"Whirligig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... censure is too violent. And yet, (looking to her with a leering smile,) she is the first woman in the world, could she but restrain that wicked tongue of hers;—she would be the only woman, could she but command that little whirligig.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... after all, were not wholly undirected. I found an intelligent guide, who was at the same time an old acquaintance. The whirligig of time brings about, not merely its revenges, but also its compensations and coincidences. Twenty-two years ago, when I was studying German as a boy in the old city of Frankfort, guests from the South ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... carrying an oblong chopping-bowl in which lay her chopping-knife. She set it down and stooped forward, turning the bowl as if it were a whirligig. Then she commenced dancing; and when she turned her back toward the stranger he saw that she was hollow. She had no back, backbone, or insides, but ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... knowing that Mr. T. Roosevelt is likely to be the next Republican nominee for President. Within the last six weeks it has become quite manifest that Taft cannot be elected. ... And so you see, the whirligig of time has made another turn. Big Business in New York is looking to Roosevelt as a statesman who is practical. The West regards him as the champion of the plain people. He is keeping silent, but no doubt like the negro lady he is quite willing ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... he, "I'll admit this is all a kind of a whirligig to me. I'm in it, and I'm losing none of the motion, but what's turning the thing is more than I can make out." He looked at Ashton-Kirk. "What place is ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... language of the Articles, and were fierce in denouncing the "kind of interpretation" said to be claimed in No. 90, have since found that they require a good deal more elasticity of reading than even it asked for. The "whirligig of time" was thought to have brought "its revenges," when Mr. Newman, who had called for the exercise of authority against Dr. Hampden, found himself, five years afterwards, under the ban of the same authority. The difference between Mr. Newman's ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... enables an animal or plant to gain an advantage over others in the struggle for life, no matter in what way, is sure to survive, and to be turned in time to every conceivable use of which its structure is capable, in the infinite whirligig ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges: and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has done, in a really eloquent passage of his book on the Emotions ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... social whirligig from which she had so lately fled, it seemed natural enough that a shake of the box should have tossed Nat Fulmer into celebrity, and sent Violet Melrose chasing back from the ends of the earth to bask in his success. Susy knew that Mrs. Melrose belonged to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... you, Pat." As he spoke, Tom slowly picked himself up, and steadying himself by Polly's shoulder, issued his commands, and the procession fell into line. First, the big dog, barking at intervals; then the good-natured Irishman, trundling "that divil of a whirligig," as he disrespectfully called the idolized velocipede; then the wounded hero, supported by the faithful Polly; and Maud brought up the rear ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... agitation of the intellectual atmosphere sets your average parson into a tempest of pumping like the jointed ligneous youth attached to the eccentric of a boy's whirligig. His philosophy of life may be boiled down into a single sentence: Carry on and you will be happy. Did We Eat ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... this courteous; but he was a man who never remembered a grudge, until ready to pay it back with compound interest. West's adolescent passion for the immediate reform of politics had long since softened, and nowadays when the whirligig of affairs threw the two men together, as it did not infrequently, they met on the easiest and friendliest terms. West liked Plonny, as everybody did, and of Plonny's sincere liking for him he never had ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Charley. If he could see all the things that I see every day in the Tuileries and Champs Elyses, he would go wild. All Paris is a general whirligig out of doors, but indoors people seem steady, quiet, and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... by his tongue," said another; "and an he will come out o' his whirligig there, I'se gie him his tartan plaid fu' ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... second invitation, for I was curious to witness the wonders which the whirligig of time had wrought ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... followed as fast as his ass could trot, and found his master lying very still by the side of his steed. "Did I not warn your honor that those things were windmills and not giants at all? Surely none could fail to see it, unless he had such another whirligig ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... free and far away from his passionate antagonisms. I found in the simple life of the community where I was brought up the same human things, in a small way, that I was subsequently to come in contact with in a larger way in the whirligig of political life in the Capitol of the Nation. I found the same relative bigness and the same relative smallness, the same petty jealousies and rivalries which manifest themselves in the larger fields of a great nation's life; ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... bottomless sea Icarus crashed with a lightning celerity, Leaving a name for the ages to be. "Ha!" chortled Phoebus, "that comes of temerity." See from the sequel the fitness of things: Nearly forgotten this early adventure is; Phoebus is beaten; Time's whirligig brings Still its revenge in the course of the centuries. Over the sky, from the east to the west of it, Man has decidedly now ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... a marked emphasis on the last sentence, to lead Massy away from the track in case . . . but he did not doubt of now holding his success. The chief engineer seemed nonplused, like a slow man invited to catch hold of a whirligig of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... the whirligig of time brings in his revenges—Louis XI. escaped. He had been buried in a crypt at Clery, and had been forgotten. In 1889 the abbe Saget, cure of Clery, opened the vault and found the body intact. Louis XI. had this sepulchre made for himself during his ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the Beaux-Arts, was asked by Octave Mirbeau to decorate Cezanne, he nearly fainted from astonishment. Cezanne! That barbarian! The amiable director suggested instead the name of Claude Monet. Time had enjoyed its little whirligig with that great painter of vibrating light and water, but Monet blandly refused the long-protracted honour. Another anecdote is related by M. Duret. William II of Germany in 1899 wished to examine with his own eyes, trained by the black, muddy painting of Germany, the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... The whirligig of Time has changed the relative positions of the two great parties in Ireland. Formerly it was the Catholics who desired the abolition of Home Rule, and the Protestants who held by the National Parliament. That ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... the case here, and we do not know why it may not be in heaven, that the ones that are turned over and shook up, and the dust knocked out of them, and their metaphorical coat tail filled with boots, find that the whirligig of time has placed them above the parties who smote them, and we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... trying to compass the inane. You are trying to duplicate your dreams, dreams without a hint of the sun. The painter at least copies or interprets real life; while the composer dips his finger in the air, making endless sound-scrolls—noises with long tails and whirligig decorations like foolish fireworks—though I think the art of the future will be pyrotechnics. Mad, mad, I tell you! But whether mad or not matters little in our land of freedom, where all men are born unequal, where only the artists are sad. They are useless beings, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... some of their gains to their customers. America has also been taking the place of France and England as international moneylenders by financing Argentina; and a great company has been formed in New York to promote international activity, on the part of Americans, in foreign countries. "And thus the whirligig of time," assisted by the eclipse of civilization in Europe, "brings in his revenges" and turns debtors into creditors. In the meantime it need hardly be said that investment at home has become for the time being a matter of patriotic duty for every Englishman, since the financing ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys, The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... always lead somewhere. That is its business—to direct one to a definite place. Now, straight, even paths are not unpleasing if the effect is to be that of a formal garden. The danger in the curved path is an abrupt curve, a whirligig effect. It is far better for you to stick to straight paths unless you can make a really beautiful curve. No one can tell ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... Kit, "they do make a lot of whirligig work for themselves, all the same as your grandmothers painting pottery that smash like eggshells. But life here isn't all play at that, and there may be something doing before sleep time tonight. I went after you so I would have a comrade I knew ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... The whirligig-beetles, those social little black fellows, gather in large numbers and chase each other round and round in graceful curves, skating over the water as if ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... would doubtless upturn their aristocratic noses, and exclaim in disgust, "To what base uses," etc. We confess that it was highly satisfactory to us to see how the tables are turned, now that "the whirligig of time has brought about its revenges." We saw the market-place, in which slaves were sometimes sold; but we were told that the buying and selling at auction were usually done in Charleston. The arsenal, a large stone structure, was guarded by cannon and sentinels. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... need for reflection. He longed to sit in some secluded spot in order to think. At present, his brain was a mere whirligig, and all things about him seemingly danced to the same tune. Stationary objects were become unstable in the eyes of Soames, and the solid earth, burst free of its moorings, no longer afforded him a safe foothold. There was a humming in his ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... I remarked. There were books all round the room, and one of those whirligig square book-cases. I saw in front a Bible and a Concordance, Shakespeare and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's book, and other classical works and books of grave aspect. I contrived to give it a turn, and on the side next the wall I got a glimpse of Barnum's ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... McDuff, who fills a council seat Within the party which has long controlled Affairs politic in these tropic Isles, Would fain resign the office he now holds. Francos, consolingly: Events march on, and as the whirligig Of time revolves, so 'tis with politics. To-day one soars aloft on Vict'ry's wings; Tomorrow Fate those pinions proud may clip. 'Tis here Philosophy a cooling draught Kindly present to him who, from his seat, Is thrust ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... wind-mill so as to catch the aura popularis, used to say that he believed that were he to turn baker, it would put bread out of fashion. I have had the better luck to dress my sails to every wind; and so blow on, good wind, and spin round, whirligig. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... and not know your Quackenbos," laughed Bab, much amused, but rather glad to find that she could teach the "whirligig boy" something, for she ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... respite. era, epoch; time of life, age, year, date; decade &c. (period) 108; moment, &c. (instant) 113. glass of time, sands of time, march of time, Father Time, ravages of time; arrow of time; river of time, whirligig of time, noiseless foot of time; scythe. V. continue last endure, go on, remain, persist; intervene; elapse &c. 109; hold out. take time, take up time, fill time, occupy time. pass time, pass away time, spend time, while away time, consume time, talk against time; tide over; use time, employ ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wealth flowed no longer through the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf, on its way to the new countries of the West; and not only Alexandria, but Damietta and Bagdad, dwindled down to their present insignificance. And yet the whirligig of time brings about its revenges. The stream of commerce is now rapidly turning back to its old channel; and British science bids fair to make Alexandria once more the inn ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley |
