"Crookedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tariff privileges and railroad rebates; while Douglas' university was built from land, which Douglas was foresighted enough to buy in anticipation of Chicago's growth, and the increment in values produced by the Illinois Central railroad. Douglas was hotly denounced for crookedness and money grabbing in those days of 1858 by the Abolitionists and Free Soilers. Indeed much is said now in criticism of Mr. Rockefeller; but I believe it will pass. Besides he is not running for office, or trying to found an ocean to ocean ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... to look at them. It did her good to see them rising, strong and firm, though hideous to behold, on higher ground than the poor dilapidated hovels at the water's edge, where fever was always breaking out, which yet made, as they supported each other in their crookedness, and leaned over their own wavering reflections, such a picturesque sketch that it seemed a shame to supplant them by such brand new red brick, such blue tiling, such ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... streets in Paris, and is said to have been first marked out by the track of the saint's footsteps, where, after his martyrdom, he walked along it, with his head under his arm, in quest of a burial-place. This legend may account for any crookedness of the street; for it could not reasonably be asked of a headless man ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who had watched continually from his notch in the hills. She had been right in the first place, and the others had been wrong. Everybody disliked Bethune, and disliking him, had attributed to him all the crookedness of the hill country, and all the time, under their very noses, Vil Holland was the real plotter—and they liked him! She could see it all, now—how, with Bethune for the scapegoat, he was enabled, unsuspected, to plan and carry out his various schemes, and with no possible chance of detection—for ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... a certain inclination, may be quite unlike the discharge found to be due to those conditions by this table, and that difference may be owing partly to greater or less roughness on the inside of the pipe, unequal flow of water through the joints into the pipe, crookedness of the pipes, want of accuracy in their being placed, so that the fall may not be uniform throughout, or the ends of the pipes may be shoved a little to one side, so that the continuity of the channel is partially broken; and, indeed, from various other causes, ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... suburb itself. Remembering that she had seen this house behind the cottage of Miss Loach, the girl used it as a landmark, and turning down a side street managed to find the top of a crooked lane at the bottom of which Rose Cottage was situated. This lane showed by its very crookedness that it belonged to the ancient civilization of the district. Here were no paths, no lamps, no aggressively new fences and raw brick houses. Susan, stepping down the slight incline, passed into quite an old world, smacking of the Georgian times, leisurely and quaint. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... horn would be as convenient, and is yet more curiously twisted. He brings that much indulged bit of the country with him, from some town's end or other, and introduces it to Concord groves, as if he had promised it so much sometime. So some, it seems to me, elect their rulers for their crookedness. But I think that a straight stick makes the best cane, and an upright man the best ruler. Or why choose a man to do plain work who is distinguished for his oddity? However, I do not know but you will think that they have ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... and fearless face that it was extremely valuable to its owner in concealing a crookedness as resourceful as that of a fox, and a moral cowardice which made him a spineless tool in evil hands. A shock of tumbled red hair over a fighting face added to the appearance of combative strength. The Honorable Asa was conventionally ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Miss B. is, up to this point, merely puzzled over things. She doesn't suspect her uncle of any crookedness, I'm sure. So we shall have to tread softly ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the same with that already noticed under the preceding head—the criminal. Further, news gatherers are at great pains to ferret out and dole out to the public daily whatever serves to excite, and especially whatever shows the moral crookedness of the Negro, and that the years of freedom already enjoyed by him have simply brought forth a generation of vipers. Too often, from the lowest to the highest court, the records are so manipulated as to show the moral obliquity of the Negro. It is a potent fact that public ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the wide-spread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... this, these same unprincipled agents, with their hired accomplices and subsidised press, in order to hide the enormity of their crimes, and to divert attention from themselves and their crookedness, systematically and incessantly misrepresent ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... perhaps, even calls in persons from the next room to see how well the baby can walk! Not a word about imperfections and failings, not a word about the tottering, the awkward reaching out of arms to preserve the balance, the crookedness of the way, the anxious expression of the countenance, or any other faults. These are left to correct themselves by the continued practice which encouragement is ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... has an unusually good chance to get glimpses of this filthy underworld, even if he does not frequent the squalid quarters of the astrologers. Bushels of mail bring this superstition and mental crookedness to his study, and his material allows him to observe every variety of illogical thought. If a letter comes to his collection which presents itself as a new specimen that ought to be analyzed a little ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... in a voice under perfect control. "Still up to your old crookedness, are you? It's a wonder to me they've let you live ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... kindness, good nature and generosity all dead? Would he have taken a ten-dollar bill—or even a hundred-dollar one—from Simpkins when he was going to be a witness in one of Hogan's cases? Not on your life! He wasn't no crook, he wasn't! He didn't have to be. He was just a cog in an immense wheel of crookedness. When the wheel came down on his cog he automatically ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... timbers. Leclere was the chief mason. He directed the affair of dressing the stones and laying them. That required a very careful head, you understand, for the tower must be straight. In the floor a little crookedness did not matter; but in the wall—that might be serious. People have been killed by a falling tower. Of course, if they were going into church, they would be sure of heaven. But then think—what a disgrace ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... in their going out of the room together again and stumbling once more down the stairway's crookedness. At the bottom of the first short flight they stopped in the darkness and Glad knocked at a door with a summons manifestly expectant of cheerful welcome. She used the formula she ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lord's motives were, it was clear that he was not acting in the plain, straight-dealing manner to be expected of one in his position. There were other signs of crookedness, slight but not without weight. I could understand his joy on finding me at Marry-me-quick's. It meant that I was a rebel, and as a loyal man, who had gone to expenses to prove his loyalty, he might easily get the Hanyards as a reward, and thus ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... language has no generic term that fits him. Yet this strange, uncouth, but life-like confusion of natures Prospero has educated into a sort of poet. This, however, has nowise tamed, it has rather increased, his innate malignity and crookedness of disposition; education having of course but educed what was in him. Even his poetry is, for the most part, made up of the fascinations of ugliness; a sort of inverted beauty; the poetry of dissonance and deformity; the proper music of his nature being to curse, its proper ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... of young people, and have a train of ill consequences. The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness; the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of all her acquaintance. The use of knowledge in our sex, besides the amusement of solitude, ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... alleged that he had read Locke On The Human Understanding, I attempted to read the Bible straight through, and actually got to the Pauline Epistles before I broke down in disgust at what seemed to me their inveterate crookedness of mind. If there had been a school where children were really free, I should have had to be driven out of it for the sake of my health by the teachers; for the children to whom a literary education can be of any use are insatiable: they will read and study far more than is ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... understanding, keeping the heart and thoughts, in Christ Jesus,' a keeping that is not meant to vanish outside holy places and holy hours, but to do its strongest and serenest work in the midst of crookedness and perverseness, under the stress of toils and burthens, as truly for me to-day as for the Philippians and their ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... solitude; when something had gone wrong with his world he had been used to retire there with his dog, or, more seldom, a book. There he had been accustomed to lie, his back supported by the tree, and hold forth to the dog upon the troubles and difficulties of life and the general crookedness of things; or, if a book were his companion, he would gaze out, between the pages, at distant Crianan clinging faintly to the knees of Ben Ghusy, and watch the swift change of passing cloud and hanging curtain of mist upon the faces ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... N. obliquity, inclination, slope, slant, crookedness &c adj.; slopeness^; leaning &c v.; bevel, tilt; bias, list, twist, swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c 243; bend &c (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd^, rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity^; gentle slope, rapid ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and the joy of his life was to take his place in the judges' stand, and sway the destinies of the lean, keen-faced trainers who drove the trotting horses. He had the eye of a lynx for the detection of any crookedness in driving, and his voice would ring out over the track like the trump of doom, conveying fines and penalties to the luckless trickster who was trying to get some unfair advantage in the start. His voice, a deep basso, rarely was heard, in fact, anywhere else. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... timber depends not only upon its relative freedom from imperfections, such as knots, crookedness of grain, decay, wormholes or ring-shakes, but also upon its density; upon the rate at which it grew, and upon the arrangement of the various elements which ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner
... be directed, where two sleep in a bed, to change every night, or every week, their sides of the bed; which will prevent their tendency to sleep always on the same side; which is not only liable to produce crookedness, but also to occasion diseases by the internal parts being so long kept in uniform contact as to grow together. For the same reason they should not be allowed to sit always on the same side of the fire or window, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... to value your ability in running down crookedness and ferreting out criminals," pursued the master mechanic. "The superintendent wired me today to have one road detective start out on a certain case. I wired back that Mr. Adair was engaged in a special case in the city. The return was to relieve ...
— Ralph on the Engine - The Young Fireman of the Limited Mail • Allen Chapman
... beloved Father, I am in Thy hands, I bow myself under the rod of Thy correction. Smite my back and my neck that I may bend my crookedness to Thy will. Make me a pious and lowly disciple, as Thou wert wont to be kind, that I may walk according to every nod of Thine. To Thee I commend myself and all that I have for correction; better is it to be punished ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... synonymous with law,' is obvious enough; and it may not be out of place to add that in French the word droit has, with almost savage irony, been selected as the technical name, not of law simply, but of legal procedure with all its crookedness.[13] Still it seems more in the ordinary course of things to explain this linguistic identification of law with justice, by supposing conformity to justice to have been the primitive element in the formation of the notion of law, than by supposing 'conformity to law to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... trembled a little as he waited for her. He was not quite sure that it was his business to tell her her duty—yet something seemed to drive him to it: he could not bear the idea of her going on in the path of crookedness. It is no easy matter for one man to tell another his duty in the simplest relations of life; and here was a man, naturally shy and self-distrustful, daring to rebuke and instruct a woman, whose presence was mighty upon him, and whose influence was tenfold heightened by the suffering ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... power of congregating upon the point of a needle. What, of bad men and of bad acts in this theory of Shinto? Motowori made answer; "Whenever anything goes wrong in the world, it is to be attributed to the action of the evil gods called the Gods of Crookedness, whose power is so great that the Sun-Goddess and the Creator-God are sometimes powerless to restrain them; much less are human beings always able to resist their influence. The prosperity of the wicked, and the misfortunes of the good, which seem opposed to ordinary ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the acute pain of being turned back into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day or every week even that M. le Cure breakfasts at the chateau; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a laborer, and yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes a rather heavy irony on the other. But to the ideal cure, of course, all characters ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... longer give the same human reverence as before to one who has been seduced into vanity so egregious; and I feel assured a priori that such presumption must have entangled him into evasions and insincerities, which naturally end in crookedness of conscience and real imposture, however noble a man's commencement, and however unshrinking his sacrifices of goods and ease ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... before, not very much," declared Bobby. "I only want to grind your machine into powder. I want to dig up the rotten municipal control of this city, root and branch. I want to ferret out every bit of crookedness in which you have been concerned, and every bit that you have caused. I want to uncover every man, high or low, for just what he is, and I don't care how well protected he is nor how shining his reputation, if he's concerned in a crooked deal I'm ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain; so that although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement. And if we consider that nevertheless there have been at all times certain officers whose duty it was to see that private ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes
... jaws. His frame was as gaunt as that of a scare-crow, and his hands and feet were enormous. He had one redeeming feature, however—a pair of blue eyes that looked straight at you and made you feel that there was no "crookedness" behind them. His brief letter had led me to expect a man of few words, but I soon found that John Jones was a talker and a good-natured gossip. He knew every one we met, and was usually greeted with a rising inflection, like this, "How ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... "Oh, father, oh!" and clung to me. Something—like a scarecrow, but not a scarecrow—swung from a limb overhanging the drive. The face was distorted and swollen; the arms and legs were drawn up in sickening crookedness. Before I saw, I knew it ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... of incredible crookedness, though the Rev. Timothy makes no mention of this fact: "They were at first designed to accommodate individuals, and laid out from house to house," and thus the traveller found himself quite as often landed in a farm-yard, as at the point aimed for. All about ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... think that we ourselves are exempt. I attribute this to our love of Pompeian Pots (on account of the beauty and distinction of this Pot's shape I spell it with a big P), which has kept us straight in a world of crookedness. The pursuit of profiles under difficulties—how much more rare than a pursuit of knowledge! Talk of setting good examples before our children! Bah! let us set good Pompeian Pots before our children, and when they grow up they will ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... he innocent?" asked the colonel sourly. "That's the point you've got to keep in your mind. He may be innocent of one kind of crookedness, and be so mixed up in another that he cannot prove he is innocent of either. That's where they've got this fellow. He dare not appeal to the people who know him best, because they'd give him away. He can't tell the police who are his agents in Greece or Armenia, or they'll find out just ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... first plunge of youth, and now you shall be a man! You have looked for happiness in the wrong direction. Don't you want to go out and do good, enlighten your fellow-men, and be useful? For your clear vision can penetrate the perversion and crookedness which ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... mercies? For my remembrance recalls me, and pleasant is it to me, O Lord, to confess to Thee, by what inward goads Thou tamedst me; and how Thou hast evened me, lowering the mountains and hills of my high imaginations, straightening my crookedness, and smoothing my rough ways; and how Thou also subduedst the brother of my heart, Alypius, unto the name of Thy Only Begotten, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he would not at first vouchsafe ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... mediocrities, and the handful who combined honesty with sagacity and sagacity with strength. At beefy luncheon-tables, and in gorgeous, stuffy bars tapestried with Lincrusta-Walton, he had listened to the innumerable tales of the town, in which greed, crookedness, ambition, rectitude, hatred, and sexual love were extraordinarily mixed—the last being by far the smallest ingredient. He liked the town; he revelled in it. It seemed to him splendid in its ineradicable, ever-changing, changeless humanity. And as the train bored its way through the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I don't—I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though, especially in ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... once remarked that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Whenever I come across an "ultra-patriot" with foam dripping from his mouth while he beats his chest with loud cries about his own honesty and the crookedness of those running the country, I suspect a phony. As a rule, I look for the criminal record of a man who's yelling "Chase out the crooks" and "Let's have honest government," and all too often I find one. Henry D. Allen, alias H.O. Moffet, alias ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... blasphemy, addressing himself to the bottles under the counter, the smeary glasses he breathed upon while wiping with a soiled and odoriferous cloth, that the boss was "bug—plumb bug." Nevertheless, his own understanding of "crookedness" warned him that the man had method, and he was anxious to discover the direction in which it was moving. Therefore he watched Beasley's doings with appreciative eyes, and his interest grew as ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... I had good reasons for distrusting and disliking him. I suppose he made a dead set at you while I was away—cowardly brute! But what hits me hardest of all is not your indiscretion; it's your persistent crookedness that poisons everything. It was the same over your bills last year—as I told you then. It's the same now. It's a poor look-out if a man can't trust his own wife; but I suppose you must have lied to me—and to Honor, a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... thing in a princess, who, before everything, must impress the public with her dignity. She had a long pointed chin, and a sweet mouth with full lips that looked most kind. Her nose was not quite straight, one side of it being the least bit different from the other,—a slight crookedness that gave her face a charm absolutely beyond the reach of those whose features are what is known as chiselled. Her skin was of that fairness that freckles readily in hot summers or on winter days when the sun shines brightly on the snow, a delicate soft skin that is seen sometimes with golden eyelashes ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... occasional knots or lumps of unfused material. The rest of the tube is usually all right, but often the defective part must be cut out. The presence of striations running along the tube is generally an indication of hard, inferior glass. Crookedness and non-uniformity of diameter are troublesome only when ...
— Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing • Francis C. Frary
... the name of heaven, Bobby, do you run around with that damned Panamanian? Steer him off to-night. I've argued with you before. It's unpleasant, I know, but the man carries every mark of crookedness." ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... would have surrendered eventually. But the ease with which the stranger made the jump from one to five convinced Ling Foo that there could be no harm in boosting five to ten. If there was a taint of crookedness anywhere, that would be on the other side. Ling Foo knew where the beads were, and he would transfer them for one thousand gold. Smart business, nothing more than that. He ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... threatening, as he had at first deemed it that night, but the fountain of blessing and the one thing needful. A man who has once learned that lesson, though imperfectly, has passed into a purer region, and left behind him his old crookedness. He has learned to pray, not as before, prayers for mere deliverance from Esau and the like, but his whole being has gone out in yearning for the continual nearness of his mysterious antagonist-friend. So, though still the old nature remains, its power is broken, and he is a new ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... these words, the fowler replied, saying, "O best of Brahmanas, Sacrifices, Gift, Asceticism, the Vedas, and Truth—these five holy things are ever present in conduct that is called virtuous. Having subjugated lust and wrath, pride, avarice, and crookedness, they that take pleasure in virtue because it is virtue, are regarded as really virtuous and worthy of the approbation of persons that are virtuous. These persons who are devoted to sacrifices, and study of the Vedas have no independent behaviour. They follow only the practices of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... useless to punish him. The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social crookedness. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... old indeed. It is so silly of people—I don't mean you, for you are such a tiny, and couldn't know better—but it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs. I am older than you are able ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... dull and unpleasant weather. And this is very singular in this humanitarian age, when excuse is found for nearly every moral delinquency in heredity or environment, that the greatest factor of discontent and crookedness, the weather, should be left out of consideration altogether. The relation of crime to the temperature and the humidity of the atmosphere is not taken into account. Yet crime and eccentricity of conduct are very much the result of atmospheric conditions, since they depend upon the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... debt has no standing in law. No legal claim of any kind could be made against him and he was perfectly aware of the fact. The proprietor of the establishment was a thoroughly unscrupulous individual with a shady record, and the games played there were open to a suspicion of crookedness. My friend had previously been told that. He had only to let the loss go unpaid and ignore the whole incident, without the slightest fear of consequences, so far as honest ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... imagination could have called the admiral a good reader. In fact, a person might very well have been considered to be strictly within the limits of truth if he had declared the old officer to be the worst reader he ever heard. But so it was, from the crookedness of human nature, that he always made a point of reading every piece of news in the paper which he considered interesting, aloud, for the benefit of those with him at ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... Flynn, who was observed by his comrades, after the delivery of the mail, to be tenderly struggling with the complicated folds of a remarkable letter—remarkable for its crookedness, ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... Crookedness there is. Where does it come from? From the men in control, mostly. Let me tell you something, you two: there's hardly a reporter in this city who isn't more honest than the paper ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... this, France and England ought to march together, protect each other; France assisting England against the Pretender, and England assisting France, if need be, against the King of Spain. M. le Duc d'Orleans had too much penetration not to see this snare; but, marvellous as it may seem, the crookedness of this policy, and not the desire of reigning, seduced him. I am quite prepared, if ever these memoirs see the day, to find that this statement will be laughed at; that it will throw discredit on ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... on this. Don't let a lot of foolish people influence you; people who can't ever see any real good in success and who blame everything on luck and crookedness. ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... something wonderful for an amateur. My love of sport, therefore, came to me naturally. I inherited it, and if I have excelled in any particular branch it is because of my father's teachings. He was a square sport, and one that had no use for anything that savored of crookedness. There was nothing whatever of the Puritan in his makeup, and from my early youth he allowed me to participate in any sort of game that took my fancy. He had no idea at that time of my ever becoming a professional. Neither had I. There were but ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... thought of that, too," she said, coolly; "about quitting you. I'm sick of it all—the getting and the spending and the crookedness. I'd put the money—yours and mine—in a pile and set fire to it, if some decent man would give me a calico dress and a chance to ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... Swiss clerk calling out the names of passengers; a half-dozen cabriolets looking at each other irresolutely and facing all possible ways; two score of unwashed loungers, in red neck-kerchiefs and velvet jackets, smoking rank, rakish, black cigars; several streets of equal crookedness and filthiness abutting against a grimy church, whence beggars, old women, and priests emerge continually; and far above all, as if suspended in the air, a grim, battlemented castle, a defence, as it seems, against the snowy mountains which march upon Bellinzona ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... for comfort; there is not a single large hall in all the great fortress, and the courtyard within the main gate is a gloomy, ill-shaped little paved space, barely big enough to give fifty men standing room. Nothing can give any idea of the crookedness of it all, of the small dark corridors, the narrow winding steps, the dusky inclined ascents, paved with broad flagstones that echo the lightest tread, and that must have rung and roared like sea ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works. Pride he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck; irresolution, the nerves shaken; an inclination to sinister paths, crookedness of the joints; spiritual deadness, a paralysis; want of charity, a contraction in the fingers; despising of government, a broken head; the plaster, a sermon; the lint to bind it up, the text; the probers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... consequences, however, does not go down into the depths of things. There is always something morally crooked and inordinate in an action itself, the general consequences whereof are bad. It remains to point out the moral crookedness, inordination, and unreasonableness, that is intrinsic to the act of suicide, apart from its consequences. We find the inordination in this, that suicide is an act falling upon undue matter, being an act destructive of that which the agent has power ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... side of the house. Staggering after Magdalen, with the basket of keys in one hand and the candle in the other, old Mazey sorrowfully compared her figure with the straightness of the poplar, and her disposition with the crookedness of Sin, all the way across "Freeze-your-Bones," and all the way upstairs to her own door. Arrived at that destination, he peremptorily refused to give her the candle until he had first seen her safely ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... and private; but the town is still much farther back in its chrysalis stage than Melbourne. Time alone can, and is rapidly making away with the old tumble-down buildings which spoil the appearance of their neighbours. But time cannot easily widen the streets of Sydney, nor rectify their crookedness. They were originally dug out by cart-ruts, whereas those of nearly every other town in Australia were mapped out long before they were inhabited. But if they were not so ill-kept, and the footpaths so wretchedly paved, I could forgive the ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... expert in outwitting those whose business it is to keep them within bounds. This kind of education has a smack of practicality in that it sharpens the wits for the struggle for existence that makes up much of the experience of city folk, but it also tends to develop a crookedness in mental and moral habits through the constant effort to get ahead of the agents of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!' ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... "Crookedness and straightness are in their nature opposite and cannot dwell together more than frost and fire; for one who has become religious, and practises the way of straight behavior, a false and crooked way of speech is not becoming. False ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... in a back-parlour. Pisa and its monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... accommodated to their size, each little wooden chair, with backs, having seats for two, so that, instead of being crowded and disturbing each other, the children sit in couples with plenty of room and air, and in perfect physical comfort. No hollow chests, no bent backs, no crookedness here. Happy and comfortable as princes these children sit in their chairs, having their feet on the floor, and their backs where they ought to be, namely, as ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Thorne be at the bottom of a systematic attempt to loot the Shoe-Bar of its movable value against the time of discovery? But when he met her face to face the idea vanished and he even felt ashamed of having considered it for a moment. Whatever crookedness was going on, this sweet-faced, clear-eyed girl was much more likely to be a victim than one of the perpetrators. The feeling was vastly strengthened when he had saddled up ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... not squandered away his brains and time and fortune upon to no other purpose but to be ridiculous. He is exempted from a dark room and a doctor, because there is no danger in his frenzy; otherwise he has as good a title to fresh straw as another. Humour is but a crookedness of the mind, a disproportioned swelling of the brain, that draws the nourishment from the other parts to stuff an ugly and deformed crup-shoulder. If it have the luck to meet with many of its own temper, instead of being ridiculous it becomes a church, and from ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... admit the force of the implication made by a certain writer upon this topic, that the crookedness in the matter of family finances is "separation and hostility between the sexes, brought about by the advancement and equality of women." Wives in all ages and in all countries, have felt the painful injustice of virtual pauperism, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... I grew to know a good many prize-fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached. I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against prize-fighters. The only objection I have to the prize ring is the crookedness that has attended its commercial development. Outside of this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing. But this is true ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... beyond and outside it, so that the time now necessary may be shortened. Besides which, I see that many of our difficulties arise from obscure and remote causes—obscure like the shape of bones, for whose strange curves there is no familiar term. We must endeavour to understand the crookedness and unfamiliar curves of the conditions of life. Beyond that still there are other ideas. Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible. For my thought is like a hyperbola ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... no matter. Eleanor could not comprehend how more loveliness could have been crowded into the enjoyment of two hours. On her pony she had full freedom for the use of her eyes; the road was excellent, and winding in and out through all the crookedness of the valley they threaded, she took it at all points of view. Nothing could be more varied. The valley itself, rich and wooded, with the little river running its course, marked by a thick embowering ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... and get ready for it. But some day an emergency just comes up and touches him on the shoulder, and he turns around and sees it all of a sudden. Then he finds he's a coward. It's pretty hard for me to understand dishonesty, or how a man can be dishonest. I've tried, but I can't do it. Crookedness isn't my particular kind of fault. But I do know this: that we every one of us have something to be forgiven for by some one. I guess I've got a temper that makes me pretty sorry sometimes. Probably you don't see how it's possible for a man to get crazy mad about little ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Masters smiled with unusual crookedness and stammered his thanks and his regrets. And so that thread came ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... Benjamin thought it was a very queer name for a public house. He did not like either part of it, and he said to himself, "'Crooked Billet'!—crookedness and a cudgel to strike down the turbulent with, are suggested." The name did not suggest any thing pleasant to him. But he went in, and engaged lodging ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... anything I don't mean. I have done a lot of dirty work with you people before, and never got much of anything out of it. You were always too strong for me; that is, I couldn't force you without exposing my own crookedness, but now I've got you right where I want you. That's my price; take it or leave it. If you don't take it now, the first two of those figures will be doubled when you do come to me. I won't go to anybody else, though others would be glad to get it on my terms, because I have ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... 'but hard to estimate him.'[23] This was never more unfortunately proved than in the remarks of Vauvenargues himself upon the great Moliere. There is almost a difficulty in forgiving a writer who can say that 'La Bruyere, animated with nearly the same genius, painted the crookedness of men with as much truth and as much force as Moliere; but I believe that there is more eloquence and more elevation to be found in La Bruyere's images.'[24] Without at all undervaluing La Bruyere, one of the acutest and finest of writers, we may say that this is ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... peaks of pride are leveled, Lifted up the lowly plain, Crookedness made straight, while crudeness Now gives ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... needed who have a natural sense of wonder.... You must wonder at man's achievements, at man's stupidity, at his honesty, crookedness, courage, cowardice—at everything that is remarkable about him wherever and whenever it appears. If you haven't this sense of wonder, you will never write a novel or become a great reporter, because you simply won't see anything to write about. Men will be doing amazing things under your very eyes—and ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... looks either a friend or an enemy, waiting to be known. But how had five years of hate come to play him such a trick, suddenly, to-day? Since last autumn he had meant sometime to get even with this man who seemed to stand at every turn of his crookedness, and rob him of his spoils. But how had he come to choose such a way of getting even as this, face to face? He knew many better ways; and now his own rash proclamation had trapped him. His words were like doors shutting him in to perform his threat to the letter, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... stand keeping quiet any longer, John," put in Paul very heatedly. "We thought it a good time to have it out with these fellows for their crookedness." ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... How shall you know if it be straight or not? Lay the ruler beside it, and you will soon find out its crookedness. ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... is a criticism of certain judicial proceedings which obtain in France; but it is also a study of an individual case of professional crookedness. We should be greatly mistaken were we to draw the dangerous conclusion that all French judges resemble Mouzon, and we should be equally wrong were we to condemn too hastily the French code relating ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... individuality; but if she married him, a miserable awakening was almost sure to come to her at last. To exchange the smooth life, the calm and the luxury, of Helmsley Court for the gloom, the occasional tempests, and the general crookedness of existence at the Red House would be no agreeable task for Margaret. Of the two, Janetta felt that life at the Red House would be far the more acceptable to herself: she did not mind a little roughness, and ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... went into this recently in New York State. I remember there was a lot of talk about crookedness, and Smith went up to find out what was going on. We made some charges, didn't we? And didn't we get a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... concerning the crippled child. Would her whole life become misshapen because of the physical form which she wore like an outer garment? And she felt, at the thought, that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness either of the body or ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... described in the New Testament as "a liar and the father thereof." A Christian is to be true and just in all his dealings, abhorring crookedness: for the essence of lying is not inexactitude in speech, but deceitfulness of intention. Christian veracity means honesty, straightforwardness, and sincerity in deed as well as in word. A writer of fiction is not a liar: to improve ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Bristol, Liverpool, and London, all are in active competition with each other, and with any foreigner who may come in their way; and their policy may truly be described as Machiavelian, in its mystery, craft, and crookedness. The business requires at least as long an apprenticeship as the diplomacy of nations, and a new hand has but little chance ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... the Koran. I believe the reason nearly all Arabs have crooked legs is because they squat so much. One cannot have straight legs when one uses one's legs to sit down on for hours at a time. They always sit in the sun, too, and that must bake them into their crookedness. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... rage thus against them," said Leborcham, "for it is on thy account that the women of Ulster have assumed one of their three blemishes, even the blemish of blindness." For there were three blemishes that the women of Ulster assumed, that of crookedness of gait, and that of a stammering in their speech, and that of blindness. Each of the women who loved Conall the Victorious had assumed a crookedness of gait; each woman who loved Cuscraid Mend, the Stammerer of Macha, Conor's ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... my boy. In such moods a fellow would like to be everywhere at the same time, ruling, regulating and putting things into order. He feels that he's responsible for everything; and it hurts him to see so much crookedness in the world. I know very well how it is. But you must consider the means and remedies at your disposal. How are you going to begin ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... with a gamester. To obtain victory in battle without cunning or stratagem is the best sport. Gambling, however, as a sport, is not so. Those that are respectable never use the language of the Mlechchas, nor do they adopt deceitfulness in their behaviour. War carried on without crookedness and cunning, this is the act of men that are honest. Do not, O Sakuni, playing desperately, win of us that wealth with which according to our abilities, we strive to learn how to benefit the Brahmanas. Even enemies should not be vanquished by desperate ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... completely reassured. In order to make your questioning absolutely bona fide, I want you to go first this morning to the office of Anderson & Wallace, the late Mr. Lawton's attorneys, and question them as if having come with Miss Lawton's authority. Don't suggest any suspicion of there being any crookedness at work, but merely inquire as fully as possible into the details of Mr. Lawton's business affairs. They will, in their replies, undoubtedly bring in Mr. Mallowe, Mr. Rockamore and Mr. Carlis, which will give ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... had suddenly materialized beside the figure of a Jap. Another figure—a gnome, a wraith! The unholy light from the pit painted it an unearthly greenish hue, and accentuated the haggardness of face, and the gleaming eyes, the humped body, its crookedness magnified by the crouched attitude. It looked like some demon come floating up on the wicked light from the "deep place." It crouched to leap, to strike, and a bared knife gleamed in an upraised hand; it glared balefully, fixedly, at the living ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... was not without reason for exasperation. He was severely attacked for his theories about the curved line of beauty, which was branded as a foolish attempt to prove crookedness elegant, and himself vulgarly caricatured. It was even asserted that the theory ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... a question came forth of its own accord relating to the Persian way of playing billiards. Gertrude had never been in Persia, but had seen some Eastern billiard cues in the India museum. Were not the Hindoos wonderful people for filigree work, and carpets, and such things? Did he not think the crookedness of their carpet patterns a blemish? Some people pretended to admire them, but was not that all nonsense? Was not the modern polished floor, with a rug in the middle, much superior to the old carpet fitted into the corners of the room? Yes. ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... probably the finest actress and stool-pigeon in the whole detective world of graft and crookedness—lighted a cigarette at the gas-burner, and laughed ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... to me. Why he is mixing himself up in the affair of Miss Wardour's diamonds, however, is my business, just now. But, first of all, to know how much or little Jerry Belknap knows of this affair, and of these people, and whether he is at his old crookedness once more. Now, here is the river; here the footpath. I must see the mistress of Wardour Place, and at ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the carriage at the bridge. The river was full of logs—long, slender, barkless pine logs—and we leaned on the rails of the bridge, and watched the men put them together into rafts. These rafts were of a shape and construction to suit the crookedness and extreme narrowness of the Neckar. They were from fifty to one hundred yards long, and they gradually tapered from a nine-log breadth at their sterns, to a three-log breadth at their bow-ends. The main part of the steering is done at the bow, with a pole; the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... but I haven't ever noticed it. There is plenty of crookedness goes on in the canyon. And no one, Indian or white man, is ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... no doubt about the old man's being right about the crookedness of the stream. If you have ever noticed an ant running over the floor you will have an idea how the Wye runs through this beautiful country. If it comes to a hill it doesn't just pass it and let you see one side of it, but it goes as far around it as it ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... the city by permission of the public utility corporations, had read Jeff's first editorial against ballot box stuffing. In it the editor of the World had pledged that paper never to give up the fight for the people until such crookedness was stamped out. Big Tim had laughed until his paunch shook at the confidence of this young upstart and in impudent defiance had sent him a check for fifty dollars ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... amongst this number I noticed that Jose Barretto was very deeply moved. His great frame shook with emotion. I learned afterwards that the man who stood was a police sergeant, who in the old days had been Jose's confederate in his political crookedness. That night this man stood acknowledging his sins and asking for membership in the church. Jose's faithfulness had won him. Once more we witnessed a marvelous victory of ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... faint rustle of her arm as it swept against the masonry, and then the ball was taken over into her grasp. Gods! what a thrill went through me when the fingers of Nais touched mine! I could not see her, because of the crookedness of the shaft, but that faint ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... whole, and fewer still in their proper places. The two or three dingy prints on the walls, originally misrepresentations in flaring colours of scriptural or other scenes, hung in various degrees of crookedness; while articles of clothing, old and new, dirtier and less dirty, were scattered about in all directions, or suspended, just where necessity or whim had tossed them. There was on the available portion of the table part of a loaf of bread, a lump of butter still half-wrapped in the ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... that "a true lover never did run a straight course," and the sincerity of present writer's affection is incontestably proved by his apparent crookedness of running, and keeping dark outside the illuminating rays of thy moon-like countenance. The cause is the unforeseen cataclysm of a decree from my family astrologer or dowyboghee, whom I have anxiously consulted upon our joint matrimonial prospects. [MEM. TO THE READERS.—This was what young ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... human heart is wicked above all things. The enemy of man is subtle and watchful beyond conception. Instead of being on the way of goodness, I am just finding out the wickedness of my nature, its crookedness, its impurity, its darkness. I want deep humility and forgetfulness of self. I am just emerging out of gross darkness and my sight is but dim, so that my iniquities are not ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... see the puc-a-puc of Government turn from the crookedness of the river, and I will go out and speak to our lord Tibbetti, who is a very simple man, and ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... You may think me troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.' Can I say what I do not know? 'You may offer an opinion.' And will the blindness and crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light and certainty of science? 'I will only ask you to give such an explanation of the good as you have given already of temperance and justice.' I wish that I could, but in my present mood I cannot reach to the height ...
— The Republic • Plato
... the first time that any of us youngsters had ever seen an army, and it was a most stately and imposing spectacle to us. It was indeed an inspiring sight, that interminable column, stretching away into the fading distances, and curving itself in and out of the crookedness of the road like a mighty serpent. Joan rode at the head of it with her personal staff; then came a body of priests singing the Veni Creator, the banner of the Cross rising out of their midst; after these the glinting forest of ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... world as the daughter of a colossal thief! Not a thief of the marts, where crookedness was confused with shrewdness far removed from the theft of the hands; but a thief who had burrowed beneath another man's property, and carried away, to coinage, his gold. Between Bully Presby and the man who tunneled under a bank to loot ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... hear a clicking of bottles and a rustling of straw; and then, behold, a veritable fairy issuing from the bowels of the earth, with flushes of red suffusing the ribbed, bewrinkled face, as the old figure straightens its crookedness to carry the dusty bottle securely, steadily, lest the cloudy settling at the bottom should be disturbed. What a merry little feast then began! We had learned where the glasses were kept; we had been busily scouring them while our hostess was below. Then wine and glasses, along with ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... inn seemed to be to compensate for the antique awkwardness, crookedness, and obscurity of the passages, floors, and windows, by quantities of clean linen spread about everywhere, and this had a ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the Netherlands, he proposed to make another of his great marches, namely into Italy, there to join his friend Prince Eugene in an invasion of France from the south-east. This plan was made impossible by the crookedness of the kings of Prussia and Denmark, and some others of the Allies. Swallowing this disappointment also, as best he might, Marlborough started from the Dyle and advanced on the great and important stronghold of Namur, at the junction of the Sambre with the Meuse. Namur ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... was as the face of an ass, his shape that of an ape and his look as the look of a malignant snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun and kissed his feet and stood before him; and the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... of Zion". But the author allows himself to run riot in the use of antitheses and contrasts. He arraigns the poor inhabitants of Samaria with pitiless severity. Whatever is good, just, beautiful, lofty, and chaste in love, proceeds from Jerusalem; whatever savors of hypocrisy, crookedness, dogmatism, absurdity, sensuality, proceeds from Samaria. The author is particularly implacable toward the hypocrites, and toward the blind fanatics with their narrow-mindedness. The personification of certain types of ghetto fanatics is a transparent ruse. The ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... six kitchen chairs in a row on one side of the room, and as many flatirons in a line on the mantelpiece. Everything where she was had, she said, to "stand just so;" and woe to the child who carried crookedness into her straight lines! Betsy had a manner of her own, and made a wonderful kind of a courtesy, with which her skirts puffed out all around like a cheese. She always courtesied to Parson Meeker when she met him, and said: "I hope to see you well, sir." Once she courtesied ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... 15, the poor man's riches, the rich man's bliss, without thee there can be no happiness: or visited with some loathsome disease, offensive to others, or troublesome to ourselves; as a stinking breath, deformity of our limbs, crookedness, loss of an eye, leg, hand, paleness, leanness, redness, baldness, loss or want of hair, &c., hic ubi fluere caepit, diros ictus cordi infert, saith [2386]Synesius, he himself troubled not a little ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... five thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness, and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... The shepherd herding the sheep—how could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Good Shepherd? The sower scattering the seed—how could he, of all men, forget and blaspheme the Heavenly Sower? Oh, the crookedness of sin! Oh, the hardness ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Little Ansdore for its associations—under its roof she had been born and her father had been born, under its roof she had known love and sorrow and denial and victory; she could not bear to think of leaving it. The queer, low house, with its mixture of spaciousness and crookedness, its huge, sag-ceilinged rooms and narrow, twisting passages, was almost a personality to her now, one of the Godden family, the last of kin that had ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Medlock whispering to the nurse had given him the idea and he had thought over it in secret until it was quite firmly fixed in his mind. Mrs. Medlock had said his father's back had begun to show its crookedness in that way when he was a child. He had never told any one but Mary that most of his "tantrums" as they called them grew out of his hysterical hidden fear. Mary had been sorry for him when he had ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you in a business sense," the captain agreed. "And I'm pleased you take that view; for I've turned kind of soft upon the job. There's been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, Law bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back of the business from the front. I don't take ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... I beg your pardon, Sarah—but, damn it, I keep on thinking of him, in soft moments, as my friend now. I sit by the hour trying to foist the blame upon Archie Wickersham, and he's no more guilty than Dexter. Dexter's merely good-natured about his crookedness; wholesome about it, somehow. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... invaluable—for, as Lady de Brantefield confidently affirmed, King John of France, and the Black Prince, had sat and supped at it. I marvelled much in silence—for I had been sharply reproved for some observation I had unwittingly made on the littleness and crookedness of a dark, corner-chimneyed nook shown us for the banqueting-room; and I had fallen into complete disgrace for having called the winding staircases, leading to the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... hats as distinctive party badges. In their social as well as in their business relations they were governed by party affinities. Neighbors differing in politics would hardly speak to each other, and each was always ready to accept the other's political crookedness as the measure of his possible depravity in everything else. They would hardly walk on the same side of the street; or sail in the same packet; or ride in the same stage-coach; or buy their groceries at the same shop; or listen ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... with Wentworth, and personally, while he believed him to be a good engineer, he wouldn't trust him out of his sight. And then he had outlined the scheme he had laid for showing him up so that Jean would be convinced of his crookedness. And now he ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... analysis of so much mud and offal may tell upon me. Physical monstrosities are attractive to physiologists or rather to pathologists. But an anthropologist prefers normal nobleness of mind, and shudders at sight and contact with intellectual and moral crookedness. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... Halstead, Burns & Co., payment it is said on a patent right owned by himself and son for a new invention in the incubator line. The son is a student at Burrton Electrical School. There is no charge of crookedness at the bank. The check had the regular endorsement of Halstead. But parties who are interested in Bauer's movements socially, have taken steps to track him to Europe. Interesting developments are promised by those who know Bauer's antecedents and especially his treatment of ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... admit that. Just the same, your son hired him to go out and get evidence in a certain matter of alleged crookedness in the registration lists. He got it, and delivered the papers to your son last night. Some of those affidavits incriminate you, David. If we wanted to use them, we could send you to the penitentiary, right here in ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... dovetailed with my own ideas, and oddly enough there was something positively wholesome in the notion of the straightforward crookedness of a ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... turning a bend, with horsemen, wild-looking, armed formidably in the manner peculiar to the country, as though they were assassins stealing forth under cover. Occasionally a female bestriding a donkey suddenly appears but twenty or thirty yards ahead, the narrowness and the crookedness of the hedged-in trail favoring these abrupt meetings; shrouded perhaps in a white abbas, and not infrequently riding a white donkey, they seldom fail to inspire thoughts of ghostly equestriennes gliding silently along these now half- deserted pathways. Many a hasty ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... through the steep, ill-paved lanes, which were a perfect exposition of crookedness, we were brought by our guide to the house of the Belgian Consul, a curious structure in the Moorish style, more of a museum than a dwelling-house. Here, the resident official, who has long filled the post, has gathered ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... natures that delight in crookedness and that even in early childhood. They would rather go about getting their heart's desire in some crooked, intricate, underhanded way than by the direct route. Such a fault is almost certain to be an inherited one; and here again, a close study of the ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... enough in Tibet, and some came under my notice in nearly every camp I entered. Deformities of the spine were common, such as displacement of the shoulder-blades; and I saw during my stay in Tibet many cases of actually humpbacked people. There were frequent cases, too, of crookedness of the legs, and clubfoot was not rare, while one constantly met with webbed fingers and supernumerary fingers and toes, as well as the absence of one or more of them. Malformations of the skull, such as the two sides being of marked unequal shape or ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... The exposure of Gage's crookedness broke up the poker parties for that season, at least; and Frank was happy, for he had saved himself and rescued Hodge and ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... what are we to think of his ascription of divinity to the race, in view of the moral and physical feebleness of human nature? The moral side of the question is answered by the Shinto theory of evil deities, "gods of crookedness," who were alleged to have "originated from the impurities contracted by [119] Izanagi during his visit to the under-world." As for the physical weakness of men, that is explained by a legend of Ninigi-no-Mikoto, divine founder of the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn |
