in the city. The following winter the citizens of Cleveland invited him to lecture again on the same subject, and he complied. The city at that time contained mostly young people—only two gray-headed men attended the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... power is the desire to conquer the environment, to lead one's fellows, to accumulate wealth (power), to write a great book (influence or power), to become a religious leader (power), to be successful in any department of human effort. In every group, from a few tots playing in the grass to gray-headed statesmen deciding a world's destinies, there is a struggle of these wills to power. In the children's group this takes the trivial (to us) form as to who shall be "policeman" or "teacher", in the statesmen it takes the "weighty" form as to which river ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... frequently paused more accurately to survey, and its laughing and sportive beams playing over chink and crevice, seemed almost as insolent and untimeous as the mirth of the young mocking the silent grief of some gray-headed and solitary mourner. ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... patronising him? Of course she was. True, she was but three-and-twenty, and he was of the same age; but, spiritually and socially, the girl develops ten years earlier than the boy. She was flattered and worshipped by gray-headed men, and in her simplicity she thought it a noble self-sacrifice to stoop to notice the poor awkward youth. And yet if he could have seen the pure moonlight of sisterly pity which filled all her ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... his wealth freely, and, besides the county doctor, had two very eminent practitioners from London, one of whom was a gray-headed man, the other singularly young for the fame he had obtained. But then he was a genuine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... a gay-hearted, good-natured woman it is certainly Miss Anthony. From the beginning of this council it is she who has kept the fun barometer away up. The gray-headed friends of her youth are all "girls" to her, and she is a girl among them. Parliamentary rules have been by no means so severe as to keep even the regular proceedings free from her lively interpolation and ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Heartless sprang up in a passion. But some lucky accident intervened, as usual, to change the subject, and the daily quarrel ended in the customary daily living reconciliation. The gray-headed old eccentrics parted, and Herr Heartless walked ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... challenged the great John Randolph, and fired once at his breast. In 1838 he planned the Cilley duel, by which a murder was committed and a wife made a mourner. In 1841, when sixty-five years old, and gray-headed, is under a five thousand dollar bond to keep the peace. At twenty-nine he perjured himself to secure a seat in the United States Senate. In 1824, made the infamous bargain with Adams by which he sold out for a six thousand dollar office. He is well known ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... counter-attack been thrown on the wall of the big lobby room of the Brown headquarters, there might have been less exultation on the part of the junior officers of the staff gathered there. They were not seeing or thinking of the dead. They were seeing only brown-headed pins pushing gray-headed pins out of the way on the map, as the symbol of an attack become a pursuit and of better than their dreams come true—the symbol of security for altar fires and race and nation. They were of the living, in the mightiest thrill that ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... in Judaea, and that between the Canaanitish and the Hellenic Jews there existed the most bitter hostility, so that—even were the story of Jesus true—it could not have reached Philo before A.D. 40, at which time he was old and gray-headed. We again quote from Mr. Lake's treatise, who prints the parallel passages, and we would draw special attention to the similarity of phraseology ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... AEbutius Elva His Master of the Knights. On the third morn thereafter, At downing of the day, Did Aulus and AEbutius Set forth with their array. Sempronius Atratinus Was left in charge at home With boys, and with gray-headed men, To keep the walls of Rome. Hard by the Lake Regillus Our camp was pitched at night: Eastward a mile the Latines lay, Under the Porcian height. Far over hill and valley Their mighty host was ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... our father's study (with, perhaps, mother looking in, unknown to him), and preaching from some simple text that we knew and loved, in quaint, yet childish words. Ah, well! perhaps it was better so, than that he should have lived to be a gray-headed ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow |
