"By fits and starts" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came from Montreal every day to see him, said it was all owing to his superb constitution and wondrous vitality. But he was very, very weak. It was days and days before he was strong enough to think, or speak, or move. He slept, by fits and starts, nearly all day long, recognizing his sister, and Kate, and Eeny, and the Captain, by his bedside, without wondering how they came to be there, or what ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... that labor is honorable for man, but that the English population would appreciate their services and that they would be able to get good wages. What we want is constant and reliable laborers; not those who come by fits and starts, just to work for a month and then be off. They must select their masters, and then make an engagement for twelve months; or it might be after a month on approval. Good laborers could get fifteen shillings per month, and as their services increased in value ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... knows but too well that anything like a chronic complaint requires a chronic treatment. The important thing, however, was that my headaches yielded gradually to the continued use of medicine; it would hardly have produced the desired effect if I had taken it by fits and starts. All this seems to me quite natural; but though my English doctor cured me, and my German doctors did not, I still hold that the German system is better. Most families have their doctor in Germany, who calls from time to ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... his divorce, until 1541, the year of his election, Henry attempted, by fits and starts, to assert his supremacy in Ireland. He appointed George Browne, a strenuous advocate of the divorce, some time Provincial of the order of St. Augustine in England, Archbishop of Dublin, vacant by ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... is so gay, so very gay, And not by fits and starts, But ever, through each livelong day She's sunshine ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. "Change in language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not equable, but eminently by fits and starts"; and when the foundations of the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities and energies which the Reformation awakened ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... painted scarlet, sails and all, but that had been in its infancy, half a century or more earlier, when it had ground wheat for the soldiers of Napoleon; and it was now a ruddy brown, tanned by wind and weather. It went queerly by fits and starts, as though rheumatic and stiff in the joints from age, but it served the whole neighborhood, which would have thought it almost as impious to carry grain elsewhere as to attend any other religious service than the mass that was performed at the ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame) |
