"Straightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prayer for fleetness. Keeper of the deer's way, Reared among the eagles, Clear my feet of slothness. Keeper of the paths of men, Hear a prayer for straightness. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... me, now it is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in 1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... the bows singly, and after that we set the great weapon again. Then, seeing that the arrow was straight in the groove, I replaced the frappings, and immediately discharged it. This time, to my very great pleasure and pride, the arrow went with a wonderful straightness towards the ship, and, clearing the superstructure, passed out of our sight as it fell behind it. At this, I was all impatience to try to get the line to the hulk before we made our dinner; but the men had not yet laid-up sufficient; there being then only four hundred and fifty fathoms (which the ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... "If that don't lick creation for smartness!" he cried. "And how are we to get to this safe? It would serve him right if we collar the lot. It'll teach him that if he ain't honest by nature he's got to be when he deals with the like of us. I like straightness, and by the Lord I'll have it!" He brought his great fist down upon the table to ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... doing badly. He was at least keeping them straight. And in the circumstances straightness was to be preferred to distance. Soon after leaving Little Hadley he had become ambitious and had used his brassey with disastrous results, slicing his fifty-third into the rough on the right of the road. It had taken him ten with the niblick to get back ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... all I could see, I turned shipwards, weary, footsore, and exhausted; my feet so sore and blistered, indeed, that long before I reached a gharrie I was obliged to take off my boots and wrap them in handkerchiefs. The dust was deep and made heavy walking, and the level straightness of a great part of the road is wearisome. Overtaking even at my slow rate of progress a string of creaking buffalo carts, I got upon the hindmost, but after a little rest found the noise, dust, and slow progress intolerable, and plodded ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... of the numerous lines which intersect the whole of the equatorial and temperate regions of Mars are, their straightness combined with their enormous length. It is this which has led Mr. Lowell to term them 'non-natural features.' Schiaparelli, in his earlier drawings, showed them curved and of comparatively great width. Later, he found them to be ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... displayed a remarkable sketch of what looked like an intricate pump, or the inside of a small steam-engine] 44 are the sights; 6 is a false stock that fits in at A; 3 is the trigger, and 2 is the cock. It loads at the breech, and fires with great force and straightness. I am going out shooting squirrels soon. I shot several fine birds for the museum. They had speckled breasts, and Dan liked them very much. He stuffed them tip-top, and they sit on the tree quite natural, only one looks a little tipsy. ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... architecture. The rear of each church, however, instead of ascending vertically, sloped at an angle of about ten degrees, and, instead of having sharp corners, was exquisitely rounded. Elsewhere also were many rounded and waving lines, where the image of a church would suggest straightness. Nevertheless, you are to cling with force to that image in shaping to your mind's eye a picture ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Excavations during recent years have done little or nothing to clear up the mystery of Silbury. The fact that the Roman road (which leaves the Bath road just west of Silbury) here deviates slightly from its usual straightness is significant and proves that the mound was in existence when the road was made. The villagers around used to ascend the hill on Palm Sunday to eat "fig cakes" and drink sugar and water. It has been suggested that this ceremony had some connexion ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... trees can not be recommended for the dual purpose of timber and nut production, as, for the former purpose, the trees should be planted close together in order to induce length and straightness of trunk with a minimum of top or bearing surface, while for the latter, they should be planted in the open and given space for the maximum development to bearing surface and a minimum length of trunk. The great demand for hickory in the making of axles, wheels, and other vehicle parts ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... until the stems grow to a proper thickness. They are then taken out of the ground, the roots and branches removed, and the stem bored through after being seasoned for some time. The care shown in rearing insures a perfect straightness of stem, and an equable diameter of about an inch or an inch and a half. The last specimens, when cut from the tree, are as much as eight feet in length, dark purple-brown in color, and highly fragrant. At Pesth are made pipes about eighteen inches in length, of the shoots of the mock ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... there is no expectation of recovering the straightness of the end of the bone; but these patients are liable to another misfortune, that is, to acquire afterwards a distortion of the spine; for as one leg is shorter than the other, they sink on that side, and in consequence bend the upper part of their bodies, as their shoulders, the contrary ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... that, Utirupa presented himself at Samson's office in the usual neat Rajput dress that showed off his lithe figure and the straightness of his stature. There was quite a party there to meet him— Samson, Willoughby de Wing, Norwood, Sir Hookum Bannerjee, Topham (still looking warm and rather weary after the game)—and outside on the open ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... gentle chin, were a little sharper than was natural, now, from illness, but round in outline and not over prominent; and the slender throat was very delicate and feminine. Only in the dark-blue eyes there was still that unabashed, quick glance and long-abiding straightness, and innocent hardness, and the ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... nose. Her forehead under its burnt-brown hair was candid; her firm little chin just dimpled. Altogether, a face difficult to take one's eyes off. But Nedda was far from vain, and her face seemed to her too short and broad, her eyes too dark and indeterminate, neither gray nor brown. The straightness of her nose was certainly comforting, but it, too, was short. Being creamy in the throat and browning easily, she would have liked to be marble-white, with blue dreamy eyes and fair hair, or else like a Madonna. And was she tall enough? Only five foot five. And ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her with the sixth toilette, a dress which was green. And now she shamed her slender straightness the nut-brown spear; her radiant face dimmed the brightest beams of full moon and she outdid the bending branches in gentle movement and flexible grace. Her loveliness exalted the beauties of earth's four quarters and she broke men's hearts by the significance of her semblance; ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... white and tall and straight. Oh, the relief of the tallness and straightness and whiteness! She had thought of something dwarfed and clumsy—dark, misshapen, slouching beast-like on two shapeless feet. Why were people ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... thought from your features and the straightness of your coal-black hair, that you were." Riel's blood was nigh unto boiling in his veins, but he had craft enough to preserve ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... me, and the landscape seemed unfamiliar to me, though it was, as to the lie of the land, an ordinary English low-country, swelling into rising ground here and there. The road was narrow, and I was convinced that it was a piece of Roman road from its straightness. Copses were scattered over the country, and there were signs of two or three villages and hamlets in sight besides the one near me, between which and me there was some orchard-land, where the early apples were beginning to redden on the trees. Also, just on the other ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... have perceived; for I did be alway in affection of the Exercises that were taught in the Upbringing of all the Peoples of the Mighty Pyramid; and by this explaining, you shall understand that I was like to be strong; but indeed, I owed the straightness and shaping of my body to the Mother that bore me. And afterward, in all my life, had I taken pride of my body to be of health and to have strength; and surely this is a matter very fit for pride; and to be told bravely ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... a long rubber slicker tight-buttoned from collar to hem. Below that Brent saw rubber boots. She stood with a lance-like straightness, very tall, very pliant, and as he stared with a fixity which would have amounted to impertinence had it not been disarmed by amazement she looked past him and through him as if ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... the spear is a sumpit or blow-pipe. This is a small wooden tube about eight feet long. The smoothness and straightness of the bore is remarkable. The hole is drilled with an iron rod, one end of which is chisel-pointed, through a log of hard wood, which is afterwards pared down and rounded till it is ...
— Children of Borneo • Edwin Herbert Gomes
... chaise was bounding upon its leather bands, jolting cruelly against the axle. Susannah cried out that she should be thrown from her seat. The swift-falling darkness encompassed their path. Their hope lay in the straightness of the road, and their chief fear was that by some greater roughness of the way the chaise, which was now ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... floor. His mouth moved over her face, over her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the youth she had ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... callyd Marchante Taylours'—evidently earning the disfavor of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftys in the cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Taylours began to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and let subordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. But why, as Carlyle puts it, the idea had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in a wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distinct species in Physiology, not Men, but fractional ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... ladies like young ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or even a projecting cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of the line from one end of the street ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... went back to the house; though he gave her the lilies, and bid her keep her soul sweet and pure as their white bells. She was sitting by Mistress Gordon's side, in one of those tall-backed Dutch chairs, whose very blackness and straightness threw into high relief her own undulating roundness and mobility, the glowing colours of her Indian silk gown, the shining amber against her white throat, and the picturesque curl and flow of her fair hair. Captain Hyde sat opposite, bending toward her; and his aunt reclined upon the ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... about at that as the other apparently expected to find him. He well knew the size of Cicely's love for him, and he'd heard her praise his straightness a thousand times. 'Twas true enough she set great store on her father; but love's love, and Sam was quite smart enough to know that love for a parent goes down the wind afore love for a lover. He looked forward, therefore, and weren't shook of his ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... before, she remarked upon the massiveness of the walls and the straightness of the ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... sea—imagine her with her dark hair brushed from her temples, but yet showing certain tiny rings there which had cunningly found their own way back, the mass of it hanging behind just to the nape of the little neck in curly fibres, such as renew themselves at their own will after being bathed into straightness like that of water-grasses. Then see the perfect cameo her profile makes, cut in a duskish shell, where by some happy fortune there pierced a gem-like darkness for the eye and eyebrow; the delicate nostrils defined enough to be ready for sensitive movements, the finished ear, the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... so private, that I don't know it, being an English merchant's, who lodges in this hotel, and whom I do not know by sight: so, perhaps, I may bring you word of this letter myself. I flatter myself Lady Ailesbury's arm has recovered its straightness and its cunning. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... man. Gerald rose slowly to his feet and stood by her side. The face of Mr. John P. Dunster, even in unconsciousness, had something in it of strength and purpose. The shape of his head, the squareness of his jaws, the straightness of his thick lips, all seemed to speak of a hard and inflexible disposition. His hair was coal black, coarse, and without the slightest sprinkling of grey. He had the neck and throat of a fighter. But for ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... explanations of various fundamental observational facts: ({alpha}) It explains the differentiation of the one quality of extension into time and space. ({beta}) It gives a meaning to the observed facts of geometrical and temporal position, of geometrical and temporal order, and of geometrical straightness and planeness. ({gamma}) It selects one definite system of congruence embracing both space and time, and thus explains the concordance as to measurement which is in practice attained. ({delta}) It explains (consistently with the theory of relativity) the observed ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... and made in lengths, which fitted into one another—a refinement which was new to me, who had hitherto imagined nothing better than a bamboo pole. Bob finally confided to me that he straightened his rods by softening the wood in steam; but I found that they did not long retain their straightness; and, there being no use for them, except the delight of the eye, I presently lost interest in them. Then Bob showed me how to make blow-pipes by pushing out the pith from the stems of some species of bushy shrub that grew outside the walls. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... and abased the servants of God and led armies? Death hath come upon them; and God is the terminator of delights and the separator of companions and the devastator of flourishing dwellings; so He hath transported them from the amplitude of palaces to the straightness of the graves. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a retriever after a wounded hare, or a terrier after a rat. Once the animal was cut out of the herd, the manager would uncoil his lasso, one end of which was made fast to the cinch-ring of his girths, and out flew the looped coil of rope with unerring straightness, catching the bullock round the horns. The intelligent horse, having played the game many times before, steadied himself for the shock which experience had taught him to expect when he would feel the whole weight of the galloping bullock suddenly arrested in his rush for freedom tugging at his ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... an established fact, and a most comforting one; for what a constant anxiety it must have been to believe that the straightness of a child's legs, and the shape of its nose, ears, and head were the direct results of our care! What a responsibility, to which every one must have felt unequal! And what a relief to say: "Nature will think of that. I will leave my baby free, and watch him grow in beauty; ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... change or overcome them. Employment is the half, and the primal half, of education—it is the warp of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength. And, whatever difficulty there may be in tracing through past history the remoter connections of event and cause, one chain of sequence is always clear: the formation, namely, of the character ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Theory of Consequents?" "Look at your shadow," said his teacher; "and you will know." Liehtse turned his head and looked at his shadow. When his body was bent the shadow was crooked; when upright, it was straight. Thus it appeared that the attributes of straightness and crookedness were not inherent in the shadow, but corresponded to certain positions in the body . . . . "Holding this Theory of Consequents," says Liehtse, "is to be at home in the antecedent." Now the antecedent of the personality is the Soul; the antecedent of the action ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... reported to be most dangerous by reason of the continuall violent and vnresistable current that was reported to haue continuall passage into the straightes, so that once entring therein there was no more hope remayning of returne, besides the perill of shelues, straightness of the passage and vncertayne wyndinges of the same, all which bread dread in the highest degree, the distance and dangers considered. So that before his revealing of the same the matter was in question, whether there were such a ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... earth when the harvest ripens over huge tracts of country; that is, of course, if the earth's atmosphere allowed a clear view of the terrestrial surface—a very doubtful point indeed. Professor Lowell thinks that the perfect straightness of the lines, and the geometrical manner in which they are arranged, are clear evidences of artificiality. On a globe, too, there is plainly no reason why the liquid which results from the melting of the polar caps should trend at all in the direction of the equator. Upon our ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... successfully performed, the drawn-down tube will have the appearance exhibited, which is suitable either for subsequently closing or handling by means of the drawn-down portion. The straightness of the point can be obtained by a little practice in "feeling" the glass when the tube is rotated as it cools just before it ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... bones, they were such as needed not to fail of straightness in the limbs, compactness in the body, smallness in hands and feet, and exceeding symmetry and comeliness throughout. Possibly between the two sides of the occipital profile there may have been an Incaean tendency to inequality; but if by any good fortune her impressible little cranium should escape ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Athens, and may the cows of Boston be embalmed with the bulls of Egypt! A white heifer should be perpetually grazing, at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm. Would it be wholly unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage, destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide both the immediate and the distant landscape, stifle the breeze, and diminish the attractiveness of the spot? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... adventurers went at the job with a will. The line was about a hundred feet long and the method of procedure was this: Frank tested the straightness of the line, as accurately as possible with his eye, while Ben and Harry carried it stretched between them. The end of each hundred feet was signalized by a stone, and Harry, who was at the end of the line, carried his end to this ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Ferrier's reasons for a course of action so wholly unlike any he had ever yet taken in the case of Lucy Marsham's son, Oliver's thoughts found themselves engaged in a sore and perpetual wrangle. Ferrier, he supposed, suspected him of a lack of "straightness"; and did not care to maintain an intimate relation, which had been already, and might be again, used against him. Marsham, on his side, recalled with discomfort various small incidents in the House of Commons which might have seemed—to an enemy—to ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nothing to mitigate the complacency with which our young friend gave himself up to it; nothing, that is, save a natural benevolence which had not yet been extinguished by the consciousness of official greatness. For Count Vogelstein was official, as I think you would have seen from the straightness of his back, the lustre of his light elegant spectacles, and something discreet and diplomatic in the curve of his moustache, which looked as if it might well contribute to the principal function, as cynics say, of the lips—the active concealment of thought. ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... to 12 feet long are selected. Three of the five timbers must terminate in spreading forks, as shown in figure 230, but this is not necessary for the other two, which are intended for the doorway and are selected for their straightness. ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... She was no mandarin's daughter, this one. She was young and exquisitely slim, with wisdom and sadness written upon her colorless face, and he was informed by a single glance at her exploring bright eyes and the straightness of her fine black brows, that ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts |
