"Thumbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And now what had come of it all? A handful of faithful attendants, and a fugitive old man, clutching in his flight at his papers and his moneybags. The last of the old-world Puritans, he departed poring over his well-thumbed Bible, and proclaiming that the troubles of his country arose, not from his own narrow and corrupt administration, but from some departure on the part of his fellow burghers from the stricter tenets of the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... your reports, my dear fellow, and very well thumbed, I assure you. I made excellent arrangements, and they are only delayed one day upon their way. I must compliment you exceedingly upon the zeal and the intelligence which you have shown over an ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... so, and you may turn to your well-thumbed pile of music for confirmation, the theme or the punch of popular music may prove the entire song. I mean, that in its final sales analysis, the magic bars are what count. To carry this logical examination still further, it is possible for a popular song to be little more than theme. ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... describe the last musical party at which we assisted. A scramble amid piles of unbound music; the right cahier found, snatched up, and opened at the well-thumbed solo with which she has already contended for many a long hour, and now hopes to execute for our applause. Alas! the piano sounds as if it had the pip; the paralytic keys halt, and stammer, and tremble, or else run into each other like ink upon blotting paper, and the pedals ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... schooner bound on a seven-months' seal-hunting cruise to the coast of Japan. We sailed from San Francisco, and immediately I found confronting me a problem of no inconsiderable proportions. There were twelve men of us in the forecastle, ten of whom were hardened, tarry-thumbed sailors. Not alone was I a youth and on my first voyage, but I had for shipmates men who had come through the hard school of the merchant service of Europe. As boys, they had had to perform their ship's duty, and, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... arrived at the Dhurrumtollah Street office at the usual hour; which, in the absence of his employer, was generally between eleven o'clock and noon. Having assorted and disposed of the morning's mail, he donned his office-coat, sat down, thumbed through Blackstone until he found two perfectly clean pages, opened the volume at that place, tipped back his chair, and with every indication of an untroubled conscience imposed his feet upon the book and began the day's labours with ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... painter, instead of replying, rose, searched out from among drawings and sketches a much-thumbed manuscript, and ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... plenty of them." Tallis thumbed the stud that allowed the magazine to slide out of the butt and into his hand. Then he checked the mechanism and the power cartridges. Finally, he replaced the magazine and put the weapon into the empty sleeve holster that MacMaine ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... out. Occasionally he would make a solid, thumping splash. He worked offshore some two hundred yards, where be led me in water half to my hips. I had to try to stop him here, and with fear and trepidation I thumbed the reel. The first pressure brought a savage rush, but it was short. He turned, and I wound him back ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... answered the man's words—while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were—the vital projector plans—not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, but right ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst
... leader, exhibiting French ingenuity, in saying their say without bringing themselves within the grasp of the censors; here, rough contributors, whose hands, more accustomed to the tar-brush than the pen, turned flowing sentences by the aid of old miscellanies and well-thumbed dictionaries. There, on wooden stools, leaning over long tables, were a row of serious and anxious faces, which put one in mind of the days of cane and birch,—an Arctic school. Tough old marines curving "pot-hooks and hangers," as if their very lives depended on their performances, ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... long carving-knife and poised himself for a blow at President Hutchinson's back. I simply pressed the little silver stud on my belt, the Krupp-Tatta popped obediently out of the holster into my open hand. I thumbed off the safety and swung up; when my sights closed on the rising hand that held the knife, ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... extracted this journal from a pile of newspapers and magazines of half a dozen countries, all thumbed and ragged from perusals that had embraced the most trivial advertisements, and all still precious because by their aid one's spirit could fly home. This London journal contained at the bottom of a page, amid some gossip about music in America, the announcement that "the widow of Lawrence Teck, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Louise" in the absence of "her beloved Julius;" and was liberally spiced with passionate protestations of her inconsolableness and yearnings for his return. Both were dated ten years back, and the paper was yellow with time, besides being creased and thumbed as by ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of assurance that it springs from no secondary cause, but is a spontaneous and unbought tribute. An English author might see with comparative unconcern his book upon a drawing-room table in London, but should he chance to meet a well-thumbed copy of it in a log-house beyond our western mountains, would not his heart swell with just pride at the thought of the wide space through which his name was diffused and his influence felt, and would not his lips almost unconsciously utter the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... dwell therein their home is not beautiful. The Esquimau would not exchange his blinding waste of snow and dark fields of water for the luxuriance of tropic vegetation. Why should we exchange the glories of the land we live in for the footworn and sight-worn, the thumbed and fingered beauties of other lands? If we desire novelty and adventure, seek it in the unexplored regions of the great Northwest; if we crave grandeur, visit the Yellowstone and the fastnesses of the Rockies; if we wish the sublime, gaze in the mighty chasm of the Canon of the Colorado, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... out and said it. In all the years they'd worked together at the Instituto Argentino de Ciencia Fisica, that had been unmentioned between them. The families of hanged cutthroats avoid mention of ropes and knives. He thumbed the old-fashioned American lighter and held it to his pipe. Across the veranda, in the darkness, he knew that Pitov was looking ...
— The Answer • Henry Beam Piper
... mechanics, and especially on the art of flying. Here you saw the spoils of the fourpenny box of cheap bookvendors mixed with volumes in better condition, purchased at a larger cost. Here—among the litter of tattered pamphlets and well-thumbed "Proceedings" of the Linnean and the Aeronautic Society of Great Britain—here were Fredericus Hermannus' "De Arte Volandi," and Cayley's works, and Hatton Turner's "Astra Castra," and the "Voyage to the Moon" of Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bishop Wilkins's "Daedalus," and the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... Truth and Nature, Of him whose whitened locks on Rydal Mount Are lifted yet by morning breezes blowing From the green hills, immortal in his lays. And for myself, obedient to her wish, I searched our landlord's proffered library,— A well-thumbed Bunyan, with its nice wood pictures Of scaly fiends and angels not unlike them; Watts' unmelodious psalms; Astrology's Last home, a musty pile of almanacs, And an old chronicle of border wars And Indian history. And, as ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... caught his fish. The hungry minds of these backwoods people were refreshed with the new life that came to their imaginations in these stories. For there was but one book in the Means library, and that, a well-thumbed copy of "Captain Riley's Narrative," had long since lost ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... fumbling in his duffel bag, fished out the thumbed and dilapidated Handbook, which was his trusty friend and companion. He opened it at page 64. He knew the place well enough, for he had many times coveted what was offered there. There, standing at attention and ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... ditty, then much in vogue, called 'True Protestant Gratitude, or, Britain's Thanksgiving for the First of August, Being the Day of His Majesty's Happy Accession to the Throne.' Jack Sheppard's library consisted of a few ragged and well-thumbed volumes abstracted from the tremendous chronicles bequeathed to the world by those Froissarts and Holinsheds of crime—the Ordinaries of Newgate. His vocal collection comprised a couple of flash songs pasted against the wall, entitled 'The Thief-Catcher's Prophecy,' and the 'Life and Death ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... book which has gone through as great a number of editions as the most popular novel. It bears Mudie's stamp upon its dingy boards, and has all those marks of arduous service which are only to be seen in books which belong to great public libraries. It is thumbed, dog's-eared, pencil-marked, worn by much perusal. Is it then a novel? On the contrary, it is a volume of sermons. A fine, tender, and lofty mind, full of thoughtfulness, full of devotion, has herein left his legacy to his country. It is not rhetoric or ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... impressed me with a doubt as to whether he had ever studied Shakespeare's text, or had not been content with the acting edition of his plays.' He arose, went to a shelf not far from his table, and having taken down a well-thumbed volume of the 'Plays of Shakespeare,' resumed his seat, arranged his glasses, and having turned to 'Henry VI.' and read with fine discrimination an extended passage, said: 'Mr. McDonough, can you tell me ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... when I was a little girl, and you were a big boy, you seemed to find something in me which made it worth while for you to leave the other big boys and stay with me and talk about my books. Will I ever forget how you read some of them aloud to me? I never open now my thumbed little copy of 'Cranford' without hearing your laughing voice stumbling over the mincing phrases, and as for 'Little Women,' I believe that I worshiped in ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... good conductor, nor of any of his scholars; but I have before me a strong general image of the interior of his establishment. I remember the reverence with which I was wont to carry to his seat a well-thumbed duodecimo, the History of Greece by Oliver Goldsmith. I remember the mental agonies I endured in attempting to master the art and mystery of penmanship; a craft in which, alas, I remained too short a time under ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... years after his first hunting trip to Kentucky, Boone began to colonize it and that in flat defiance of the British government. He thumbed his nose too at a menacing proclamation of North Carolina's ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... day, and he wished to reach a particular spot before the heat of noon. So Martin and Barney despatched breakfast in as short a time as possible, and the hermit read them a chapter out of his large and well-thumbed Bible, after which they ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... and closed mysteriously. Officials and subofficials passed hurriedly to and fro. Whispered conversations were heard. The book on rules and regulations was hopefully thumbed. Hours passed. Finally the two prisoners were pompously told that they had "obstructed the traffic" on Pennsylvania Avenue, were dismissed on their own recognizance, and ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... battered books, and singed holders for flatirons, and the faded little shoulder shawl that I had seen her wear many a day about her bent shoulders. There were her old tin match-box spilling all its matches, and a goose-wing for brushing up ashes, and her much-thumbed Leavitt's Almanac. It was most pathetic to see these poor trifles out of their places. At last the ticket was found in her left-hand woolen glove, where her stiff, work-worn hand had grown used ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... was produced, the flat, cardboard chessmen turned upside down, and the corner of a table, on which a few well-thumbed newspapers lay, utilized for the game. The players were so interested in making moves and getting kings that, at first, they did not notice the talk of the card players which was directed against them; for Matt, being called ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... with my bookseller I went straight home and took down my favorite copy of the "Decameron" and thumbed it over very tenderly; for you must know that I am particularly attached to that little volume. I can hardly realize that nearly half a century has elapsed since Yseult Hardynge and I parted. She was such a creature as the great novelist himself would have chosen for a heroine; she ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... having the gift of Asmodeus, that well-gloved right hand would have been revealed as resting upon the handle of a heavy revolver, and the contents of the tourist-looking portmanteau been known as some thirty-eight thousand dollars in well-thumbed currency and greasy checks of ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... pocket of poplar and spruce, a warbler suddenly brought its song to a jerky end. He heard the excited Pe-wee—Pe-wee—Pe-wee of a startled little gray-back giving warning of an unwelcome intruder near its nest. And he rose to his feet, laughing softly as he thumbed down the tobacco in his pipe. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain might believe in him, but Bateese and her wary henchmen had ways of their own of strengthening ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... you. Old ladies with palm-leaf fans in their tireless hands come and sit with you. They aren't brilliant old ladies, you understand. I know some whose secular library consists of the Complete Works of John Esten Cooke, Gilmore Simms's War Poems of the South, and a thumbed copy of Father Ryan. But add to these the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Imitation of Christ, and it doesn't make such a bad showing. It's astonishing how soothing the companionship of women fed upon this pabulum can be, when the things of the world are ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... comer. The Japanese cannot pocket it any more than he can thrill to short Saxon words or we can thrill to Chinese hieroglyphics. The leopard cannot change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we. We are thumbed by the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we in a day rethumb ourselves. Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation, rethumb himself ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... open, plundered, and set up on end; all parlor ornaments carried off—even the alabaster Apollo and Diana that Hal valued so much. Her piano, dragged to the centre of the parlor, had been abandoned as too heavy to carry off; her desk lay open with all letters and notes well thumbed and scattered around, while Will's last letter to her was open on the floor, with the Yankee stamp of dirty fingers. Mother's portrait half-cut from its frame stood on the floor. Margret, who was present at the sacking, told how she ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... fireflies or carefully thumbed flashlights, didn't come from his near right, Number One, minor crimes, or Number Two, ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... books, though she had examined them with interest only yesterday. There was Burns; and she knew why it was he could repeat Tam O'Shanter so readily with never a moment's hesitation. There were two volumes of Scott—Lady of the Lake and other poems, much thumbed and with a cigarette burn on the front cover, and Kenilworth. There were several books of Kipling's, mostly verses, and beside it Morgan's Ancient Society, with the corners broken, and a fine-print ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... lying ill with diphtheria. As for clothing, he had nothing to offer. The secrets of his outward appearance were known to him alone, but they were of a nature to discourage the hope of raising money on coat or trousers. A few well-thumbed volumes of Russian authors could not be expected to find a brilliant sale in Munich at a moment's notice. He looked about, and he saw that there was nothing, and he turned ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... though usually chests in which clothing and furs are stored are utilized also as seats. A closet built at one side holds the meager supply of dishes. On a mantelshelf the clock ticks, if the cabin boasts one, and by its side rests a well-thumbed Bible. ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... buds and insects. The carriage moved so slowly that he was in no haste to turn the pages; and each spike of yellow foxglove, each clouding of butterflies about a patch of speedwell, each quiver of grass over a hidden thread of moisture, became a marvel to be thumbed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the schoolroom, but it is quite likely to have been given up now, or perhaps it is called by some other name. It sounds dull, but is not really, at least there was one part of it that interested me immensely, so much so that that particular page was thumbed and dirty with being turned over so many times. This was the page on which volcanoes were described. I never thought I should see a volcano, but the idea of these tempestuous mountains, seething with red-hot fire inside, and ready to vomit forth flames and lava ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... which Phebe reached home again he was more like his former self. He asked her many questions about the sea, which he had never seen, and told her what he had been doing while she was away. An old, well-thumbed translation of Plato's Dialogues was lying on the carved dresser behind him, in which he had been reading every night. Instead of the ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... and advised, and the cowboy thumbed and scratched, but the broncho's only sign of animation was a vicious switching ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... allowed the jackies in their amusements. With boxing, broadsword, and single-stick play, drill and skylarking, the hours of daylight were whiled away; and by night the men off duty would gather about the forecastle lantern to play with greasy, well-thumbed cards, or warble tender ditties to black-eyed Susans far across the Atlantic. Patriotic melodies formed no small part of Jack's musical repertoire. Of these, this one, written by a landsman, was for a long time popular among the tuneful souls of the forecastle, and was not altogether ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... have crushed him more completely. He saw red butterflies whirling around before his eyes, then staggered and fell upon the velvet-covered bench beside the great cage of monkeys, who, over-excited by all the turmoil, clung in a bunch to the bars, hanging by their tails or by their little long-thumbed hands, and in their frightened inquisitiveness assailed with the most extravagant grimaces of their race the stout bewildered man, who sat staring at the floor and repeating to himself aloud: "I am lost! I ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... family (the distinction I particularly admired); and that the lady, her condescending friend, was a grocer's daughter! Niobe, at this precise point of the conversation, bestowed a ghastly grin upon the new allies, and producing from her reticule a well-soiled and much be-thumbed volume (whether of plays, or a novel, I could not discern), commenced perusing it with an avidity apparently unchecked by its disgusting odour, the which powerfully assailed me. I, too, was allowed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... same; and a catalogue of the unredeemed pledges made to the electors of Westminster, and originally taken in by them—a compliment very handsomely returned by the honourable Baronet, who kindly took his constituents in in return. Very curious, though much dogs-eared, thumbed, and as far as the author's name ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 13, 1841 • Various
... fallen from his weary fingers; beside him was an empty match-box and tragic evidence of a number of unsuccessful attempts to get fire from a Swedish tandsticker. Crumpled under the elbow of the indomitable idealist was a much-thumbed copy of The Bartender's Benefactor, or How to Mix 1001 Drinks, in which he had been seeking imaginary solace when he fell asleep. Near his head ticked a pocket alarm clock, which they found set to gong ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... for France. He pictured himself as her conqueror! One of his favorite books was Plutarch's "Lives of Illustrious Men." He devoured the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" whole. "With my sword by my side, and Homer in my pocket, I hope to carve my way through the world," he wrote to his mother. Another well-thumbed volume was ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... consultations with his patient, and the good women of the household lauded the comforting effect of his visits. In the meantime the wonderful divining rod, that great key to nature's secrets, was duly prepared. The doctor had thumbed over all his books of knowledge for the occasion, and the black fisherman was engaged to take them in his skiff to the scene of enterprise, to work with spade and pickax in unearthing the treasure, and to freight his bark with the weighty ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the cottage with pious love an ancient and much-thumbed book, on whose fly-leaf was written 'Jason Fletcher, His Bible.' Then, having no longer any reason to conceal the early history of the deceased, she related to the village gossips—as a warning against trusting too fully to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... He thumbed down the overdrive button. The universe of stars went out, while everything living in the ship felt the customary sensations of dizziness, of nausea, and of a spiraling fall to nothingness. ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... The contest between skepticism and revelation has long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the temper of the Age of Reason belong to the eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters, and in America well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the school-master. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... bitter tears away, and soothed me with unbounded praises and visions of future success. He was then confined to the house with his last illness. He asked me that day if I would like to have, when he was gone, the old lexicon, Testament, and grammar that we had so often thumbed together. "Yes, but I would rather have you stay," I replied, "for what can I do when you are gone?" "Oh," said he tenderly, "I shall not be gone; my spirit will still be with you, watching you in all life's struggles." Noble, generous friend! He had but little on earth to ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the desk, drew out the greasy, well-thumbed book. In their excitement, they forgot rank and tried ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the river bank; and when it was eaten, sat for a time on the scooped-out brink while Avon ran at their feet—Arthur Miles searching again in the thumbed pages of The Tempest for a hint that might perchance have escaped him; Tilda as sedulously intent on a page of a ladies' newspaper in which the bread had ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... behind an Indian screen, stood a narrow camp bedstead, covered with a gaudy Eastern shawl, and also a large tin bath, with a can of water beside it. Against the wall leaned a clumsy deal bookcase filled with volumes well-thumbed and in old bindings. On one side of the tiny fireplace was a horse-hair sofa, rendered less slippery by an expensive fur rug thrown over its bareness; on the other was a cupboard, whence Beecot rapidly produced crockery, knives, forks, a cruet, napkins and other table accessories, all ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... necessary that I should write a book which should be universally read—not merely by the highly educated portion of the community, for they are able to judge for themselves; but read by every tradesman and mechanic; pored over even by milliners' girls, and boys behind the counter, and thumbed to pieces in every petty circulating library. I wrote the work with this object, and I wrote accordingly. Light and trifling as it may appear to be, every page of it (as I have stated) has been the subject of examination and deliberation: it ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... yelped. "Fire! They've set fire to the city! There it is! pouring out of the window ... and the door!" He started forward. Brett yanked the pistol from the holster, thumbed back the hammer. ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... those he usually wore. Besides the Byron and Pilgrim's Progress were Scott's Quentin Durward, Captain Marryat's Midshipman Easy, a pocket Testament, and a long and frightfully stiff book on the art of fortifying towns, much thumbed, and bearing date 1863. By far the most interesting thing I found, however, was a diary, kept down to the preceding Christmas. It was a pathetic document, full of calculations of the price of meals; resolutions ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... other day of all the persons and things I have been compared to. It begins well, with Alcibiades, but it ends with the Swiss giantess or the Polish dwarf, I forget which. Here is your book. You see it has been well thumbed. In fact, to tell the truth, it was my cribbing book, and I always kept it by me when I was writing at Athens, like a gradus, a gradus ad Parnassum, you know. But although I crib, I am candid, and you see I ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... ran in current for long enough. We sat together at Mr. Davies's feet—I am speaking metaphorically, for in reality we sat opposite to him—and we thumbed our Cordery and our Nepos together, and made such progress as our natures and our application permitted. Mine, to be honest, was little enough, for I hated ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... logical. In his cabin—a comfortable room with a fine big stove—he had a picture of his wife and daughters, all very rigid and uncomfortable. He also had three books. They included neither Burns nor Scott. One was the Bible, thumbed by his grandfather and his father till the paper had worn yellow and thin at the sides. The second, I am sorry to say, was called The Beautiful White Devil. The third was an odd volume of Froude in the Everyman edition. It dealt ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... he illustrated a point by reference to the much-thumbed pages. He was very keen, and not very articulate. I knew just enough to be an intelligent listener, and, though hungry, was delighted to hear ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... I've thumbed it out in the Bible, and I know it now by heart, And it's put the steam in my boiler, and made me ready to start. I ain't not afraid to die now; I've been a bit bad in my day, But I know when I knock at them portals there's one as ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... interior of newspaper establishments, in whatever country you may find them. For rusty dinginess, perhaps, there is nothing to equal a London office, with its floors strewed with newspapers from all parts of the world, parliamentary reports, and its shelves creaking under books of all sorts, thumbed to the last extremity. Notwithstanding these appearances, however, there is discipline—there is real order in the apparent disorder of things. Those newspapers that are lying in heaps have to be accurately filed; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... frequently forgotten, not because I desire to dim the fame of his eminent successor. Few of the present generation of geologists have read Playfair's "Illustrations," fewer still the original "Theory of the Earth;" the more is the pity; but which of us has not thumbed every page of the "Principles of Geology?" I think that he who writes fairly the history of his own progress in geological thought, will not be able to separate his debt to Hutton from his obligations to Lyell; and the history ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... After a moment, he thumbed a button on his chair arm. "Inform Lord Senesin that he is requested to appear for a Royal Audience in forty-five ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of the Dictionary will soon be the best-thumbed of them all. Only long and frequent use upon particular occasions fully tests a book of this kind; but it needs no very exhaustive scrutiny to reveal that the EPITOME is a work well organised, of exact learning, and of a careful ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... leaned forward, over the back of the front seat, unhooked the receiver of the scrambler-equipped radiophone, and sat back down. He thumbed a button on the side of the handset and said: "This is Seven Oh Two." After a short silence, he said: "You can call off the net. You want him brought in?" He listened for a moment. "O.K. Are we cleared through the main ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the old mossy vicarage where Coleridge spent his dreamy childhood lay a well-thumbed copy of that volume of Oriental fancy, the "Arabian Nights," and he has told us with what mingled desire and apprehension he was wont to look at the precious book, until the morning sunshine had touched and illuminated it, when, seizing it hastily, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... pocket his 'Book of Chances,' a volume as well thumbed as the minister's Bible. 'This is a treatise on the subject,' he said. 'I will teach it to ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... not so long ago, when he took his abilities for granted. Now he was getting old enough to have to verify them. He thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, then picked up the glove ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's real name in it. You—you and him—fixed it up between you so that you could say to yourself ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... The well-thumbed old doctor's prescription she had purloined even back in the hotel days, and embargo and legislation were daily making more and more furtive and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... doctor? Yas; I think so, too. It's tied in a right good bow for a ten-thumbed man, which I shorely ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... "screwtaw," as Reuben called it, and there was the old well-thumbed volumes that had constituted his sole wealth of books before he had the range of the well-filled library ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Kinloch, my second, knew her as well as I did. I found him dryin' his socks on the main-steam, an' combin' his whiskers wi' the comb Janet gied me last year, for the warld an' a' as though we were in port. I tried the feed, speered into the stoke-hole, thumbed all bearin's, spat on the thrust for luck, gied 'em my blessin', an' took Kinloch's socks before I went up to ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... secrets in this shebang," he said smiling. Then the smile went out, and his face grew suddenly grave, for, as the book fell open in his hand, he saw that it was the first primer of a child, and on the thumbed and tattered page the word "RAT" stared at him in ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... he thumbed over the typewritten sheets in his hands, "you say there has been a murder committed here. With this tenant, Marsh, and a patrolman, getting into action so soon after the shot, a body couldn't possibly be moved out of the house—certainly, ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... of the Rabbits and Hares, the delightful scoundrelism of the Fox, the cunning shrewdness of the Marten and Weasels, the hoyden visages of the Kittens, and the cool, slippery demeanour of the Frogs, are all capitally given. The book may lie on the drawing-room table, or be thumbed in the nursery; and in the latter case we have little doubt that many an urchin still in petticoats will in future years associate his most vivid recollection of the Great Exhibition of 1851 with Mr. Bogue's perpetuation of ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... those precise circumstances, would have paralyzed the average person. It didn't quite paralyze Mihul. She dropped forward, doubled up and struggling for breath, but already twisting around toward Trigger. Trigger stepped across her, picked up the Denton, shifted its setting, thumbed it to twelve-hour stunner max, and let Mihul have it ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... other of the arts. To the popularity of the "Beggar's Opera" of John Gay, that satirical attack upon the Government of Sir Robert Walpole, we are indebted for its songs and music appearing as the motif of the pack, from which we give here the Queen of Spades (Fig. 22), and the well-thumbed cards before us show that they were popular favourites. Their date may be taken as nearly coincident with that of the opera itself, viz., 1728. A further example of musical cards is given in Fig. 23, from a French pack of 1830, with its pretty piece of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... them "great investigations," as distinguished from "large publications." I have in my hand a little book, which those of you who are at a great distance may have some difficulty in seeing, and which I value very much. It is, I am afraid, sadly thumbed and scratched with annotations by a very humble successor and follower of Harvey. This little book is the edition of 1651 of the 'Exercitationes de Generatione'; and if you were to add another little book, printed in the same small type, and about ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... faded carpet, a grandfather's clock and two eighteenth century prints of Petrograd. All the rooms were square, so Russian with their placid family portraits, their old tables and chairs, not beautiful save for their fidelity, and old thumbed editions of Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov in the bookshelves. Clocks, old slow clocks, all telling different time, all over the house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all those odd family things that Russians collect, china of the worst period, brass trays, large candlesticks, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... in the last two years—there were now three of Henry Galleon's novels there. Bobby had given him one, "Henry Lessingham," shining bravely in its red and gold; he had bought another, "The Downs," second hand, and it was rather tattered and well thumbed. Another, "The Roads," was a shilling paper copy. He had read these three again and again until he knew them by heart, almost word by word. He took down "Henry Lessingham" now and opened it at a page that was turned down. It is Book III, chapter VI, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... who sets out in the morning with his well-thumbed Baedeker to examine the curiosities of a foreign town, but I do not follow in his steps; his eagerness after knowledge, his devotion to duty, compel my respect, but excite me to no imitation. I prefer ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the family, that had ticked the solemn requiem of the dead, and had kept company with the watcher at the bedside. There were the big, restful beds and the old, open fireplace, and the old family Bible, thumbed with the fingers of hands long since still, and wet with the tears of eyes long since closed, holding the simple annals of the family and the heart and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... lengthened career with treasures which would make a small library, and has beheld no duplicates.' Probably many of these incognita and rarissima perished in the great fire of London; others again met their fate solely through their own popularity, being 'thumbed' to pieces. In 1494 Pynson thought well enough to reprint Caxton's 'Book of Good Manners'; but of this once popular book one copy only—that which was formerly in ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... here. Get me the menu, Poons. Jenny, you will ask your good aunt, Miss Husted, to dine with us en famille—one of our old-time dinners. Now, what shall we have?" he said, scanning the well-thumbed menu that Poons ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... laying aside the well-thumbed volume and taking a step forward, "the quantities are correct. I am sure this will be excellent toffy, but—Dick, you shocking boy! whatever are you doing? Licking the spoon, I declare. How very vulgar!" and Winnie opened her eyes in horrified amazement ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... thumbed the bank-notes. The dark brown corduroy was simply, if mannishly cut, and in a way it became her. Her small feet and rounded ankles would have appeared to better advantage in high-heeled shoes and silk stockings than ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... well-thumbed scrap of paper with its mysterious lines of warning, for the time being Bessie and all her troubles passing from his mind. Jack was now full of his own affairs. He found himself growing a bit discontented because ...
— Air Service Boys Over The Enemy's Lines - The German Spy's Secret • Charles Amory Beach
... there are others, the baffled, fighting and disordered others, for whom nothing that they can see with their mortal eyes is enough, and who'll be restless all their days with their queer little maps and their mysterious, thumbed directions to some island or other that they'll never reach and never even get ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... patriarchs, the names of the sons of Jacob, the chronologies of the Chronicles, but he knew the families of Rehoboth better. These latter were engraved on the palms of his hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart. As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt. Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an account on the fly-sheet of the Bible, and seemed ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... explained the Irishman. "Someone didn't want the blaze to spread and scattered earth clear around the place, with a spade." Leaning over he picked up a clod and thumbed it significantly. "It hasn't been done a half hour. The dirt ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... taken his folk to church, but we friendly slipped through his gates and reached the silent, spick-and-span house, with its trim barn, and a vast mound of copper-coloured wheat, piled in the sun between two mounds of golden chaff. Every one thumbed a sample of it and passed judgment—it must have been worth a few hundred golden sovereigns as it lay, out on the veldt—and we sat around, on the farm machinery, and, in the hush that a shut-up house always imposes, we ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... light had been preserved owing to its having taken sanctuary, almost upon publication, in a great library, where it was forgotten. But the others that passed over Mr. Ponder's counter in the Poultry,—were they all lost, thumbed and dog's-eared out of being? They are gone,—that is all you can say; and gone apparently beyond ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... flesh-coloured pig, and many a time have I seen him under the orchard trees following close at the heels of the grunting beast while reading his office. His old breviary, like his soutane, is very much the worse for wear, the leaves having been thumbed nearly to the colour of chocolate; but if he had a new one now, he would find it hard to believe that it had the same virtue as the other. Notwithstanding his years, he can do harder work than watching a pig. I have seen him haymaking and reaping, and always ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... in a hand so large and round that I could not avoid seeing the first verse, though I turned away my eyes as quickly as possible; that verse, to the best of my memory, ran thus: "Say, lovely Lesbia, when thy swain." Upon the ground lay a box of patches, a periwig, and two or three well thumbed books of songs. Such was the reception-room of Beau Fielding, one indifferently well calculated to exhibit the propensities of a man, half bully, half fribble; a poet, a fop, a fighter, a beauty, a walking museum of all odd humours, and a living shadow of a past renown. "There ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for their rarity or their early dates, for their previous ownership or the beauty of their binding—for any reason except the one that makes them books rather than curiosities. These collections are not libraries in the intellectual or the literary sense. Three well thumbed volumes in the attic of one who loves them are a better library for him than those on which ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... and tell me all he could remember. He was very willing, and added that somewhere or other he had a diary which he had written: perhaps it might be of use? I asked him to send it me, and was sent some dirty thumbed sheets of paper. And this is what ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... bedroom, the time being one in the morning, and Mr. Peters had expressed a wish that Ashe should read him to sleep. He had voted against Ashe's novel and produced from the recesses of his suitcase a much-thumbed cookbook. He explained that since his digestive misfortunes had come on him he had derived a certain ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... over the leaves. Carelessly at first; but, lighting on a passage which attracted his attention, he soon became intent upon the volume. It was a history of the lives and trials of great criminals; and the pages were soiled and thumbed with use. Here, he read of dreadful crimes that made the blood run cold; of secret murders that had been committed by the lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... at Porter's tone when he began, but he had relaxed by the time the millionaire had finished, and was even managing to look smugly tolerant. Elshawe had thumbed the button on his minirecorder when the conversation had begun, and he was chuckling mentally at the thought of what was going down on the thin, magnetite-impregnated, plastic thread that was ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... carefully scrubbed, served for parlor, kitchen, and hall. Rows of pewter and earthen dishes glittered along the dresser. On an old oaken table, well rubbed and polished, lay the family Bible and prayer-book, and the drawer contained the family library, composed of about half a score of well-thumbed volumes. An ancient clock, that important article of cottage furniture, ticked on the opposite side of the room, with a bright warming-pan hanging on one side of it, and the old man's horn-handled Sunday cane on the other. The fireplace, as usual, was wide and deep enough to admit a gossip knot ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... The well-thumbed books in the village library she had read, as well as those in the possession of her aunt. She had tried needlework, problems of patience, and the translation of a few chapters of an Italian novel into English in order to occupy her time. But those hours when she ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... his clothes sulkily over the back of the wicker chair and, after some deliberation, drew a well-thumbed, red-covered book from his library shelves. Sherlock Holmes was a far better panacea for his troubles than ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... Half a dozen times I fended with my intact arm. Then he got the poor mangled arm again, closed down, and stripped the meat off the bone from the shoulder down to the elbow-joint, where his teeth met and he was free of his second mouthful of me. But, at the same time, with my good arm, I thumbed ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... only he reckoned with their temperaments when dealing with them, and paid no heed to their actual words. Francis Markrute was a philosopher. A number of the shelves of this, his library, were filled with works on the subject of philosophy, and a well-thumbed volume of the fragments of Epicurus lay on a table by his side. He picked it up now and read: "He who wastes his youth on high feeding, on wine, on women, forgets that he is like a man who wears out his overcoat in the summer." He had not wasted his youth either on ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... she read about the Ancient Britons to poor Bates came vividly into her mind, and though she had since re-read the passage that had then attracted her attention a hundred times, it had never before presented itself to her in its full significance. Hurriedly turning the well-thumbed leaves, she read aloud the passage which ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Even English things had to come to him through France, if he was to prize them very highly; and there is a passage in "Dilemmas" which I have always thought very characteristic of his own tastes, as it refers to an "infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well-thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of Tauchnitz." He was Latin by all his affinities, and that very quality of slightness, of parsimony almost in his dealings with life and the substance of art, connects him with the artists of Latin races, who have ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... artists read the poets and the poets visited the artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong. Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... hours. George is round by the pumps, stripped to the waist, washing. He has finished; on the black-board he has recorded his steam-pressure, his vacuum, his speed per minute, the temperature of his sea water, his discharge water, and feed water; but he cannot leave till I have thumbed all bearings, noted all water levels, tried the gauges, and see that bilges, pumps, thrust-block, tunnel-shaft, and stern-gland are all right. And while I do all this I try to make out the orchestration of the uproar as my friend would some tremendous Wagnerian ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Kennedy thumbed through the delicate intimacies of her traveling bag with the keen, impersonal manner which always distinguished him; then he found her beaded handbag and proceeded to rummage through that. Suddenly he paused ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve |
