"Take shape" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... successor was young and stood in awe of him at first; but awe was not a quality the veteran inspired for long. Already Joe Ash began to grow restive under Levi's criticisms, and dimly to feel that the old hackler was better away. To-day Mr. Baggs allowed the resentment awakened by Best's criticisms to take shape in offensive comments at the expense of his young successor. He was of that order of beings who, when kicked, rests not until ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... figures of 125,000 tons. The production for the year foots up over 4,500,000 tons. The expansion and development of industries throughout the Middle and Southern States continues, and hundreds of new enterprises will take shape early in the spring. Iron and steel makers are projecting new furnaces and mills in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama. Some forty or fifty cotton mills are projected between Georgia and Texas. Mining companies ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... important conference. Here I looked at sketches, plans, and working drawings until my eyes swam. Four more months passed which I utilized to the full. I then went to Kiel and saw a remarkable framework of steel slowly take shape upon the stocks across the way at Gaarden. Rotund, snug, and harmless the thing lay there. Inside it were hidden all the countless, complicated, and powerful features of those sketches and working drawings. I cannot boast that the reality as executed in steel and brass was any easier ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... means of a written constitution. And when American statesmen did so, they did it without any reference to Sir Harry Vane. His relation to the subject has been discovered only in later days, but I mention him here in illustration of the way in which great institutions grow. They take shape when they express the opinions and wishes of a multitude of persons; but it often happens that one or two men of remarkable foresight had thought ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... once realized began to take shape in his mind, and that night, contrary to his usual custom, he could not go to sleep. Sandy came in early, and the children went wearily off to bed. Then Sallie began to talk on the very subject which lay so heavy on his own heart, and he could tell from the tone of the conversation that ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... close to such suffering and forget it!" was his thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her uniform—and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... out, the mud glistened in the moonlight, but nothing was to be seen more than Anne had beheld on many a summer night before, no phantom was evoked before her eyes, no elfin-like form revealed his presence, nor did any spirit take shape to upbraid her with his unhallowed ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sarcasm with which it was torn to rags. Once or twice Thresk was on the point of springing up in her defence, but she looked at him with so much terror in her eyes that he did not interfere. He sat and watched and meanwhile his plan began to take shape ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... given for our departure upon our business. But while I waited I looked hither and thither through the moon-lit gloom to discern this face and that of familiar youth, and as I noted them and named them to myself, I was dimly conscious of a thought that would not take shape in words, and yet a thought that, all unwittingly, troubled me. I seemed like a child that tries, and tries in vain, to recall some duty that was set upon it, and that has wickedly slipped its memory. Man after man ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... with a thousand spears, and his force was growing in snowball fashion as he progressed through the land. The great road which Notiki, the northern chief, had started by way of punishment was beginning to take shape. Bosambo ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... walk. At unexpected moments they come, and he grows aware of the issues of his mysterious life, and his heart shakes and shivers like a lightning-shattered tree. In that drear light all earthly things seem far, and all unseen things draw near and take shape and awe him, and he knows not what is true and what is false, neither can he trace the edge that marks off the Spirit from the Life. Then it is that the footsteps echo, and the ghostly footprints ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... musician—that was his longing and his dream. And he never came to quite an honest understanding with himself on this point, for desire and dream were interwoven in his mind; he could not separate the one from the other. But when he weighed them, and allowed them to rise up and take shape before him, it was invariably in this order that they did so. In reality, although he himself was but vaguely conscious of the fact, it was to some extent as means to an end, that, when his eyes had been opened to its presence, he clutched—like a drowning man who seizes upon a spar—clutched ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... innumerable offshoots, pursues a SE. course till joined by the Meghna, and under that name enters the Bay of Bengal; its most noted offshoot is the HOOGHLY (q. v.), which pursues a course to the S. of the Meghna; between these lies the Great Delta, which begins to take shape 220 m. inland from the Bay of Bengal; the Ganges is 1557 m. in length, and offers for the greater part an excellent waterway; it is held in great reverence as a sacred stream whose waters have power to cleanse from ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook where seeds may germinate in silence, and where through slow fruition the mysterious forms of organic life may come to take shape and thrive. He who thus looks a little deeper into the secrets of nature than his forefathers of the sixteenth century may well smile at the quaint conceit that man cannot be the object of God's care unless he occupies an immovable position in the ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... lives depended. We ceased at once to feel like standing passively on the defensive, but immediately crawled out of the hut to do something,—exactly what, we did not know. Our thoughts had, indeed, hardly time to take shape in our minds, so quickly had the change come in the situation and ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... life and who will simply play a part there take shape in successive images. The first, a fair but illusive picture, fades away as another sadly obtrudes itself; and another, paler yet, comes in its turn; and thus they all vanish, becoming less and less distinct until the end, until the day when a last, vague ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... of Ash, the Shadow Witch raised her grey sleeves and waved them toward Curling Smoke. Prince Ember, watching to see what she was about to do, saw a creature, as if in answer to the giant's cry, take shape from among the smoke wreaths that lay along the ground and begin to creep, half hidden ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... must do something desperate or recklessly place himself by his friend's side. Eventually, mainly through the quick-wittedness of Madame Dubec, a plan that seemed to offer a chance presently began to take shape. This plan was to create so strong a diversion at some point of the route that Max might be enabled to make a dart away to safety, and to aid his further progress once the first part of the plan ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... feared to plan and his hand to execute. Onward his black horse strides, companioned by the storm, like a dark thought travelling on the wings of Night. He does not believe in any God, and yet the terrible fears that spring up in his soul, born fungus-like from a few drops of blood, take shape and form, and seem to cry aloud, "We are the messengers of the avenging God." He glances up. High on the black bosom of the storm the finger of the lightning is writing that awful name, and again and again the voice of the thunder reads it aloud in spirit-shaking ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... me especially important that all of us be clear, in our own thinking, about the nature of the threat we have faced-and will face for a long time to come. The measures we have devised to meet it take shape and pattern only as we understand ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... artisans with the determination to grapple with the problem of the unskilled workmen. From the Dockers' strike of 1889 the New Unionism became a fighting force in public affairs, and the idea of a Labour party began to take shape. On the new problems Liberalism, weakened as it already had been, was further divided, and its failure in 1892 is to be ascribed far more to this larger cause than to the dramatic personal incident of the Parnell divorce. In office without legislative power from 1892 to 1895, ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... but pleased him most of all that she could talk as an equal with these people, to him so brilliant and clever. The faint thought of her which had been unconsciously with him for years began to take shape. How pleasant it would be to be like the Strattons, to live with Nellie always, and have friends to come and see them on a Saturday night! How a man would work for a home like that, so full of music, so full ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... of his art. He who paints a man, an angelic being, or a divine being, paints something we feel may have life. But it is impossible to imagine Time with a body as it is to imagine a painting embodying Newton's law of gravitation. It is because such abstractions do not readily take shape that Watts drew so much on the imaginative tradition of his predecessors. Where these pictures are impressive is where the artist slipped by his conscious aim, and laid hold of the nobility peculiar to ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... was beginning to take shape in my head, but I didn't rush it. First I had to be sure that I knew him well. Any man that can con an entire world into building a battleship for him—then steal it from them—is not going to stop there. The ship would need a crew, ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... poignant whisper to Elizabeth Gibbons, as he thrust out his arms akimbo and squinted learnedly at Preciosa through his fingers. "And hasn't the lad got line!" he presently added in a rapturous undertone, as the black and white tracing began to take shape. Prochnow was drawing with immense freedom, decision, confidence; every stroke told, and told the first time. "He knows how! He knows how!" moaned Little O'Grady, locking his hands and forearms in a strange twist and rocking to and fro with emotion. "He's got the wrist!—the ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... permanent French settlement was effected. With the coup d'oeil of a general or the foresight of a prophet, Champlain, the illustrious first founder of French empire in America, in 1608 fixed the starting-point of it at the natural fortress of Quebec. How early the great project had begun to take shape in the leading minds of the nation it may not be easy to determine. It was only after the adventurous explorations of the French pioneers, traders, and friars—men of like boundless enthusiasm and courage—had ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the wall I wander; The hoary stones have set my heart astir; My thoughts take shape and move beside me in the guise Of the stern men who built the wall in early olden days. One by one the melancholy phantoms go stepping from me, And I follow them in and out among the stones. I think of the days long gone, Flown like birds beyond the ramparts of the ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... in a primitive forest—his income would be essentially of his own making and would include all that he makes. He would not, like the primitive man, get the literal things that he fashions, but he would get the amount of wealth that he creates—the value of the literal products which take shape ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... Inquisitorial methods in a land accustomed to liberty—the prince, meantime, remaining moderate, to the exasperation of the Protestants, whose blood boiled at the prospect of an Inquisition in their midst and for their extermination. From Breda, William watched evils take shape, his very calm giving him advantage in forming accurate judgment of the magnitude of opposition on which he might rely, concurring in a remonstrance drawn up in March of 1566; and in the latter part of this month he went to a meeting of the Council ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... from her head, Religion with the rest bent forward to look. She saw, or thought she saw, in the curling gray cloud a woman's face. It seemed to take shape and expression, as she gazed, until it grew familiar. The forsaken woman, who had seen the face of a successful rival, sank heavily upon the floor. Some of the others screamed, some moaned and prayed. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various |
