"Lilliputian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bulk but built upon exactly the same plan and proportions, say a Brobdingnagian and a Lilliputian, and let both show their powers in the arena. Suppose the first to weigh a million times more than the second. If the giant could raise to his shoulder, some thirty-five feet from the ground, a weight twenty thousand pounds, the dwarf can raise to his shoulder, not, as might be thought, a fiftieth ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... perfect and beautiful, but cast in a Lilliputian mould. It stood barely a foot high, the most delicate thing he had ever looked upon. Mature in every detail of its proportion, the dainty hoofs, the fragile legs, smooth-coated body, and small, wide-antlered head—a miniature eight-pointer—made such a vision ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... broken by the far-off approaching purr of the sickle, flicked by the faint snap of the driver's whip, and out of the low rustle of the everstirring lilliputian forest came the wailing cry of a baby wild chicken lost from its mother—a falling, thrilling, ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... fretfully. There leapt into Jane's mind a memory picture of Nannie Slade Hunter before the joyfully hailed arrival of the Teddybear,—the tiny, white, enameled chiffonier with its little bunches of painted flowers spilling over with offerings—Lilliputian garments as 'fine as a fairy's first tooth'—the chortling pride of Edward R.—the beaming, nervous mother and mother-in-law—the endless flowers and books; Nannie herself, cunningly draped and swathed in Batik crepe, prettier than ever ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... headset followed, after which Mac oozed into the Lilliputian air lock at the bottom, now rear, wall of the cabin. He nodded to Ruiz, who secured the air lock, then adjusted his suit control to force a little pressure into his suit. Gradually the suit became livable. Then he cracked ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... not equal to the marching when, later on, the Lilliputian army formed itself in line and kept step to the music of a lively tune, and he was far too shy on the first day to join in the play, though he watched the game of the Butterfly with intense interest from his nook by ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... his first trip was but a very small one: three men in all, with but thirteen horses. It reads lilliputian compared with the princely cavalcade that later on set out with Burke to travel over comparatively well-known country, involving only a short excursion through a land without natural difficulties or obstacles; and yet it actually achieved the greatest part ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... soil is clay, stickier and greasier than one could believe possible. It's like almost solid paint, and the least rain makes the sides of the trenches slimy, and the bottom a perfect sea of mud—pulls the heels off your boots almost. One feels like Gulliver walking along a Lilliputian town all the time. The front line of trenches—the firing line—have scientific loopholes and lookout places in them for seeing and firing from, and a dropping fire goes on from both sides all day long, but is ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... Literature is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Shoes" in facsimile, since which there has been added to it a Standard edition of Goldsmith's Works, edited by Mr. Gibbs. I had the pleasure of making many researches respecting the old London publisher (Goldsmith's friend), John Newbery, respecting his Lilliputian Classics, and I have been enabled to introduce several of the Quarto early editions to the firm, and have had great pleasure in writing and placing on record numerous facts and data, since utilized in the very interesting "Life of John Newbery, a last century bookseller." The connection of ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... 1572 when Drake, at the age of twenty-seven, sailed out of Plymouth on the Nombre de Dios expedition that brought him into fame. He led a Lilliputian fleet: the Pascha and the Swan, a hundred tons between them, with seventy-three men, all ranks and ratings, aboard of them. But both vessels were 'richly furnished with victuals and apparels for a whole year, and no less heedfully ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... king and a parliamentary constitution, but not a parliamentary God and a parliamentary religion." The interval of a century has not weakened the force of the remark. It is indeed time that we should leave off these petty cavils on frivolous points, these Lilliputian sophistries, whether our "eggs are best broken at the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... is a Lilliputian!" laughed Stas. "If he should rear himself and stretch out his trunk, he might catch you ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... her hand softly and caressingly over his head, lamented the loss of his poor hair. Amongst them they relieved him of his straitjacket, set up his head, covered his feet, and he slept like a top for want of drastics and opiates, and in spite of some brilliant charges by the Lilliputian cavalry. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Triumph erected by Napoleon, commonly called l'Arc du Carrousel. It is a beautiful piece of architecture, but is far too small to tally with such a vast mass of buildings as the Palace and offices of the Tuileries. By the side of them it appears almost Lilliputian. It would have been better to have made it in the style of the triumphal arch of the Porte St Denis. On this arc of the Carrousel are bas-reliefs both outside and inside, representing various actions of Napoleon's life. He is always represented ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the marvels—that met me at my old school—was a scene from the "Critic," played by the most Lilliputian boys. Puff—played by Powell (I don't forget that name)—was simply marvellous. And yet Powell, if he will forgive me for saying so, was the merest whipper-snapper. Sir Christopher Hatton could scarcely have emerged from the nursery; and yet the idea of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... admit, 'Tis all my pleasure thy past toil to know; For pleased remembrance builds delight on woe. At every danger pants thy consort's breast, And gaping infants squall to hear the rest. How did I tremble, when, by thousands bound, I saw thee stretch'd on Lilliputian ground! When scaling armies climb'd up every part, Each step they trod I felt upon my heart. 70 But when thy torrent quench'd the dreadful blaze, King, queen, and nation staring with amaze, Full in my view ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... sight as I sat with the swallows flying far under my feet. The people did not wander about the street here and there as usual, but hundreds after hundreds of small objects came on in regular array. Then I could see long lines of Lilliputian soldiers marching in the procession, with their tiny bayonets glancing in the sun; and every now and then came up a soft swell of music, feeble but sweet. 'What is all this about?' thought I. 'Are they going to set one of these little ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... reigning in hell (excuse the word, I quote Milton) to serving in heaven; in London they would be nothing, at Hogs Norton Spa, or Pumpington Wells, they are every thing; making difficulties about admissions to Lilliputian Almack's." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... formed one living and unbroken tissue. A strange example of this fact revealed itself to me when, wandering in a rough courtyard, I noticed a little building which jutted out over a precipice. I opened the door, and discovered a Lilliputian chapel with seats in it for some twenty people. Facing me was an altar trimmed with decaying lace and supporting a mildewed breviary, and before it, in full armor, with gauntleted hands outstretched, was the effigy of a kneeling knight. He had knelt there as an image of prayer for more than three ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... the time," returned Mrs. Brewster, "when we ran away from school to see the Lilliputian bazaar and your mother was there and walked you out by the ear?" Thus the flow ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... to play the part of Gulliver, only visit the inferior planets, such as Mercury, Venus, or Mars, whose density is a little less than that of the earth; but do not venture into the great planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; for there the order will be changed, and you will become Lilliputian." ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... they rang with a harmony that the inherited practice of centuries had given them. And beyond was the monotonous accompaniment of the sea on the rocks. Hamilton lived to be an old man, and he never left the West Indies; but sometimes, at long and longer intervals, he found himself listening to that Lilliputian orchestra, his attention attracted to it, possibly, by a stranger; and then he remembered this night, and the woman for whom he would have sacrificed earth and immortality had he been ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... molecular inquiry,' with stars in place of atoms, mighty spheres in place of 'dust,' 'the firmament above' instead of 'the firmament beneath.' In fact, the astronomer, in sweeping with his telescopic eye the 'blue depths of ether,' is, as it were, some Lilliputian inhabitant of an atom prying into the autumnal structure of some Brobdignagian world of saw-dust; organised into spiral and other elementary forms, of life, it may be, something like our own. The infinite height appears, in short, like the infinite depth, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... recalling Miss Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first time in his life that amiable naturalness, inimitable airiness, ease and adaptability, which characterize the Anglican clergy and their method of doing things. Attenuated tennis, Lilliputian Badminton, swings, a greased pole, potato and sack races, fiddling, and dancing on a platform, for the French, all these he passed in review with Mrs. Abercorn and the English ladies, presently participating in a merry ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... majestic. From that day forth bureaucracy used to its own profit the mistrust that stands between receipts and expenditures; it degraded the administration for the benefit of the administrators; in short, it spun those lilliputian threads which have chained France to Parisian centralization,—as if from 1500 to 1800 France had undertaken nothing for want of thirty thousand government clerks! In fastening upon public offices, like a mistletoe on a pear-tree, ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... poor orphan, and should refuse to permit her to go just wherever she is bid?" As he spoke these words M. Perigord clutched the chair in which he sat as if to keep himself steady, whilst a nervous twitching seemed to convulse his lilliputian frame. ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... erecting houses, temples, churches, &c., is sometimes surprising. Girls as well as boys seem to be greatly amused with this form of exercise; and both seem to be little less gratified in destroying than in rearing their lilliputian edifices. ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... and dressmaker, as a card in the window informed the passer-by. Not that the card was necessary, as of course in so small a place everybody knew everybody else; but it was a sort of sign of office, and was always most carefully replaced when Sarah Ann, Miss Michin's Lilliputian maid, cleaned the window, which she did much oftener than was necessary—at least, Mrs. Dodd, the post-mistress, who lived opposite, said so. But then Mrs. Dodd had the shop and a young family to attend to, and did not find it possible ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... well-intended address[32] to the mechanics upon their combinations. Will it do good? Umph. It takes only the hand of a Lilliputian to light a fire, but would require the diuretic powers of Gulliver to extinguish it. The Whigs will live and die in the heresy that the world is ruled by little pamphlets and speeches, and that if you can sufficiently demonstrate ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... water not easy to describe. Words seem colorless—inadequate to convey the picture it presented or the sense of awe it inspired. Looking at it from among the boulders on the shore it seemed the last degree of madness for human beings to pit their Lilliputian strength against that racing, thundering flood. Certain it was that The Big Mallard was the supreme ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... frequented by minor members of 'The Fancy,' who are technically called flat-catchers, and who picked up a very pretty living by a quick hand, a rattling tongue, a deal board, three thimbles, and a pepper-corn. The game they played with these three curious articles is a sort of Lilliputian game at cups and balls; and the beauty of it lies in dexterously seeming to place the pepper-corn under one particular thimble, getting a green to bet that it was there, and then winning his money by showing that it is not. Every operator at this game ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... body, he must have been a tailor!—Charge, my fine fellows, and throw the constables out of the window, and the stewards after them. Every man his bird; and here goes for my Cock Robin." With that he made a grab at his Lilliputian antagonist, but missed him, as he slid away amongst the women like an eel, while his pursuer, brandishing his wooden arm on high, to which I now perceived, for the first time, that there was a large steel hook appended, exclaimed ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... preferment there, the furious exile never fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous "Drapier's Letters" patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and invective: they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy—the assault is wonderful for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rushing on his enemies and felling them: one admires not the cause so much as the strength, the anger, the fury of the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... listened, as if in an ecstasy, to a sound which seemed to me no better than a tiny chirping from an innumerable multitude of lilliputian grasshoppers. ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... Hesse-Darmstadt over; Should have withal the hard assurance To hold a Son of Song in durance. Why, as I lately sauntered out To see what Gotham was about, Just below NIBLO'S, west southwest, In a prosaic street at best, I chanced upon a lodge so small, So Lilliputian-like in all, That Argus, hundred-eyed albeit, Might pass a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... and he challenged one of his tormentors, whose name was Crofts, to a duel. Crofts accepted the challenge, and, being determined to persevere in his fun to the end, appeared on the battle ground armed only with a squirt. This raised a laugh, of course, but it did not tend much to cool the injured Lilliputian's anger. He sternly insisted on another meeting, and with real weapons. Crofts had expected to have turned off the whole affair in a joke, but he found this could not be done; and public opinion among the courtiers ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... by its shank and beat the fellow with it till he cried for mercy. The son tells of the first school he attended, when he was but five years old. It was kept by the widow of one of Napoleon's generals, a militant lady who every morning marshalled the school, a Lilliputian army with the teachers flanking the line like beardless sergeants in stays and petticoats, and distributed rewards and punishments as the great Emperor was wont to do after a battle. For the dunces there was a corner strewn with dried peas on which they were made ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... more difficult to attain for the woman of the ordinary household than for the worker in a mine, for he at least, when the work of his set is over, has two-thirds of the twenty-four hours to himself. The woman is bound by a thousand Lilliputian threads from which there seems no escape. She often makes frantic efforts to escape, but the combined strength of the threads generally proves too strong. There can be no doubt that the present household system is ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... dainty in her manner and ways, and with a graceful little figure, peculiarly supple and sinuous. Her humble origin certainly did not betray itself in her hands and feet, which were exquisite in shape and lilliputian ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... petals of the delicate buds were beginning to wither. And Sir Chetwynd had heard much of Cairo; he understood that there was a great deal of liberty allowed there between men and maids,—that they went out together on driving excursions to the Pyramids, that they rode on lilliputian donkeys over the sand at moonlight, that they floated about in boats at evening on the Nile, and that, in short, there were more opportunities of marriage among the "flesh-pots of Egypt" than in all the rush and crush of London. So here he was, portly and ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Lilliputian sloops, with their sails all blown out like white roses, came floating bravely into port, and Philip Wentworth lounged by us, wearily, in ...
— A Struggle For Life • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... each nation priding itself upon the antiquity, beauty, and energy of its own tongue, with an avowed contempt for that of its neighbor; yet our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials, and make their speech in the Lilliputian tongue. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street. Above McCreery's, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the Engineers Club, is Best's, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but no more so. Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to commerce. Silverware is represented by Gorham's at Thirty-sixth Street. Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther's Sons between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... arrows, my little man?" said her ladyship to Hal, as she reviewed her Lilliputian regiment. "You can't march, man, without ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... getting their money's worth. The most inappropriate books were put out in large paper, Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, for instance. At the other extreme of size may be cited the Pickering diamond classics, also in a large-paper edition, pretty, dainty little books, with their Lilliputian character only emphasized by their excess of white paper. But their print is too fine to read, and their margins are out of proportion to the printed page. Though their type is small, they by no means exhibit the miracle of the books printed ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... you talk; you quite confuse me with being so silly,' said Mrs. Gibson, fluttered and annoyed as she usually was with the Lilliputian darts' Cynthia flung at her. She had recourse to her accustomed feckless piece of retaliation—bestowing some favour on Molly; and this did not ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... big Pennsylvania Railroad stone bridge is still burning, and the efforts of the firemen to quench or stay the progress of the flames are as futile as were those of Gulliver's Lilliputian firemen. The mass, which unquestionably forms a funeral pyre for thousands of victims who lie buried beneath it, is likely to burn for weeks to come. The flames are not active, but burn away ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... hanging woods still float great flakes of gray fluff, which remain there, motionless. In the foreground, in front of and below this almost fantastic landscape, is a miniature garden where two beautiful white cats are taking the air, amusing themselves by pursuing each other through the paths of a Lilliputian labyrinth, shaking the wet sand from their paws. The garden is as conventional as possible: not a flower, but little rocks, little lakes, dwarf trees cut in grotesque fashion; all this is not natural, but it is most ingeniously arranged, so ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... discernible at more than a mile's distance, for the trees that compose it are "shin oaks," the tallest rising to the height of only eighteen inches above the surface of the ground. Eighteen inches is enough to conceal the body of a man lying in a prostrate attitude; and as the Lilliputian trees grow thick as jimson weeds, the cover will be a secure one. Unless the pursuers should stray so close as to tread upon them, there will be no danger of their being seen. Further reflection has by this time satisfied them that the Indians are not upon ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... was pressed close down to the floor, but he showed his teeth and uttered a growl like a lilliputian peal of thunder. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-dried mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was an imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunches of lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurel wreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of the Second Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed into brightness ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... subsequent proprietor. Dugdale supposes the village took its name from a castle, once on the premises; and that the castle-hill yet remains: but this hill is too small, even to admit a shelter for a Lilliputian, and is evidently an artificial trifle, designed for a monument. It might hold, for its ancient furniture, a turret, termed a castle—perhaps it held nothing in Dugdale's time: the modern is a gladiator, ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... classical. After the daring flights of the previous century, writers contented themselves with marking time. Chenedolle, whose verse Madame de Stael said to be as lofty as Lebanon, and whose fame is lilliputian to-day, was, with Ducis, the representative of their advance-guard. In painting, with Fragonard, Greuze and Gros, there was a greater stir of genius, yet without anything corresponding in ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... long inspection, he informed us that he had discovered uranium, and that it now remained only to submit it to certain operations in a laboratory in order to prepare the substance that was to give renewed life to those lilliputian monsters in the car, which fed upon men's breath ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... valley, and took our way towards Paris, by a broad paved avenue, that was bordered with trees. The road now began to show an approach to a capital, being crowded with all sorts of uncouth-looking vehicles, used as public conveyances. Still it was on a Lilliputian scale as compared to London, and semi-barbarous even as compared to one of our towns. Marly-la-Machine was passed; an hydraulic invention to force water up the mountains to supply the different princely dwellings of the neighbourhood. Then came a house of no great ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... direction, and this I resolved to do. Having advanced a little, I gave him my wind, when he was instantly alarmed, and backed into the bushes, holding his head high and right to me. Thus he stood motionless as a statue, under the impression, probably, that, owing to his Lilliputian dimensions, I had failed to observe him, and fancying that I would pass on without detecting him. I rode slowly on, and described a semicircle to obtain a shot at his shoulder, and halting my horse, fired from the saddle; he got it in the shoulder-blade, and, as slowly and silently ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... day must no doubt come when clashing objects will break the ties of common interest which now preserve the Union. But no man may foretell the period of dissolution.... The many restraining causes are out of sight of foreign observation. The Lilliputian threads binding the man mountain are invisible; and it seems wondrous that each limb does not act for itself independently of its fellows. A closer examination shows the nature of the network which keeps the members of this association so tightly bound. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... extinguisher lifted by a tiny hand, from beneath, and a small human face, no bigger than a thumb-nail, with nicely proportioned features, peep from beneath it. In this Lilliputian countenance was such a ghastly consternation as horrified my uncle unspeakably. Out came a little foot then and there, and a pair of wee legs, in short silk stockings and buckled shoes, then the rest of the figure; and, with the arms holding about the ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... that they had all the charm of elegant models; their excessive whiteness, as contrasted with the brown rocks, or the sombre, deep, dull, heavy green of the olive-tree; and the puny size, and little slow walk of the Lilliputian men and women on the bank; made a charming picture. There were ferries out of number, too; bridges; the famous Pont d'Esprit, with I don't know how many arches; towns where memorable wines are made; Vallence, where Napoleon studied; and the noble river, bringing at every winding ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... take my Diversion while he minded Business, for that all would Blow Over soon), I took an Excursion ('twas in the third year of my Residence here) into North Holland, to visit the famous village of Brock. Here the streets are divided by little Rivulets, for all the world like Lilliputian Canals; the Houses and Summer-houses all of Wood, painted Green and White, very handsome, albeit whimsical in their shape, and scrupulously neat. The Inhabitants have a peculiar association among themselves, and scarcely ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... time had darkened the shadows to a burnt-onion hue. Along the edges of the picture, almost against the black oak frame, a continuous narrative unfolded in unintelligible episodes, intruding one upon the other, portraying Lilliputian figures, in houses of dwarfs. Here the Saint, whose name Durtal had sought in vain, crossed a curly, wooden sea in a sailboat; there he marched through a village as big as a fingernail; then he disappeared into the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... dread Was haunted by a terrible night Mare, A monstrous burthen on the corporation!— Look at the Bill of Fare for one day's share, Sea-turtles by the score—Oxen by droves, Geese, turkeys, by the flock—fishes and loaves Countless, as when the Lilliputian nation Was making ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... worlds we see reflected in the polished surface of a concave mirror, where all but the observer himself is transformed into a fantastic miniature of the reality. In that quaint fairyland diminutive rivers flow gracefully under tiny trees, past mole-hill mountains, till they fall at last into lilliputian lakes, almost smothered for the flowers that grow upon their banks; while in the extreme distance of a couple of rods the cone of a Fuji ten feet high looks approvingly down upon a scene which would ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... name has past into the words 'to pandar' and 'pandarism'. 'Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto; 'thrasonical', from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... coquetting, quarreling swimmers, relieving the colorless ice with groups of jetty velvet and scoter ducks, gray and white-winged coots, crested mergansers in their gorgeous spring plumage, and fat, lazy black ducks, with Lilliputian blue and green winged teal, filling the air with the whirr of swift pinions, and the ceaseless murmur of the mating myriads, rested from their long northward journey, a host such as mortal eye hath seldom beheld, and which it ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... little poetical imagination—of gigantic strength, with a propensity to incessant trifling—of passionate purpose, with the clearest and coldest expression, as though a furnace were fuelled with snow. A Brobdignagian by size, he was for ever toying with Lilliputian slings and small craft. One of the most violent of party men, and often fierce as a demoniac in temper, his favourite motto was Vive la bagatelle. The creator of entire new worlds, we doubt if his works ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... aside the herculean morio who had been childishly standing over the pot, licking his fingers in eager anticipation; whereupon the imbecile set up a sharp cry that blended with the deeper roar of the lilliputian. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... there, as a bird might see it, within the glance, as distinct as some geographical plan executed in relief. To think of it, such a past, such a history, so much grandeur, and Rome so dwarfed and contracted by distance! Houses as lilliputian and as pretty as toys; and the whole a mere mouldy speck upon the earth's face! What impassioned Pierre was that he could at a glance understand the divisions of Rome: the antique city yonder with the Capitol, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ordinary emotion that Katherine Grandison heard that this perfect cousin Ferdinand had at length arrived. She had seen little of him even in his boyish days, and even then he was rather a hero in their Lilliputian circle. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... gazing before her with blind eyes. Sir John she had dismissed already from her mind; she hated him, that was enough; for whatever Seraphina hated or contemned fell instantly to Lilliputian smallness, and was thenceforward steadily ignored in thought. And now she had matter for concern indeed. Her interview with Otto, which she had never yet forgiven him, began to appear before her in a very different light. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from ministering to the wants of these primitive traders, the articles exposed for sale, and the places where they were sold, bore strong outward marks of being expressly adapted to their tastes and wishes. The tailor displayed in his window a Lilliputian pair of leather gaiters, and a diminutive round frock, while each doorpost was appropriately garnished with a model of a coal-sack. The two eating-house keepers exhibited joints of a magnitude, and puddings of a solidity, which coalheavers alone could ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... his body. Bending his eyes downward as much as he could he saw it was a human creature not six inches high. We are at liberty to suppose that Gulliver was a man of ordinary height, that is to say, not six feet high. If the Lilliputian was "not six inches high," what was the ratio of height between Gulliver and his miniature captors? If, then, Gulliver is twelve times the size of one of his captors, we ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... of man should dwell in a palace, not in a pest-house; in a human temple, velvety, lined with down, inside and out; in which there are hundreds of millions of lilliputian trappings, fittings and articles of furniture, to carry on the minute and finer functions and chemistry of the soul. The very multitude of the fine equipments that decorate the temple give it that beautiful ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... bow and arrows, my little man?' said her ladyship to Hal, as she reviewed her Lilliputian regiment. 'You can't march, man, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... yet, you know, without looking at you, the way I do your mother, so you'll have to give me some notion of what's the occasion of these alternate seizures and releases of a defenseless Lilliputian godfather." He made a confident gesture toward the upper part of the house with his fan. "About your mother—I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis. But calm yourself. It's not so bad as it seems when ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... "Ranger," who soon thereafter hoisted the new flag on board that vessel at Portsmouth. The "Ranger" set out to sea about November 1st, her battery consisting of sixteen six-pounders, throwing only forty-eight pounds of shot from a broadside, an armament which appears grotesquely lilliputian in comparison with the thirteen-inch guns, firing projectiles of over half a ton from our steel-armored battleships of to-day, which cost as much as five million dollars and are of 16,000 tons burden. With this little ship he sailed to Europe, capturing two prizes on the way, and, after touching ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... they thought it ridiculous that a colony with less than half a million of people should want nine Governments in addition to its central authority. The procedure of the Provincial Councils, where Mr. Speaker took the chair daily and a mace was gravely laid on the table by the clerk, seemed a Lilliputian burlesque of the great ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... looks as though it held a ball of snow-white cotton in its teeth. The last I shall mention is the Hapale pygmaeus, one of the most diminutive forms of the monkey order, three full-grown specimens of which, measuring only seven inches in length of body, I obtained near St. Paulo. The pretty Lilliputian face is furnished with long brown whiskers, which are naturally brushed back over the cars. The general colour of the animal is brownish-tawny, but the tail is elegantly barred with black. I was surprised, on my return ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... Jim Dyckman tremendously. He broke out into fierce diatribes against the Chinafying of the United States with its Lilliputian army guarding its gigantic interests. He began to toy with the idea of enlisting in the Canadian army or of joining the American aviators ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... spaces of the open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward, and so shift my ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rush of sound burst joyously on the silence—the slumbering trees awoke, their leaves moved, their dark branches quivered, and the grasses lifted up their green lilliputian sword-blades. Bells!—and SUCH bells!—tongues of melody that stormed the air with sweetest eloquence—round, rainbow bubbles of music that burst upon the wind, and dispersed ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... disposition were to be realised, and if B could see what was flowing in the optic nerve of A, he would experience a sensation almost analogous to that of A. Whenever the latter saw a dog, a sheep, or a shepherd, B would likewise see in the optic canal minute dogs, microscopic sheep, and Lilliputian shepherds. At the cost of such a childish conception, a parity of content in the sensations of our two spectators A and B might be supposed. But I will ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... final downfall, are fruitful themes wherefrom the historian can draw wholesome lessons for all generations. Whether his Charlesbourg (then called Bourg Royal) castle was used as the receptacle of some of his most valuable booty, or whether it was merely a kind of Lilliputian Parc au Cerfs, such as his royal master had, tradition does not say. It would appear, however, that it was kept up by the plunder wrung from sorrowing colonists, and that the large profits he made by paring from the scanty pittance the French government ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... tongue, with an avowed contempt for that of their neighbour; yet our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials, and make their speech, in the Lilliputian tongue. And it must be confessed, that from the great intercourse of trade and commerce between both realms, from the continual reception of exiles which is mutual among them, and from the custom, in each empire, to send their young nobility and richer ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... of the armistice, and indeed it did not affect him, for General Hull had acted under the immediate orders of the American Secretary at War, and was consequently irresponsible to General Dearborn, with the aid of the Lilliputian navy of the Lakes, was maintaining the ascendancy of Great Britain in Upper Canada and Michigan. He was about indeed to make an attempt upon Niagara, to be followed by another upon Sackett's Harbour, with that daring, promptitude and judgment, which ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... return to Venice;—the great stream of concourse flowed in the direction of the Giardini Pubblici, which are a nook of one of the more southerly islands on which the city stands, fitted up as a miniature landscape, its lilliputian hills and vales being the only ones the Venetians ever see. The intercourse betwixt Venice and the Continent has no doubt become more frequent since the opening of the railway; but formerly it was not uncommon to find persons who had never been ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the heights above (ah, humiliation that there should be heights above), I find my black top subjected to a process of shrinking. As I reach the top it ignominiously permits itself to be flattened out to a mere ridge without a head, a Lilliputian hill bemoaning ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby |
