"Dovetail" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... question that, as to where the sensuous ends, and the spiritual begins. The dovetail is so exact just at the junction that it is impossible to determine, and it is there that "spirit and flesh grow one with delight" on occasion; but the test of the spiritual lies in its continuity. Pleasures of the senses pall upon repetition, but pleasures of the soul continue and increase. A ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... in most cases is quite indiscoverable, and still less, according to the dates of the MSS. in which they are contained. The order is given by the position, in real or mythical history, of the events they deal with. Of course it is not practicable to dovetail them into one another with perfect accuracy. Where a story, like that of the Children of Lir, extends over nearly a thousand years, beginning with the mythical People of Dana and ending in the period ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... geography, history, science, and Belles Lettres, as distinct subjects for study—whereas, in reality, they dovetail into one another in the closest bonds of relationship; and, were they only thus judiciously intermingled, in one, thorough, cosmical course of learning, they would, most likely, be better understood in their separate parts, and, ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... of, it might afford him some diversion to take a reading of them, for the purpose of enquiring farther into the particulars of the Welsh gentleman's history—which undoubtedly was a wee mysterious; consisting of matters lying heads and thraws; and of odds and ends, that no human skill could dovetail ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... found with Scott's character. This candour, however, is only one of the merits of the book. The wonderfully skilful arrangement of so vast and heterogeneous a mass of materials, the way in which the writer's own work and his quoted matter dovetail into one another, the completeness of the picture given of Scott's character and life, have never been equalled in any similar book. Not a few minor touches, moreover, which are very apt to escape notice, enhance its merit. Lockhart was a man of all men least given ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury |
