"Compactness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... manager he writes in the same letter: "I miss him dreadfully. The sense I used to have of compactness and comfort about me while I was reading, is quite gone; and on my coming out for the ten minutes, when I used to find him always ready for me with something cheerful to say, it is forlorn. . . . Besides which, H. and all the rest of them are always somewhere, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... essential idea is to divide the opposing force by penetrating through an interval found, or made, in it, and then to concentrate upon that one of the fractions which can be least easily helped by the other. In a column of ships this will usually be the rear. The compactness of the order attacked, the number of the ships cut off, the length of time during which they can be isolated and outnumbered, will all affect the results. A very great factor in the issue will be the moral effect, the confusion introduced into a line thus broken. Ships coming up toward the break ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... whale-line for the close coiling to which it must be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may give it compactness and gloss. Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... about the book was its maturity and compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining "young writers" whom every season produces as inevitably as its debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour and then settle down to producing industriously for the class with which their peculiar trick of phrase has found favor. It was ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... foreshortened thing, where representation is arrived at, as I have already elsewhere had occasion to urge, not by the addition of items (a light that has for its attendant shadow a possible dryness) but by the art of figuring synthetically, a compactness into which the imagination may cut thick, as into the rich density of wedding-cake. The moral of all which indeed, I fear, is, perhaps too trivially, but that the "thick," the false, the dissembling second half of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
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