"Skim over" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Thames, are the just resemblance of his Wit. You may observe how near the water they stoop! how many proffers they make to dip, and yet how seldom they touch it! and when they do, 'tis but the surface! they skim over it, but to catch a gnat, and then mount in the air ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... simplicity, clearness, and logical force, the same scripturalness, fullness of doctrine, and evangelical earnestness, that characterized his subsequent ministrations. He preached not to the fancy, but to the conscience and the heart. He confined not himself to hortatory appeals, nor did he, in any wise, skim over the surface of things; but, as both my notes and recollections of his college sermons assure me, he was apt to handle, and that vigorously, the high topics of theology. He gave us not milk alone, but strong meat. Yet have I seldom known a man so remarkable for making an abstruse ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... him one day, in his gruffest tone, "you are not turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have given you sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in matters that the poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I looked to see the rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin to mope and pule as if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem to think more than a boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly thought, nor ever will be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my care ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... they could see her, she led them forward at a swift pace, which astonished them both. She did not run, but she seemed to skim over the ground, and she took advantage of every bit of cover till they entered ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... the seat mentioned, and her twin brother began to hoist the mainsail of the Ice Bird. It ran up easily, and caught by the wind the craft began to skim over the surface of the lake like a ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... friends were thus conversing, the Cree chief was arranging the smaller of the canoes for the use of the young hunters—that is, he took out all the lading, making it so light that it would skim over the water like an egg-shell with the slightest impulse of ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... alighted on the top of a hill. But they were not ready to undertake a long journey yet; and so, just before daybreak, they flew back home. Every fair night after that they practiced with their wings, and at the end of a month they felt as safe in the air as on the ground, and could skim over the hilltops ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... evening; and a bet has been made and won several times of going from Amsterdam to Leyden in little more than an hour. Persons who have been drawn by sticks held by skaters have told me that the speed with which they skim over the ice is enough to turn one giddy; but this rapidity is not the only remarkable thing about it: another point very much to be admired is the security with which they traverse great distances. Peasants will go from one town to another at night. Young men go from Rotterdam to Gouda, ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... unusual in any one species, the wide-spread law of compensation decreeing otherwise. More sombre hued seed-eaters which live their lives in the Park are towhees, swamp, song, field, and chipping sparrows. The bank and barn swallows skim over field and pond all through the summer, gleaning their insect harvest from the air, and building their nests in the places from which they have taken their names. The rare rough-winged swallow deigns to linger and nest in the Park as well as do his ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... designate as "repression," in which we recognize the infantile first step of passing adverse sentence or of rejecting through reason. To investigate in what way and through what motive forces such a transformation can be produced constitutes the problem of repression, which we need here only skim over. It will suffice to remark that such a transformation of affect occurs in the course of development (one may think of the appearance in infantile life of disgust which was originally absent), and that it is connected ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... Pond was not used as much as the river for skating; but this winter the ice was as smooth and solid as if it had been frozen artificially, so the High School boys and girls could not resist the temptation to skim over its surface. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower
... the swift-footed garcon, would skim over the polished boards to the newcomer, and, tendering the menu, would wait, pencil in hand, until the guest, after careful contemplation, selected his five plats from its ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Common Gull with numbers of his black-headed cousins. His beak and legs and webbed feet are greenish yellow, and this is quite enough to distinguish the two birds. Their habits are much the same. Both skim over the sea, or the coast, looking for waste food. They are not very "choice" in their meals; dead fish or live fish, young crabs, worms, shell-fish or grubs they eat readily, as well as any offal thrown from passing ships, or the ...
— On the Seashore • R. Cadwallader Smith
... looks across great lakes I have gazed into the days to be, and as the great flies come upon four wings of gauze to skim over blue waters, so have my dreams come sailing two by two out of the days to be. And I dreamed that King Ebalon, whose soul was not thy soul, stood in his palace in a time far hence, and beggars thronged the street ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands and smiled, for the clear, full roar of the surge among the ice reminded them of salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming ground-willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over between the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of the sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing him rise, ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... pleasures as they do that of sleep, without knowing it. To the end that even sleep itself should not so stupidly escape from me, I have formerly caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it. I ponder with myself of content; I do not skim over, but sound it; and I bend my reason, now grown perverse and peevish, to entertain it. Do I find myself in any calm composedness? is there any pleasure that tickles me? I do not suffer it to dally with my senses only; I associate my soul to it too: not there to engage itself, but therein to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne |
