"Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stuff-grabbing, nut-gathering, selfish instincts, these have done this work! The rats know too much to gnaw through the sides of the ship that carries them; but these so-called wise men of the world have eaten away the walls of society in a thousand places, to the thinness of tissue-paper, and the great ocean is about to pour in at every aperture. And still they hoot and laugh their insolent laugh of safety and triumph above the roar of the greedy and boundless waters, just ready to overwhelm ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... the comet's surpassing thinness and lightness is not a mere speculative opinion. It rests upon incontrovertible proof. In 1770, Lexell's Comet passed within six times the moon's distance of the earth, and was considerably retarded in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... early was to begin my tendency to overtreat, rather than undertreat (when there was choice or danger) my subject. (Many members of my craft, I gather, are far from agreeing with me, but I have always held overtreating the minor disservice.) ... There was the danger of the noted "thinness"—which was to be averted, tooth and nail, by cultivation of the lively.... And then there was another matter. I had, within the few preceding years, come to live in London, and the "international" light lay, in those days, to my sense, thick and rich upon the scene. It ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... in which we can judge of the wonderful tenuity or thinness of comets—that is, that the smallest stars can be seen through their tails, even though those tails must be many thousands of miles in thickness. Now, if the tails were anything approaching the density of our own atmosphere, the stars when seen through them would appear to be moved out ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... presented herself, all of a sudden, in full ball-dress. These surprises might have perilous consequences. He reproached her for her lack of prudence. Nevertheless, he was not taken with her appearance. The low body of her dress exposed her thinness ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... and he knew the appearance of them all. How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments. There were slow eyes that drooped on one heavily as ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... aboard, swung slowly to her dock. As the big vessel had approached the coast the few cabin passengers were at first a little nervous, but the contempt in which the officers held, or pretended to hold, the submarine menace made itself soon felt throughout the ship, and but for the thinness of their ranks all went as usual. It is true that the little group of army contract-seekers and returning refugees seemed to enjoy constituting themselves into special look-outs, and regarded it as their particular duty, as long as it did not interfere with their game of bridge, or might ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... as the same man. The tailor, after all, does a good deal to make the man, externally at least, and the change of clothes in Arnold's case had transformed him from a superior looking tramp into an aristocratic and decidedly good-looking man, in the prime of his youth, saving only for the thinness and pallor of his face, and a perceptible stoop ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... strained. My fame had become annoying for my enemies, and a little trying, I confess, for my friends. But at that time all this stir and noise amused me vastly. I did nothing to attract attention. My somewhat fantastic tastes, my paleness and thinness, my peculiar way of dressing, my scorn of fashion, my general freedom in all respects, made me a being quite apart from all others. I did not recognise ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... wand, and the native poppy turns to deepest crimson, the white of the calla lily becomes a gorgeous yellow, rose and blackberry lose their thorns, the cactus its spines. The meat of the walnut and almond become richer in quality, while their shells diminish to the thinness ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... gunong-api, or more correctly, gunong ber-api. Lava has been seen to flow from a considerable one near Priamang; but I have never heard of its causing any other damage than the burning of woods. This however may be owing to the thinness of population, which does not render it necessary for the inhabitants to settle in a situation that exposes them to danger of this kind. The only volcano I had an opportunity of observing opened in the side of a mountain, about twenty miles inland of Bencoolen, one-fourth ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... which was exactly the colour of the big, appealing eyes, with their trick of following people about. She looked a little pale and pathetic, which somehow gave her a specious air of being pretty, which she really was not at all. The swaying young thinness of those very slight girls whose soft summer muslins make them look like delicate bags tied in the middle with fluttering ribbons, has almost invariably a foolish attraction for burly young men whose characters are chiefly marked by lack of forethought, and Lady Alanby ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... itself, in many cases similar to magnetism, having powerful attraction in some directions and very little or none in others. A crystal of mica, for instance, or gypsum may be divided to any degree of thinness, but is very difficult to even break. This property of crystals is termed cleavage. Cohesion and crystallization are affected variously by various circumstances, such as heat or its absence, motion or its absence, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... he painted and repainted his Annunciation, washed out the under layer with essential oil before making his "pentimenti" or corrections, and in this way the thinness was kept. ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... and dirty and lean as hungry hounds; but they were the men whom Steve had once bidden Hardwick Elliott to watch, once they had begun to scent combat. Fat Joe was no longer plump. Steve was worn down to actual thinness. And it would have taken a careful eye to have selected the chief from their ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... and a long drooping moustache concealed his mouth. On the whole his appearance was redeemed from the grotesque by an extraordinary pair of black eyes, which were round and large as those of a Persian cat. Despite the man's exceeding thinness, he conveyed a certain suggestion of strength. At that moment he had a handkerchief between his fingers, and Gurdon could see that his wrists were supple and pliable as if they had been made of india rubber. Gurdon had heard that ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... ease gowns in the fashion of to-day. The men, somewhat grave always, accompany the music with snaps of their fingers in the air: shaven and sunburnt faces to which labor in the fields, in smuggling or at sea, has given a special thinness, almost ascetic; still, by the ampleness of their brown necks, by the width of their shoulders, one divines their great strength, the strength of that old, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... child it must die a much worse death than that to which he had put it. As a similar circumstance occurred a short time after, we have every reason to suppose the custom always prevails among them; and this may in some degree account for the thinness of population which has been observed among the ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... inquiring mind, the dwarf decided to satisfy himself upon the matter. All around him lay slabs of rock, some of which were worn perfectly smooth and to the thinness of a tombstone, by centuries of polishing in the iron jaws of glaciers. Selecting one of these of convenient size, Otter approached the edge of the bridge, pushing the stone before him over the frozen snow. Here the ice was perfect, except for a slight ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... a top soil of rich loam containing small rocks and pebbles. Underneath it is washed gravel, rocks, boulders, yellow sand, etc. What is the limit as to thinness before trees ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... out "No!" For the first time she realized the aesthetic beauty of his face, scarred and wasted though it was by the deep lines of intellectual toil and consuming sorrow. There was not a line out of place, save where his cheek-bones projected slightly, owing to his extreme thinness, and left deep hollows under his eyes. Nor was his expression the expression of a guilty man, for, notwithstanding the intense melancholy which dwelt always in his dark eyes, and seemed written into every feature, there was blended with it a strange pride, the slight yet ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The thinness of the poor girl's cheek, and the sharpness of her features, bore witness to the truth of what she said. Morton ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and as soon as the door had closed behind her, Jimmy Challoner went over to the looking-glass and stared at his pale reflection anxiously. He had always rather admired himself, but this afternoon his pallor and thinness disgusted him. No wonder Christine did not want to look at him or talk to him. He passed a nervous hand over the refractory kink in his hair, flattening it down; then, remembering that Christine had once said she liked it, brushed ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... skull is thinner in those regions that are most constantly used in the mental habits of the individual. The illumination of the skulls of these two youths (here Professor Windsor inserted a lighted taper in each) discloses a nearly uniform thinness of the entire skull, showing that they exercised all the faculties of the mind. The skull of this old warrior, however, presents a different appearance under the same test. You will notice that the illumination is confined to that portion of the skull lying around the base of the brain, ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... and Germany have declared that Bismarck was the real author of the Russo-Turkish War. The dogmatism of their assertions is in signal contrast with the thinness of their evidence[120]. It rests mainly on the statement that the Three Emperors' League (see Chapter XII.) was still in force; that Bismarck had come to some arrangement for securing gains to Austria in the south-east as a set-off to her losses in 1859 ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the mother, consequently if the diet is of such a nature as to induce over-abundance of fat, the child will be born too fat. This does not mean a healthy child by any means, and it may mean considerable extra pain for the mother. A mother inclined to thinness need not fear that this diet will reduce her. The taking of cream, eggs, bacon and other fat foods often has the opposite effect from that desired. A thin person adopting the above light diet will generally get ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... that no other hickory has such a fine record it makes me very enthusiastic over this variety in spite of the fact that it bears my name. Were you to classify this hickory from casual observation, you would think it is a pure shagbark, and it is only the extreme thinness of shell and the outside appearance pf the nut shell ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... a maelstrom of fog, that choked him, half blinded him, twisted about him like wet, coiling ropes, and in a dreadful moment he saw that through the fog were thrust out toward him arms of a famine thinness, the extended fingers of which groped at his throat, were obliterated by the fog, groped once ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and the patient had died but yesterday. That bed was a hopeless one, because its occupant was sinking fast, and could only be roused to turn the poor pinched mask of face upon the pillow, with a feeble moan. The awful thinness of the fallen cheeks, the awful brightness of the deep set eyes, the lips of lead, the hands of ivory, the recumbent human images lying in the shadow of death with a kind of solemn twilight on them, like the sixty who had died aboard the ship and were lying at the bottom of the sea, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... appearance of a wall near its ridge, and of snow, alluded to during the march hither on the 18th ultimo, is still visible. Considerable as is the cultivation, it bears a very small proportion to the great extent of waste, and probably untillable land, untillable from the extreme thinness of the soil and its superabundant stones. Cratoegus occurred near Mahmoud's tomb, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... summer —with that charm of Italian vegetation that comes to us as its confession of having scenically served, to weariness at last, for some pastoral these many centuries a classic. In a certain cheapness and thinness of substance—as compared with the English stoutness, never left athirst—it reminds me of our own, and it is relatively dry enough and pale enough to explain the contempt of many unimaginative Britons. But it has an idle abundance and wantonness, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of waiting the Overlanders were gratified to see the cabin door open and a woman step out, shading her eyes with a hand. She was tall, thin and angular, the thinness of her face accentuated by a pair of big horn-rimmed spectacles through which she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... times when feebleness has become so feeble as even to invent a theory, making thinness of voice, weakness of stamina, and general emasculation literary virtues; when intellect can find adequate interest only in the chess-puzzles of a Browning, and the sense of humor can find adequate sustenance ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... dipping tank that contains a one or two per cent water solution of liquor cresolis compositus, or a coal tar disinfectant, or that has from three-fourths to one and one-half inches of oil on top of the water, is the most satisfactory method of destroying the hog louse. Because of the thinness of the hog's coat and the danger from irritating the skin when strong solutions of a disinfectant are used, most swine breeders prefer crude oil as a remedy for lousiness in hogs. Crude oil may be applied to the bodies of hogs with ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... being so bandied. Now I think on it, 'twere possible his legs were cushioned thus to hide a senile thinness! 'Tis human nature when badgered by excess of limit to flounder into limitless excess. Look upon the Burgomaster at thy feet with a surfeit of good round legs, he is unfortunate for being in excess, he cannot whittle down. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... whom chance had thrown in the way, were forced to attend the consuls; fear prevented the rest from coming not only to the house, but even to the forum. Nor could any thing be done by reason of the thinness of the senate. Then indeed the people began to think their demand was eluded, and the redress of their grievances delayed; that such of the senators as had absented themselves did so not through chance or fear, but on purpose to obstruct the business. ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... not know that the shameful fact of Kalora's thinness was being whispered among the young men of Morovenia. When the daughters were out for their daily carriage-ride both wore flowing robes. In the case of Kalora, this augmented costume was intended to conceal ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... was not set off by the severity of her toilet; there was no touch of spring or brightness anywhere, no look or note which should belong to one so young, unless it was the extreme thinness of ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the thinness," as he put it) she caught a heavy cold, he took the matter in dispute wholly ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... they project into distinct vesicles or cavities, smaller and more numerous behind, fewer in number and larger in front; and each of them not a simple cavity, but more or less convoluted, while the long walls of those cells are of gossamer thinness, and as porous as gauze. They even communicate, and are lined, and externally wrapped together, by the same membrane; the whole assuming a pear-like form, attached by its base or greater extremity, and decreasing in size as it proceeds downwards; the cells becoming fewer, and terminating at ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... died away. And while she thus held him, Mallalieu, who had often observed Miss Pett in her peregrinations through the Market Place, and had been accustomed to speaking of her as a thread-paper, or as Mother Skin-and-Bones, because of her phenomenal thinness, wondered how it was that a woman of such extraordinary attenuation should possess such powerful fingers—her grip on his wrist was like that of a vice. And somehow, in a fashion for which he could not account, especially in the disturbed ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... John," Walter said, grasping his friend's arm, and then letting it fall again, with an exclamation of horror at its thinness. "You needn't be afraid. My father is out—not that that would make ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... head, sighing and smiling bitterly. He takes a part in conversation and usually makes no answer to questions; he eats and drinks mechanically when food is offered him. From his agonizing, throbbing cough, his thinness, and the flush on his cheeks, one may judge that he is in the first stage of consumption. Next to him is a little, alert, very lively old man, with a pointed beard and curly black hair like a negro's. By day he walks up and down the ward from window to window, or ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... bare feet were in a sad state by this time, his pajamas were torn and his hands were worn tender from using them for feet when running along on all fours. At the same time his temper was wearing to a point of dangerous thinness. It was likely to break down the slender barrier that held it at almost ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... cedar-bush, higher than a couple of feet at most. Against such blasts the solid wall was necessary, while the many intersecting partitions inside gave additional strength. It was a very solid structure as against winds, notwithstanding the comparative thinness of the walls,—0.63 m.—2 ft.—being their greatest width, and 0.33 m.—13 ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... pervaded the kitchen. Mrs. Binney, enormous, good-natured, capable, was opening crabs at one end of the table, her sleeves rolled up, and her gingham dress, in the last stage of age and thinness, protected by a new stiff white apron; Celia, Mrs. Carew's cook, was sitting opposite her, dismembering two cold roasted fowls; Lizzie Binney, as trim and pretty as her mother was shapeless and plain, was filling silver ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth if the other do. And though it in the centre sit, Yet when the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... above-mentioned type refers with the north-east of France and the Jura Mountains adjoining. In that country, distant above 400 geographical miles, the analogy to the accepted English type, notwithstanding the thinness or occasional absence of the clays, is more perfect than in Yorkshire ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... THINNESS is the state of that individual, the muscular frame of whom is not filled up by strength, and who exhibits all angles of ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... very kind," she said, with a penetrating glance at Susan. What a pretty girl Susan must have been, so soft and pale and appealing, a little human wood-anemone! She would be very pretty again when she had got over the scared look and the thinness which was almost emaciation. And how well that print suited her! Lady O'Gara had sent down a bundle of things to the South lodge, so that Susan might not appear as a scarecrow to the people. The print had pale green leaves sprinkled over a white surface. It suggested a snowdrop, perished by the ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... in splitting a mineral substance called mica into films of such extreme thinness as to give brilliant colours. One plate, for example, gave a yellow colour, another a blue colour, and the two together a deep purple, but as plates which produced this colour were always less than the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... goodness of the Creator, feels that goodness brought, as it were, into very contact with the senses. The eye loves to wander over the bountiful provisions nature is throwing forth in every direction for our comfort, and fixes its gaze on the clouds, which, having lost the chilling thinness of winter, roll in rich volumes, amidst the clear and softened fields of azure so peculiar to the season, leading the mind insensibly, to dwell on the things of another and a better world. It was on such a day, that the inhabitants ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... It would be better to call this form the Southern type. The noticeable features in all our specimens are the parallel sides, the hard material, thinness, the carving for the fingers, but above all the reappearance of the eccentric cavity for the index finger. This cavity is not a great perforation, as in the Point Barrow type, but an eccentric pocket, a compromise between the Northern cavity ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... lip, the shape of which it had altered. I concluded in my own mind that she was about thirty years of age, and that she wished to be married. She was a little dilapidated—like a house—with having been so long to let; yet had, as I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent in ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... same time he saw the shocking thinness of the little face, made into a wolf's face by hunger; the mingled horror and desperation of the eyes; the big man would not have believed a child's face could express emotions of such magnitude. He was wonder-stricken ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... was well that, having made the round of the garden, they came suddenly upon Mr. Hale, whose whereabouts had been quite forgotten by them. He had not yet finished the pear, which he had delicately peeled in one long strip of silver-paper thinness, and which he was enjoying in a deliberate manner. It was like the story of the eastern king, who dipped his head into a basin of water, at the magician's command, and ere he instantly took it out went through the experience of a lifetime. I Margaret felt stunned, and unable ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... question on account of coarseness, the deepest waves of the record being less than one-thousandth of an inch in depth, and many of them probably ten to one hundred times as shallow. Edison finally decided to apply a preliminary metallic coating of infinitesimal thinness, and accomplished this object by a remarkable process known as the vacuous deposit. With this he applied to the original record a film of gold probably no thicker than one three-hundred-thousandth of an inch, or several hundred times less than the depth of an average wave. Three hundred such ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... irrepressible Sam, "unless it is that it is in my blood; for one of the last things I heard my mother say, ere I left home, was that, to judge by the thinness of the milk furnished by the farmer who supplied us, he much reminded her of Pharaoh's daughter, as he took a ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... absorbed the lips to such thinness that the depressions between the teeth were clearly revealed. From the first dose to the last breath this was a case of dying, and the most persistent fight for life against immense odds I have ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... times recently called attention to the thinness of my hair at the top of my head, and recommended me to get it seen to. I was this morning trying to look at it by the aid of a small hand-glass, when somehow my elbow caught against the edge of the chest of drawers ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... have bark that peels off in thin horizontal layers—the color, thinness, and toughness differing in the different species; the Ashes have bark which opens in many irregular, netted cracks moderately near each other; the bark of the Chestnut opens in large longitudinal cracks quite distant from one another. The color of the bark and the character of the scales are ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... Author's note.—"Jokes occasionally about the schoolmaster's thinness and lightness,—how he might suspend himself from the spider's web and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... century the depth of the pump-shaft was about four fathoms, and the roof had been cut away to the thinness of three feet in some places. Twelve men were employed for two hours at the windlass in hauling the water, while six others were "teaming" from the bottom into the pump. When sufficient water had been cleared away the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... now, Fred," said Henrietta, "I think you would indeed say so. She has now and then a beautiful little pink flush, that lights up her eyes as well as her cheeks; and when she smiles and talks about those old times with papa, she does really look just like the miniature, all but her thinness." ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the visitors is a bad one. All this whiteness of muslin, this polished parquet, the brightness of the window-panes reflecting the sky sad at beholding these things, seem to throw into bold relief the thinness, the unhealthy pallor of these dying little ones, already the colour of their shrouds. Alas! the oldest are only aged some six months, the youngest barely a fortnight, and already there is in all these faces, these faces in embryo, a disappointed ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... for another second at the boy's thin, grave face, so like, in its very thinness and gravity, all that a composite of its Puritan forbears might have been. And as he became suddenly conscious of that resemblance he reversed the card, a whimsical twist touching his lips, and wrote above his own name, ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... mine," Verrian responded, in a violent ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in the fact of Miss Andrews's tall thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman's heart with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... some time afterwards Kit returned to his uncle's room. The shutters were pushed back from the balcony window and the strong light, reflected by the white wall, showed the thinness of Adam's figure and the deep lines on his face. His skin was a curious yellow color and his eyes ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... said Von Rosen. He had not the least idea of the thinness of the ice. Annie trembled. Her truthfulness was as her life. She hated even evasions. Luckily Von Rosen was so far from suspicion that he did not ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of a portion of the metal beaten out to so great a degree of thinness, as to allow a greenish-blue light to be transmitted through its pores. About 400 square inches of this are sold, in the form of a small book, containing twenty-five leaves of gold for 1s. 6d. In this case, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... everything "gradely" about her. The table-cloth was not only snow-white and beautifully mended, but of fine quality; the spoons were silver, worn to egg-shell thinness, but resplendently bright; the teapot, a heavy, old-fashioned Britannia metal one, was polished till it might have been of the same precious ore; the cups and plates were of delicate transparent china. Margaret came of good old north-country stock, and these possessions ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... the inn for shelter. For two hours the downpour lasted, but it cooled the air and rendered the return journey a little more supportable; and when we arrived at the house, we also arrived at the decision that never again to a picnic, as far as we were concerned, should thinness and rotundity go side ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... likewise of Paris, time-honoured Historian of Astronomy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophising, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion—of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic Officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... tears and as the hand passed upward she smiled as sweetly as a young girl, with a pathetic and utterly charming mischievous expression. Then the palm passed downward, and her face was left again stiff and masklike, the lips twisted a little into a cruel thinness, her eyes hard as agates on my own. She was superb, and I silently applauded. Then she ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... privacy and security of her own room, and with muffins and oysters for tea, Aunt Blin took out her upper teeth, that she might eat comfortably. Poor Aunt Blin! she showed her age and her thinness so. She had fallen away a good deal since she had been sick. But she was getting better. On Monday morning, she thought she would certainly be able to go out. All she had to do now was to be careful of her cough; and Bel had just bought her a ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... his voice, a husky thinness as if its vigor was pinching out, made her anxious. He was worn to the bone, the shade of himself. She slid her feet to the floor, and throwing off ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... it from me," said Houadir, "to see my generous benefactress deceived; but the thinness of inhabitants, occasioned by the tyranny of Almurah, is the cause that your provisions are more plentiful; but yet I insist upon bearing my part in the burden of the day, and Urad shall ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... artificial life against which we inveighed; it had been a home for many years, in spite of all; it was my home too; and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all the artifice and conventionalism of life was but an impalpable thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below was none the worse for it. Once, as we turned our boat to the bank, there was a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic figure of a hound, couched above the house, as ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are interesting as music, and the workmanship is skilful. If one can get over the thinness of the part-writing, especially in the slow movements, there is much to enjoy in them. The style of movement—Tempo di Menuetto—in No. 2 recalls Emanuel ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... screens. Two large vases hinted at some vulgarity of taste; a grand piano in the back room suggested a love of music, and Mrs. Lahens had but to sing a few notes to leave no doubt that she had bestowed much care on the cultivation of her voice. But method only disguised its cracks and thinness as powder and rouge did the fading and withering of her skin. She was like ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... day for ordinary work; the laborers mixing concrete were paid $2.75 per day. Another source of much relative expense was the high cost of lumber and carpenter work on the forms. On account of the thinness of the walls and roof, the cost of lumber and labor required per cubic yard of concrete was considerable. A part of the lumber was used the second time in forms, but it was found impracticable to delay the work by waiting for the concrete to harden before ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... ornament or emphasis. The story itself is there, as if the poet thought it an impertinence to add any harmonies of his own. If it were only extant as a whole, it would be one of the most notable of poems. Where else is there anything like it, for sincerity and for thinness? ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... before he stirred, an hour in which Ellen's eyes had silently noted that which had escaped them hitherto, a curious change in his colour as he lay with closed eyes, a thinness of the flesh over the cheek bones, dark shadows beneath the eyes. Whether he slept she could not be sure. But when he sat up again these signs of wear and tear seemed to vanish at the magic of his smile, which had never been brighter. Nevertheless she watched ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... green all through, and toss it away; the men look surprised, and some youngsters straightway pick it up, eat the inside out until they can scoop out no more, and then, breaking the rind in pieces, they scrape it out with their teeth until it is of egg-shell thinness. They seem to do these things with impunity ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the sunlight on the white buildings in the streets; for Angouleme, being set upon a hill, is exposed to the full glare of the sun. Tall Cointet was really scarcely above middle height; he looked much taller than he actually was by reason of the thinness, which told of overwork and a brain in continual ferment. His lank, sleek gray hair, cut in somewhat ecclesiastical fashion; the black trousers, black stockings, black waistcoat, and long puce-colored greatcoat (styled a levite in the south), all completed his resemblance ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... he not kept his dignity and waited? There had been no occasion for being so definite. He had gone too far, had been carried away. To be sure he had told the two men not to go near the telegraph operator, but that would no doubt but serve to arouse their suspicions of the thinness of his story. They would talk the matter over and start an investigation of their own. Then they would find out he had lied. He imagined the two men as already engaged in a whispered conversation regarding the probability ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... alone can give. With the blue silk gauze lightly tied under his collar, and the lapels of his thin coat thrown back to admit his thumbs to his waistcoat pockets, he felt almost cheerful before his glass. Should he shave? As once before, this important question occurred to him. His thinness gave him some advantages of figure, but he thought that it made his face older. What effect would cutting off his beard have upon it? He had not seen the lower part of his face for fifteen years. No one could say what recent ruin of a double chin might ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... became faint in the heated atmosphere, two rows of chairs before him, and as she turned to make her way out, he saw that it was Eleonora, and was appalled by seeing not only the whiteness of the present faintness, but that thinness and general alteration which had changed the beautiful face so much that he asked himself for a moment whether she could have escaped the fever. In that moment he had moved forward to her support; and she, seeming to have no one belonging to her, clung to the friendly arm, and was presently ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I see a immense mirror turnin' round and round seemin'ly invitin' folks to look. But as I glanced in, I tell the truth when I say, I wuzn't much bigger round than a match, and the thinness made me look as tall as ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... only the colour of the hair, but also its thinness (according to all pictures and busts we have of Shakspere, he was bald-headed), seems to have been satirised by Jonson in his 'Poetaster.' In act ii. sc. 1, Chloe asks Crispinus, who, excited by her love and her beauty, ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... about the Army, made it a Maxim, That good Wigs, delicate Linen, and a chearful Air, were to a poor Dependent the same that working Tools are to a poor Artificer. It was no small Entertainment to me, who knew his Circumstances, to see him, who had fasted two Days, attribute the Thinness they told him of to the Violence of some Gallantries he had lately been guilty of. The skilful Dissembler carried this on with the utmost Address; and if any suspected his Affairs were narrow, it was attributed to indulging himself in some fashionable ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... kind of the voice in respect of its smoothness or roughness, sonority or thinness, musicalness or harshness; also in respect of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... part of our Union is more exposed to invasion by the numerous avenues leading to it, or more defenseless by the thinness of the neighboring population, or offers a greater temptation to invasion, either as a permanent acquisition or as a prize to the cupidity of grasping invaders from the immense amount of produce deposited ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... just passed thirty, but the premature thinness of his hair in front, the listless droop of his heavy shoulders, and the bluish pallor about his firm jaw contrived to make him appear older than he was. There was a kindliness in the wrinkles about his eyes, and his mouth, though solid, was not lacking in indications of intuitive understanding. ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... to be the banks of what was once a fresh-water lake; the water-wash is quite distinct. It had small iron and limestone gravel, with sand and a great number of shells worn by the sun and atmosphere to the thinness of paper, plainly indicating that it is many years since the water had left them. Judging from the water-marks, the lake must have been about twelve feet deep in the plain. The eucalyptus is growing here. We then proceeded over another ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... a post-chaise, carrying four insides, whose extreme thinness enabled them to travel thus economically without experiencing the slightest inconvenience. These four personages were, two very profound critics, Mr Gall and Mr Treacle, who followed the trade of reviewers, but occasionally indulged ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... rounded throat and slender white arms. Her hands were small and white and her fingernails were highly polished. Sheer silk stockings and neat, expensive shoes. A hint of cheapness about her; perhaps it was the unnatural thinness of the delicately arched eyebrows, John thought; or perhaps the shortness of her skirt; but ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... rings, being relatively small and heavy, would probably condense much sooner than the large, light, outer rings. The planetoids are apparently the rubbish of a ring which has failed to condense into one body, perhaps through its uniformity or thinness. The separation of so big a mass as Jupiter might ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... by the way, Dr. Guenther wrote: "The skin differs in nothing from that of Phoca foetida. In the skull I observe that the nasal bones are conspicuously narrower than in typical specimens from the northern coasts. There is also a remarkable thinness of bone, a want of osseous substance; but it is impossible to say whether this is due to altered physical conditions or should be accounted for by the youth of the specimen, or whether it ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... overalls were dusted and cleaned, and put through this acid vat, and that acid tub, growing whiter and more pulpy with each process until it was fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture out of it, flattened it to the proper thinness and spewed it out at last, miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp, white paper. On the first day of the Easter vacation Fanny Brandeis walked down to the office of the Winnebago Paper Company's mill and applied at the superintendent's office for a job. She got it. They ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... lids still half-open above the dull eyes, with lips drawn back to show the gums, was little change. Beneath the chin a large white bow of coarse muslin had been tied. It was designed to hide the thinness of the throat, but gave, besides, a dreadful air of smartness to the poor corpse. Above the sunken chest the arms were crossed, but, over them, and over the thin hands, in a burning, shining mass of resplendent ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... Narrative" volume 5 part 1 page 18.) At the cataracts of the great rivers Orinoco, Nile, and Congo, the syenitic rocks are coated by a black substance, appearing as if they had been polished with plumbago. The layer is of extreme thinness; and on analysis by Berzelius it was found to consist of the oxides of manganese and iron. In the Orinoco it occurs on the rocks periodically washed by the floods, and in those parts alone where the stream is rapid; or, as the Indians say, "the rocks are black ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... uproarious greeting, the kitchen door timidly opened, and Miranda, who had been astir for nearly an hour and had the table already laid for breakfast, stepped into view, and, with a smile on her face that actually broadened its thinness dangerously near to the proportions of a genial and happy reciprocation of the jovial greeting, ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... head covered with thick, coarse hair. His face was swarthy and round, covered with abundant hair, which formed a long, coarse beard. His round eyes cast sharp glances from beneath their thick eyelids. The thinness of the man was increased by a strange dress—more strange than the man himself. It was a very simple costume, consisting of a bag made of rough gray linen, girded around the neck and waist with a hemp rope, and falling to the ground ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... was placed between these surfaces and an arrangement of scale levers provided so that the pressure exerted on the nut could be weighed. The surfaces were brought together till the nut was cracked and the pressure required was noted. This measures the thinness of the shell or more properly the strength of the shell, the weakest shell of course being the one that takes the least pressure to crack. This pressure was measured in kilograms for by doing so it was possible ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... teaching philosophy in Latin, and, as it were, to be presenting it with the freedom of the city. For up to this time she has seemed like a stranger at Rome, and has not put herself in the way of our conversation; and that, too, chiefly because of a certain highly polished thinness of things and words. For I am aware that there are some men who are able to philosophise in any language, but who still employ no divisions and no definitions; and who say themselves that they approve of those things alone to which nature silently assents. Therefore, they discuss, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... his host—whose side-face, revealed above the skylight, was now turned towards him—he was struck by the profile, whose clearness of cut was refined by the thinness, incident to ill-health, as well as ennobled about the chin by the beard. Away with suspicion. He was a true off-shoot of a true ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... two weeks to take note of their mother's appearance as, with easy confidence in her exhaustless strength, they had never done before. Since the night when they had learned that she was not quite well, they had discovered for themselves the delicacy of the smiling face, the thinness of the graceful body, the many small signs by which those who run may read the evidences of lessened vitality, if their eyes are once opened. They wondered that they had not seen it all before, and found the only explanation in the cheery, undaunted spirit which had covered ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... railway-track. We sat with our backs to the precipice, because what little wind there was came from that quarter. At some time or other the fog thinned a little; we did not know when, for we were facing the empty universe and the thinness could not show; but at last Harris happened to look around, and there stood a huge, dim, spectral hotel where the precipice had been. One could faintly discern the windows and chimneys, and a dull blur of lights. Our first emotion was deep, unutterable gratitude, our next was a foolish rage, born ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had stopped at the sound of the morning cannon, we found great difficulty in gathering together even a cold breakfast of ekmek, yaourt, and raisins. Ekmek is a cooked bran-flour paste, which has the thinness, consistency, and almost the taste of blotting-paper. This is the Turkish peasant's staff of life. He carries it with him everywhere; so did we. As it was made in huge circular sheets, we would often punch a hole in the middle, and slip it up ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... jerked his rod and brought up a fingerling which he silently unhooked and threw back overboard. "Considering the thinness of the air where you came out, maybe half a cubic mile of it had to transpose into your time to let your ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... Alix. Well, there was something rather pleasant in the thought after all, if Alix didn't mind his ugliness and thinness. Cherry thought about it all day. She had had no thought of money a year or two ago; but she was more experienced ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... square head of an arrow called quarril. In chemistry it is the Florence oil flask used for evaporation. From its thinness it ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... there was something in her general aspect, possibly due to the arrangement of folds or colors— heaven knows what, for Simon Jefferson was but a poor male observer— that made a merit of her very thinness. The weak heart of the burly bachelor tingled with pleasure in nice proportions, while his mind attained the aesthetic outlook of a classic age. To be sure, the skirts did show a good deal of Fran; very good—they could not ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... Brent look at her with more attention than he would ordinarily have given. She was a tallish girl, whose figure would have been unusually good had it been properly filled out; as it was, she was thin, but only too thin for her proportions—her thinness, had she been three inches shorter, would have passed for a graceful slenderness. But Brent took this in at a glance; his attention was more particularly concentrated on the girl's face—a delicate oval, framed in a mass of dark hair. She was all dark—dark hair, an olive complexion, ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... fat and sensual is to appear to mitigate the latter evil with at least a pretence at good humor; to be thin and sensual is to be a devil. This man was evil, not with the grossness of a debauchee but with the thinness of the devotee. And he was an old man, too. Sixty odd years of vicious life, glossed over in the last two decades by an assumption of respectability, had swept over the gray hairs, which ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... dressing, I weighed and found that I had lost all four of those last surplus pounds and two more in three days. Those two extra pounds might be construed to prove love, but exactly on whom I was utterly unprepared to say. I didn't even enjoy the thinness, but took a kind of already-married look in my glass and tried to slip the egg past my bored lips and get myself to chew it down. It was work; and then I took up the judge's letter, which also was ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of Christian life and conduct? Well, speaking for myself, I make no pretension to the lofty disregard of doctrine which in so many quarters seems to be regarded as the hall-mark of enlightened thinking. We do well to beware of a so-called "breadth," which is but a pet euphemism for thinness. ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness, even ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... She's hung on. She just wouldn't die, though she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire when she went out with the sheep. Oh, she's thin now. Never will be fat. But it's the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris. I don't think much of that burg, but she's just hankered for ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... he spoke to the men of marching feet—. Now and then he sang for them in that thin old voice whose thinness was so overlaid by the passion of his patriotism that those who listened found no ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... temptation to imitate, yet we cannot forego a regret that he did not turn to Violet Scully that was and look into the married life of the Marchioness of Kilcamey—her grey intense eyes shining through a grey veil, and her delightful thinness—her epicene bosom and long thighs are the outward signs of a temper, constant perhaps, but not narrow. He would have been able to discover an intrigue of an engaging kind in her, and the thinking out of the predestined male would ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... his best, technically. Is there any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets present us with their ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... they were able to locate the clearing by means of a thinness of the trees, a few more rays of daylight penetrating from that direction. Hay-uta happened to be looking toward that point, when he caught the outline of a figure stealing along ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... in his chair and watched them. For all her strange beauty, Julia, too, was one of the suffering children of the world. The lines of her figure, which should have been so subtle and fascinating, were sharpened by an unnatural thinness. Aaron's cheeks were almost like a consumptive's, his physique was puny. There was something in their expression common to both. Maraton was conscious of a wave of pity as ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reclined on a sofa, her face emaciated to a surprising thinness for the comparatively short interval since her attack. 'Come in, sir,' she said, as soon as she saw him, holding out her hand. 'Don't let me ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... rather tall and very slender; and yet every voluptuous curve of her lithe body refuted the idea of thinness. Her head was small and her face small, and short, and oval, with no wonderfully chiseled features, only the skin was quite exceptional in its white purity—not the purity of milk, but the purity of rich, white velvet, or a gardenia petal. Her mouth was ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... grown thinner than ever, or rather that her thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished—the very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn itself into the arch of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... with the long and ponderous Gothic war-sword which was flung unbuckled on the same sod. The Emir was in the very flower of his age, and might perhaps have been termed eminently beautiful, but for the narrowness of his forehead and something of too much thinness and sharpness of feature, or at least what might have seemed such in a European ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... things are made of all these which are not drapery, but the ideas peculiar to drapery; the properties which, when inherent in a thing, make it drapery, are extension, non-elastic flexibility, unity and comparative thinness. Everything which has these properties, a waterfall, for instance, if united and extended, or a net of weeds over a wall, is drapery, as much as silk or woollen stuff is. So that these ideas separate drapery in our minds from everything ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... each tree are here in jars numbered to correspond with the trees from which they were gathered and may be compared for variation in size, shape, thinness of shell and flavor. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... color sense. The most primitive flowers are therefore for the most part simple, widely open, regular, devoid of nectar or with their nectar unconcealed and easily accessible, and greenish, white, or yellow in color.... Lepidoptera, by the thinness, sometimes by the length, of their tongues, were able to produce special modifications. Through their agency were developed flowers with long and narrow tubes, whose colors and time of opening were in relation to the tastes and habits of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... minutely all their wondrous ingenuity. But her contrivance and dispensation of milk alone is sufficient to prove nature's wonderful care and forethought. For all the superfluous blood in women, that owing to their languor and thinness of spirit floats about on the surface and oppresses them, has a safety-valve provided by nature in the menses, which relieve and cleanse the rest of the body, and fit the womb for conception in due season. But after conception ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... came. Those who held an honest doubt as to some one policy, or act, questioned, found their mere doubt become in Aguado's mind damning certainty. And so many good Spaniards dead in war, and so many of pestilence, and such thinness, melancholy, poverty in Isabella! And where was the gold? And was this rich Asia of the spices, the elephants, the beautiful thin cloths and the jewels? The friends of Christopherus Columbus had their say also, but suddenly there arose ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... reading an Atlanta paper while he stood looking over her shoulder. She had passed well into spinsterhood, as was shown by the inward sinking of her cheeks, the downward tendency of the lines about her mouth, the traces of gray in her brown hair, and a general thinness ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... purpose this side of iron; it was as good as a rope, for was not the Gordion knot tied with it? and could be whittled down as fine as a knitting needle without breaking, and still keeping its strength; it could be pounded into basket stuff, separating the layers to almost any degree of thinness. It handled every tool, from a pitchfork to an awl, and made the whole of a rake, the bows, teeth, head and staff. Besides, it had medicinal virtues; it was good for nose-bleed ever since it staunched the royal ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic painting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose of design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and technical feeling—that expression of candour and satisfaction which may pervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and dislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must proceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the articulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 'cold valley' and the 'cold mountain' when we shouldn't have done either, and we have bought experience and paid for it. Never mind! experience is nearly always worth its price. And I have nearly lost my cough, and Robert is dosing me indefatigably with cod's liver oil to do away with my thinness.... ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... rising to their normal level where indented by the pressure of her husband's receding footsteps. It reminded her that she had been struck with the change in his aspect; the extremely intellectual look that had always been in his face was wrought to a finer phase by thinness, and a care-worn dignity had been superadded. She returned to Winterborne's side, and during her meditations another tread drew near the door, entered the outer room, and halted at the entrance of the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... visitors to afternoon tea. Observe how Wing immediately falls in with English taste and custom! Without a word from me, out comes the silver tea-pot, the best china, the finest linen! He produces his choicest plum-cake; the bread-and-butter is cut with wafer-like thinness; and the tea—ah, well, no Englishwoman, Miss Raven, can make tea as ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... the immense press and was measuring it with her fiery glance, as if to take it by assault, to sack it, to destroy it, in spite of the withered and fragile thinness of her eighty years. Then, with a ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... without spoons and forks then?" said Rosamond, whose very lips seemed to get thinner with the thinness of her utterance. She was determined to make no further ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... I feared that I should never see you again." Then she noticed the thinness of his clothing and its dampness. "Why, you are cold and wet," ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of copper, silver, or lead, Pl. II. Fig. 13. and 15. or capsules of glass, porcellain, or stone ware, Pl. II. A, Fig. 1. and 2. Pl. III. Fig. 3 and 4. The best utensils for this purpose are made of the bottoms of glass retorts and matrasses, as their equal thinness renders them more fit than any other kind of glass vessel for bearing a brisk fire and sudden alterations of heat ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... it to be in a large, vacant spot of the universe, peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practised repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ornamentation tenderly harmonizing with the rest. So far as their power over certain tones of religious mind is owing to a palpable degree of non-naturalism in them, I do not praise it—the exaggerated thinness of body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults, and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very building itself, and sustaining it—not like the Greek caryatid, without ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... scarcely two inches apart, and about half as deep, and held perhaps half a million extremely small books. Each comprised many hundreds of pages, made of a perfectly opaque, bluish-white material of such incredible thinness that ordinary India-paper ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... the one hand, the thickness and stiffness of the petioles, and, on the other hand, the thinness and softness of fine cotton thread, and what an extremely small weight one-sixteenth of a grain (4.05 mg.) is, these facts are remarkable. But I have reason to believe that even a less weight excites ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... Judith's epicene thinness had become gaunt, but it was not that so much as the colouring of her face and the fact that she was wearing pince-nez that made her an absolutely different being. This was the third time in her life ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... spare man with a face that even in the wrinkles and thinness of age, and perhaps a little asceticism, was sweet and calm, and the brown eyes were soft, entreating. Clean shaven, the chin showed narrow, but the mouth redeemed it. He wore the black cassock of the Recollets, the waist ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... meat, you shall see him took so thin in many places as in the musculous parts, that you will hardly believe it to be the same Horse, especially if he be (as the Phrase is among Horse-masters) a Nash or Wash-Horse. The cause of which thinness will easily be granted to be only an exhaustion of Juice, expended out of the Blood, which did stuff out these Vessels. And whoever, that is used to ride hard, shall observe, how thick this foul Horse breaths, and at what a rate he will reek and sweat, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... repeated upon the helmet, which appeared to be completely covered by an image of the same bird of ill omen. But that which was particularly calculated to excite surprise in the spectator, was the great height and thinness of the figure, which, as it arose from the ground, and placed itself in an erect posture, seemed rather to resemble an apparition in the act of extricating itself from the grave, than that of an ordinary man rising upon his feet. The horse, too, upon which the lady rode, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... who was her plaything and her god. It was left for Irene herself to beg him to eat more, to rest in the hot part of the day, to take a tonic, and so forth. But she did not tell him that she was the a cause of his thinness—for one cannot see the havoc oneself is working. A man of eighty-five has no passions, but the Beauty which produces passion works on in the old way, till death closes the eyes which ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his eyes he showed no emotion. John noticed that his features were cast in the antique mold. The pallor and thinness of his face accentuated his powerful features, and once more John was reminded of the portraits of the young Napoleon. Could there be such a thing as reincarnation? But he remembered that while a new ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler |
