"Warped" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and, at all hazards, declaring to her how matters were; but other feelings subdued my better emotions. Oh, what monsters are we made of by the fashions of the world! how are our kindlier and nobler feelings warped or destroyed by their baleful influences! I felt that it would not be HONOURABLE, that it would not be ETIQUETTE, to betray O'Connor's secret. I sacrificed a higher and a nobler duty than I have since been called upon to perform, to the dastardly fear of bearing the unmerited ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... be tiresome. We are taught to number him among the truly great and good men, but he lived and laboured long ago; moreover, we are not a cheery lot of heathen living happy and unwashed in the depths of primeval forests, so our judgment is warped. As to Charles's goodness, I heard some story about his offering to marry an Empress of the East while his first wife was still alive, not, it appears, from any ardent devotion to the lady—I do not believe he ever met her—but simply from the sordid motive ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Is't not a kind of incest to take life From thine own sister's shame? What should I think? Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair! For such a warped slip of wilderness Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance: Die; perish! might but my bending down Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed: I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,— ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the public, critics, musicians, conductors, get on your nerves? Is it any consolation for you to know that Van Kuyp will be famous? What is his fame or his failure to you? Where do you, Alixe Van Kuyp, come in? Why must your charming woman's soul be sacrificed, warped to this stunted tree of another's talent? You are silent. You say he is trying to make me deny Richard! You were never more mistaken. I am interested in you both; interested in you as a noble woman—stop! I mean ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... inveterately full of tears; of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing, piteous, and pitiful Humanity, who begs of me and offers me her faded love in the street corners. She shall be my Queen, the subject of my song, the motive of my poetry. She may be guilty, warped awry from her birth, and now a tired harlotry; but she shall rest on my shoulder and I shall comfort her. She is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to truth, and from ignorance to knowledge, and from all to love; and all her ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... thought as the development of a new era in the literature of our land. Its matter is high-toned and interesting, it is the most outspoken print we know of, and its outspokenness is the result of a fresh and vigorous life that is not warped by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no man can succeed in business unless he has a brain to enable him to lay his plans, and reason to guide him in their execution, so, no matter how bountifully a man may be blessed with intelligence, if the brain is muddled, and his judgment warped by intoxicating drinks, it is impossible for him to carry on business successfully. How many good opportunities have passed, never to return, while a man was sipping a "social glass," with his friend! How many foolish bargains have been made under the influence of the "nervine," ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... sank it they might raise it again and have the cannon ready for action again in a few hours. We've got to burn the boat and then the cannon will be warped and twisted so they can't fix ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to it we found that neither the pilot nor the observer was seriously hurt. Flying in Mesopotamia was made unusually difficult by the climatic conditions. The planes were designed for work in France and during the summer months the heat and dryness warped the propeller blades and indeed all the wooden parts. Then, too, the fine dust would get into the machinery when the aviator was taxiing for a start. Many pilots coming out from France with brilliant records met an early and untimely end because they ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... I was ashamed of the thought which, as I came to him, flashed through my mind, that he might do some violent thing. Not that I had any fear of violence; but I had an active dislike of awkward circumstances. I felt his fluttering pulse, and noted the blue line on his warped lips. I gave him some medicine, and then sat down. There was a silence. What could I say? A dozen thoughts came to my mind, but I rejected them. It was difficult to open up the subject. At last he put his hand upon ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... show that you are an ignorant, short-sighted child. Do you suppose that a woman of my years and experience would make no better provision for the future than a man's changeful mind—a warped and undeveloped mind, at that? No; I have an agreement with Mr. Holcroft. I shall be a member of his household for three months at least, and long before that he will begin to see everything in a ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... of the orchard we came upon a grape-arbor, with seats built along the sides and a warped plank table. The three children were waiting for us there. They looked up at me bashfully and made some request ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... word. The creek, which had been hidden behind a maze of swamp grass when the Barang entered the river, now lay fair and open, and a boat sent in to sound reported water enough for her full-load draft. And as the vessel was slowly warped in, two great mooring posts were found in the shore at precisely the best place for her to lay. Still there was no visible sign of ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... stayed out of sight for the time being. He'd barely got the mine put away, along with a handful of warped metal slugs, which was what the mine had left of their attacker's mechanical equipment, and Trigger's cabin door locked again, when three visitors came zooming down the storerooms hall in a small car. A ship's engineer and two assistants had arrived ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... stancia a wooden calendar of native construction was suspended over the doorway. Some superstition is probably attached to the possession of these, for although I frequently tried to purchase one at a fancy price the owners would never sell this primitive timekeeper which was generally warped and worm-eaten with age. I never saw ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... her make-up any inherent weakness of mentality, Hazel might perhaps have brooded herself into neurasthenia. Few save those who have actually experienced complete isolation for extended periods can realize the queer, warped outlook such an existence imposes on the human mind, if that mind is a trifle more than normally sensitive to impressions, and a nature essentially social both by inclination and habit. In the first months of their marriage she had assured herself and him repeatedly that she could be perfectly ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the east side of Sydney Cove, was assigned to us by the governor for carrying on some of our employments, whilst others were in progress on board the ship and in the dockyard. On the morning after our arrival we warped to a convenient situation near the point, and sent on shore the tents, the sailmakers and sails, and the cooper with all the empty casks. Next day the observatory was set up, and the time-keepers and other astronomical instruments placed there under the care of lieutenant Flinders, who, ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... Princess Lowicka made life pleasant for the talented boy. Then came his lessons with Joseph Elsner in composition, lessons of great value. Elsner saw the material he had to mould, and so deftly did he teach that his pupil's individuality was never checked, never warped. For Elsner Chopin entertained love and reverence; to him he wrote from Paris asking his advice in the matter of studying with Kalkbrenner, and this advice he took seriously. "From Zwyny and Elsner even the greatest ass must learn something," he is ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... never man yet lay."[22] And yet it is the man as revealed in Jesus Christ, not the man as fashioned by the world, with its low traditions and low public opinion, that is true to human nature. In moments of excitement or danger he reverts to this true nature, which has been so warped and overlaid by the world. In the great mass meetings which I held for the purpose of pleading with men to come over on my side and help me in the work of saving women from the awful doom to which men sentence them, I used to bring this home by saying ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... little sunshine in it for one of his warped, ill-conditioned nature. There was a profound conviction in the minds of the company officers that the mere sight of happiness or content in the face of a subordinate was more than enough to set Canker's wits to work to wipe it out. There was ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... up a lazy street. On a hill farther up the river a fortress basked in peace, and had no desire to be disturbed. In the town the buildings were of warped timber, and a few of stone. Parasitic tumors, like loathsome black ulcers, swelled abundantly on the roofs. They were the buzzards, the only form of life held sacred. To clean up nature's and man's spendthrift killing ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... across the picture—a bent, tired, work-warped woman—his mother. The pitiable leanness of the life of Hiram's mother had been appalling. One word stood for the tenor of her days from sun to sun—nothing. She had never seen a piano or a typewriter, or even a washing machine. Silent, unmurmuring, she had given ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... vessel, Phillips proposed Tobago; and just as they had done, a Man-of-War's boat came into the Harbour, the ship cruising to the Leeward of the Island; which was no sooner gone, but they warped out, and plied to ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... wonder is past we receive great men as the present attainment of an illimitable Nature, as the Earth receives the light of stars, unnoticed save of wandering lovers, and sweeps undisturbed on its way. If sometimes we are warped from our sphere by the apparition of noble persons, wise men presently recover themselves and serve with a milder and firmer persistence their own nature. The way is made clearer by these bright lights, universal nature is fairer that there are so many single stars; but they must be ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... by my faith!' the Hermit said— 'And they answered not our cheer! The planks looked warped! and see those sails, How thin they are and sere! 530 I never saw aught like to them, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... The country that marched them to the front with speeches and music when the guns were talking throws them on the scrapheap when they come back maimed. I have no faith in a country that takes so much and gives a little so grudgingly. I've learned to think, Robin, and perhaps it has warped me a little. You have suffered. So have I, partly because I was ignorant of the nature I was born with, which you didn't understand and which I'm only myself beginning to understand—but mostly because the seats of the mighty were filled by fools and hypocrites seeking their own advantage. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to it safely. I know that many of you have done, and are every day doing, whatever you feel to be in your power; and that even all this wrong and misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving to do his best, without noticing that this best is essentially and centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the modern economist, that 'To do the best for yourself, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... be so far alike, it is very remarkable, that they differ widely in other particulars, and that this difference may be regarded as a strong proof of the difference of their origins. As the obligation of promises is an invention for the interest of society, it is warped into as many different forms as that interest requires, and even runs into direct contradictions, rather than lose sight of its object. But as those other monstrous doctines are mere priestly inventions, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... these extraordinary words had aroused in his memory most painful recollections, D'Argenton relapsed into silence, and said not another word the whole evening. Poor Ida was also thoughtful, haunted by vague fears of the noble ladies who had so warped the gentle spirit of her poet, so drained his heart that there was not a drop left ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... God's noblest handiwork. How does your spiritual self compare with your physical frame?—has it attained the same perfection? No; it has become so dwarfed and misshapen by your indulgence in sin and vice—so hardened by yielding to so-called 'pleasure,' your intellect so warped, your talents so misapplied that even your Maker would scarcely recognize the being that He Himself had brought into existence. You are forty-nine years old, Gerald—you may have ten, twenty, even thirty more to live. How will you spend them? Will you go on as you have been living for ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... less tragic than her family. On her face, written in the acid of pain, was the history of the blows and cruelty that had warped her active body. Owing to her crippled foot, her entire left side sagged hopelessly and her arm swung away, above it, like a branch from a decayed tree. But more saddening than her distorted body was the lonely soul that looked out of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the other, but the Spaniard had only thirty men and two small guns. The Holland ships proceeded to anchor outside the harbour, and, lowering their longboats, sent ashore forty men, all armed with pistols. But the Spaniards had been on the alert, and having warped their vessel to a safer position above the bridge, they placed their two guns on the deck, and every man prepared ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... it proved, for the Russian captain, in reply to the second lieutenant, had told him in English, "that he would answer that question with his broadside," and before the boat was dropped astern, he had warped round with the springs on his cable, and had recommenced his fire ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... imagined. To the list that has been already published we must add the name of James Farendell, the energetic contractor so well known to our citizens, who was missing the morning after the fire. His calcined remains were found this afternoon in the warped and twisted iron shell of his counting-house, the wooden frame having been reduced to charcoal in the intense heat. The unfortunate man seems to have gone there to remove his books and papers,—as was evidenced by the iron safe being found open,—but ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... the plans to be carried out in the colonies. From the settlement of Jamestown down to the breaking out of the war, and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, not a single one of the royal governors ever suffered his sense of duty to the crowned heads to be warped by local views on "the right of slavery." The Board of Trade was untiring in its attention to the colonies. And no subject occupied greater space in the correspondence of that colossal institution than slavery. The following circular ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... passage hid the machine in what, if Graylock's story was correct, had been Hovig's personal stateroom. As Dasinger approached that point, it was like climbing into silent thunder. The door was locked, and though the walls beside it were warped and cracked, the cracks were too narrow to permit entry. Dasinger dug out a tool which had once been the prized property of one of Orado's more eminent safecrackers, and went to work on the lock. A minute or two later he forced the door partly back in its tilted frame, scrambled through ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... shade on the yellow earth, and the lifting, expectant sound of high wind in top branches. And sometimes, in the heart of such an arm of woodland, the old horse's hoofs would echo hollow on the warped and mellowing boards of a tiny bridge, and there would be a momentary slip and gurgle of water underneath, on down through the ferns. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... responsibilities. You can not divorce them. A liberal education greatly increases a man's obligations. There is coupled with it a responsibility which you can not shirk without paying the penalty in a shriveled soul, a stunted mentality, a warped conscience, and a narrow field of usefulness. It is more of a disgrace for a college graduate to grovel, to stoop to mean, low practises, than for a man who has not had a liberal education. The educated man has gotten ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... drop of the milk of seven white milch kine every morn and every eve to the trough of stone at the foot of the Heugh, for the Laidly Worm to drink. And this they did, and after that the Laidly Worm troubled the country-side no longer; but lay warped about the Heugh, looking out to sea with its ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... is the fatal malady of painters. There are, however, a few rare cases in which the detracting element attaches itself to the followers and not to the profession, as though it would seem there was a something in the daily working of that peculiar craft which warped the minds and coerced the natures of men to be different from what temperament and character ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... a nature be comprehended by a woman like Olive O'Brien, a creature of wild impulses, whose notions of morality were as shifty as the quicksands, whose sense of right and wrong was so strangely warped? For the first time in her life the strong accusing light of conscience seemed to penetrate the murky recesses of her nature with an unearthly radiance that seemed to scorch her into nothingness. Her ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... can find a couple of explanations that I would rather explore first, before dragging in an alien life form. There may have been a mutation or an inherited disease that has deformed or warped ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... Study of History is full of precepts, maxims, warnings, injunctions, all of which may be pondered by students with advantage. We are enjoined, for example, to beware of permitting our historic judgment to be warped by influences, whether of Country, Class, Church, College, or Party; and it is said, by way of driving home the warning, that the most respectable of these influences is the most dangerous. But very few writers, and, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... warped by books! We are not contented with realities: we crave conclusions. With what ardour our minds respond to real events with literary deductions. Upon a train of incidents, as unconnected as life itself, we are wont to clap a booky ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... 'n' looks at the money box. The front of the car has warped till there's a big crack in the right-hand side of the box you can see the platform through. I drops two nickels in on that side, 'n' bing! they go down the shoot 'n' out the crack. They falls on the platform 'n' Orphy picks 'em up 'n' goes south ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... wooden building rose abruptly without fence or garden from the waste of whitened grass. Close to it there stood a birch-log barn or stables, its sides curiously ridged and furrowed where the trunks were laid on one another, roofed with wooden shingles that had warped into hollows here and there. Further away there rose another long building, apparently of sod, and a great shapeless yellow mound with a domed top towered behind the latter. It was most unlike a trim English rick, besides ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... do this thing which to him, by the strange standard of his warped code, spelled dishonour, he would and he would not; and while he paltered, was visited by an oddly vivid memory of the clear and candid eyes of Cecelia Brooke, seemed veritably to see them searching his own with their ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... Under the warped lodge frames which the fires of the Iroquois had spared, there were yet visible clusters of the ears of last year's corn. Here, under his own eye, were growing yet other ears, ripe for the harvesting and ripe for the coming growth. A strange spell fell upon the soul of Law. Visions ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... character. That wonderful and continually more elaborate and penetrating analysis of the evolutionary process by Darwin and his followers and successors and antagonists, the entire subordination of the individual lot to the specific destiny that these criticisms and researches have emphasized, has warped and altered the aspect of a thousand human affairs. It has made reasonable and in order what Schopenhauer found so suggestively perplexing, it has dispelled problems that have seemed insoluble mysteries to ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Evidently there were vast possibilities in a democratic propaganda. At the outset Bonaparte's racial sympathies were warmly aroused for the liberation of Italy; and though his judgment was to be warped by the promptings of ambition, he never lost sight of the welfare of the people whence he was descended. In his "Memoirs written at St. Helena" he summed up his convictions respecting the Peninsula in this statesmanlike utterance: "Italy, isolated within its ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... a dreary morning's work before us, for there was no sign of any wind, and the boats had to be got out and manned, and the ship warped three or four miles round the corner of the island, and up the narrow passage to the haven behind Skeleton Island. I volunteered for one of the boats, where I had, of course, no business. The heat was sweltering, and the men grumbled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quality, and that which, combined with his talents, make the loss a national one, was his great moral and professional courage, his unshaken attachment to what he considered a good cause. No consideration ever warped him from his duty. He was proof not merely against those speculations on the best probable means of personal advancement which many men reject as well as he did, but against that desire of standing well with the ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... resolve: Low-voiced he spake, with eyes upon the ground And inward smile that dimly reached his lips: 'Brethren, be wary lest ye strive with God Through wrath, that blind incontinence of age, For what He wills He works. By passion warped Ye deem this trial strange, this conflict new, Yourselves doomed men that stand between two Fates, On one side right, on one side miracles! Brethren, the chief of miracles is this, That knowing what ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... understand them. This is a question which all thinking persons must needs regard with profound interest and anxiety. If, in the deliberate opinion of the country, the judgments of the High Court of Parliament are habitually, though unconsciously, warped by party and political feelings and prejudices; if, with such views and intentions, they have strained and perverted the law of the land, wickedly sheltering themselves under the unfortunate difference of opinion existing among the judges, those who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... with pictures on the walls, and shiny chairs and tables; smart clothes and clean hands; evenings of mental peace in a home of his own. And a woman to manage it and him. That was the bewildering part of it—he wanted a woman to order him about, some one gentle and sweet, to blot from his warped mind the hideous nightmare of strife and scheming amidst which he seemed always to have moved. He longed to have to change his clothes after the day's work, to wash and brush himself, to smile and converse in his best of English. ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... fare any better than trade at the hands of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer, and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul, encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... sign. He is a gone man surely. His understanding warped and turned backward. To see him blighted the way he is would stir ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... military folk of all ranks—for the military profession is as much respected in Japan as it is despised in China—went hither and thither in groups and pairs. Passepartout saw, too, begging friars, long-robed pilgrims, and simple civilians, with their warped and jet-black hair, big heads, long busts, slender legs, short stature, and complexions varying from copper-colour to a dead white, but never yellow, like the Chinese, from whom the Japanese widely differ. ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... follow my own tastes and inclinations; to be the person I believe God designed me to be; to fill the niche I believe He designed me to fill! Abbie, I hate my life. I have not a happy moment. It is all rasped, and warped, and unlovely. I am nothing, and I know it; and I had rather, for my own comfort, be like the most of those who surround me—nothing, and not know it. Sometimes I can not help asking myself why I was made as I am. Why can't I be a clod, a plodder, and drag my way with stupid ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... fat," declared the jolly little Elizabeth. "I'm simply warped from being out in the rain. ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... an unintruding guest, I watched her secret toils from day to day; How true she warped the moss to form the nest, And modeled it within with wood and clay. And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew, There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers, Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue: And there I witnessed in the summer hours A brood ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... kindle a spirit of emulation. We beheld, with pleasure, the two princes adding to the dignity of their rank, and their fame in arms, all the grace and elegance of polite literature. But it is fatally true, that when the public taste is once corrupted, the mind which has been warped, seldom recovers its former tone. This difficulty was rendered still more insurmountable by the licentious spirit of our young men, and the popular applause, that encouraged the false taste of the times. I need not, in this ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... glory appears to be departing: a class much neglected, much enduring; thoroughly English—just, industrious, and patient; true to the altar, and loyal to the throne; though haply shaken somewhat now from both those noble faiths—warped in their principles, and blunted in their feelings, by lying doctrines and harsh economies; a class—I hate the cold cant term—a race of honourable men, full of cares, pains, privations—but of pleasures next to none; whose life at its most prosperous estate is labour, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... stanzas range from six to eighteen lines in length, and the lines themselves from four short syllables to the long Alexandrine. At times one has the feeling that this love of changing rhythms and rhymes has improperly warped the meaning of ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... the fleet some ten miles astern, all making chase. Hull put out his boats to tow the Constitution; Broke summoned the boats of the squadron to tow the Shannon. Hull then bent all his spare rope to the cables, dropped a small anchor half a mile ahead, in twenty-six fathoms of water, and warped his ship along. Broke quickly imitated the device, and slowly gained on the chase. The Guerriere crept so near Hull's lee beam as to open fire, but her shot fell short. Fortunately the wind, though slight, favored Hull. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not what I meant. You mustn't let your feelings get their nose turned up, or their underlip out, either, because feelings can grow warped just ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... the new palace; the modern sight of southern India. It is brimming with life; it looks like a Gothic cathedral in course of construction. Two towers, each at a guess, 150 feet high, with a wing between them, bristle with bamboo scaffolding so warped and twisted out of the perpendicular that the uprights are like old fishing rods. The extraordinary intricacy is quite fascinating, but at present it partially prevents one seeing the general proportions and effect of the building. As we see it, in the afternoon, the great mass of building ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... American home to-day still merits even such an offensively pretentious epithet as "Palladium." What morals our people have known and practised they have learned and been drilled in in the homes. That these morals should have been warped by a class-bias was inevitable. A home, itself the product of a society divided into classes, could not teach anything but a class-morality. A purely social morality (if morality be the proper name for the highest conduct in a classless society) is ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... those bygone times with poignant regret, but there were a few—generally fellows who had been contaminated by contact with Socialists or whose characters had been warped and degraded by the perusal of Socialist literature—who said that they did not desire to work overtime at all—ten hours a day were quite enough for them—in fact they would rather do only eight. What they wanted, they said, was not more work, but more grub, more clothes, more leisure, more ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... and spray a league away The anchor stout he bore, Till, safe at last, I made it fast, And warped ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... luck on his robbing raid. And the swarms of yellow butterflies were bands of stranger fairies travelling incognito. I knew what these fellows were about, but I said nothing. The ancients were good enough folk, but their idea of perspective was abominably warped. I ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... politics the American practice is to charge it against the Administration. In literature all grievances are attributed to the Puritans. If a well-written book does not sell, it is because the Puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an honest discussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the fault of the Puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines of new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to destruction or impotence, it is in protest ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... quarter it is seen. The writer of these Letters, which he never dreamed would be published, is the best self-portrayed Gentleman in literature. In everything he was naturally a stylist, perfected by assiduous art, yet the graceful steeple is somehow warped out of the beauty of the perpendicular. His ideal Gentleman is the frigid product of a rigid mechanical drill, with the mien of a posture master, the skin-deep graciousness of a French Marechal, the calculating adventurer ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... antipathy of these fanatics had for many years been artfully fomented against Charles; and though their principles were, on all occasions, easily warped and eluded by private interest, yet was some coloring requisite, and a flat contradiction to all former professions and tenets could not safely be proposed to them. It is certain, at least, that Cromwell made use of this reason why he admitted rarely of visits from the king's ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... I could see her nose up in the air forty feet above us, covered with fore-cabin passengers. I warped the lady and the children upward—Heaven knows how; for the sea was breaking over us very sharp—till we were at the mainmast stump, and holding on by the wreck of it. I felt the ship stagger as if a whale had struck her, and heard a roar and a swish behind me, and looked back—just in time ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... away from you to punish me, do you?" The Elder could not comfort her when she was in this frame of mind; in fact, he himself was sometimes afraid, seeing her utter absorption in the child. Yet it never for one instant warped her firmness or judiciousness of control. Draxy could not have comprehended that type of love which can lose sight for one instant of the best good of the loved one. Her control, however, was the control of a wise and affectionate ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... withdrawal of those who had attained the prescribed limits of wealth from commercial competition, earlier worldly success, and earlier marriage, with all its beneficent moral results, would become possible to the young; while the older men of active intellect, whose sagacity is now lost or warped in the furtherance of their own meanest interests, would be induced unselfishly to occupy themselves in the superintendence of public institutions, or furtherance of public advantage. And out of this class it would ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... where their father was. Apparently he thought that his published letter was sufficient reassurance for the time being. Perhaps he did not wish them to get at him in any way, or to have his purposes affected by any appeal from them. Perhaps, as Adeline firmly believed, his mind had been warped by his suffering—he must have suffered greatly—and he was not able to reason quite sanely about the situation. Mrs. Hilary spoke of the dignity and strength which both the sisters showed in their trial and present stress. She praised Suzette, especially; she said ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... thing is a ship of any kind. So narrow, so long, so grotesque; so low in the middle, so high at each end, like a China pen-tray; with no rigging, with nowhere to go to aloft; with mats for sails, great warped cigars for masts, gaudy dragons and sea-monsters disporting themselves from stem to stern, and on the stern a gigantic cock of impossible aspect, defying the world (as well he may) to produce his equal,—it would look more at home at the top of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... later the great liner was warped securely alongside the great landing stage, while the whistle shrieked a noisy greeting. Passengers hurried from one group to another, shaking hands in a final farewell with shipboard acquaintances whom they had come to know so well ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... (February 1st) the cutter was warped out of Oyster Harbour; and, as the wind was from the eastward, we profited by it: after beating out of the Sound we steered along the coast, and at eight o'clock were abreast ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... their decorative value. Whatever the design of the case—and, of course, it must harmonize with the other wood of the room—its shelves must be easily adjustable to books of different heights, standing in compact rows and not half opened to become permanently warped and spoiled. Varnished or painted shelves grow sticky with heat and form a strong attachment for their contents. The bookcase curtain is useful more as a protection against dust than as an art adjunct, for there is nothing more delightful to ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... that procrastination was certainly not to be numbered among his failings. It came to her that his interests, for the present, were identical with her own. As half-owner in the Three Bar it would be as much to his advantage as to her own to build it up. Waddles's warped legs prevented his acting as foreman on the job and it might be that the other man would find some way to prevent the leak that was sapping the life from the Three Bar. His half-ownership entitled him to the place. Billie Warren loved her brand and her personal distrust of Harris was submerged ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... from cupidity all the days of his life. This, in turn, had engendered a chronic distrustfulness, and his mind and character had become so warped that he was a very disagreeable man to deal with. He was also a victim to somnambulic propensities, and very set in his ideas. He had been a weaver of cloth from the cradle, until the fever of Klondike had entered his blood and torn him away from his loom. His cabin stood ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... potent for either good or evil, might have been trained and swayed aright until it had developed grandly out into the glorious womanhood the Creator must have planned for her. He knew, as if by revelation, that this woman had nothing in common with the narrow, self-righteous souls of Rykman's Corner. Warped and perverted though her nature might be, she was yet far nobler than those who sat in ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity of her ideals dies with Ali. At Damascus and at Bagdad an autocratic system warped by contact with Rome infects the religious; the result is a theocracy in which the purposes of Mohammed, at least on their political side, are abandoned, lost at last in the gloomy and often ferocious ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage scenery,—ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, intensely tenacious of the past, and still tingling with their old local love of country,—a people with whom, "to be a Bearnais is greater than to ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... all-wool double-warped U. S. government standard bunting, 45 stars sewn in the field, both sides, with canvas headings, best lacquered brass grummets, and all ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 11, March 17, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... sickness came over her. She could not disguise from herself the fact that he was dying. The warped and pallid face, the panic-struck eyes, the sweat, the wound in the neck, the damp hands nervously pulling the hem of the sheet—these indications were not to be gainsaid. The truth was too horrible to grasp; she wanted to put it away from her. 'This ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... in literature we meet with men who seem endowed with an obliquity of understanding, yet active and busy spirits; but, as activity is only valuable in proportion to the capacity that puts all in motion, so, when ill directed, the intellect, warped by nature, only becomes more crooked and fantastical. A kind of frantic enthusiasm breaks forth in their actions and their language, and often they seem ferocious when they are only foolish. We ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... failed so completely that there is nothing more in life for them. People like me,—I don't mean thieves and criminals necessarily,—who have had that which they know to be the best and biggest and truest part of themselves tortured and warped and twisted and denied and smashed and beaten and betrayed and killed; and who, because they feel that their real selves are dead within them, don't care what happens to that ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... were made that she should be towed out of the shed to test her efficiency at a mooring post which had been prepared in the middle of the dock. She was launched on May 22nd in a flat calm and was warped out of the shed and hauled to the post where she was secured without incident. The ship rode at the mooring post in a steady wind, which at one time increased to 36 miles per hour, until the afternoon of May 25th, and sustained no damage whatever. Various engine trials ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... mentally normal after that. He had reared Jetta with the belief that sin was inherent in all females. It obsessed him. Warped and twisted all his outlook as he brooded on it through the years. Woman's instincts; woman's love of pleasure, pretty clothes—all could ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... Venus, in which the periodical money of this people, as ferocious in their pleasures as they are calm at work, is squandered as it had been at play. For five days, then, there is no repose for this laborious portion of Paris! It is given up to actions which make it warped and rough, lean and pale, gush forth with a thousand fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose, are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white with intoxication, or ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... game; grave and ardent, already strong, they throw their pelota against the wall, while, in a singing voice and with the needful intonation, one of them counts and announces the points, in the mysterious tongue of the ancestors. Around them, the tall houses, old and white, with warped walls, with projecting rafters, contemplate through their green or red windows those little players, so lithe, who run in the twilight like young cats. And the carts drawn by oxen return from the fields, with the ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... mood, the keen relish for high enterprise, and the joyful love of life which they make known to us. The world to which they introduce us is so remote that the pre-occupations and vulgarities of the present, by which we all are hemmed and warped, fall away from us; and it is at the same time so real and of such absorbing interest that we are caught up in spirit and carried to the Attic Plain and the hills of Latium. They are useful, not because they teach us anything that may not be learned ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... lean, with legs warped by long years in the saddle. He was called The Spider because of his physical attributes as well as because of his attitude toward life. He never went anywhere, yet he accumulated sustenance. He usually had a victim tangled in his web. It was said that The ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Vittoria did her best to laugh at her mishaps in walking, and compared herself to a Capuchin pilgrim; but she was unused to going bareheaded and shoeless, and though she held on bravely, the strong beams of the sun and the stony ways warped her strength. She had to check fancies drawn from Arabian tales, concerning the help sometimes given by genii of the air and enchanted birds, that were so incessant and vivid that she found herself sulking at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... trifling and ignoble thoughts. The regularity of the India House labor upheld him. The extent and character of his acquaintance also helped to determine the quality of the things which he produced. Had he seen less, his mind might have become warped and rigid, as from want of space. Had he seen too much, his thoughts might have been split and exhausted upon too many points, and would thus have been so perplexed and harassed, that the value of his productions, now known ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... not-understood doctrine down his unwilling throat, she lived the simple creed of loving her neighbor better than herself. And the old pair of goggles she wore made little halos around the least speck of good she found in any transgressor, no matter how warped with evil. ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... dramatization reveals is because "Esther Waters" was written in that period of his life when Mr. Moore was most himself. After ten years in London he had escaped considerably from the French influence of his young manhood, and his genius had not been warped out of its true plane, as he would doubtless now say, by Irish mists. Mr. Moore must have felt that there was something not wholly himself in much of "The Untilled Field" and in much of "The Lake," that ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... your talk," Elizabeth heard, and next she heard some door that stuck, pulled open with a shriek of the warped timber. Next they were gambling, and made not much noise over it at first; but the Indians in due time began to lose to the soberer whites, becoming quarrelsome, and raising a clumsy disturbance, though it was plain the whites had their own way and were feared. The voices rose, and soon there was ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... wave of homesickness swept over the girl, homesickness for the world as she had always known it, her world as it had been before the war warped and twisted and spoiled things. And yet, oddly enough, there was no sense in the Cameron house of anything being spoiled. They talked of Ted Gordon in the same unbated tone of voice in which they spoke of her cousin Bob or of his ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... permit it.' He took his pipe from his mouth, and slapped his knee emphatically. 'Have you observed no change in the girl, since then? If you have not, I have. She is still the same devoted, affectionate child to that warped old man that she always was; but look at her face and form, and listen to her voice. She was once the gayest, merriest little creature that ever lived. It threw sunshine into one's heart only to look at her; and when she ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... milestone he intended to give a little supper that night at the hotel. Madam Villenauve, standing beside him, suddenly threw her arms around his neck and kissed him smack upon the lips, with a quite enthusiastic declaration, in very charmingly warped English, that he was "a dear old sing." Bobby, reverting quickly in mind to the fact of the extreme unconventionally of these people, took the occurrence quite as a matter of course, though it embarrassed him somewhat. He rather counted himself a prig that he could not sooner get over ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... the mind of the New Zealander these simple notions of right and wrong have been warped, and, as it were, suffocated, by a multitude of unnatural and monstrous inventions, which have grown up along with them from his very birth. How misapplied are the epithets, natural and artificial, when employed, as they often ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... weariness that ever and again turns the heart sick. Oh the pains and the perils of the going out! There are elements of danger in modern life that threaten all the world's toilers, whatever their work may be and wherever they may have to do it. There is the danger that always lurks in things—a warped judgement, a confused reckoning, a narrowed outlook. It is so easily possible for a man to be at close grips with the world and yet to be ever more and more out of touch with its realities. The danger in the places where men toil is not that ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... disguising of the rafters and "collar-ties" of the building. This was a process which lent itself to the curiously warped artistic sense of the benighted people. Print—I mean cotton rags—was the chief idea of decoration. They understood these stuffs. They were cheap—or, at least, as cheap as anything sold at Lablache's ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... studied. He has written a fine paper about him in his "Miscellanies," and we trace his influence not only in Carlyle's thought and sentiment, but in the very form of their utterance. He was, indeed, warped by him, at one period, clear out of his orbit, and wrote as he inspired. The dazzling sunbursts of Richter's imagination, however,—its gigantic procession of imagery, moving along in sublime and magnificent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... he caught sight of their two selves reflected in the looking-glass over the mantelpiece, and realised the immense gulf which separated them—a gulf not of void chaos and flaming space, but the deeper gulf of warped affections and sinful thoughts—he had felt a sudden longing to be other than what he was, to have Charlie for a true friend, to give up trying to make him a bad boy, and to fall at his feet and ask his pardon. And when he ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... again to the Indian Agency at Fort Lyons where he had left his son with Colonel Boone. Finding this son so changed, so assiduous to business, so positive in manner, so thoroughly free, as it seemed from the follies of his younger days—follies that had warped all his best natures—due, as Judge Wright was compelled to confess, to the timely efforts of Colonel Boone, there sprang into the breast of Judge Wright an unquenchable flame of jealousy. What right had Colonel Boone to hold such an influence over this boy, the pampered ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus |
