"Mimicry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the first balcony, her plump body swaying and swaggering to the music. One man, seated in a box across the theater from us, was trying to speak to somebody in the box above ours. We could not hear what he said, but his mimicry was eloquent enough. Holding out a box of candy, he was facetiously offering to shoot some of its contents into the mouth of the person he was addressing. One woman, in an orchestra seat near our box, was discussing the play ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... operation in human life when human beings have been stripped of all "mythical ideas of Sin:" not a pretty picture nor a condition of affairs under which we should like long to exist. Some of the other resemblances are less dreadful, but none the less instructive. Let us take the matter of Mimicry. There is a form of protective mimicry whereby the living thing is like unto its surroundings, and thus escapes its enemy. We find it in warfare in the use of khaki dress, in white overalls in snow-time, in other such expedients. But there is also a form of Aggressive Mimicry in which a deadly ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... idea to have Clarence Fussyface play the monkey, because Clarence's intelligence is built on a plan to suggest such mimicry, but a hand-organ proprietor by the name of Guissepi, who is summering at Newport, came to the rescue with a real monkey by the name ...
— Skiddoo! • Hugh McHugh
... hole in the floor of the cellar, giving as his reason for such a proceeding that "there was no way of keeping wine like burying it." While the man worked at the job, his genial employer beguiled his labours with merry quips and tales, which he illustrated with delightful mimicry. The hole dug, the man was sent about his business. "I will bury the wine myself," said his employer, and on one or two occasions M. Ducoudray was seen by persons living in the house going in and out of his cellar, a lighted candle in his hand. One day the pale ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... idea, and there is that one great creative force in our civilisation. When it wakens not, then our faith in money, in material power, takes its place; it fights and destroys, and in a brilliant fireworks of star-mimicry suddenly exhausts itself and dies in ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... potent joyousness that he communicated the contagion of it to his hearers. He spoke in a pleasant, well-modulated voice, with fluctuations in tone that accorded nicely with the circumstances of the recital; and his gestures and power of mimicry seemed to conjure up the characters whose adventures he narrated. He was so successful that he gave up telling stories in public, for fear of acquiring the reputation of an entertainer, which might have robbed him of the high consideration which he exacted both ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... whole of the heap of clothes. It requires address and swiftness of foot to do so without being taken prisoner by the foe. The winning of the game is decided by which party first loses all its men or all its property. At Hawick, where this legendary mimicry of old Border warfare peculiarly flourishes, the boys are accustomed to use the ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... been the chief amusement and plaything of Madame Duboc—to be held on her lap, perched upon the piano, placed on high cushions in the carriage, and lifted on the table of the drawing-room, where she entertained a brilliant, if dissipated company, by her talk, her little songs, her laughter, her mimicry, and her dancing. She rarely danced now, yet all the seductive arts of perfect dancing seemed hers by right of birth. Each movement, each gesture had a peculiar charm, and her dark blue eyes, the more provocative ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... back in wrathful mimicry from the head of the stair, and while Alden still stood bewildered, in at the open door flocked Mary Chilton, and Desire, and Elizabeth, their girlish laughter bubbling over at some girlish jest, and with a muttered greeting Alden stalked through ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... interesting conversation, by his charming anecdotes, and droll stories without end of his childhood, of people at Coburg, of our good people in Scotland, which he would repeat with a wonderful power of mimicry, and at which he would himself laugh most heartily. Then he would at other times entertain us with his talk about the most interesting and important topics of the present and of former days, on which it was ever a pleasure ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... believed in the utter overthrow of Richelieu; and while he was yet on his way to Versailles, the ballad-singers of the Pont Neuf were publicly distributing the songs and pamphlets which they had hitherto only vended by stealth; and the dwarf of the Samaritaine was delighting the crowd by his mimicry of Maitre Gonin. At the corners of the different streets groups of citizens were exchanging congratulations; and within the palace all the courtiers were commenting upon the approaching triumph of M. de Marillac, whose attachment to the interests ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... reach England, skipper," he said, "you and Tagg, and Mrs. Stump, too, for that matter, must come and see my place in the North. An' I'll tell ye wot," he went on, with fair mimicry of Stump's voice and manner, "you'll all 'ave the time of your lives, sink ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... was witty without being ill-natured, and she described all that had happened in the little town since Elizabeth's wedding-day with a subdued and charming mimicry that made the room ring with laughter. Also, she ate her breakfast with such evident enjoyment that she gave an appetite to the others. All took an extra cup of coffee with her, and it seemed only a part of the general conversation and ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... as slitting the throat of some artless animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry—an instinctive ruse to get away from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn't—dear lad!—believe in himself. There wasn't a trace of hypocrisy in his composition. He was sure that his 'call' was irresistible, while to me ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... her, says I," she had a trick of mimicry and dropped easily into the southern English accent, "'Miss Millit, are you aware that the gentleman who lives opposite to me has been, to my knowledge, consistently drunk for two months—ever since he came to live at Kroomans?' ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... movements in the history of the world. Here we are concerned only with the simplest and most definite examples that can be found anywhere, and therefore we will deal in preference with the lower animals, among which, in the absence of voice, the means of communicating thought, mimicry, and physiognomy, are so imperfect that the harmony and interconnection of the individual actions cannot in its main points be ascribed to an understanding arrived at through speech. Huber observed that when a new comb was being constructed a number of the largest working-bees, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... so to the present time, had not better creatures been begetting better things than ichthyosauri, or famine, or fire, or convulsion put an end to them. Good apes begat good apes, and at last when human intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi- simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could, of his own forethought, add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his body and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate machinate mammal ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... wish particularly to dwell, is the extraordinary resemblance that the cock bird bears to the cock black-headed oriole. If this extended to the hen, and if the grosbeak were parasitic on the oriole, it would be held up as an example of mimicry. We should be told that owing to its resemblance to its dupe it was able to approach the nest without raising any suspicion and deposit its egg. But the grosbeak is not parasitic on the oriole, and it is the ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... situations. He adds: "The final cause of their colors is easily understood, as they serve some purpose of the animal, but the efficient cause would seem almost beyond conjecture." Of all this subject of protective mimicry thus sketched out by the older Darwin, we find no hint or trace in any ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... we account for the brilliant birds, and painted snakes, and gorgeous insects, that occur abundantly all over the world. It will be advisable to answer this question rather fully, in order that we may be prepared to understand the phenomena of "mimicry," which it is the special object of this paper to ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... know the queer types of people who drifted about the river banks and the poorer sections of the city. He knew every small inflection of their voices and their every trick and gesture, and now he acted them out to the great delight of the other clerks. But he could put his powers of mimicry to greater uses. He went to the theatre, particularly to hear Shakespeare's plays, as often as he could, and then would repeat long passages from the plays, giving the exact voice and manner of the leading actors. ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... to the establishment of the theatre." To recite an epilogue while seated on the back of an ass was a favourite expedient of the comedians of the early Georgian period, while the introduction of comic songs and mimicry—such as the scene of "The Drunken Man," and the song of "The Four-and-Twenty Stock-Jobbers," which Mr. Harper performed on his benefit-night in 1720—was found to be a very attractive measure. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... shameful lack of standard on the part of citizens of the United States, or, as it was put, with no little exasperation, "What is the trouble with America?" Hereupon brightly gleamed the fat young man whom I had marked for a wit at Les Trois Pigeons; he pictured with inimitable mimicry a western senator lately in France. This outcast, it appeared, had worn a slouch hat at a garden party and had otherwise betrayed his country to the ridicule of the intelligent. "But really," said the fat ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... easy for him; that, as a kindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublime masterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds—either the imitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls or gentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known and most famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to the taste of the age. For, although he may only be able to appreciate slavish copying or accurate portraiture of the present, still he knows that ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... kept, and which resembled a miniature menagerie, the silence broken by the mooing of cows, the braying of donkeys, the whistle of canaries, and the roars of mock-lions when their powers were invoked by the attendants, and her ears drank in that discordant bable of tiny mimicry like music. There was no spirit of criticism in her. She ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sounds at first glance quite complete, yet, on examination, it will be observed that there is no such close analogy as these writers appeared to think. To begin with, in singing the mind only occupies itself with the sound produced. To learn singing is to practise mimicry. We cannot determine the position of the vocal chords before producing the note. Our consciousness begins at the other end; the mind conjures up a certain ideal sound which we attempt to realize vocally; if the desired timbre is produced the laryngeal action is correct. ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... next, above the chorus of joyous whooping might be heard individual comments, each shrieked out shrilly and each punctuated by a sneeze from Mr. Leary's convulsed frame; or lacking that by a simulated sneeze from one of the revellers—one with a fine humorous flare for mimicry. And these comments ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the party who conceives himself aggrieved. The issue will be as in Mr O'Connell's courts, where the parties played at going to law; from the moment when they ceased to play, and no longer "made believe" to be disputing, the award of the judge became as entire a mockery, as any stage mimicry ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... it," I said to myself, "and he must obviously be an excellent judge. I shall devote more time to mimicry in ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... resemblance of any in the group. Your weight is about the same as mine—your shoulders are a trifle stooped and you walk with a curious drag of your left foot. Your hair is white but thick: the contour of our faces is quite similar, and so with dry cosmetics, some physical mimicry, and the use of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses like yours I can make a comparatively good double. The only exposure to the sharp eyes of your enemies will be, first, when I substitute myself for you and take your automobile back home; second, when I go down to the theatrical district, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... and he looked down upon the unconscious man more in curiosity than in hate. The wearing of the Arab burnoose which Tarzan had placed upon his person had aroused in the mind of the anthropoid a desire for similar mimicry of the Tarmangani. The burnoose, though, had obstructed his movements and proven such a nuisance that the ape had long since torn it from ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... not already heard and judged; and he certainly expected nothing unusual from the proper and commonplace Thora Ragnor. But Sunna exerted all her facial skill and eloquence, and told the clever incident with wonderful spirit and delightful mimicry. Adam was enchanted; he threw down his knife and fork and made the room ring with laughter and triumph so genuine that Sunna—much against her will—was compelled to laugh with him. They heard the happy ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... where the lineaments that do not disgust in the potato meet us in the human face, or even in the hippopotamus, whom accordingly Nature kindly puts out of sight. It is bad taste that we suffer from,—not plainness, not indifference to appearance, but features misplaced, shallow mimicry of "effects" where their causes do not exist, transparent pretences of all kinds, forcing attention to the absence of the reality, otherwise perhaps unnoticed. The first step toward seemly building is to rectify the relation between the appearance and the uses of the building,—to give to each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... nature and partly from vanity. The ecstasies of mirth and terror, which his gestures and play of countenance never failed to produce in a nursery, flattered him quite as much as the applause of mature critics. He often exhibited all his powers of mimicry for the amusement of the little Burneys, awed them by shuddering and crouching as if he saw a ghost, scared them by raving like a maniac in St. Luke's, and then at once became an auctioneer, a chimney-sweeper or an old woman, and made them laugh till the tears ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... first is the method of the universal barbarian mind, which paints the life to come as a shadowy reflex or copy of the present world and life, an unsubstantial, graspless, yet actual and conscious realm of ghosts, carrying on a pale and noiseless mimicry of their former adventures in the body. Holding fast to that clew of analogy which is the nucleus of philosophy in this view, but rejecting the rest as fantastic figment, we arrive at the next way in which those who are unwilling to leave their thoughts ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Inspirited by his interview with Lady Annabel, and her gracious reception of his overtures, Lord Cadurcis was in one of those frolic humours, which we have before noticed was not unnatural to him. He had considerable powers of mimicry, and the talent that had pictured to Venetia in old days, with such liveliness, the habits of the old maids of Morpeth, was now engaged on more considerable topics; an interview with a pasha, a peep into a harem, a visit to a pirate's isle, the slave-market, the bazaar, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... turned to the six waiting cubes. Again as at a command four of the things moved, swirled in toward each other with a weird precision, with a monstrous martial mimicry; joined; stood before us, a platform ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... the knights in the theatre. Scandalous libels, published to defame persons of rank, of either sex, he suppressed, and inflicted upon their authors a mark of infamy. He expelled a man of quaestorian rank from the senate, for practising mimicry and dancing. He debarred infamous women the use of litters; as also the right of receiving legacies, or inheriting estates. He struck out of the list of judges a Roman knight for taking again his wife whom he had divorced and prosecuted for adultery. He ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... refrain from laughter. The servants would explode at dinner if the lad, asking for something which wasn't at table, put on that countenance and used that favourite phrase. Even Dobbin would shoot out a sudden peal at the boy's mimicry. If George did not mimic his uncle to his face, it was only by Dobbin's rebukes and Amelia's terrified entreaties that the little scapegrace was induced to desist. And Joseph, having a dim consciousness that the lad thought ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... colours or marks seemed to have a value as "warning colours," advertising the nauseousness of their possessors to the bird, which had learned to recognise them; in other cases these colours and marks seemed to be borrowed by palatable species, whose unconscious "mimicry" led to their survival; in other cases, again, the patterns and spots were regarded as "recognition marks," by which the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... laugh and roar with glee By my transcendent feats of mimicry, And humour wanton as an elvish sprite: I wake from daydreams ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... Platonida Ivanovna always spoke of all fashionably-dressed ladies of the period—'with a pretty dolly face; and she goes prinking this way ... and pluming that way'—Platonida presented these fancied manoeuvres in mimicry—'and making saucers like this with her eyes'—and she drew big, round circles in the air with her forefinger—'You're not used to that sort of thing. So you fancied ... but that means nothing, Yasha ... no-o-thing at all! Drink ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... accompanied this sally sounded perhaps a trifled forced and hard, but neither Sir Andrew nor Lord Tony were very keen observers. The mimicry was so perfect, the tone of the voice so accurately reproduced, that both the young men joined in a hearty ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... for your money, or perhaps—for the thing has happened again and again—there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? "Johnsmithia"! ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... "The Minstrels," says Bishop Percy, "were an order of men in the Middle Ages who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sang to the harp verses composed by themselves and others. They appear to have accompanied their songs with mimicry and action. They are called in Latin of the day histriones, Mimi and Scurrae. Such arts rendered them exceedingly popular in this and in neighboring countries, where no high scene of festivity was esteemed complete ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... to recover his dignity. The waiter behind him, recognizing only the delightful mimicry of this adorable officer, was in fits of laughter. Nevertheless, the consul managed to ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... valley of dry bones. Christianity, on the other side, had won the victory almost without a blow. Instead of ever coming to grapple with its mighty rival, the great catholic church of heathenism hardly reached the stage of apish mimicry. When its great army turned out to be a crowd of camp-followers, the alarm of battle died away in peals of defiant laughter. Yet the alarm was real, and its teachings were not forgotten. It broke up the revels ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... though I have no idea of the cause of my childish absorption in the subject. It was certainly altogether spontaneous and not encouraged, for I have a vivid recollection of how an eager and eloquent description of my categories (profusely illustrated by mimicry) brought me a sharp reprimand and a very nasty tonic. The tonic was taken under compulsion, but the cure is ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... formed a real nursery of talent for the metropolitan theatres, enriched with anecdotes of Foote and Garrick as lively and dramatic as any of the scenes in their own farces, and affording the strongest confirmation of their protege's account of his unrivaled mimicry. The story of George Anne Bellamy, and that of Mrs. Robinson, the "Perdita" of a somewhat later day, deal with the more familiar and less obsolete vicissitudes of betrayed beauty, while giving us glimpses of a social crust that has since been replaced by a more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... could reply, the voice from the silver and red patrol ship dropped into an exaggerated mimicry ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin |
