"Bigness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he spoke, with its vivid glare showing to Cleggett the enemy magnified to a portentous bigness against a background of chaotic night. Two or three of them stood, leaning keenly forward; several of the others had dropped to one knee; the rifle discharge had checked the rush, and they also were waiting for ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... just the same—only different—like a portrait in a newspaper that somebody had tried to copy. All around the inner edges of his bigness it was as though someone had sketched the outline of a slimmer man.—It ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... atmosphere of bigness about the Court of the Universe, created not only by the architectural features, but by the symbolism of the final meeting of the Nations of the World, made possible by the completion of ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... than her convenience; at every sudden whirl responsive to the word of command she was in momentary fear of being flung beneath the swiftly trampling hoofs of the horses on either side of her, and despite her recoil from the bigness and bluffness and presumable bloody-mindedness of the two troopers beside her she was sensible of their sympathy as they took heed of the instability with which she bounced about, perched up side-wise on a military saddle. Indeed, one was moved to ask her if she would not prefer ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Barnaby True could see him very plain, the moonlight shining full upon him—a large, stout gentleman with a round red face, and clad in a fine laced coat of red cloth. Amidship of the boat was a box or chest about the bigness of a middle-sized traveling trunk, but covered all over with cakes of sand and dirt. In the act of passing, the gentleman, still standing, pointed at it with an elegant gold-headed cane which he held in his hand. "Are you ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... the government of a mayor and aldermen, and may pass for a place of wealth, considering the bigness of it. Here, we found, the merchants began to trade in the pilchard-fishing, though not to so considerable a degree as they do farther west—the pilchards seldom coming up so high eastward as Portland, and not very often ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... did," said Barby. "They beat all, for bigness and goodness both. I can't keep 'em together. There's thousands of 'em, and I mean to make Philetus eat 'em for supper—such potatoes and milk is good enough for him, or anybody. The cow has gained on her milk wonderful, Fleda, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... more gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms. The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice of the river. I am not specially attracted by the people; but they are courteous; the women very ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... successors a great, consolidated railroad enterprise, skillfully and successfully administered. The great weakness of Commodore Vanderbilt and his associates, and of those who later imitated his work was their fundamental conception of the railroad as a private venture. Success consisted in bigness, great profits, crushing or buying out competitors, and administering the business for the best good of the few owners, regardless of the interests of the region through which the railway passed. Vanderbilt and many of his contemporaries ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... I thought I did about the bigness of London, I found that morning that I never had any idea of what an everlasting town it is. It is like a skein of tangled yarn—there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Going in this way from Nelson's Monument out into the country, it was amazing to see how long it took to get there. ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... could hardly be said that this Corsair was a handsome man, still he had fine Corsair's eyes, full of expression and determination, eyes that could look love and bloodshed almost at the same time; and then he had those manly properties,—power, bigness, and apparent boldness,—which belong to a Corsair. To be hurried about the world by such a man, treated sometimes with crushing severity, and at others with the tenderest love, not to be spoken to for one fortnight, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... the Ace," once bound by oath to succour one another in peril or poverty, were long ago dispersed; one or two had died; one or two had gone to live elsewhere; the others were disappeared into the smoky bigness of the heavy city. Of the brethren, there remained within his present cognizance only his old enemy, the red-haired Kinney, now married to Janie Sharon, and Charlie Johnson, who, out of deference to his mother's memory, had passed the Amberson Mansion one day, when George ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... a bewildering Irish compound of laughter and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a thick cap. He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated, excitable, a type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost coarse, sometimes, but he had all a big man's tenderness and sweetness, and everyone liked him. Susan and he quarreled with and criticized each other, William imitating her little affectations of speech and manner, Susan reviling ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... middle classes, and make such Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are told they have [41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their hands and sinews. But teaching ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... figures present—or to figures past—or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just as interesting to you, or ought to be—as if it was a million times as big. There is no more sublimity—per se—in ground sloped at an angle of forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture of a rock, than in a horizontal one. ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... building of the Canadian Pacific until it was within one hundred days of completion. Perhaps, in view of the Grand Trunk's record, it was as well that the men on this side of the Atlantic were to be thrown on their own resources from the start, and given the chance for bigness which ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... and "an air of noble dignity never left his manly features, in either defeat or battle." On following his brilliant career as a commander one realizes as never before, that "intellect and not numbers rule the world; liberty-loving ideals and not force overmaster bigness; and that truth and right, when supported by strong and worthy purposes, always ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... against the precious keg, and perhaps the bigness and quietness of everything had really rendered him unconscious. But he did not know he was asleep until the Viking man woke him up by kindly shaking ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... the Word will not stifle and gag them up—I speak now for amplification's sake—the view of those who are saved shall. There comes an incestuous person to the bar, and pleads, That the bigness of his sins was a bar to his receiving the promise. But will not his mouth be stopped as to that, when Lot, and the incestuous Corinthians, shall be set before him (Gen ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... nearer, I thought it to be a white bowl of a prodigious height and bigness; and when I came up to it I touched it, and found it to be very smooth. I went round to see if it was open on any side, but saw it was not, and that there was no climbing up to the top of it, it was so smooth. It was at least ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... this valley, I perceived it was strewed with diamonds, some of which were of a surprising bigness. I took pleasure in looking upon them; but shortly saw at a distance such objects as greatly diminished my satisfaction, namely, a great number of serpents, so monstrous, that the least of them was capable of swallowing an elephant. ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... alert reporters day and night in the field. The old-world papers do not compete with those of the new in the matter of quantity of news. But just here comes in one of the chief faults of the American journal, one of the besetting sins of the American people,—their well-known love of "bigness," their tendency to ask "How much?" rather than "Of what kind?" There is a lack of discrimination in the daily bill of fare served up by the American press that cannot but disgust the refined and tutored palate. It is only the boor who demands a savoury ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... panic was growing beyond her control. They passed once more between the broken waves and entered the still bay with its border of flowering earth. There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie sat gazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedly distressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight, hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmatic governess; it was in contradiction ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... small the boy that gazes up so wistfully. Are they gods, as all but his own nation believed? No,—"the work of Thy fingers," "which Thou hast ordained." The consciousness of God as their Maker delivers from the temptation of confounding bigness with greatness, and wakes into new energy that awful sense of personality which towers above all the stars. He is a babe and suckling—is that a trace of the early composition of the psalm?—still he knows that out of his lips, already beginning to break into song, and out ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child; now she felt her own inferiority. Was she to stand babbling to him about hallucinations and gold plates? ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... good literary account of it: of course he cannot speak from personal experience. He begins with the Ajaib al-Makhlukat by Al- Kazwini (ob. A.H. 674 A.D. 1274) who tells us that the bird builds in the desert a very small nest (whence the Hadis, "Whoso shall build to Allah a mosque, be it only the bigness of a Kata's nest, the Lord shall edify for him a palace in Paradise"); that it abandons its eggs which are sometimes buried in sand, and presently returns to them (hence the saying, "A better guide than the Kata"); that it watches at night (?) and that it frequents highways to reconnoitre ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... that we had plenty of matter for talk now, since the raiding of our village seemed by long odds the greatest event that had really ever occurred in the world; for although these dull peasants may have thought they recognized the bigness of some of the previous occurrences that had filtered from the world's history dimly into their minds, the truth is that they hadn't. One biting little fact, visible to their eyes of flesh and felt in their own personal vitals, became at once more prodigious to them than the grandest remote ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... with the flurried meekness of her apologies to Peter senior. "Here you've saved all my dear old things I had in the days before everything was big. I never can get used to it, and I never will now. It's the bigness, I guess, that's seemed—somehow—to take your pa and Ena away from me—long ago. But I've got you. And you let me come here. So I am happy. I'm a real happy woman, Petie. And I want you to be happy the way ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... penned It down, until at last it came to be, For length and breadth, the bigness ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... fire. Now Jack of Hilton is a little hollow image of brass, of about twelve inches high, kneeling upon his left knee, and holding his right hand upon his head, having a little hole in the place of the mouth, about the bigness of a great pin's head, and another in the back about two-thirds of an inch diameter, at which last hole it is filled with water, it holding about four pints and a quarter, which when set to a strong fire, evaporates after the same manner ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... conformity with my public declarations, though some blanks are filled up. I have in truth thought it my duty, without in the least committing myself or anyone else, to think through the subject as well as I could, being equally convinced of its urgency and its bigness.' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... Crow's Foot, having demonstrated the bigness of his heart, and received in return a tangible proof of the corresponding size of the trader's, addresses his braves, cautioning them against violence or rough behaviour. The braves, standing ready with their peltries, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... a little above the average height ... with the deep chest and deep voice that always go with the born leader of men; the bigness and strength of the hands ... the clear eye and broad, firm, and expressive mouth, and the massive head that suggests irresistibly a combination of Napoleon ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... rods were rare and attracted an unreasonable amount of attention. One Forquer, who was Lincoln's opponent, had recently rodded his house—and every one knew it. This man's speech consisted partly in ridiculing his opponent, his bigness, his awkwardness, his dress, his youth. Lincoln heard him through without interruption and then took ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... during this talk," said Packard afterward, "that I first realized the potential bigness of the man. One could not help believing he was in deadly earnest in his consecration to the highest ideals of citizenship. He had already made his mark in the New York Legislature. He was known as a fighter who dared to come out in the open and depend upon the backing of ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... to my Lord Crewe's, where one Mr. Templer (an ingenious man and a person of honour he seems to be) dined; and, discoursing of the nature of serpents, he told us some in the waste places of Lancashire do grow to a great bigness, and do feed upon larkes, which they take thus:—They observe when the lark is soared to the highest, and do crawl till they come to be just underneath them; and there they place themselves with their mouth uppermost, and there, ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... I admit that any large corporation built up by the legitimate processes of business, by economy, by efficiency, is natural; and I am not afraid of it, no matter how big it grows. It can stay big only by doing its work more thoroughly than anybody else. And there is a point of bigness,—as every business man in this country knows, though some of them will not admit it,—where you pass the limit of efficiency and get into the region of clumsiness and unwieldiness. You can make your combine so extensive that you can't digest it into a single system; ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... because we never join it to the verb; yet there are three instances in which it becomes such, before a noun: viz., to-day, to-night, to-morrow. If it is a "particle," so is any other preposition, as well as every small and invariable word. If it is a "little word," the whole bigness of a preposition is unquestionably found in it; and no "word" is so small but that it must belong to some one of the ten classes called parts of speech. If it is a "sign of the infinitive," because it ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Maizeaux, describes him thus: "M. de St. Evremond had blue, lively, and sparkling eyes, a large forehead, thick eyebrows, a handsome mouth, and a sneering physiognomy. Twenty years before his death, a wen grew between his eye-brows, which in time increased to a considerable bigness. He once designed to have it cut off, but as it was no ways troublesome to him, and he little regarded that kind of deformity, Dr. Le Fevre advised him to let it alone, lest such an operation should be attended with dangerous symptoms in a man of his age. He would often make merry ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... large, and his wealth at this time exceeding great. And because the city of Moscow is the chiefest of all the rest, it seemeth of itself to challenge the first place in this discourse. Our men say, that in bigness it is as great as the city of London, with the suburbs thereof. There are many and great buildings in it, but, for beauty and fairness, nothing comparable to ours. There are many towns and villages also, but built out of order and ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt
... primitive in form, it deals essentially with elemental moods and ideals. Epical poetry is poetic not because it is metrical and conformative to rhythmical standards,—though it usually is both,—but it is poetry because of the high sweep of its emotional outlook, the bigness of its thought, the untamed passion of its language, and the musical ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... dolorous effects. Yet not as it had done in the East, where, if any bled at the nose, it was a manifest sign of inevitable death; nay, but in men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, after awhile, the ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... out on the mail sacks, his ears unlatched, listening for the sound of the night city editor's bell, or his gruff "Say, you!" his mind kept reverting to their bigness and wide, all embracing, protecting arms. A letter from Jonathan received that morning, and still tucked away in his inside pocket, had ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... There was nothing of the cad or snob about him, and his short season of adversity had rubbed all the little crudities off his character, leaving him a man that the majority of both sexes would admire: women for his bigness, his gentleness, his fine brown moustache—and for his wealth; men, because he was a ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... ever known—and by that I don't mean in height— for I have seen men with a greater number of physical inches. Inches, somehow, have very little to do with the impression—and so has muscle, strong as yours is. It is simple bigness that I am talking about, and it was the first thing I noticed ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... head. "It is not because I feel it an ordinary experience, Nona, but because so much has happened I am overpowered by the bigness of it. Really, when we got safely away from the fort, the battle, or at least my share in it, was only about to begin. We had gone a few miles into the country, when General Alexis became desperately ill. Unless he could have immediate attention ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... you know, she has a strange look of you? When I was half off my head I used to mix you up together. She has such a generous and holy bigness—the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed plank, The suburb of their straw-built citadel, New rubbed with balm, expatiate, and confer Their state-affairs: so thick the airy crowd Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless—like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of his presence was power and bigness, not the good-natured size that is hulking and awkward, but bigness that is elegant and fine-fibered and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... square farm-homesteads, white, red-roofed, with their out-buildings, stood naked amid the lands, without screen or softening. There was something big and exposed about it all. No more the cosy English ambushed life, no longer the cosy littleness of the landscape. A bigness—and nothing to shelter the unshrinking spirit. It was all exposed, exposed to the sweep of plain, to the high, strong sky, and to human gaze. A kind of boldness, an indifference. Aaron was impressed and ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... are we going to dress?" asked Amy. Nina, instantly diverted, suggested that they go in. Nina's awkward bigness and Amy's mousy neutral tones were as well displayed in one garment as another, but both girls debated over pinks and blues, crepes and mulls, every evening, as if the world was watching them alone. Harriet lingered ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... the critics of such things find plenty of fault with St. Paul's; and even I could see that its bigness was a little prosy, that it suggested the historic rather than the poetic muse; yet, for all that, I could never look at it without a profound emotion. Viewed coolly and critically, it might seem like a vast specimen of Episcopalianism in architecture. Miltonic ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... is his corpulence and the exterior marks of good living which he carries about him, thus 'turning his vices into commodity'. He accounts for the friendship between the Prince and Poins, from 'their legs being both of a bigness'; and compares Justice Shallow to 'a man made after supper of a cheese-paring'. There cannot be a more striking gradation of character than that between Falstaff and Shallow, and Shallow and Silence. It ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Jack told us, we should reach the Indian Settlement betimes that Day; about Noon, we pass'd by several fair Savanna's, very rich and dry; seeing great Copses of many Acres that bore nothing but Bushes, about the Bigness of Box-trees; which (in the Season) afford great Quantities of small Black-berries, very pleasant Fruit, and much like to our Blues, or Huckle-berries, that grow on Heaths in England. Hard by the Savanna's we found the ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... sense of this disproportion between size and sense which barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half in jest and half in earnest, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... The bigness of Texas is evident from a cursory examination of the map. But its effect upon the people of that state is not generally known. It is about six hundred miles from Brownsville, at the bottom of the map, to Dallas, which is several hundreds of miles from the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... she tore the letter into a thousand half-pence] [i.e. into a thousand pieces of the same bigness.] This is farther explained by a passage in As you ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... that there fell not so much as one grain to the ground. As he went from the church, they brought him, upon a dray drawn by oxen, a heap of paternosters of Sanct Claude, every one of them being of the bigness of a hat-block; and thus walking through the cloisters, galleries, or garden, he said more in turning them over than sixteen hermits would have done. Then did he study for some paltry half-hour with his eyes fixt upon his book; but as the comic saith, his mind was ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... well-cover'd in, the middle walk at the top was, Which was ascended by steps of rough flat pieces constructed. And within it were hanging fine chasselas and muscatels also, And a reddish-blue grape, of quite an exceptional bigness, All with carefulness planted, to give to their guests after dinner. But with separate stems the rest of the vineyard was planted, Smaller grapes producing, from which the finest wine made is. So she constantly mounted, enjoying in prospect the autumn. And the festal day, when the neighbourhood ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... possessed no distinction of parts (and hence filled no space), a group of even a thousand atoms would not differ in extension from a single atom, and the different kinds of extension—minuteness, shortness, bigness, length, &c.—would never emerge. If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the atoms also have distinct sides, they have parts and are made up of those parts, and those parts again are made up of their parts, and so on in ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... were not altogether unlike in appearance. They were both tall and well covered with flesh, and there was a family resemblance in their features. But the Squire's bigness and ruddiness were those of a man who took much exercise in the open air, the Rector's of a man physically indolent, who lived too much ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... a minute's space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind, a little devil not an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite through the bars! He was soon taught better manners. All the snakes were curious, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... remember one week, traveling through the Mississippi Valley, stopping every night in some town that had something which was advertised as the biggest in the world. On Friday I reached a sleepy little village which seemed the picture of contented mediocrity. Here, thought I, I shall find no bigness to molest me or make me afraid. But when I sat down to write a letter on the hotel stationery I was confronted with the statement, "This is the biggest little hotel ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of Douglas at this point in his career is perfectly clear. To span the continent with States and Territories, to create an ocean-bound republic, has often seemed a gross, materialistic ideal. Has a nation no higher destiny than mere territorial bigness? Must an intensive culture with spiritual aims be sacrificed to a vulgar exploitation of physical resources? Yet the ends which this strenuous Westerner had in view were not wholly gross and materialistic. To create the body of a great American Commonwealth ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Cove. It was a finger of the sea thrust straight into the land, a finger three hundred yards long, forty yards wide, with an entrance so narrow that a man could heave a sounding lead across it, and that entrance so masked by a rock about the bigness of a six-room house that one holding the channel could touch the rock with a pike pole as he passed in. There was a mud bottom, twenty-foot depth at low tide, and a little stream of cold fresh water brawling in at the head. A cliff ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... out of a name like that, especially when it had got into their lives through Uncle Arthur. Mr. Twist had never heard of the Clouston Sacks, which made Anna-Rose still more distrustful. She wasn't in the least encouraged when he explained the bigness of America and that nobody in it ever knew everybody—she just said that everybody had heard of Mr. Roosevelt, and her heart was too doubtful within her even to mind being told, as he did immediately tell her within ear-shot of Anna-Felicitas, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... my life—ends it as surely as it did hers," Chris said, quietly. "Just now—well, I don't see ahead—just now. After awhile I believe she'll come back to me—her sweetness and goodness and bigness—for Alice was the biggest woman, and the finest, that I ever knew; and then I'll try to live again—just as she would have had me. And meanwhile, I try to comfort myself that I tried to show her, in whatever clumsy way I could, ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... discern'd else that I was strangely overjoyed with it, and earnest to have it; for though the poor fellow made what haste he could to untie his bag, I did nothing but chide him for being so slow. Last I had it, and, in earnest, I know not whether an entire diamond of the bigness on't would have pleased me half so well; if it would, it must be only out of this consideration, that such a jewel would make me rich enough to dispute you with Mrs. Chambers, and perhaps make your father like ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... says Mr. Gladstone, 'I recited the leading particulars to my able and intelligent friend Cardwell, not in the cabinet but then holding office as president of the board of trade. He was so bewildered and astounded at the bigness of the scheme, that I began to ask myself, Have I a right to ask my colleagues to follow me amidst all these rocks and shoals? In consequence I performed a drastic operation upon the plan, and next day I carried to Lord Aberdeen ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... somewhat Tall, exceeding the meane, with a proportionable bigness to become it, but no way inclining to Corpulency: of an exact Straightnesse of the whole Body, and a perfect Symmetry in every part thereof. He was of a Sanguine constitution, which beautified his Face with a pleasant Ruddinesse, but of so Grave ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... bigness, its wildness, perhaps also its beauty, though the beauties of the desert land do not always appeal to alien eyes. She felt its bigness and its wildness; and she who had lived the cramped life of the town resented both, because she had no previous experience by which to measure ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... hours dragged along. The sun had already passed the zenith, the barbecue-fires were dying out, on the western sky-line rested a cloud in bigness like to a man's hand and of the blackness of night itself. Would they ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... death of the Duke of Lauderdale, says—His heart seemed quite spent: There was not left above the bigness of a walnut of firm substance: The rest was spongy, liker the lungs than ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... they have the merriest of times while they can, and when the governess, Death, summons them to bed, they obey her with unsurprised quietness. It sends the mercury of one's optimism rising to see the way they do it. I search my mind to find the bigness of motive which supports them, but it forever evades me. These lads are not the kind who philosophise about life; they're the sort, many of them, who would ordinarily wear corduroys and smoke a cutty pipe. I suppose ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... was the situation on the face of it, nevertheless it was extremely matter-of-fact in the handling; which is the way sometimes with incredible situations; as if, since we know instinctively that we cannot rise unprepared to the bigness of its possibilities, we keep our feet planted steadfastly on the ground and refuse to rise at all. And afterward, perhaps, we look back and wonder how it ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... things that Allah hath made fear the son of Adam.[FN265]" The fisherman ceased not to divert himself with the marvels of the deep, till they came to a high mountain and fared on beside it. Suddenly, he heard a mighty loud cry and turning, saw some black thing, the bigness of a camel or bigger, coming down upon him from the liquid mountain and crying out. So he asked his friend, "What is this, O my brother?"; and the Merman answered, "This is the Dandan. He cometh in search of me, seeking to devour me; so cry out at him, O my brother, ere he reach us; else he will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... princess of the dervish's prayers?" To which the first answered, "You do not know, it seems, that she is possessed by a genie. But I well know how this good dervish may cure her. He has a black cat in his convent, with a white spot at the end of her tail, about the bigness of a small piece of Arabian money; let him only pull seven hairs out of the white spot, burn them, and smoke the princess's head with the fumes. She will not only be immediately cured, but be so safely delivered from the genie that he will never ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... his profession scientifically, we find him as soon as he was old enough to think for himself, or make others listen to him, "amending the great errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking observations, studying the form of the earth, and convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and studying the necessities of his country, and discovering the remedies ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... One of the Witches confessed, too, that the Devil had sent her to torment the Minister, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and strike it into his Head, but it would not enter very deep. They confessed also that the Devil gives them a Beast about the bigness and shape of a young Cat, which they call a Carrier, and that he gives them a Bird too as big as a Raven, but white. And these two Creatures they can send anywhere, and wherever they come they take away all sorts ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... high up in the canvas instead of low down; the consequence is that compositions so treated not only lose in grandeur and truth, but appear to be toppling over, or give the impression of smallness rather than bigness. Indeed, they look like small pictures enlarged, which is a very different thing from a large design. So that, in order to see them properly, we should mount a ladder to get upon a level with their horizon line (see Fig. ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... suddenly realized her own smallness. She felt almost overpowered with the bigness of what the man's words had shown her. It was wonderful to her the thought of this—this "scallawag." The word flashed through her mind, and with it came an even fuller realization of Mrs. Ransford's stupidity. The man's ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... little to indicate that it recognizes the urgency and bigness and significance of the momentous situation which ...
— High Finance • Otto H. Kahn
... and spade. We must assemble for the task great mechanical contrivances. And so with our energies of will; a slight tool means a slight achievement; a huge, aggressive engine, driving on at full blast, means corresponding bigness of results. ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... for crawling together on flat tables of rock, or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports, I beheld huge slimy monsters—soft snails, as it were, of incredible bigness—two or three score of them together, making the rocks to ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... compact—a domino of tiled houses and walled gardens, dwarfed by the disproportionate bigness of the church. From the midst of the thoroughfare which divided it in half, fields and trees were visible at either end; and through the sally-port of every street there flowed in from the country a silent invasion of green grass. Bees and birds appeared to make ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spat upon me through the grille and chuckled. Now, glancing about, I espied a stone hard by about the bigness of a man's head and, laying by my staff, I wrenched the stone from where it lay and, raising it aloft, hove it with all my strength; whereon the gate crashed open so suddenly as to catch the fellow a buffet that laid him sprawling on his back, and ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... man, was the foretime until thou camest to thy dawn, and what remains is infinite on through Hades: what share is left for life but the bigness of a pinprick, and tinier than a pinprick if such there be? Little is thy life and afflicted; for not even so it is sweet, but more ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... and you keep your sluggish mountain of bones covered. A year or two ago I'd have urged you along with a stick. I used to get some work out of you then. But you think you're too big for that, now, don't you? You fancy I'm afraid of your bigness, eh? Well, do you want me to try it out? What ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... been put to bed early, with every one a crown of gold upon her head. There was in the same chamber a bed of the like bigness, and it was into this bed the Ogre's wife put the seven little boys, after which she went ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... him honoured and courted by bishops and judges, peers and commoners, by the greatest of English statesmen and the greatest of English painters. But his kingship was in him from the first. He had been anax andron even among his schoolfellows. His bigness, in more ways than one, made them call him "the great boy," and the father of one of them was astute enough even then to perceive that he would be more than that: "you call him the great boy, but take my word for it, he will one day prove a great man." The ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... metafor a little about the bigness of this buildin', so's to let foreign nations git a little clearer idee of the size ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... to shrink from any combat that was pressed on him, and on this occasion the venomous little foreigner found him most ready to oblige. It wanted but a slight jostle, an Italian oath hissed out, a few words in broken English to the effect that big men were proverbially clumsy, and that bigness and courage were not always to be found united. Stokoe knew very well who his assailant was, knew his reputation, and the slender chance the ordinary swordsman might expect to have against this foreigner's devilish skill, but his weapon was unsheathed almost ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... her hair, hesitated for some time in the choice of a necklace. There was the pearl-colored necklace—it was very pretty, but every one could tell at once that they were not genuine pearls. Real pearls of the bigness of these would be very valuable. Also there was something childish about pearls which latterly she wished to avoid. She had quite grown up now. The letting down of the last tuck in her dress marked an ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... incessantly. A new light had come over things,—"The light that never was on sea or land," he called it,—and he had worked feverishly. He saw the water and the rugged land as Uncle William saw them. Through his eyes, he painted them. They took on color and bigness—simplicity. "They will call it my third style," said the artist, smiling, as he worked. "They ought to call it the Uncle William style. I didn't do it—I shall never do it again," ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... few moments' space, So smooth the pool, so vanished every trace, It seemed that surely the fantastic pair Had been but snowy phantoms passing there. Winona hardly hoped to see them rise, But while she gazed with half-expectant eyes, The waters strangely quivered in a place About the bigness of a tipi's space, Where weirdly lighting up the hollow wave Beat a deep-glowing heart, whose pulsing ray Now faded to a rosy flush away, Now filled with fiery glare the farthest cave. A shapeless bulk arose, ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... this part; I couldn’t see before my nose, and must burst my way through by main force and ply the knife as I went, slicing the cords of the lianas and slashing down whole trees at a blow. I call them trees for the bigness, but in truth they were just big weeds, and sappy to cut through like carrot. From all this crowd and kind of vegetation, I was just thinking to myself, the place might have once been cleared, when I came on my nose ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lamely. He was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well, he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in this ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... precious stones, each tree bearing fruit of one colour and kind of jewel, and these fruits were of all colours, green and white and yellow and red and what not else of colours. Their glitterance outshone the rays of the sun in its forenoon splendour and the bigness of each jewel overpassed description; suffice it that not one of them might be found with the greatest of the kings of the world, [237] no, nor a gem half the bigness of the ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... to receive all kinds of colours, as well as Sleave-Silk; yet when this Silken Flax is twisted into threads, it quite loseth its former luster, and becomes as plain and base a thread to look on, as one of the same bigness, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... always forwards—are full of ravings about automobiles and scenery and pictures. Pictures!" Alec pointed to the meadow ahead of them where a million fireflies flashed their tiny lanterns, "—I wish he could see this! And I wish—I wish I could make him understand the bigness of it all. And how tired I am of sitting still and letting other people do things. I want to live." The boy's voice trembled ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... early morning of the 1st of July. This is the crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish tetter, like sulphur or the rancid fat on meat. The inside has rather the ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... frowned down at Dal. Known as "Tiger" to everyone but the professors, the young man's nickname fit him well. He was big, even for an Earthman, and his massive shoulders and stubborn jaw only served to emphasize his bigness. Like the other recent graduates on the platform, he was wearing the colored cuff and collar of the probationary physician, in the bright green of the Green Service of Medicine. He reached out a huge hand and gently rubbed the pink fuzz-ball ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts. No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist. Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp—a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter. And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last. Something in the attitude of the manikins—faces they have none, they are ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair—it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head—and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... her close to him. "But that's just mood. I've felt that same sensation up here—a foolish, indefinable foreboding. All the out-of-the-way places of the earth produce that effect, if one is at all imaginative. It's the bigness of everything, and the eternal stillness. I've caught myself listening—when I knew there was nothing to hear. Makes a fellow feel like a small boy left by himself in some big, gloomy building—awesome. Sure, I know it. It would be hard on the nerves to live here always. ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in his turn, Thus spoke in tones of deep concern:— "I happen'd through a mead to pass; The monks, its owners, were at mass; Keen hunger, leisure, tender grass, And add to these the devil too, All tempted me the deed to do. I browsed the bigness of my tongue; Since truth must out, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... regarded anything less than a whole leg of a sheep as an insult) that night, half-a-dozen slap jacks, and a trifle of mushrooms." "How big were the mushrooms?" I asked. "Oh, they was rather fine ones, mum, I won't deny: they might have been the bigness of a plate." Now even supposing them to have been perfectly wholesome, a few dozen mushrooms of that size, eaten half raw with a whole shoulder of mutton, are quite enough to my ignorant mind to account for so severe ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... within the door-frame: "'Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice I will come in to him and will sup with him,—I come to preach the everlasting gospel to every one that heareth, and all that I want here is my bigness on the floor.'" ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... his paddling, his gray eyes alert. His aloneness and the bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the only human atom, did not weigh heavily upon him. He loved this bigness and emptiness and the glory of solitude. It was middle autumn, and close to noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and warm with sunlight. ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... that I never got used to the dirty, dusty little half-civilized town there on the plateau. Even as a child I felt the intolerable difference between the place and its surroundings. Men ought to be better up there, but they aren't. They just magnify faults with the bigness of the hills around. Lots of it was romantic, lots of it ought never to be lost, the frank freedom, the vital living, the joy of uncertain victory over the dirt of the mines. It made men wild, wild to the last degree, that ever possible stumbling into gold, pure, glittering ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... of them but have chains, earrings, or collars of this metal. They had some of their arrows herewith, much like our broad arrow-heads, very workmanly made. Their chains are many hollow pieces cemented together, each piece of the bigness of one of our reeds, a finger in length, ten or twelve of them together on a string, which they wear about their necks: their collars they wear about their bodies like bandeliers a handful broad, all hollow pieces like the other, but somewhat shorter, four hundred pieces in a collar, very ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... mentioned by optic writers, whereby they will have us judge of those distances, in respect of which the breadth of the PUPIL hath any sensible bigness: And that is the greater or lesser divergency of the rays, which issuing from the visible point do fall on the PUPIL, that point being judged nearest which is seen by most diverging rays, and that remoter which is seen by less diverging ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... half-formed, needing men. Its bigness was not an accident of geography, but a pregnant fact in the consciousness of a people as wide as itself. Thousands of redmen once covered it, and it was then only a big place, not a great country. It must be a mighty race who would master those ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Ernest and Edie, when they got their own cheque for their quarter of the proceeds, they gazed in awe and astonishment at the bigness of the figure; and then they sat down and cried together like two children, with their hands ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... railway station to meet some of their guests, and drove them to the house in their carriage, watching for compliments on their district, on the rapid vegetation, on the condition of the roads in the department, on the cleanliness of the peasants' houses, on the bigness of the cattle they saw in the fields, on everything that met the eye as far as the edge ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant |
