"Thinness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... 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 there, than the city of New Orleans. It is known also that the seizure of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... can the scholar miss of somebody's stove or fireside to sit by; where, though he be not thoroughly heated, yet he may gather warmth, and at last sleep away the night under a roof. I will not touch upon other less material circumstances, as the want of linen, and scarcity of shoes, thinness and baldness of their clothes, and their surfeiting when good fortune throws a feast in their way; this is the difficult and uncouth path they tread, often stumbling and falling, yet rising again and pushing on, till they attain the preferment they ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... surmise whence she had come, or why she was there. She was a woman probably something over thirty years of age. She had thick black hair, which she wore in curls,—unlike anybody else in the world,—in curls which hung down low beneath her face, covering, and perhaps intended to cover, a certain thinness in her cheeks which would otherwise have taken something from the charm of her countenance. Her eyes were large, of a dark blue colour, and very bright,—and she used them in a manner which is as ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... multitudes, 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 ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... luxurious and indolent ease, Shif'less Sol Hyde, who had attained a great reputation for laziness by incessantly claiming it for himself, but who was nevertheless a hunter and scout of extraordinary skill. Jim Hart, a man of singular height and thinness, whom Sol disrespectfully called the "Saplin'"—that is, the sapling, a slim young tree—was doing the cooking. The others were typical frontiersmen—lean, big of build, ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... proper. It may then be fit to listen to the dictates of prudence, and pay some attention to the prejudices of mankind. The sternness of age and the austerity of censoriousness are now silent. Now pleasure wears a freer garb; and the manners of enjoyment are more frank and unrestrained. The thinness of indiscretion and the airy forms of inadvertence are lost and annihilated amid ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... 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 ship come ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... Yet how paint her as she was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In a word, the Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem. Her face was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle Ages. Her skin was white, with a faint rose tint. Everything about her erred, as it were, by an excess ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... geometric—zigzags, crosses, spirals, and concentric semicircles—and are executed in beautiful tints of brown, red, yellow, black, and white, the design being sometimes in dark on a light ground, and sometimes in light upon dark. The extraordinary thinness of the walls of these polychrome vessels, and the fineness of the clay from which they are fabricated, show to what a pitch the potter's craft had reached at the early period to which they belong. Of the ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... regarded his son, who now approached, leaning on one of the courtiers. When he looked at the girl, he recoiled with disgust; for she was so gaunt and tall that the clothes of Desiree scarcely covered her knees, and her extreme thinness, her red, hooked nose, her black and ill-shaped teeth, made her as ugly as Desiree was beautiful. Prince Warrior, who for months had thought of nothing but his lovely bride, stood petrified. "King," said he to his father, "I am betrayed! this is not the lady whose portrait ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... it be a fine or a broad pointed nib, plays a certain part in determining the thickness or thinness of the strokes, I am willing to allow, but here again we have no argument against graphology, for most people have their favourite nib—just as they prefer one occupation to another—and this is the one which will best serve to define their characteristics. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... flow, aside from actual local disease, is brought about by excessive muscular exercise during menstruation; by the use of all stimulants, whether alcoholic beverages or quinin; as well as by the thinness ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... a Perfect Figure, overcoming Nervousness, Constipation, Biliousness, Flabbiness of flesh and thinness ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... register are apt to be too thin. The middle register, however, produces in the alto voice a tone that is rich without being too heavy, so that it avoids undue heaviness on the one hand and on the other a thinness that is in no way comparable with the light tones of soprano, but simply a thin and unsatisfactory alto. Alto tone in the middle register therefore gives the standard tone-quality for alto voice; and when singing in chest or head register, an alto should endeavor to ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... softly spreading lilac gown, she wrote on her portfolio with the same gold pencil presumably the same thoughts. If her softly drooping curls were faded and cast lighter shadows over thinner cheeks, one could more easily attribute the dimness and thinness to the lack of one's own memory than to change ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... with its roots—nothing. The only aging factors here are the erosion of the wind—and that's negligible in this atmosphere—and the cracks caused by changing temperature. And one other agent—meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four strike ground right here near ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... in his intense force and soft gradations; the general thinness of colour is opposed to his system. He followed him, however, in his method of painting his shadows with the brush, instead of "hatching" them; he used the same yellowish ground, and "sfumato," [Footnote: Eastlake's Materials for a History ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... still burning, else the smoke would not have caught the eye of the Indian youth; but it must have been smoldering for hours, judging from the thinness of the vapor, and the fact that little more than a pile of ashes and ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... addition. And, indeed, he was very long, Basil Ransom, and he even looked a little hard and discouraging, like a column of figures, in spite of the friendly face which he bent upon his hostess's deputy, and which, in its thinness, had a deep dry line, a sort of premature wrinkle, on either side of the mouth. He was tall and lean, and dressed throughout in black; his shirt-collar was low and wide, and the triangle of linen, a little crumpled, exhibited by the opening of his waistcoat, was adorned by a pin containing ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... sweat, and then kept one day without water or moist 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, will not much wonder ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... 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
... of autumn leaves ribbed with gold. I reached the shore of the lake; I walked on as far as the pigeon-shooting ground. The idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to sea again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, I wished ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... No coffee? Nothing of the kind was available. Still thankful for the opportunity of turning her mind to details, Sally hurried upstairs again. Gaga was already half-undressed, and stood in front of the fire folding his coat. His thinness was grotesque in the bright light of ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... young gentleman who affected a charming frankness and abruptness in his speech, but who was in reality the most specious flatterer of the entire party. Mr. Jenks rejoiced in the following personal advantages: red hair, a blue nose, goggle eyes, and jaws of transparent thinness. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... her friend, leaning against a pillow as if for support, "if you knew that all my suffering for the last few years had been for you, that this change, and pallor, and thinness, were all occasioned by the fear that the time might never come when I could tell you that I love you, you would pardon such a hasty declaration of my feelings toward you. You were but a child when first we met," he continued, placing his hand upon her head as he had then been wont to do, ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... impression by his speech. He prepared it with the utmost care, and to "make assurance doubly sure," committed it to memory, a thing he rarely did. His turn came. There was an expectant rustle through the audience, some almost audible comments on his clothes, his height, his thinness. He cleared his voice. He started to say the first word. It was gone. Frantically he searched his memory for that speech. His mind was a blank. Again he cleared his voice and wrestled fiercely with his inner consciousness. ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... reached that age when young women's hands are slender but still rosy, when their forms have still that charming delicacy which some people call thinness and others youthfulness, and when their movements have that excessive suppleness which is like awkwardness, but which it would be the height of art to imitate. Leaning back with easy grace in their arm chairs, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the stranger in a bluff, deep voice. "I take it from your uniform, your tan and your thinness that ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... her by the arm, and turned her face to the light. There had been a dash of color in it a moment ago, but it had faded, and Lady Wolfer's eyes filled with tears as she noticed the thinness ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... 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, who affected ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... strange-looking man. He was rather small and thin; he had a large 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 it covered ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... thin shaft of golden light streamed in through the narrow opening above my head, and, striking on the opposite wall, gleamed there for a few minutes in radiant and dazzling beauty, passing obliquely upward the while until it grew narrower and more narrow, dwindled down to the thinness of a thread, and finally vanished. I had witnessed the last gleam of earthly sunlight I was ever ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... next room through a low door, all three of them having to bow their heads as they entered, and there they saw a gigantic machine at work between whose revolving cylinders depended the long gold ingots which were gradually reduced to the proper thinness for making gold coins. ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... youth from generation to generation. He is of the kind of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various language." But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... companions at table, and almost as new as I was. I was quite happy with this. They had seemed to me to be nice children, which, in fact, they were. But I was taken aback when I saw the smallness of my bed, the thinness of the mattress, and what displeased me most, the iron bed-stead. I had never seen anything like it. However everything was very clean, and in spite of my dismay I slept soundly, worn out by the shocks to my system which I had suffered on this ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... etiquette, both in habits and costume. Many of the horses that passed were made to carry double. Here would ride past a man with a woman behind him; there a couple of girls, or two elderly females. Elsewhere appeared a priest of tremendous length and thinness, with feet much too near the ground, and further on a boy, so small as to resemble a monkey, with behind him a woman so old as to suggest the idea he had taken his great-grandmother out ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... know," replied the 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
... 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
... horse with spongy feet is shod for the first time, care must be taken to avoid excessive paring of the sole, for already the natural wear of the foot has been sufficient to keep the soft horn in a state of thinness. For the same reason hot fitting of the shoe must not be indulged in for too long a time. That common malpractice of the forge, 'opening up the heels,' must, in this case, be especially guarded against, or the excessive ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... the people the pleasure of seeing their great man, to give himself the pleasure of their admiration, and to help on the Congressional campaign, the result of which would be the preliminary popular verdict upon his administration. The thinness of the crowds, the feebleness of the enthusiasm, the newspaper sneers and flings at that oratory once hailed as a model of dignity and eloquence—even he could not accept the smooth explanations of his flatterers. And in November ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... of the 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, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... braids were in full order, while Ethel was still struggling to get her plait smooth, and was extremely beholden to her sister for taking it into her own hands and doing the best with it that its thinness and roughness permitted. And then Flora pinched and pulled and arranged Ethel's frock, in vain attempts to make it sit like her own—those sharp high bones resisted all attempts to disguise them. "Never mind, Flora, it is quite tidy, I am sure, there—do let me be ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... show up well in those things," Violet said to her, "that is, for a thin woman. The men don't care much for thinness." ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... 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 only in the table-leaping antics of a Mark Twain, and the conscience can be goaded ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... 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
... with the largeness of a pumpkin and the thinness of the stem upon which it grew. "What could the Almighty have been thinking about?" he cried. "He has certainly chosen a bad place for a pumpkin to grow. Eh zounds! Now I would have hung it on one ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... and moreover the alcaba, the duty which has to be paid at the gates of Mexico, so that it would bring no profit if sent there; while in the surrounding district there is not sufficient population to consume the produce; so that these unnecessary and burdensome taxes, the thinness of the population, and the want of proper means of transport, impede the prosperity of the people, and check the progress ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... personage. He held his head so bent upon his breast, that nothing was to be seen of his face thus thrown into shadow, except the tip of his nose, upon which fell a ray of light, and which must have been long. From the thinness of his wrinkled hand, one divined that he was an old man. It was Louis XI. At some distance behind them, two men dressed in garments of Flemish style were conversing, who were not sufficiently lost in the shadow to prevent any one who had been present ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... chain which hung around her neck, and brought forth from beneath the embroidered thinness of her gown the two rings, which gave out flashing lights as she bent ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... 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 ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... face 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 her figure. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... chin, and a thin-lipped mouth, slightly raised at one corner, and opening readily over some irregular but very white teeth. Except for the eyes and eyebrows the features could claim nothing much in the way of beauty. Yet at this moment of seventeen—thanks to her clear colours, her small thinness, and the beautiful hair so richly piled about her delicate head—Lucy Purcell was undeniably a pretty girl, and since her arrival in Manchester she had been much more blissfully certain of the fact than she had ever succeeded in being while she was still under the repressive ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... language 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 way from its top, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... reduced mass of ice, might break his way out; and as by the constant chiselling the wall grew weaker and thinner, Pouchskin's fears increased in proportion. He was only too happy, when, having picked the congealed mass to what was thought a sufficient thinness, he desisted from his work, and crept out of the enclosure, through the space that had been ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... last he saw, now looked tearfully out from their large orbits, but more innocently than a bird from its nest. Over her broad forehead she had wound a large silk handkerchief in turban fashion. It hung down behind. She wished to conceal the thinness of her hair. He smiled to recognise her again in this. More spiritualised, more ethereal in her beauty, her innermost aspirations shone forth without effort. Her thin hands caressed his hair, and now she gazed ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... pupil at the College of Plassans, who was also nicknamed Le Squelette-Externe (The Skeleton Day-Boarder) on account of his extreme thinness. Against the regulations of the College, he used to bring in snuff to the ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... antiquity affords not their equal; assigning as a reason that porphyry was introduced into Rome at a period when the fine arts were tending to their decline. Notwithstanding the hardness of the substance, they are executed with such taste and perfection, that the porphyry is reduced to the thinness of china.] ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... frame, thus suggesting a stoutness which is not warranted by the size of the leg. The modelling of legs and arms in these statues is noteworthy. They are thin, according to Donatello's idea of his subject; and though the thinness takes the natural form of slender circumference, one sees that the limb with its angular modelling and its flat surfaces has become thin: the thinness is explained by the character. The feet of the Siena bronze are exceptionally ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... 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 ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... 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 and ...
— Throwing-sticks in the National Museum • Otis T. Mason
... of the age; the rarity of the material, its fineness of texture, the ease which it gave to the body, were the objects chiefly sought. Young men were seen in the Forum in robes of a material as soft as that worn by women and almost transparent in its thinness. Since all these instruments of pleasure, and the luxury that appealed to ambition even more keenly than to taste, were pursued with a ruinous competition, prices were forced up to an incredible degree. An ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... which the sheets are subjected makes the alloy very brittle, so that it has to be softened or "annealed," as it is called, by being heated red-hot in very large ovens before each re-rolling. When the sheets have attained the required thinness, they are cut into widths and lengths suitable for easy handling, transportation, ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, April 22, 1897, Vol. 1, No. 24 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... always set ashore at such a place. The missionary we landed was the young father from Arichat, and in appearance the pleasing historical Jesuit. Slender is too corpulent a word to describe his thinness, and his stature was primeval. Enveloped in a black coat, the skirts of which reached his heels, and surmounted by a black hat with an enormous brim, he had the form of an elegant toadstool. The traveler is always grateful ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness, and loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm carefully, surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her drawn and, as it seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed to her that things must be so, and yet ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... are generally granulated. The shell in this latter breed, and more especially in Malays is apt to be thicker than in Games or Spanish; but the Minorcas, a sub-breed of Spanish, are said to lay harder eggs than true Spanish. (7/38. 'The Cottage Gardener' October 1855 page 13. On the thinness of the eggs of Game-fowls see Mowbray on 'Poultry' 7th edition page 13.) The colour differs considerably,—the Cochins laying buff-coloured eggs; the Malays a paler variable buff; and Games a still paler buff. It would appear that darker-coloured ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... never, and could never be, closed, flanked by lamp-standards carrying no lamp. Rust was the only active agent to be seen there at this time of the day and year. The palings along the front were rusted away at their base to the thinness of wires, and the successive coats of paint, with which they were overlaid in bygone days, had been completely undermined by the same insidious canker, which lifted off the paint in flakes, leaving the raw surface of the iron on palings, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... comforts of our establishment. The crooked knife generally made of an old file, bent and tempered by heat, serves an Indian or Canadian voyager for plane, chisel, and auger. With it the snowshoe and canoe-timbers are fashioned, the deals of their sledges reduced to the requisite thinness and polish, and their wooden bowls and spoons hollowed out. Indeed though not quite so requisite for existence as the hatchet yet without its aid there would be ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... Hugh Krayne dreamed he was a very skeleton for thinness—not an unusual vision of fat men—and also a Tyrolean yodler, displaying himself before a huge audience of gigantic human beings, who laughed so loudly that he could not open his lips to frame the familiar words of his song. In ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... longer warm. The darkness, too, made Gertrude restless and they searched the storage closets vainly for candles. When they sat down again they could hear the panting of the engine. The exhaust had the thinness of extreme cold. They were winding on heavy grades among the Buttes of the Castle Creek country, and when the engineer whistled for Castle station the big chime of the engine had shrunk to a baby's treble; ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness—an orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues—an orchestra that has substance without density, sonority without blatancy, refinement without thinness. ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... represented an owl with its wings spread, a device which was 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 ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... winning, to us, in that sturdy sense, that thirst for mathematical precision, that impatience of theory, that positive and self-reliant—we don't mind saying, somewhat dogmatical—air, that sternness of feature, thinness of lip, and coldness of eye, which belong to the best examples. We respect even the humbler ones; for they at least hate sentiment, they do not comprehend or approve of humor, and they never relish wit. What does a taste for these qualities indicate, but an idle and frivolous mind, devoted ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... into a theoretical exposition of the universe. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their talk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with active duty ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... restrained from greed, lust and violence 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 all ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... English comic papers and found that the following list comprised all the subjects discussed: Mothers-in-law; Hen-pecked husbands; Twins; Old maids; Jews; Frenchmen and Germans; Italians and Niggers; Fatness; Thinness; Long hair (in men); Baldness; Sea sickness; Stuttering; Bloomers; Bad cheese; Red noses. A like examination of American newspapers would perhaps result in a slightly different list. We have, of course, our purely local ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... resembles examples of A. fusca in immature dark pelage, but it differs from this species in the thinness of the ears, and in the greater relative length of the narrower and more tapering tragus, and in its very much smaller size. In size it resembles both 'Vesperugo' propinquus Peters and V. (Marsipolaemus) albigularis ...
— Description of a New Vespertilionine Bat from Yucatan • Joel Asaph Allen
... Brighton, but the person to whom it was lent did not return it to me in time. Will you tell her this, if you do see her, and give her my kind regards at the same time? Dear Bell was so sorry not to have seen you. If she had, you would have thought her looking very well, notwithstanding the thinness—perhaps, in some measure, on account of it—and in eminent spirits. I have not seen her in such spirits for very, very long. And there she is, down at Torquay, with the Hedleys and Butlers, making quite a colony of it, and everybody, in each several letter, grumbling in an undertone ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... an improvement of character is necessary—a purification and deepening of the interior life. It grows out of friendship and the fervor of noble interests. And to these the fickleness and thinness of soul attendant on ignorance and selfishness, as well as on miscellaneous ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... trees, seemed to have the drowsy hum of mid- 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, a romantic shabbiness and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... to determine which of our English porcelains is the best; probably, indeed, one will be found superior in hardness, another in whiteness, a third in the thinness and evenness of the glaze, a fourth in the form of the articles, a fifth in the design, and a sixth in the colours. In hardness and in fusibility, they are probably all inferior to the Dresden and to the Sevres porcelain; for pieces in biscuit and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... indicate a very great degree of thinness. Specimens of sheet gold ornaments found in the tombs are thicker, but are sufficiently thin to indicate that, if actually made by these people, almost any degree of thinness could be attained by them. It would probably not be difficult to apply thin sheet gold to the comparatively ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... 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 to utilize some stock apparatus. After the pressure required to crack has been noted ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... a vapour which led him to believe in the existence of an open sea. In a second trip he actually saw this sea with its drifting ice, and came back convinced of the impossibility of going further in a sledge on account of the thinness of the ice. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... have the new one, that's flat," muttered the widow; and she drew out the old one and began to fold it up. But though she had made much of its thinness and insufficiency to the Baroness, she was so powerfully affected at parting with it, that all its good qualities came strongly to ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... 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
... bent-in-the-back, gimlet-eyed, wearing a musty brown coat, soiled black stock, unspeakable linen, and skin-tight trousers held to his rusty shoes by wide straps—showing not only the knuckles of his knees but the streaked thinness of his upper shanks—(Cruikshank could have drawn him to the life)—sidled into the room, mopping his head with a red cotton handkerchief which he took ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... triangle had been broadened to an oval brow, the chin was held slightly lowered, and 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 ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... "What is the measure of the thinness of Hope? What on earth is exceedingly difficult of acquisition? Tell me this, O holy one, for thou art well conversant ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... very beautiful; that is the only word which applies to his appearance. His regular features, in their extreme thinness, were ethereal as the face of an angel, but he had not the painful look of emaciation which one so often sees in the faces of those long kept in confinement. He was very thin indeed, but there was a perfect grace in all his movements, an ease and self-possession ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 and knocked the glass out of my hand and smashed it. Carrie was in an awful way ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... 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 ever become aware of in an acute case. In this case ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... and the thinness of its population, left many of the streets utterly deserted. The principal nobles were thus enabled to possess themselves of a wide range of buildings, which they fortified, partly against each other, partly against the people; ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... had to find its expression and its stay in the buttress. But even the buttress, although it bears witness to the outward and horizontal force of weight, was nevertheless so fashioned with its gable and pinnacle, or its own arched form, as to aid the upward movement. The thinness of walls and partitions, and the piercing of these with arches and windows, by lightening the force of weight, also contributed to increase the vertical movement. At sight of a true Gothic cathedral, we feel ourselves fairly lifted ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... 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, ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... wanted to get away. Yet wherever she went, there came upon her that feeling of thinness, as if she were made smaller, belittled. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... north, at Lac La Biche, at Old Fort Resolution, or at Fort McPherson some trace of him might have been found. His skin was crinkled and weather-worn, like dry buckskin, and over his brown, thin face his hair fell to his shoulders, snow-white. His hands were thin, even his nose was thin with the thinness of age. But his eyes were still like dark garnets, and down through the greater part of a century their ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... 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
... equally true of the greatness and smallness of the fingers? Can sight adequately perceive them? and is no difference made by the circumstance that one of the fingers is in the middle and another at the extremity? And in like manner does the touch adequately perceive the qualities of thickness or thinness, of softness or hardness? And so of the other senses; do they give perfect intimations of such matters? Is not their mode of operation on this wise—the sense which is concerned with the quality of hardness is necessarily concerned ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 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 ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... with some mass of igneous rock. By means of the microscope, the true nature and mode of formation of chalk can be determined with the greatest ease. In the case of the harder varieties, the examination can be conducted by means of slices ground down to a thinness sufficient to render them transparent; but in the softer kinds the rock must be disintegrated under water, and the debris examined microscopically. When investigated by either of these methods, chalk is found to be a genuine organic rock, being composed of the shells or hard parts ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... unattractive child and I was a plain, uninteresting sort of girl. I was shy and could not talk to people, so of course I bored them. I knew I did not look well when I wore beautiful clothes. I was little and unimportant and like a reed for thinness. Because I was rich and a sort of chieftainess I ought to have been tall and rather stately, or at least I ought to have had a bearing which would have made it impossible for people to quite overlook me. But; any one could overlook ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of which it is the organ, though I might admit it among the conditions of its actual functions; for the same reason, I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and (as it were) super-substantiated. With these, I abjure likewise all chemical agencies, compositions, and decompositions, were it only that as stimulants they suppose a stimulability sui generis, which is but another paraphrase for life. ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... her now eyed the preacher. She followed their looks; and there, in the pulpit, was a face as of a staring corpse. The friar's eyes, naturally large, and made larger by the thinness of his cheeks, were dilated to supernatural size, and glaring her way out of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... filled out; in figure, she had improved; her elfin thinness had become slimness, delicately curved and subtly contoured. Also her coloring had deepened; she was like a woman cast in gold. But her expression was not pleasant. Her light, gray-green eyes had a petulant look; her thin, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... was placed a little beyond our Don Quixote's, and, though only made of the pack-saddles and cloths of his mules, had much the advantage of it, as Don Quixote's consisted simply of four rough boards on two not very even trestles, a mattress, that for thinness might have passed for a quilt, full of pellets which, were they not seen through the rents to be wool, would to the touch have seemed pebbles in hardness, two sheets made of buckler leather, and a coverlet the threads of which anyone that chose ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... got under way, into the heaving waters of the now agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of their elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp canoes, dug out to the thinness of a board from the straight-grained dry pine, rapidly ahead over the broken and subdued waves of the cove, in which they had been stationed, till they rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off the view of the ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... The use of argument to persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind would have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question. The boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at half- past five. The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a summer's gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance. The boats reached ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... planted herself before 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 gesture ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... stammering tom-fool" is not an amiable one! Or take his account of Wordsworth- -how instead of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with "a handful of numb unresponsive fingers," and how his speech "for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution" excelled all the other speech that Carlyle had ever heard from mortals. He admitted that Wordsworth was "a genuine man, but intrinsically and extrinsically a small one, let them sing or say what they ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... personality and peculiarities of Legrand and Dupin, who are thus individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood, they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied intelligences ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... as limpid, as pure, and as blue as the azure of the day. Her hair, of a shaded fairness, arranged with exquisite taste, fell in silky curls over her lovely mantling cheeks; she passed across the paper a delicate hand, whose thinness announced her extreme youth. At each burst of laughter that proceeded from her friend, she raised, as if annoyed, her white shoulders in a poetical and mild manner, but they were wanting in that richfulness ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a few moments later she appeared in the doorway he wondered if he knew her at all. She was dressed for afternoon in some clinging dark stuff which made her figure slim almost to the point of thinness. She wore a small hat with a tall plume and seemed to have gained in stature. Her face was paler and her modulated voice and the studied gesture as she offered him her hand did more to convince him that things were ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... of hide was stripped it was thickly covered with salt and rolled up. This is the preliminary step. Afterwards the skin, in many places an inch in thickness, is pared down to a condition of pliable thinness. This work requires hours or even days of hard labor by many skilful wielders of the paring knife. The skulls and many of the bones are saved when an animal is being preserved for a museum, but when we arrived they had not yet ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... and stratification was observed almost universally in the sediment brought up from all points except where the sandy layers above alluded to occurred. Mr. Horner attributes this want of all indication of successive deposition to the extreme thinness of the film of matter which is thrown down annually on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... change! The glimpse he had caught of Wabi's bloodshot eyes, the terrible thinness of the Indian youth's face, the chilling lifelessness of his hands, made him shiver with dread. Was it possible that a few short hours could bring about that remarkable transformation? And where was Mukoki, the faithful old warrior from whose guardianship Wabigoon and Minnetaki were seldom ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... and sentiments—punch, puns and witticisms, were handed about in abundance; in the mean time, the room began to wear an appearance of thinness, many of the boxes were completely deserted, and the Knights of the Bound Table were no longer surrounded by their Esquires—still the joys of the bowl were exhilarating, and the conversation agreeable, though at times a little more in a strain of vociferation than had been manifested at the entrance ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his fingers through his hair, as if in its thinness and fading color he could discern ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... warm body in his embrace, the feeling of her smooth, round arm, through the thinness of her sleeve, pressing against his cheek, thrilled Annixter with a delight such as he had never known. He bent his head and kissed her upon the nape of her neck, where the delicate amber tint melted into the thick, sweet smelling mass of her dark brown ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris |
