"Hair's breadth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nerves under control. He would go through the next hour without anyone suspecting the madness that was in his mind. He was absolutely sober and self-collected. He walked along a seam of the matting that ran the whole length of the gallery, and did not deviate from it one hair's breadth. Now he was ready. Perfectly prepared to deliver his lecture. He sat down and picked up the newspaper, and the print was clear. "The weather still continues to be fine over the British Islands. ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... his companion, what other term could she have applied to the strongest and simplest of her ideas but the one that exactly fitted it? She applied it then, though her own instinct moved her, at the same time, to pay her tribute to the good taste from which they hadn't heretofore by a hair's breadth deviated. "If it didn't sound so vulgar I should say that we're—fatally, as it were—SAFE. Pardon the low expression—since it's what we happen to be. We're so because they are. And they're so because they can't be anything else, from the moment that, having originally intervened ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... only type of American. It is one which, as bodied forth in Abraham Lincoln, commands the love and veneration of the people of the United States, and the admiration of the world wherever his name is known. To the noble and towering greatness of his mind and character it does not add one hair's breadth to say that he was the first American, or that he was of a common or uncommon type. Greatness like Lincoln's is far beyond such qualifications, and least of all is it necessary to his fame to push Washington from his birthright. To say that George Washington, an English commoner, vanquished ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... replied the Fox, "if you wish me well, do not stand pitying me, but lend me some succour as fast as you can; for pity is but cold comfort when one is up to the chin in water, and within a hair's breadth of ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... their danger, exerted themselves to the utmost, a faint breeze sprang up off the land, and our navigators perceived, with unspeakable joy, that the vessel made headway. So near was she to the shore, that Tupia, who was ignorant of the hair's breadth escape the company had experienced, was at this very time conversing with the Indians upon the beach, whose voices were distinctly heard, notwithstanding the roar of the breakers. Mr. Cook and his friends now thought that all danger was over; but about an hour ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... faculty of endearing himself so warmly to his friends, never married. It is true he sometimes desired to found a home of his own, but in reality the mistress of his absorbing passion was his art, to which everything else remained secondary. He never swerved a hair's breadth from this devotion to creative art, but accepted poverty, disappointment, loneliness and often failure in the eyes of the world, for the sake of ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... prejudice and tradition. I never could advance my curiosity to conviction; but came away at last only willing to believe.' See also post, March 24, 1775. Hume said of the evidence in favour of second-sight—:'As finite added to finite never approaches a hair's breadth nearer to infinite, so a fact incredible in itself acquires not the smallest accession of probability by the accumulation of testimony.' J. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... abolition of slavery throughout the land; and whether in the prosecution of our object this party goes up or the other party goes down, it is nothing to us. We cannot alter our course one hair's breadth, nor accept a compromise of our principles for the hearty adoption of our principles. I am for meddling with slavery everywhere—attacking it by night and by day, in season and out of season (no, it can never ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... in order that you may fully enjoy your visit to us. One of our peculiar qualities is that water is never permitted to quite touch our bodies, or our gowns. Always there remains a very small space, hardly a hair's breadth, between us and the water, which is the reason we are always warm ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... of the Texan so that his head would remain clear of the ever deepening wash in the bottom of the boat, she seized the pole and worked frantically. But after a few moments she realized the futility of her puny efforts to deviate the heavy craft a hair's breadth from its course. The tree-root that had knocked the Texan unconscious had descended upon the boat, and remained locked over the gunwale, holding the trunk with its high-flung tangle of roots and branches close ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... empty as the rainbow hues which vanish when the sun is down. But there was no remedy. Genius, devotion, and courage; the adornments of his mind, and the energies of his soul, all exerted to their uttermost stretch, could not roll back one hair's breadth the wheel of time's chariot; that which had been was written with the adamantine pen of reality, on the everlasting volume of the past; nor could agony and tears suffice to wash out one iota ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... dejected Bumpus, these words only made him grunt. Had he not watched Giraffe working away for dear life with that miserable little outfit a dozen times, and always with the same result—getting perilously near success, but always missing it by a hair's breadth? ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... convincing enough, at any rate. You see, there is a certain per cent of—let us call it waste effort—in this colonization business. We have to reckon on a certain number of nibblers who won't bite"—Andy's honest, gray eyes widened a hair's breadth at the frankness of her language—"when they get out here. They swallow the folders we send out, but when they get out here and see the country, they can't see it as a rich farming district, and they won't invest. They go back home and ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... of the Commonwealth, and a dry, dull, moralising style of sermon was the result. And, generally, this fear on both sides engendered a certain timidity and obstructiveness and want of elasticity which prevented the Church from incorporating into her system anything which seemed to diverge one hair's breadth from the groove ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... been more than twenty-five years of age, and was a little above the ordinary height; had he a single hair's breadth taller, the matchless symmetry of his form would have been destroyed. His unclad limbs were beautifully formed; whilst the elegant outline of his figure, together with his beardless cheeks, might have entitled him to the distinction of standing ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... supplemented his weakness, helping and learning alternately, while his blind master's skill filled him with wonder and despair. The years of struggle for perfection had not been wasted; and though the eye that once detected the deviation of a hair's breadth could no longer tell the true from the false, yet nature had been busy with her divine work of compensation. The one sense stricken with death, she poured floods of new life and vigour into the others. Touch became something more than the stupid, ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the same tendency. We like everything to be exactly in its accustomed place; we like things to happen exactly at their appointed times; we like everything to be usual, orderly, punctual, methodical, to a hair's breadth, to a minute. It distresses and upsets us if it is not so. For instance, to take a very trifling matter, a thrush has built its nest year after year in the catkin-tree on the lawn; this year, for ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... heard Anna's hand on the door. The effort of rising, and of composing his face to meet her, gave him a factitious sense of self-control. He said to himself: "I must decide on something——" and that lifted him a hair's breadth ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... candidate, Dodgson could see the man with his grimy hands and torn collar, crumpling up as the volley from the firing party caught him. The editor himself had never come in contact with crude realities such as this—a London County Councillor escaping by a hair's breadth from a fully-deserved conviction for corruption over a tramway contract was the nearest approach he had witnessed—but he understood the value of Jimmy's reminiscences, and, without a moment's hesitation, he asked him for an article, hinting plainly ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... protector of the world, [299] I had paid money, and got these [two here] released from the Jew's bondage; in return for which, they having given money, endeavoured to take away my life. They are both present; ask them if [in all I have related] I have varied a hair's breadth [from the truth]. Well, they led me out [to the plain]; when I saw the stake, I washed ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... breath on his face. But he reached the tree—a beech, one of whose lower limbs was almost within reach. He leaped upward to seize it, but as he did so his rifle caught on a bush and was jerked from his hand. A great gray foamy-jawed creature snapped closely at his heels and by a hair's breadth he escaped, as he ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... jewels? . . . Jesus!" The old man's gaze, roving a hair's breadth, saw the yawning drawers. "That paper, Monsieur, or you shall never leave this place alive! Hallo! Help, men! ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... never permits him to think whether his work be graceful, but whether it be just; so that his tremulous and almost fearful conscientiousness—tremulous with desire to see all, and fearful lest some line should wander by a hair's breadth from its fullest expressiveness—makes him lose sight entirely of grace and repose. No form that has the appearance of being painfully drawn can ever be a graceful one; and so the Pre-Raphaelite, until he has something of a master's facility and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... hurled another mighty rock, which almost lighted on the rudder's end, yet missed it as if by a hair's breadth. So Ulysses and his comrades escaped, and came to the island of the wild goats, where they found their comrades, who indeed had waited long for them, in sore fear lest they had perished. Then Ulysses divided ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... than a man can endure. Have I not heard death hissing at me from more thousands of barrels, and never yet moved a hair's breadth out of its way. And shall I now be taught to tremble like a woman? tremble before a woman! No! a woman shall not conquer my manly courage! Blood! blood! 'tis but a fit of womanish feeling. I must glut ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him; and then began one of the most maddening performances I have ever watched. Carefully he held the needle to the light, carefully he wetted and trimmed his cotton to a point. And for ten stricken minutes we saw him miss the eye of the needle, sometimes by an inch, sometimes by a hair's breadth. It was a thrilling contest between obstinacy and evasiveness. I was fascinated by it. Every time, as the cotton neared the eye, my heart slowly ascended into my mouth, only to drop with a fatal swiftness into my boots as the triumphant needle ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... any high position or high qualities, but from the consciousness of that sort of gentle passive strength, which knows that no external circumstance, or difficulty, or pressure will avail to make its owner step but a hair's breadth aside from the path which conscience has marked as that of ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... before her, and as she listened she arranged a half dozen pens evenly on the rest. The words she heard and spoke mattered more to her than life or death; her features were livid as those of a corpse, yet her hands went on with their mechanical work—one pen did not project a hair's breadth beyond the other. We lawyers know how common such puerile, commonplace actions are in the supreme moments of life, and how seldom men wring their hands, or use tragic gesture, or ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... riverside with her; he was close to her; nobody was present, but he could not stir nor speak! Catharine felt his gaze, although her eyes were not towards him. At last the lily came to an end and she tossed the naked stalk after the flower. She loved this man; it was a perilous moment: one touch, a hair's breadth of oscillation, and the two would have been one. At such a crisis the least external disturbance is often decisive. The first note of the thunder was heard, and suddenly the image of Mrs. Cardew presented itself before Catharine's eyes, appealing ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... in rapid passages, for it does not impart sufficient clarity. In the modern idea something more crisp, scintillating and brilliant is needed. So we use a half staccato touch. The tones, when separated a hair's breadth from each other, take on a lighter, more vibrant, radiant quality; they are really like strings of pearls. Then I also use pressure touch, pressing and caressing the keys—feeling as it were for the quality I ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... question. Now Sydney Baxter is not his real name, but this I can vouch is his true story. For the most part it is told exactly in his own words. You'll admit its truth when you have read it, for there isn't a line in it which will stretch your imagination a hair's breadth. It's the plain unvarnished tale of an average young man who joined the army because he considered it his duty—who fought for many months. That's why I am trying to record it; for if I tell it truly I shall have written the ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... could do very much with a boomerang; but I could throw a spear to a hair's breadth, as many a chicken had occasion to discover. When you go home for Christmas I hope you will remember that all this was very wrong, and that you will consider we are civilized people, not Mohicans, nor Pawnees. I also made a ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... have heap'd upon my brain The gather'd treasure of man's thought in vain; And when at length from studious toil I rest, No power, new-born, springs up within my breast; A hair's breadth is not added to my height; I am no nearer ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the Republican eight. Moved, next, that evidence be admitted that the board was illegal because its acting members were all of one party,—No. Moved, that evidence be admitted that the board threw out votes dishonestly and fraudulently,—No. In each case, the Republican eight refused to look a hair's breadth beyond the governor's seal to the returning board's certificate. In the same way they dealt with Florida ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... his momentary, shadowy fashion when he recognized Jacob Relstaub, whom he had frightened almost out of his wits a week before. No doubt the German had told the incident many times afterward, and would always insist he escaped by a veritable hair's breadth. ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... intuition. It is astonishing to see in what crazy vessels these people will risk themselves. I have seen Indians cross rivers in a leaky montaria, when it required the nicest equilibrium to keep the leak just above water; a movement of a hair's breadth would send all to the bottom, but they managed to cross in safety. They are especially careful when they have strangers under their charge, and it is the custom of Brazilian and Portuguese travellers to leave the whole management to them. When ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... there is still all that is heaviest, largest, strongest, at the summit, and all that is lightest, smallest, weakest, at the base. When you first see the Cheese-Wring, you instinctively shrink from walking under it. Beholding the tons on tons of stone balanced to a hair's breadth on the mere fragments beneath, you think that with a pole in your hand, with one push against the top rocks, you could hurl down the hill in an instant a pile which has stood for centuries, unshaken by the fiercest hurricane that ever blew, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... say is that we are so variously composed that circumstance does play a powerful part in giving rein to this or that element in us and making the scale go down for good or bad, and that often the best of us only miss the wrong turning by a hair's breadth. Dirt, it is said, is only matter in the wrong place. Put it in the right place, and it ceases to be dirt. Give that man with twenty-seven convictions against him a chance of revealing the better metal that is in him, and, lo! he is hailed as a hero ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... infrequently expend upon a book an amount of labour and a value of material quite out of proportion to the importance of the book. Still, being a thoroughly conscientious workman, who never hurried the forwarding, never cut from a margin a hair's breadth more than was necessary, and hated finger-marks on the whiteness of a page, he was well known as such, and had plenty of work—had often, indeed, to refuse what was offered him, hence was able to decline all such jobs as would give him no pleasure, and grew ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... expression in the human countenance. The greater he is, the more he will feel their subtlety, and the intense difficulty of perceiving all their relations, or answering for the consequences of a variation of a hair's breadth in a single curve. Indeed, there is nothing truly noble either in color or in form, but its power depends on circumstances infinitely too intricate to be explained, and almost too subtle to be traced. And as for these Byzantine ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... tenaciously through all the perils and adversities of her own stormy career, and able to imbue the child-bride, her daughter, with such an unyielding devotion to the faith of Nicaea, that not one of all the formidable personages whom she met in her new husband's home could avail to move her by one hair's breadth towards ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... the American clock on the mantelpiece. The result relieved him; it was not so late as he had feared. He knelt down, to steady himself, as nearly as possible on a level with the nurse's knees. By a hair's breadth at a time, he got both hands under the child. By a hair's breadth at a time, he drew the child away from her; leaving her hand resting on her lap by degrees so gradual that the lightest sleeper could not have felt the change. That done ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... chuckle—and the door swung open. The great, unwieldy thing was only a monumental bluff! It not only had not been locked, but it COULD NOT be locked—the mechanism was out of order, the bolts could not be moved by so much as a hair's breadth! ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... even grand at the moment, had a greater influence upon her than she knew. Instead therefore of interposing the door between them, she only kept it poised, ready to fall to the moment the sanity of the youth should become a hair's breadth more doubtful ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... once— not wait for him to come to me—and entreat him, as he loved me, to deliver me from the dire necessity of obeying my father. If he were a gentleman, as I hope he may be, he would manage to get me out of it somehow, and wouldn't compromise me a hair's breadth. But, that is, if I were you. If I were myself in your circumstances, and hated him as you do, that would not serve my turn. I would ask him all the same to set me free, but I would behave myself so that he could not do it. While ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a sufficient evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with him, he girded up his soul with the reflection that, as he suffered for the word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth from it. "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... but very few botanists; but I feel sure that the day will come when they will be valued. By no means modify even in the slightest degree any result. Accuracy is the soul of Natural History. It is hard to become accurate; he who modifies a hair's breadth will never be accurate. It is a golden rule, which I try to follow, to put every fact which is opposed to one's preconceived opinion in the strongest light. Absolute accuracy is the hardest merit to attain, and the highest merit. Any deviation is ruin. Sincere thanks for all your laborious trials ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... resentment of the intrusion of such a book upon him had nothing to do with the difficulty he found in writing it. His classic agonies were caused by no unruliness in the story he had to tell; his imagined book was rooted in his thought, and never left its place by a hair's breadth. Year after year he worked upon his subject without finding anything in it, apparently, to disturb or distract him in his continuous effort to treat it, to write it out to his satisfaction. This was the only difficulty; there was ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... idea of it," he said, "till I began to look at her with an eye to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not a line without meaning, not a hair's breadth that is not admirably finished. And then her mouth! It 's as if a pair of lips had been shaped to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!" Later, after he had been working for a week, he declared ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... directions faithfully," he said. "He said to lay our course south by south-west and showed me what he meant on my compass. I haven't deviated a hair's breadth. Somewhere about here should be the first landmark—three rocks shaped like a camel lying down. ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... same thing as this soldier with the harsh voice, and it was that affair and this soldier that were so agonizingly, incessantly pulling and pressing his arm and always dragging it in one direction. He tried to get away from them, but they would not for an instant let his shoulder move a hair's breadth. It would not ache—it would be well—if only they did not pull it, but it was impossible to get rid ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... were as gods, knowing all things—above all, he feared myself, as I could see, having met me first at the very house of Rumbald, as if I were his friend, and now again in the chamber of his accuser. It was piteous to see how he sought to be very exact in his memories, and not go by a hair's breadth beyond ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... is waiting for us. . . . A cable's length on the port, and level with us—that's the order, and you'll watch it until I give the next. You have lost us twenty minutes. Happen that might turn out the hair's breadth I was speaking of—the difference between life and death—and the whole Pacific ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... flag of the British Empire, were we to violate one little rule ... were we to take any property, no matter how small, without just payment to its owner; were we to drink one glass of beer too much ... were we to overstep by a hair's breadth the smallest rule of the code of a "soldier and a gentleman," we were ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... exception of the little cut in the adagio. This will be done at our next representation. Send me therefore the necessary instructions about the study of the "Flying Dutchman," and be assured that I shall not deviate from them by a hair's breadth. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... but the breadth of a hair, beyond that point, the picture becomes an overcharged caricature, as likely to create laughter as diffuse distress." Never, perhaps, has that subtle boundary-line been hit with more admirable dexterity, just within the hair's breadth here indicated, than it was, for example, in Macready's impersonation of Virginius, where his scream in the camp-scene betrayed his instantaneous appreciation of the wrong meditated by Appius Claudius against the virginal purity of his daughter. As adroitly, in his way, as that great ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... went on unsupportably; his wife was wise, correct, just, to a hair's breadth. Good God, when would they go? Now—there was a break in the conversation—he would rise and say good- night. Probably they wanted to discuss things more personal than his presence allowed and were waiting for just that. He was aware that Mrs. Grove's gaze, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... bodies are acted upon. All hang by bands of unwrought silk. If the silk were twisted, it would twist the magnets, and the accuracy of their position would be disturbed. Magnets, like telescopes, must be true in their adjustment to the hundredth part of a hair's breadth. One magnet hangs north and south; another east and west; and a third, like a scale-beam, is balanced on knife-edges and agate planes, so beautifully, that when once adjusted and inclosed in its case, it is opened only once a year, lest one grain of dust, or one small ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... fellow who had been shot was himself trying to take human life; according to mountain law, he had got his deserts. Hence no astonishment should be felt that, while this human tragedy was being played to a finish, the carabao-butchers had not turned a hair's breadth from their business. For when I turned again to see how they were getting on, I found that they had disappeared, and, walking to the place, saw not a trace of the butchery save the trampled ground and a small heap of undigested grass. Mr. Worcester had told me before ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... back into the crowd). My little friend, get back! Now see, I'll make A line upon the ground, and if thy toes, But by a hair's breadth, cross that line again, I'll drop my spear on them and they shall be As flat as ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... only one game lost, and by a hair's breadth. Wait until the end of the season, and ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... out Jim to the driver. He poised, stepped lightly up and over, and avoided by the safe hair's breadth being crushed when the log rolled. But it did not lie quite straight and even. So Mike cut a short thick block, and all three stirred the heavy timber sufficiently to ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... memory of several episodes in which they were connected with one another and of attempts which Disraeli made to win Bright's support and co-operation. Bright could cultivate friendships with politicians of very different schools without being induced to deviate by a hair's breadth from the cause which his principles dictated, and he could treat his friends, at times, with refreshing frankness. When Disraeli warmly admired one of his greatest speeches and expressed the wish that he himself could emulate it, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... unit of magnitude by which she measures her works. Man takes his standards of dimension from himself. The hair's breadth was his minimum until the microscope told him that there are animated creatures to which one of the hairs of his head is a larger cylinder than is the trunk of the giant California sequoia to him. He borrows his inch from the breadth of his thumb, his palm and span from ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... contrived to save the fatigue of a long stair. On getting to the bottom he saw nothing of William, and in walking on the wet planks he slipped down and fell on his side, and cut his face and bruised his eye; he says his eye was within a hair's breadth of being put out by the sharp corner of a rock. He walked up the long stair, being too giddy after his fall to attempt the car, and he felt very headachy and unwell in consequence all the morning. At last William made his appearance. There had been no ferryman for a long time, and when he came ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... was secured his whole soul was stirred by anxiety for Fred Linden, who, he knew, was placed at more disadvantage than he. Since he was further from shore than was he, and since the latter had been able to save himself only by a hair's breadth, it was clearly beyond the power of Fred to escape in the same manner—though it might be that there was some other ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... destiny had not only dragged into political life, but, as Whip of the Parnellite Party, had made him the official representative of a body for the most part socially unknown, and disliked with a fervour happily not often imported into Parliamentary warfare. DICK POWER, whilst never swerving by a hair's breadth from loyalty to his colleagues and his leader, so bore himself that he was welcome in any Parliamentary circle, from "GOSSET's Room" to the floor of the House, which he sometimes "took" to deliver a witty speech in support of a Motion for adjourning ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 12, 1891 • Various
... the boy under his very nose, and made off with him. The shot that had been fired to bring the war-chief to earth failed in its purpose, and while the hunter was forcing him into a corner he awoke to the fact that he was there himself, and it was only by a hair's breadth that he succeeded in saving ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... the cat's eyesight, the rabbit's sense of hearing, the horse's sense of taste, and the homing pigeon's "locality," he would not be one whit better prepared to appreciate Kipling's "Dipsy Chanty," and not a hair's breadth nearer a point where he could write ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... howled in its surprise and delight, but Phil never varied his pose by a hair's breadth until Emperor finally set him down, flushed and ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... interesting, and characteristic of Turner: no other artist would have put the round pier so exactly under the round cliff. It is under it so accurately, that if the nearly vertical falling line of that cliff be continued, it strikes the sea-base of the pier to a hair's breadth. But Turner knew better than any man the value of echo, as well as of contrast,—of repetition, as well as of opposition. The round pier repeats the line of the main cliff, and then the sail repeats the diagonal shadow which crosses it, and emerges above it just as the embankment does above ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... of our Heavenly Father, his eyes are open; so if man goes to perdition he must go with his eyes open. In all this we have perfect harmony with all Bible duty and truth, and also with science and universal consciousness of freedom and ability to choose and act. Not by a hair's breadth has God ever infringed upon the freedom of the soul to shape and mould its own moral character, and shape its own moral destiny; but he has done many wonderful things to better the condition of the free soul—not forsaking it in the ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... heaven. His presence is everywhere, His power is boundless, and we are His children whom He loves. He makes His sun to shine over all; He overlooks no one. He sees into the dark recesses of all hearts, and no one can move a hair's breadth without His consent. He places freely before men happiness and eternal life. Listen to what I say to you ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... lonely garret, toiling, toiling, waiting, waiting, amid poverty and hunger, but neither hunger, debt, poverty nor discouragement could induce him to swerve a hair's breadth from his purpose. He could wait, even ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... pigeons are whirling around us, occasionally poising themselves against the stern, as serenely, apparently, as if the elements were at rest. The barometer has remained perfectly stationary at 29.57 during this blow for seven hours (from morning to 7 P.M.), without varying a single hair's breadth, during all of which time the gale was raging with unmitigated violence from about S.W. by W. to S.W. During this period, we were travelling about on an average speed of eleven knots; and of course this must have been the rate of speed of the vortex—distant from us probably 150 ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... hands, of eyebrows exquisitely arched, told more than his words. They showed to a hair's breadth how far he expected, how far was prepared, to tempt his customer. No pedlar before a doorful of girls' sidelong heads could more deftly have marketed his wares. The monk, too, sidled his head; he pursed ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... evidence of the sincerity with which he was fulfiling your expectations in relation to Kansas. And it gives me pleasure here to say of him, what I am assured I can now say with confidence, that he will not shrink a hair's breadth from the position he has taken, but will move another step in advance, and fall, if fall he must, manfully upholding the rights and defying ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... moral codes: one for himself, with largest latitude—swearing, chewing, smoking, drinking, gambling, libertinism, all winked at—cash and brains giving him a free pass everywhere; another quite unlike this for woman—she must be immaculate. One hair's breadth deviation, even the touch of the hem of the garment of an accused sister, dooms her to the world's scorn. Man demands that his wife shall be above suspicion. Woman must accept her husband as he is, for she is powerless so long as she eats the bread of dependence. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the slapping of our feet on the hard road might have been heard a mile away. He had started a pace behind me, and he finished in the same position. For all his extra years and the weight of his valise, he had not lost a hair's breadth. The devil might race him for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mountain. When a mounted cowboy climbs a hill he does not believe in fussing with such nonsense as grades; he goes straight up. Similarly, this man evidently considered that, as roads were made for travel and distance for annihilation, one should turn on full speed and get there. Not one hair's breadth did he deign to swerve for chuck-hole or stone; not one fractional mile per hour did he check for gully or ditch. We struck them head-on, bang! did they happen in our way. Then my head hit the disreputable top. In the mysterious fashion of those who ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... perhaps drive him to despair. But one more of the series, viz., No. 6, as a parting gage d' amitie, he must positively permit me to drop into his pocket. Supposing, then, that No. 5 were surmounted, and that, supernaturally, you knew the value to a hair's breadth, of every separate word (or, perhaps, composite phrase made up from a constellation of words)—ah, poor traveller in trackless forests, still you are lost again—for, oftentimes, and especially in St. Paul, the words may be known, their sense may be known, but their logical relation is still ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... personality, that stamps them finally as belonging to an immense mediocrity. It is this subtle and microscopic change, a sixteenth of an inch in the height of a collar, a line in the pattern of a scarf, a hair's breadth in the disposition of a crease, that the psychologists of the market-place call distinction, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... resting on the word, "I'll take you for a walk to see the sights. There are rabbits, sheep, new lambs, very white and lively, a hare if we're lucky, ponies, perhaps, if we go far enough. We've all these things on the moor. Oh," her grimace missed foolishness by the hair's breadth which fortune always meted to her, "it's a wonderful place. Will you come ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... some student or apprentice might distinguish himself by asking an embarrassing question or so. Say the range of easily possible conditions on any given planet was a scale ten miles in length. Then that area on the scale where man could exist without artificial aids would still be less than a hair's breadth. And now to find a planet more nearly perfect for man than the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... to the right, found the door locked, and patiently turned his key a hair's breadth at a time in the lock, until he slid the bolt back. Behind him the repressed breathing of O'Malley fanned warmly the back of his neck. He pushed the door open a half inch at a time, found the outer office dark and silent, and crossed it stealthily to the closet behind the stove. O'Malley and Whittier ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... poet would have fallen on his face with an "Exi a me, nam peccator sum." Sandro the painter was different—no mercy there. He made a snatch at a carbon and raised his other hand with a kind of command—"Holy Virgin! what a line! Stay as you are, I implore you: swerve not one hair's breadth and I have you for ever!" There ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... considerable, though they are too noisy for warfare, and so we are compelled to live separate for awhile; and then I think it would grieve me to part with Killdeer; but I see no reason why we should not be buried in the same grave, for we are as near as can be of the same length—six feet to a hair's breadth; but, bating these, and a pipe that the Sarpent gave me, and a few tokens received from travellers, all of which might be put in a pouch and laid under my head, when the order comes to march I shall be ready at a minute's warning; and, let me tell you, Master Cap, that's ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... books, that horses are horses, that men are men, and that fire is by him esteemed fire, because he holds that every one of these things is sensible and subject to opinion. But this Colotes, as if he were not a hair's breadth distance from wisdom, takes it to be one and the same thing to say, "Man is not" and "Man is a ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... a little ironically as she said it, and exaggerated by a hair's breadth, perhaps, the purely conventional nature ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... then," said the aged monarch, "to give it up to him; for if he has the steady will, and has positively resolved to find it, he will work until he has drained the last drop of water from the Tigris, rather than deviate a hair's breadth from his purpose." ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... blind trail, how he had escaped capture at Lake Sturgeon by a hair's breadth and a snowfall that obliterated his tracks, and how he had, finally, in despair, started for Fort Severn for help, took ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... helped these men to talk as collectedly as if the ship were laid alongside a Thames wharf. They knew not the instant the Kansas might lift again and turn turtle, yet they did not dream of deviating a hair's breadth from their duties. The second officer went aft to carry out the captain's instructions. Courtenay followed a little way, passing to leeward of the chart-house, until he reached his own quarters. There was no door on that side, ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... space. No, not motionless—the red rod was shortening, drawing the truant craft back toward the launching port from which she had so hopefully emerged a few days before. Back and back it was drawn; Costigan's utmost efforts futile to affect by a hair's breadth its line of motion. Through the open port the boat slipped neatly, and as it came to a halt in its original position within the multilayered skin of the monster, the prisoners heard the heavy doors clang shut behind ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... poised, then nodded, launching the axe. Crack! came the handles of the two hatchets, and rattled together. But the blade of her hatchet divided the space betwixt my blade and the painted face, nor touched the outline by a fair hair's breadth. ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... the quill, for my tale is told. For me, life is full of many quiet interests and much happiness, but even now there grips me at times a longing for those mad wild days, when death hung on a hair's breadth, and the glamour of romance beckoned the feathered foot ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... die and the coin that comes from it only two sides of the same form?—there is not a hair's breadth anywhere between their surfaces where they lie, the one inclosing the other. Yet part them, and the light strikes on them how differently! That is a mere condition of light: join them in darkness, where the light cannot ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... True, few know how to practise this art at your age, and it is alien to many all their lives. But the stars! From them, the least and the greatest, man can learn to go his way patiently, year by year. Always the same course and the same pace. No deviation even one hair's breadth, no swifter or slower movement for the unresting wanderers. No sudden wrath, no ardent desire, no weariness or aversion urges or delays them. How I love and honour them! They willingly submit to the great law until the end ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... instinct, Mascola sensed rather than saw the Richard's change of course. If he tried to make the fog he would be cut in two. If he deviated a hair's breadth at that speed he'd turn turtle. There was only one ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... however, forgot to finish a verse as he had intended, and jumped to one side as a stone bounced off his leg. Looking up, he saw another missile curve into his patch of sky and swiftly bear down on him. He avoided it by a hair's breadth and wondered what had happened. Then what Mr. Travennes thought was a balloon, being unsophisticated in matters pertaining to aerial navigation, swooped down upon him and smote him on the shoulder and also ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... exactly .45 of an inch (11.43 mm.), and had therefore decreased by .1 of an inch (2.54 mm.). After only 10 hrs. 37 m. the margin began to re-expand, for the distance from edge to edge was now a trace wider, and after 24 hrs. 20 m. was as great, within a hair's breadth, as when the drops were first placed on the leaf. From this experiment we learn that the motor impulse can be transmitted to a distance of .22 of an inch (5.590 mm.) in a transverse direction from the midrib to both ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... and "furious." Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards "fuming," you will say "fuming-furious;" if they turn, by even a hair's breadth, towards "furious," you will say "furious-fuming;" but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll
... An improper sound it was to come from his manly chest; and what made it worse was the thought that for the least thing, by a mere hair's breadth, he might have taken this affair sentimentally. But clearly Anthony was no diplomatist. His brother-in- law must have appeared to him, to use the language of shore people, a perfect philistine with a heart ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... veranda of the unoccupied house above the jail Nan Keith stood rigid, her hand upon her heart. During the period of the committee's absence inside the jail she did not alter her position by a hair's breadth. She was in the hypnosis of a portentous waiting. Time fell into the abyss of eternity: whether it were ten minutes or ten hours did not matter in ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... the port foc'sle, wherein I was sitting, was the hatch to the forepeak, below. It was this yard square trap-door which caused my agitation. My glance fell casually upon it, and I saw it move! It lifted a hair's breadth, and I heard a slight scraping ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... pride to blind resentment of his interference. The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty, and that, whatever straits he conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her aid, strengthened her resolve not to admit him a hair's breadth farther into her confidence. However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would rather persist in darkness than owe ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face that looked, after all, made for suffering—already half pleading, half defiant—as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's breadth from its estimate ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... their size or number is the mathematical exactitude of their proportions,—the minute perfection of their balance,—the exquisite precision with which every one part is fitted to another part, not a pin's point awry, not a hair's breadth astray. Well, the same exactitude which rules the formation and working of Matter controls the formation and working of Spirit; and this is why I know that ghosts exist, and, moreover, that we are COMPELLED ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... contains potentially, in their rudiments, all the bodily and mental characteristics which the child inherits from both parents. It is clearly against reason to assume an eternal and unending life for an individual phenomenon whose beginning in time we can determine to a hair's breadth, by direct observation. Judging of human spiritual life from a rational point of view, we can as little think of our individual soul as separated from our brain, as we can conceive the voluntary motion of our arm apart from the contraction of its muscles, or the circulation ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... gallops, the mare going easily on her bit, gliding over the ground smoothly and springily; the horse shaking his head, and every now and then tearing madly at the reins, without being able to gain a hair's breadth on the iron hands that ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... from an ex-Lady Mayoress, came up all smiles, to greet us. Doria gave him a glance which in spite of my devotion to Barbara and my abhorrence of hair's breadth deviation from strict monogamy dealt me a pang of unregenerate jealousy. There is only one man in the universe worthy of being so regarded by a woman; and he is oneself. Every true-minded man will agree with me. She was inordinately proud ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... decoy-duck in the shape of a mistress, as your master did. Very many of them are gentlemen in feeling and conduct; neither arrogant nor insolent, nor rogues and knaves, like those who go about inns, measuring the length of strangers' swords, and ruining their owners if they find them a hair's breadth longer than the ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... one else does. His master's boots—especially the brown sort—are part of his religion. He understands an Englishman, and is unmoved by his behaviour, whatever it may be. I have met him in India, in Kashmir, at Embassies, in Consulates, on steamers, and I have never known his conduct alter by a hair's breadth. He is piped in red, and let that explain him, as it explains much else that is British. Just a thin red line down the length of a trouser or round a coat, and the man thus adorned ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... He was no theoretical reformer. He would never take the wrong road; but, if he could not go as far as he wanted to along the right road, he would go as far as he could, and bide his time for the rest. He would not compromise a hair's breadth on a principle; he would compromise cheerfully on a method which did not mean surrender of the principle. He perceived that there were in political life many bad men who were thoroughly efficient and many ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... oil colours is made. It has been deferred till now, because the placing of the colours is, of course, of as much importance as the harmony. This done, the canvas is for the first time produced, and thereon is enlarged the design, the painter re-drawing the outline—never departing a hair's breadth from the outlines and forms already obtained—and then highly finishing the whole figure in warm monochrome from the life. Every muscle, every joint, every crease is there, although all this careful painting is shortly to be hidden with the draperies; ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... passion of relief, the tension of his wrists exquisite with relief. And with the base of his palms he shoved at the chin, with all his might. And it was pleasant, too, to have that chin, that hard jaw already slightly rough with beard, in his hands. He did not relax one hair's breadth, but, all the force of all his blood exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man, till there was a little cluck and a crunching sensation. Then he felt as if his head went to vapour. Heavy convulsions shook the body of the officer, frightening ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... a heat-flash passing over him. Had he swerved a hair's breadth from the line, time would have tacked finis to the tale. "Now, I am perfectly willing to talk," putting his point to the Colonel's breast. "It would inconvenience me to kill you, but do not count too much ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... over the face of the dead man. As she followed Macdonald back to the trail, tears filled her eyes. She was remembering that the white, stinging death that had crept upon these men so swiftly had missed her by a hair's breadth. The strong, lusty life had been stricken out of the big Cornishman and probably of his partner in crime. Perhaps they had left mothers or wives or ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... legislature was obliged to flee before the enemy; Gates was crushed at Camden; Arnold the traitor scourged Richmond with his raiders; Monticello itself was captured by cavalry, and Jefferson escaped only by a hair's breadth. His estate was trampled over, his horses stolen, his barns burned, his crops destroyed and many of ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... you have just gotten by the Board by a hair's breadth. What kind of an act of gratitude would it be for you to make your first act a breach of discipline? For a fight, though often necessary here, is ...
— Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis - Or, Two Midshipmen as Naval Academy "Youngsters" • H. Irving Hancock
... is evident that without departing by a hair's breadth from the lines of this framework, an indefinite number of services might by a process of substitution be put together, each one of which would in outward appearance differ widely from every other one. The identical skeleton, that is to say, might be so variously ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... fancied, with the same sense of superior size and strength and a slight whitening of the eye, as if ready to shy at any moment. At the door he "backed." Then he entered sideways. I noticed that he cleared the doorway at the top and the sides only by a hair's breadth. ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... outside of the lenses, while taking care not to disturb the lie of the instrument by a hair's breadth, put his ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... cupboard door all the evening, Joe, you know you did," cried Ben; "you were just within a hair's breadth of letting the whole thing out ever so many times. Polly and I had to drag you away. We were glad enough when you went to bed, I can ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... another form probably no more was published. The introduction is an account of the editorial staff to wit, a learned divine who "hath entered with so much discernment into the true spirit of the schoolmen, especially Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, that he is qualified to resolve, to a hair's breadth, the nicest cases of conscience." A physician who "knows, to a mathematical point, the just tone and harmony of the risings pulses...." A lawyer who "what he this day has proved to be a contingent remainder, to-morrow he will with equal learning show must operate as an executory devise ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 43, Saturday, August 24, 1850 • Various |
