"Meticulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... women were observed sweeping the trail to the spring with meticulous care, in preparation for the double procession which came down at about 1:30 ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... hence folk set their watches by it, or rather by the whistle on Cardigan's mill. With a due appreciation of the important function of this clock toward his fellow-citizens, old Zeb Curry, the chief engineer and a stickler for being on time, was most meticulous in his whistle-blowing. With a sage and prophetic eye fixed upon the face of the clock, and a particularly greasy hand grasping the whistle-cord, Zeb would wait until the clock registered exactly six-fifty-nine ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... dim interior and twilight gathering outside. He shaved—without conscious purpose—with meticulous care, and put on the blue flannel coat. Later he rowed himself ashore and proceeded directly through the orange grove to the ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... had been reached and the engines stopped, Somers frowned and studied his complex control board. He was a thin and meticulous man, and he operated his ship with mechanical perfection. He was well liked in the front offices of Mikkelsen Space Lines, where Old Man Mikkelsen pointed to Captain Somers' reports as models of ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... breakfast, smoked a second cigarette as he scanned the morning paper, then he dressed himself with meticulous care. He possessed a tall, erect, athletic form, his perfectly fitting clothes had that touch of individuality affected by a certain few of New York's exclusive tailors, and when he finally surveyed himself in the glass, there was no denying the fact that he presented an appearance ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... attention with which Billy tended me, and the meticulous care with which he followed the instructions set forth in the book of directions attached to the ship's medicine-chest, for such a case as mine, I was not again troubled with delirium, nor did I experience any other set-back of any kind; on the contrary, I made such excellent progress that within ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... Clayton Spencer, standing tall and erect, had watched the women go out. How typical the party was of Natalie, of her meticulous care in small things and her indifference or real ignorance as to what counted. Was it indifference, really, or was it supreme craftiness, the stupidity of her dinners, the general unattractiveness of the women she gathered around her, the ill-assortment of people who had ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Turnhill where they lived. Turnhill lies a couple of miles north of Bursley. One side of the market-place was barricaded with stacks of coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye and straw bread. This coal and these loaves were being served out by meticulous and haughty officials, all invisibly, braided with red-tape, to a crowd of shivering, moaning, and weeping wretches, men, women and children—the basis of the population of Turnhill. Although they, were all endeavouring to make a noise they, made scarcely any noise, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the most affected and the most meticulous, are all anxious to seal themselves of the tribe of Dante. But they are no more like that divine poet than the flies that feed on a dead Caesar are like the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... who worked silently all day over a set of giant ledgers, interminably beautifying their pages with his meticulous figures. True, Bean had once heard Bulger fail interestingly to borrow five dollars of Metzeger until Saturday noon, but a flash of true Napoleonic genius now enabled him to see precisely why Bulger had not succeeded. Metzeger ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... woman's disinclination to acquire the intricate expertness that lies at the bottom of good housekeeping is due primarily to her active intelligence; it is difficult for her to concentrate her mind upon such stupid and meticulous enterprises. But whether difficult or easy, it is obviously important for the average woman to make some effort in that direction, for if she fails to do so there is chaos. That chaos is duly visible in the United States. Here women reveal one of their ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Ammophila fed on Spiders is precisely the same as the Ammophila fed on caterpillars, just as man fed on rice is the same as man fed on wheat. In vain I pass my lens over the product of my art: I cannot distinguish it from the natural product; and I defy the most meticulous entomologist to perceive any difference between the two. It is the same with my other boarders who have had ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... my dinner that night. The waiter who laid the white cloth on a marble table was unctuously suggestive as to menu. Luscious grapes and crisp salad, which Belgian gardeners grow with meticulous care, I remember of it. You might linger over your coffee, knowing the truth, and look out at the people who did not know it. When they were not buying more buttons with the allied colours, or ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... keeping with this restraint that in all her ways, her manners, her dress, her speech, her pride, there should be a meticulous simplicity. It was not the simplicity of the hedge-row any more than of the hothouse; it was rather that of some classic flower, lavender or crown-imperial, growing from an ancient stock in some dignified, long-tended garden. It was thus a simplicity closely allied ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... produces the long sought superior nut, is of little importance compared to its value to the farm. It is incumbent, therefore, upon every nut enthusiast, who has a hand in bringing to the attention of farm owners the value of nut trees, to be meticulous in giving instructions for ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... and has described her for us with the meticulous particularity of his time and temper. He runs over her parts like a virtuoso. The iris of her eyes, for instance, was wet grey, but ringed with black and shot with yellow, giving so the effect of hot green; her mouth ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... decided, he'd be in Pleasant Street; and later he dressed with the most meticulous care. A growing doubt seized him as he mounted the outside steps of the Ammidons' impressive house; but he crushed it down and firmly rapped with the polished knocker ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... We cannot all do all things, Sir, and if you save the State (As the great Twin Brethren mean to in despite of HARCOURT's hate), What does it matter, DICEY, if your letters are not quite In that style epistolary, which our fathers called "polite"? 'Tis a little too meticulous—in you—and rather late, After giving Mr. GLADSTONE such a wholesome slashing "slate." Take heart of grace, dear DICEY, and don't let Sir WILLIAM's "point" In your tough (if tasteless) armour find a vulnerable joint. "Old ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... with Jacqueline's eager face watching for him at the window, or her beautiful voice mingling in the twilight with the tinkling notes of his old piano. The punching-bag and other purely masculine paraphernalia had been banished to his own room, and the living-room, alas! had lost its aspect of meticulous neatness. But when Philip found a darning-basket spilled into his usual chair, or a riding-glove of Jacqueline's lying among the scattered sheets of his half-finished sermon, he did not frown. He told himself he would get used to it presently. In fact, he rather liked it. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby, that great sportsman, and old Lady Osprey. And finally he took us by way of a village lane—three children bobbed convulsively with eyes of terror for my uncle—through a meticulous garden to a big, slovenly Vicarage with faded Victorian furniture and a faded Victorian wife, who gave us tea and introduced us to a confusing family dispersed among a lot of disintegrating basket chairs upon the edge of a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... interest in the answers which Parker framed glibly to meet the insistent demand for information from his wife and daughter. The meal concluded, he excused himself and sought Pablo, of whom he demanded and received a meticulous account of the "accident" to Miguel Farrel. For Bill Conway knew that the gray horse never bucked and that Miguel Farrel was a hard man ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... driven through a tumultuous and shabby thoroughfare to King's Cross, and taken another ticket, and installed herself in another train, that Hilda began to feel suddenly, like an abyss opening beneath her strength, the lack of food. Meticulous in her clerical duties, and in many minor mechanical details of her personal daily existence, she was capable of singular negligences concerning matters which the heroic part of her despised and which did not immediately bear on a great purpose ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... playing on a sort of mandoline-shaped instrument. It had two strings, and he twanged these alternately, without the slightest effort to change their pitch by stopping with his fingers. He bent his head sidewise, and listened with the meticulous attention of a connoisseur. We stopped at that place for fully ten minutes, but not for a second did he leave off twanging his two strings, nor did he even momentarily ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... that evening, and his first thought was, Well, at any rate I've earned enough to pay for the clothes. He had been there exactly four weeks. Quite calmly, he lifted his feet out of the tub and began to towel them daintily. The meticulous way he dried between his toes was infuriating ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... the other hand, her moral life had from the first shown capacity of expansion; it held at its service an intellect, of no very fine quality indeed, but acute and energetic. In all practical affairs she was greatly superior to the average woman, adding to woman's meticulous sense of interest and persistent diplomacy a breadth of view found only in exceptional males; this faculty the circumstances of her life richly fostered, and, by anomaly, advancing age enlarged, instead of contracting, the liberality of her spirit. After fifty ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... lucrative industry. The French speak of "making" silkworms (faire des vers-a-soie). Lucrative as it is, it would never succeed in England even if the white mulberry could be induced to grow, for successful silkworm rearing demands such continual watchfulness and meticulous attention as only French people can give; English people "couldn't be bothered" to expend such minute care on anything ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... a shiver, to see his face on cheese and butter wrappers. Some of the criticisms were glowing, others absurd as criticisms occasionally are. Chopin wrote to Titus the same rhapsodical protestations and finally declared in meticulous peevishness, "I will no longer read what people write about me." This has the familiar ring of the true artist who cares nothing for the newspapers but reads them religiously after his own ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... you knew,' 'I should have loved to have been,' 'different than,' which appear in these letters, would have been absolutely impossible to a man of Blade's meticulous literary temperament." ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... want. Rita was not poor. Her father conducted a small but profitable grain elevator at Wichita, and, after her sudden marriage, decided to continue her allowance, though this whole idea of art and music in its upper reaches was to him a strange, far-off, uncertain thing. A thin, meticulous, genial person interested in small trade opportunities, and exactly suited to the rather sparse social life of Wichita, he found Harold as curious as a bomb, and preferred to handle him gingerly. Gradually, however, being a very human ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... example of monkish cataloguing comes from Dover Priory, a cell belonging to Canterbury. One John Whytefield compiled it in 1389. The note preceding the catalogue tells of unbounded enthusiasm for the library and a meticulous regard for order. No better proof of the care taken of books by most monks could be found. The catalogue is in three parts. First there is a brief inventory of the books as they are arranged on the shelves. This is a shelf-list designed for the use of the preceptor; just the ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... establishment at Putney ready for her. Sir Isaac had not consulted her about it, it had been his secret, he had prepared it for her with meticulous care as a surprise. They returned from a honeymoon in Skye in which the attentions of Sir Isaac and the comforts of a first-class hotel had obscured a marvellous background of sombre mountain and wide stretches of ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... call of loyalty to a gratuitous personal master, may have some difficulty in appreciating the force and the moral austerity of this spirit of devotion to an ideal of dynastic aggrandisement, and in seeing how its paramount exigence will set aside all meticulous scruples of personal rectitude and veracity, as being a shabby ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... corner. As Keith passed near one of the close groups around a gambling table, it parted momentarily, and he looked into the eyes of the man in charge, cold, passionless, aloof, eyes neither friendly nor unfriendly. And he saw the pale skin; the weary, bored, immobile features; the meticulous neat dress; the long, deft fingers; and caught the withdrawn, deadly, exotic personality of the professional ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... let Ann go as far as the gate, she'll only make it a stepping-stone to something else to-morrow." Taking no interest in public affairs, her inherited craving for command had resorted for expression to a meticulous ordering of household matters. It was indeed a cult with her, a passion—as though she felt herself a sort of figurehead to national domesticity; the leader of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... morning it might be reassumed in the minimum of minutes. He was not a man, for example, to leave the changing of studs from one shirt to another till the morrow. Had it been practicable, he would have brushed his hair the night before. Constance already loved to watch his meticulous preparations. She saw him now go into his old bedroom and return with a paper collar, which he put on the dressing-table next to a black necktie. His shop-suit was laid out ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Heine (before his fever),— I do not tell a lie so arrant As say my passion's wings are furled up, And, without plainest heavenly warrant, I were ready and glad to give the world up— But still, when you rub brow meticulous, And ponder the profit of turning holy If not for God's, for your own sake solely, —God forbid I should find you ridiculous! Deduce from this lecture all that eases you, Nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of peril; every spoke of the wheel a rash, but an obliged experiment—rash as a forlorn hope, needful as the leap that lands a fireman from a burning staircase. Noon was made; the captain dined on his day's work, and I on watching him; and our place was entered on the chart with a meticulous precision which seemed to me half pitiful and half absurd, since the next eye to behold that sheet of paper might be the eye of an exploring fish. One o'clock came, then two; the captain gloomed and chafed, as he held to the coaming ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... his actual vocations with his literary avocations. Besides, it is quite certain that he would not have made a good editor. In the first place, he was fitted neither by education nor by temperament for the troublesome and 'meticulous' business of knocking contributions into shape. And, in the second, he would most assuredly have fallen into the most fatal of all editorial errors—that of inserting articles, not because they were actually good or likely to be popular, but because the subjects were interesting, or ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... grimly. "I shall take all these to the laboratory at the Food Controller's Headquarters, where Mrs. Marrow will submit each tuber to a meticulous test in order to satisfy herself as to its bona fides. You will be gratified to hear that, should your potatoes prove to be all they seem, the Controller will issue you a blue card, registering you as a certified vendor of Government-tested potatoes. This you may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... stick and she pressed both hands against her forehead, driving back her thoughts. Thinking was dangerous and a folly: it was a concession to circumstances, and she would concede nothing. She stood up, looked round for a mirror, remembered there was not one in the hall, and with little, meticulous touches to her hat, her hair and the white stock round her neck, ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... it must be remembered that the dates of piratical expeditions are often impossible to obtain: the wrath of the chroniclers at the nefarious deeds of the corsairs greatly exceeding their desire for a meticulous accuracy in the matter of the exact time of their occurrence. Uruj, as has been seen, had by his headstrong folly once again placed his brother and himself in a decidedly awkward situation. By the losses which ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... himself, perhaps, that with the horses to think of he had no time to think about getting married. Certainly he did not seem to find his bachelor state amiss. His little house, in the new block of stabling, white walled, red-roofed, painted with cross beams to its pointed gable, was kept with meticulous care. Patsy did his own work. Lady O'Gara was right perhaps when she called him a ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... words in wrong senses, as "The book greatly intrigued me," "Leave me take this," "He was obsessed with the idea," or "He is a meticulous writer." ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... handsome tooled-leather portfolio to hold his letters, which he wrote on loose-leaf sheets and mailed unfolded. They were letters that deserved preservation, prose poems composed with infinite pains and copied with meticulous care. If the potpourri was at times redolent of the dried flowers of other men's loves, Eleanor was blissfully unaware of it. When he wrote of the lonesome October of his most immemorial year, or spoke of her pilgrim soul coming to him at midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... meticulous care put the letters safely on to the bed a step was heard coming along the passage, the step of Nicky, the only step in that house which was both that of a man and vigorous. Archelaus turned his head a little on the pillow, and Ishmael, for the first time ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a special study of campaigning possibilities under the conditions which actually arose in August 1914, and under whose aegis definite plans and administrative arrangements to meet the case had been elaborated beforehand with meticulous care. Enjoying all the advantages arising from having made a close study of the subject and from having an Intelligence Department brimming over with detailed information at his beck and call, Sir J. French entirely failed to grasp the extent ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... almost entirely in this secondary quality that their interest lies; their ostensible subject-matter is unimportant. An apparent exception is the book in which Beyle has embodied his reflections upon Love. The volume, with its meticulous apparatus of analysis, definition, and classification, which gives it the air of being a parody of L'Esprit des Lois, is yet full of originality, of lively anecdote and keen observation. Nobody but Beyle could have written it; nobody but Beyle could have managed ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... to the waiter and Don began to load his pipe. Thessaly watched him, smiling whilst he packed the Latakia mixture into the bowl with meticulous care, rejecting fragments of stalk as Paphnutius rejected Thais; more in sorrow ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... subdued bright energy, very smartly but plainly dressed in dark blue tweed, with a large black hat in which a wing had been accurately placed by the best milliner in New York. Her clothes were so well-worn, and her grooming was so meticulous, her accent so clean and crisp, her manner so devoid of patronage, yet subtly remote, her controlled heart so kind that she perennially fascinated the buxom, rather sloppy, preternaturally acute, and wholly unaristocratic young ladies of ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... up on deck and loading them into the eight main-deck guns that still remained to us, after carefully sponging out the latter. Next, I gave my attention to the Maxims, preparing them for action with meticulous care, overhauling, cleaning, and oiling the mechanism of them, satisfying myself that they were in perfect working order, placing a belt of cartridges in position in each, and taking care to have an abundant supply ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... philosophy is chiefly, if not wholly, interested in grasping a philosophic point of view. He is not interested in highly meticulous details, and still less is he interested in checking up the author's statements to see if the author is consistent with himself. He takes such consistency, even if unwarrantedly, for granted. A continuous reading of the original Ethics, even on a single topic, is impossible. The subject-matter ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... burrows uncovered along their entirety, with the meticulous care such a task demands, have revealed at the bottom, encrusted in the wall of the terminal chamber, a living root, sometimes of the thickness of a pencil, sometimes no bigger than a straw. The visible portion of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the days preceding the funeral was curious. She coupled the most meticulous care as to the preparations for the ceremony, and a sort of loving gentleness when she decked Miss Emily's small old frame for its last rites, with suspicion and hatred of Miss Emily living. And this suspicion she held also against ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Matias had in the banks; for all that, too, would come to him when the old man died. Acquisitiveness—money and land—had become his one, his ruling passion. Monotony, meanwhile, had turned him into an accurate, methodical, meticulous machine; so that every night he would make out a schedule, hour for hour, of all that he would do on the following day. At the bottom of this passion for riches conjugal contagion probably lay. Eight ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... feature of the Film is happily caricatured by Captain Bairnsfather in his amusing page of pictures. The hero, the heroine (with smile), the villain, the heavy father, all of the most approved pattern—everything down to the meticulous inaccuracy characteristic of the American film in matters of detail, is shown with the good-natured sarcasm befitting a master of satire as well as of humour, while the story tells itself ...
— Fragments From France • Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
... and intimate of observances—many of which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess him. . . . It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once inseparably bound up with his majesty. Christ himself was one of the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest evidence in several instances of his disregard ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... frightened; timid, timorous, faint-hearted, cowardly, craven, pusillanimous, meticulous; terrible, frightful, dreadful, grim, awful, dire, fell, atrocious, ghastly, terrifying, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... days later, this meticulous monarch is found commanding men and women to tie up their hair, eight months being granted to make the change, and, at the same time, the practice of women riding astride on horseback came into vogue, showing that female costume had much in common with ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Coldriver by deserted and circuitous roads. He stopped his horse in a dark spot on the edge of the village, and, with the baby cautiously held in his arms, he slunk through back ways and short cuts to the house where Jed and Martha Lewis made their home. With meticulous stealth he passed through the gate, laid the baby on the doorstep, rang the bell long and determinedly, and then, with astonishing quiet and agility, hid himself in the midst of a ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... take patience. Fear shrinks before them 'like a thing reproved,' not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story. 'Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make a shift ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... listening to the porter's meticulous but perplexing directions, they prepared to leave the station. It was beginning to rain, and they turned up the collars of their coats as they trudged through the slush of the ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... individual that interests him, as the shadowy accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait of Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we also have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... in life, on the other hand, curiously, Aylmer's real taste in art and decoration was Pre-Raphaelite; delicate, detailed and meticulous almost to preciousness. He often had delightful things in his house, but never for long. He had no pleasure in property; valuable possessions worried him, and after any amount of trouble to get some object of art he would often give it away the next week. For he really liked money only ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... supplies the ideal mental discipline. That is only true for the minority of boys who reach the stage at which real Latin prose is written. Most flounder about all their time in the stage of artificial Latin prose, wherein is nothing more than the meticulous application of a set of laboriously acquired grammatical rules—a tolerable training in conscientious application, such as any subject can supply, but nothing more. Yet it may well be true—on this point we feel uncertain—that ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... Red School-house" is more than a mere collocation of words, accurately descriptive. It is what Mat King would call a "symblem," and as such requires the music's dying fall to lull and enervate a too meticulous and stringent tendency to recollect that it wasn't little, or old, or red, or on a hill. It might have been big and new, and built of yellow brick, right next to the Second Presbyterian, and hence close to the "branch," so that the spring freshets flooded the ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... It is immaterial to them that their remarks are personal, complimentary or otherwise. I have had members of my own family complimented on their good looks as if they were children. In this respect Americans differ greatly from the English. The English adhere with meticulous care to the rule of avoiding everything personal. They are very much afraid of rudeness on the one hand, and of insincerity or flattery on the other. Even in the matter of such a harmless affair as a compliment to a foreigner on his knowledge of English, they will precede it with a request ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... the hammock, directed our course along the shore-front under palm-trees, planted in stately rows with meticulous precision. He kept far enough to one side to avoid the charge of being seen walking with me, but from time to time tossed me remarks calculated to keep ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... They even circled slowly round so that each part of the cave was examined with meticulous care by six pairs of eyes in turn. But it was all in vain; the cave only seemed to become more and more ordinary the ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... Allison had spoken of the trailmen, my past had rushed back and stood, complete to yesterday's supper (only had I eaten that supper twelve years ago)? I remembered my father, a lined silent man who had liked to fly solitary, taking photograph after photograph from his plane for the meticulous work of Mapping and Exploration. He'd liked to have me fly with him and I'd flown over virtually every inch of the planet. No one else had ever dared fly over the Hellers, except the big commercial spacecraft that kept to a safe altitude. I vaguely remembered the ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... architecture, costumes and customs during the time of the Maccabeans, of Rome under the Christian persecutions, of Spain under the Inquisition, of France during the Middle Ages, at the time of Saint Bartholomew and the Dragonnades, were studied with a meticulous care ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... but natural that most of his requests should be for theological works which would be of service in preparing his defence on technical points. Reading was his sole solace during his imprisonment, and it is noticeable that, whenever he asks for a book he speaks of it—not with the dry, meticulous precision of a bibliographer but—with all the caressing detail of a genuine book-lover. He indicates the sizes of the various works which he needs, describes their bindings, and mentions in what part ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... cannot deny the authoress the distinction accorded her by the "Biographia Dramatica" of being—for her time, at least—"the most voluminous female writer this kingdom ever produced." Moreover, it is not Richardson, the meticulous inventor of the epistolary novel, but the past-mistress of sensational romance who is credited with originating the English domestic novel. Compared with the delicate perceptions and gentle humor of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, Mrs. Haywood's best volumes are doubtless dreary ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... little. But we can bring one person more out along these Highways and then convince a fourth and a fifth and a fiftieth and a thousandth. By then we'll be shoved back off the stage while the big wheels grind painfully slow but exceedingly meticulous." ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... fields and small were arranged in a system of accessibility and workability that would have warmed the heart of the most meticulous efficiency-expert. Every fence was hog-tight and bull-proof, and no weeds grew in the shelters of the fences. Many of the level fields were in alfalfa. Others, following the rotations, bore crops planted the previous fall, or were ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the earlier Romantic school, the new adventurers have notoriously experimented with poetic form. France, the home of the most rigid and meticulous metrical tradition, had already led the way in substituting for the strictly measured verse the more loosely organized harmonies of rhythmical prose, bound together, and indeed made recognizable as verse, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... fitted under the lower planes, ready to leave for their objective; the ghostliness of Ypres as we hovered seven thousand feet above its ruins; a certain riotous evening when eight of the party of fourteen ate their last dinner on earth; a severe reprimand delivered to me by a meticulous colonel, after I returned from a long reconnaissance that included four air flights, for the crime of not having fastened my collar before arrival on the aerodrome at 5 A.M.; a broken Boche aeroplane falling in two segments ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... heavier and though she was still neat, her dresses were always of dark colors and made up by herself of cheap materials. For, while she bought without consulting Martin, her privilege of discretion was confined within strict and narrow limits. He kept a meticulous eye on all her cancelled checks and knew to a penny what she spent. If he felt a respect for her thrift it was completely unacknowledged. They worked together with as little liking, as little hatred, as two oxen pulling ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... that Desmond had always admired 'the jolly old thing' with its eager outstretched wings and splendid brow. Doctor Renshaw shook his head over the library as a hospital ward, and ordered a vast amount of meticulous ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... long as merchants of standing in London or New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... only one without an activity to support himself. But he was at the shop every weekday, six to ten p.m., cementing stellene with meticulous care, while he muttered ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... the pistol into his coat-pocket, from another produced a gold cigarette-case, and from the store of this last with meticulous care selected ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... were about fifty yards off. Ferguson sprinted back down the hill, the girl screaming pointlessly meanwhile. There was just time—you'll have to take my word for this; Ferguson explained it all to me in the most meticulous detail, but I can't repeat that masterpiece of exposition—for Ferguson to decide. To decide again, you understand, precisely as he had decided on the Argentina. Rotten luck, wasn't it? He could just have flung tow-head out of the way by getting ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a shy gentle youth, very quiet and refined, a little effeminate, even, in his exaggerated gracefulness and in his meticulous care for his clothes and his person. He avoided all company except that of the Barringtons, probably because a similarity in circumstances formed a bond between ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... accustomed to delicate and meticulous though comparatively simple tasks, he had admirably foreseen the extraordinary complication of these inquiries; so much so that, with the modesty of the true scientist that he was, he regarded his own studies, even the most substantial, ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... interest and attention of the readers. It seems to me that readers are repelled by pages sprinkled with misspellings, commas and apostrophes. The value of exact phonetic transcription is, of course, a great one. But few artists attempt this completely. Thomas Nelson Page was meticulous in his dialect; Joel Chandler Harris less meticulous but in my opinion even more accurate. But the values they sought are different from the values that I believe this book of slave narratives should have. Present day readers are less ready for the over-stress ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... Harkness stood with downcast eyes that followed with meticulous precision the intricacies of design in the rug on which he stood. A voice was speaking. Not the cool, imperative voice of Mademoiselle Delacoeur, mistress of vast estates, but the voice of Diane—the Diane he had learned to love—and ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... overtime, and his boredom in his lodgings was such that he would often arrive at the office before the appointed hour. He asked thirty shillings a week, and Denry in a mood of generosity gave him thirty-one. He gave Denry his whole life, and put a meticulous order into the establishment. Denry secretly thought him a miracle, but up at the club at Porthill he was content to call him "the human machine." "I wind him up every Saturday night with a sovereign, half a sovereign, and a shilling," said Denry, "and he goes ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... smoke-wrack flying abaft, and trudging steadily for the mouth of the harbour. I stood there, I think, fully three minutes before I moved or took action, but during that space of time I had jumped at the conclusion. I was not wanted aboard. Was it Day? No; the idea was absurd, as he was most meticulous in his observation of the conventions. It certainly was not the Prince. The inference was only too obvious. The hour of sailing ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... nothing, but continued to work with meticulous care. Rick watched closely, and was satisfied. There was ample equipment for all. Scotty helped Barby into her gear while ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... that those tchinovniks would be so accessible to lofty motives that they would cease thereafter to be venal and meticulous? I should be laughed at ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Carpaccio's study of S. Benedict at Venice. It is all sweet, tender, delicate, and carefully finished; but without depth, not even the depth of Perugino's feeling. In S. Francesco, Pinturicchio, with the same meticulous refinement, painted a letter addressed to him by Gentile Baglioni. It lies on a stool before Madonna and her court of saints. Nicety of execution, technical mastery of fresco as a medium for Dutch detail-painting, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and anything in the nature of 'phrase-making' was banned. But now I found myself slightly shocked by this attitude which Swann invariably adopted when face to face with generalities. He appeared unwilling to risk even having an opinion, and to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy, some precise but unimportant detail. But in so doing he did not take into account that even here he was giving an opinion, holding a brief (as they say) for something, that the accuracy of his details had an importance of its own. I thought ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... did not go much beyond the Greek settlements (like the Greek courtesans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed only to the more cosmopolitan Saites), their art certainly influenced all the finer art of the Saitic age, initiating a renascence whose characteristics of excessive refinement and meticulous delicacy survived to be reinforced in the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... these volumes in search of literary discoveries is foredoomed to disappointment. Indeed, the same might have been said of "L'Edition Municipale"; for the "Motheau et Jouaust" edition, reprinted by MM. Flammarion in their "Bibliotheque classique," was complete enough to satisfy all but the most meticulous scholars, while for general literary purposes the edition published in 1595, three years after the author's death, by his niece, Mlle. de Gournay, is sufficient ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... prisoner and another man had appeared in the road again, carrying a stretcher between them, walking with the slow, meticulous steps of great fatigue. A series of shells came in, like three cracks of a whip along the road. Martin followed the stretcher-bearers into ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... merely because he would have cut us out with her, but because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy of her, so helplessly incapable of appreciating her. I think we conceived of him as tall, with drooping fair moustaches, and contemptibly meticulous in his dress. He would probably not be of the Quarter; he would sneer ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot
... book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its eighteenth-century pictures—family portraits, meticulous animal paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne, perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of ten generations ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks, of an extraordinarily matinal character, at the hour of the meticulous rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement herself, as if we, in our fresh ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Hazel met him on the threshold, no longer timorous, deprecating, awkward, but gravely and sweetly maternal. She led him in. Tea was laid with the meticulous reverence of ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... closed their exclusively historical work, and transferred their minute observation and excessively meticulous treatment of small aspects of life to realistic romance. Their first novel, "Les Hommes de Lettres," 1860 (now known as "Charles Demailly"), showed some lack of ease in using the new medium, but it was followed by "Soeur Philomene," 1861, one of the most finished of their fictions, ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... territory filled with splendid cities and ruled by powerful monarchs. We had been trying to understand and interpret the stories of their conflict with Israel as if they had been written by a Western war-correspondent, careful to verify all his statistics and meticulous in the exact description of all his events. This view of things melted from us with a gradual surprise as we realised that the more deeply we entered into the poetry, the closer we should come to the truth, of the narrative. Its moral and religious meaning is firm and steadfast as the mountains ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... secrets of their quality save at the magical summons of what we call "style." Mr. Pepys was a quaint fellow and no Goethean egotist; but he managed to put a peculiar flavour of style—with a rhythm and a colour all its own—into his meticulous gossip. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... ticketed, everything has its number: the donkeys, the donkey-drivers, the stations even where they are allowed to stand—"Stand for six donkeys, stand for ten, etc." Some very handsome camels, fitted with riding saddles, wait also in their respective places and a number of Cook ladies, meticulous on the point of local colour, even when it is merely a question of making some purchases in the town, readily mount for some moments one or other of ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... principalities within reach; well supplied, moreover, with expert advisers for both classes of work. All this is important in view of the pre- eminency of Ts'in when the time came, 400 years later, to abolish the meticulous feudal system altogether. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... the other course. With letters of introduction from Mr. Meiklejohn, he consulted the houses of Messrs. Clark and Messrs. Constable in Edinburgh. He did not find that his knowledge of Greek was adequate to the higher and more remunerative branches of proof-reading, that weary meticulous toil, so fatiguing to the eyesight. The hours, too, were very long; he could do more and better work in fewer hours. No time, no strength, were left for reading and writing. He did, while in Edinburgh, send a few things to magazines, but he did not actually 'bombard' ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... Stanley. The not very usual form "Laurana," which is the name of a character in his latest novel, is that of the heroine of Parismus. Further, he had had curious early experiences (which we know from his own meticulous revelations) of writing love-letters, when he was a mere boy, for girl-friends of his to adapt in writing to their lovers. "His eye," he says, "had been always on the ladies," though no doubt always also in the most honourable way. And, quite ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... fond of his mother and his sister, and was always talking about them. Caesar alone would listen without being impatient to the meticulous narratives Ignacio told about the things that happened ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... handicapped by their own petty regulations. Notwithstanding the fact that their high standards of craftsmanship produced an excellent grade of goods, they were over-regulated and hide-bound, averse to new methods. There was as great a contrast between their meticulous traditions and the freer paths of the new capitalism as there was between scholasticism and science. They could neither raise nor administer the funds needed for foreign commerce and for export industries. Presently new technical methods were adopted by the capitalists, a finer way of smelting ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... a good historian. Alexandre Dumas was a novelist who knew his history. At least in his early works, he was meticulous in his research. This series of books are histories which place most romantic novels in the shade; they cover many centuries and many lands—those concerning the ...
— Quotes and Images From "Celebrated Crimes" • Alexander Dumas, Pere
... of the National Schools, Actual State Councillor, Grigory Vladimirovitch Doulebov, had his eye on a higher position in the educational department. That was why he tried to gain favour by showing a meticulous attentiveness to his duties. His perseverance was astonishing. He never gave an impression of haste. His reception of subordinates and petitioners, announced on a placard on his door to take place on Thursdays ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... landlocked country who "midway in his mortal life" began writing for the first time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not after the meticulous manner of the modern Paul Prys of psychology, but following the larger method of Flaubert, who believed that actions should translate character—imagine these paradoxes and you have partly imagined Joseph ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... talk from a negro. Also, he thought that young Arkwright, being white, was really not within the sphere of his ministry. He, Peter Siner, was a worker in the black world of the South. He was part of the black world which the white South was so meticulous to hide away, to keep out of sight and ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... not necessarily throughout. There are men and women who fuss and fume over trifles who never falter or fret when their larger purposes are blocked or deferred. Some cannot stand detail who plan wisely and with patience. Vice versa, there are meticulous folk, little people, whose petty obstacles are met with patience and cheerfulness, who revel in minute detail, but who want returns soon and cannot wait a long time. We are not to ask of any man whether he is patient but rather what does he stand or do patiently? ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson |
