"Sketchy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. And ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... of his narrative makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... popularity of Charles Kingsley has been rather declining, the credit of his brother Henry has been gradually rising. Those who have complained of something rather shallow and sketchy in some of his former books will find far more solid and faithful work in this. Indeed, he undertakes rather more than he can carry through, and the capacious plot, well handled at first, gets into some confusion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... in his seat. "And then," resumed the condemned, "came the final discomfiture. In our village we had a modest little debating club, and I remembered having promised, chiefly, I suppose, to please and impress the doctor's wife, to give a sketchy kind of lecture on the Balkan Crisis. I had relied on being able to get up my facts from one or two standard works, and the back-numbers of certain periodicals. The prosecution had made a careful note of the circumstance that the man whom I claimed ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... scarf bound them as the night before, but an icy gale like that which swept from the open river would have frozen through arctic furs. Notwithstanding all this, his spirits were lighter than usual. The scene he had left at home floated on before his eyes, and transfused itself with the black, sketchy trees against the sky and blent with the ragged barbs of smoke that depended from cottage chimneys. The wind had been boisterous enough, and would have torn it away on a cantering jaunt not many minutes ago, but, surcharged as it was now with blinding snow, it had its own liberty ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... turning the corner of the drive they saw Geoffrey's bicycle leaning against the porch. "I expect she's in the drawing-room with her grandfather. There seem to be lights everywhere. Well, I'm going to make a bee-line for the dining-room for grub. We had a very sketchy lunch, no tea, and no dinner, so I ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... you can't hear one-third of the jokes because of the laughter at the other two-thirds (and a little because of the indistinct articulation of one or two of the players). Of course when I say "plausible" I don't exactly mean that any Brigade Headquarters was run on the sketchy lines of General Archibald Root's, or that the gallant author or anybody else who was in the beastly thing ever thought of the Great War as a devastating joke, but rather that if it be true, as has been rumoured, that not all generals ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various
... be brought out in London. It will not stand the ghost of a chance unless well mounted. Music light and sketchy; remarkable for a Chorus of Fishermen, well known ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... information about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be," I protested. "No one knows anything about it really. Here's the file of the United Services ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... possibly, and elaborated beyond Randolph's sketchy and casual utterance; but Amy looked uncomfortable and chilled and glanced with little favor at a few other flat stones lying at her feet. "Please don't. Please change the subject," she seemed ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... laundry gave us a boost, too. Even J. Streblitz, high-class tailoring for ladies and gents, chipped in a ten and told us about his boy Herman, who'd been made a corporal and was at Chateau Thierry. Inside of three hours we'd made a sketchy canvas of the whole block, got half a dozen of the men to go on the committee, had over $100 subscribed, and ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... all a dream, and Rose knew nothing of Tessie's adventure, beyond the suspicions conveyed in the two sketchy letters sent since ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... really fit for the stage, and may be read with pleasure to-day. Neither of these compliments can fairly be paid to The Natural Son and The Father of the Family. Diderot's plays ought to be looked upon merely as sketchy illustrations of a favourite theory; as the rough drawings on the black board with which a professor of the fine arts may accompany a lecture ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... remained an unsolved riddle. In the century prior to 1872 (See the digest of Dagonet's publication in Chapter XV) French psychiatrists wrote some good descriptions of stupor and offered brilliant, though sketchy generalizations about the condition. Two years later an English psychiatrist (Newington, See Chapter XV) improved on the French work. Little light has been thrown on the subject since then. The researches of the later French School showed that stupor often occurs in the ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... up chiefly to Alson Clark's over-sketchy and intemperately colored Panama pictures. The most interesting thing here is Ernest Lawson's "Beginning of Winter," on wall B, a representative work by one of the most ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... something of what this restless speculative scientific generation is thinking and doing. But I can't read with much pleasure the fragmentary review literature of the day. The "Cornhill" and that class of books I can't stand, and sketchy writings. The best specimens of light reading I have seen of late are Charlotte Yonge's "Pupils of St. John the Divine," and Guizot's ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was in the motor-car: and though Robert, in a different and more sketchy costume, would have been a gallant Batavian warrior, there would be a certain indecorousness in permitting my fancy to make the necessary changes. I had to content myself, therefore, with things as they were; with the teuf-teuf of the automobile instead of the wild wailing of white-robed ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... and watched by bailiffs without, until death came to his relief. A corner of the Morning Post noticed his death, generously adding, that his manner displayed considerable genius, though his style was rather sketchy; and referred to an advertisement, which announced that Mr. Varnish, a well-known printseller, had still on hand a very few drawings and painings by Richard Tinto, Esquire, which those of the nobility and gentry who might wish to complete their collections of ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... ideas about the new countries are pretty sketchy," he said. "People always talk to me about the fearfully hot climate of Australia, and seem mildly surprised if I remark that we have about a dozen different climates, and that we have snow and ice, and very decent winter sports, in Victoria. I don't think they ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... reasonably clear,—but the close interpretation of these conditions, to enable us to predict the extent of one of these deposits, or to explain its presence in one place and absence in another, is in an early and sketchy stage. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... quick but rather sketchy list. "And your own overcoat and sweater—or I won't let you go. Promise." Her fingers turned in his and caught ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was little more than a skit, and the plot—if the thin, sketchy incident that stood in its place may be called one—served only as an excuse for a continuous fusillade of local hits, often of a personal character. These not only kept the audience in a fever of merriment, but long afterward furnished Mexican official ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... be read by ladies in some quiet half-hour before toiletting or untoiletting, or by the weaker sex in the smoking-room, the Baron begs to commend "THACKERAY's Portraits of Himself," as interesting to Thackerayans, and "A Maiden Speech," in Murray, for August, the latter being rather too sketchy, though in its sketchiness artistic, as, like Sam Weller's love-letter, it makes you "wish as there was more ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... sat around with expectant faces while he got out his tobacco and laid a sheaf of papers on the table, and waited while their envoy, laying Bassett's map on the table, proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the trail beyond the pass, some sketchy ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The sketchy nature of Japanese poetry, especially in this five-line stanza, may be illustrated further by two poems quoted by Prof. B. H. Chamberlain in his "Things ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... just can't stand for this!" he groaned, and the tragedy in his voice contrasted so quaintly with his comic appearance, bareheaded, hair ruffled, and costume sketchy, that I felt rising symptoms of hysteria, which had to be controlled. "I must get you and the mater and Milly into safety somehow. To-night is the limit. Mater's more dead than alive, ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... taffrail, gazing down with open mouth and vacant stare at the water, I took a good long look at him. He interested me much—because he was so exceptionally uninteresting; a pallid, anaemic, indefinite hobbledehoy, with a high, narrow forehead, and sketchy features. He had watery, restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white in its paleness; and twitching hands that played nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. This shadowy moustache seemed to absorb ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... is but little similarity between the above sketchy trifle and the celebrated "Moon-Story" of Mr. Locke; but as both have the character of hoaxes (although the one is in a tone of banter, the other of downright earnest), and as both hoaxes are on the same subject, the moon—moreover, as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... not sure," I said, "that I like all those blanks. It's a good model, of course, but it's just a bit too sketchy." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... of this chapter the authors have endeavored to present very briefly a sketchy notion of the astounding range of Edison's practical ideas, but they feel a sense of impotence in being unable to deal adequately with the subject in the space that can be devoted to it. To those ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... of 'Rutledge' does not often send out a new volume, but when she does it is always a literary event.... Her previous books were sketchy and slight when compared with the finished and trained power evidenced in 'An ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... very sketchy analysis of German femininity in the war, I reiterate views expressed on previous visits to Germany, that German women are not standing the anxiety of the war as well as those ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... Dr. Livesey drawing at their pipes in the oak-pannelled dining room, and Black Dog outside the door, and Pew coming tapping along the road with his stick!" cried Hugh John, turning off a sketchy synopsis of ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... but no! ingrate that I am, to-day I should be content—simply to be; even a cabbage ought to be happy in such perfect summer weather. T. B. Aldrich is in—as much as he ever is supposed to be; but I recall now that I read his sketchy book the other night, while I was brushing my hair, giving it a sort of 'good time generally,' letting it run wild a little before going to sleep. I read 'Pierre Antoine's Date Tree' quite through, and liked—the last part very much indeed. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... meat had a taste of flannel, Durtal had nodded a sketchy affirmative, knowing full well that if he ventured on the least comment he would have to endure an incoherent harangue on all the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre. I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all- pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the classics,—with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... insufficient) 640; neglect &c. 460. Adj. incomplete; imperfect &c. 651; unfinished; uncompleted &c. (see complete &c. 729); defective, deficient, wanting, lacking, failing; in default, in arrear[obs3]; short of; hollow, meager, lame, halfand-half, perfunctory, sketchy; crude &c. (unprepared) 674. mutilated, garbled, docked, lopped, truncated. in progress, in hand; going on, proceeding. Adv. incompletely &c. adj.; by ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pilots with excellent records of achievement in war-flying who have but a sketchy knowledge of motor and aircraft construction. Some are college-bred men, but many more have only a common-school education. It is not at all strange that this should be the case, for one may have had no technical training worth mentioning; one may have only a casual ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... "damned spot" stares us in the face, blights our hopes, and crushes our sympathies—hideous slavery —hideous alike in the recollection of the past, the contemplation of the present, and the anticipation of the future. I wish two things— 1. That you would write a work on the subject less "sketchy and perfunctory," as you call it, so that any one not versed in English law and procedure might be able to understand it and appreciate it thoroughly. 2nd. That you would, when relieved from your present office, come out as ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... was going to take much longer than the outside margin he had allowed to build the plant. If a driven well failed, he must try out the Prebles'. Perhaps Dick's knowledge of irrigation would prove to be sketchy and that water supply too would prove inadequate. He believed still that his plans for the plant itself would not have ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... It was a sketchy sort of arrangement, but it worked very well. Sometimes Peter provided the meals which Emma cooked, for he was expert at snaring, crabbing, shrimping, and fishing. Sometimes the spirit moved Cassius to lay an offering of a side of bacon, a bushel of potatoes, a string ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... for this story was supplied by a three-year-old. The pattern was added. An older child would not be content with so sketchy an account. But it seems to compass a three-year-old's most significant associations with a stable. The title is one in actual use by ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... may be installed an electric dishwasher, depending, of course, on whether the family considers its benefits equal to the expense involved. If mother is to do the work, it may be warranted; but where her efforts are limited to one or two sketchy meals on Thursdays and Sunday evenings, one might well interview the person who is monitor of the service wing the bulk of the time. Dishwashers, cake mixers, complicated fruit juice extractors, and similar gadgets are all excellent but they are not essential. Many ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... sculptors of the present treat the minor details of their subjects in a sketchy, or, as some critics contend, in a rough imperfect manner, while others find that this treatment of detail, combined with a careful, comprehensive treatment of the important parts, emphasizes the meaning and imparts strength to the whole, as no smoothness ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... W.,—I have your good letter. By 'good' I mean many things—well done as a bit of sketchy composition, a welcome letter, kindly also in spirit, cheering, timely, telling of things that interest the receiver, one, too, having the flavor of the household whence it comes, altogether a good letter. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... am afraid her cheek bones are too high for good proportion, and I know that her hair is not always so carefully dressed as it should be, but what is the difference when the hair is crowned with a halo? I can't swear to any of these things; they're sketchy impressions. The only thing I am absolutely sure about is the inner light that shines to an unbelievable degree. I wish she had more time and I wish I had more time and that she and I might become such friends as you and I are. ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, a la Juliet, having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume, consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, the turban over one eye and the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... ought to say, the famous manuscript ends. Indeed, this late Marseilles part of it was very hurried and sketchy. The main object which he had in view—or rather which, in the first inception of the idea, I had suggested he should have in view—namely, "to interest, perhaps encourage, at any rate to stimulate the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... polish. They knew little about springing smartly to attention and nothing whatsoever about the interior economy of a 6-inch gun. Their attire was sketchy, to say the least of it. Even the admiral wore grey flannel trousers, a once white sweater, and coloured muffler, and it is to be feared that an officer from a battleship might have referred to them collectively as a "something ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... politically, is a subject too broad, too wide, and too deep for us, we most readily confess; nor is it exactly proper for a work of a sketchy nature, in which we only skim lightly along the surface of society, picking up any little curiosity as we go along, but without dipping deep into motives or habits of thought or action, especially in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Bay—on the day before Easter. The Indians had some gold which they said came "from the north." Cabeca, who was treasurer of the expedition, strongly advised against proceeding through a totally unknown country on this very sketchy information. But Narvaez consulted the pilot, who said he knew of a harbor some distance to the west, ordered the ships to meet him there, and with forty horsemen and two hundred and sixty men on foot, struck ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... because he mocks or mimics the songs of other species, like others of his kindred. He does not, in fact, mimic the set songs of others, although he often introduces notes and phrases borrowed from other species into his own performance. He sings in a sketchy way all the year round, but in spring has a fuller unbroken song, emitted with more power and passion. For the rest of the time he sings to amuse himself, as it seems, in a peculiarly leisurely, and one may say, indolent manner, perched on a bush, from time to time emitting ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... probably the most promising member of the school. His style was sketchy, conscientious, and full of strength and decision. He worked in large lines, broad surfaces and masses of light or shade. His colour was good, running to purples, reds, and admirable greens, full of ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... Absalom Senior, on the other hand, is neither wanting nor disputed. We have had to wait until our own century for the pioneer work on this writer, since he cannot have been considered a sufficiently major poet by Samuel Johnson's sponsors, and Langbaine's account is sketchy. In a periodical paper[8] Macdonald summarized supplementary evidence on the dates of composition of Settle's poem; he was working on it in January 1681/2, and it was published on the following April 6. Lockyer, ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... silvery-white stylus attached to it. The pilot sat down the instant they stopped and began to draw in white lines on the black surface. He drew a picture of a man and an angular flying machine, and then a sketchy, impressionistic outline of a city's towers. He drew a circle to enclose all three drawings and indicated himself, the machine, and the distant city. Tommy nodded comprehension as the pilot looked up. Then came a picture of a half-naked man ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... him that can happen to an automobile except an absolute smash. He punctured his tires, had a big hole in his reservoir, his steering gear bent, his bougies always doing something they oughtn't to. He dined and slept at Falaise; rather a sketchy repast, but as he told us he could always get along with poached eggs, could eat six in an ordinary way and twelve in an emergency, we were reassured; for one can always get eggs and milk in Normandy. He arrived in a perfectly ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... point from which expeditions start and to which they return. Doubtless an extended stay in the country would show him that problems of administration and possibilities of development could be even more absorbing; but such things are very sketchy ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... simple, and apparently pagan, way of stating the case; they will be considered in due time. The reader is asked to refrain from parting company with the writer, if his prejudices are aroused, until the consonance of this sketchy account of the basis of morality with Christianity and all idealism can ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... see that you are homely, but when I think of you I know that you are great." it is this combination of an unprepossessing physique with rare dignity of character which Hunt has represented in what many consider the best of American portraits. It is perhaps too much in the sketchy style of Velasquez, but ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... convention by which the matter of a first edition—whether a single story or a collection of stories—which has been reproduced from a magazine or magazines, is treated as if it were a novelty. It is a sound and benevolent convention, because the stuff of magazines only receives at best a very sketchy notice. Miss May Sinclair, however, is apparently prepared; to risk the loss of any advantage to be derived from it, for her collection of short and middle-sized stones republished under the title of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 27, 1914 • Various
... of purity, piety, and manly independence which they brought with them and illustrated, has never ceased to work powerfully among our people. Why not bring the children into direct contact with these characters in the intermediate grades, not by short and sketchy stories, but by full life pictures of these men and their surroundings? We have not been wholly lacking in literary artists who have worked up a part of these materials into a more durable and acceptable form for our schools. We need to make ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... highly finished; nothing of the pittore improvisatore. A party of this kind should be more sketchy in its style; the outline more free, and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... very carefully extricated himself from among the slumberers and followed. He congratulated himself upon the fact that his preparations for the night had been extremely sketchy, had in fact consisted merely in removing his coat and riding-boots. Once safe outside the cabin, he pulled on the boots, smoothed his hair with his fingers, knotted the handkerchief more becomingly about his throat, and went in ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... brigade took over the front, a sketchy business in view of the position, and the N.Z's. marched back. One of the officers, during the day, had called out to us in characteristic Colonial fashion, "Well, boys, are you going up to finish it?" whereupon one of the men replied with Lancashire directness, "Ay, we started it, so ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... unavailable, resources during the period of his perdition. For one or the other of these reasons—orthographical inability, or Irish pride—the half is never told; therefore, as a rule, the reading public is acquainted only with sketchy and fallacious pictures of that continuous, indurating hardship which finally sends reluctant Hope after her co-tenants of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... &c (be insufficient) 640; neglect &c 460. Adj. incomplete; imperfect &c 651; unfinished; uncompleted &c (complete) &c 729; defective, deficient, wanting, lacking, failing; in default, in arrear^; short of; hollow, meager, lame, halfand-half, perfunctory, sketchy; crude &c (unprepared) 674. mutilated, garbled, docked, lopped, truncated. in progress, in hand; going on, proceeding. Adv. incompletely &c adj.; by halves. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... effects, the name of the author is almost invariably that of a newcomer, or of one of our few uncorrupted masters of the art. Still more remarkable, the good short stories that I meet with in my reading are the trivial ones,—the sketchy, the anecdotal, the merely adventurous or merely picturesque; as they mount toward literature they seem to increase in artificiality and constraint; when they propose to interpret life they become machines, and nothing more, for the discharge ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... see what you mean. Like the statuary of Rodin or Epstein. One sees really only half the form, as if growing out of the sketchy sculpture. And then there's another thing—I hope ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... Going upon the rather sketchy suggestions of Mrs. Standish, the girl had prefigured Aunt Abby as a skittish female of three-score years and odd; a gabbling creature with a wealth of empty gesticulation and a parrot's vacant eye; semi-irresponsible, prone to bright colours and an overyouthful ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... and valleys (as in my description of what the Man saw from his Hillside) appearing to us as a sequence of risings and sinkings with correlated intensities; a slope springing up in proportion as the previously seen one rushed down; the movements of the eye, slight and sketchy in themselves, awakening the composite dynamic memory of all our experience of the impetus gained by switch-back descent. Moreover this sequence, being a sequence, will awaken expectation of repetition, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... just as I did for our little "Diving Bell,"—as a sort of pastime, and because my daily toil was mechanical, and furnished no occupation for my thoughts. Perhaps the fact that most of us wrote in this way accounted for the rather sketchy and fragmentary character of our "Magazine." It gave evidence that we thought, and that we thought upon solid and serious matters; but the criticism of one of our superintendents upon it, very kindly given, was undoubtedly just: ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... and superficial, these portraits disclose on more intimate study a fine constructive quality. They are not particularly interesting in colour; as a matter of fact they are very monochromatic. Their appeal is based on an intensely serious quality of studious experimentation, which a very sketchy technique cannot hide. To the left of the three Mancinis hangs a simple picture of large proportions called "Maternity," by Pietro Gaudenzi. This is one of those modern interpretations of the birth of Jesus ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... publication of the first edition of this work, the figure in question has appeared from the pencil and burin of Mr. Cotman; of which the only fault, as it strikes me, is, that the surface is too rough—or the effect too sketchy.] ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... anon. Her twelve-year-old boy comes to the Home daily to get milk for the wretched baby, whom we had heard was down with the disease. When he came this morning I told him to stay outdoors while we fetched the milk, because I knew how sketchy are the precautions of his ilk against carrying infection. "No fear, miss," he assured me. "The baby was terrible bad last night, but he's all clear ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... computed at from twenty-one to twenty-three miles. Whatever its exact length may have been is immaterial; it was the method in which it was conducted that was so desperately trying. After the usual sketchy apology for a breakfast, the column moved off with the Somersets as advance-guard, and 'F' and 'G' company of the Dublins as rearguard. From a variety of causes the progress was uncommonly slow, and, no halt being ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... not," he declared very positively. "That sort of thing is no child's work. That's what painters do when they're recording an impression, and I've often looked in more wonder at such sketchy outlines than at the finished product. To know how to get that impression on paper so that it's unmistakable—I tell you that's training and nothing else. I don't know enough about it to say it's genius, too, yet I've had an artist friend tell me it cost him more ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... dictated the painter; "execution sketchy; coloring quiet, to be in keeping with the place and subject, but pure. You know the scene better than I, so work away, Giotto. Motto—'Will ye pay or toll it, mother?' Price twenty-five guineas. Take it to What's-his-name's, and if it sells we'll go ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a lawyer. He was nothing! At the bar he never rose a step after the first day, when, together, we appeared in our mutual maiden case; and contenting himself with the occasional execution of a landscape, sketchy and bold, but without finish, he remained in that nether-land of public consideration, unable to grasp the certainties of either pursuit at which he nevertheless was constantly striving; striving, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... look much better," George said to his mother, a few minutes after their arrival, on the night they got home. He stood with a towel in her doorway, concluding some sketchy ablutions before going downstairs to a supper which Fanny was hastily preparing for them. Isabel had not telegraphed; Fanny was taken by surprise when they drove up in a station cab at eleven o'clock; and George instantly demanded ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... he had pieced together a few sketchy fragments of Miss Terroll's biography, just enough to make the wish for fuller knowledge tantalizing. That was her maiden name, also used as a stage name, but she had been married when just out of Wellesley. She spoke little of that episode. Her girlhood was a pleasanter theme and its environment ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of the United States, p. 3. Ludlow and Hughes; Macmillan, London, 1862. The title of this work is singularly infelicitous, for it is merely a sketchy and not very clear account of the ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Brady, certainly suggested the presence of some sketchy outline of such an ideal in their minds. One Sam, in particular, an ebony-hued sportsman, threw himself into the task with great vim. I rather fancy he is waiting for us with his revolver to this moment. But why worry? Here we are, safe and sound, and Comrade Windsor may be expected ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... novels. Its plot is weak and meagre—but it is still simple and natural, and has not borrowed any of those adventitious aids to which we have alluded above. It bears throughout an air of probability, untinctured by romance, and has the strong impress of truth and fidelity to nature. Sketchy and vivacious, always humorous and sometimes witty; it has many scenes and portraits, which in terseness and energy, will compare with any of its predecessors; and occasionally there are touches of genuine sentiment which seize on the sympathies of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... his car to-day, as he occasionally liked to do, then asked, why was a Settlement? And as well as she could Carlisle retailed her rather sketchy information: how "they" planned to buy the deserted Dabney House, make it the headquarters for all the organized charities of the city, and use the rest of the great pile for working-men's clubs, night classes, lodgings, gymnasiums and ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... with Van Rycke's unfailing patience and aplomb. The Cargo-master seemed in nowise tired by his wasted day and Dane knew that Van would probably sit up half the night, going over for the hundredth time Traxt Cam's sketchy recordings in another painstaking attempt to discover why and how the other Free Trader had succeeded where the Queen's men were up ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers. In the apple orchard the young grass was powdered with gold, and the long grey shadows of the trees barred the ground like the sketchy ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... him thinking. He had a sketchy knowledge of the salmon packer's monopoly of cannery sites and pursing licenses and waters. He had heard more or less talk among fishermen of agreements in restraint of competition among the canneries. But he had never supposed it to be quite so ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the conviction was borne in on me that the stratagem had at least saved us from immediate capture. Like most men who ride I had very sketchy ideas of what three miles afoot is like—at night—in high heels. The latter affliction was common to both Miss Emory and myself. She had on a sort of bedroom slipper, and I wore the usual cowboy boots. We began to go footsore about the same time, and the little rolling ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... annoyance. Phil surmised that she had enjoyed the experience; but Lois added no details to her hasty picture. Lois did not trouble herself greatly with details; everything with her was sketchy and impressionistic. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... sketchy manner. Determine on the place to begin your drawing and then use a continuous, easy line, without lifting the chalk from the paper, except when necessary to start in a ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... Gravener said. "It was a sketchy design of her late husband's, and he handed it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but of which, should she eventually see her opportunity—the ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... the scope of this book to enter into a detailed account of the tiger, discussing his structure, habits, and characteristics, it may aid the reader if I give a sketchy general outline of some of the more prominent points of interest connected with the monarch of the jungle, the cruel, cunning, ferocious king of the cat tribe, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... and New York, and it is she, I believe, who started the questionable practice of having one performer impersonate both Marguerite and the classic Queen. Boito has given us so little of Goethe's Gretchen in his delightful, but sketchy, opera that it does not make much difference how the part is acted; but Helen is a character that seemed cut to the very form of Nilsson—regal in beauty and carriage, soul-moving in voice, serene in pose and gesture. She fitted perfectly into the fairest picture that a lover ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sake of the success of the performance, for although a small part, so much depended upon its being ideally interpreted! Later on, when the work was given in Paris, I became convinced that this part had been written in too sketchy a style, and this induced me to reconstruct it by making extensive additions, and by supplying all that which I felt it lacked. For the moment, however, it looked as if no art on the part of the singer could ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the changes of my beliefs and purposes that have arisen out of that. I had meant it to be the story of my life, but how little of my life is in it! It gives, at most, certain acute points, certain salient aspects. I begin to realize for the first time how thin and suggestive and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be. How we must simplify! How little can we convey the fullness of life, the glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects, the dawns and dreams and double ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... tone. Decidedly, the gentleman in the velveteen jacket was worth nothing at all, he was altogether pasty and badly seated; the only really good bit of work about him was his hand. In the background the two little wrestlers—the fair and the dark one—had remained too sketchy, and lacked substance; they were amusing only to an artist's eye. But he was pleased with the trees, with the sunny glade; and the nude woman—the woman lying on the grass appeared to him superior to his own powers, as if some one else had painted her, and as if he had never yet beheld her in ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... there, my dear child, it must be there still. Perhaps it is! I know your sketchy fashion of looking. See! I will come and help you to look again. Perhaps we shall find the book hidden away in a corner where you have never ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... immense; not a scrap, apparently, was left over to cover, decently, the rest of the earth's surface—of that one was quite certain in looking at this vast inverted cup overflowing with ether. What there was of land was a very sketchy performance. Opposite ran the red line ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the imagination. That cookery articles, even if read, are certainly not acted upon, is proved by the monotony of the suburban dinner. And they are not acted upon because the reader finds them incomplete, "sketchy," ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... numerous to mention. Mr Wopples presented them first to his wife, a faded, washed-out looking lady, with a perpetual simper on her face, and clad in a lavender muslin gown with ribbons of the same description, she looked wonderfully light and airy. In fact she had a sketchy appearance as if she required to be touched up here and there, to make her appear solid, which was of great service to her in her theatrical career, as it enabled her to paint on the background of herself any character ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... There were some three hundred men newly drafted into the Third Battalion; there were some three hours in which we had to get our equipment and learn to adjust it. As it was, many of the extreme greenhorn type marched away garbed in most sketchy fashion. Some had parts of their equipment in bags; others utilized their pockets as holders for unexplained, and to them inexplicable, parts of the ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... sustain its energy when the demands upon it are constant, and all legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not recollect in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent conventionalism of light and shade, sketchy forms continually less and less developed, the walls and the faces drawn with the same stucco color, alike opaque, and all the shades on flesh, dress, or stone, laid in with the same arbitrary brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled. Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy, faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small, irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark, unenduring little flower—yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and it's a good one, too. I read an account of it in an aviation paper; but the description was too sketchy for me to see ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... perturbation. Clara paused, with the powder puff in her hand, while she listened to Flora's explanation of how Ella feared that some one might, after all these years, be going to marry Judge Buller. Who this might be she did not even hint at. She left it ever so sketchy. But the little stare with which Clara met it, the amusement, the surprise, and then the shortest possible little laugh, were guarantee that Clara had seen it all. She had filled out Flora's sketch to ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... the doorway looking well about him before he lifted a loosened plank in the flooring and took from beneath it the grand old weapon of the Williams family. Nor did his eye lighten with any pleasurable excitement as he sat himself down in a shadowy corner and began some sketchy experiments with the mechanism. The allure of first sight was gone. In Mr. Williams' bed-chamber, with Sam clamoring for possession, it had seemed to Penrod that nothing in the world was so desirable as to have that revolver in his own hands—it was his dream ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... manner of Rembrandt? Any of his pictures that show this slovenliness, are, we should suspect, in those parts merely sketched in—a method agreeable to his practice, which was to work upon and upon, glazing, and heaping colour—a method which required, in the first instance, a loose and undefined sketchy manner. Some few years ago there was a picture by him exhibited at the Institution, Pall-Mall—dead game, wonderfully painted, and evidently unfinished; a boy in the background was, as we might term it, daubed in in a very slovenly manner, and with a greenish ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Milton—the comparison is not one to be pressed—de Vlaminck is like Keats. He is the most lyrical of the younger Frenchmen; the flash and sparkle of his pictures is the wonderfully close expression of a tremblingly delighted sensibility. Yet there is nothing sketchy about them. Consider his landscape (No. 65), and you will be astonished to find what a solid, self-supporting design these delicately graded tones and lightly ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans—tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Mr. Cargan. "I ain't no Charles Dana Gibson with words. My talk's a little rough and sketchy, I guess. But here's the outline, plain as I can make it. Two thousand a year from Hayden. Twenty thousand in two seconds if you ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... away from the house, where Bear and his companions could not take exception to the presence of an interloper. The late afternoon and evening were chiefly spent in having warm baths, which were most grateful after the, of necessity, somewhat sketchy ablutions of the past three days. Now that the safe arrival of the luggage was an accomplished fact, and the travellers clothed and fed, there seemed little reason for late hours, and it was not long after dinner when the general dispersal took place. ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... with cotton-wool," said a Midshipman whose acquaintance with the classics was still a recent, if sketchy acquisition. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Freda's opinion that spite had actuated the circulation of the damaging paper, she and her chums had exhibited an admirable restraint concerning it. They had evidently accepted Adrienne's sketchy explanation of it at its ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... a swift illumination up above—a rocket. The scene in which I am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The crest of our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... divide, because, he said, it was very important that we should present a substantial unity to India. This is upon the question of either House considering a Bill like the Bill that is now on the Table—a mere skeleton of a Bill if you like. I see it has been called vague and sketchy. It cannot be anything else, on the broad principle set ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... So easily and swift I drew, Sufficed for my design; My sketchy, superficial hand Drew solids at a dash—and spanned A ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... and lumbered into the inn, and I, having guided him up the narrow staircase to his room, descended to my bunk in a corner of the tiny salon. My sleeping arrangements were always sketchy. ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... a lot of seafaring out of Konassa, and there are several other busy seaports we know of. But no one in any of them ever heard of navigation out of sight of land, let alone trying it. There's nothing but pilotage, and even that's pretty sketchy. And, there's this thing." He crossed to the workbench, picked up the sword, and stroked ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... whether literary production be your aim, unless you may study undisturbed your labours will never bear their full fruit. Interrupted, your knowledge will be scanty, diverse, and generally inapplicable, your literary output sketchy, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... The reader of these sketchy studies of fishing in Norway has been fairly warned already not to expect exciting records of slaughter amongst salmon. Of course, no angler would be at a loss to explain away his poor bags; his excuses are proverbial, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... this little matter," suggested Raleigh, "don't you think we might go somewhere and feed? I can get a sketchy kind of wash at the office while you're talking to the manager; and I'm beginning to notice that I didn't ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the papers made him ridiculous. Couldn't they do the same with Weissmann and me? Think of a big, sprawling, sketchy drawing in the Blast, with Weissmann glaring at a strangely beautiful young lady in scanty gown—his hands spread like claws upon the table, while another younger man (myself) catches at a horn floating overhead. Oh yes, there are great possibilities in to-night's entertainment. May I ask you, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... against Commonwealth," that went with that. While most men had to go propertyless in a world that was privately owned, the assertion of equality was an empty lie. For the rest, primordial Socialism was entirely sketchy and experimental. It was wild as the talk of school-boys. It disregarded the most obvious needs. It did not provide for any principle of government, or for the maintenance of collective thought and social determination, it offered no safeguards and guarantees for ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... they made their way through the streets of Cynthiana, where the acrid smoke of burning caught at throats, adding to the torturous thirst which dried a man's mouth when he tore cartridge paper with his teeth. Drew and Croxton took sketchy orders from Captain Quirk, their eyes red-rimmed with fatigue above their powder-blackened lips and chins. Fan out, be eyes and ears for the column moving into the ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... she awoke and found herself alone, she might die. He knelt by her side, and chafed her hands; but it was of no avail. Just then a thought came into his mind. He would paint her as she slumbered in that death-like swoon. He seized his brushes, and quickly wrought a picture—sketchy, but true—and when it was drawn he called it 'Death.' Then came signs of awakening. Tears flowed from the half-opened eyes, and rushes of colour, like the morning sunrise, stole over her cheeks. Then the mists cleared ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... subjects which are to be picked up in the stores. There is a good deal of choice among these. We have ourselves published one or two, from originals by Mr. Botch, which will answer as well as anything we know, being admirable in color and architectural feeling, and just sketchy enough. Pains should generally be taken not to make an elaborate picture of an architectural sketch, and the processes preliminary to making a highly-finished water-color painting, such as laying a ground-color of neutral orange, and sponging it partly out, ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... the box toward him. James realized immediately a ten-cent cigar at the least when he began to smoke. Doctor Gordon filled a pipe mechanically. His face still wore the gloomy, almost fierce, expression which it had assumed at table. He was a handsome man in a rough, sketchy fashion. His face was blurred with a gray grizzle of beard. He wore his hair rather long, and he had a fashion of running his fingers through it, which made it look like a thick brush. He dressed rather carelessly, still like a gentleman. His clothes were slouchy, and needed brushing, ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... picture such as was never seen on land or sea. Having thus placed myself on record, I began to examine the other decorations. There were heads and faces, and architectural scraps, trees and animals, and bits of landscape and ships that pass in the night. Most of the work was decidedly sketchy, but some of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard |
