"Flimsy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Away with the flimsy idea that life with a past is attended. There's now—only now—and no past. There's never a past; it has ended. Away with the obsolete story and all of its yesterday sorrow! There's only Today, almost gone, and in front of Today stands Tomorrow. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... tormenter. Shreds of the wreck flapped wildly in its eyes. Spider-like ribs clung to its massive limbs and poked its reeking sides, while the swaying handle kept tapping its cheeks and ears and nose, as if taunting the creature with being held and badgered by a thing so flimsy and insignificant! ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... were not inactive. Where an arm or leg showed to their hawk-like eyes, their rifles cracked sharply, to be generally rewarded with a howl of pain from some cutthroat who had been winged. But there could be but one end to such a battle. The convicts were well protected behind big trees, while the flimsy sides of their canoes afforded the brave little band of Seminoles almost no protection. Still they fought stubbornly on, answering shot with shot until the point and canoes were shrouded in a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... country is going to pot because of it. People hold high office or places of responsibility not because of superior intelligence, or even acquired skill, but because of the social-labels they've accumulated, and these can be based on something as flimsy—from the Movement's viewpoint—as who your grandparents were, what school you attended, how much seniority you have on the job, what part of town you live in, or what ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the subject, in the light of the actual provisions of the Constitution, the avowed purpose of its framers, their own practice and the practice of their successors, without being absolutely convinced that this whole fabric of opposition on constitutional grounds is as flimsy as a cobweb. This country of our love and pride is no malformed, congenital cripple of a nation, incapable of undertaking duties that have been found within the powers of every other nation that ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... Was it chance or the immutable workings of fate which took us in time past the house of the cherry tree? In a porch hammock was Rosie, a vision of budding beauty only half clouded in flimsy lawn and lace. Yet with never a turn of the head Dickie swaggered by, talking meanwhile to me in tones meant to carry an idea of much light-heartedness. Over my shoulder I noted that Rosie was standing watching us, a puzzled look on ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... expensive goods which must only be shelved after their color or design was out of date. Such conditions had created an American market for cheap silks such as was unknown in Europe where quality was a far greater factor in the sale of silk materials. In the United States these flimsy dress goods could be turned out with little expense on American power-looms by unskilled workmen, whereas in other countries experienced men were ...
— The Story of Silk • Sara Ware Bassett
... which he could once have drawn at will. Like a fool he had believed it possible to serve mammon with impunity, and for as long as it suited him. He knew better now. At this moment he was undergoing the sensations of one who, having taken shelter in what he thinks a light and flimsy structure, finds that it is built of the solidest stone. Worse still: that he ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... unsparing unapologetic ugliness and the rigid straightness which overwhelmed her. It was the planlessness, the flimsy temporariness of the buildings, their faded unpleasant colors. The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others. Between a large new "block" ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... as near to him as she could, sheltering him in the crevice of the cliff. Her one flimsy petticoat was soaked, and her legs felt like ice; but those little choking snores filled her with a joy almost too ...
— Troublesome Comforts - A Story for Children • Geraldine Glasgow
... of him. It is impossible to argue the patient out of his delusions by pointing out to him how clearly they conflict with reality; he evades any such test by some counter-argument, no matter how flimsy, and sticks to his dream ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... was before. Their work has been wrought in a spirit of serious truthfulness, which in itself places the Oberammergau stage in a class by itself, above and beyond all other theaters. Everything is real, and stands for what it is. Kings and priests are dressed, not in flimsy tinsel, but in garments such as real kings and priests may have worn. And so no artificial light or glare of fireworks is needed to make these costumes effective. And this genuineness enables these simple players to produce ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... summons us to Armory's John Buncle and to the Reverend Richard Graves's Spiritual Quixote as to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that "for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous, The Spiritual Quixote may, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four themselves." That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered through The Peace of ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... delightful, dangerous shower, that cools the earth without interrupting our pleasures for dreary days, is approaching. No one whose dwelling is not better protected than most of those which bear the vain and flimsy decorations called "lightning-rods" can know whether his own house may not in a few moments receive a ruinous stroke, or that it may not be his lot to enter eternity with the first flash from that dark, towering mass of sulphurous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... volume has, in less than six months, reached a fourth edition, which is to us a proof that the readers of the present day know how to discriminate pure gold from pinchbeck or petit or, and intense, natural feeling from the tinsel and tissues of flimsy "poetry." The booksellers, nevertheless, say that poetry is unsaleable, and they are usually allowed to speak feelingly on the score of popularity and success. Yet within a very short time, we have seen a splendid poem—the "Pelican Island," by (the) Montgomery; the "Course of Time," a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... themselves. Till the end of the eighteenth century the ships were flat-sterned with heavy "quarter-galleries" projecting from the side at the stern, while their bows below water were bluff with long projecting beak-heads which, to avoid weight, were but flimsy structures, affording no protection whatever to the crew. In 1805 Sir Robert Seppings remedied this defect by constructing a solid circular bow right up to the main-deck, thus protecting the crew from raking shot. A dozen ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... room to hide her tears. Fanny's second visit was not as her first. The first had seen the outraging and repelling of the nobler nature by the ignoble. Diana had frankly not been able to endure her cousin. There was not a trace of that now. Her father's papers had told her abundantly how flimsy, how nearly fraudulent, was the financial claim which Fanny and her belongings had set up. The thousand pounds had been got practically on false pretences, and Diana knew it now, in every detail. Yet neither toward ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Code Schofield, I presume," he announced, thrusting his hand nervously into his pocket and bringing out a fistful of papers. So eager and excited was he that, unnoticed, he dropped one flimsy sheet, many times folded, into ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... girl's. She was looking across the tree-tops towards an angry bank of clouds—long, pencil-like streaks of black on a purple background. Below, in the street, a taxi passed with grinding of brakes and noisy horn. The rail against which she leaned looked very flimsy. Sir Timothy stretched out his hand ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... which she had abandoned herself. She took a long draught of the discolored beverage, and, had it been the pure mountain spring, its effect could scarcely have been more magical. It not only refreshed the body, but inspired the mind. With this dawning hope the poor prisoners built the flimsy fabric of ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... Austin Turold how near he stood to the edge of the precipice. The strain of the interview had told on him. This was the first actual buffet of the beast's paw. He led the way to his son's room and watched Barrant go through his intimate belongings with the feeling that intelligence was a flimsy shield against the brutal force of authority. The law in search of prey cared nothing for such civilized refinements as intellect or self-respect. As well try to stop a tiger ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... a fool,' replied the first speaker, 'in matters where my own advantage is staked, but my eye is keen enough to see through the flimsy disguise of a country damsel at a glance; and I tell you, as surely as I hold this ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... himself that the mother of his children was corrupt only at heart,—that the Black Horses had come to the door in time,—and, wretchedly consoled by that niggardly conviction, flinging into the flames the last flimsy tatters on which his honour (rock-like in his own keeping) had been fluttering to and fro in the charge of a vain treacherous fool,—envy you that mourner? No! not even in his release. Memory is not nailed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it is that the Great man abides by what is solid, and eschews what is flimsy; dwells with the fruit and not with the flower. It is thus that he puts away the one and makes choice of ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... displayed in a sheet of pale glassy water reflecting faithfully the contour of the shore. High in the colourless sunshine a solitary bird, all black, hovered, dropping and soaring above the same spot with a slight rocking motion of the wings. A ragged, sooty bunch of flimsy mat hovels was perched over its own inverted image upon a crooked multitude of high piles the colour of ebony. A tiny black canoe put off from amongst them with two tiny men, all black, who toiled exceedingly, striking down at the pale water: ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... actually projecting all round the head, leaving it in dark intaglio. Finally, five thin and scratchy strokes of very cold bluish white are struck for the high light on the forehead and nose, and the head is complete. Seen within a yard of the canvas, it looks actually transparent—a flimsy, meaningless, distant shadow; while the background looks solid, projecting and near. From the right distance, (ten or twelve yards off, whence alone the whole of the picture can be seen,) it is a complete, rich, substantial, and living realization of the projecting head of the animal; while ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... I answered in turn, "I know very well, though I can conjure up this feeling of security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and I take it rather as men take symbols. For though these good people will at last perish, and some brewer—a Colonel of Volunteers as like as not—will buy this little field, and though for the port we are drinking there will ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... out the window at the gleaming needle of Ship II beside the flimsy-looking gantry. Full power was ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... Ladybug declared. "They're so flimsy and delicate that Betsy Butterfly never dares venture out in bad weather. Of what use would I be to Farmer Green if I had wings like hers? If I stayed under cover whenever the sun didn't shine, the orchard would soon ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Ladybug • Arthur Scott Bailey
... as if their intention was to pick us off without exposing themselves. The thing could be done too. For a rifle ball would tear through the flimsy woodwork of our shelter as ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... the press; could criticise all the genius of the age faster than it could be produced; could make his own malignity look like wit, and turn the wit of others into absurdity, by placing it topsy-turvy. As thus, when he attacked "The Traveller" of Goldsmith, which he called "a flimsy poem," he discussed the subject as a grave political pamphlet, condemning the whole system, as raised on false principles. "The Deserted Village" was sneeringly pronounced to be "pretty;" but then it had "neither fancy, dignity, genius, or fire." ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... in the group. Mr. Craske had caught sight of Lady Ostermore and Mistress Winthrop, and he fell to giggling, a flimsy handkerchief to his painted lips. "Oh, 'Sbud!" he bleated. "Let me die! The audaciousness of the creature! And behold me the port and glance of her! Cold as a vestal, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... highest reward of the journalist. No honours, no money, no fame can ever satisfy him as does the knowledge that by means of his pen he is influencing the thoughts, and winning the affections, of some at least of that vast unknown public whom it is his duty to address. A sheet of paper is but a flimsy thing, yet, as a rule, when used by the journalist it cuts off the electric current of sympathy which passes between speaker and auditor when they are visible to each other. The discovery that it may sometimes ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... found that in order to feel as he ought to feel some effort was necessary; that treason to her was possible, and because he had looked with such eyes upon his cousin that evening. He saw himself as something separate from himself, and although he knew what he saw to be flimsy and shallow, he could do nothing to deepen it, absolutely nothing! It was not the betrayal of that thunderstorm which now tormented him. He could have represented that as a failure to be surmounted; he could have repented it. It was his own ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... going to the foot one passes from Alaska into British Columbia. Along its shores were scores of miners, busily engaged in building boats with which to make the rest of the journey. Sad to say, owing to their impatience and lack of skill, some of the boats were so flimsy and ill-constructed that they were certain to go to pieces in the fierce rapids below, and add their owners to the long list of victims whose bodies strew the pathway from Chilkoot to ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... Rake, in his eloquence; and he was undoubtedly right for that matter; but then—the Zu-Zu was the rage, and if ever she should be sold up, great ladies would crowd to her sale and buy with eager curiosity at high prices her most trumpery pots of pomatum, her most flimsy ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... charm so much, without her attendant Graces, as they will without her. Among men, how often have I seen the most solid merit and knowledge neglected, unwelcome, or even rejected, for want of them! While flimsy parts, little knowledge, and less merit, introduced by the Graces, have been received, cherished, and admired. Even virtue, which is moral beauty, wants some of its charms if ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... nevertheless. Thinking thus, he might even have been content to go his ways and take his fill of vengeance by slaying Florimond upon the morrow. But Garnache's rash temper, rising anew, tore that last flimsy chance to shreds. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... pausing and becoming impressive), Newman is a flimsy mystic; he has no foundation, but he builds logically enough—at least as far as I see—on his fancies and other people's fancies. This is to be a simple ninny. But Mr. Rogers fancies he believes a mystical religion, and ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... the other room being occupied by an Italian. We had to make a flying start for Naples at 5 A.M., and I got up at 4, in order to shave, dress and breakfast in time to catch the train. I opened the proceedings by starting to strop my razor on a big leather strop; the door being quite flimsy, my Italian neighbor heard me distinctly, and as he was trying to fall asleep he became very angry, jumped out of bed and protested in loud and profane language. I paid no attention to his protest and then he rang his bell long and violently. As I wanted to make a respectable appearance at breakfast, ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... and one that I shall never forget—the white-faced, distracted woman, tramping in her flimsy house-shoes over the rough ground, bursting through the bushes, regardless of the thorny branches that dragged at skin and hair and dainty clothing, and sending forth from time to time a tremulous cry, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... breaths while she rustled in. Say, who'd have thought that a few clothes could make such a difference? For instead of the big sloppy young female who used to slouch, gigglin' around the basement who should breeze in but a zippy young lady, a bit heavy about the shoulders maybe for that flimsy style of costume, but more or less stunning, for all that. Rowena had bloomed out. In fact, she had the lilies of the field ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... heel is a good one. The heels, through which the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don't find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... on his heel. But Ada was not to be torn away. She ran her eye over the stock, marvelling at the cheapness of everything. Jonah, finding nothing better to do, lit a cigarette, and turned a contemptuous eye on the bales of calico, cheap prints, and flimsy lace displayed. Presently he began to study the tickets with extraordinary interest. They were all alike. The shillings in gigantic figures of red or black, and across the dividing line elevenpence three-farthings pencilled in strokes as ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... pages to an attempt to prove that immorality is not characteristic of uncivilized races in general. He leads off with that preposterous statement of Barrow that "a Kaffir woman is chaste and extremely modest;" and most of his other instances are based on equally flimsy evidence. I shall recur to the subject repeatedly. It is hardly necessary to call the reader's attention to the unconscious humor of the assertion of Westermarck's friend Cousins that "between their various feasts the Kaffirs have to live in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... It was no flimsy, two-fingered ceremony, but a whole-hearted, whole- handed grip that made the man's blood move more quickly. Unconsciously, as he felt the warm strength in the touch of the girl's hand, he leaned toward her with quick eagerness. And Barbara, who was looking straight into his face with ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... buy those flimsy French things that do not give you any wear. And presently we may not be able to buy either French or English. She is not going to be so rich either. It's nonsense to think of that marshy land ever being valuable. Whatever possessed anyone to buy it, I can't ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... I was better pleased. Man had done little, but nature was prodigal to make up for his omissions. The buildings were poor and flimsy, but in the middle of December the flowers bloomed, vines were green, bushes sent forth their leaves, and the beauty of the scene even under the leaden skies and rising gale made it ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... than a hundred days a year, but usually so lightly that one thinks of it as liquid sunshine. In the wet quarter from December until March there are almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to water, the land and sea are hidden by the screen of driving rain, and the thunder shakes the flimsy houses, and echoes menacingly ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... This came to me secondhand. The lone witness was said to have rushed over to his car to get his camera as the disk approached. When it plunged toward the lake, he was so startled that he failed to snap the picture until the moment it struck. This story sounded so flimsy that I didn't ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... fifteenth century; the advance of trade intercourse between India and the Italian Republics, the gradual liberation of Russia the use made of the caravan routes by some of the most active of the Western clergy, are the chief notes of the time between the Polos and Prince Henry; and the flimsy fabrications of Mandeville—"of all liars that type of the first magnitude"—would be fairly left without a word even in a minute history of discovery, if he had not, like Ktesias with Herodotus, won a hearing for himself and drawn ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... course and flow back to its own confines. It was absurd. It was grotesque. It was a sporting thing to do, but would it mean the collapse of the sprawling, disjointed British Empire, linked together by a flimsy tradition of loyalty to ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... at Mrs. Gray's, he gave the flimsy but pathetic excuse that he wanted a place in which he might find occasional seasons of peace and quiet. When Mrs. Gray protested against this useless bit of extravagance, his grief was so obviously genuine that her heart was touched, and ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... she slept fitfully, but was awakened by the sound of voices on the sands outside the hut. Its flimsy structure, already warped by the fierce day-long sun, allowed her through chinks and crevices not only to recognize the voices of the detectives, but to hear distinctly what they said. Suddenly the name of Jarman struck upon her ear. She sat ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... if we ought to take all these light waists?" she asked a little later, holding up a beautiful flimsy one. "It's sure to be hot ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... perhaps the only real enemy he has to fear. How his heart and his flimsy paper must flutter in the unruly gusts of a March wind! We only imagine him pasting up a "Sale of Horses," in a retired nook, and seeing his bill carried ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... a lover; ay, and a romantic one too? Yet do I carry every where with me such a confounded farrago of doubts, fears, hopes, wishes, and all the flimsy furniture of a country ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... fluttered uselessly down and fire showered thick upon it. Timbers and beams crumbled like paper things and were no more. The whole flimsy structure had caved in! ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... boundaries all about it, but with everything worse excluded, being of course the most insolently-pleasant thing in the world. In addition to which, when the garden is in the Italian manner, with flowers rather remarkably omitted, as too flimsy and easy and cheap, and without lawns that are too smart, paths that are too often swept and shrubs that are too closely trimmed, though with a fanciful formalism giving style to its shabbiness, and here and there a dusky ilex-walk, and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... eyes that day in the forest? Could you forget what you wrote there? Only your lips refused me. Even when they refused me, they were warm with my kisses. They were mine, as you were, body and soul. You loved me, Hermia—from the first. These flimsy barriers you're raising, I'll break them ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... touch of conscience; What served him pleased him, and without a murmur He stamped his broad seal on these lawless deeds. What at that time was right, because thou didst it For him, to-day is all at once become Opprobrious, foul, because it is directed Against him. O most flimsy superstition! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... position—for man, the heir of all the ages: hag-ridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain. If a pebble in our boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and shake it out. And once the matter is fairly understood it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. About this there ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... pro-slavery elements of Philadelphia were brought into action, and matters looked for a time as though Slavery in this instance would have everything its own way. Passmore was locked up in prison on the flimsy pretext of contempt of court, and true bills were found against him and half a dozen colored men, charging them with "riot," "forcible abduction," and "assault and battery," and there was no lack of hard swearing ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... it is clear that the flimsy argument of this prattler fails utterly, and, together with everything he constructs upon it, is found to be without any basis whatever. But that he may the better understand his own mummery, even in case I should grant that a process of reasoning might be ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... due disdain of the flimsy foundations of human pride, have shown that every man is equally descended from a million of ancestors, within a given number of generations; thereby demonstrating that no prince exists who does not participate in the blood of some beggar, or any beggar who does not share ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... saw through this flimsy pretext, and realized at once what had happened. The miserable man, nervous and excited, had, in the excess of fear, attempted to take his own life. The grim specters of the night were too horrible to endure, and he had sought to escape their torments by the act ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... houses. That may refer to the common trials of every life, but it is best taken as referring to the future judgment, when God 'will lay judgment to the line, and righteousness to the plummet'; and whatever cannot stand that test will be swept away. Who would run up a flimsy structure on some windy headland in northern seas? The lighthouses away out in ocean are firmly bonded into living rock. Unless our lives are thus built on and into Christ, they will collapse into a heap of ruin. 'Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the morning, when we went down for our animals, we found that they had broken through the flimsy fence of the Navaho, and had worked considerable havoc in his corn-patch. The Navaho grumbled and gesticulated, and showed unmistakable anger, but I took the matter coolly and, after seeing the extent of the damage, quietly asked the head of the family: "Tu-kwe peso?" ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... of Jorgensen's looked like any other flimsy construction under the dome. We had just passed a row of small warehouses, and the only difference seemed to be the lighted sign ...
— Fee of the Frontier • Horace Brown Fyfe
... were thumps and bangs as grapplers clanged on the surface of the craft. Mud gurgled around them as they were hauled up and out with the sound of a giant sipping soup. A mud-encrusted hatchway flew open, and Kielland stepped down on a flimsy-looking platform below. Four small rodent-like creatures were attached to it by ropes; they heaved with a will and began paddling through the soupy mud dragging the platform and Kielland toward a row of low wooden buildings near some ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... in pomp of words to raise A courtly monument of empty praise, Where self, transpiring through the flimsy pile, Betrays the builder's ostentatious guile, Accept, oh West, these unaffected lays, Which genius claims and grateful justice pays. Still green in age, thy vig'rous powers impart The youthful freshness of a ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... sweeps the clouded sky. Ask him his griefs; what midnight demons plough The lines of torture on his lofty brow; Unlock those marble lips, and bid them speak The mystery freezing in his bloodless cheek. His secret? Hid beneath a flimsy word; One foolish whisper that ambition heard; And thus it spake: "Behold yon gilded chair, The world's one vacant ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... their quarrel, and join them in a contest for alleged political rights. Nearly half the people of the North were ready to acknowledge the justness of their complaints. The election of Lincoln was indeed a flimsy pretext for separation, but it had the merit of universal publicity, and of rankling irritation among the unthinking masses of the South. Agriculture was depressed, commerce was in panic, manufacturing populations were in want, the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Russian pom pom. This latter gun is a rapid fire artillery piece, firing a clip of five shells weighing about one pound apiece, in rapid succession. We later discovered that they, as well as most of the flimsy rifles, were made by several of the prominent gun manufacturers of the ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... exclaimed Hamilton, laughing. "I see through your flimsy veil. We won't say any more: you either argue in a circle, or ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... only three of the ten remained. Then these three, seeing destruction inevitable, signalled for a last united effort, and, all together, flew at full speed straight for the great yellow gas-bag of the biggest Parseval and for certain death. As they tore into the flimsy air-ship there came a blinding flash, an explosion that shook the hills, and that ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... joy and confident expectation, reared on a flimsy basis of supposition, to dire despair consequent on a wrong reading of physical and mental changes, are rapid. Friends, lovers and heroes quickly succeed one another, play their parts, and ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... deported to France; he died at Orthez early in the following year. His verses are modelled on those of Melendez Valdes; though not deficient in technique or passion, they are often disfigured by spurious sentimentality and by the flimsy philosophy of the age. Cienfuegos was blamed for an unsparing use of both archaisms and gallicisms. His plays, Pitaco, Zoraida, La Condesa de Castilla and Idomeneo, four tragedies on the pseudo-classic French model, and Las Hermanas generosas, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... the entire dominions of a third, who had given no cause for umbrage, and with whom they were both at that time in perfect peace and amity. Similar instances of political robbery (to call it by the coarse name it merits) have occurred in later times; but never one founded on more flimsy pretexts, or veiled under a more detestable mask of hypocrisy. The principal odium of the transaction has attached to Ferdinand, as the kinsman of the unfortunate king of Naples. His conduct, however, admits of some palliatory considerations, that ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... buy flimsy furniture, however cheap. As a rule, there is too much furniture in the American home. It is better to get along with a few good, durable articles, even though a little expensive, than with a profusion ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... but what he really is in the sight of God, his Maker. This is what shall come out, at last, from the obscurations and uncertainties of this lower atmosphere into the clear, truthful light of eternity; shall cast off the devices, the flimsy pretences, the temporary shows, the convenient disguises, of this mortal life of mixed substance and shadow, and stand a bare, naked, unclothed fact of being before itself, the universe, and God. Alas! what multitudes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... imagination, only stimulate an irrational fancy. They seem to the person affected to cause a play of imagination, but they really produce only a state of nervous action which causes their subject to feel appreciation of otherwise trifling mental pictures that in themselves are flimsy nothings. Let a man so affected try to impart to another his fancies, and—well, who has not been bored by a drunken man? Did De Quincey, with that superb mind, succeed in fancying anything that even he could tell? He speaks of glowing ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... replied: "Even with those things of Mrs. Meldrum's." I begged him not to think my laughter in bad taste: it was only a practical recognition of the fact that we had built a monstrous castle in the air. Didn't he see on what flimsy ground the structure rested? The evidence was preposterously small. He believed the worst, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... asked to take a sail, and as Buller had driven with him, it would be impossible for him to decline sailing with Buller; but he must see the boat. There was a train for his home at a quarter past seven; if he were not on the premises he could not be asked to sail. If Buller's boat were a little, flimsy thing, he would take that train—but he would ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... croucher in all points; and destroy the very basis of the character by an overacted humiliation, highly improper because too glaring not to excite Alonzo's suspicions. He must be a dull Alonzo indeed, if he could not look through such flimsy dissimulation. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... English swine can wait!" This was the dictum of those in authority and the underlings were only too eager to fulfil it to the letter. If there were the slightest opportunity to deprive us of our food, on the flimsy pretext that we had not answered the summons with sufficient alacrity, it was eagerly grasped. Under these conditions we had to go supperless to bed, unless we could procure something at the canteen or our more fortunate comrades ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... did not altogether approve of Scott's poetry, but he felt its effectiveness. In his "Reply to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine," Byron wrote: "What have we got instead [of following Pope]? A deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances, imitated from Scott and myself, who have both made the best of our ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... turn, offend us like an insincerity. All should be plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence it is that, in "Rhoda Fleming," Mrs. Lovel raises such resentment in the reader; her motives are too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the weight and strength of her surroundings. Hence the hot indignation of the reader when Balzac, after having begun the "Duchesse de Langeais" in terms of strong if somewhat ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be seen going about with him as she does. She hardly lets him get out of her sight when he's in town. I invited them to tea the last time they were here and she wouldn't let him come; kept him at her house, made some flimsy excuse, and had the evening with him to herself. She's tried her ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... the present order have no reason to complain if their impatient generalisations are marshalled, however disingenuously, against them. But the judicious folk of every school who are now trying to take their bearings may wonder if much is to be gained by putting up and knocking down such flimsy figures of straw. Mr. HAROLD COX contributes a rather too solemn preface, which labels this otherwise irresponsible novel as a serious tract. I rather think that the engaging spectacle of the biographer of WILKES and the editor of The Edinburgh (the author ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... received this letter, I think, late on Sunday afternoon, because I was, I remember, up and dressed, and walking about my room. It was written on flimsy grey paper in pencil, which made it difficult to read. There were sentences unfinished, words misspelt, and the whole of it in the worst of Russian handwritings. Certain passages, I am, even now, quite unable ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... put in another, with an attempt at gaiety, as if to dispel the feeling of gloom. "Their heart's like a flimsy fairing—little watch looks all right, but just shake it a bit, and 'tis all ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... false shows, plausibilities, expediences: the true man is needed to discern even practical truth. Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early in the contest, How they were to dismiss their city-tapsters, flimsy riotous persons, and choose substantial yeomen, whose heart was in the work, to be soldiers for them: this is advice by a man who saw. Fact answers, if you see into Fact! Cromwell's Ironsides were the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... doing in such a crowd anyway?" continued the woman, "when you're so weak. You look as flimsy as a dish-rag. What have you been doing? Let me give you ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... the long summer days, and indeed until driven from the open by the blizzards of winter, not one of these children of the free air and open sky could be persuaded to enter the dismal shelter afforded by the log houses. They much preferred the flimsy teepee or tent. And small wonder. Their methods of sanitation did not comport with a permanent dwelling. When the teepee grew foul, which their habits made inevitable, a simple and satisfactory remedy was discovered in a shift to another camp-ground. Not so with the log houses, whose foul ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... for two beaver skins; a double handful of salt for one beaver skin—and so on in proportion in everything else; the poor Indian had to give pile upon pile of beaver skins, which might be worth two or three hundred dollars, for a few yards of flimsy cloth. Englishmen and Frenchman who went there expressly to traffic with the Indians, generally started from Quebec and Montreal, leaving their families at home; but so soon as they reached this wild country, they would take Indian wives. When they left the country, they would ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... of the Society," he said, "and never perhaps in the history of astronomy, had an alleged discovery of such magnitude and consequence been promulgated on the strength of such flimsy evidence;" and after traversing in detail all the arguments of his opponent, he declared it his firm conviction that the effects which Professor Gazen had thought fit to advance as a "discovery," were neither more ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... stirred by the monsoon, purred in gentle contact. In the starlight the old stone church outlined its old-world, old-time architecture in friendly shadows which veiled the pitiful scars and age-stains: the bamboo shacks across the square—wry, flimsy, smutted by a hotly jealous sun—had yielded to the magic of the night to become little golden houses in which the fairies abode till the ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he continued, pointing to the manuscript of the Marguerites. "I have put ink on the string and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the factory. I felt as much lost as if I had found myself translated there after a sleep of legendary length. There are many new faces. The factory has tripled—quadrupled in importance; quite a town of flimsy buildings has ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... did it see? Vaughan had been under the sun-shelter when the storm broke. The first gust had blown the flimsy structure down flat, and the weight of sand, which poured immediately on to it, prevented it from being blown away. The frightened white boy had been pinned under the fallen boughs and had been unable to get free while the ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... along the main street being suddenly checked by another huge barricade, we wound round to the right, and at last reached a house where less than a score of Mobiles were gathered, protected from sudden assault by a flimsy barrier of planks, casks, stools, and broken chairs. This was the most advanced French outpost in the direction we were following. We passed it, crossing some open fields where a solitary man was calmly digging potatoes, risking his life at every turn of his spade, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the two sides of the flimsy shirt-waist at the breast and torn it aside, off her shoulders, off ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... fallen tree to the top of the cache. He could see marks of the brute's paws in the snow that covered the trunk. He had not dreamt a wolf could leap so far. A second had followed the first, and a third and fourth, until the flimsy scaffold had gone down under ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... natural phenomena which are constantly before us that it would be felt by every student to possess a real value, that (from that circumstance) it would dwell in his mind, and that it would enable him to correct a great amount of flimsy education in the country, and, so far, to raise ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... disturbed. He searched amongst the papers on his desk and brought out at last a flimsy half-sheet of notepaper which ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Roman Empire, of which we have several credible histories. Now, there are two modes of investigation open to us, the dogmatic and the inductive. We may take either. We may construct for ourselves, from the most flimsy suppositions, a metaphysical balloon, inflated with self-conceit into the rotundity of a cosmogony, according to which, in our opinion, the world should have been made, and we may paint it over with the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... sacklike hammock, the Navaho began to shake faintly, and weight piled up. It was mild compared to that on the shuttle, since the big ships couldn't take high acceleration. Space had been conquered for more than a century, but the ships were still flimsy tubs that took months to reach Mars, using immense amounts of fuel. Only the valuable plant hormones from Mars made commerce possible at the ridiculously ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... nation for an aggressive war; and they have raised no voice against the appalling decision that, in order to attain Germany's purposes, every rule of morals and humanity should be set aside. They have servilely accepted every flimsy pretext for outrage, and have followed, instead of leading, their passion-blinded people. It was the same in Austria-Hungary. Austrian and Hungarian prelates have passed in silence the fearful travesties of ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... The flimsy fine dialogue was a little above Algernon's level in the society of ladies; but he muttered, bowing, that he would endeavour to support it, with Mrs. Lovell's help, and this did well enough; after which, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondescript packages in wrappers like patent medicines; closed yellow paper envelopes, very flimsy, and marked two-and-six in heavy black figures; a few numbers of ancient French comic publications hung across a string as if to dry; a dingy blue china bowl, a casket of black wood, bottles of marking ink, and rubber stamps; a few books, with titles hinting at impropriety; a few apparently old ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... warships the fan ought to be placed where room can be found for it low down in the ship, far below the water line. An electrically driven horizontal fan, with its motor, can be got into the thickness of a deck with its beams, if needs be. This would clearly be better than depending on a flimsy construction, which would certainly be greatly damaged, if not entirely shot away, in action. If clear decks are wanted, the windsail is about as inconvenient as it is ugly, and that is saying ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... pressure the North had brought to bear, the hope that they had not even acknowledged to themselves, the hope based merely on the circumstance that they did not know, was routed by this one fact. Now they could no longer shelter behind the flimsy screen of an ignorance of their enemy's condition. They knew. The most ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... and bitterly opposed the measure, and his sermon on the "Subordination of Woman," published in the Register, called out spirited replies from Mrs. Savery and Mrs. Bloomer in the same journal, which completely demolished the flimsy fancies of the gentleman. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... behind him. Yet Rex knew well by what strange accidents the deceit of an assumed identity is often penetrated. Some old comrade or companion of the lost heir might suddenly appear with keen questions as to trifles which could cut his flimsy web to shreds, as easily as the sword of Saladin divided the floating silk. He could not afford to ignore the most insignificant circumstances. With consummate skill, piece by piece he built up the story ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... to prevent anyone going in at the first alarm and saving anything," Tom said. "They didn't count on the roof burning through first, giving me a chance to use the sand. I made the roof of the red shed flimsy just on that account, so the force of the explosion if one ever came, would be mostly upward. You know the expanding gases, caused by an explosion or by rapid combustion, always do just as electricity does, seek the shortest and easiest route. ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... lie awake, hearing through the flimsy walls their passionate tones, now rising high, now fiercely forced into cold whispers; and then their words to each other sounded ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... stayed with the girls, and a miserable afternoon we had of it. The Story Girl again and again declared that she "didn't believe it," but when we asked her to tell a story, she evaded it with a flimsy excuse. Cecily pestered at Aunt Janet's life out, asking repeatedly, "Ma, will you be washing Monday?" "Ma, will you be going to prayer meeting Tuesday night?" "Ma, will you be preserving raspberries next week?" and ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... were fixed upon the sidewalk. There was a flimsy piece of paper fluttering about impelled by the wind. He stooped ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger |
