"Lopping" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contain some good clear-headed articles; but I sought in vain for the playful vivacity and the keenly-cutting satire, whose sharp edge, however painful to the patient, is of such high utility in lopping off the excrescences of bad taste, and levelling to its native clay the heavy growth of dulness. Still less could I find any trace of that graceful familiarity of learned allusion and general knowledge which mark ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... becoming, and their highest happiness being found in shopping, polking, and the schottisch—pretty, petted, useless, expensive butterflies, whose future husbands and children were to be pitied and prayed for. But to-day, we find them lopping off superfluities, retrenching expenditures, deaf to the calls of pleasure, or the mandates of fashion, swept by the incoming patriotism of the time to the loftiest height of womanhood, willing to do, to bear, or to suffer for the beloved country. The riven fetters of caste and conventionality ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... session of limb-lopping every morning, each of which resulted in quite a pile of severed members. I presume more bungling operations are rarely seen outside of Russian or Turkish hospitals. Their unskilfulness was apparent ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... self, of which all indulgences are only greater or smaller branches. Self-righteousness and self-trust, self-seeking and self-pleasing, self-will, self-defence, self-glory—these are a few of the myriad branches of that deeply rooted tree. And what if one or more of these be cut off, if such lopping off of some few branches only throws back into others the self-life to develop more vigorously ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... hardly a chance of a full-lop. In some half-lops the ear that hangs down is broader and longer than the upright ear;[258] so that we have the unusual case of a want of symmetry on the two sides. This difference in the position and size of the two ears probably indicates that the lopping of the ear results {108} from its great length and weight, favoured no doubt by the weakness of the muscles consequent on disuse. Anderson[259] mentions a breed having only a single ear; and Professor Gervais another breed which ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... arm of knowledge, not deceiving itself with romantic misrepresentations of things by the way, but fully recognizing what is wrong from the outset, and making direct for the root of the evil instead of contenting itself by lopping a branch here ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... why, but I felt that someone was there who wished to see the young monk's grave. For a moment I stood there. Then I went to the house where I kept my tools for my work in the cemetery, and got a shears which I used for lopping the cypress trees. I took a ladder quickly, set it against the wall, mounted it, and from the cypress I had seen moving I lopped some of the boughs. The sobbing ceased. As the boughs fell down from the tree I saw a woman's ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... restless disposition always to separate himself from his companions on these occasions, and always to occupy himself when he is alone in cutting new walking-sticks for his own use. The mere act of cutting and lopping at hazard appears to please him. He has filled the house with walking-sticks of his own making, not one of which he ever takes up for a second time. When they have been once used his interest in them is all exhausted, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... been certain at that moment that the populace would rise. When it rose intelligently the movement against the Church and civilization would come to nothing. The Revolt elsewhere—in half barbaric Europe—would come to no more than the lopping off of outer and insignificant things. The Baltic Plain, sundry units of the outer Germanies and Scandinavia, probably Hungary, possibly Bohemia, certain mountain valleys in Switzerland and Savoy and France and the ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... almost the only white man at the wharf, moved slowly from bale to bale, ripping the covers with his knife and probing with his cotton auger into the middle of each bale to test its quality. Mules dozed about with lopping ears. Nowhere was there haste; neither here nor on the street; nor in the railway offices beyond, where sat John Eddring, agent of the personal injury department of ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... A right knowledge and apprehension of the past teaches humbleness and self-sustainment to the present. Showing us what has been, it also reveals what can be done. Progress is Janus-faced, looking to the bygone as well as to the coming; and radicalism should not so much busy itself with lopping off the dead or seeming dead limbs, as with clearing away that poisonous rottenness around the roots, from which the tree has drawn the principle of death into its sap. A love of the beautiful and harmonious, which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... upon me so that I was not able to go abroad. In that hour I made a vow to my God that I would never again cut man or woman from the light of the sun and the air of God; for I perceived the nature of the punishment. How can I break my vow? Were it only the lopping of a hand or a foot I should not delay. But even that is impossible now that the English have rule. One or another of my people'—he looked obliquely at the Director-General of Public Education—'would at once write a letter to the Viceroy, and perhaps I should ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... religious country. Her history is the history of Catholicism: she has survived in all her times of storm and stress by tightly embracing the Cross." And he could now come to the national wars; from the battles in which popular piety saw Saint James, on his white steed, lopping off the heads of the Moors with his golden cutlass, to the uprising of the people against Napoleon, behind the banner of the parish and with their scapularies on their bosoms. He did not have a word to say about ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... the rains over, but the stakes which I had cut from the trees, shot out like willows the first year after lopping their heads. I was ignorant of the tree I cut them from; but they grew so regularly beautiful, that they made a most lively appearance, and so flourished in three year's time, that I resolved to cut more of them; and these ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... may well say that, Sir! Bin allowed to run to rack and ruin, this here pooty bit o' garding has. Want a lot o' clearing, scurryfunging, and topping and lopping, afore it'll look anythink like. But it's got the making of a puffeck parrydise in it, a puffeck parrydise it has—with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... hear nothing of human sacrifices now, and it is questionable if the present Casembe could bring a thousand stragglers into the field. When he usurped power five years ago, his country was densely peopled; but he was so severe in his punishments—cropping the ears, lopping off the hands, and other mutilations, selling the children for very slight offences, that his subjects gradually dispersed themselves in the neighbouring countries beyond his power. This is the common mode by which tyranny is cured in parts like these, where fugitives are ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... noise or care for anything but their breakfast. Yet even they gather and fly before the approaching tumult. Hares come hurrying out, and dash over the smooth hillside; magpies rise, poise themselves, slue round, and dive backwards into the wood; and then circumspect, lopping easily and lightly along, a fox crosses through the teazles, and slips down to a drain in the hollow; and see! another fox behind him, along the same path, and on the same errand, for each trots up to a covered drain, looks ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... regard to the division of labor: it consists in setting competition and morality against each other, in order to limit them by each other, as M. Rossi pretended to arrest and restrict economic inductions by morality, cutting here, lopping there, to suit the need and the occasion. I have refuted M. Rossi by asking him this simple question: How can science be in disagreement with itself, the science of wealth with the science of duty? Likewise I ask the communists: How can a principle whose development is clearly ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... cutting a tree close down to the root. Many of them are good charcoal-burners, and indeed their principal occupation is supplying the adjacent villages with charcoal and firewood. They use small narrow-edged axes for felling, but for lopping they invariably use the Nepaulese national weapon—the kookree. This is a heavy, curved knife, with a broad blade, the edge very sharp, and the back thick and heavy. In using it they slash right and left with a quick downward stroke, drawing the blade quickly toward them as they strike. They are ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... bears no fruit, except much dung be laid about it; and justice comes not from some till they be richly manured: some trees require much visiting, much watering, much labour; and some men give not their fruits but upon importunity: some trees require incision, and pruning, and lopping; some men must be intimidated and syndicated with commissions, before they will deliver the fruits of justice: some trees require the early and the often access of the sun; some men open not, but upon the favours and letters ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... again at the pulling off of those copper-toed boots at night, there by the kitchen stove, after the chase is done. But, ah! how happy I am again, holding up for the gaze of a kind pair of eyes this great, gray creature with the lopping ears. ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough |
