"Retouch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most attractive picture. Harold had praised it a great deal, and told her that it would make her famous. But when the carpenter work came in Maude put it aside until now, when she brought it out again, and was just beginning to retouch it in places, as Harold ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... fertilized the soil in which it grew. He unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems. "To touch and retouch," he once wrote to the Rev. William Unwin, "is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself." Even ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... anxious to observe all the niceties of art which I had learned, so as not to lapse into some error. The first cast I took in my furnace succeeded in the superlative degree, and was so clean that my friends thought I should not need to retouch it. It is true that certain Germans and Frenchmen, who vaunt the possession of marvellous secrets, pretend that they can cast bronzes without retouching them; but this is really nonsense, because the bronze, when it has ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... we can retouch Bernstein for enough extra to get them done for us. It's the ducats, my lord, that move my fancy. The Bernsteins have grown almost disagreeably rich at the same old stand and it's about time the Kirkwoods were thrusting their talons into the ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... in to criticise and retouch her mother's painstaking arrangements. She grew flushed and ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... imperfections in a certain portion of the construction; that the grave consideration and wisdom of the Assembly might remedy these errors before it dissolved; and that, amongst other ameliorations which might be applied to this work, they might retouch two or three articles in which the power assigned to the executive authority and the legislative authority had been ill defined, so as to restore to the executive power the independence and scope indispensable ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... not familiar, and to portray only such characters as she knew intimately, their speech, dress, manner, and the motives that governed their action. If unconsciously she followed any rule of expression, it was that of Cowper, who said that to touch and retouch is the secret of almost all good writing. To her theory and rule she added personal charm, intelligence, wit, genius of a high order. Neglected by her own generation, she has now an ever-widening circle of readers, and is ranked by critics ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... la Rose, left some of the obsolete phrases, while he got rid of others; cette bigarrure de langage vieux et moderne, was with him writing no language at all. The same circumstance occurred abroad, when they resolved to retouch and modernise the old French metrical version of the Psalms, which we are about to notice. It produced the same controversy and the same dissatisfaction. The church of Geneva adopted an improved version, but the charm of the old one ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... acquired sufficient reputation as a dramatist, or at least as a recaster of the plays of others, to excite the jealousy of the leading playwrights, whose crude dramas he condescended to rewrite or retouch. That graceless vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent death-bed his old friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe, and trying to dissuade them from "spending their wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully declares: "There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... himself, (for his last plays were but his dotages,) I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had. He was a most severe judge; of himself as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it in his works; you find little to retouch or alter. Wit and language, and humour also, in some measure, we had before him; but something of art was wanting to the drama till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who succeeded him. You seldom find him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... alter," says Pope, "any thing to please his friends, before publication; but would not retouch his pieces afterwards: and, I believe, not one word in Cato, to which I made an objection, was suffered ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... But oft, like Israel's incense, laid Upon unholy, earthly shrines; Of nursing many a wrong desire; Of wandering after Love too far, And taking every meteor-fire That crossed my pathway, for a star. All this it tells, and, could I trace The imperfect picture o'er again, With power to add, retouch, efface The lights and shades, the joy and pain, How little of the past would stay! How quickly all should melt away— All—but that Freedom of the Mind, Which hath been more than wealth to me; ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various |
