"Teens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... SOPHY had to endure from her sister a dreadful scene, the harsh details of which have not yet faded from her memory. And then I remembered, too, how it was a matter of family chaff against HERMIONE that once, not very long after she had entered upon her teens, she had sobbed convulsively through a whole night, because she had discovered that her juvenile arms were thin and mottled, and she imagined that she would never be able to wear a low ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... we never get over being boys and girls. The good, healthy man sixty years of age is only a boy with added experience. A woman is only an old girl. Summer is but an older spring. August is May in its teens. We shall be useful in proportion as we keep young in our feelings. There is no use for fossils except in museums and on the shelf. I like ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... from no one but you. Or do you think, from papa? There, it makes you laugh yourself. And then, why do you always dress me in this rig, this boy's smock? Sometimes I fancy I shall be put back in short clothes yet. Once I have them on again I shall courtesy like a girl in her early teens, and when our friends in Rathenow come over I shall sit in Colonel Goetze's lap and ride a trot horse. Why not? He is three-fourths an uncle and only one-fourth a suitor. You are to blame. Why don't I have any party clothes? Why don't you make ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... a birthday means That sets you spinning through your pretty teens. A slim-grown shape adorned with golden shimmers Of tossing hair that streams and waves and glimmers, Lo, how you run In mere excess of fun, Or change to silence as you stand and hear Some kind old tale that ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... had, every one knew, begun his career as a reporter on a provincial paper. If funny old pater had been just a shade less clever or enterprising, his family would have been educated at grammar schools and gone into business in their teens. Of course, Mrs. Potter had pulled the social level up a bit; but what, if you came to that, had Mrs. Potter been? Only the daughter of a country doctor; only the underpaid secretary of a lady novelist, for all she was so ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and Macpherson's Ossian; but hymns must have filled her ear with the ring of rhyme, for she was continually versifying, sometimes passages of Scripture, sometimes Ossian, long before she was halfway through her teens. Very foolish, sing-song, emotional specimens they are, but notable as showing the bent of nature that forms itself into heroism. Her family were Baptists, and she was sixteen when the sense of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... needful, and never used, even medicinally, with entire confidence. This loathsome weed, then, should not be used, even medicinally, except in extreme cases, and then in the hands of a skillful physician. For every man—and especially for every boy, who has hardly entered his teens—to take this poison into his own hands, and determine for himself how much he will use, is as preposterous, as if he were to take upon himself to deal out arsenic, corrosive ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... S., "the command to honor thy father and thy mother, is far more comprehensive, and exacts many more duties, than the young, and, I am sorry to say, the old too, are willing to recognize. The young are too apt to think, when they get into their teens, that there are a great many things about which there is no need of asking their parents' advice and counsel; that they know, then, about as well as their parents what they ought to do; and, by the time ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston
... ages back to adolescence. Hence his average or typical opponent tends to be progressively younger and younger than he is, and in the end the mere advantage of her youth may be sufficient to tip over his tottering defences. This, I take it, is why oldish men are so often intrigued by girls in their teens. It is not that age calls maudlinly to youth, as the poets would have it; it is that age is no match for youth, especially when age is male and youth is female. The case of the late Henrik Ibsen was ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... to Vance a most unpleasant and unreasonable sort of talk, and, as may be imagined, it did not increase his love for his godmother. So things had gone on from bad to worse between them until Vance was a fine, lusty lad beginning his teens, when one day the Blue ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... College Steward; from him in the year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large personality swam into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens; from him the progenitors ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... tendency of the young poet that impresses us. Here is no "withering scorn," no heart "blighted" ere it has safely got into its teens, none of the drawing-room sansculottism which Byron had brought into vogue. All is limpid and serene, with a pleasant dash of the Greek Helicon in it. The melody of the whole, too, is remarkable. It is not of that kind ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... degree. He was mischievous, willful, daring, reckless. Hardly an escapade took place in the community in which he did not share; and his sensitiveness and quick temper led him continually into trouble. In his early teens he swore like a trooper, chewed tobacco incessantly, acquired a taste for strong drink, and set a pace for wildness which few of his associates could keep up. He was passionately fond of running foot races, ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry Wilkinson gives us two or three; one on the authority of a personal friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the fair Diana would let loose her silvery laugh in the intervals. She was hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of fastened to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the wedded pair accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn a business the game of whist. We read that he burst out at last, with bitter ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with us, it is true—downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above one's knee; but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply. Then we had boarders from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... could, and that he should do the same for her, if that also were possible. As for lookings and sighings and pressings of the hand, she had gone through all that some twenty years since in India, when Thompson had been young, and she was still in her teens. ...
— The Chateau of Prince Polignac • Anthony Trollope
... seemed a very ladylike kind of person and carried in his hand a rose of which he smelled now and then as he walked along, and he sang a little song that sounded for all the world as though it were being sung by a girl in her teens. And Robin's gorge rose at the sight of him for he hated unmanliness and thought that this gaily clad ladylike fellow who seemed to turn his nose up at the ground he walked upon must be a courtier or some nobleman that had never done an honest day's ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... scenes, Wrote a lot of ballet music in his teens: His gentle spirit rolls In the melody of souls— Which is pretty, but I don't know ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... regained his equilibrium, and faced the one who had dealt him such a furious blow—a slender youth not yet out of his teens, yet in whose blue eyes ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... milliard, billion, trillion &c V. centuriate^; quintuplicate. Adj. five, quinary^, quintuple; fifth; senary^, sextuple; sixth; seventh; septuple; octuple; eighth; ninefold, ninth; tenfold, decimal, denary^, decuple^, tenth; eleventh; duodenary^, duodenal; twelfth; in one's 'teens, thirteenth. vicesimal^, vigesimal; twentieth; twenty-fourth &c n.; vicenary^, vicennial^. centuple^, centuplicate^, centennial, centenary, centurial^; secular, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... fearlessly against all comers. With such a friend, always ready to give me of his best—alas, at the time, in my youthful ignorance of men, I failed altogether to appreciate my good fortune in meeting a companion like this—my mind rapidly expanded, and before I was half way through my teens I was learning to put boyish things behind me. Although Fothergill did not encourage my precocious affection for the press, wisely holding that a literary life was one reserved only for the few, and, like ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... and pernicious is this one word "Wait," here more than ever, where mastery of language is in question. But a glance shows how much more absurd it is to let a man pass out of his teens before putting him through a thorough course of elocution. It is while the muscles of throat and lungs are as flexible as a piece of Indiarubber, and the young ear sensitive to every nuance of sound, the future priest must learn to articulate, to pronounce correctly, ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts. Th—— was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks.—Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critic; and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe.—M. is said to bear his mitre high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) sufficiently justifies the bearing. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... views when I began; and it is a common complaint of me that I have a long tongue. I believe it is a fault beloved by fortune. Which of you considerate fellows would have done a thing at once so foolhardy and so wise as to make a confidant of a boy in his 'teens, and positively smelling of the nursery? And when had I cause to repent it? There is none so apt as a boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties such as mine. To the beginnings of virile common-sense ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... years of groping, blundering, and seeming idleness were not without their influence on his intellectual improvement even through direct contact with books. While still a boy in his teens, and put prematurely to uncongenial attempts at shopkeeping and farmkeeping, he at any rate made the great discovery that in books and in the gathering of knowledge from books could be found solace and entertainment; in short, he then acquired a taste for reading. ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... which must have glutted themselves with slaughter; and when, after a horror of disgust, having swum as it were through a dead sea, I got to the wall, I peeped from a small clear space before it through a hole, and made out a man, two youths in their teens, two women, three girls, and piles of cartridges and provisions; the hole had no doubt been broken from within at the spur of suffocation, when the poison must have entered; and I conjectured that here must be the mine-owner, director, manager, or ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor—men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning—and who cannot earn three hundred dollars in a year. There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches—whose parents have lied to get them their places—and who do not make the half of three hundred dollars a year, and perhaps not even the third of it. And then to spend such a sum, all in a single day of your life, at ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... part is a very venerable age. But as to a planet, as to our little earth, instead of arguing dotage, six thousand years may have scarcely carried her beyond babyhood. Some people think she is cutting her first teeth; some think her in her teens. But, seriously, it is a very interesting problem. Do the sixty centuries of our earth ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... they were removed as soon as they began to think for themselves. It will be observed that there is a palpable break in the uniformity of the list. Yoritsugu alone was stripped of office while still in his teens. That was because his father, the ex-shogun, engaged in a plot to overthrow the Hojo. But the incident was also opportune. It occurred just at the time when other circumstances combined to promote the ambition of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... in Norwich, where George was schooled under a master whose name at least is still familiar to English youth, Dr. Valpy (brother of Dr. Richard Valpy). Among his schoolfellows at the grammar school were Rajah Brooke and Dr. James Martineau. George Borrow, a hardened truant from his earliest teens, was once horsed, to undergo a flogging, on the back of James Martineau, and he never afterwards took kindly to the philosophy of that remarkable man. We are glad to know that Edward Valpy's ferule was weak, though his scholarship was strong. Stories were current that even in those days George used ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... also by the acquisition of the habit of thought regarding general courses of action. We can hardly expect meditation on the part of little children. But those who are older, those entering their teens, may and should be able to think things out, to plan out the day's actions, to determine their own ways of conduct. Children who have the custom of quiet, private prayer often develop ability to see their conduct in the calm of those moments. They get a mental elevation over ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... aged sixteen months is playing with a heap of toys on the rug near the fire and is carefully watched over by a young brother of five. The three other girls are charming little maidens. The eldest, though but in her early teens, is intellectual and studious; the second has a decided talent for painting, whilst the third, says her mother, laughing, 'is a consummate idler, but witty ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... masterpieces. There is a picture of Maria by B. Wilson the engraver, made before she left Ireland. In it the features are handsome and the figure graceful, though over-dressed, and the whole impression is of a matron in her thirties rather than a maid in her teens. The picture we give of her is from a whole-length by Gavin Hamilton, a Scotch artist, a friend of Burns, born in Lanark about 1730. He must have been a precocious genius, for this picture was engraved by McArdell, and published in 1754. ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... this desire will not allay restlessness, and many a school-room seat becomes vacant in the early teens. If, instead of the harsh measures so often used, the boy could know he had not only the loving sympathy but also the pride of his parents in this harbinger of approaching manhood; if, in place of force, he were given choice, after all the considerations ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... young-man-of-the-world bow and air. He had not been to Eton and Oxford and touched the outskirts of two or three London seasons, as a boy beauty and a modest Apollo Belvidere in his teens, without learning a number of ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sex begins long before its obvious manifestations at puberty, and that the direction of its vaguer and less differentiated habits in these earlier years is as important as its hygiene at the more noticeable climax of the early 'teens, increase the teacher's responsibility. Moreover, there is probably not a teacher of ten years' standing who has not faced—or by ignorance neglected—some emergency where moderate insight into the laws whereby the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... dared not refuse to ride with her. He was less able even than her own family to combat her purpose. One day some one had asked him why, since she called him Jack, and he was on the road to thirty years, while she was yet in her teens, he did not call her Betty or Bess, as all other Elizabeths were called in those days. He meditated a moment, then replied, "I never heard any one, even in her own family, call her so. I can't imagine any one ever calling her by any more familiar ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... daughter who since her teens had nursed invalid parents until death had claimed them and left her mistress of the homestead where she now lived. There had, it is true, been a boy; but in his early youth he had shaken the New Hampshire ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... talk continues albeit one carries it more lightly through a meal. A French officer arrived in the only automobile of his garage which the government had not commandeered. We looked down upon it stealthily that we might not give offense to his chauffeur, for the car is a Panhard in the last of its teens—which holds no terrors to a woman but is a gloomy age for a motor. An American architect from our Clearing House bowed over my hand a little more Gallic in these days than the Gaul himself. He has a right to the manners of the country. He had come over at the beginning of the war for ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... very time the Church loses its grip upon the boys and girls the public school loses its grip also. The exodus begins about the fifth grade, and at the eighth grade fifty per cent. of the scholars have departed. At the twelfth grade, near the middle teens, ninety per cent. of the scholars have gone out from the public schools. Thus these two most powerful forces in the creation of character, the Church and the School, lose their hold upon ...
— The Personal Touch • J. Wilbur Chapman
... seventeen, appeared younger than her years warranted. Some girls carry the child far into their teens, and Head the mirthful innocence of infancy with the richer, fuller life of budding womanhood. This was true of Elsie. Hers was not the forced exotic bloom of fashionable life; but rather one of the native blossoms of her New England home, having all the delicacy ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... O Tam! had they been queens A' plump an' strapping, in their teens; Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen, Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen! Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair, That ance were plush o' guid blue hair, I wad hae gi'en them aff my hurdies, For ae blink o' the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... had found them, both in their teens, and he had promptly taken them both along with their scant affairs. It was about the only thing to his credit that he had married Ellen, hard and fast enough, with the offices of a bona fide justice, a matter which he had regretted often enough ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... almost laugh out, which told him that the present scene would figure in some after frolic formidable enough to young gentlemen who are never proof against the ridicule of mirthful girls in their teens. He longed to laugh with her at it all, but an assembled school, a roguish scholar, would not exactly admit of this; so, coloring a little, and then provoked at himself for the gossiping blood which betrayed his inward embarrassment, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... extraordinary precautions are taken to prevent friends of intending candidates from approaching him in any way. There is no age limit, and men of quite mature years are to be found competing against youths hardly out of their teens; indeed, there is an authenticated case of a man who successfully graduated at the age of seventy-two. Many compete year after year, until at length they decide to give it up ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... old, too feeble, or too diseased to excite the cupidity of the most zealous lieutenant who eked out his pay on impress perquisites; of lads but recently embarked on the adventurous voyage of their teens; of pilots willing, for a consideration, to forego the pleasure of running ships aground; of fishermen who evaded His Majesty's press under colour of Sea-Fencible, Militia, or Admiralty protections; and of unpressable foreigners whose wives bewailed them more or less ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... in her earliest teens, Tilly Slowboy was a nursery-maid for little Mrs. Peerybingle's baby, and despite her extreme youth, was a most ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... who were uncle and aunt before they were well in their teens, disputed much as to whether nephews or nieces were more desirable; Ben contending that it was clear girls were good for less than boys, else they would not be always in petticoats, which showed how little they were meant for; whereupon Letty, who argued much from books, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... breakfast. What kind of a dinner do you make? Pa. Oh, sir, I eat a very plain dinner indeed; some soup, and some fish, and a little plain roast or boiled; for I dinna care for made dishes; I think, some way, they never satisfy the appetite. Dr. You take a little pudding, teens and afterwards some cheese. Pa. Oh, yes! though I don't care much about them. Dr. You take a glass of ale and porter with your cheese? Pa. Yes, one or the other; but seldom both. Dr. You West-country people generally take a glass of Highland whiskey after dinner. Pa. Yes, we do; ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Broxton parsonage? Those were happy days, especially when Seth, who was three years the younger, began to go out working too, and Adam began to be a teacher as well as a learner. But then came the days of sadness, when Adam was someway on in his teens, and Thias began to loiter at the public-houses, and Lisbeth began to cry at home, and to pour forth her plaints in the hearing of her sons. Adam remembered well the night of shame and anguish when he first saw his father quite wild and foolish, shouting a song out fitfully among ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... courtesy only, and I was ashamed of the little superiority which that advantage gave me. What cause for pride can there be in the possession of so much dross? You will smile, sir, when I tell you of the resolution which fixed itself in the mind of a boy scarcely in his teens. My playfellows were respected on account of the considerations which I have named. Why should I not be respected? I vowed that I would become so. And how? For what? For nothing less, sir, than myself; for my own high principle and integrity of conduct. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... form and is not without grace. As long as she is healthy and blooming she may be considered a beauty.... in the forest, but she soon gets faded because of the fatiguing life she leads and also because of her early marriage, for she is already a wife when our girls are at the beginning of their teens. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... ashamed of standing so confessed. In his own line, however, the Trengganu Malay is far in advance of any other natives on the East Coast, or indeed in the Peninsula. He has generally read his Kuran through, from end to end, before he has reached his teens, and, as the Malay character differs but slightly from the Arabic, he thereafter often acquires a knowledge of how to read and write his ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... time for the managers and playwrights to begin to consider the question whether they cannot go farther afield and handle themes from which they have held aloof hitherto. Gorgeousness of mounting has ceased to help managers; even the maidens in their teens have grown sophisticated, and jeer at the bread-and-butter love-stories; and successful modern French drama offers a much smaller proportion of adaptable plays than used to be the case. There must be a bottom to the deepest purse, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... a young boy in his teens. His face is intelligent; he is not a born criminal. He is above the average in intelligence, and in him there are all possibilities of ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... of ours—his reputation was in everybody's mouth, certainly. He had been, so they said, a runagate, a night-raker, and in the days of his youth a trifle wild. But now with the shadows of forty deepening upon him, it was not fair that all the hot blood of his teens and twenties should rise up in judgment against him. Still so it was. And the reason of it was, he had not, as he ought, married and settled. For which sin of omission, as the gossips of Eden Valley said, "there was ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... kind, eh? You mean Something milder? Let's see!—O Joe! Tell to the stranger that little scene Out of the "Babes in the Woods." You know, "Babes" was the name that we gave 'em, sir, Two lean lads in their teens, and greener Than even the belt of spruce and fir Where they built their nest, and ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... quite a different world from their own—the fact was written large in her clothing, in her manner, in the very tones of her voice; and, second, that in spite of her pale face and widow's veil, she was even younger than they were, a girl hardly out of her teens. ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... every Saturday at twelve o'clock. It is only a thousand a year; but don't you be down-hearted; I conclude she will raise your salary as you advance. You must forge her name to a heavy check, rob a church, and abduct a schoolgirl or two—misses in their teens and wards of Chancery preferred—and she will make it thirty, no doubt;" and Joe looked ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... a young thing, Just enter'd in her teens Fair as the day, and sweet as May, Fair as the day, and always gay; My Peggy is a young thing, And I'm not very auld, Yet well I like to meet her at The wawking ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and gently clapped her hands. "Add twenty years to that," she answered with an innocent burst of pride. Then she told how she had entered the order while yet in her "teens," had held half the offices of trust in the community, and had never missed any of the most rigid fasts or absented herself once from the midnight office, never having known so much as a day's ill-health. "Ah, a nun's life is a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... herself would perhaps have been unable to declare. Certain only it is that at over thirty years of age this clever, sensible, clear-seeing woman fell to sighing and blushing, starting and stammering at the sounding of a name, as though for all the world she had been a love-sick girl in her teens. ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... decieve Cicero and all the world; cruel for policy's sake, without ever a twinge of remorse or compunciton: a marble-cold impassive mind, and no heart al all, with master-subtlety achieving mastery of the world.—Alas! a boy in his late teens and early twenties, so nearly friendless, and with enemies so many and so great... A boy "up aginst" so huge and difficult circumstances always, that (you would say) there was no time, no possibility, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... day, and praying Him to show her what to do with her life, and, if it was His will, to make it a little less lonely. Then she rose and dressed herself, feeling that now that she had done with her teens, she was in every respect a woman grown— indeed, quite old. And, in honour of the event, she chose out of her scanty store of dresses, all of them made by Pigott and herself, her very prettiest, the one she had had for Sunday wear last summer, a tight-fitting robe of white ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of Mr. Irving was excessive, unaffected modesty and distrust of himself and of his own writings. Considering how many a debutant in letters, not yet out of his teens, is so demonstratively self-confident as to the prospective effect of his genius on an expecting and admiring world, it was always remarkable to hear a veteran, whose fame for half a century had been cosmopolitan, expressing the most timid doubts as to his latest compositions, and fearing they ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... on horseback. I did not know how he looked on the ground, but I would have married him myself in a second if he had asked me, partly no doubt because he was a little like Lord K——, the hero of my teens to whom I had never spoken, and partly because he was the exact opposite of Uncle Tom. How Miss Collett could! How anybody could! Yet Uncle Tom always talked as if he had only to choose among the flower of ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... always on the qui vive, listening for a step, a voice, and wondering now and then, with a start, whether it was the very material door-gong that she heard, or only the dim, intangible echo of a wild wish in her agitated heart. Oh! you little group of "teens," there is a day coming! Brush away those filmy cobwebs of your pleasant dreams; they are hiding your reality. Shut out that mass of "tangled sunbeams" that interrupts your future; there is a pall over the heart, now bounding in its untold ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... raise her. One guesses the rest. They will be sobbing together in a minute, the girl's face buried in the other's shoulder. All you are to see is just the wistfulness,—"My dear! my dear!" And then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in her teens for all that, hides her hot cheeks and cries her little wild heart to quietness. Some of it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All of it—and here's the point—is to be seen in the street among these clear-eyed Tuscan women, just as ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... boy was called Edmund, or, in my vernacular, Eddy. There were in his nature a gravity, depth, and sweetness which won my heart and respect, and we became friends in that intimate and complete way that seems possible only to boys in their early teens. For that matter, neither of us was yet over twelve; I think Eddy was part of a year my junior. But you must search the annals of antiquity to find anything so solid and unalterable as was our friendship. He was the most absolutely ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... into obedience at the point of the bayonet: young boys in their teens brandished revolvers in the high roads: rough, brawny dockers walked about endowed apparently with unlimited authority, and in the dark recesses of the General Post Office, beyond the reach of law or ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... in the woods; I know every tree and bypath; yes, and many a swim have I had in the old river. Jerry Quintin," he continued, "as we used to call him. Why, I've known him since I was a child. Do you want to hear about him? Well, when he was a youth, not quite out of his teens, Mr. Thorndyke gave the land on which the Monastery stands, Quintin was made chairman of the board of trustees, and treasurer also. He has handled every dollar of the funds, superintended the erection of all the ...
— The Mystery of Monastery Farm • H. R. Naylor
... and removed each to a remote portion of the palace, with separate suites of attendants, and their only meetings took place in the private apartments of the Pope, and rarely. Thus Ippolito and Alessandro entered upon their teens with no judicious, kindly, or formative influences around them. It was said that each boy threw in the other's face the fact of his illegitimacy, which fawning dependants had revealed to them. Their environment and associates were most undesirable, and nothing was done to instil and encourage ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... should bear in mind that simplicity is what harmonizes best with youth, but care must be taken to avoid the simplicity of the school-room and of a "miss in her teens." We can call to mind a young lady who made her appearance at an evening party in London, where "all the world and his wife" were collected together, and when it was necessary to be somewhat smart, in a rather skimp spotted ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... the public ball-rooms, a stranger would be delighted with such a display of pretty faces and neat figures. I have hardly ever seen a really plain Canadian girl in her teens; and a downright ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... few stray pages somewhere, and then there is nothing for it but to let the matter take its course. Relief comes only when the last page of the last book is read; and then there are relapses whenever a new book appears until one is safely on through the teens. The boys will be delighted to know, therefore, that 'Taken by the Enemy' is but the first of six books to come out in rapid succession, all based on the thrilling incidents of ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... honor, a hatred of anything underhanded, and his conscience pricked him a little. However, it was not his fault, he told himself. Stephen Foster had no business to be churlish and ungrateful, and treat his daughter as though she were a school miss still in her teens. And what wrong could there be about the day's outing together, if no harm was intended? It would all come right in ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... to a third-class carriage, which carried natives and colored people, also one European in lonely majesty. This last stood smoking a cigarette in an amber or mock-amber mouthpiece. He was a boy not long out of his teens, a boy with a dazzling complexion if, indeed, he were not a girl in a boy's grey suit. He introduced himself, as he ushered his fellow-traveler into a compartment. 'I'm the only one here,' he said. 'I've been alone since Mafeking. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... to half a score of summers Make the sweetest of the "teens"— Not too young to guess, dear Lily, What ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... competent fortune, handsome exterior, amiable character, and four-and-twenty years of age—emerged from a house in the Calle San Bernardo at Madrid, where he had passed a wearisome hour in practising a duet of Bellini's with Dona Feliciana Vasquez de los Rios. This young lady, still in her teens, moderately pretty and tolerably rich, Andres had from childhood been affianced with, and was accustomed to consider as his future wife, although his sentiments towards her were, in fact, of a very tepid description. Betrothed as children by their parents, there was little real love between ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of the hall were about two hundred men, all armed with sabers,—men of every age, and height and swarthiness, from stout, blue-bearded veterans to youths yet in their teens,—dressed in every hue imaginable from the scarlet frock-coat, white breeches and high black boots of a risaldar-major to the jeweled silken gala costume of the dandiest of Rajput's youth. There was not a man present who did not rank himself the equal of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... serve in the Revolution were in the early twenties. There were a few seasoned old warriors, of course, but the majority of them were young. Such were the companions-in-arms of Lafayette, himself still in his teens. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... untruth to which we English people are particularly prone in India, and, I am assured, everywhere else. It is this. Young 'miss in her teens', as soon as she finds her female attendants in the wrong, no matter in what way, exclaims, 'It is so like the natives'; and the idea of the same error, vice, or crime, becomes so habitually associated in her mind with every native she afterwards sees, that she ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... towns, boys who begin to earn a living when they enter their teens may be taught in evening schools to practice the craft of carpentry, bricklaying, plastering, plumbing, gas fitting, etc., as is shown successfully in the Auchmuty schools of New York. Trade ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... her at the town on our way down had never reached her. She was a widow—Mrs. Plew—whose husband, a good river pilot, had died from overwork on a hard trip to New Orleans in the floods of the Mississippi two years before, leaving her with six children dependent upon her, the eldest a lad in his "teens," the youngest a little baby girl. They owned their home, just on the brink of the river, a little "farm" of two or three acres, two horses, three cows, thirty hogs, and a half hundred fowls, and in spite of the bereavement, they had gone on bravely, winning the esteem and commendation ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... Some of the finest classics in our literature are penned in prose. But within this minor peril lies the germ of a major peril. The trouble is that prosiness may develop into pessimism. And when prosiness curdles into pessimism the case of the patient is very grave. I heard a young fellow in his teens telling a much older man of his implicit faith in the providence of God. 'Yes,' said the senior, with a sardonic smile, 'I used to talk like that when I was your age!' I heard a young girl telling a woman old enough to be ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... satiric face seemed to change its time of life. At this moment it was infantine, yet it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and knowledges. Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed to find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his teens. Nevertheless he divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn't prove a bore. He would prove on the contrary a source of agitation. This idea held the young man, in spite of a ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... was too sweet and her mind too serious for egoism or the pettier vanities, but she hardly could help being conscious of the energy of her brain; and if she had passed through childhood in ignorance of her beauty, she barely had entered her teens when her happy indifference was dispelled; for the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... aware of it, she was engrossed in its contents. It was full from cover to cover of coloured photographs of women. There were dark girls, fair girls, auburn girls, every type of womanhood to be met with under Northern skies; they ranged from slim girls in their teens to over-ripe beauties, whose principal attraction was the redundance of their figures. For all the immense profusion of varied beauty which the women displayed, they had certainly two qualities in common—they all ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... love for herself. She was nine years his senior; her own affections became probably engaged, and, as time advanced, his feeling seems to have subsided into one of warm and very loyal friendship. We hear, indeed, of his falling in love, as he was emerging from his teens, with a handsome girl who was on a visit at his father's house. But the fancy died out 'for want of root.' The admiration, even tenderness, for Miss Flower had so deep a 'root' that he never in latest life mentioned her name with indifference. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... two hundred girls, coming from nearly two hundred different families, each one brought up, until she was in her teens, in different ways. Looking over the population of a small village, the most careless observer must see how unlike the homes are; how every grade of morals and manners is represented, and with what telling effect they ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... the Chateau are those of the six pretty daughters of Louis and Marie Leczinska. There are the ill-starred twins, Elizabeth and Henrietta: Madame Elizabeth, who never lost the love of her old home, and, though married, before entering her teens, to the Infanta of Spain, retired, after a life of disappointment, to her beloved Versailles to die; and the gentle Henrietta who, cherishing an unlucky passion for the young Duc de Chartres, pined quietly away after witnessing her ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... slight need, and make his burly middle-age a leaning-staff not inappropriate to her blooming youth. It was pleasant to observe how Tilly Slowboy, waiting in the background for the baby, took special cognizance (though in her earliest teens) of this grouping; and stood with her mouth and eyes wide open, and her head thrust forward, taking it in as if it were air. Nor was it less agreeable to observe how John the Carrier, reference being made by ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... therefore, of tearing it in pieces, and throwing it into the water, she folded it carefully up, and placed it in the pretty corset of white satin, which seems the natural escritoire of a shepherdess in her teens. Scarcely had she closed the drawer, and double locked it, when she saw at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Ann that Virginia confided her inmost fears lest Tony should follow in his father's footsteps. From Sir Philip, choleric and tyrannical, she concealed them completely—and many of Tony's youthful escapades as well, paying some precocious card-losses he sustained while still in his early teens out of her own slender dress allowance in preference to rousing his uncle's ire by a knowledge of them. But with Ann, she had ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... at about "three or four" years of age, spontaneous imitation "becomes very prominent the latter part of the first year," the gang instinct is characteristic of the preadolescent period, desire for adventure shows itself in early adolescence, altruism "appears in the early teens," and the sex instinct "after about a dozen years of life." The child of from four to six is largely sensory, from seven to nine he is motor, from then to twelve the retentive powers are prominent. In the adolescent ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... on the barren tundra of Alaska, Marian had hunted rabbits, ptarmigan and even caribou and white wolves with her father in her early teens. She was as steady and sure a shot as most ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... visited their uncle four years had passed, and, in that time, they had shot up to womanhood, although they were not yet out of their teens. Their father was a landed proprietor living in north Northumberland; and, like other landed proprietors who live under the shade of the Cheviots, was rich in his flocks, and his herds, and his men-servants and his maid-servants, and ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... gift for music that it had been a question at one time whether he should not perhaps give up everything else in order to develop this gift, but he became a scholar notwithstanding, although he never entirely gave up composing, and playing the piano. While still in his teens, he became acquainted with Wagner's music and grew passionately fond of it. Long before he met Wagner he must have idealised him in his mind to an extent which only a profoundly artistic nature could ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... very good and not hurried through with that undue haste so noticeable at home. The assembly, being considerably leavened with people who are, to say the least, well out of their teens, makes itself comfortable for an hour or more, doing ample justice to the delicacies provided; indeed, after the ladies have all departed, bachelors and wayward husbands usually return to the attack once, and even twice, so ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... brightness to charm a visitor to that poor house. It crackled cosily, toasting their toes outstretched upon the fender-bar, melting their mood to such glowing confidences as they had not exchanged since Mary was in her teens. No lamps were lighted. The widow was frugal with gas when eyes were idle; her extravagant sister loved ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... girls had ever enjoyed were the young Tristrams. There were two boys and two girls. The boys were the younger, the girls the elder. The boys were not yet in their teens, but Molly and Isabel Tristram were about the same age as the young Cardews. Molly was, in fact, a year older, and was a very sympathetic, strong-minded, determined girl. She and her sister Isabel had not been educated at home, but had ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... neither the man nor his work; for the Church under consideration has risen from the testimony solemnly set forth and the startling declarations made by this person, who, at the time of his earliest announcements, was a farmer's boy in the first half of his teens. If his claims to ordination under the hands of divinely commissioned messengers be fallacious, forming as they form the foundation of the Church organization, the superstructure cannot stand; if, on the other ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... my personal observation, viewing the matter at close range, that nearly always fat, like old age or a thief in the dark, steals upon one unawares. I take my own case. As a youngster and on through my teens and into my early twenties—ah, those romping elfin twenties!—I was, in outline, what might be termed dwindly, not to say slimmish. Those who have known me in my latter years might be loath to believe it, but one of my boyhood nick-names—I had several, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... huge bonfire, and stared, with knitted brows, at Dominic Le Mierre, who swaggered in and out amongst the girls, tapping one on the cheek, chucking another under the chin, and pulling the long curls of a young creature in her teens. In the fitful and flickering light, the master of Orvilliere looked like a sea-king, so stalwart, so wicked, so magnetic. It was quite plain to Perrin Corbet that he was more than a little the worse for drink; and he watched ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... Gladstone—ever from youth up the beloved and admired of many personal intimates (although some may be politically his opponents). Always the foremost man, warm-hearted, earnest, hard-working, and religious, he had a following even in his teens; and it is noticeable that a choice lot of young and keen intelligences of Eton and Christ Church formed themselves into a small social sort of club, styled, in compliment to their ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... her head, straightened herself up and shook down her hair. Then she passed a hand several times over her face, and when Hal looked again there stood before him a girl in her teens. . "Great Scott!" exclaimed ...
— The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders • Clair W. Hayes
... in this world than that of a boy below his teens. It is so without calculation, without qualification, and without reserve. Dr. Dunn let his eyes rest kindly upon his ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... willing slave bound at the chariot wheels of a good-natured despot. No amount of work tired Mrs. Herrick; she had the strength and vitality of ten women. It never entered her head that a growing girl in her teens was liable to flag and grow weary, and so the pretty pink roses that had bloomed among Alpine snows faded out of Anna's cheeks, and the soft brown ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Spirit of the Age hope to do with a boy scarcely yet in his teens, who dared arraign her in such fashion as is set forth in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... little bit of a fellow—now don't laugh!" cried Mr. Thimblefinger, seeing Mr. Rabbit wink at Mrs. Meadows,—"I mean when I was in my teens. Well, when I was younger than I am now, an old witch lived not far from our house. Her eyes were red around the rims, and her eyeballs looked as if they had been boiled. Everybody called her Peggy Pig-Eye, and she answered to that name about as well ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... said I listlessly, not seeing what great good the "Life of Robert Hall" could do me, or why the same medicine should suit the old weather-beaten uncle and the nephew yet in his teens. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... even when they are married. Until he is forty, a man may be led under Providence into forming a connection with a woman of suitable age and family. After that age he will never look at any girl out of her teens, and either perpetrates a folly or does not marry at all. If the Danvers family is not to become extinct, or to be dragged down by a mesalliance, measures must be taken ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... was saying," he continued, turning again to my partner, "we all of us make mistakes and I made the biggest one when I annexed the present Mrs. D. I was a young fool hardly out of my teens, and the sight of a pretty face and a tearful story of woe were too much for me. She was an actress. Comprenez? A sort of Lydia Languish, la-de-da kind of a girl. Oh, she caught me fast enough, and it was only after I had swallowed ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... stands at present, it is the old story of the Lion and the Painter; the elderly gentlemen are likely to have it their own way; they say what they like, while the young ones are content to do what they like. And the more absurdity a man displays in his teens, (and some, it must be confessed, are absurd enough) the more insupportable an air of wisdom does he put on when he gets settled. And as there is no hope of these sedate gentry being sent to College again to teach the rising ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... good report these words, "In the days we went a-gipsying," were ever and anon at my tongue's end. The other part of the song I quickly forgot, but these words have stuck to me ever since. On purpose to try to find out what fortune-telling was, when in my teens I used to walk after working hours from Tunstall to Fenton, a distance of six miles, to see "old Elijah Cotton," a well-known character in the Potteries, who got his living by it, to ask him all sorts of questions. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... playful as a child, but it was because the play was in him and it was time for play. When our brother was pastor of the North Church, in Newburyport, it was our custom to meet every Monday morning in Boston. On one occasion, a brother-in-law of mine, a boy in his teens, accompanied me to Boston, where we were to meet Mr. Powell. We soon found ourselves tramping about the city on errands. Mr. Powell was effervescing with fun. At such seasons, and they were very frequent, he took great pleasure in making me the victim of his frolicsomeness. On this ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... activity. The spirit of painting settled at a very early age upon young Diego de Silva Velazquez—the second name by which he is universally known belonged to his mother's family—almost before he was in his teens he was working in the studio of Francisco de Herrera, architect and painter. The temperaments of master and pupil could not fuse; there was sufficient trouble to lead Don Juan Rodriguez to transfer his son's services to Francesco ...
— Velazquez • S. L. Bensusan
... need of a Tabernacle in that quarter, for the poverty and wickedness were very dreadful. Boys not yet in their teens staggered by half-tipsy, or lounged at the doors of gin-shops. Bonnetless girls roamed about singing and squabbling. Forlorn babies played in the gutter, and men and women in every stage of raggedness and degradation marred the beauty of that ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... "serving his time" and before he was out of his teens, Henry Willis was appointed organist of Christ Church, Hoxton. In the early fifties he was organist of Hampstead Parish Church, where he had built a new organ, and for nearly thirty years he was organist at Islington, Chapel-of-Ease, which post he only resigned after he had passed ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... general effect you are a bit chippendale, aren't you? But that can be outgrown. The rarest beauty isn't that which comes before the 'teens. If you never have anything else, be grateful for your eyes—and remember this afterward. Be merciful with them, because unless I'm a poor prophet there will come times when you will do well ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... enough, though she said little to him. And the only time he saw her flustered was when she ordered a young man of the Brons out of the building. Jack felt a bit sorry for the fellow. He was scarcely out of his teens and was all shook up because Nea was going out there into space instead of staying here in ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... expect to express that to which the serious student of thirty, the man who has actually lived, can give voice. If the violinist's art is truly a great art, it cannot come to fruition in the artist's 'teens. His accomplishment then is no more than a promise—a promise which finds its realization in and by life itself. Yet Americans have the brains as well as the spiritual endowment necessary to understand and appreciate beauty in a high degree. They can ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens |
