"Crumple" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which spread out upon his knees, was now doing duty as a tablecloth. Having finished his meal, the man lazily glanced at the paper; but finding its contents, at first, to possess no particular interest, he was about to crumple it up and throw it away, when his eye lighted on a paragraph which induced him to pause. He smoothed out the paper, and raised ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... once, but more often with one at a time. In the latter case I would announce to the passers-by the glad news that I had struck a miraculous bargain at a wholesale bankruptcy sale, for instance, and exhort them not to miss their golden opportunity. I also learned to crumple up new underwear, or even to wet it somewhat, and then shout that I could sell it "so cheap" because it was ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... between the eyebrows. Ten years.—The artist breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.—Hold on! Stop that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... and pull out a plum and say: 'What a good boy am I!' Yet, to be just, you are a boy of excellent parts in many ways, which encourages us to hope that we may yet be able to bring out the good that is in you, and, at the same time, bring out the evil; at any rate, crumple it up where it is, which amounts to the same. How this desirable end is to be attained is not yet quite clear to my own mind. So you will have to go home with us to-night, where you shall make the acquaintance of our cubs, who will gladly share their bed with you. And pleasant bed-fellows ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... especially if such be school-girls, subjects for unalloyed mirth. The nine girls choked and turned their backs and even giggled aloud as Miss Hyle went prone, now backward with a whack, now forward in a limp crumple. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... should e'er mishap Betide my crumple-visaged Ti, In shape of prowling thief, or trap, Or coarse bull-terrier—I should die. But ah! disasters have their use; And life might e'en be too sunshiny: Nor would I make myself a goose, If some ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... doll concealed in a pillowcase (he could not bear to crumple and tear for his purpose that precious marriage newspaper), he made his way to the door of the little girl's home. "This is yours," he told her, stripping off the case and holding out the gift. She heard him, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... himself that day in the sand dunes before Fort Fisher. Red, reeking carnage rioted all about him. Hail, fumes, lightning and thunder of battle rolled over him and sickened him. He saw his own Massachusetts troop hurl itself up against the Confederate breastworks, crumple up on itself, and fade away back into the smoke. He lost it, and lost himself in the smoke. He wandered blindly over the field, now stumbling over a dead man, now speaking to a living stricken one: Here straightening a torn body ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... Vanringham's breast. The lackey coughed, choked, clutched his assassin by each shoulder; thus he stood with a bewildered face, shuddering visibly, every muscle twitching. Suddenly he shrieked, with an odd, gurgling noise, and his grip relaxed, and Francis Vanringham seemed to crumple among his garments, so that he shrank rather than fell to the floor. His hands stretched forward, his fingers spreading and for a moment writhing in agony, and then he ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... even the universe. Billions of minds seeing trees as trees, houses as houses, streets as streets ... and not as something else. Minds that see things as they are and have kept things as they were.... Destroy those minds and the entire foundation of matter, robbed of its regenerative power, will crumple and slip away ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... syphilis—every kind of person from the top to the bottom of the social scale. It was not a simple matter of ordering pills for them from the pharmacy, or castor oil from the medicine room. I had to sit beside their beds when they heard the truth; I had to see the women crumple up and go limp; I had to tell the blind child's father that he did it, to bolster up the weak girl, to rebuild the wife's broken ideals, to suppress the rowdy and the roysterer, to hear the vows of the boy who was paying for his first mistake, and listen to the stories ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... would be found to believe it. At the very best there must be a terrible and shocking scandal, and Beatrice would lose her good name. He placed himself in the position of counsel for the petitioner in a like case, and thought how he would crush and crumple such a defence in his address to the ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... cried, and began to crumple, falling slowly against Simone in a complete faint. Simone caught her in trembling hands and lowered her gently. She said to her daughter, "You mustn't do that in front of Grandy. You're a bad girl, ...
— The Putnam Tradition • Sonya Hess Dorman
... hold on the red-bearded man's wrist, Gregory struck with all his force at the bulging chest. As the blow landed he felt the body crumple in his arms and the knife clattered to the rocks. The islander staggered backward with his assailant pressing close against him. In their struggle both men had for the moment forgotten the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... magnificence; help yourself as you please to my treasures; make gold flow, heap up gems; order, make, unmake, raise, destroy; be my mistress, my wife, my queen. I give you Egypt with its priests, its armies, its toilers, its numberless population, its palaces, its temples and cities. Crumple it up as you would crumple up gauze,—I will win other kingdoms for you, larger, fairer, and richer. If the world is not sufficient, I will conquer planets for you, I will dethrone the gods. You are she whom I love; Tahoser, the daughter ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... certainty about the constancy of the order of things, and therefore be in a position to declare that such and such events are impossible. Some of the old mythologies recognised this clearly enough. Beyond and above Zeus and Odin, there lay the unknown and inscrutable Fate which, one day or other, would crumple up them and the world they ruled to give place to ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... old and tired. The vision that had seemed so close, so tangible, so ready to be made actual, had suddenly retreated beyond her reach, and she was left as empty of heart and hand as she had been before. For a moment her whole figure seemed to crumple; and then she shook herself together into a resisting, ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... Perhaps it is some stunning disaster in business. Or perhaps death has leaped into our quiet meadows. Or perhaps some presumptuous sin has suddenly revealed its foul face in the life of one of our children. And we are "all at sea!" Our little, neat hypotheses crumple like withered leaves. Our accustomed roads are all broken up, our conventional ways of thinking and feeling, and the sure sequences on which we have depended vanish in a night. It is experiences like these which make the soul cry out with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... her away. "Mag is looking daggers at us. We mustn't crumple that finery any more, precious.—Remember not to talk at the top of your lungs.—Have you ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... found the weapon. As he straightened up again, his eyes unconsciously took in the scene about him. He saw Hal make a last futile effort to free himself from the grasp of the first Austrian, and then fall to the floor with the man on top of him; and he saw Uncle John crumple up as a flash of flame came from the revolver ...
— The Boy Allies in Great Peril • Clair W. Hayes
... worked out she decided to try for the double event. Within a few minutes of the time she had allowed for them, she heard the twitter of four destroyers' screws quartering above her; rose; got her shot in; saw one destroyer crumple; hung round till another took the wreck in tow; said good-bye to the spare brace (she was at the end of her supplies), and reached the rendezvous in time ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... beyond question, which occurred during some tests with man-lifting kites at Farnborough. These kites are strongly built, and withstand as a rule extremely high winds. On this particular day a kite, when it had reached a certain altitude, was seen to crumple up suddenly. The wind did not seem specially strong—not at any rate on the ground; and there appeared no reason for the breakage of the kite. Another was sent up; but the same thing happened, and at the same altitude. Then the officer who was in charge of the kites sent ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... absolutely at his mercy because she loved the children. "Never let him blackmail you," Peter had said. "Stand up to him always, and he'll probably crumple up." ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... out of the harbour, and stood on towards Saint Helen's. She certainly looked as unlike our notions of a man-of-war as anything could be, though, as Paul Truck observed, "she would crumple up the Minotaur in a few minutes with her four thirty-five ton guns, powerful ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mrs Enticknapp, "you shall not do any lessons, and while I am busy with Nanna and Margaretta you may amuse yourselves quietly. After dinner you shall all go out for a walk. If you crumple up your pinafore in that way, Sophia Jane," she added, "you ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... strange, unbeauteous red things a man almost held in fear, and whose ugliness a woman but loved because she was near angel; but this one—" and he drew nearer still with a grave countenance—"surely it looks not like the rest. 'Tis not so red and crumple-visaged—its tiny face hath a sort of comeliness. It hath a broad brow, and its eyes will sure be large ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... how the girls sorted them. And the room in which they do it. And the bins. And the machinery. Oh, it's the most fascinating, and—and sort of relentless machinery. And the acid burns on the hands of the men at the vats. And their shoes. And then the paper, so white. And the way we tear it up, or crumple it, and throw it in the waste basket. Just a piece of paper, don't you see what I mean? Just a piece of paper, and yet all that—" she stopped and frowned a little, and grew inarticulate, and gave it up ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Schools at Quantico, Virginia, are one example—form a valuable public asset for potential future use. And throughout Tidewater here and there, old estates in private hands guard their woods and fields and shores against increasing development, though more and more each year crumple before pressure and the temptation ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... gentleman's bite; and he fancied his defence had been correct. Perceiving a crumple of the lips of Mr. Durance, he took the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... correctness of everything we've said, so far. That secret which the judge feared he would reveal, that secret which old Hastings was blundering after—that secret, Mr. Crown, was such a danger to him that, to escape the questioning of even stupid old Hastings, he could do nothing but crumple up on the floor and feign illness, prostration. Why, don't you see, he was ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... went out to snatch and crumple it; then his clenched fist dropped to his side. It seemed as if his eyes would blacken the paper ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... policy of their Admiral, and rejoicing in the near prospect of a turning of the tables—(for could they once get the Englishman betwixt them and the Duke of Parma's fleet, which was waiting on the Dutch coast, they would crumple him up like chaff between two mill-stones)—already, I say, they were counting on seeing the enemy run past them, down the wind; when, lo, with a derisive shot or two into the air, the Englishmen put about quietly, and after hovering a little, and running a little in the teeth of the wind to get ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... reproach against me that I possessed such a calm, and, for a woman, cool-headed temperament that I should be like the woman we read of—if the house was threatening to tumble down, I should, before hastily fleeing, stop to smooth down a crumple in the window-curtains—I need hardly tell you that the beginning of your letter quite upset me. I could scarcely breathe; there was a bright mist before my eyes. Oh! my darling Nathanael! what could this terrible thing be that had happened? Separation from you—never to see you again, ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... down his stern and looked again. He drove up heedless of his direction as he watched. He saw the wind-vanes give, saw the huge fabric strike the earth, saw its downward vanes crumple with the weight of its descent, and then the whole mass turned over and smashed, upside down, upon the sloping wheels. Then from the heaving wreckage a thin tongue of white fire licked up towards the zenith. He was aware of a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... being off her rubber plant. So you see we should always be kind when we can; and if the canary bird doesn't go to sleep in the bowl with the goldfish, and forget to whistle like an alarm clock in the morning, I'll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and the crumple-horn cow. ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, "we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like—" Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big "C H U." She had erased it with the point of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... born to a gentle family in the Calendar of Monteith, and was celebrated even in boyhood for his feats of strength and daring. While still at school he could hold a hundredweight at arm's-length, and crumple up a horseshoe like a wisp of hay. The fleetest runner, the most desperate fighter in the country, he was already famous before his name was besmirched with crime, and he might have been immortalised as the Hercules of the seventeenth century, ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... ago, bringing most of it along with me. I was considerably bumped and I presume bruised, but not hurt. However, I decided to lie still here for a while until I recovered my nerves and disposition. Then I tried to climb back to you for consolation and found that my legs would crumple under me in the most absurd fashion. So I fell to making disagreeable noises so you would come and find me. What are we going to do, Tory? I can't walk and I weigh too much for you ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... their third cup of tea. They would never blow away—never, never. Woodhouse was there to eternity. And the Natcha-Kee-Tawara Troupe was blowing like a rag of old paper into Limbo. Nothingness! Poor Madame! Poor gallant histrionic Madame! The frowsy Miss Pinnegar could crumple her up and throw her down the utilitarian drain, and have done with her. Whilst Miss ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... spiky shrub on the slope stood brown and sere now, and thirty feet high, and cast long shadows that stretched out of sight, and the little seeds that clustered in its upper branches were brown and ripe. Its work was done, and it was brittle and ready to fall and crumple under the freezing air, so soon as the nightfall came. And the huge cacti, that had swollen as we watched them, had long since burst and scattered their spores to the four quarters of the moon. Amazing little corner in the universe—the landing ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... received it, and Hamilton was such a fool that he could easily be put off, and in any case the whole thing was probably some absurd scare; but still Rivers wanted to be out of all responsibility, and was already cursing the sudden impulse that made him crumple up the telegram and keep it back. Now, he could not tell why, his mind misgave him when he found Sarrasin coming into Hamilton's room and heard that Hamilton had gone to arouse ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... struggled for a word. But his distress was not observed by the detective. His eyes, suspicious and accusing, still were fixed upon Hemingway, and under their scrutiny Harris saw his friend slowly retreat, slowly crumple up into a chair, slowly raise his hands to cover his face. As though in a nightmare, ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... stopped short. For an instant he stood swaying on his feet, a puzzled face showing under the trickling blood. Then he flung out his hands a little, and they flapped loosely at the wrists, like wet clothes hung in the wind to dry, and Billy seemed to crumple up suddenly, and slid down upon the grass in an ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... to look and see who it was that had called, a shot rang out and the beast, which had been running along, crouched low like a cat after a bird, seemed to crumple up. Then it turned a complete somersault, and a ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... was saying, this strong, desperate man, armed with a revolver, allowed you to walk across the room and strike him in the face, causing him to crumple up and fall to the floor as if struck by a—well, someone like Jack Dempsey. Isn't ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... Now, I crumple it up at one corner, and tie it to Mr. Balloon's half yard or so of tail, and turn him loose in the room. He rises slowly for a little, and then as slowly settles down to the floor. That won't do. I want to see him ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk men thought that Tennessee—beyond the Veil—was theirs alone, and in vacation time they sallied forth in lusty bands to meet the county school-commissioners. Young and happy, I too ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... there had been a schoolmaster like that around when I was born, then. Oh, here we are at the bridge. I'm going to shut my eyes tight. I'm always afraid going over bridges. I can't help imagining that perhaps just as we get to the middle, they'll crumple up like a jack-knife and nip us. So I shut my eyes. But I always have to open them for all when I think we're getting near the middle. Because, you see, if the bridge DID crumple up I'd want to SEE it crumple. What a jolly rumble it makes! I always like the rumble part of it. ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery |
