"Crooked" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perch I crew, And would have sung much longer too, When came a crooked devil's minion, The slater 'twas in my opinion. Who after many a knock and shake Detached me wholly from my stake. My poor old heart was broke at last When from the roof he pulled me past The bells which from their station glared And on my fate in wonder stared, But vexed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... is not wont to be scorned of ladies," said Deodonato. "Am I crooked, or baseborn, or ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... The lines must necessarily pass through the points A, B, C, D, and E. But, subject to this condition, they may be varied in an infinite number of ways. For example, at a point midway between A and the edge, the line may be completed in an unlimited number of ways (straight or crooked), provided it be exactly reflected from E to the opposite edge. And similar variations may ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... a wretched thing, very crooked and wouldn't carry farther than fifteen paces at the most. However, it would send your skull flying well enough if you pressed the muzzle of it ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... many dogs lay together in the Crooked River Road House through the storm. At late bedtime of the last night came a scratching on ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... heard her cry, before I came in sight of her. She was sitting at the root of a crooked, dead tree. In front of her she held, one hand grasping each leg, what seemed to me to be an ungainly and wingless goose. All about her the ground was soft and boggy. Her clothes were muddy, her face was red, and the creature she ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... what I rose for. I'm going to name for the United States senate a clean man, one who doesn't wear either the Harley or the Ridgway brand. He's as straight as a string, not a crooked hair in his head, and every manjack of you knows it. I'm going to name a man"—he stopped an instant to smile genially around upon the circle of uplifted faces—"who isn't any friend of either one faction ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... setting forth Brahman's nature.—That Brahman is represented as having different forms, as it were, is due to its connexion with its (unreal) limiting adjuncts; just as the light of the sun appears straight or crooked, as it were, according to the nature of the things he illuminates (15).—The B/ri/hadara/n/yaka expressly declares that Brahman is one uniform mass of intelligence (16); and the same is taught in other scriptural ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... something to say against every one, but she made herself especially merry over a good king who stood quite high up in the row, and whose chin had grown a little crooked. "Well," she cried and laughed, "he has a chin like a thrush's beak!" and from that time he got the name ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... to bear the itch of impatience, for ladies were not plentiful at the dance. Before anybody had time to be astonished by his boldness, a young man was bowing before June, presenting his crooked elbow, inviting her to the dance with all the polish that could possibly lie on any one man. On account of an unusually enthusiastic clatter of heels at that moment, Dr. Slavens and Miss Horton, a few paces distant, could not hear what he ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... did not suffer now. If something that felt like an iron claw would leave off gripping her heart, she could almost have felt comfortable. Maurice must die, she knew that, but something else had died before him. She wondered if it were this same heart of hers; and then she noticed her baby's hood was crooked, and stopped at the next lamp-post to put it straight, and felt a vague sort of pity for it, when she saw its face was pinched and blue with cold, and pressed it closer to her, though she rather hoped to find it dead when she ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... place in the coach in which she had journeyed a year before; and reaching the station at Blaennos, soon arrived at Fordsea. Leaving her luggage at the station, she made her way into the well-remembered town. There was the white-flashing harbour, here was the crooked Reuben Street, and here the dear little house once occupied by her uncle, where she and Cardo had spent their happy honeymoon. Yes, she remembered it all; but she held her head up bravely, and crushed down every tender memory, hardening her heart, and setting herself to attend to the business ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... was filled with classes, demands and sick babies, but between duties and when Jane was elsewhere I snatched time to inspect eagerly every visitor who clicked a sandal or shoe-heel on the rough stones of my crooked front path. I kept up the vigil for my desired pupil until I heard one of my adoring housemaids confide to the other that she had "the great grief to relate Jenkins Sensie was getting little illness in her head. She condescended ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... generally dies early from chills and checked perspiration, which bring on 'loin-disease,' paralysis of the hind-quarters, or from a fatal swelling of the stomach, the result of bad forage. Most of the men carried knives, daggers, and crooked swords in curious leather scabbards. This practice should never be permitted in Africa. Natives entering a station should be compelled to leave their weapons with the policeman at ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... slaves of custom and established mode, With pack-horse constancy we keep the road Crooked or straight, through quags or thorny dells, True to the jingling of our leader's bells. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... River: When St Jerom's Sound was open, it bore N.W. We then steered W.S.W. by the compass for Cape Quod, which is three leagues distant from the southermost point of the sound. Between Elizabeth Bay and Cape Quod is a reach about four miles over, called Crooked Reach. At the entrance of Jerom's Sound, on the north side, we saw three or four fires, and soon afterwards perceived two or three canoes paddling after us. At noon Cape Quod bore W.S.W.1/2 W. distant four or five miles, and soon after ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... Köng,(Ger. König) - Old Norse for king. Kooken - Cake. Kop,(Ger. Kopf) - Head. Kreutzer - Frederick Creutzer, distinguished professor in the University of Heidelberg, author of a great work on "Symbolik." Krumm,(Ger.) - Crooked. Kümmel,(Ger.) - Cumin brandy. Kummel, kimmel,(Ger.) - Schnapps, dram. Hans, in his tipsy enthusiasm, ejaculates, "Oh, mein Gott in Kimmel!" instead of "im Himmel" (heaven), becoming guilty of an unconscious alliteration, and confessing, according to the proverb in vino ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... Sir John Tufton,—he married one of my Lady Wotton's heirs, who is lately dead,—and to invite me to think of it. Besides his person and his fortune, without exception, he tells me what an excellent husband he was to this lady that's dead, who was but a crooked, ill-favoured woman, only she brought him L1500 a year. I tell him I believe, Sir John Tufton could be content, I were so too upon the same terms. But his loving his first wife can be no argument to persuade me; for if he had loved her as he ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... from Samana to Crooked is to the southwest, which is the direction that the Admiral said he should steer "tomorrow evening." The distance given by him ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... explorer, with a smile at von Hofe. "I'll answer for that, Jack. Selim is satisfied, and we'll probably never hear from him or Mowbray again. Our own trip is perfectly fair and square, the authorities will know everything we do, and we can't afford to soil our fingers with anything crooked. It ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... square, and which can skip 'way across the board, 'specially when that little pawn-thing can go straight ahead two squares sometimes, and the next minute only one (except when it takes things, and then it goes crooked one square) and when that tiresome little horse tries to go all ways at once, and can jump 'round and hurdle over anybody's head, even the king's—how can you expect folks to remember? But, then, ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... of colleges for young men; of various institutions of learning; of a liberal system of common schools for the poor. All this is very well in its way. A little light is better than none when the road is crooked, and the country abounds in ruts and deep pitfalls. But the lights shed by these institutions are much obscured by the official glasses through which they shine. The building of fortifications; the manufacture of gunpowder; the use of guns and swords; the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... was a little back-room, used as a private tap-room, which had a separate entrance by a dark and crooked alley, which communicated with Fleet Street, after a circuitous passage through several by-lanes and courts. This retired temple of Bacchus had also a connexion with Benjamin's more public shop by a long and narrow entrance, conducting to the secret premises in which a few old topers ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... him as neat as a new pin this morning, and he says the Bishop will think him too buckish by half. I took him into Mammy Dempster's room to show himself. We hear Tryan is making sure of the Bishop's support; but we shall see. I would give my crooked guinea, and all the luck it will ever bring me, to have him beaten, for I can't endure the sight of the man coming to harass dear old Mr. and Mrs. Crewe in their last days. Preaching the Gospel indeed! That is the best Gospel that makes everybody ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... in despair, Her tears falling like rain: She had never spun a thread in her life, Nor ever reeled a skein! Hark! the door creaked, and through a chink, With droll wise smile and funny wink, In stepped a little quaint old man, All humped, and crooked, and ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... would have been of more service so far, than half a dozen guns, The weather is quite cold, need overcoats, & mittens. [May 22—39th day] Again we get up the cattle & start on; the land here is poor, the country flat, & grass only in places, the road is very crooked thus far; for the track runs wherever it is nearest level. We encamped on the Little blue,[40] which we had been following up for the last 3 or 4 days, it is a poor place for grass. Some teams turned back a day ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... or their usual missile, can be thrown by a skilful hand, so as to rise upon the air, and thus to deviate from the usual path of projectiles, its crooked course being, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... one white man. There had been times when he could have killed him from afar. More than once on the trail Wentworth unconsciously stood with the sights of Alex Thumb's rifle trained upon his head, or his heart. But such was his hatred that Thumb always stayed the finger that crooked upon the trigger—and bided ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... went outside. He found on the right-hand side of the house a deep quarry-pit. Round the edge of it were horns of all kinds, black horns and white horns, straight horns and crooked horns. And below in the pit he saw a young man digging for horns that were sunk in the ground. He had on a jacket made of the skin ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... flannel shirt was open at the throat, the strong muscles of which sloped beautifully into the splendid shoulders. There was strength in the clean-cut jaw of the brown face. It was an easy guess that he had wandered by paths crooked as well as straight, that he had taken the loose pleasures of his kind joyously. But when he had followed forbidden trails it had been from the sheer youthful exuberance of life in him and not from weakness. Farrar judged that the heart of the young vagabond was sound, that the ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... remembered Julio, stretching out to him her arms of light, so that he suddenly awoke to find himself surrounded by all the honors and advantages of celebrity. Fame cunningly surprises mankind on the most crooked and unexpected of roads. Neither the painting of souls nor a fitful existence full of extravagant love affairs and complicated duels had brought Desnoyers this renown. It was Glory that put him ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... grieve That, in the undertaking which has caused His absence, he hath sought, whate'er his aim, Companionship with One of crooked ways, From whose perverted soul can come no good To ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... its expert readers had exactly the same result. Evidently the public does not agree with the opinion expressed by the eccentric artist Blake in his "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," when he said: "Improvement makes strange roads; but the crooked roads without improvements are roads ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... through Konigstrasse, and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done. They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Rivas, despite the shabby habiliments in which the gaol authorities had arrayed him, looked all dignity and grandeur, while El Zorillo—the little fox, as his prison companions called him—was an epitomised impersonation of wickedness and meanness; not only crooked in soul, but in body—being in point of fact an ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... thickly wreathed with a wild growth of plants and heavily-leaved trees, the vault of a grotto revealed itself, within which, and in the distance, stood a large white figure, with aged head, long beard, crooked back, and goat's legs. To his lips he held a pandean pipe, from which the extraordinary sounds appeared to proceed. Little waterfalls leapt here and there from the rocks around, and then collected themselves ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... from catching fire from the other, one of the dishes was covered with a piece of flat glass. I next raised the quicksilver in the bell-glass up to E F, by sucking out a sufficient portion of the gas by means of the syphon G H I. After this, by means of the crooked iron wire (fig. 16.), made red hot, I set fire to the two portions of phosphorus successively, first burning that portion which was not covered with the piece of glass. The combustion was extremely rapid, attended with a very ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... through the patched panes. The snow that sifted in through the loose sash lay unmelted on the sill. Jim had a piece of old carpet about him, and coughed with almost every breath. Mrs. Wiggs's head was in her hands, and the tears that trickled through her crooked fingers hissed as they fell on the stove. It was the first time Jim had ever ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... first city-builder; and a good deal of murdering has been carried on in the interest of city-building ever since Cain's day. Narrow and crooked streets, want of proper sewerage and ventilation, the absence of forethought in providing open spaces for the recreation of the people, the allowance of intramural burials, and of fetid nuisances, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... her, and got out a sewing-box that was lined with a piece of her mother's wedding dress. And as she straightened the crooked edges she told the doctor about the wedding dress, and about the mother who had called her Harmony because of the hope in her heart. And soon, by dint of skillful listening, which is always better than questioning, the faded little woman doctor ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... blessed are you because you have believed; and more blessed are you because you are called of me to preach my gospel, to lift up your voice as with the sound of a trump, both long and loud, and cry repentance unto a crooked and perverse generation, preparing the way of the Lord for his second coming; for behold, verily, verily, I say unto you, the time is soon at hand, that I shall come in a cloud with power and great glory, and it shall be a great day at the time of my coming, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... by lightning, or in the way of a 36-pounder! Ralph Waldo is death and an entire stud of pale horses on flowery expressions and japonica-domish flubdubs. He revels in all those knock-kneed, antique, or crooked and twisted words we used all of us to puzzle our brains over in the days of our youth, and grammar lessons and rhetoric exercises. He has a penchant as strong as cheap boarding-house butter, for ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... northern cordilleras of Luzon, produce figures of stars, snakes, birds, etc., on children 7 to 9 years old. Hans Meyer describes the pattern of the Igorots. There appears to exist a great variety of symbols; for example, on the arms, straight and crooked lines crossing one another; on the breast, feather-like patterns. Least frequently he saw the so-called Burik designs, which extended in parallel bands across the breast, the back, and calves, and give to the body the appearance of a sailor's striped jacket. It is very ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... told about, although he supposed he had sifted the business to the foundation and understood it all before he made the agreement to help him. Perhaps if the man had lived he would have been able to carry his crooked dealings through and save the whole thing, with what help father had given him, and neither father nor the world would ever have found out—I don't know.—But anyway, his dying just then made the whole thing fall in ruins, and right on top of father. But even ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Ravenshaw, turning from the window with a sarcastic laugh. "Louis Lambert, indeed, and Winklemann are crack shots, and John Flett is not bad, but the others are poor hands. Mowat can only shoot straight with a crooked gun, and as for that half-cracked schoolmaster, Jan Macdonald, he would miss a barn door at fifty paces unless he were to shut his eyes and fire at random, in which case he'd have ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... Brandenburg;" looking into everything with his own eyes; making, I can well fancy, innumerable crooked things straight; reducing more and more that famishing dog-kennel of a Brandenburg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... found out about the snowball just the same," said Bob thoughtfully. "Every little bit helps when we have to fight against that crooked gang of Buck's." ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... narrow, crooked street, which is still called a lane, and which runs from the south side of the street of the Lombards towards the river, there is one of these old houses of a century past, and which, both in ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... of society is seen, "from beardless youth to crooked age," as the author asserts. Men and women of all classes and conditions, high and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned: ladies in long trains and furred gowns; knights with long peaked shoes, carrying falcons ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the other. His favorite poets were Horace and Pope; his chosen philosophers, Hobbes and Voltaire. He took his exercise and his fresh air under protest; and always walked the same distance to a yard, on the ugliest high-road in the neighborhood. He was crooked of back, and quick of temper. He could digest radishes, and sleep after green tea. His views of human nature were the views of Diogenes, tempered by Rochefoucauld; his personal habits were slovenly in the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... but our agreeable conversation was soon interrupted by the attendants, who perceived that the camel was walking in a crooked manner and came to find out what was wrong. Luckily they were slow in their movements, and the prince had just time to get back to his own box and restore the balance, before the trick ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... bend in the crooked alley which she rapidly threaded, he lost sight of her, and, running a few yards, he turned the angle just in time to see the flutter of her dress and scarf, as she disappeared through a postern, that opened in a ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... watching the crooked blue spots of the sky through the tree-tops of a Canadian forest, Francis read this letter over and over, and as he did so it seemed strange to him that he had not thought to help Katrine in this way himself. If she ever found out that he had done so she would probably never forgive him, ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... beautiful Sabbath morning desires to jeopardize his immortal soul in order to be beyond the reach of want, and ride gayly over the sunlit billows where the cruel fangs of the Excise law cannot reach him, let him cultivate a lop-sided memory, swap friends for funds and wise counsel for crooked consols. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... your going around so much with Gretzinger," he said one evening, "except that I don't like the fellow and believe he's crooked, and it may, under the circumstances, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... Haram and in Syria the Kays and Yaman (which remain to the present day) were as pugnacious as Highland Caterans. The tale bears some likeness to the accumulative nursery rhymes in "The House that Jack Built," and "The Old Woman and the Crooked Sixpence;" which find their indirect original ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... of sorcery. Legends abound everywhere throughout the Talmud. Rabbi Judah said, Rav said, "Everything that God created in the world, He created male and female. And thus he did with leviathan, the piercing serpent, and leviathan the crooked serpent. He created them male and female; but if they had been joined together they would have desolated the whole world. What then did the Holy One do? He enervated the male leviathan, and slew the female, and salted her for the righteous in the time to come, for it is said, 'And ...
— Hebrew Literature
... gold ducats, Eminence,' answered the latter, and his dirty crooked fingers poured the gold back into ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... peel, are the small salmon which run from about five or six pounds to ten pounds, are very good fish, and make handsome dishes of fish, sent to table crooked in ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... flew along an ancient Roman road. A bullock slowly lifted from the slimy mud its shaggy monstrous head, with short tufts of bristles between its crooked backward-bent horns. It turned the whites of its dull malignant eyes askance, and sniffed a heavy snorting breath into its wet ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... and the one that naturally attracted my attention, was a young lad of about my own age. He was busily engaged with an Indian crooked knife, endeavouring to make an arrow. In his eagerness to succeed, he let his knife slip, and unfortunately, cut himself very badly. At the sight of the blood,—which flowed freely, for the wound was an ugly one—the lad set up a howl of pain and alarm, which greatly startled his stoical relatives. ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... necessity of exertion. But, though Nelson saw with what a knavish crew the Sicilian court was surrounded, he was blind to the vices of the court itself; and resigning himself wholly to Lady Hamilton's influence, never even suspected the crooked policy which it was remorselessly pursuing. The Maltese and the British in Malta severely felt it. Troubridge, who had the truest affection for Nelson, knew his infatuation, and feared that it might ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... silence. But very soon I recalled the fact that this was a very lazy child, and concluded that she had coaxed her mother into sending an excuse for keeping her at home, and so had kept her liberty on this beautiful morning. About two minutes' walk from the cottage, at the side of the crooked road running through the village, there was a group of ancient pollarded elm trees with huge, hollow trunks, and behind them an open space, a pleasant green slope, where some of the village children used to go every day to play on the grass. Here I used to see this girl lying in the sun, her ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... indeed every day in the world around you.[6] Thus water continually dropping wears away rocks: and iron and steel are moulded by the hands of the artificer: and chariot wheels bent by some strain can never recover their original symmetry: and the crooked staves of actors can never be made straight. But by toil what is contrary to nature becomes stronger than even nature itself. And are these the only things that teach the power of diligence? Not so: ten thousand things teach the same truth. A soil naturally ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... death. [Sidenote: Their weapons.] Moreouer they are enioined to haue these weapons following. Two long bowes or one good one at the least, three quiuers full of arrowes, and one axe, and ropes to draw engines withal. But the richer sort haue single edged swords, with sharpe points, and somewhat crooked. They haue also armed horses with their shoulders and breasts defenced, they haue helmets and brigandines. Some of them haue iackes, and caparisons for their horses made of leather artificially doubled or trebled vpon their bodies. The vpper ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... rock. Its streets are whimsical. They wander up and down levels, and in and out of houses, and sometimes they are roads and sometimes they are stairs. One glance at them and I began to repeat, "There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile." A delightful genius had done the town to ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... they expand, and become what are termed "mother cloves," fit only for seed or for candying. The ground under the tree is first swept clean, or else a mat or cloth is spread. The nearest clusters are taken off with the hand, and the more distant by the aid of crooked sticks. Great care should be taken not to injure the tree, as it would prevent ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... domed stair turret at the south-east corner. The west door is plain with a simple architrave. The square-headed windows have a deep splay—the wall being very thick—their architraves as well as their cornices and pediments rest on small brackets set not at right angles with the wall, but crooked so as to give an appearance ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... scarcely knew him before we went away, and he called me by my first name as pat as you may please, and I didn't like it. And when he rolled up the towelling he crooked his little finger in such an affected, genteel, Miss Prim sort of way that it made his big fat hands look ridiculous. I don't know exactly what it was about him that irritated me so, but I couldn't bear him. And yet ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in the sun. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Ester; I know it now. That table-cloth has been crooked in spite of me for a week. Maggie lays it, and I can not straighten it. I don't get to it. I travel five hundred miles every night to get this supper ready, and it's never ready. I have to bob up for a fork or a spoon, or I put on four ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... Pomfret, had come to be a great favourite with the Londoners, in whose eyes he appeared as the champion of the oppressed against the strong. His memory was long cherished in the city, and miracles were believed to have taken place—the crooked made straight, the blind receiving sight and the deaf hearing—before the tablet he had set up in St. Paul's commemorative of the king's submission to the Ordinances. Edward ordered the removal of the tablet, but it was again set up as soon as all ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... that stands somewhat apart on your left, behind the statue of Charles IV, is the work of the Jesuits. We may go in by the wide gateway into this mass of buildings, the Clementinum, also part of the University, but this is guide-book business, and I prefer to take you my own way. So we go along the crooked street past a bunch of churches, one of which is the longest in Prague; you may see their bulbous towers from my terrace, or your own if you get the right point of view. These churches do not interest me particularly except for a lovely bit of wrought-iron railing belonging ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the passing of the summer. And as the old gentlewoman stood there in the open door of that rustic temple of learning, with the deep-shadowed, wooded hillside in the background, and, in front, the rude clearing with its crooked rail fence along which the scarlet sumac flamed, I thought,—as I still think, after all these years,—that I had never ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... Oh, we are all crooked in our values, Paine. The best that a man can give a woman is his courage, his hope, his aspiration. That's enough. I learned it too late. I don't know why I am saying ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... in April and May. An eight-quart-a-day cow was not much to my liking, but Thompson said that with good care they would do better in the spring. "Four of those cows ought to make fine milkers," he said; "they are built for it,—long bodies, big bags, milk veins that stand out like crooked welts, light shoulders, slender necks, and lean heads. They are young, too; and if you'll dehorn them, I believe they'll make your thoroughbreds hump themselves to keep up with them at the milk pail. You see, these cows never had more than half a chance to show what ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... he done? Had he murdered as well as destroyed so many happy homes? Was he crooked at cards? Our minds became acutely active, but we could discover no more because the old Colonel, the source of knowledge, had fallen ill and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... jacket of civil or military rank, with the kris thrust into a brilliant sash, here supplements the universal sarong, itself of bolder design and glowing colour in this old-world realm of Mataram, the centre of Java's historic interest. The crooked blade of the kris is still used in divination, light and shadow playing over the wavy steel, ever suggesting cabalistic signs inscribed by an invisible hand on the azure surface. The kris is popularly endowed with healing efficacy, and the availing touch of the sacred talisman is an ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... and disappeared; the other fellow, then marching up to me, very smoothly asked me the way to the church, and while I was explaining to him to turn first to the right and then to the left, and so on,—for the best way is, you know, exceedingly crooked,—the hypocritical scoundrel seized me by the collar, and cried out, 'Your money or your life!' I do assure you that I never trembled so much,—not, my dear Miss Lucy, so much for my own sake, as for the sake of the thirty poor families on the common, whose wants ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... As they drew back John was in the position of a boxer, standing lightly on his toes, his left hand extended with the shoulder drawn up to protect his chin, which rested against his collarbone, his right arm crooked back. The bed was between him and the door, ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... of February the vessels entered the Coldwater. Here the stream was wider and the current slacker, the trees rarely meeting overhead; but the channel was nearly as crooked, and accidents almost as frequent. Six days were consumed in advancing thirty miles through an almost unbroken wilderness. The stream widened and the country became more promising in the lower part of the Coldwater and the upper part of the Tallahatchie, into which the ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... half-past three they had had enough and so returned to the landing and pulled back to the cruiser. Steve, who had supplied himself with yesterday's New York and Boston papers, pre-empted a seat on the bridge deck and stretched himself out on it, his legs crooked over the railing. The others found places in the shade as best they could and talked and watched for the Follow Me and listened to occasional snatches of news from Steve. There was practically no breeze and the afternoon was uncomfortably hot even ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... dog, a second self—a great gaunt yellow creature of unknown breed, with crooked legs, big feet and the name Drollo. What Drollo meant, or whether it was an abbreviation, we never knew, but there was a certain satisfaction in it, for the dog was droll: the fact that the Minorcan title, whatever it was, meant nothing of that kind, made ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... I said, the work of the harbour squad isn't ordinarily very remarkable. Harbour pirates aren't murderous as a rule any more. For the most part they are plain sneak thieves or bogus junk dealers who work with dishonest pier watchmen and crooked canal ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... intellect, a luxuriant organism, and vital powers of no mean degree. These forces had to find an outlet, and they could find it only in the love for a woman. There remained nothing else for me. My whole misfortune is that, as a child of a diseased civilization, I grew up crooked; therefore love, too, came to ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of not unpleasing doubt and uncertainty as to the precise direction in the bowels of the earth, in which this mighty cavern might be supposed to extend. When we add that the weather-beaten signboard bore the half-obliterated semblance of a magpie intently eyeing a crooked streak of brown paint, which the neighbours had been taught from infancy to consider as the 'stump,' we have said all that need be said of the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... so disturbed," whispers my lady. "Singleton has a crooked mouth, and I credit Patty with ample sense to choose between you. I adore her, Richard. I wish ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... although they could not fly, ran at a great rate. They were in reality penguins, which abounded in those regions. In one day they killed no less than three thousand. On another island they found the body of a man who had been long dead. From these islands onwards the passage was so crooked and narrow that they very frequently had to come to an anchor. They found numerous harbours and abundance of fresh water. The mountains here rose to a great height, their tops apparently lost in the sky, and covered with ice and snow. On the low grounds many fine trees were seen, with ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... of attachment to passing animals. These are the kinds we human beings of either sex oftenest find clinging to our skirts or trousers after a walk in a rabbit-warren. But in herb-bennet and avens each nut has a single long awn, crooked near the middle with a very peculiar S-shaped joint, which effectually catches on to the wool or hair, but drops at the elbow after a short period of withering. Sometimes, too, the whole fruit is provided with prehensile hooks, while sometimes it is rather the individual seeds ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... still a boy. Yes, you—I have seen big, tall children with bushy beards and gray hairs and crooked ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... ever saw,—some of them made of shells, some of leather, some of moss, and others simply covered, with bright pieces of chintz. I longed to arrange them in more orderly fashion. They were hanging crooked or too close together, not one of them in a proper way I decided, as I took a swift survey of the room. But presently my gaze was arrested, and all thought of pictures hung awry ceased; for there, in a darkened corner of the room, I traced the rigid ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... yer yaller rascal! W'at de debbil yer mean by tellin' me sich a lie? Ben wuz black ez a coal an' straight ez an' arrer. Youer yaller ez dat clay-bank, an' crooked ez a bair'l-hoop. I reckon youer some 'stracted nigger, tun't out by some marster w'at doan wanter take keer er yer. You git off'n my plantation, an' doan show yo' clay-cullud hide aroun' yer no more, er I'll hab yer sent ter ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... every out-door scene kaleidoscopic; a modern grain thresher will take the place of weary animals plodding in a circle, treading out the grain; half-clad women at the fountains will disappear, and iron pipes will convey water for domestic use to the place of consumption. The awkward branch of crooked wood now used to turn the soil will be replaced by the modern plough, and reaping machines will relieve the weary backs of men, women, and children, who slowly grub beneath a burning sun through the broad grain fields. Irrigating streams will be made to flow by ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... extremity of David's danger and the morality of his age, in estimating, not the nature of his action, but the extent of his guilt in doing it. The same relaxation of the vigour of his faith which left him a prey to fear, led him to walk in crooked paths, and the impartial narrative tells of them without a word of comment. We have to form our own estimate of the fitness of a lie to form the armour of a saint. The proposal informs us of two ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "to look at the Professor, you'd know there was never nothing crooked about his partner. And I have—but nothing about his past. Only I'm willing to put up real money that whatever happened to Professor Vose was something that was caused by no fault of his. He's always been sad. Never heard ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... spake from the rolling cloud, borne on the "wings of the wind," and indicated his dealings with a fallen race, pointing the debaters for illustrations of power, wisdom, and glory, to his works of creation, from the "crooked serpent" to "Orion and the Pleiades," floating in the nightly sky—the wonders of ocean, ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... at his wits' ends to know what to do with himself. Finally it struck him that it would be fine fun to "play fish." So he went to one of his mother's drawers and got a long string, on the end of which he fastened a crooked pin; then he went way up—up—up—so many flights of stairs, to the very highest entry he could find, way to the top of the house; from there the stair-case wound round, and round, and round, like a cork-screw, down into the front entry, far enough ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... 21 districts; Acklins and Crooked Islands, Bimini, Cat Island, Exuma, Freeport, Fresh Creek, Governor's Harbour, Green Turtle Cay, Harbour Island, High Rock, Inagua, Kemps Bay, Long Island, Marsh Harbour, Mayaguana, New Providence, Nichollstown and Berry Islands, Ragged Island, Rock Sound, Sandy Point, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... thank you with all my heart," she stammered. And then by an awkward intuition she looked in his face and saw written there all the hopelessness and longing which he was striving to conceal. For one moment she saw clearly, and then the crooked perplexities of the world seemed to stare cruelly in her eyes. A sob caught her voice, and before she was conscious of her action she laid a hand on Lewis's arm and burst ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Three crooked little windows and three doors so low that a short man had to duck his head under the lintels, faced the lake. The middle door gave ingress to the store proper; the door on the right was the entrance to Peter Minot's household quarters; ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... pleasant speech. When he is in a strait he promises whatever you wish, but as soon as he has escaped he forgets his promise. The treachery or falsehood, whereby he is advanced, he calls prudence; the way whereby he arrives whither he will, crooked though it be, he regards as straight; whatever he likes he says is lawful, and he thinks he is released from the law, as though he were ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive to set the crooked straight? Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme Beat with light wing against the ivory gate, Telling a tale not too importunate To those who in the sleepy region stay, Lulled by the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... with three empty shells in the cylinder. I also found a theatrical make-up box, with grease paints, gauze, and all that. Also currency amounting to about three hundred dollars. Nothing incriminating, nothing actually crooked. Simply circumstantial as relating to recent events in your ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... some features quite new to me. The houses all stand completely in the water, and are reached by long rude bridges. They are very low, with the roof shaped like a large boat, bottom upwards. The posts which support the houses, bridges, and platforms are small crooked sticks, placed without any regularity, and looking as if they were tumbling down. The floors are also formed of sticks, equally irregular, and so loose and far apart that I found it almost impossible to walls on them. The walls consist of bits ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a cigar and climbed to the front seat with George. Up the steep and crooked road the stout horses tugged their way, and the wagon creaked, and the Gale River, here only a brook, came gurgling, dashing to meet them—down from the mountains, from the farm, from Roger's youth to welcome him home. And the sun was flashing through the pines. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... the miscellany of the Crystal Palace Hotel had failed to reveal a single razor. The razor used by the miner should in all reason have been found, but there was neither that nor any other. The baffled seeker believed there must have been crooked work somewhere. Without hesitation he found either Jimmie or his companion to be guilty of malfeasance in office. But at least one item of more or less worried debate was eliminated. He need no longer weigh mere surface gentility against ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... to escape a tumble. "If I could only find something to hold to, I could give you a hand. It's so cursed dark, and there are no trees here where they're needed. Here's something; it's a root. It will hold all right." He braced himself on the rock, gripped the crooked root with one hand and swung himself across toward Thea, holding out his arm. "Good jump! I must say you don't lose your nerve in a tight place. Can you keep at it a little longer? We're almost out. Have to make that next ledge. Put your foot ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... spread the knowledge of what a civilized government does for the people! At Shanghai and Tientsin, veritable fairylands for the Chinese, they cannot but contrast the throngs of rickshas, dog-carts, broughams, and motor cars that pour endlessly through the spotless asphalt streets with the narrow, crooked, filthy, noisome streets of their native city, to be traversed only on foot or in a sedan chair. Even the young mandarin, buried alive in some dingy walled town of the far interior, without news, events, or society, recalled with longing the lights, the gorgeous ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the horizon appears within a stone-cast; and the narrow prospect enhances the sense of privacy. Man avoids the place—even his footprints are uncommon; but a great number of birds hover and pipe there fishing, and leave crooked tracks upon the sand. Apart from these, the only sound (and I was going to say the only society), is that of the breakers ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fishes for the truth, and has not the art;[7] and of this are manifest proofs to the world Parmenides, Melissus, Bryson,[8] and many others who went on and knew not whither. So did Sabellius, and Arius,[9] and those fools who were as swords unto the Scriptures in making their straight faces crooked. Let not the people still be too secure in judgment, like him who reckons up the blades in the field ere they are ripe. For I have seen the briar first show itself stiff and wild all winter long, then bear the rose upon its top. And I have seen a bark ere now ran ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri |
