"Flawed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... both the stones, though they have been reset," said the Marchese without moving from his place. "Look, gentlemen, the emerald is slightly flawed, or it would be worth ten times the amount. The ruby is flawless, but it is not a large one. Both the stones come from a set of jewels which I once gave my wife. And, since it is quite impossible for me to suppose that the Marchesa ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... Shallows and banks seem to have been numerous during the period of at least the Lower formation. The flagstones of Caithness and Orkney, and the argillaceous fish beds of Cromarty and Ross, not only abound in the ripple-marked surfaces of a shallow sea, but also in cracked and flawed planes that must have dried and split into polygonal partings in the air and the sun. The appearance of these in the neighborhood of the town of Thurso, about half a mile to the east of the river, is not a little curious. Bearing throughout the general ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the Frenshe monster,[48] Neapolitan Seignor, the man-makarel[49] and marchant of madens-fleshe that deales altogether in flawed ware and crackt comodityes? the bawdy broker, I meanes, where a man for his dollers may have choyse of diseases, and som tymes the pox too, if hee will leeve beehind him ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... of a tongue. Then get you hence. This Jinnai undertakes the charge and exercise of the weapons of the furious god. Bah! They are but of wood." To the horror of the priest he gave the wooden Fudo[u] which adorned the chamber such a whack that the unfortunate and flawed divinity parted into its aged fragments. "What! You still delay!" A hand of iron was laid on the old fellow's neck. Jinnai bent him to the ground. He looked around for implement. None was better to hand than part of the outraged god. Holding firm his victim, and raising his robes, ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... something dapper about him even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than her real height, seeing that she was dressed, like a half-grown boy, in a soft-collared shirt open at the throat and a pair of loose trousers. She had large but rather regular features, ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... hand. Parents and guardians cannot be too careful in this regard, and young women themselves should, by refusing such associates, avoid all danger of contracting such ties. Wealth, nor family rank, nor genius, availeth aught if the character of the man be flawed. ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... put to his lips the wine of which I was drunken. The boy took his first sip from Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria",—that cracked Bohemian glass, which, handed in a golden salver that might have come from the cunning graver of Cellini, yet forces one to taste, over a flawed and broken edge, the sourest drop of ill-made vin du pays, heavily drugged and made bitter with Paracelsian laudanum. Under that strange patchwork quilt so imaginative a soul as Clarian could not fail to dream. It was a great pity I had not been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... life of torment. Can I tell you how it was? At first to see them together was like looking through a glass upon a picture; a picture gallant and beautiful yet removed behind a screen and not of this world. Suppose now that by little and little the glass began to be flawed, or the picture behind it to crumble (you could not tell which) until when it smiled it smiled wryly, until rocks toppled and figures fell askew, yet still kept up their pretence of play against the distorted woodland. Nay, it was worse than ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... inexhaustible time and imperishable material at her absolute command, slowly, vacillatingly, not hesitating at any waste or any cruelty, Nature works out some form till it approaches perfection; then finds it flawed, finds it is not the thing she meant, and with the same strong, unscrupulous and passionless action breaks it up and begins anew. As in our own lives we sometimes feel that the slow progress of years, the structure built up ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... the brain grew momentarily clearer, he would wonder, almost in his old cynical way, at his own pity. She seemed to have come to love him. But was it not altogether for her good that his flawed, contradictory life should be cut violently from hers? Could their marriage, ill-planted, ill-grown, have come in the end to any tolerable fruit? His mind passed back, with bitterness, over the nine months of it; not bitterness ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... behind each rock and in every shallow, sheltered place in the stream a plentiful gathering of tiny red stones. They were of a pale, ruby cast, and mostly flawed; dainty trifles, translucent and full of light when she held them to the sun. She began a search for a larger specimen. It might mount nicely into a stickpin for Bill, she thought; a ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... clasped hands and whispered: "May not even a flawed piece prove so unique, so valuable in other respects, that ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... said Katharine; and after they had stared at each other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It was through a dank and tear-flawed world that she stumbled conventward, while out of the east the sun came bathed in mists, a watery sun no ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... passed at that moment over the appearance of the bay. It was no more that clear, visible interior, like a house roofed with glass, where the green, submarine sunshine slept so stilly. A breeze, I suppose, had flawed the surface, and a sort of trouble and blackness filled its bosom, where flashes of light and clouds of shadow tossed confusedly together. Even the terrace below obscurely rocked and quivered. It seemed a graver thing to venture on this place of ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inch, they fought their way along the edge of the foaming rocks, until Kit feared he had made a mistake. And then, when on the verge of himself turning back, they came abreast of a narrow opening, not twenty feet wide, which led into a land-locked enclosure where the fiercest gusts scarcely flawed the surface. It was the haven gained by the boats of previous days. They landed on a shelving beach, and the two employers lay in collapse in the boat, while Kit and Shorty pitched the tent, built a fire, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... hero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice round him; but he is the only example even approximating to the heroic type. Coriolanus—Caesar—Antony, stand in flawed strength, and fall by their vanities;—Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeo an impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the biographies of men of letters, and of artists generally; and this arises from the pictures of comparative defeat which, in almost every instance, such books contain. In these books we see failure more or less,—seldom clear, victorious effort. If the art is exquisite, the marble is flawed; if the marble is pure, there is defect in art. There is always something lacking in the poem; there is always irremediable defect in the picture. In the biography we see persistent, passionate effort, and almost constant repulse. If, on the whole, victory ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... their courage or adorned it by their studies, they would have merited, and under a king of such learning and such equity would have received in some sort, their reward. I look upon them as so many old cabinets of ivory and tortoise-shell, scratched, flawed, splintered, rotten, defective both within and without, hard to unlock, insecure to lock up again, ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... ghostly sound, lingering within the Altar, where it seems to chant in its wild way of Wrong and Murder done, and false Gods worshipped, in defiance of the Tables of the Law, which look so fair and smooth, but are so flawed and broken. Ugh! Heaven preserve us, sitting snugly round the fire!—it has an awful voice that Wind at Midnight, singing in a church!" Of all this and of yet more to the like purpose, not one syllable was there in the Reading, which, on the contrary, began at once point-blank: "High ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... blushed together; Then her story of the ring Sounds not improbable, She told it me so well It seemed the actual thing:— 370 Oh, keep your counsel close, But I guess under the rose, In long past summer weather When the world was blossoming, And the rose upon its thorn: I guess not who he was Flawed honour like a glass, And made my life forlorn, But my Mother, Mother, Mother, Oh, I know her from all ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... lord, I am too tired to kiss. Look how the earth is like an emerald, With rivers veined and flawed with fallow fields. ...
— Helen of Troy and Other Poems • Sara Teasdale
... something which the imitator more than half misunderstood. Of mediaeval literature proper, apart from chronicles and genealogies, Walpole knew nothing: and for its more precious features he had the dislike which sometimes accompanies ignorance. But he undoubtedly had positive literary genius—flawed, alloyed, incomplete, uncritical of itself, but existing: and this genius showed itself here. His paper-and-ink "Strawberry" is quite another guess structure from his lath-and-plaster one. For itself in itself—for what it ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... quicksilver in the wet way, is that the ore need not be crushed so finely. Roasting takes the place of fine crushing, as the ore from the roasting furnace is either found somewhat spongy in texture or the grains of silica in which fine gold may be incased are split or flawed by the fire. For quicksilver amalgamation very fine crushing is necessary to bring all gold particles in contact with it. Quicksilver being so thick in substance, it will not find its way readily in and out of a microscopically fine spongy body or through very fine flaws in grains ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... alert in political matters, ready to seize every opportunity to do good and to promote the cause of freedom. He was, in a word, one of that large army of pilgrims whose ambition is to "make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight." In 1791 he wrote an anonymous letter to Fox, in which he advanced the sentiments to which he later gave expression in his "Political Justice," his principal work. In his autobiographical notes ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of his passions. The imperfections of his temperament have pierced his poetry and prose, shattered their structure, and blurred their beauty. Only four or five of his poems—"The Raven," "Ligeia," the earlier of the two addressed "To Helen," and the sonnet to his wife—escape being flawed by some fit of haste, some ungovernable error of taste, some hopeless, unaccountable break in their beauty. In criticism, Poe initiated a fearless and agile movement; he had an acute instinct in questions of literary form, amounting to a passion, as all his instincts and perceptions did; ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... together; Then her story of the ring Sounds not improbable, She told it me so well It seemed the actual thing:— O keep your counsel close, But I guess under the rose, In long past summer weather When the world was blossoming, And the rose upon its thorn: I guess not who he was Flawed honor like a glass And made my life forlorn; But my Mother, Mother, Mother, O, I know ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... fashion. And suddenly a great white light shot up in her heart, and loving one man she knew she had no right to deceive another, to live a deception all her life long, to cheat him—yes, it was that. Better a hundred times to live out her flawed ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... check any disloyalty, if possible. If the Marquis alone could not effect his purpose with the regiment, no staff officer could aid him. He was a lonely old man and a hard that morning. The odds against him were tremendous, and his weapons were flawed and breaking in his hand. That only made him the more firmly resolute. He knew how sometimes one man could enforce his will on unwilling thousands. Was he that man that ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... that she valued most. The diamond nose-stud that takes the place of the Western patch in drawing attention to the curve of the nostril, the gold ornament in the centre of the forehead studded with tallow-drop emeralds and flawed rubies, the heavy circlet of beaten gold that was fastened round her neck by the softness of the pure metal, and the chinking curb-patterned silver anklets hanging low over the rosy ankle-bone. She was dressed ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... of offence; she could not forget the Woman in the thought; while she was instructing you as a mind, she wished to be admired as a Woman; sentimental tears often dimmed the eagle glance. Her intellect, too, with all its splendor, trained in a drawing-room, fed on flattery, was tainted and flawed; yet its beams make the obscurest school-house in New England warmer and lighter to the little rugged girls who are gathered together on its wooden bench. They may never through life hear her name, but she is not the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the cover, half expecting the blaze of a jewel-case. She saw at first only dull shanks of metal tumbled one upon the other. But, after a moment's peering, between them she caught gleams of veritable light. Her fingers went in to retrieve a hoop of heavy silver, in the midst of which was sunk a flawed topaz. She admired a moment the play of light over ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... compensation is responsible for the fact that, while the coast's dazzling summer is flawed by trade winds, its rainy season is tempered by mushrooms. At least, so thought Van Mater. Connoisseur that he was in the joys of living, he confessed to a new sensation when, for the first time, he found himself plodding over the seared, round-shouldered hills, spongy with the supererogatory wetness ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Predstaviteley (110 seats; members elected by universal adult suffrage to serve four-year terms) elections: last held 17 and 31 October 2004; international observers widely denounced the elections as flawed and undemocratic, based on massive government falsification; pro-LUKASHENKO candidates won every seat, after many opposition candidates were disqualified for technical reasons election results: Soviet Respubliki - percent of vote by party - NA; seats ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... now guiltless of any hint of sullenness; she hummed softly to herself, whose heart had almost forgotten its birthright of song and laughter; never the least pang of conscience flawed the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance |
