"Crookedly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perplexing," said Martha, sitting down with a sigh, and regarding the tea-table with a critical gaze; "quite perplexing. I'm sure I don't know how I shall bear it. It is too bad of George— darling Ailie—(dear me, Jane, how crookedly you have placed the urn)— it ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... He smiled crookedly. "You know, convicts' prayers don't seem to rise very high, miss—don't seem to reach anywhere. We haven't got the stand-in with the Boss that others seem to have," he said ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... The savior, turning toward her, saw the fattest little Madigan nudge her red-haired neighbor savagely. She was evidently angry at something. "It's good of you to take me in like this. What I want to say is that the train was late crawling crookedly up and around the mountains. I had no idea of arriving in the evening and coming in upon you this way. But when I got here, the town looked so savage, don't you know, so—drear—and desolate and—and flimsy, I got a bit home-sick—there! The thought of all you people, my own people, housed ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... so absurd," smiled Farrington, crookedly; "it is enough when I say I want this girl's happiness. Don't you realize," he went on rapidly, "that the only thing I have in my life, that is at all clean, or precious, or worth while, is my affection for my niece? I want to see her happy; I know that her happiness ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... potted plant with four blossoms. The four blossoms were elaborately dead. Their death was drawn with a fearful care. An obscure deliberation was exposed in the depiction of their drooping petals. The pot tottered very crookedly on a sort of table, as near as I could see. All around ran a funereal scroll. I read: "My farewell to my beloved wife, Gaby." A fierce hand, totally distinct from the former, wrote in proud letters above: "Punished for desertion. Six ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... chuckle, as if she had made an original observation. But she had not, for Lady Garvington always appeared worn and weary, and sallow, and untidy. She was the kind of absent-minded person who depended upon pins to hold her garments together, and who would put on her tiara crookedly ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... meagre dress flapping about her knees like a flag. But at the foot of the rickety outer steps that ran across the bare front of the shack crookedly, like a broken arm, I caught her by ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... for two hours before she came, painting a small patch of the gorse. Old gnarled stems wound upward crookedly, and beneath them lay a dead carpet of gorse needles with a blade or two of grass shooting through. From the roots and bases of the main stems sprouted many a shoot of young gorse, their prickles tender as the claws of a new-born kitten, their shape, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... points of his black mustache and regarded her askance, smiling crookedly. "Yoh 'fraid for trus' me, that's why I promise," he said at last. "Me, I don' need padre to mumble-mumble foolish words before I can be happy. Yoh 'fraid of Luck Leen'sey, that's why I promise. Now yoh come way up here, so luck don' matter no more. ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... good long drive from Mrs. Derrick's. The road was first on the way to Mr. Simlins'; from there it turned off at right angles and went winding crookedly down a solitary piece of country; rising and falling over uneven ground, twisting out of the way of a rock here and there, and for some distance skirting the edge of a woodland. There was light enough to see by, but it was not just the piece of road one would choose of a dark night; and Faith ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... is about all." Ten days later Ashe, a dressing on his leg and a few of the pain lines smoothed from his face, sat on a bunk in the arctic time post nursing a mug of coffee in his hands and smiling, a little crookedly, ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... ragged beard. This he was plucking with nervous jerks, talking to himself the while, and casting a disparaging eye upon the portrait of Remington Kara which hung above the marble fireplace. A pair of pince-nez sat crookedly on his nose and two fat volumes under his arm completed the picture. Fisher, who was an observer of some discernment, noticed under the overcoat a creased blue suit, large black boots and a pair of ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... "He could get good work anywhere, but he won't work honestly. All he cares for is the excitement of big things he can get at crookedly. That was why he tried a coup with that copper mine in the Urals and had to clear out of Russia. And the La Chance mine that he came to contemptuously, and just to get hold of me, is a big thing too. No—listen! You don't know how big, for you've been kept in the dark. But Dick knows; and that's ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... because they had no beastly money. Not all Herbert's pious skill could make this out a blessing. It was bad enough being "so rich" at the Silts; here he was more ashamed of it than ever. In a few weeks he would come of age and his money be his own. What a pity things were so crookedly arranged. He did not want money, or at all events he ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... asked Frank, laughing in spite of himself at the woe-begone figure of the professor, who, his bonds having been cut, now stood upright with his spectacles perched crookedly on his nose. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... was in disorder. Chairs were overturned, there were empty spaces on the wall where the finest pictures of the millionaire had been hung. The window facing the door was wide open. The shutters were broken; one of them was hanging crookedly from only its bottom hinge. The top of a ladder rose above the window-sill, and beside it, astraddle the sill, was an Empire card-table, half inside the room, half out. On the hearth-rug, before a large tapestry fire-screen, which masked the wide fireplace, built in imitation of the big, wide fireplaces ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having opinions, just ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... in the family at a day's notice! and that wedding Magdalen's! and not a single new dress ordered for anybody, the bride included! and the Oriental Cashmere Robe totally unavailable on the occasion when she might have worn it to the greatest advantage! Mrs. Wragge dropped crookedly into a chair, and beat her disorderly hands on her unsymmetrical knees, in utter forgetfulness of the captain's presence and the captain's terrible eye. It would not have surprised her to hear that the world had come to an end, and that the only mortal whom Destiny ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... was like marble, so smooth and so fair; Though it's wrinkled so crookedly now, As if time, when those furrows were made by the share, Had been ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... length they rose to go to bed, it struck each man as he followed his neighbour upstairs that the one before him walked very crookedly. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... strode purposefully into the bathroom. He smiled crookedly at his own reflection in the mirror. It was damnably difficult for a President to outwit ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... he intended to hire one of the waiting cabs to drive him back to St. Fair. As he neared the top of the street which led to the square, his eye was caught by the flutter of a woman's dress in one of the narrow old passages which spindled crookedly off it. The wearer of the dress was his niece Sisily. She was walking swiftly. A turn of the passage took her in the direction of the Morrab Gardens, and ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... although bearing signs of haste, was in Mildred's usual clear handwriting; but there was a postscript scrawled crookedly across the inner sides of the sheet and prefixed by ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... shall I say of him, for he had no personal history. He had an old name, however, which he hoped not to sully, and he bent himself quietly to duty, as, crookedly and undesirably, it came his way. He found no call to do great things of the world, but rather to straighten out the small things of a wee corner of it, and there to keep the peace. The maid just came into his life, and he, in his plain way, thanked Providence ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... under the bowlder alone, a small brown creature in picturesque-looking rags, a mere waif and stray of a child, with her feet trailing in the pool; every now and then small mottled crabs scrambled crookedly along, or dug graves for themselves in the dry waved sand. The girl watched them idly, as she flapped long ribbons of brown seaweed, or dribbled the water through her hollowed hands, while a tired sea-gull that had lowered wing was skimming slowly ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... stood well apart from the flock of houses, as though, like himself even in this, it were suspicious and meant to keep its own business to itself. Only one other building had approached it in neighbourly fashion, and this originally had been Honeycutt's barn. Now it had a couple of crazy windows cut crookedly into its sides and a stovepipe thrust up, also crookedly, through the shake roof, and was known as the McQuarry place. Here one might count on finding Swen Brodie at such times as he favoured Coloma with his hulking ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... children were fetching water, and playing about, even straying almost beyond call. No guards were posted, on the look-out. The logs of the defences had sagged by weather—some appeared to have rotted. One of the double gates, swung inward, hung crookedly. It was a Boonesborough gone to ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... her furniture, seemed to have taken on a coating of dust. Timid eyes looked out at Joan from behind pince-nez set rather crookedly on a thin nose. One side of her face, from eye to chin, was disfigured by an unsightly bruise. Miss Bacon dabbed a handkerchief to it continually and started ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... horses, which Ephraim's brother rode, and was to be sent back to the Manathans, for one of theirs, which must return to the South River. We rode on a little further, and came to Millstone River again, which runs so crookedly, that you cross it at three different places. After we crossed it now, we took the bridles from the horses, in order that they might eat something, while we sat down and dined together, upon what we had in our travelling bags. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... guest in honor of the day's event. Four weeks later Flavia read it, under the flowering almond trees that surrounded the house so closely as to overhang the balcony on which she sat. Read it, then kissed the careless, boyish Corwin B. Rose that slanted crookedly across the foot of the page. Holding the letter, she sat ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife. For her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly about my life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain from base capitulations? How are you to put aside love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly about into ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... just wide enough for two slim persons to pass side by side. The rough wooden walls were neither painted nor stained, and the knot-holes were stuffed with rags. Here and there a rude door was open, hanging crookedly on its hinges, while the occupant talked with a friend outside, or prepared for an expedition, laden with kitchen utensils, coal and food, to the common cooking-place of the rabbit colony—a queer and dismal set of iron shelves, long and narrow, sticking out from a wall, and calling ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... began to appear, singly and in twos and threes, and then go out again, and go on up the stairs which led crookedly to and from the corner the office was cramped into. Some of them went up stairs after merely glancing into the office, others found letters there, and staid chatting awhile. They looked at Cornelia with merely an identifying ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... are not regular, but the expression exquisite. I suppose he might be considered plain; his nose is large, rather thin, and not straight; his mouth is large but finely shaped; I think he smiles a little crookedly. Anyway, his eyes are beautiful; they are set far apart, and are strangely expressive. For the rest, he is more freckled than any one I ever saw, and his hair—which is of no particular colour—is rather long and thrown off the temples, save for one lock that continually ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... what makes you walk so crookedly?" "Oh, my nose, you see, is crooked, and I have ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... hands deep in his trouser pockets and stared purposelessly into space, twisting his eyebrows out of alignment and crookedly protruding his ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... to learn to read, but it was not encouraged by the hermit, nor was there any book available save the portuary, crookedly and contractedly written on vellum, so as to be illegible to anyone unfamiliar with writing, with Latin, or the service. However, the anchoret yielded to his importunity so far as to let him learn the alphabet, traced on ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bullets began to whicker around him. He dodged behind the ship, then ran crookedly for cover. By great good luck, he was not hit. His beast-men hurried ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... the dream out of Jeanne by kicking Doggie out of her sphere. And there was a girl in England in Doggie's sphere whom he was to marry. She knew it. A man does not gather his sagacities in order to answer crookedly a direct challenge, unless there is ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... credibility. Some men were supposed to be so rarely endowed that "a thousand liveried angels" waited on them invisibly, to execute their behests for the benefit of those they favoured; while, much oftener, the perverse and crookedly disposed, who delighted in mischief, would bring on those to whom, for whatever capricious reason, they were hostile, calamities, which no sagacity could predict, and no merely human power could baffle ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... life so crookedly from servants and such," he added. "Phoebe and I just try to straighten ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... crookedly points with his crooked fingers at the large letters, and reads: "One thousand dollars (hic) dollars reward for the capture of John Logan! What do you say to that, Carats? That's a fine fellow to have for a lover, ...
— Shadows of Shasta • Joaquin Miller
... to him that Moreau could die. This disaster was the sudden collapse of the habits that had become part of his nature in the ten or more monotonous years he had spent on the island. He talked vaguely, answered my questions crookedly, wandered ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... had looked out of the little window of his room on the day of his arrival. The whole of its trunk was evergrown with dry moss, its bare, rugged branches, sparsely covered with reddish leaves, rose crookedly, like some old arms held up in supplication. Nejdanov stepped firmly on to the dark soil beneath the tree and pulled out the object he had taken from the table drawer. He looked up intently at ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... it to be pronounced?—and when her weak sight not allowing her to finish it, she handed the paper to Papa and requested him to read it all over again from the beginning? I fancied that she must have done this last because she did not like to read such a lot of stupid, crookedly written stuff herself, yet wanted to point out to Papa my utter lack of feeling. I expected him to slap me in the face with the verses and say, "You bad boy! So you have forgotten your Mamma! Take that for it!" Yet nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, when ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... woolen stockings; above it was a pinafore—a regular child's pinafore, of the cheap, strong, blue-speckled print which in those days was generally worn. A little shabby shawl, pinned at the throat, and pinned very carelessly and crookedly, with an old black bonnet, much too small for her large head and her quantities of ill kept hair, completed the costume. It did not impress favorably a lady who, being, or rather having been very handsome herself, was as much alive to appearances as ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... out of his chamber window. The trunk of this apple-tree was covered with dry moss, its bare and knotty branches, with but a few little green and brown leaves, stuck out here and there, raised themselves crookedly towards the heavens, like the suppliant arms of an old man, with bent elbows. Nezhdanof stood firmly on the dark earth which surrounded the foot of the apple-tree, and drew from his pocket the small object which he had previously taken from the table drawer.—Then he looked attentively ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... criticism, if my love were in harmony with law and principles, I should have found in Aniela the dogma of my life, and other dogmas, other beliefs, would have come to me in course of time. Yet I do not know; perhaps I could not love otherwise than crookedly; and in this lies my incapacity for life. In short, that which ought to have been my health and salvation has become my disease and damnation. Strange to say, there was no lack of warnings. It almost seems as if people ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... clear lettering on the southern arm. Eastwards a much more weatherbeaten arm, pointing crookedly up a stony cart track, said in dim brown characters: "CHILMARK 2 M." Plainly a short cut over the moor! Better stones underfoot than padded dust: and Lawrence struck uphill swiftly, glad to escape from the traffic of the London road. But he knew too much about short ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... The road wound crookedly up a hill, as it left the streets of the town behind. The scattered tents extended for a mile in this direction, the squares of silent canvas, like so many dice, cast on the slopes by a careless fate that had cast man ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... and there on the walls were great smears of black from the torches, and even one or two torn bits of stuff and a crushed hat marked where the pressure had been fiercest. Most eloquent of all was the splintered door behind him, still held fast by one stout bolt, but leaning crookedly against the dinted wall ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... stretch of sophism be called a voluntary act. He recalled the long, sordid, sensational matrimonial comedy of which he had been the victim; the keen competition of the parents of daughters for the hand of so renowned an infant prodigy, who could talk theology as crookedly as a graybeard. His own boyish liking for Pessel, the rich rent-farmer's daughter, had been rudely set aside when her sister fell down a cellar and broke her leg. Solomon must marry the damaged daughter, the rent-farmer had insisted to the learned boy's ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... They were travelling eastwards. The landscape below was level and unvaried, of a greenish hue, and much like that of Chick's own earth in the early spring-time—a vast expanse, level and sometimes dotted with opalescent towns and cities. Ribbons of silver cut through the plain at intervals, crookedly lazy and winding, indicating a drainage from north to south or vice versa. Looking back to the west, he could see the great, golden sun, poised as he had seen it that morning, a huge amber plate on the rim of the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... wandered to the creature who had replaced the first man at the end of the water-pipe. Enormous brown paws clutched it savagely; the wild, big head hung back, and in a face covered with a wet mass of hair there gaped crookedly a wide mouth full of fangs. The water filled it, welled up in hoarse coughs, ran down on each side of the jaws and down the hairy throat, soaked the black pelt of the enormous chest, naked under a torn check ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... seemed to be swept out of the great avenue by the swirl of a mental backwash. He remembered muddy shores, a harbor without quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught fire mysteriously and smoldered for days, so that amazed ships came into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red at midday. He remembered the things, the ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... has been rendered unhappy for the rest of her life, has been lost and dishonored by a man whom she has ceased to love, because he took off his coat awkwardly, trimmed one of his nails crookedly, put on a stocking wrong side out, and was clumsy ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... soul hath borne testimony concerning him; according to the Great Balance his case is truth (i.e., just). No wickedness hath been found in him. He did not filch offerings from the temples. He did not act crookedly, and he did not vilify folk ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... things oft go crookedly, Even then this love is still, Can the cross bear patiently, Thinking 'tis the Father's will. From this thought doth comfort taste, Better days will ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... to the ground in a cloud of dust and splinters; having only got hold of a wisp of seaweed, or a handful of those draggled funeral trappings which were strewn about this place. The floor of the vault was sandy; and so, though I fell crookedly, I took but little harm beyond a shaking; and soon, pulling myself together, set to strike my flint and blow the match into a flame to search for the fallen candle. Yet all the time I kept in my fingers this handful ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... (5) Every one, I conceive, deliberately chooses what, within the limits open to him, he considers most conducive to his interest, and acts accordingly. I must hold therefore that those who act against rule and crookedly (6) are ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... room overhead the light had leapt to full brilliancy. An uncertain hand pulled the shade down crookedly. As the young man turned for a last look at the house he perceived a shadow hurriedly passing and repassing the lighted window. Then all at once the shadow, curiously huddled, stooped and was gone. There was something sinister in the sudden disappearance of that active shadow. Jim ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... crookedly, with a languid tolerance bespeaking amusement and contempt. James prided himself upon his forbearance, and it was rarely indeed that he betrayed more than a hint of the superiority which ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... he was, even if he did not know how he got here. The L-B—if it did exist—was to the west. He had a vivid mental picture of the rocket shape, its once silvery sides dulled by exposure, canted crookedly amid trees. And he was going ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... old-fashioned house near at hand. Its walls were weather-worn, its yard was not tidy. The faded curtains at the windows hung crookedly. The glass of the panes was dirty. The entire aspect of the place indicated that there was no woman's hand to make it home. It was ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... the table wore rough knickerbockers, high, rather muddy boots, a loose jacket, and a cap set crookedly on the head. When Northrup spoke, the young person turned and he saw that it was a woman. There was no surprise, at first, in the eyes which met Northrup's—the door of the little yellow house was constantly admitting ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... there with the blood." How can we know that alcohol does mischief in the brain? You cannot answer? Did you never see a drunken man? Now tell me how you might know his brain has been hurt by alcohol.—"He talks funny; he acts strangely; he is very cross; he does not know what he is doing; he walks crookedly; he falls down; sometimes he falls asleep, and is almost like a dead ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis |
