"Crookedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... best of Brahmanas, Sacrifices, Gift, Asceticism, the Vedas, and Truth—these five holy things are ever present in conduct that is called virtuous. Having subjugated lust and wrath, pride, avarice, and crookedness, they that take pleasure in virtue because it is virtue, are regarded as really virtuous and worthy of the approbation of persons that are virtuous. These persons who are devoted to sacrifices, and study of the Vedas have no independent behaviour. They follow only the practices of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... careful! Miss B. is, up to this point, merely puzzled over things. She doesn't suspect her uncle of any crookedness, I'm sure. So we shall have to tread softly where ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... inclination, slope, slant, crookedness &c adj.; slopeness^; leaning &c v.; bevel, tilt; bias, list, twist, swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c 243; bend &c (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd^, rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity^; gentle slope, rapid slope, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... human heart is wicked above all things. The enemy of man is subtle and watchful beyond conception. Instead of being on the way of goodness, I am just finding out the wickedness of my nature, its crookedness, its impurity, its darkness. I want deep humility and forgetfulness of self. I am just emerging out of gross darkness and my sight is but dim, so that my iniquities are not ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... steps. We could hear a clicking of bottles and a rustling of straw; and then, behold, a veritable fairy issuing from the bowels of the earth, with flushes of red suffusing the ribbed, bewrinkled face, as the old figure straightens its crookedness to carry the dusty bottle securely, steadily, lest the cloudy settling at the bottom should be disturbed. What a merry little feast then began! We had learned where the glasses were kept; we had been busily scouring them while our hostess ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... was president of the local jockey club, and the joy of his life was to take his place in the judges' stand, and sway the destinies of the lean, keen-faced trainers who drove the trotting horses. He had the eye of a lynx for the detection of any crookedness in driving, and his voice would ring out over the track like the trump of doom, conveying fines and penalties to the luckless trickster who was trying to get some unfair advantage in the start. His voice, a deep basso, rarely ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... honest and fearless face that it was extremely valuable to its owner in concealing a crookedness as resourceful as that of a fox, and a moral cowardice which made him a spineless tool in evil hands. A shock of tumbled red hair over a fighting face added to the appearance of combative strength. The Honorable Asa was conventionally dressed, and his linen was white, but ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... the oar, what he immediately perceives by sight is certainly crooked; and so far he is in the right. But if he thence conclude that upon taking the oar out of the water he shall perceive the same crookedness; or that it would affect his touch as crooked things are wont to do: in that he is mistaken. In like manner, if he shall conclude from what he perceives in one station, that, in case he advances towards the moon or tower, he should still ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... who combined honesty with sagacity and sagacity with strength. At beefy luncheon-tables, and in gorgeous, stuffy bars tapestried with Lincrusta-Walton, he had listened to the innumerable tales of the town, in which greed, crookedness, ambition, rectitude, hatred, and sexual love were extraordinarily mixed—the last being by far the smallest ingredient. He liked the town; he revelled in it. It seemed to him splendid in its ineradicable, ever-changing, changeless humanity. And as the train ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... it sacrifices all to the perishable vanity of sudden celebrity. Often he flew from his task in utter exhaustion and despair. He had quitted the smooth and even line of truth, to wind about and split himself on all the crookedness of paradoxes. He paints his feelings in a letter to Birch. He says—"I was so disgusted with an old subject, that I had deferred it from month to month and year to year." He had recourse to "an expedient;" which was, "to set the press on work, and so oblige himself to supply copy." ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... came for me in a body while I was still tired and dirty from the fight and worn out with anxiety and loss of sleep. They accused me of having put up a job on them, but I guess the sight of my condition convinced them of my sincerity, for only one paper even hinted at any crookedness, and that proved the best ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... of Man; which he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works. Pride he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck; irresolution, the nerves shaken; an inclination to sinister paths, crookedness of the joints; spiritual deadness, a paralysis; want of charity, a contraction in the fingers; despising of government, a broken head; the plaster, a sermon; the lint to bind it up, the text; the probers, the preachers; a pair of crutches, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of her arm as it swept against the masonry, and then the ball was taken over into her grasp. Gods! what a thrill went through me when the fingers of Nais touched mine! I could not see her, because of the crookedness of the shaft, but that faint touch ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... themselves they manage that no interloper shall come in for a share of the spoils. They unite against the newcomer and crucify him. They control municipal legislation. They buy aldermen like cattle. The city is at their mercy. They are all religious and moral men; their crookedness is purely commercial and political. Their different monopolies oppress the town, and the press is their tool. Most newspaper warfares upon them are mere "blinds" to draw off public attention to one quarter, while they gobble up ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... long ago, nor enigmatical and threatening, as he had at first deemed it that night, but the fountain of blessing and the one thing needful. A man who has once learned that lesson, though imperfectly, has passed into a purer region, and left behind him his old crookedness. He has learned to pray, not as before, prayers for mere deliverance from Esau and the like, but his whole being has gone out in yearning for the continual nearness of his mysterious antagonist-friend. So, though still the old nature remains, its power is broken, and he is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Sir Walter had great friends at court, therefore his kinsmen stirred up things against my son so that, to save him from prison, I had to pay a ransom of six hundred pounds in gold. All might have gone well even yet, only that, by ins and outs and crookedness of laws, I was shorn like a sheep that is clipped to the quick. So it came that I had to pawn my lands to the Priory of Emmet for more money, and a hard bargain they drove with me in my hour of need. Yet I would have thee understand I ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... very old indeed. It is so silly of people—I don't mean you, for you are such a tiny, and couldn't know better—but it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... nothing in the Wild West show to which any exception can be taken, and it is my purpose, as a part owner in the show, and I have put in the contracts with my partners, that no crookedness nor rowdyism will be permitted by attaches of the I show. We will assist the local authorities, too, in ridding the show of the sort of camp-followers who frequently make traveling shows the scapegoat for their misdoings. We propose to have our show efficiently and honestly policed, ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... was what Marius, with a soul which must always leap up in loyal gratitude for mere physical sunshine, touching him as it touched the flies in the air, could not away with. There, surely, was a sign of some crookedness in the natural power of apprehension. It was the [55] attitude, the melancholy intellectual attitude, of one who might be greatly mistaken in things—who might make ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness, and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... is described in the New Testament as "a liar and the father thereof." A Christian is to be true and just in all his dealings, abhorring crookedness: for the essence of lying is not inexactitude in speech, but deceitfulness of intention. Christian veracity means honesty, straightforwardness, and sincerity in deed as well as in word. A writer of fiction is not a liar: to improve in the telling an anecdote or a story is not necessarily ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Squigg," he said, in a voice under perfect control. "Still up to your old crookedness, are you? It's a wonder to me they've ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... declared, with emphatic conviction and an adequate flow of blasphemy, addressing himself to the bottles under the counter, the smeary glasses he breathed upon while wiping with a soiled and odoriferous cloth, that the boss was "bug—plumb bug." Nevertheless, his own understanding of "crookedness" warned him that the man had method, and he was anxious to discover the direction in which it was moving. Therefore he watched Beasley's doings with appreciative eyes, and his interest grew ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... psychologist has an unusually good chance to get glimpses of this filthy underworld, even if he does not frequent the squalid quarters of the astrologers. Bushels of mail bring this superstition and mental crookedness to his study, and his material allows him to observe every variety of illogical thought. If a letter comes to his collection which presents itself as a new specimen that ought to be analyzed a little further, nothing is needed but a short word of reply. It will at once bring a full ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... assisting England against the Pretender, and England assisting France, if need be, against the King of Spain. M. le Duc d'Orleans had too much penetration not to see this snare; but, marvellous as it may seem, the crookedness of this policy, and not the desire of reigning, seduced him. I am quite prepared, if ever these memoirs see the day, to find that this statement will be laughed at; that it will throw discredit on ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the cottage of Miss Loach, the girl used it as a landmark, and turning down a side street managed to find the top of a crooked lane at the bottom of which Rose Cottage was situated. This lane showed by its very crookedness that it belonged to the ancient civilization of the district. Here were no paths, no lamps, no aggressively new fences and raw brick houses. Susan, stepping down the slight incline, passed into quite an old world, smacking of the Georgian times, ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... good reasons for distrusting and disliking him. I suppose he made a dead set at you while I was away—cowardly brute! But what hits me hardest of all is not your indiscretion; it's your persistent crookedness that poisons everything. It was the same over your bills last year—as I told you then. It's the same now. It's a poor look-out if a man can't trust his own wife; but I suppose you must have lied to me—and to Honor, a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... amongst this number I noticed that Jose Barretto was very deeply moved. His great frame shook with emotion. I learned afterwards that the man who stood was a police sergeant, who in the old days had been Jose's confederate in his political crookedness. That night this man stood acknowledging his sins and asking for membership in the church. Jose's faithfulness had won him. Once more we witnessed a marvelous victory ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... malignant snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun and kissed his feet and stood before him; and the King said to him, "I desire thou go out against ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... easy-chairs and tables accommodated to their size, each little wooden chair, with backs, having seats for two, so that, instead of being crowded and disturbing each other, the children sit in couples with plenty of room and air, and in perfect physical comfort. No hollow chests, no bent backs, no crookedness here. Happy and comfortable as princes these children sit in their chairs, having their feet on the floor, and their backs where they ought to be, namely, as ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I don't—I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though, especially ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Something he had heard Mrs. Medlock whispering to the nurse had given him the idea and he had thought over it in secret until it was quite firmly fixed in his mind. Mrs. Medlock had said his father's back had begun to show its crookedness in that way when he was a child. He had never told any one but Mary that most of his "tantrums" as they called them grew out of his hysterical hidden fear. Mary had been sorry for him when he ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... vile spawn from underground. Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... church—I'll give to the heathen—I'll stop takin' Your name in vain, and say my prayers reg'lar! Oh, Lord! Once I stole a halter and I ask Your forgiveness. And I left a neighbour's gate open on purpose so the stock got into his cornfield, but I ain't a bad man naturally, and this is the first real crookedness I ever done intentionally. Lord," he pleaded, "hear my humble prayer ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Vandon properties. Ruth often went to look at them. It did her good to see them rising, strong and firm, though hideous to behold, on higher ground than the poor dilapidated hovels at the water's edge, where fever was always breaking out, which yet made, as they supported each other in their crookedness, and leaned over their own wavering reflections, such a picturesque sketch that it seemed a shame to supplant them by such brand new red brick, such blue tiling, such dreadful ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Brantefield confidently affirmed, King John of France, and the Black Prince, had sat and supped at it. I marvelled much in silence—for I had been sharply reproved for some observation I had unwittingly made on the littleness and crookedness of a dark, corner-chimneyed nook shown us for the banqueting-room; and I had fallen into complete disgrace for having called the winding staircases, leading to the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... You may think me troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.' Can I say what I do not know? 'You may offer an opinion.' And will the blindness and crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light and certainty of science? 'I will only ask you to give such an explanation of the good as you have given already of temperance and justice.' I wish that I could, but in my present mood ...
— The Republic • Plato
... modern suicides this youth was the most interesting; of all literary impostors the least unpardonable, though his ways were, unhappily for himself, of indefensible crookedness. He neither ascribed his fictions to a great name as Ireland did, nor did he, like Macpherson, steal the heart out of national ballads and traditions, to stuff a Bombastes Penseroso ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... and its monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... spoke the truth, sir; and no good would come of such crookedness. But Mat meant well; the lad has a good heart, and I do not doubt he has a sore conscience when he thinks of all the evil he has wrought. Leave him with me, sir; I can manage him best. There, I hear Prissy calling to us, and we ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... general consequences, however, does not go down into the depths of things. There is always something morally crooked and inordinate in an action itself, the general consequences whereof are bad. It remains to point out the moral crookedness, inordination, and unreasonableness, that is intrinsic to the act of suicide, apart from its consequences. We find the inordination in this, that suicide is an act falling upon undue matter, being an act destructive ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... captured. At this point we picked up the other man who was with the expedition, and who escaped. The Valley City continued to ascend the Cashie river, and after encountering much difficulty on account of the narrowness and crookedness of the river, we arrived at the Roanoke river above Plymouth, where we could see the town, but we could see no fleet nor American flag. We concluded then that the Albemarle had not been sunk, but had driven the fleet back into the Sound. Of course, it was not a very happy ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... his hands in his pockets and started down the crowded crookedness of Lexington Street. He reached the market and strolled through it leisurely, feeling very much at home with the meats and vegetables and the good country look of many of the stall keepers. Its size amazed him; but then ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... plunge of youth, and now you shall be a man! You have looked for happiness in the wrong direction. Don't you want to go out and do good, enlighten your fellow-men, and be useful? For your clear vision can penetrate the perversion and crookedness ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... St. Denis, which is one of the oldest streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it, with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place. This legend may account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be asked of a headless man that he ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... exclaimed Corporal Flynn, who was observed by his comrades, after the delivery of the mail, to be tenderly struggling with the complicated folds of a remarkable letter—remarkable for its crookedness, size, dirt, and ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... to one of the horses. "We didn't elude him. You'll find what's left of the black-hearted devil under that canvas," he answered coolly. "Lessard was at the bottom of the crookedness. We've packed him and Paul Gregory fifty miles for ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... enough in Tibet, and some came under my notice in nearly every camp I entered. Deformities of the spine were common, such as displacement of the shoulder-blades; and I saw during my stay in Tibet many cases of actually humpbacked people. There were frequent cases, too, of crookedness of the legs, and clubfoot was not rare, while one constantly met with webbed fingers and supernumerary fingers and toes, as well as the absence of one or more of them. Malformations of the skull, such as ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... "It is bad. Crookedness in real estate transactions is bad. We don't want to waste our time, however, in feeling worried about it. What we want to do is to show the other fellow that our ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Melbourne. Time alone can, and is rapidly making away with the old tumble-down buildings which spoil the appearance of their neighbours. But time cannot easily widen the streets of Sydney, nor rectify their crookedness. They were originally dug out by cart-ruts, whereas those of nearly every other town in Australia were mapped out long before they were inhabited. But if they were not so ill-kept, and the footpaths so wretchedly paved, I could forgive ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... them their bird-hunt to-day?" "'Tis not seemly for thee to rage thus against them," said Leborcham, "for it is on thy account that the women of Ulster have assumed one of their three blemishes, even the blemish of blindness." For there were three blemishes that the women of Ulster assumed, that of crookedness of gait, and that of a stammering in their speech, and that of blindness. Each of the women who loved Conall the Victorious had assumed a crookedness of gait; each woman who loved Cuscraid Mend, the Stammerer of Macha, Conor's son, stammered in her speech; each woman in like ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... physical form which she wore like an outer garment? And she felt, at the thought, that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness either of the body ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... be for a time under the charm of Wyvis Brand's strong individuality; but if she married him, a miserable awakening was almost sure to come to her at last. To exchange the smooth life, the calm and the luxury, of Helmsley Court for the gloom, the occasional tempests, and the general crookedness of existence at the Red House would be no agreeable task for Margaret. Of the two, Janetta felt that life at the Red House would be far the more acceptable to herself: she did not mind a little roughness, and she had a great longing to bring mirth and sunshine into the ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to this, these same unprincipled agents, with their hired accomplices and subsidised press, in order to hide the enormity of their crimes, and to divert attention from themselves and their crookedness, systematically and incessantly misrepresent and vilify the ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... like not the style of it. It seemeth to me that nothing is ever done in a straightforward manner any more. Is life full of naught but crookedness and devious windings and turnings? Let me go to the queen openly, I ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... debited to my account; besides, you do people injustice. Concerning my appointment or non-appointment I know nothing as yet, except what was told me when I left; everything else is possibilities and surmises. The only crookedness about the matter us far has been the government's silence towards me, for it would have been only fair to let me know by this, and officially at that, whether during next month I to live here or in Pomerania with wife and child. Be careful in your remarks ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and .. more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. "Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!" he groans, "straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!" Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as one who in that miserable plight still turns and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... seemed to our friend that a young artist would work none the worse for having her seated at his side reading Chenier's iambics. They were newly married, he supposed, and evidently their path of life had none of the mocking crookedness of some others. They asked little; but what need to ask more than such quiet summer days by a shady stream, with a comrade all amiability, to say nothing of art and books and a wide unmenaced horizon? To spend such a morning, ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... laboriously. Once, stung by the airs of a schoolfellow who alleged that he had read Locke On The Human Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, and actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust at what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there had been a school where children were really free, I should have had to be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for the children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable: they will read and study far more than is good ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... keep them within bounds. This kind of education has a smack of practicality in that it sharpens the wits for the struggle for existence that makes up much of the experience of city folk, but it also tends to develop a crookedness in mental and moral habits through the constant effort to get ahead of the agents of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... failed will break all his bones. I can no longer give the same human reverence as before to one who has been seduced into vanity so egregious; and I feel assured a priori that such presumption must have entangled him into evasions and insincerities, which naturally end in crookedness of conscience and real imposture, however noble a man's commencement, and however unshrinking his sacrifices of goods and ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... shrewdly observed that "a true lover never did run a straight course," and the sincerity of present writer's affection is incontestably proved by his apparent crookedness of running, and keeping dark outside the illuminating rays of thy moon-like countenance. The cause is the unforeseen cataclysm of a decree from my family astrologer or dowyboghee, whom I have anxiously consulted ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... into this recently in New York State. I remember there was a lot of talk about crookedness, and Smith went up to find out what was going on. We made some charges, didn't we? And didn't we get a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... occasional knots or lumps of unfused material. The rest of the tube is usually all right, but often the defective part must be cut out. The presence of striations running along the tube is generally an indication of hard, inferior glass. Crookedness and non-uniformity of diameter are troublesome only when long pieces must ...
— Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing • Francis C. Frary
... the Netherlands, he proposed to make another of his great marches, namely into Italy, there to join his friend Prince Eugene in an invasion of France from the south-east. This plan was made impossible by the crookedness of the kings of Prussia and Denmark, and some others of the Allies. Swallowing this disappointment also, as best he might, Marlborough started from the Dyle and advanced on the great and important stronghold of Namur, at the junction of the ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... analysis of so much mud and offal may tell upon me. Physical monstrosities are attractive to physiologists or rather to pathologists. But an anthropologist prefers normal nobleness of mind, and shudders at sight and contact with intellectual and moral crookedness. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... kindness, good nature and generosity all dead? Would he have taken a ten-dollar bill—or even a hundred-dollar one—from Simpkins when he was going to be a witness in one of Hogan's cases? Not on your life! He wasn't no crook, he wasn't! He didn't have to be. He was just a cog in an immense wheel of crookedness. When the wheel came down on his cog he automatically did ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... also be directed, where two sleep in a bed, to change every night, or every week, their sides of the bed; which will prevent their tendency to sleep always on the same side; which is not only liable to produce crookedness, but also to occasion diseases by the internal parts being so long kept in uniform contact as to grow together. For the same reason they should not be allowed to sit always on the same side of the fire or window, because they will then be inclined ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... hasting on to yet greater mercies? For my remembrance recalls me, and pleasant is it to me, O Lord, to confess to Thee, by what inward goads Thou tamedst me; and how Thou hast evened me, lowering the mountains and hills of my high imaginations, straightening my crookedness, and smoothing my rough ways; and how Thou also subduedst the brother of my heart, Alypius, unto the name of Thy Only Begotten, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he would not at first vouchsafe to have inserted in our writings. For rather would he have them savour ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... exclamations, how pleased she is with the performance; and she, perhaps, even calls in persons from the next room to see how well the baby can walk! Not a word about imperfections and failings, not a word about the tottering, the awkward reaching out of arms to preserve the balance, the crookedness of the way, the anxious expression of the countenance, or any other faults. These are left to correct themselves by the continued practice which encouragement ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... already noticed under the preceding head—the criminal. Further, news gatherers are at great pains to ferret out and dole out to the public daily whatever serves to excite, and especially whatever shows the moral crookedness of the Negro, and that the years of freedom already enjoyed by him have simply brought forth a generation of vipers. Too often, from the lowest to the highest court, the records are so manipulated as to show the moral obliquity of the Negro. It is a potent fact that public ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... he repeated. "'Bije put his note in the safe? A note promisin' to pay all he'd stole! And left it there where it could be found? Why, that's pretty nigh unbelievable, Mr. Sylvester! He might just as well have confessed his crookedness and be done ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... depict the meanness of soul that dwelt in that extraordinary shell? The blithesome tapestry-makers, albeit adepts in form, grace and harmony, could not touch the subjectiveness of existence. Thus it was a double pleasure for Triboulet to see, limned in well-chosen hues, his form, the crookedness of which he was as proud as any courtier of his symmetry and beauty, the while his dark, vain soul lay concealed behind the mask of merry ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... aberrations of human nature caused by dull and unpleasant weather. And this is very singular in this humanitarian age, when excuse is found for nearly every moral delinquency in heredity or environment, that the greatest factor of discontent and crookedness, the weather, should be left out of consideration altogether. The relation of crime to the temperature and the humidity of the atmosphere is not taken into account. Yet crime and eccentricity of conduct are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... handled that way, with the same ease, by men heavier than himself,—by Jack English, for example. And Holliday was heavier; he knew that he had given away pounds in the weighing in; that there had been crookedness at the scales, but he hadn't tried to prove it. Yet Holliday was stronger even than Jack English, unbelievably stronger. And Perry knew now that he was about to test that strength to the uttermost. Holliday had romped with the roughness of a great puppy; now it was going to be ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... it be that God or his priests could be better men than Finn, the King of the Fianna, a generous man without crookedness. ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... figure had suddenly materialized beside the figure of a Jap. Another figure—a gnome, a wraith! The unholy light from the pit painted it an unearthly greenish hue, and accentuated the haggardness of face, and the gleaming eyes, the humped body, its crookedness magnified by the crouched attitude. It looked like some demon come floating up on the wicked light from the "deep place." It crouched to leap, to strike, and a bared knife gleamed in an upraised hand; it glared balefully, fixedly, at the living ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... melancholy, doomed face, he might have died in peace if he had only played the game fairly. JAMES THE SECOND, too, and MARLBOROUGH, the greatest Captain of his age, and BOLINGBROKE, the eloquent philosophiser, the grave moralist, how different might their ends have been had not you, O CROOKEDNESS, presided at their births, and ruled their lives. But, avaunt, History! Here I am straying into a treatise, when I merely intended to remind you of little PETER SHEEF, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... then up the narrow, deep and crooked river. At our noon rendezvous Kawaybawgo and his foot-companions came in with a fine deer, the victim of his old but effective gun. In the early afternoon our progress became slow and excessively wearying from the shallowing of the river and its wonderful crookedness. The current ran like a mill-race around hundreds of short turns, and had its own exasperating way upon our keels. Finally, we were obliged to wade and drag the canoes after us in water varying between ankle-and waist-deep. A few hours ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... unlike the discharge found to be due to those conditions by this table, and that difference may be owing partly to greater or less roughness on the inside of the pipe, unequal flow of water through the joints into the pipe, crookedness of the pipes, want of accuracy in their being placed, so that the fall may not be uniform throughout, or the ends of the pipes may be shoved a little to one side, so that the continuity of the channel is partially broken; and, indeed, from various other causes, all of which may occur in any ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... Arabs have crooked legs is because they squat so much. One cannot have straight legs when one uses one's legs to sit down on for hours at a time. They always sit in the sun, too, and that must bake them into their crookedness. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... of a timber depends not only upon its relative freedom from imperfections, such as knots, crookedness of grain, decay, wormholes or ring-shakes, but also upon its density; upon the rate at which it grew, and upon the arrangement of the ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... power of congregating upon the point of a needle. What, of bad men and of bad acts in this theory of Shinto? Motowori made answer; "Whenever anything goes wrong in the world, it is to be attributed to the action of the evil gods called the Gods of Crookedness, whose power is so great that the Sun-Goddess and the Creator-God are sometimes powerless to restrain them; much less are human beings always able to resist their influence. The prosperity of the wicked, and the misfortunes of ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... had started by detailing his every move of the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: "The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook lacked but one thing," she had naively written, "and that one thing was that his crookedness required a leading string to guide it into channels that were worthy of his genius." In a word, SHE would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him? He was to answer by the next ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... same time, Benjamin thought it was a very queer name for a public house. He did not like either part of it, and he said to himself, "'Crooked Billet'!—crookedness and a cudgel to strike down the turbulent with, are suggested." The name did not suggest any thing pleasant to him. But he went in, and engaged lodging and ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... whose ears the low-voiced Best seems stilled by the clash of the First, Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst, Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom, and fear, Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... billiards. Gertrude had never been in Persia, but had seen some Eastern billiard cues in the India museum. Were not the Hindoos wonderful people for filigree work, and carpets, and such things? Did he not think the crookedness of their carpet patterns a blemish? Some people pretended to admire them, but was not that all nonsense? Was not the modern polished floor, with a rug in the middle, much superior to the old carpet fitted into the corners of the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... also in the power-giving 'peace that passeth understanding, keeping the heart and thoughts, in Christ Jesus,' a keeping that is not meant to vanish outside holy places and holy hours, but to do its strongest and serenest work in the midst of crookedness and perverseness, under the stress of toils and burthens, as truly for me to-day as for the Philippians and their ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... occasions, the offences of Casey in the comparatively small matter of a municipal election, are better left unmentioned. Even now, in San Francisco, how many are there in local office who can with clear conscience declare their innocence of crookedness or corruption, or fraud in elections? When it comes to throwing the stone at the staked sinner, conscience palsies the arm of many who feel disposed to throw it. Casey was once in the city prison ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... had spoken of it, taught from it, made it sacred. The shepherd herding the sheep—how could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Good Shepherd? The sower scattering the seed—how could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Heavenly Sower? Oh, the crookedness of sin! Oh, the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the force of the implication made by a certain writer upon this topic, that the crookedness in the matter of family finances is "separation and hostility between the sexes, brought about by the advancement and equality of women." Wives in all ages and in all countries, have felt the painful injustice of virtual pauperism, and struggled ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... me a crook. I'm crooked by nature. I like crookedness," said Pelman. "That's why I'm ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... could for a moment redeem the deformity, dulness and decrepitude of the Repeal Association, had passed from its ranks and enrolled themselves in the new League, it resolved to struggle on, acting as a check and a stain by its anility and crookedness, on the rising hopes of the country. During the discussions that led to the formation of the league, it was emphatically announced by certain members of the Confederation that on no ground and for ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... disappointment. There's a hatred of art, there's a hatred of literature—I mean of the genuine kinds. Oh the shams—those they'll swallow by the bucket!" I looked up at the charming house, with its genial colour and crookedness, and I answered with a smile that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. "Ah it doesn't matter after all," he a bit nervously laughed; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... enough; and it may not be out of place to add that in French the word droit has, with almost savage irony, been selected as the technical name, not of law simply, but of legal procedure with all its crookedness.[13] Still it seems more in the ordinary course of things to explain this linguistic identification of law with justice, by supposing conformity to justice to have been the primitive element in the formation ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... has less honour been shown than to this girl who was born in crowded Hornsey, who lived a life of toil and struggle, and died penniless. Why? Because the human heart, despite its crookedness and failings, recognizes that love is the greatest thing in the ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... by cutlets a la Soubise. They have not the acute pain of being turned back into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day or every week even that M. le Cure breakfasts at the chateau; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a laborer, and yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes a rather heavy irony on the other. But to the ideal cure, of course, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... session; and there was no question as to the right of such committees to require such attendance. In this instance, however, the persons summoned were not permitted to obey the behests of the Committee, and in the attendant circumstances there were pretty plain indications of crookedness and collusion between the Crown officers and Sir Peregrine Maitland. Each of the two officers concerned, immediately upon receiving his summons, caused the fact to be communicated to the Lieutenant-Governor, and each wrote a shuffling letter to the Chairman ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... language has no generic term that fits him. Yet this strange, uncouth, but life-like confusion of natures Prospero has educated into a sort of poet. This, however, has nowise tamed, it has rather increased, his innate malignity and crookedness of disposition; education having of course but educed what was in him. Even his poetry is, for the most part, made up of the fascinations of ugliness; a sort of inverted beauty; the poetry of dissonance and deformity; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... used to retire there with his dog, or, more seldom, a book. There he had been accustomed to lie, his back supported by the tree, and hold forth to the dog upon the troubles and difficulties of life and the general crookedness of things; or, if a book were his companion, he would gaze out, between the pages, at distant Crianan clinging faintly to the knees of Ben Ghusy, and watch the swift change of passing cloud and hanging curtain of mist upon the faces of the ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... Crooked Man, cheerfully. "As to the sixpence, I must find that myself; and as to my crookedness, a whirlwind did it and a whirlwind must undo it. I don't mind. You see, I do not feel ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... story of Linford Pratt, who earnestly desired to get on in life, by hook or by crook—with no objection whatever to crookedness, so long at it could be performed in ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... observer once remarked that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Whenever I come across an "ultra-patriot" with foam dripping from his mouth while he beats his chest with loud cries about his own honesty and the crookedness of those running the country, I suspect a phony. As a rule, I look for the criminal record of a man who's yelling "Chase out the crooks" and "Let's have honest government," and all too often I find one. Henry D. Allen, alias H.O. Moffet, alias Howard Leighton ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... Holland, who had watched continually from his notch in the hills. She had been right in the first place, and the others had been wrong. Everybody disliked Bethune, and disliking him, had attributed to him all the crookedness of the hill country, and all the time, under their very noses, Vil Holland was the real plotter—and they liked him! She could see it all, now—how, with Bethune for the scapegoat, he was enabled, unsuspected, to plan ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... carriage at the bridge. The river was full of logs—long, slender, barkless pine logs—and we leaned on the rails of the bridge, and watched the men put them together into rafts. These rafts were of a shape and construction to suit the crookedness and extreme narrowness of the Neckar. They were from fifty to one hundred yards long, and they gradually tapered from a nine-log breadth at their sterns, to a three-log breadth at their bow-ends. The main ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cabriolets looking at each other irresolutely and facing all possible ways; two score of unwashed loungers, in red neck-kerchiefs and velvet jackets, smoking rank, rakish, black cigars; several streets of equal crookedness and filthiness abutting against a grimy church, whence beggars, old women, and priests emerge continually; and far above all, as if suspended in the air, a grim, battlemented castle, a defence, as it seems, against the snowy mountains which march upon Bellinzona from every side ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... distinction which spoke of lofty sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness which commanded respect a little too decidedly. His aquiline nose bent at the tip from left to right, a slight crookedness which was not devoid of grace; his blue eyes, his high forehead, prominent enough at the brows to form a thick ridge that checked the light and shaded his eyes, all indicated a spirit of rectitude, capable of perseverance and perfect loyalty, while it gave a singular ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... might damage you in a business sense," the captain agreed; "and I'm pleased you take that view, for I've turned kind of soft upon the job. There's been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, law bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back of the business from the front. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... offices of "J. L. & T. J. O'Regan, Private Detectives," "The Zenith Spiritualist Church, Messages by Rev. Lulu Paughouse," "The International Order of Live Ones, Seattle Wigwam," and "Mme. Lavourie, Sulphur Baths." The dead air of the hallway suggested petty crookedness. Milt felt that he ought to fight somebody but, there being no one to fight, he banged along the flapping boards of the second-floor hallway to the ground-glass door of Silberfarb the Society Tailor, who was also, as an afterthought on a straggly ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... pleasant, though not brilliant with sunbeams. It made no matter. Eleanor could not comprehend how more loveliness could have been crowded into the enjoyment of two hours. On her pony she had full freedom for the use of her eyes; the road was excellent, and winding in and out through all the crookedness of the valley they threaded, she took it at all points of view. Nothing could be more varied. The valley itself, rich and wooded, with the little river running its course, marked by a thick embowering of trees; the hills that enclosed the valley taking every form of beauty, sometimes ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... however, always the city promoter who furnishes all of the crookedness. He himself may be deceived by those who sell him the mine. Some of the most thrilling stories in literature might be written about salted mines. The sale of the Bear's Nest Mine, and the special train expedition to the salted Bear River placer field; the sale of the Mulatos Mine to a set of Chinamen, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... not very much," declared Bobby. "I only want to grind your machine into powder. I want to dig up the rotten municipal control of this city, root and branch. I want to ferret out every bit of crookedness in which you have been concerned, and every bit that you have caused. I want to uncover every man, high or low, for just what he is, and I don't care how well protected he is nor how shining his reputation, if he's concerned in a crooked deal ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... rough hands as tenderly as a mother. I am thinking of the fact that I have discovered something quite new and genuine, a human heart that is warm and real and true and simple, simple as the heart of a child, a mind that has no crookedness, a man who, in Paris or here in Marseilles, is absurd, not because he is rough and uncouth, but because he is like Monsieur Gulliver amongst the little people. I have seen the great, I have seen the wind and the ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of memories, two years of bitterness, two years of ugly recollections had made its mark. In all his dealings with Thayer, conducted though they might have been at a distance, Barry Houston could not place his finger upon one tangible thing that would reveal his crookedness. But he had suspected; had come to investigate, and to learn, even before he was ready to receive the information, that his suspicions had been, in some wise at least, correct. To follow those suspicions ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the bright sun,—a picture which through long habitude of observation had grown very sweet to him. It was not every day that such a house as Abbot's Manor came within reach of the archaeologist and antiquarian. The beautiful tiled-roof—the picturesque roughness and crookedness of the architectural lines of the whole building, so different to the smooth, hard, angular imitations of half-timbered work common in these degenerate days, were a delight to the eyes to rest upon,—a wealth of ivy clung thickly to the walls and clambered round the quaint ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... get right on this. Don't let a lot of foolish people influence you; people who can't ever see any real good in success and who blame everything on luck and crookedness. And Bill ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... story of Linford Pratt, who earnestly desired to get on in life, by hook or by crook—with no objection whatever to crookedness, so long as it could be performed in ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... the long sad face of cripples, but beautiful shining curls hung thickly, hiding the crookedness of the shoulders. She was nine years old, and was just beginning to awake to a sense of the importance of ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... enjoyment in a thing altogether right. She took it for granted that bad and beautiful were often one; that the pleasures of the world owed their delight to a touch, a wash, a tincture of the wicked in them. Such have so many crooked lines in themselves that they fancy nature laid down on lines of crookedness. They think the obliquity the beauty of the campanile, the blurring ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... we ourselves are exempt. I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots (on account of the beauty and distinction of this Pot's shape I spell it with a big P), which has kept us straight in a world of crookedness. The pursuit of profiles under difficulties—how much more rare than a pursuit of knowledge! Talk of setting good examples before our children! Bah! let us set good Pompeian Pots before our children, and when they grow up they will ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... too big, and too rich for him to handle on his own. Get that. And Murray knew what he was coming to. That was Allan's way. He handed him the whole story because he was a straight dealing feller who didn't understand the general run of crookedness lying around. It was no partnership in a bum trading outfit. It was a big gold proposition, and it had ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement. And if we consider that nevertheless there have been at all times certain officers whose duty it was to see that private ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... has ridden in a Southerly direction down to Heintzelman's Division, at Sangster's Station, "to make arrangements to turn the Enemy's right, and intercept his communications with the South," but has found, owing to the narrowness and crookedness of the roads, and the great distance that must be traversed in making the necessary detour, that his contemplated movement is too risky to be ventured. Hence he at once abandons his original plan of turning the Enemy's right, and determines on "going around his left, where ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... hasten straight to Lopez, and Lopez, Driscoll foresaw, would interpret his scruples into a disguised acceptance. The crookedness of the game left the American no other trump, and he played it—against immediate death. Lopez, of course, would send him under guard to Juarez, but Driscoll thought he could trust that staunch old Roman, when once informed, to call for a new deck ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... world as the daughter of a colossal thief! Not a thief of the marts, where crookedness was confused with shrewdness far removed from the theft of the hands; but a thief who had burrowed beneath another man's property, and carried away, to coinage, his gold. Between Bully Presby and the man who tunneled under ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the poor man's riches, the rich man's bliss, without thee there can be no happiness: or visited with some loathsome disease, offensive to others, or troublesome to ourselves; as a stinking breath, deformity of our limbs, crookedness, loss of an eye, leg, hand, paleness, leanness, redness, baldness, loss or want of hair, &c., hic ubi fluere caepit, diros ictus cordi infert, saith [2386]Synesius, he himself troubled not a little ob comae defectum, the loss of hair alone, strikes ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... heard her in conversation with some man, who now presented himself, and proved to be a gardener. He said he had formerly acted in that capacity for Southey, although a gardener had not been kept by him as a regular part of his establishment. This was an old man with an odd crookedness of legs, and strange, disjointed limp. S——- had told him that we were Americans, and he took the idea that we had come this long distance, over sea and land, with the sole purpose of seeing Southey's residence, so ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... him when, toward six o'clock he found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before it—one couldn't say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this; had kept along the height, after shaking off slumber; had admired, had almost ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... waiting to be known. But how had five years of hate come to play him such a trick, suddenly, to-day? Since last autumn he had meant sometime to get even with this man who seemed to stand at every turn of his crookedness, and rob him of his spoils. But how had he come to choose such a way of getting even as this, face to face? He knew many better ways; and now his own rash proclamation had trapped him. His words were like doors shutting ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... anything I don't mean. I have done a lot of dirty work with you people before, and never got much of anything out of it. You were always too strong for me; that is, I couldn't force you without exposing my own crookedness, but now I've got you right where I want you. That's my price; take it or leave it. If you don't take it now, the first two of those figures will be doubled when you do come to me. I won't go to anybody else, though others would be glad to ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... I am in Thy hands, I bow myself under the rod of Thy correction. Smite my back and my neck that I may bend my crookedness to Thy will. Make me a pious and lowly disciple, as Thou wert wont to be kind, that I may walk according to every nod of Thine. To Thee I commend myself and all that I have for correction; better is it to be punished here than hereafter. Thou ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... Masters smiled with unusual crookedness and stammered his thanks and his regrets. And so ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... constitution of our nature"—but the rising of a subject will against its true king, disobedience to a person as well as contravention of a standard. It is "iniquity"—perversion or distortion—a word which expresses the same metaphor as is found in many languages, namely, crookedness as descriptive of deeds which depart from the perfect line of right. It is "sin," i.e., "missing one's aim;" in which profound word is contained the truth that all sin is a blunder, shooting wide of the true goal, if regard be had to the end of our being, and not less wide if regard be had ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... possible, and calls to no one 'Come and look at me!' And yet it is picked out from the trees of the world; picked out for length, picked out for breadth, picked out for straightness, picked out for crookedness, chosen with an eye to every need of ship and boat. Strangely twisted pieces lie about, precious in the sight of shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves, I come upon an open glade where workmen are examining some timber recently delivered. Quite a pastoral scene, with a background ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... it is a great comfort to me to think that you will stay in London and help in keeping things straight in this world of crookedness. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... may be shortened. Besides which, I see that many of our difficulties arise from obscure and remote causes—obscure like the shape of bones, for whose strange curves there is no familiar term. We must endeavour to understand the crookedness and unfamiliar curves of the conditions of life. Beyond that still there are other ideas. Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible. For my thought is like a hyperbola ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... and have a train of ill consequences. The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness; the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her acquaintance. The use of knowledge in our sex, besides the amusement ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... just comes up and touches him on the shoulder, and he turns around and sees it all of a sudden. Then he finds he's a coward. It's pretty hard for me to understand dishonesty, or how a man can be dishonest. I've tried, but I can't do it. Crookedness isn't my particular kind of fault. But I do know this: that we every one of us have something to be forgiven for by some one. I guess I've got a temper that makes me pretty sorry sometimes. Probably you don't see how it's possible for a man to get crazy mad about little things. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... soul of man, produce this melancholy, and many great inconveniences, by that antidote of good counsel and persuasion may be eased or expelled. Deformities and imperfections of our bodies, as lameness, crookedness, deafness, blindness, be they innate or accidental, torture many men: yet this may comfort them, that those imperfections of the body do not a whit blemish the soul, or hinder the operations of it, but rather help and much increase it. Thou art lame of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... it was clear that he was not acting in the plain, straight-dealing manner to be expected of one in his position. There were other signs of crookedness, slight but not without weight. I could understand his joy on finding me at Marry-me-quick's. It meant that I was a rebel, and as a loyal man, who had gone to expenses to prove his loyalty, he might easily get the Hanyards as a reward, and thus round off the family property in our neighbourhood. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... knew exactly what had happened, what Hugo Tancred had actually done. For some years she had known that he was by no means scrupulous in money matters, and that very evening Sir Langham had made it clear to her that this crookedness had not stopped short at his official work. There had been a scandal, so far-reaching a scandal that it had ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... keeping quiet any longer, John," put in Paul very heatedly. "We thought it a good time to have it out with these fellows for their crookedness." ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... the wall on the opposite side. It surprised me to find so many of the streets no wider than this. But there was more breathing room wherever two streets crossed and where several of them opened into some great place. The crookedness and curvature of the streets constantly tempted me to seek what might be beyond, around the corner, or the bend; and whenever I sought, I found still other corners or bends hiding the unknown, and luring ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... are leveled, Lifted up the lowly plain, Crookedness made straight, while crudeness Now gives ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... food or bed?... Splendid young men who went away in their prime to fight for you and came back ruined, suffering! Nothing wrong when sane women with the vote might rid politics of partisanship, greed, crookedness? Nothing wrong when prohibition is mocked by women—when the greatest boon ever granted this country is derided and beaten down and cheated? Nothing wrong when there are half a million defective children in this city? Nothing wrong when there are not enough ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey |
