"Sketchy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went rushing past. Enticing odours arose from the kitchen. The grocery wagon came, and came again. The girls went home. A sketchy lunch was eaten off the kitchen table, and father stayed down town. The girls reappeared. They overran the kitchen, peeling oranges and pineapples and bananas for "heavenly hash." Marguerite grew cross. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... of the first edition of this work, the figure in question has appeared from the pencil and burin of Mr. Cotman; of which the only fault, as it strikes me, is, that the surface is too rough—or the effect too sketchy.] ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled. Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy, faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small, irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark, unenduring little flower—yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... unlarding his frame. Shortly he was Corporal Ginsburg—a trim upstanding corporal. Then he became Sergeant Ginsburg and soon after this was Second Sergeant Ginsburg of B Company of a regiment still somewhat sketchy and ragged in its make-up, but with promise of good stuff to emerge from the mass of its material. When his regiment and his division went overseas, First Sergeant Ginsburg went ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about art. It's a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do now—sketchy and not too wise—the kind that makes one think of things one ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... debated plans for a self-mutilation such as would make his appearance as the Child Sir Lancelot inexpedient on public grounds; it was a heroic and attractive thought, but the results of some extremely sketchy preliminary experiments caused him to ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... ought to indulge in, would be simply, 'I have seen the Falls;' so if I were to show my prudence, I should say, 'I saw the Coronation.' But how is it possible to refrain from giving expression, however slight and sketchy, to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... that spite had actuated the circulation of the damaging paper, she and her chums had exhibited an admirable restraint concerning it. They had evidently accepted Adrienne's sketchy explanation of it ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... had been for years in coasters, then in the Mediterranean, and last in the West Indian trade. He had never been round the Capes. He could just write a kind of sketchy hand, and didn't care for writing at all. Both were thorough good seamen of course, and between those two old chaps I felt like a small boy between ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... saw Geoffrey's bicycle leaning against the porch. "I expect she's in the drawing-room with her grandfather. There seem to be lights everywhere. Well, I'm going to make a bee-line for the dining-room for grub. We had a very sketchy lunch, no tea, and no dinner, so ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... The witness here took from the pockets of his overcoat copies of the Times, and with the permission of the Court, read again with unction his own criticism, to every word of which he said he still adhered. "All Mr. Whistler's work is unfinished. It is sketchy. He, no doubt, possesses artistic qualities, and he has got appreciation of qualities of tone, but he is not complete, and all his works are in the nature of sketching. I have expressed, and still adhere to the opinion, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... am, to-day I should be content—simply to be; even a cabbage ought to be happy in such perfect summer weather. T. B. Aldrich is in—as much as he ever is supposed to be; but I recall now that I read his sketchy book the other night, while I was brushing my hair, giving it a sort of 'good time generally,' letting it run wild a little before going to sleep. I read 'Pierre Antoine's Date Tree' quite through, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... when the medium returned I got these pertinent words: 'I was not a disappointment to myself, but I was at a point where nerve force failed me.' This was signed 'Ernest,' and was accompanied by another sketchy bar of music. It all looked like a real attempt to give me what I had asked for, and yet it was the kind of reply that might have been made by the medium had she known the history of my musical friend, or had she been able to take it out ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... In this exceedingly sketchy way was the firm of Andrea Contini and Company established and lodged, being at the time in a very shadowy state, theoretically and practically, though it was destined to play a more prominent part in affairs than either of the young partners anticipated. Orsino discovered before ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... something of what this restless speculative scientific generation is thinking and doing. But I can't read with much pleasure the fragmentary review literature of the day. The "Cornhill" and that class of books I can't stand, and sketchy writings. The best specimens of light reading I have seen of late are Charlotte Yonge's "Pupils of St. John the Divine," and Guizot's ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stores. There is a good deal of choice among these. We have ourselves published one or two, from originals by Mr. Botch, which will answer as well as anything we know, being admirable in color and architectural feeling, and just sketchy enough. Pains should generally be taken not to make an elaborate picture of an architectural sketch, and the processes preliminary to making a highly-finished water-color painting, such as laying a ground-color of neutral orange, and sponging it partly out, cutting out foreground lights with ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... pirates with wolfish voracity devoured the meal which had been meant for us. They had pocket-flasks with them, and as they attacked them with frequency the talk grew louder and wilder. By degrees it was possible to comprehend the extraordinary disaster which had befallen us, at least in a sketchy outline of which the detail was filled in later. Tony, it appeared, was the master of a small power-schooner which had been fitting out in San Francisco for a filibustering trip to the Mexican coast. His three companions were the crew. None was of the old hearty breed of sailors, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... If Marchand is like a minor Milton—the comparison is not one to be pressed—de Vlaminck is like Keats. He is the most lyrical of the younger Frenchmen; the flash and sparkle of his pictures is the wonderfully close expression of a tremblingly delighted sensibility. Yet there is nothing sketchy about them. Consider his landscape (No. 65), and you will be astonished to find what a solid, self-supporting design these delicately graded tones and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... He gave a rather sketchy description of his imaginary home in Fleming County, Kentucky—a none too convincing description. Then he tried to change the subject by asking her if she had ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... will be seen that the work to be done here is necessarily more sketchy in character, though none the less taken from life in every detail, the aim in both cases being the same,—to give, as far as possible, the heart of the problem as it is seen by the worker, as well as by ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... before he could meet such a situation with Van Rycke's unfailing patience and aplomb. The Cargo-master seemed in nowise tired by his wasted day and Dane knew that Van would probably sit up half the night, going over for the hundredth time Traxt Cam's sketchy recordings in another painstaking attempt to discover why and how the other Free Trader had succeeded where the Queen's men were up against a ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that meat had a taste of flannel, Durtal had nodded a sketchy affirmative, knowing full well that if he ventured on the least comment he would have to endure an incoherent harangue on all ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... I had a decent meal to offer you," Poppy went on. "Often the commissariat department is a bit sketchy on Sunday, in—well, in these days of the cleaned slate. But you see, Lionel Gordon, of the Twentieth Century Theatre, was to tell me, this afternoon, what decision he had come to about the engagement I have been spelling to get. He is an appalling mongrel, three-parts ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... came back, the old need to know what he had been before putting on this present very casual body. Was his present state a reward or a penance? From the time of leaving the office to the last item in that sketchy dinner, he had been put upon by persons and circumstances. It was time to know what life meant ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... demands upon it are constant, and all legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not recollect in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent conventionalism of light and shade, sketchy forms continually less and less developed, the walls and the faces drawn with the same stucco color, alike opaque, and all the shades on flesh, dress, or stone, laid in with the same arbitrary brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... was finishing a somewhat hurried and sketchy luncheon a telegram was handed to him. It was from Max Wisler, the San Francisco detective, and it said laconically, "Don't let ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be," I protested. "No one knows anything about it really. Here's the file of the United Services ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... American popularity of Charles Kingsley has been rather declining, the credit of his brother Henry has been gradually rising. Those who have complained of something rather shallow and sketchy in some of his former books will find far more solid and faithful work in this. Indeed, he undertakes rather more than he can carry through, and the capacious plot, well handled at first, gets into some confusion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... land, where it did not jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys. The whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French landscape. For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to art, than in art to nature; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Liberal I shall close my observations on the works of Lord Byron. They are too voluminous to be examined even in the brief and sketchy manner in which I have considered those which are deemed the principal. Besides, they are not, like them, all characteristic of the author, though possessing great similarity in style and thought to one another. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important, consisting mainly of papers of the Salmagundi variety contributed to the Talisman, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, Tales of the Glauber Spa, 1832; and impressions of Europe, entitled Letters of a Traveler, issued in two series, in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... speaking, there is but little similarity between the above sketchy trifle and the celebrated "Moon-Story" of Mr. Locke; but as both have the character of hoaxes (although the one is in a tone of banter, the other of downright earnest), and as both hoaxes are on the same ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... modish medico, laughs low At ruddy RASPER'S keenly-whispered mot— RASPER, a soul all strictures, Holds the great world a field for sketchy chaff. Many love not the man, but how they laugh At ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... Going upon the rather sketchy suggestions of Mrs. Standish, the girl had prefigured Aunt Abby as a skittish female of three-score years and odd; a gabbling creature with a wealth of empty gesticulation and a parrot's vacant eye; semi-irresponsible, prone to bright colours and ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... pulled together and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder where he could have seen her. He had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures. She was clearly an American, but with the loose native quality strained through a closer ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... I know that you are great." it is this combination of an unprepossessing physique with rare dignity of character which Hunt has represented in what many consider the best of American portraits. It is perhaps too much in the sketchy style of Velasquez, but admirable for ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—far more hideous and depressing ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... the Dragon may take as little interest in Ellaline's clothes as he has taken in Ellaline's self, or that, being used to the costumes of the Bengalese, which, perhaps, are somewhat sketchy, he may be thankful that his ward has ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... about the new countries are pretty sketchy," he said. "People always talk to me about the fearfully hot climate of Australia, and seem mildly surprised if I remark that we have about a dozen different climates, and that we have snow and ice, ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers. In the apple orchard the young grass was powdered with gold, and the long grey shadows of the trees barred the ground like the sketchy outlines in a ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... draw in a sketchy manner. Determine on the place to begin your drawing and then use a continuous, easy line, without lifting the chalk from the paper, except when necessary to ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... handling is so preposterously long and the reliefs of dialogue and other things frequently managed with so little skill, that, except for sheer passing of time, the books have been found difficult to read. The present writer's knowledge of Spanish is too sketchy to enable him to read them in the original with full comfort. Amadis and Palmerin are legible enough in Southey's translations, made, as one would expect from him, with all due effort to preserve the language ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... and it's sketchy," said he; "but as a serious consideration of affairs in Eastern ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Flagg did not include the cow among his "Picturesque Animals," for that is where she belongs. She has not the classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body; her irregular, sketchy outlines, like those of the landscape,—the hollows and ridges, the slopes and prominences; her tossing horns, her bushy tail, tier swinging gait, her tranquil, ruminating habits,—all tend to make her an object upon which the artist eye loves to ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... bone of fact and almost instantly he visioned in their completeness unextinct ichthyosauri of business. By day he fairly consumed old Bronson; he read dry books far into the night. Thus he rapidly filled the holes in the walls of his knowledge, and strengthened its rather sketchy foundation. Of course he realized that what he was learning was in a sense academic; it had to be tested and developed and made flexible by experience; but then much of it became instantly a living enlargement of the things of which he was ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... think. He is as cheerful and as inconsequent as ever, and his plans for the future seem to me, although I am not a practical woman of business, more sketchy than well defined. Sometimes, after listening to him, I have come to the conclusion that even so attractive a quality as absolute optimism can be overdone, and that the principle of never crossing a bridge before ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... uneasily in his seat. "And then," resumed the condemned, "came the final discomfiture. In our village we had a modest little debating club, and I remembered having promised, chiefly, I suppose, to please and impress the doctor's wife, to give a sketchy kind of lecture on the Balkan Crisis. I had relied on being able to get up my facts from one or two standard works, and the back-numbers of certain periodicals. The prosecution had made a careful note of the circumstance that the man ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... is a second survey of our ground, somewhat more detailed than the first, but woefully sketchy. Everyone who has studied MSS. of any class or period would detect omissions in it which for him would vitiate the whole story. The best I can hope is that the assertions in it are not incorrect, and that it gives a true notion of the general course of book-production ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... material for this story was supplied by a three-year-old. The pattern was added. An older child would not be content with so sketchy an account. But it seems to compass a three-year-old's most significant associations with a stable. The title is one in actual use ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... did for our little "Diving Bell,"—as a sort of pastime, and because my daily toil was mechanical, and furnished no occupation for my thoughts. Perhaps the fact that most of us wrote in this way accounted for the rather sketchy and fragmentary character of our "Magazine." It gave evidence that we thought, and that we thought upon solid and serious matters; but the criticism of one of our superintendents upon it, very kindly given, was undoubtedly just: "It has plenty of ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... of Ella's perturbation. Clara paused, with the powder puff in her hand, while she listened to Flora's explanation of how Ella feared that some one might, after all these years, be going to marry Judge Buller. Who this might be she did not even hint at. She left it ever so sketchy. But the little stare with which Clara met it, the amusement, the surprise, and then the shortest possible little laugh, were guarantee that Clara had seen it all. She had filled out Flora's sketch to ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... "That's just a sketchy outline," said Jimmy, pausing for breath. "I can't do you justice impromptu like this—you're too ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... finished; nothing of the pittore improvisatore. A party of this kind should be more sketchy in its style; the outline more ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... his hands over his ears, and henceforth hardly dares even to read history, to say nothing of writing it. Perhaps I draw too harsh a picture, but the truth is that I did, as a very young man, with no training except that provided by a sketchy knowledge of the classics, once attempt to write an historical biography. I shudder to think of my method and equipment; I skipped the dull parts, I left all tiresome documents unread. It was a sad farrago ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dogs away. The dialect in which he spoke proved incomprehensible to Matthews. Luckily it was not altogether so to Abbas, that underling long resigned to the eccentricities of the Firengi, whose accomplishments included even a sketchy knowledge of his master's tongue. It appeared that the law of Bala Bala forbade the door of the Father of Swords to open before sunrise. But the tall-hatted one offered the visitor the provisional hospitality of a black tent, of a refreshing drink of goats' buttermilk, and of a comfortable ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger than a cut in Punch, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's most finished engravings. And if this had been Hogarth's ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... dictated the painter; "execution sketchy; coloring quiet, to be in keeping with the place and subject, but pure. You know the scene better than I, so work away, Giotto. Motto—'Will ye pay or toll it, mother?' Price twenty-five guineas. Take it to What's-his-name's, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... their way through the streets of Cynthiana, where the acrid smoke of burning caught at throats, adding to the torturous thirst which dried a man's mouth when he tore cartridge paper with his teeth. Drew and Croxton took sketchy orders from Captain Quirk, their eyes red-rimmed with fatigue above their powder-blackened lips and chins. Fan out, be eyes and ears for the column moving ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... National Gallery, which owes much to his hand. He fails conspicuously in form, his shadows are black, and his figures often vulgar, but he has a fine sense of colour, and a free, crisp touch. He was one of the young masters who flooded Venice with light, sketchy wares. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... him. James realized immediately a ten-cent cigar at the least when he began to smoke. Doctor Gordon filled a pipe mechanically. His face still wore the gloomy, almost fierce, expression which it had assumed at table. He was a handsome man in a rough, sketchy fashion. His face was blurred with a gray grizzle of beard. He wore his hair rather long, and he had a fashion of running his fingers through it, which made it look like a thick brush. He dressed rather carelessly, still ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... was born a slave of George Brady, in Kentucky. Eli's memory is poor and his story is somewhat sketchy. He ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... exhaustion. He'd gone there to try to get first hand information about the creature the executive at the Celestial Developments Company had talked so vaguely of. And the tale the convalescent had told him of the thing on the asteroid was as fantastic as it was sketchy. ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... objected that the stories are too short and sketchy for the praise that has been bestowed on them, it may be answered that in their translation we have had the best opportunity to observe the skill, power, and perception of character which constitute their real merit. Simple as they ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... leant over the taffrail, gazing down with open mouth and vacant stare at the water, I took a good long look at him. He interested me much—because he was so exceptionally uninteresting; a pallid, anaemic, indefinite hobbledehoy, with a high, narrow forehead, and sketchy features. He had watery, restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white in its paleness; and twitching hands that played nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. This shadowy moustache seemed to absorb as a rule the best part ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... songs of other species, like others of his kindred. He does not, in fact, mimic the set songs of others, although he often introduces notes and phrases borrowed from other species into his own performance. He sings in a sketchy way all the year round, but in spring has a fuller unbroken song, emitted with more power and passion. For the rest of the time he sings to amuse himself, as it seems, in a peculiarly leisurely, and one may say, indolent manner, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... gratification of your desire to possess knowledge, or whether literary production be your aim, unless you may study undisturbed your labours will never bear their full fruit. Interrupted, your knowledge will be scanty, diverse, and generally inapplicable, your literary output sketchy, incoherent, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... friends not to divide, because, he said, it was very important that we should present a substantial unity to India. This is upon the question of either House considering a Bill like the Bill that is now on the Table—a mere skeleton of a Bill if you like. I see it has been called vague and sketchy. It cannot be anything else, on the broad principle set out ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... for if she awoke and found herself alone, she might die. He knelt by her side, and chafed her hands; but it was of no avail. Just then a thought came into his mind. He would paint her as she slumbered in that death-like swoon. He seized his brushes, and quickly wrought a picture—sketchy, but true—and when it was drawn he called it 'Death.' Then came signs of awakening. Tears flowed from the half-opened eyes, and rushes of colour, like the morning sunrise, stole over her cheeks. Then the mists cleared away, and she saw Chios kneeling before her, and, with a wild, convulsive start, ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... my first Revolution—and I hadn't the least idea what lobbying Pretoria meant. My friend gave me a sketchy view of its meaning, and assured me it was usually ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... immense; not a scrap, apparently, was left over to cover, decently, the rest of the earth's surface—of that one was quite certain in looking at this vast inverted cup overflowing with ether. What there was of land was a very sketchy performance. Opposite ran the red line ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And the cow-puncher, ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... a quick but rather sketchy list. "And your own overcoat and sweater—or I won't let you go. Promise." Her fingers turned in his and ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... during Mr. Colton's life-time, under the title of "Visit to Athens and Constantinople," with additions from the original manuscripts of the author, and revised and condensed by the editor. Mercurial, sketchy, and incoherent, tasting strongly of the salt water and the ship's-cabin, enlivened with occasional flashes of harmless vanity, it rewards the attention of the reader by its lively, rapid descriptions, its unfailing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... sketchy," says she. "In the first place, when I landed here in New York about a year and a half ago, I'd made up my mind to connect with big money. I didn't know exactly how; the stage, maybe. Anyway, I knew the coin was here, and that ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... let, to the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... hesitation she had made up her mind to tell him of her new-found knowledge, and at once he had filled in and coloured the sketchy outlines of the picture drawn by the rather foolish if kindly natured Miss Weatherfield. Yes, it was true that he had been a fool, though a quixotic fool—so Blanche had felt on hearing his version of the story. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... on our recent literature is Pattee, A History of American Literature since 1870 (Century Co., 1915), which deals with two hundred or more writers. A more sketchy attempt at a contemporaneous history is Vedder, American Writers of To-day (Silver, 1894, revised 1910), devoted to nineteen writers whom the author regards as ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... dimple. Distinctly so, indeed. When ladies of fifteen possess dimples, mere man becomes but as a piece of damp blotting-paper. Pringle was seventeen and a half, and consequently too old to take note of such frivolous attributes; but all the same he had a sort of vague, sketchy impression that it would be pleasanter to run up a lively century against the O.B.s with Miss Lorimer as a spectator than in her absence. He felt pleased ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... initiation "A little journey to the pearly gates," and once or twice it looked for a short time as if the victim had mislaid his return ticket. Treat yourself to an election riot, a railway collision and a subway explosion, all in one evening, and you will get a rather sketchy idea of what we aimed at. I don't mean, of course, that we ever killed any one. There is no real danger in an initiation, you know, if the initiate does exactly as he is told and the members don't get careless and something that wasn't expected doesn't ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... is what you would call a "beak," and I am afraid her cheek bones are too high for good proportion, and I know that her hair is not always so carefully dressed as it should be, but what is the difference when the hair is crowned with a halo? I can't swear to any of these things; they're sketchy impressions. The only thing I am absolutely sure about is the inner light that shines to an unbelievable degree. I wish she had more time and I wish I had more time and that she and I might become such friends as you and I are. I can't tell you, ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... island of Hachijo[u] by girls well fitted themselves to give grace to the beautiful tissue, an obi (sash) of fawn and scarlet into which was woven the shadowy figure, here and there, of a landscape—sketchy but suggestive. The belt which girded it within was of egg coloured crape, and the orange tissue broadened and hung down to add its touch of carefully contrasted colour. The hair was built high in the taka-shimada style, tied on top with a five ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... his hands—quite passable hands, if you didn't look too closely at what should have been nails—and bent forward in a sketchy gesture. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... is to be brought out in London. It will not stand the ghost of a chance unless well mounted. Music light and sketchy; remarkable for a Chorus of Fishermen, well known ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... monstrously over-simplified and rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use. If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact the picture I have given is, however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will. The details of systems may be reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... may be installed an electric dishwasher, depending, of course, on whether the family considers its benefits equal to the expense involved. If mother is to do the work, it may be warranted; but where her efforts are limited to one or two sketchy meals on Thursdays and Sunday evenings, one might well interview the person who is monitor of the service wing the bulk of the time. Dishwashers, cake mixers, complicated fruit juice extractors, and similar gadgets are all excellent ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... sketchy studies of fishing in Norway has been fairly warned already not to expect exciting records of slaughter amongst salmon. Of course, no angler would be at a loss to explain away his poor bags; his ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... and sketchy picture of religious life in India so far as it can be gathered from the older Brahmanic books has reference mainly to the kingdoms of the Kuru-Pancalas and Videha in 800-600 B.C. Another picture, somewhat fuller, is found in the ancient literature of the Buddhists and Jains, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... kiddin' yourself. I couldn't see a thing wonderful about him, or where he was much different from others I'd glanced at casual. Such a small party to have so much fuss made over! Why, one of his hands wasn't much bigger'n a cat's paw. And his face was so red and little and the nose so sketchy that it didn't seem likely he'd ever amount to much. Here he'd had more'n a week to grow in, and I couldn't notice ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... been dunned by his landlady within doors, and watched by bailiffs without, until death came to his relief. A corner of the Morning Post noticed his death, generously adding, that his manner displayed considerable genius, though his style was rather sketchy; and referred to an advertisement, which announced that Mr. Varnish, a well-known printseller, had still on hand a very few drawings and painings by Richard Tinto, Esquire, which those of the nobility and gentry who might wish to complete ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... doorway looking well about him before he lifted a loosened plank in the flooring and took from beneath it the grand old weapon of the Williams family. Nor did his eye lighten with any pleasurable excitement as he sat himself down in a shadowy corner and began some sketchy experiments with the mechanism. The allure of first sight was gone. In Mr. Williams' bed-chamber, with Sam clamoring for possession, it had seemed to Penrod that nothing in the world was so desirable as to have that revolver in his own hands—it was his dream come true. But, for reasons ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... realised later on that her daughter had escaped much trouble, as in 1836 the Balzac family threatened M. de Montzaigle with a lawsuit on the subject of his son, who was left to wander about Paris without food, shoes, or clothes. We cannot suppose that any one with such sketchy views of the duties of a father could have been a particularly satisfactory husband; but perhaps Laurence died before she had time to discover M. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... stories—which has been reproduced from a magazine or magazines, is treated as if it were a novelty. It is a sound and benevolent convention, because the stuff of magazines only receives at best a very sketchy notice. Miss May Sinclair, however, is apparently prepared; to risk the loss of any advantage to be derived from it, for her collection of short and middle-sized stones republished under the title of the first of them, The Judgment of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... start and to which they return. Doubtless an extended stay in the country would show him that problems of administration and possibilities of development could be even more absorbing; but such things are very sketchy to ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Our sketchy tour of Windsor Castle has hitherto been told in visits far between, perhaps, if not few, for the interesting character of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... the boys arrived, and I shall never forget Dredge's first appearance on the scene. You know the Lanfears always lived very simply. That summer they had gone to Buzzard's Bay, in order that Professor Lanfear might be near the Biological Station at Wood's Holl, and they were picnicking in a kind of sketchy bungalow without any attempt at elegance. But Galen Dredge couldn't have been more awe-struck if he'd been suddenly plunged into a Fifth Avenue ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against the low doorway, and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel Lanfear's foot, and became hopelessly ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... hours, without intermission, every day. Then the passion of love infects them; the pleasant choir breaks up, and its ten thousand members scatter wide over the surrounding fields and pasture lands. During courtship the male has a feeble, sketchy music, but his singing is then accompanied with very charming love antics. His circlings about the hen-bird; his numberless advances and retreats, and little soarings above her when his voice swells with importunate passion; his fluttering lapses back to earth, where he ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... a sketchy sort of arrangement, but it worked very well. Sometimes Peter provided the meals which Emma cooked, for he was expert at snaring, crabbing, shrimping, and fishing. Sometimes the spirit moved Cassius to lay an offering of a side of bacon, a bushel of potatoes, a ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... of the little verandah roof sagged crazily. Over it clambered a vine. Close about drew the forest. That was it: the forest! The "homestead" was a mere hovel; the cultivation a patch; the improvements sketchy and ancient; but the forest, become valuable for lumber where long it had been considered available only for shakes, furnished the real motive for this desperate attempt to rehabilitate old and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... meditation that Byron excelled. "Description," as he said in Don Juan, "was his forte." His manner is indeed peculiar, and is almost unequalled; rapid, sketchy, full of vigour; the selection happy, the strokes few and bold. In spite of the reverence which we feel for the genius of Mr. Wordsworth we cannot but think that the minuteness of his descriptions often diminishes their effect. He ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sets of drawings. The ones for us can be sketchy, and need not have too much exactitude of design. We know what we're doing—at ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were always sketchy. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... that show this slovenliness, are, we should suspect, in those parts merely sketched in—a method agreeable to his practice, which was to work upon and upon, glazing, and heaping colour—a method which required, in the first instance, a loose and undefined sketchy manner. Some few years ago there was a picture by him exhibited at the Institution, Pall-Mall—dead game, wonderfully painted, and evidently unfinished; a boy in the background was, as we might term it, daubed in in a very slovenly manner, and with a greenish colour, evidently for the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... was tempered by the happenings of the first week. Doubtless he would have made a desperate struggle, but it would have been useless. Not even conversion can make new habits overnight, and in his first two years at college Joe had been known to teachers and students alike as distinctly a sketchy student, wholly inexpert ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... of Calabar is a fine type of the secret society. It is exceedingly well developed in its details, not sketchy like Isyogo, nor so red-handed as Poorah. Unfortunately, however, I cannot speak with the same amount of knowledge of Egbo as I could ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... your good letter. By 'good' I mean many things—well done as a bit of sketchy composition, a welcome letter, kindly also in spirit, cheering, timely, telling of things that interest the receiver, one, too, having the flavor of the household whence it comes, altogether a good letter. I had one also from Her; which I brutally answered with a preachment—in pencil, too, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... brief and very sketchy analysis of German femininity in the war, I reiterate views expressed on previous visits to Germany, that German women are not standing the anxiety of the war as well as ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... with no earthly resemblance to Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is an unfinished sketch rather than a portrait, but a sketch that would not too shamefully have discredited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most modern fineness and subtlety in Emma; and, for all its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar certainty of touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, the revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of means, scenes, passages, phrases, apparently slight, are charged with the most intense psychological ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... missed your vocation," she said, while her eyes narrowed and her upper lip shortened into a delightful smile. "You were born to be a schoolmaster, a veritable pedagogue and terror of illiterate youth. You love to correct. And my rather sketchy English gives you an opportunity of which I observe you are by no means slow to take advantage. You care infinitely more for the manner of saying, than for the thing said. Whereas I"—she broke off abruptly, and her face straightened, became serious, almost severe, again. "Do you see who ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... part of the tour, which occupied in all about two months, was performed on horseback, and with only two attendants. A pleasantly-written account of some of the experiences encountered during this invigorating holiday may be found in "The Emigrant," a light, sketchy, and most readable little volume put forth by Sir Francis ten years afterwards. Soon after his return to the Seat of Government his self-complacency received a check in the form of a despatch from the Colonial Office, ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... brought with them and illustrated, has never ceased to work powerfully among our people. Why not bring the children into direct contact with these characters in the intermediate grades, not by short and sketchy stories, but by full life pictures of these men and their surroundings? We have not been wholly lacking in literary artists who have worked up a part of these materials into a more durable and acceptable form for our schools. We need ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... such as exist for themselves and require a greater perfection; he was therefore always ready and at hand when the publishers needed larger and smaller copper-plates for any work: thus the vignettes to Winckelmann's first writings were etched by him. But he often made only very sketchy drawings, to which Geyser knew very well how to adapt himself. His figures had throughout something general, not to say ideal. His women were pleasing and agreeable, his children /naive/ enough; only he could not ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... Phil surmised that she had enjoyed the experience; but Lois added no details to her hasty picture. Lois did not trouble herself greatly with details; everything with her was sketchy ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... admirably; and a good biography, marred only by a lack of sympathy and by occasional inaccuracy in details, is William G. Sumner's Andrew Jackson (rev. ed., 1899). Of older biographies, the most important is James Parton's Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (1861). This work is sketchy, full of irrelevant or unimportant matter, and uncritical; but for a half-century it was the repository from which historians and biographers chiefly drew in dealing with Jackson's epoch. John H. Eaton's Life of Andrew Jackson (1842) describes Jackson's earlier ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... be absolutely positive at this stage of the game? Eh? Our evidence is sketchy, I admit. It is not as solidly based as our other reconstructions of his background, but it appears that he thinks of symbols as being unable to convey much information. The pattern for his raids, for instance, indicates that his knowledge of ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Rubens' method, and which strictly belongs to his colouring, from which arises what may be not improperly designated flimsiness, that is, the leaving too much of the first getting in of his picture, the first transparent sketchy brown. If in some respect this gives force to the more solid parts, by the contrast of the transparent with the opaque, yet is it rather a flashy force, in which the means become too visible; an entire substance is wanted; we come too immediately to the bare ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... clear,—but the close interpretation of these conditions, to enable us to predict the extent of one of these deposits, or to explain its presence in one place and absence in another, is in an early and sketchy stage. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... set in, it occurred to the authorities that it would be a waste of labour to continue to train some few million good men for a shooting season that might never re-open, and the weekly programme became rather a sketchy affair till some brain more brilliant than the rest conceived the idea of giving a good sound education in the arts of peace to this promising and waiting multitude. The idea was joyfully accepted, and gradually filtered through its authorised channels, suffering ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... least, I intimated that I was a lonely old affectionate man with this and that to offer, and she intimated that that wasn't enough. It was all—" he laughed—"It was all extremely sketchy!" ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too thin and sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full fields have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand, and quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very poet's flower, I thought; not fit for ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... as Marta and Pantalis. Nilsson had fixed the ideal of Helen in Europe and New York, and it is she, I believe, who started the questionable practice of having one performer impersonate both Marguerite and the classic Queen. Boito has given us so little of Goethe's Gretchen in his delightful, but sketchy, opera that it does not make much difference how the part is acted; but Helen is a character that seemed cut to the very form of Nilsson—regal in beauty and carriage, soul-moving in voice, serene in pose and gesture. She fitted perfectly into ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of our passage through this upper end of Red Canyon we refer to our journal: sketchy notes jotted down, usually in the evening just before retiring, by the light of a camp-fire, or the flickering flame of a candle. Under the date of Friday, September the 15th, we ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... parts of his work. But this lack of a fixed specific style spread likewise to other forms of composition; Schiller's drama became too rhetorical; Friedrich Rueckert's lyric poetry too prosaically didactic; that of Annette von Droste-Huelshoff often too obscure and sketchy. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... She knew how other girls had gone out with Willis in his smart car and come back to give rather sketchy accounts of the evening's pleasure jaunt. Her friend Linda had tried it once and remarked later that Willis was some speed and that Madeline had the right hunch to ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... crust, the precursors of Atlantic, Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the individual to the common-weal, of "Wealth against Commonwealth," that went with that. While most men had to go propertyless in a world that was privately owned, the assertion of equality was an empty lie. For the rest, primordial Socialism was entirely sketchy and experimental. It was wild as the talk of school-boys. It disregarded the most obvious needs. It did not provide for any principle of government, or for the maintenance of collective thought and social determination, it offered no safeguards and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... bound them as the night before, but an icy gale like that which swept from the open river would have frozen through arctic furs. Notwithstanding all this, his spirits were lighter than usual. The scene he had left at home floated on before his eyes, and transfused itself with the black, sketchy trees against the sky and blent with the ragged barbs of smoke that depended from cottage chimneys. The wind had been boisterous enough, and would have torn it away on a cantering jaunt not many minutes ago, but, surcharged as it was now with blinding snow, it had its own ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... of Konassa, and there are several other busy seaports we know of. But no one in any of them ever heard of navigation out of sight of land, let alone trying it. There's nothing but pilotage, and even that's pretty sketchy. And, there's this thing." He crossed to the workbench, picked up the sword, and stroked ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... Sir Penthony says, who has not anticipated so ready an acceptance of his advice, getting between him and the door. "In my opinion she has retired to her room by this; and it really would be rather sketchy, you know,—eh?" ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... for these facts, and resolutely grappling with the many other difficulties of the task, we shall now attempt to exhibit what we consider were the real teachings of Plato in relation to the fate of the soul. This exposition, sketchy as it is, and open to question as it may be in some particulars, is the carefully weighed result of earnest, patient, and repeated study ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... every eligible man in the place. It was not a healthy thought, but it was the offspring of sheer vexation, and Helen experienced her second temptation that day when de la Vere, the irresistible "Reginald" of Mrs. Vavasour's sketchy reminiscences, came and asked her ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... of interest she paid was of course high, because of the uncertainty of her security, and the arithmetic of lovers is often sketchy and optimistic. Yet they had very glorious times after that return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were still old-fashioned. ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... once thoroughly British, quite un-American and a little difficult to follow. It had a quality that at first he could not define at all. Compared with anything he had ever seen in his life before it struck him as being—he found the word at last—sketchy. For instance, he was introduced to nobody except his hostess, and she was indicated to him by a mere wave of Mr. Britling's hand. "That's Edith," he said, and returned at once to his car to put it away. Mrs. Britling was a tall, freckled woman ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... learning to ride. He said that a friend had lent it to him—a man in Hanbridge whose mother had given up riding on account of stoutness—but who exactly this friend was Rachel knew not, Louis' information being characteristically sketchy and incomplete; and with his air of candour and good humour he had a strange way of warding off questions; so that already Rachel had grown used to a phrase which she would utter only in her mind, "I don't like ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Two hours later—after a sketchy meal served by trembling-handed servants—the trio were seated in the music-room. Over and over, a dozen times, they had reviewed their position, from all angles. And they had come to the conclusion that the sanest thing to do was to wait in comfortable ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... The sketchy nature of Japanese poetry, especially in this five-line stanza, may be illustrated further by two poems quoted by Prof. B. H. Chamberlain in his "Things ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the veranda. Blue Bonnet wished there were rather fewer people there; it was tiresome to make explanations before such an audience. Besides, she did not know the visitor's name,—introductions had been of a rather sketchy sort that day. Suddenly she made up her mind: she would explain nothing just then, and trust to her grandmother's ready tact to understand ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... reproduction, he glanced at first casually over the dozen or more sketches and studies on the succeeding pages. Many of them represented studies of women's heads and figures, with little or no attempt to obtain a likeness. Some were half-draped, showing in a sketchy way the long graceful lines of the half-nude figure, of bare shoulders and breasts, of gauze-like fabrics that but illy concealed impressive charms. Suddenly his eyes narrowed and a sharp exclamation fell from his lips. He bent closer to the pages and studied ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... been living in those days when it first beamed upon mankind that the earth was round, I am sure I should have said, "We know now the bounds of the earth: there are no interminable plains joined to the regions of the sun, allowing of indefinite sketchy outlines at the edges of maps. That little creature man will immediately begin to think that his world ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps |
