"Broken-backed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a recurring decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this light exactitude of the numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almost leapt to his feet. "Why, good heavens!" he cried. "I won that election; and it was won by one vote! But for me it would have been the despicable, broken-backed, disjointed, inharmonious figure five hundred and fifty-four. The whole artistic point would have vanished. The Mark of the Man would have disappeared from history. It was I who with a masterful hand ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... before she could be brought up in the wind again, and the old Juno had then to go through a trial such as her joints even in her younger days had never been equal to. She was like many another vessel that is a good sailor enough, a little broken-backed from the weight of the cargo amidships; and as she gave to the strain, the ladder that stood in the hold began to saw up and down in the coaming forward, while the water came oozing in through the staring ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... sore over Blazing Star, and he was not ready yet to put another into the vacant place. After a silent five minutes' walk, they reached the corral with fifty horses of all colours, sizes, and shapes. Then Kyle said: "Jim, I've been thinking, preachers ain't exactly broken-backed carrying their spondulix. I kind o' think I owe ye something in the way of possibilities for putting Blazing Star in hands which may be a big help to me. So there's my bunch; you can go over them at your own time and pick the best as ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... most notorious Pirates? It deals with the last few years of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth, a period that might with justice be called "The Decline and Fall of Piracy," for after 1730 Piracy became but a mean broken-backed affair that bordered perilously ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... a garret where cobwebs hang thick Over walls that display the bare mortar and brick, Whose windows look down on the roofs of back sheds, From a height that would dizzy the coolest of heads, A young author sits by a rickety stand, In a broken-backed chair, with a pen in his hand, And patiently toils ere the sunlight shall fade To black the last quire of a ream of 'white laid.' The shadows have deepened that hang on the wall; But the Finis is written, the pen is let fall; And, glad of a respite from labors ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various |
