"Crotchet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fact that she has money will make him very slow to speak. Besides, he has a silly crotchet in his head now. He thinks that if he tried to marry her it would look as if he had given ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... aggregate of rosy cheeks and sunny smiles represented, I was informed they were the sum total of a ladies' school at Williamsburg—and a very charming sum total they were. Having a day's holiday, they had come up by the early steamer to pic-nic on the banks, and were now returning to chronology and crotchet-work, or whatever else their studies might be. Landing at King's Mills, a "'bus" took us all up to Williamsburg, a distance of three or four miles, one half of which was over as dreary a road as need be, and the other ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... reason for withholding his sanction from the iron bridge; and as that reason shows how some wretched crotchet, springing from their miserable system, is sure to start up on all occasions, and defeat the most needed improvement, I shall here state what it was. At the point where it was wished to have the bridge erected, the Tiber flows ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... or "bow-wow" imitations. For instance, the North Americans express by "whip-poor-will" what the Brazilians call "Joao-corta-pao." The Guinea fowl may have been the "Afraa avis;"but that was a dear luxury amongst the Romans, though the Greek meleagris was cheap. The last crotchet about it is that of an African traveller, who holds it to be the peacock of Solomon's navies, completely ignoring the absolute certainty which the South-Indian word "Tukkiim" carries ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... major, with the same fingering as the next study in F, No. 8, would be beneficial. It certainly would. By the same token, the playing of the F minor Sonata, the Appassionata of Beethoven, in the key of F sharp minor, might produce good results. This was another crotchet of Wagner's friend and probably was born of the story that Beethoven transposed the Bach fugues in all keys. The same is said of ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... should all build houses just like his. Mere clap-trap to win political influence—for his own people break the windows, and take no care of their fine new houses. I am sure property is burdened heavily enough without this absurd crotchet for additional spoliation. Old Cross Hall was crazy enough to leave him a lot of money as well as the estate; he certainly might have left the money to the poor girls he had brought up like his daughters, and not have left them to starve, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... out and about. In this respect they are an example to those careful mammas who keep their children, the whole day long, in their chairs, reading, writing, ciphering, drawing, practising music lessons, doing crotchet work, or anything, in fact, except running about in spite of the sunshine always peeping in and inviting them out of doors; and who, in the due course of time, are surprised to find their children growing up with incurable heart, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... decide further that while the best of them are remarkably good of their kind, few of them can be called positively bad in it. And yet again, if he has been fortunately gifted by nature with that appreciation of form which saves the critic from mere prejudice and crotchet, from mere partiality, he will, I believe, go further still, and say that while owing something to spirit, they owe most to form itself, to the form of the single-assonanced or mono-rhymed tirade, assisted as ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... any difference with Fanny," said he. "I was not able to explain all about it, nor can I now: it was a crotchet of the earl's—only some nonsense; however, I'm off now—I can't wait a day, for I mean to write to say I shall be at Grey Abbey the day after to-morrow, and I must go by Dublin. I shall be off in a couple of hours; so, for Heaven's sake, Sophy, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... house. Here our young democrat kept half-a-dozen horses, all of them—as men around were used to declare—fit to go, although they were said to have been bought at not more than L100 each. It was supposed to be a crotchet on the part of Lord Hampstead to assert that cheap things were as good as dear, and there were some who believed that he did in truth care as much for his horses as other people. It was certainly a fact that he never would have but one out in a day, and he was wont to declare that ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... wrote and talked as though most blissfully ignorant of that rule. The passages given above from his 'Principia' palpably violate it. But Theists, however learned, pay little regard to any rules of philosophising, which put in peril their fundamental crotchet. If they did, Atheism would need no apologist, and Theism have no defenders; for Theism, in all its varieties, presupposes a supernatural Causer of ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... lives was something which was enough to madden the eight healthy girls who lived at The Dales. Aunt Sophia was, in their opinion, all crotchets, all nervousness, all fads. She had no tact whatsoever; at least, such was their first opinion of her. She put her foot down on this little crotchet, and pressed this passing desire out of sight. She brought new rules of life into their everyday existence, and, what is more, she insisted on being obeyed. With all their cleverness they were not half so clever as Aunt Sophia; they were no match for this good ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... movements to represent note-values the crotchet is taken as the unit; this is represented by a step; higher values, from the minim to the whole note of twelve beats, are represented by a step with one foot and a movement or movements with the other foot or with the body, but without progression, e.g., a minim by one step and ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... the pundits on the Calcutta side of India consider it to be Mesua ferrea. Throughout our travels in India, we were struck with the undue reliance placed on native names of plants, and information of all kinds; and the pertinacity with which each linguist adhered to his own crotchet as to the application of terms to natural objects, and their pronunciation. It is a very prevalent, but erroneous, impression, that savage and half-civilised people have an accurate knowledge of objects of natural history, and a uniform nomenclature for them.] Mesua ferrea, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... be prevented by the appointment of a Parliamentary head, connected by close ties with the present Ministry and the ruling party in Parliament The Parliamentary head is a protecting machine. He and the friends he brings stand between the department and the busybodies and crotchet-makers of the House and the country. So long as at any moment the policy of an office could be altered by chance votes in either House of Parliament, there is no security for any consistency. Our guns and our ships are not, perhaps, very good now. But they would be much worse if any thirty ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... could not understand the joy Beatrice felt over the crude gifts of the fishermen's wives, nor her ecstasy when a poor girl whom she had once befriended, brought her a dozen yards of narrow and very dirty crotchet edging. Beatrice almost kissed that edging, and her eyes filled with tears as she folded it ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the many-coloured crotchet-mats and anti-macassars with which Miss Opie loved to decorate the apartment; nor was a paper frill adorning a paltry green flower-vase wanting to complete the tasteless ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... firm belief that there is an intimate relationship between the stomach and the ear, the saucepan and the crotchet, the mysteries of Mrs. Rorer and the mysteries of Mme. Marchesi. It has even occurred to me that one of the reasons our American composers are so barren in ideas is because as a race we are not interested in cooking and eating. Those countries in which ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... insisted—that these and similar honoraria ought to be accepted, because else you were lowering the prescriptive rights and value of the office, which you—a mere locum tenens for some coming successor—had no right to do upon a solitary scruple or crotchet, arising probably from dyspepsia. Better men, no doubt, than ever stood in your stockings, had pocketed thankfully the gifts of ancient, time-honored custom. My uncle, however, though not with the carnal recusancy which besieged the spiritual efforts of poor Cuthbert ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... work instead of the right. Now crochet the two sides together, and under every space, and under the chain stitches which form the slope, all round and where the crown is to be sewed in, work 2 d.c. stitches; and round the front and back, where the border will be worked, crotchet 3 d.c. stitches into every space, making 7 ...
— The Ladies' Work-Book - Containing Instructions In Knitting, Crochet, Point-Lace, etc. • Unknown
... examination, be repelled from Mr. Hare's plan by what they think the complex nature of its machinery. But any one who does not feel the want which the scheme is intended to supply; any one who throws it over as a mere theoretical subtlety or crotchet, tending to no valuable purpose, and unworthy of the attention of practical men, may be pronounced an incompetent statesman, unequal to the politics of the future. I mean, unless he is a minister or ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... had educated for this purpose, because, within a few weeks of the time fixed for the wedding, she was guilty of the frivolity, while on a visit from home, of wearing thin sleeves. Yet Mr. Day and my aunt's relations were benevolent people, only strongly imbued with the crotchet that by a system of training might be educed the hardihood and simplicity of the ideal savage, forgetting the terrible isolation of feelings and habits which their pupils would experience in the future life which they must pass among the ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... outside is the important thing, and the inside only incidental. Insipidity of mind is perhaps a trifle objectionable, because there are a few young men of property who dislike insipidity, and who therefore might be lost from the toils in consequence. It is a crotchet and an eccentricity in a man to desire a wife with a bright mind, but since there are such persons, it is just as well to pay a slight attention to the mind in odd moments when one is not engaged ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... short, bent, crotchet forceps. The forceps have bent and toothed jaws, which are intended to take hold of the fetus where neither cords nor hooks can be applied, as the ear, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... men whom he had there. For he said that on t'other side the water lived friars who styled themselves her sweet ladyship's most humble servants. Item, the goodly Friar-minors, who are semibreves of bulls; the smoked-herring tribe of Minim Friars; then the Crotchet Friars. So that these diminutives could be no more than Semiquavers. By the statutes, bulls, and patents of Queen Whims, they were all dressed like so many house-burners, except that, as in Anjou your bricklayers use to quilt their knees when they tile houses, so these holy friars had usually ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone; they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... there passes a bent glass-tube, T E, perforated near the closed end, F, with a number of small holes. (The perforations are easily made by piercing the partially softened glass with a white-hot steel needle; an ordinary crotchet needle, the hook having been removed and the end sharpened, answers the purpose very well.) The end, T, of the glass tube is connected by caoutchouc tubing with the coal-gas supply, the perforated end dipping into the sulphur. The neck of the retort, inclined slightly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... any crotchet (pardon the word), however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house, the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fifteen feet square, with a Brussels carpet, papered with brown, and hung with a lithograph of Rosa Bonheur's "Horse Fair," an engraved copy of Herring's "Village Blacksmith," and two smaller ones, of "The Stable" and "The Barn Yard," from the same artist. A table and bureau, spread with crotchet work, eight chairs and the bed, were all the furniture. Upon this bed, a low walnut four-poster, lay the dying President; the blood oozing from the frightful wound in his head and staining the pillow. All that the medical skill of ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... feeling of anger with the Nazarene. Whilst the question of his life and death was debated he was riding in front of our party, and there was something in the anxious writhing of his supple limbs that seemed to express a sense of his false position, and struck me as highly comic. I had no crotchet at that time against the punishment of death, but I was unused to blood, and the proposed victim looked so thoroughly capable of enjoying life (if he could only get to the other side of the river), that I thought it would be hard for him to die merely in order to give me a character ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... insecure. You know all the time that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour looks thence-forward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for nothing. They shall see us all stand out to sea to catch them in the open, as I said in the town-hall of Scarborough yesterday, on purpose. Everybody laughed; but I stuck to it, knowing how far the tale would go. They take it for a crotchet of mine, and will expect it, especially after they have seen us standing out; and their plans ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore |
