"Thick-skinned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... oranges are adapted for this purpose. Thick-skinned and woolly oranges are no use. Peel a thin-skinned ripe orange, divide each orange into about six pieces, soak these in a syrup flavoured with sugar rubbed on the outside of an orange, and if liqueur ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... she admitted, "but, thick-skinned though he is, I have managed to make him understand pretty well how I feel about him. You'll find him a thorn in your side," ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... volunteer to drive about the Glen and Four Winds one day, collecting promised Red Cross supplies with Abner Crawford's old grey horse. One of the Ingleside horses was lame and the doctor needed the other, so there was nothing for it but the Crawford nag, a placid, unhasting, thick-skinned creature with an amiable habit of stopping every few yards to kick a fly off one leg with the foot of the other. Rilla felt that this, coupled with the fact that the Germans were only fifty miles from Paris, was hardly to be endured. But she started off gallantly on ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wiser the West Indian negro, who takes a burning stick from the wood fire, and tenderly lights his weed therewith, or joyfully brings a handful of the white-hot ashes in his thick-skinned palm, that 'massa' may fire his cigar! Or the travelling peddler or tinker, who, as he sits by the way-side, patiently wooes the sun with a 'burning-glass' till his tobacco ignites, or uses with equal prudence and skill ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... homage, very many of them; said they were "incorporated with Boehmen"; said this and that; much disinclined to homage; and would not do it. Stiff, surly fellows, much deficient in discernment of what is above them and what is not: a thick-skinned set; bodies clad in buff leather; minds also cased in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... short-jointed. Leaves large, longer than wide, deeply five-lobed; dark green above, lighter and very hairy below; coarsely toothed; with short, thick petiole. Bunches very large, loose or sometimes scraggly, borne on long peduncles; berries large, long, more or less curved, dark purple, spotted, thick-skinned, borne on long pedicels; flesh firm, crisp, sweet but not rich in flavor; quality good but not high. Season late, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... these marshes the jaguars also followed the peccary herds; it is said that they always strike the hindmost of a band of the fierce little wild pigs. Elsewhere they often prey on the tapir. If in timber, however, the jaguar must kill it at once, for the squat, thick-skinned, wedge- shaped tapir has no respect for timber, as Colonel Rondon phrased it, and rushes with such blind, headlong speed through and among branches and trunks that if not immediately killed it brushes the jaguar off, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... topographically correct, trotting off in succession to the right or left, through its own lane, to its own dwelling; till old Kunz, at the Village-head, now left alone, blew his last blast, and retired for the night. We are wont to love the Hog chiefly in the form of Ham; yet did not these bristly thick-skinned beings here manifest intelligence, perhaps humor of character; at any rate, a touching, trustful submissiveness to Man,—who, were he but a Swineherd, in darned gabardine, and leather breeches more resembling slate or discolored-tin breeches, is still the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... to-morrow. He wants to buy our furniture. It's a piece of luck, isn't it? The only piece of luck I've had.... By God, Hinde, this serves me right. Eleanor always said I was selfish, and I am. I'm terribly self-satisfied and thick-skinned. I had no qualification for this work ... nothing but my conceit ... and I've been let down. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... although Politics and Romance, in the History of Human Intrigue, have often known and enjoyed the same yoke, with Khalid they refused to pull at the plough. They were not sensible even to the goad. Either the yoke in his case was too loose, or the new yoke-fellow too thick-skinned and stubborn. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... befall them without his will. If it be his will, then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity at all. Thus and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded from harm. And I for one—by no means a thick-skinned or hard-nerved man-am absolutely satisfied with this arrangement, and do not wish for any other kind of immunity from danger and catastrophe. Quite as sensitive to pain as the most highly strung organism, I yet feel that the worst of it is conquered, and the ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the old man. The second time I was lucky enough to catch a big blue-fish, which we had for dinner. The Captain is an excellent specimen of the sturdy navigator, with his loose blue clothes, his ultra-divergent legs, his crisp white hair, and his jolly thick-skinned visage. He comes of a seafaring English race. There is more or less of the ship's cabin in the general aspect of this antiquated house. I have heard the winds whistle about its walls, on two or three occasions, in true mid-ocean style. And then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... sash-windows, two on either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution, an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though not inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly to ignore ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... own piety, nevertheless knew it. The preachers, moreover, were less than human. They preached interminable sermons. Discourses lasting an hour and a half were common, and even lengthier ones were not unusual. The parsons were hopelessly thick-skinned, moreover, and impervious to hints. When on one occasion, at which Sylvane was present, the congregation began to consult their watches, the preacher, instead of bringing his sermon to a close, exclaimed, "See here, you don't ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... said Shubin, 'only I'm afraid of being late. Look at the river; it seems to beckon us. The ancient Greeks would have beheld a nymph in it. But we are not Greeks, O nymph! we are thick-skinned Scythians.' ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... favour by all possible means.' 'True it is, madam,' he answered, 'your Grace and I have been at divers controversies, in the which I never perceived your Grace to be offended at me.' Knox's complacency is sometimes thick-skinned: but he was not wrong in thinking that Mary, a woman with immensely more brains than the generality of her posthumous admirers, had from the first understood and, perhaps, half liked her uncompromising adversary, and that she had at least enjoyed the dialectic ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... angrily at her, but being too thick-skinned to take in the full meaning of the child's words, he caught only the familiar name she had spoken. "Miss Wayne?" he bellowed. ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... and sirloins' should have been intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate through our outer rind—which, to say the truth, is often elephantine enough—to the central core of heat; and we must not complain if he was too apt to deny the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... come. It is a quality you are born with or without. He was born without. Sarah knows all about it. It won't hurt her; she has the methods of an ox. She goes direct to her point, and tramples over everything that stands in her way. If he were less thick-skinned she would be the death of him; but fortunately he has ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... needed for the development of imperialism, but who were unhampered by the restrictive influences of those who had sought perfection. To organize and administer the new industrial-financial-commercial regime, the leaders must be shrewd, ingenious, quick-witted, thick-skinned, unscrupulous, hard-headed, and avaricious; yet daring, dominating, and gifted with keen prevision and vivid imagination. These qualities had not been bred under any of the Mediterranean civilizations, or that of Central Europe ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... most effective. Even the thick-skinned moose is not exempt from discomfort. At certain seasons the canoe voyager in the Far North will run upon a dozen in the course of a day's travel, standing nose-deep in the river merely ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... suitor, but altogether by a feeling of duty towards her uncle. And he would point out to this suitor how dastardly a thing it would be to take advantage of a girl so placed. He planned a speech or two as he drove along which he thought that even Urmand, thick-skinned as he believed him to be, would dislike to hear. 'You may have her, perhaps,' he would say to him, 'as so much goods that you would buy, because she is, as a thing in her uncle's hands, to be bought. She believes it to be her duty, as being altogether dependent, to be disposed of as her uncle ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... powerful claws it can with ease spring up the trunk of a tree, and make its way along a branch, ready to pounce down upon a foe. It is truly the lord of the South American forests, as it often attacks the thick-skinned tapir, and even the largest alligator. In spite of the enormous jaws of the latter, the jaguar will leap towards the tail of the creature, tear open its side, and devour it even before life is extinct. Only two animals do not fear the jaguar; ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... you regard it?" A less thick-skinned man than Merrington would this time have caught something more than surprise ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... and easier ones, and let them much more alone. I wonder if I really keep them better? But if not, may GOD, I pray Him, send me back the restless zeal, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which He gives in early youth! It is so easy to become more thick-skinned in conscience, more tolerant of evil, more hopeless of good, more careful of one's own comfort and one's own property, more self-satisfied in leaving high aims and great deeds to enthusiasts, and then to believe ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... 'sow his wild oats' and have done with it; in the nether, 'to have your fling' is almost necessarily to fall among criminals. The death was sudden; it affected the lad profoundly, and filled him with a remorse which was to influence the whole of his life. Mr. Roach, a thick-skinned and rather thick-headed person, did not spare to remind his apprentice of the most painful things wherewith the latter had to reproach himself. Sidney bore it, from this day beginning a course of self-discipline of which not many are capable at any age, and very ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... inclined to doubt that you'll ever do anything even when you have the vote." He looked at her reflectively. She appeared very smooth and sensitive and young. "It'll take at least six generations before you're sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is," he continued, "the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... passed the parting with Tilly that night I gave her the word that I was going to be around for a week or so, and that I wanted to see more of her. Not thick-skinned, her kind, when it came to showing like and dislike, and she looked her pleasure for the honest girl she was. Ay, a striking lass, and I didn't wonder that Chief George was taken ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... in the earliest ages of the great Tertiary division, and exhibit in the group an aspect very unlike that which they at present bear. The Eocene ages were peculiarly the ages of the Palaeotheres,—strange animals of that pachydermatous or thick-skinned order to which the elephants, the tapirs, the hogs, and the horses belong. It had been remarked by naturalists, that there are fewer families of this order in living nature than of almost any other, and that, of the existing genera, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... that kind," replied Jack. "Both of them are too thick-skinned to be sensitive. More than likely they have been telling their friends that we did our best to get them into trouble and that they ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... well as their drunken state would allow, they forthwith proceeded, in ribald language, to entertain their more sober shipmates with a tale of gross, wanton, cruel outrage, perpetrated on board the Spaniard, that made my blood boil with indignation, and caused me, thick-skinned sailor as I was, to blush at the thought that the perpetrators were, like myself, human. I noticed that Danton listened with greedy ears to the foul recital; and by and by, when the long-boat's cargo had been roused out of her ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... that—very like an electrified frog!" murmured Vargrave, as he took up the "Morning Chronicle," so especially pointed out to his notice; and turning to the leading article, read a very eloquent attack on himself. Lumley was thick-skinned on such matters; he liked to be attacked,—it showed that he ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... be beneath that of Jane Austen, but which certainly is akin to hers, and has the same quality of pure and simple human nature. Pure and simple human nature is, for the moment, out of fashion as the subject of modern romance. But it remains a curious problem how the boisterous, brawny, thick-skinned lump of manhood whom we knew as Anthony Trollope ever came to conceive so many delicate and sensitive country maidens, and to see so deeply and so truly into the heart of their ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison |
