"Lilliputian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Waldorf is Pelham, consisting of 1,200 acres, one of the largest fruit farms in the world. Passing Esopus Island, which seems like a great stranded and petrified whale, along whose sides often cluster Lilliputian-like canoeists, we see Brown's Dock on the west bank at the mouth of Black Creek, which rises eight miles from Newburgh on the eastern slope of the Plaaterkill Mountains. Flowing through Black Pond, known by the Dutch settlers as the "Grote Binnewater," it cascades its way along the ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... window. On your tip-toes to see. It's that fascinating Lilliputian with a beard and electric bowels who stands in drug store windows and administers corn cure to his own toes with ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... such as Mercury, Venus, or Mars, whose density is a little less than that of the earth; but do not venture into the great planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune; for there the order will be changed, and you will become Lilliputian." ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... rang with a harmony that the inherited practice of centuries had given them. And beyond was the monotonous accompaniment of the sea on the rocks. Hamilton lived to be an old man, and he never left the West Indies; but sometimes, at long and longer intervals, he found himself listening to that Lilliputian orchestra, his attention attracted to it, possibly, by a stranger; and then he remembered this night, and the woman for whom he would have sacrificed earth and immortality had ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... are likely to preserve the liberty we have obtained, only by unremitting labors and perils. But we shall preserve it; and our mass of weight and wealth on the good side is so great, as to leave no danger that force will ever be attempted against us. We have only to awake and snap the Lilliputian cords with which they have been entangling us during the first ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... our way towards Paris, by a broad paved avenue, that was bordered with trees. The road now began to show an approach to a capital, being crowded with all sorts of uncouth-looking vehicles, used as public conveyances. Still it was on a Lilliputian scale as compared to London, and semi-barbarous even as compared to one of our towns. Marly-la-Machine was passed; an hydraulic invention to force water up the mountains to supply the different princely dwellings of the neighbourhood. Then came a house of no great pretension, buried in trees, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... itself upon the antiquity, beauty, and energy of its own tongue, with an avowed contempt for that of its neighbor; yet our emperor, standing upon the advantage he had got by the seizure of their fleet, obliged them to deliver their credentials, and make their speech in the Lilliputian tongue. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... never read them, but one of the company now gave him some general account of Lilliput and Brobdignag. He thought the account of the little people more entertaining than that of the large ones; the carriage of Gulliver's hat by a team of Lilliputian horses, diverted him; but, when he was told that the queen of Brobdignag's dwarf stuck Gulliver one day at dinner into a marrow bone, S—— looked grave, and seemed rather shocked than amused; he said, "It must have almost suffocated poor Gulliver, and must have spoiled his ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... never fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous "Drapier's Letters" patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and invective: they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy—the assault is wonderful for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rushing on his enemies and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Lilliputian kingdom compared with which the smallest German principality of former days was enormous. Curiously enough, whilst Monte Carlo is peopled with gamesters, the only tenants of Monaco seem to be priests, nuns and their pupils. The miniature capital, state and kingdom ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... million of people should want nine Governments in addition to its central authority. The procedure of the Provincial Councils, where Mr. Speaker took the chair daily and a mace was gravely laid on the table by the clerk, seemed a Lilliputian burlesque of the great ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... absorbed in the task. At last a tiny commotion manifested itself in the bottom of the funnel. Impulsively she laid her hand on Orde's, to stop them. Fascinated, they watched. After incredible though lilliputian upheavals, at length appeared a tiny black insect, struggling against the rolling, overwhelming sands. With great care the girl scooped this newcomer out and set him on the level ground. She looked up ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... ordinary emotion that Katherine Grandison heard that this perfect cousin Ferdinand had at length arrived. She had seen little of him even in his boyish days, and even then he was rather a hero in their Lilliputian circle. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest —most unadulterated, and compromising sand—in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, "sage-brush," ventures to grow. If you will take a Lilliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire—set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them, you'll understand (provided the floor is covered 12 inches deep with sand,) what it is to wander through a sage-brush desert. When crushed, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sovereigns edgeways, and of sufficient length to allow of two hundred of them to rest in that position one against another. The trough thus charged is fixed slopingly upon the machine, over a little table, as big as the plate of an ordinary sovereign-balance. The coin nearest to the Lilliputian platform drops upon it, being pushed forward by the weight of those behind. Its own weight presses the table down; but how far down? Upon that hangs the whole merit and discriminating power of the machine. At the back and on each side of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... dashing equestrians exhibiting all the gay paraphernalia of a Mexican horseman; stately vehicles drawn by two snow-white mules; tally-ho coaches conveying merry parties of American or English people; youthful aristocrats bestriding Lilliputian horses, followed by liveried servants; while here and there a mounted policeman in fancy uniform moves slowly by. In the line of pedestrians are well-dressed gentlemen in black broadcloth suits, wearing silk ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... all his work, Swift's contribution to the coming Novel was above all the use of a certain grave, realistic manner of treating the impossible: a service, however, shared with Defoe. He gives us in a matter-of-fact chronicle style the marvelous happenings of Gulliver in Lilliputian land or in that of the Brobdingnagians. He and Defoe are to be regarded as pioneers who suggested to the literary world, just before the Novel's advent, that the attraction of a new form and a new method, the exploitation of the truth that, "The proper study of mankind ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... wholesome lessons for all generations. Whether his Charlesbourg (then called Bourg Royal) castle was used as the receptacle of some of his most valuable booty, or whether it was merely a kind of Lilliputian Parc au Cerfs, such as his royal master had, tradition does not say. It would appear, however, that it was kept up by the plunder wrung from sorrowing colonists, and that the large profits he made by paring from the scanty pittance the French ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... some changes since we met; A patient little seamstress yet, With small means striving, Have you a Lilliputian spouse? And do you dwell in some ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... through the door, the elder woman moved about the shop, setting it in order for the night. It was a labor of love to put the dolls to bed, to lock the glass doors safely on the puffy rabbits and woolly dogs and round-eyed cats, to close the drawers on the tea-sets and Lilliputian kitchens, to shut into boxes the tin soldiers that their queer ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bound and pricked by a thousand delicate lilliputian bonds. The 'regiment of women' was complete. He could do ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... highroad, the flat mountain face opened a black, egg-shaped mouth at me. I got out of the carriage to approach it, and while I stood peering down the dark throat, as if I were a Lilliputian doctor examining the tongue of Giant Gulliver, I was suddenly clapped upon the shoulder. It flashed into my mind that perhaps it was forbidden to stare at the tunnel-in-making; and turning to defend myself from a lash of red tape, with the adage that ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... sight as I sat with the swallows flying far under my feet. The people did not wander about the street here and there as usual, but hundreds after hundreds of small objects came on in regular array. Then I could see long lines of Lilliputian soldiers marching in the procession, with their tiny bayonets glancing in the sun; and every now and then came up a soft swell of music, feeble but sweet. 'What is all this about?' thought I. 'Are they going to set one of these little creatures over them for a bailie or a king?' And one did march ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... however, of all the marvels—that met me at my old school—was a scene from the "Critic," played by the most Lilliputian boys. Puff—played by Powell (I don't forget that name)—was simply marvellous. And yet Powell, if he will forgive me for saying so, was the merest whipper-snapper. Sir Christopher Hatton could scarcely have emerged from the nursery; and yet the idea of utter stolidity never found a better exponent ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... have observed one general fact, and that is, that the adjectival epithet which is prefixt to all the virtues is invariably the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput, I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense, and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the neighboring Republic Blefusca—for since Swift's time it has become a Republic—I hear all these virtues suddenly ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... that I had ever seen in the North except the oleander. Even that had wholly changed its habits and appearance, and resembled the pot-grown plant of Northern households only as the gigantic sequoia of California resembles the stunted Lilliputian pine of the Siberian tundra. The Key West oleander is not a plant, nor a shrub; it is a tree. In the yard of a private house on Carolina Street I saw an oleander nearly thirty feet in height, whose branches shaded an area twenty feet or more in diameter, and whose mammoth clusters of rosy flowers ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... Mister TURNER came in for the BENJAMIN'S mess of obloquy, having represented Pluto, the god of wealth, in the act of carrying off a female Proserpine, but the figures so Lilliputian, and in such a disproportionate expansion of confused sceneries, that the elopement produced but a very paltry impression. The slipshod carelessness of this painter may be realised from the fact that in a composition styled "Blue Lights to Warn Steamboats off Shoal Water," the blue lights are ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... got up, and the Italian, relieved from their weight, rolled over on his back, and then on his side, staring all around, and making desperate efforts to free himself. He was like the immortal Gulliver when bound by the Lilliputians, except that one of his assailants, at least, was no Lilliputian, for in brawn, and sinew, and solid muscle, Frank, boy though he might be, was not very much, if at all, his inferior. As he struggled, and stared, and rolled about, the boys looked on; and Frank ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... teach the art of dwarfing, training, and grafting trees and plants, and of laying out miniature landscapes, into which artificial mountains and valleys are introduced, and very frequently lakes, studded with lilliputian fern-covered islands, around which gold and silver fish may be seen darting about; or, if the sun is hot, taking refuge under curious Japanese bridges, or the broad leaves of the lotus, which usually cover a portion of the surface—the only thing out of proportion, ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... mercy. The son tells of the first school he attended, when he was but five years old. It was kept by the widow of one of Napoleon's generals, a militant lady who every morning marshalled the school, a Lilliputian army with the teachers flanking the line like beardless sergeants in stays and petticoats, and distributed rewards and punishments as the great Emperor was wont to do after a battle. For the dunces there was a corner strewn with dried peas on which they were ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... "Ranger," who soon thereafter hoisted the new flag on board that vessel at Portsmouth. The "Ranger" set out to sea about November 1st, her battery consisting of sixteen six-pounders, throwing only forty-eight pounds of shot from a broadside, an armament which appears grotesquely lilliputian in comparison with the thirteen-inch guns, firing projectiles of over half a ton from our steel-armored battleships of to-day, which cost as much as five million dollars and are of 16,000 tons burden. With this little ship he sailed to Europe, ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... which there has been added to it a Standard edition of Goldsmith's Works, edited by Mr. Gibbs. I had the pleasure of making many researches respecting the old London publisher (Goldsmith's friend), John Newbery, respecting his Lilliputian Classics, and I have been enabled to introduce several of the Quarto early editions to the firm, and have had great pleasure in writing and placing on record numerous facts and data, since utilized in the very interesting "Life of John Newbery, a last century ...
— Banbury Chap Books - And Nursery Toy Book Literature • Edwin Pearson
... a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-dried mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was an imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunches of lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurel wreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of the Second Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed into brightness ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... of different bulk but built upon exactly the same plan and proportions, say a Brobdingnagian and a Lilliputian, and let both show their powers in the arena. Suppose the first to weigh a million times more than the second. If the giant could raise to his shoulder, some thirty-five feet from the ground, a weight twenty thousand pounds, the dwarf can raise to his shoulder, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various |
