"Fledgling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Webb, quietly, "that if all followed your boys' example, insects would soon have the better of us. They are far worse than the birds. I've seen it stated on good authority that a fledgling robin eats forty per cent more than its own weight every twenty-four hours, and I suppose it would be almost impossible to compute the number of noxious worms and moths destroyed by a family of robins in one season. They earn ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... not a little shocked to discover that his ideas in respect of the preacher's calling were of a very worldly kind. The notions of this fledgling of dissent differed from those of a clergyman of the same stamp in this:—the latter regards the church as a society with accumulated property for the use of its officers; the former regarded it as a community of communities, each possessing a preaching house which ought to be made commercially ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... dazzling smile, "when your heart is athirst for knowledge, gaping for it like a fledgling's mouth for food, and, as it chances, though I am not very wise, I can satisfy ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... grocers; and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument—once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench—attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... knew he was coming a strange stillness seemed to fall upon the child. She had grown long-legged and was at the fledgling stage when even a pretty girl sometimes looks plain, and she, who had as yet no claim to beauty, was at her worst. She was quite aware of it, with her intense soul-worship of all beautiful things. Some unreasoned impulse made her keep away from her master during ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... a fledgling," observed the Major. "But Kenneth's a bright lad and a big gun in his county. He'll ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... unicameral National Assembly note: fledgling parliament; a 275-member Transitional Federal Assembly; the new parliament consists of 61 seats assigned to each of four large clan groups (Darod, Digil-Mirifle, Dir, and Hawiye) with the remaining 31 seats divided ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... his appropriate part. Upstairs, Francois, the brilliant man of the world and of politics, assumed a regal air, bestowed courtesies and promises, and made himself agreeable to all. His manners were easy and complying; he looked at business from a lofty standpoint; he intoxicated new recruits and fledgling speculators with the wine of his favor and his fervid speech, as he made plain to them their own ideas. Downstairs, Adolphe unsaid his brother's words, excused him on the ground of political preoccupation, and cleverly slipped the rake along the cloth. He played the part ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... conquest and demanded victories of their own. I have seen their diagrams scratched on the walls, cut into the beams upon the play ground, and numberless other illustrations of the living interest they took in the subject. For my own part, as far as experience in teaching goes, I was a mere fledgling: I knew nothing of the rules of pedagogics, as the Germans name it; but I adhered to the spirit indicated at the commencement of this discourse, and endeavoured to make geometry a means and not a branch ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... at the front door, peeping out, still in his leather jacket and apron of green baize; he was whistling softly to himself, and looked like a grown fledgling that did not dare to let itself tumble out of the nest. A whole world of amazement lay ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... they painted a shadow constantly intruded, chilling them, such a shadow, deep and cold, as is cast by an iceberg. The door would open, and his father's face, high and white with ice-blue eyes, would hang above them. Instantly, the man remembered, the boy would cower like a fledgling beneath the sparrow-hawk, but with as much distaste as fear in his cringing. The words that followed always seemed the same—he could reconstruct the scene clearly, but whether it had occurred once or many times he could ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... it was before I left off definitely choosing out a story for the pleasure of making myself cry! When one begins to avoid that luxury of the fledgling emotions, the first leaf ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... and bird and butterfly. Inevitably she began to specialise, but her specialisation was not in one species but rather in one process, in the dawning and budding life of the young in the real "home life" before the new fledgling or tiny furred body left the nest for an independent life and a future nest of its own. The wild mates at work upon the house which instinct prompted was to be of use soon, the construction of a swinging pocket hung high up by an oriole, this was a part of the ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... dream. The enthusiasm of men participating in a race's expansion to glory. There was the feeling, even stronger here in space than back on Earth, of man's destiny being fulfilled, that humanity had finally emerged from its infancy, that the fledgling had finally found its wings and got off ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... received at San Francisco and filled by every stage or steamer, the lavish entertainment accorded to officers of any grade and to wayfarers with any sign of money, the complaints of victims who had been fleeced, the gloomy silence of certain fledgling subalterns after brief visits at "Camp Ochre," as Blake had dubbed it, all pointed significantly to but one conclusion, that, so far from living on his pay, Nevins was gormandizing on that of everybody else, and doubtless "raising the wind" ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... thy sister spirit, Spring, Pausing above the earth, sees every hue Of her prismatic crown, reflected true In forests and in fields, and fledgling's wing, So thou dost see thy spirit glorying With faith, that man is more than Nature's spew— In human spirit that, from beauty drew First breath to know that ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... assail not only the big but the small hawks with fearlessness, driving them in headlong flight. They not only capture insects, but pounce on mice, small frogs, lizards, and little snakes, rob birds' nests of the fledgling young, and catch tadpoles ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... boots and beard of Allah's Prophet!" he swore, growing freer-tongued now that his liberty of action had been limited. "Here we stand and talk like two old hags, Mahommed Gunga! My word is given. Let us find out now what this fledgling general of thine would have us do. If he is to release my prisoner, at least I would like to ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... above me, Where the casement all the night Shone, softened with a phosphor glow Of sympathetic light, And that her fledgling spirit pure Was pluming fast ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... was more than curious to see what particular kind of a fledgling could be born to these two parent birds—one so hard and unsympathetic and the other so kind and simple. Jim, I remembered, had always spoken enthusiastically of Ruby, but then Jim always spilled over the edges whenever he spoke of the things he loved, whether ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the university of the planets, was set among the low hills of the western part of the North American continent. Here, in the nest of fledgling spacemen, boys from Earth and the colonies of Venus and Mars learned the complex science that would enable them to reach unlimited heights; to rocket through the endless void of space and visit new worlds on distant planets ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... in a new magazine, which, as it was just rising into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my condescension. It was a charity, indeed, to give my support to this fledgling, and I sent to it a long article, entitled, 'The Cultivated, as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts were returned, with this quiet bit of advice:—'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other reforms, we would advise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had learned to use their wings,—they could fly. Would it not have been passing strange, had they continued as they were, contented to cower and to crawl, when they had acquired the power to soar? And will you be content to remain forever only a fledgling, satisfied with having acquired the power of rising, but never actually using the wings which these years of honorable industry ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... also in the Episcopal, the novitiate is expected to serve for a time under an older clergyman; but all the other denominations have broken away, and now spring the fledgling on the world straight ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... where birds and fledglings and grass and the light winds of heaven were more important than brick and stone and stocks and bonds. He got up and followed her flowing steps across the grass to where, near a clump of alder bushes, she had seen a mother sparrow enticing a fledgling to take wing. From her room upstairs, she had been watching this bit of outdoor sociology. It suddenly came to Cowperwood, with great force, how comparatively unimportant in the great drift of life were his own affairs when about him was operative all this splendid ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Master. In fact, to give all the odd and whimsical names invented by Dickens would be to publish a book, for he compiled an indexed volume of names from which he drew at will. He used, however, but a fraction of his list. The rest are wisely kept from the public, else, forsooth, the fledgling writers of penny-shockers would seize upon them ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... that Luke Mellows would have amounted to much. Perhaps, if he had ventured over the nest's edge, he would have perished on the ground, trampled into dust by the fameward mob, or devoured by the critics that pounce upon every fledgling and suck the heart out of all that cannot ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... lighted at sunset. Like one of these that I remember, called the Soul-beckoning Rest, was this listener, Carleton, who begat eloquence by his kindly gaze. Nor was this power to lift up and cheer—this winged help of a great soul, like that of a mother bird under her fledgling making first trial of the air—given only to the professional speaker in the pulpit. This ten-talent layman was ever kindly helpful, with ear and tongue, to his fellow holder-in-trust of the ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... Nature's work as merely arbitrary and haphazard, is greatly exercised over the reason for the existence of crests on birds. But, surely, may not the sight of snake-skins that first greet the eyes of the fledgling flycatchers as they emerge from the shell be a good and sufficient reason why the feathers on their little heads should stand on end? "In the absence of a snake-skin, I have found an onion skin and shad scales in the nest," says John Burroughs, who calls ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... which Master Gyles would not allow them even to touch, and saffron cakes with raisins in them, and spiced hot cordial out of tiny silver cups. Bareheaded pages clad in silk and silver lace waited upon them as if they were fledgling kings; but the boys were too hungry to care for that or to try to put on airs, and waded into the meat and drink as if they had been starved ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... bent upon a definite errand and one that promised another meeting with Isabel at the end of the journey he shared the Governor's zest for flight. It was a joy to be free under the broad blue arch of June. Spring is a playtime for fledgling fancy but in summer the heart is strong of wing and dares the heavens. It was Archie who now initiated vocal outbursts, striking up old glee club catches he hadn't thought of since his college days. He was in ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... royally I should feast if by some strange unheard-of accident one were to fall disabled to the ground and be at my mercy. But nothing impossible happened, and I had no meat. What meat did I ever have except an occasional fledgling, killed in its cradle, or a lizard, or small tree-frog detected, in spite of its green colour, among the foliage? I would roast the little green minstrel on the coals. Why not? Why should he live to ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... they could no longer see over them, ministers awakening to the fact that they had given all their store and must get a new supply, business men aware of a call to another field of action— working with a consistent earnestness the average fledgling freshman cannot imagine—he is not old enough; yet generally the tendency is to exclude such students, unless they will go back and do the arduous, and often for them useless, work of preparing to pass the examinations for entrance to ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs |
