"Meticulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stick and she pressed both hands against her forehead, driving back her thoughts. Thinking was dangerous and a folly: it was a concession to circumstances, and she would concede nothing. She stood up, looked round for a mirror, remembered there was not one in the hall, and with little, meticulous touches to her hat, her hair and the white stock round her neck, she left ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... words. "And the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted. ..." Every word here was chosen with meticulous care. The wrong done should be righted; why not say that Alsace-Lorraine should be restored? It was not said, because it was not certain that all of the French at that time would fight on indefinitely for reannexation if they were offered a plebiscite; ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... seldom vivid; as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "You feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk." The scheme of Ibsen's drama was too vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt. What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted here and there in miniature. It is a pity that he chose for dramatic representation so enormous a field. It would have suited his genius far better to have abandoned ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... swiftly and with extreme vividness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... without an activity to support himself. But he was at the shop every weekday, six to ten p.m., cementing stellene with meticulous care, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... as Point Able had been reached and the engines stopped, Somers frowned and studied his complex control board. He was a thin and meticulous man, and he operated his ship with mechanical perfection. He was well liked in the front offices of Mikkelsen Space Lines, where Old Man Mikkelsen pointed to Captain Somers' reports as models of neatness and efficiency. On Mars, he stayed at the Officers' Club, eschewing the stews and ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... I exclaimed grimly. "I shall take all these to the laboratory at the Food Controller's Headquarters, where Mrs. Marrow will submit each tuber to a meticulous test in order to satisfy herself as to its bona fides. You will be gratified to hear that, should your potatoes prove to be all they seem, the Controller will issue you a blue card, registering you as a certified vendor of Government-tested potatoes. This you may place in your window for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... father conducted a small but profitable grain elevator at Wichita, and, after her sudden marriage, decided to continue her allowance, though this whole idea of art and music in its upper reaches was to him a strange, far-off, uncertain thing. A thin, meticulous, genial person interested in small trade opportunities, and exactly suited to the rather sparse social life of Wichita, he found Harold as curious as a bomb, and preferred to handle him gingerly. Gradually, however, being a very human if simple person, he came to ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Canterbury and Cambridge and Brighton and a few other approved places. Through all these he walked with a meticulous circumspection, wondering what people thought, asking inwardly if he were squaring with their ideas of what conduct should be. Only once did I find him fully competent and sufficiently assertive. The incident occurred on a late afternoon, in a small side street just ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... little. But we can bring one person more out along these Highways and then convince a fourth and a fifth and a fiftieth and a thousandth. By then we'll be shoved back off the stage while the big wheels grind painfully slow but exceedingly meticulous." ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... the greatest faults of the French at war, is to go, without reason, from the most meticulous caution to limitless confidence. Now, since the Russians had allowed us to cross the Nieman, invade Lithuania and occupy Wilna without opposition, it had become the done thing, amongst certain officers to say that the enemy would always retreat and would never stand ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... and boards came up easily; his cache empty Mayer had not troubled to renail them. In the space between the rafters and the flooring Jim had found no more money, only a bunch of canvas sacks, and a dirty newspaper. With the Chinaman's meticulous carefulness he had brought these back to his employers; in proof of which he laid a small, neatly tied package on Crowder's knee. For the rest his work was done. He had paid the Whatcheer room boy and seen him reinstated, had followed Mayer to the depot, viewed ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Use of words in wrong senses, as "The book greatly intrigued me," "Leave me take this," "He was obsessed with the idea," or "He is a meticulous writer." ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... 'If only you knew,' 'I should have loved to have been,' 'different than,' which appear in these letters, would have been absolutely impossible to a man of Blade's meticulous literary temperament." ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... in a fair way of being fulfilled—nay, its fulfillment was inevitable; whereat Cappy, after the habit of the aged in their conflict with Youth, felt very much like shaking hands with himself. Indeed, so pleased was he that presently he called in Mr. Skinner and related the story in meticulous ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... coffee and candles. They were at liberty to prepare their own dejeuner in winter or to buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in the dark, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were as cheaply niched as any one in the gay city. Rentieres after their meticulous fashion, they drew a ridiculous but regular amount from the mysterious coffers ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... example, to leave the changing of studs from one shirt to another till the morrow. Had it been practicable, he would have brushed his hair the night before. Constance already loved to watch his meticulous preparations. She saw him now go into his old bedroom and return with a paper collar, which he put on the dressing-table next to a black necktie. His shop-suit was laid ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... not unsightly. The man is not conspicuously vulgar. The man does not eat peas with his knife. The man pronounces his aitches with meticulous care and accuracy. The man, moreover, is worth rather more than a quarter of a million pounds. ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... I must be going now," said Nelly in the speech of the valley. She went away through the side-door, opening and shutting it with meticulous care, so that it would not make a sound. . . . As though a sound ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... was brought, and Hang-won, after poring over it awhile, took a pencil and with meticulous care jotted down certain marks upon it. When he had finished, Togo turned ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... meticulous monarch is found commanding men and women to tie up their hair, eight months being granted to make the change, and, at the same time, the practice of women riding astride on horseback came into vogue, showing that female costume had much in common with male. Caps of varnished ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... slightest interest in the answers which Parker framed glibly to meet the insistent demand for information from his wife and daughter. The meal concluded, he excused himself and sought Pablo, of whom he demanded and received a meticulous account of the "accident" to Miguel Farrel. For Bill Conway knew that the gray horse never bucked and that Miguel Farrel was a ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... speaks of the parties thereto as "the signatory States," e. g., Articles 1, 2, 3, 8, 11, etc. It is curious this is so in view of the meticulous insistence by the British Dominions at the Peace Conference, on the use, throughout the text of the Covenant generally, of the expression "Members of the League" instead of ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... rose to the dignity of "sectors" when trench warfare began—the infantry amused themselves by making a series of night-raids the cumulative effect of which was considerable. They were carried out on a small scale with meticulous regard for detail, as was very necessary if only because the storming parties had rarely less than a thousand yards to cover before ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... was silent. Harkness stood with downcast eyes that followed with meticulous precision the intricacies of design in the rug on which he stood. A voice was speaking. Not the cool, imperative voice of Mademoiselle Delacoeur, mistress of vast estates, but the voice of Diane—the Diane he had learned to love—and it tore ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... intimate clues of any sort to this criminal. These are the threads which lead the detective to his quarry in fiction and on the stage. Here we lack even the faintest description of the man, or woman if that is her sex. It is murder from a distance, planned with almost meticulous care, executed coolly and without ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... novelist needs be a good historian. Alexandre Dumas was a novelist who knew his history. At least in his early works, he was meticulous in his research. This series of books are histories which place most romantic novels in the shade; they cover many centuries and many lands—those concerning the Rennaissance Popes are ...
— Quotes and Images From "Celebrated Crimes" • Alexander Dumas, Pere
... seems to me that readers are repelled by pages sprinkled with misspellings, commas and apostrophes. The value of exact phonetic transcription is, of course, a great one. But few artists attempt this completely. Thomas Nelson Page was meticulous in his dialect; Joel Chandler Harris less meticulous but in my opinion even more accurate. But the values they sought are different from the values that I believe this book of slave narratives should have. Present day readers are less ready for the over-stress of phonetic ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick carpet ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... smartly but plainly dressed in dark blue tweed, with a large black hat in which a wing had been accurately placed by the best milliner in New York. Her clothes were so well-worn, and her grooming was so meticulous, her accent so clean and crisp, her manner so devoid of patronage, yet subtly remote, her controlled heart so kind that she perennially fascinated the buxom, rather sloppy, preternaturally acute, and wholly unaristocratic young ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... about the physician. Apparently there was another man who placed his patients above anything else, though he was probably meticulous about obeying all actual rules. There was no law against listening to a ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... he had laboured on the face, painting it in with meticulous touches only to rub it out with savage disgust. To transcribe those tranquil, liquid eyes, their expression more naive than her daughter's—this had proved too difficult a problem for the usually facile ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... tooled-leather portfolio to hold his letters, which he wrote on loose-leaf sheets and mailed unfolded. They were letters that deserved preservation, prose poems composed with infinite pains and copied with meticulous care. If the potpourri was at times redolent of the dried flowers of other men's loves, Eleanor was blissfully unaware of it. When he wrote of the lonesome October of his most immemorial year, or spoke of her pilgrim soul coming to him at midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, she thrilled ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice |
