"Sliver" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sliver with his fingers and jerked it out, examined the tiny incision and then thrust the wounded member into his mouth. "Don't ever tell any of my patients that you saw me do this," he laughed, with a return to good humor, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... in a sliver in the door bore the entry in lead- pencil, "Gone Duck Shooting to Plover Slough," for it was the custom of the twins to faithfully chronicle the cause of their absence and their probable location each time they ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... Injuns done taught old Jim. They uses it to make people holler when they don't want to. They takes a little sliver of pine, jest a little tiny sliver, ma'am, and they sticks it in under the toe nails where it hurts. Then they lights it. They sticks more of 'em under the finger nails and through the skin here an' there. Then ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... line back cow has got a calf—the prettiest little critter—Dad has gin her to me, and I call her Helleny, I do, I swow! And when she capers round she makes me think of the way you danced 'High putty Martin' the time you stuck a sliver in ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... north from Burton here, In quantity equals not one of yours. See how this river comes me cranking in, And cuts me from the best of all my land A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out. I'll have the current in this place damn'd up; And here the smug and sliver Trent shall run In a new channel, fair and evenly: It shall not wind with such a deep indent, To rob me of so rich a ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... lie back when the ache along her spine began to set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin rolls and to the delicatessen next door for a quarter-pound of Bologna sausage sliced into slivers while she waited. She would sit on the cot-edge munching alternately from sliver to roll, gulping through a throat that was continually tight with wanting to cry, yet would not ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... I was saying, there he lays dead! When I was with him on the Luther Briggs he fell from the main crosstrees, broke both legs and one arm, and made a dent in the deck, and he got well. And a week ago, come to-morrow, he got a sliver under his thumb, and there ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... measurement is hardly possible, for the speed of machinery is very often regulated by the amount of work each process is made to do; for example, if a roving frame makes a coarse hank, the speed of the spindles does not require to be so great as when the hank is finer; in that case the mule draws out the sliver to a greater extent than when the roving is finer, or, in other words, the mule in one case does the work of the roving ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... bright sliver of sunlight high aloft. It moved slowly toward the east. It showed the unmistakable glint of sunshine upon polished steel. It was the artificial satellite—a huge steel hull—which had been built in the gigantic Shed from ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... They's no luck to it, because I made every sliver of it with my own hands." An idea came ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... his marooning on the narrow island of ice surrounded by fathomless crevasses, with a knife-edged sliver curving deeply "like the cable of a suspension bridge" diagonally across it as the only means of escape, I shuddered at his peril. I held my breath as he told of the terrible risks he ran as he cut his steps down the ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... sliver in my finger, Miss Laura. Too bad to trouble you," Soapy answered with a sneer on his ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... about marrid life, except what ye tell me an' what I r-read in th' pa-apers. But it must be sad. All over this land onhappily mated couples ar-re sufferin' almost as much as if they had a sliver in their thumb or a slight headache. Th' sorrows iv these people ar-re beyond belief. I say, Hinnissy, it is th' jooty iv th' law ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... odious leer. The jailer and the hangman, they are waiting both for me,— I cannot bear to see them wink so knowingly at thee! Oh, how I loved thee, dearest! They say that I am wild, That a mother dares not trust me with the weasand of her child; They say my bowie-knife is keen to sliver into halves The carcass of my enemy, as butchers slay their calves. They say that I am stern of mood, because, like salted beef, I packed my quartered foeman up, and marked him 'prime tariff;' Because ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... the yacht lay directly over an old wreck, which was so overgrown that it seemed little more than a huge rock. One of the men had brought up a sliver of wood in proof of the story, however, and at sight of ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... building of the hut. Before departing she had insisted that the man leave a note for Tarzan thanking him for his care of them and bidding him goodbye. This they left pinned to the inside wall of the hut with a little sliver of wood. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... overhead. Steadying his gun on the edge of the rock, he took careful aim—but the other spoke first. It was a marvellous shot—or a chance one. The bullet splintered the edge of the stone protecting Garth's head, and sang off. A jagged sliver of stone ploughed across the back of his extended hand. He exclaimed as in casual surprise, and his gun exploded harmlessly in the air. He looked at his hand stupidly as at an alien member; then suddenly he understood; and whipping out his handkerchief, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... suddenly had become very quiet. A tree, sap-bursting, cracked resoundingly; the sound went through her like a sliver. She stood there, poised as if for flight, feeling upon her from every tree, rock and bush, the hostile eyes of peering things; and she was mighty glad when Nicodemus came running to her resonantly across the clearing, demanding ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... or three days later, Dr. Busey was summoned to "Greenwood," where he found Dr. Snyder dying from just such an accident. The branch of the tree he had been sawing off was hanging by a splintered sliver, too weak to support its weight and, in swinging to the ground, had knocked away the ladder on which ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... about his adventures of the night as if she were a pal and when she said she had slept through all the rumpus outside, he said, "Well, you've got West Ketchem, where I come from, beaten twenty ways. Could I have just one little sliver—no, not as much as that—well, all right. That town, why you couldn't wake it up, Mrs. Piper, not with an earthquake. It would just fall down through the crack in the earth and go right on sleeping—no I couldn't eat another speck. We ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... to pick away a sliver of salmon lodged between his teeth, and the men and women, with idle hands ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, sliver-like rim, alone, as it ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... her eggs in a very queer way. First she finds a puddle or a pool of warmish water. Then she fastens herself to some stick, or sliver, or stem, or floating leaf, by her first two rows of legs. Then she lays ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... water is to tie or hold together two flat pieces of glass, keeping two of the edges close together and separating the opposite two about one-eighth of an inch with a sliver of wood. Then set them in a plate of water or colored liquid and notice how the water rises between the pieces of glass, rising higher the smaller the space (Fig. 27). It is the capillary force which causes water to rise in a piece of cloth or ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... producing accidentally a petty bow of most rotund proportions. He found that the string twanged joyously, and, to the delight of Beechleaf, kept twanging it for such time as his boyish temperament would allow a single occupation. Then he picked from the ground a long, slender pencil of white wood, a sliver, perhaps, from the making of a spear shaft, and began strumming with it upon the taut sinew string. This made a twang of a new sort, and again the boy and girl were interested temporarily. But, at last, even ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... violently MAD about it and told him I would strangle any man who insulted me by accusing me of the most distant relationship with any religion excepting the religion of FREE LOVE.... He laughed like a lion with a sliver in its paw. 'You are absolutely the best COUNTERFEIT in circulation that I know of!' he guffawed. 'Well, I'm going to fire Syvorotka and put you in charge of a little FIRING SQUAD when we get to our camping ground at Ekaterinburg!' were his exact words, half ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... share of the spoils, immediate preparations were made for a midnight banquet; calabashes of poee-poee were filled to the brim; green bread-fruit were roasted; and a huge cake of 'amar' was cut up with a sliver of bamboo and laid out on an ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with sliver. Those eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, "Oh, be careful, I am so sensitive. Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not hurt me. Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... said Holmes, as he took out his pocket-knife, pulled a sliver of wood off the tree-trunk we were sitting on, and began to whittle it, "the red clay I found on Eustace Thorneycroft's shoes was pretty good evidence that he had been around the stable, where the only red clay in the neighborhood is located; ...
— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry
... flings his bridle Ower t' yak-stoup,(1) an' sleely cooms seekin' his may; The trod by the river is green as a sliver,(2) For the Flowers o' the Forest ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... along the sliver he was whittling. "I don't know of any one specially that's hankering for railroad-lines round here," ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... of dragon, tooth of wolf; Witches' mummy; maw and gulf Of the ravin'd salt sea shark; Root of hemlock, digged i' the dark; Liver of blaspheming Jew; Gall of goat, and slips of yew Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse; Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips; Add thereto a tiger's chaudron, For ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... dark, lying on his back, and heard himself mumbling little piggish squeals and grunts of joy. His jaws were moving, and between his teeth meat was crunching. He did not move, and soon small fingers felt about his lips, and between them was inserted a tiny sliver of meat. And in that he would eat no more, rather than that he was angry, Labiskwee cried and in his arms sobbed herself to sleep. But he lay on awake, marveling at the love and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... rims round their edges as all our gold and silver and even copper coinage now has. And, accordingly, the clever rogues of that day soon discovered that it was far easier for them to take up a pair of shears and to clip a sliver of silver off the rough rim of a shilling, or a shaving of gold off a sovereign, than it was to take of their coats and work a hard day's work. Till to clip the coin of the realm soon became one of the easiest and most profitable kinds of crime. In the time of Elizabeth a great improvement ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... I went to the door into the hall, which opened, fortunately, with its hinge nearer to the hearth—(so that a man entering would not see immediately into that part of the room in which I should be)—and beneath the door I slipped a little sliver of wood from the wood-basket by the hearth, so that the door would stick a little. Having done that I went on tip-toe to the other door and put my ear to the panel. But I feared they would not say anything very significant, with ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... "Somethin' besides deer is bother'n' him," said Pete as they worked cautiously down a steep switchback. The horse had stopped and was trembling. Bailey glanced back. "Up there!" he whispered, gesturing to the trail above them. Pete had also been looking round, and before Bailey could speak again, a sliver of flame split the darkness and the roar of Pete's six-gun shattered the eerie silence of the hillside. Bailey's horse plunged off the trail and rocketed straight down the mountain. Pete's horse, rearing from the hurtling shape ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... almost invariably without any difficulty, the umbilical cord is cut usually with a bamboo sliver, the mother sits up to prevent a reflux of the afterbirth into the womb, the child is washed, and the operation is over. If the mother can not suckle her child it is nourished with rice water, sugar cane juice, and other light food, but is ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... a jack-knife from his pocket, he shaved some of the plug into the palm of his left hand, rolled it between his palms, and filled the pipe. Then, with some deliberation, he selected a long, slender sliver from the wood box, ignited it at the stove, lighted his pipe and carefully extinguished ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... Quixote's chamber in a terrible fright, crying out, "Help, help, good people, help my master! He is just now at it, tooth and nail, with that same giant, the Princess Micomicona's foe; I never saw a more dreadful battle in my born days. He has lent him such a sliver, that whip off went the giant's head, as round as a turnip."—"You are mad, Sancho," said the curate, interrupted in his reading; "is thy master such a devil of a hero, as to fight a giant at two thousand ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... here and now it matters that you don't share in the money; it matters that you slave half your time for a father who doesn't anywhere near appreciate you; it matters that you slave the rest of the time for every Tom and Dick and Harry and Jane and Mehitable in Hillerton that has run a sliver under a thumb, either literally or metaphorically. ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... ugliest, most suggestive weapons I have ever seen—long sliver-thin blades sharper than razors. The Arabs knelt on our chests (their knees were harder and more merciless than wooden clubs) and laid the blades, edge-upward, on the skin ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... certain phases of the moon or seasons of the year, or from some spot where the sun was supposed not to have shone on it.[1] Hence Shakespeare makes one of his witches speak of "root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark," and of "slips of yew sliver'd in the moon's eclipse," a practice which was long kept up. The plants, too, which formed the witches' pharmacopoeia, were generally selected either from their legendary associations or by reason of their poisonous and soporific qualities. Thus, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... we did clean her! We stripped her of every stitch and sliver until she floated high, an empty hull, even her spars and running rigging ashore. I understood now the crew's grumbling. We literally went at her with a ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... missing piece. Just before dark their efforts were rewarded; one of the men found it, and such a scramble occurred for even the smallest nibble at it! Enormous prices were given for a single chew. It opened at one dollar for a mere sliver, rose to five, and closed at ten dollars when the last ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... them under a tub. The cellar never was a safe place again; Aunt Ann tried it with doughnuts, and the crock was empty in two days. She put her stick cinnamon on the top shelf in the closet, behind her medicine bottles, and when she wanted it a week after, there was not a sliver to be found. Then the loaf sugar—I don't know but that was the worst of all. Did he stuff his pockets with it? did he carry it away by the capful? It seemed incredible that anything could go so fast. One day, Aunt Ann detected Teddy behind the window curtain with a tumbler so nearly ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... Jane, "and since the youngsters are safely tucked in, I believe we should take Sally's advice. This is quite sumptious," folding down the extra white shams and coverlet. "Rather a pity to spoil it for such a sliver of sleep." ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... which contemplates me. A glaze of greenish grease seals the mystery of its content, I induce two fingers to penetrate the seal. They bring me up a flat sliver of cabbage and a large, hard, thoughtful, solemn, uncooked bean. To pour the water off (it is warmish and sticky) without committing a nuisance is to lift the cover off Ca Pue. ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... faced me I could read his disappointment. "Walter, I've made a most careful search of his chair and the table and everything about the space where he dropped. The poison must have been in the wine, but there's not a tiny sliver of that glass left, nothing but a thousand bits ground into the canvas, too small to hold even a drop of the liquid. Just think, a dried stain of the wine, no matter how tiny, might have served me ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... torrents. "It is bad," he sobbed. "It's the worst sliver there's ever been in this ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... merchants to bear the whole cost of fitting out the Channel fleet, or the gunsmiths to bear the whole cost of supplying arms to the regiments in Flanders, as to restore the currency of the kingdom at the expense of those individuals in whose hands the clipped sliver happened at a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of doing it by heating a flat stone, and cooking the fish on that," replied Tom. "Then some old hunters who won't bother to carry a frying-pan into the woods with them manage by toasting the meat or fish at the end of a long sliver of wood. Given the fish and a hot fire, the fellow who couldn't invent some way of cooking would deserve ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... a hand-bridge crossed the skirting creek, the boy dismounted. Ahead of him lay the stile where he had said good-by to Sally. The place was dark, and the chimney smokeless, but, as he came nearer, holding the shadows of the trees, he saw one sliver of light at the bottom of a solid shutter; the shutter of Sally's room. Yet, for a while, Samson stopped there, looking and making no sound. He stood at his Rubicon—and behind him lay all the glitter and culture of that other world, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... stripped from it the scorched wrappings of leaves, it gave forth a scent so savoury as to prick up Jerry's ears and set his nostrils to quivering. When the boy had torn the steaming carcass across and cooled it, Jerry's meal began; nor did the meal cease till the last sliver of meat had been stripped and tongued from the bones and the bones crunched and crackled to fragments and swallowed. And throughout the meal Lamai made love to Jerry, crooning over and over his little song, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... is like the subtle spell The sliver moonlight weaves; And what so sad and what so glad And what so ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... three or more feet in length, and as large as a man's thumb at the butt end. By bending it in the shape of the letter U it may easily be inserted in the skin, the latter being [Page 275] fastened by catching the lip on each side into a sliver notch cut on each end of the bow, as our ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... There was a sliver of flame in the darkness, and mingled with the report came a cry of anguish and a woman's scream, as a heavy stick in the hands of Colonel Ashley broke the ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... Clay chewed on a sliver of steak and looked at Kelly. "I'd marry you, Pocahontas, if you'd ever learn to cook steaks like beef instead of curing them like your ancestral buffalo robes. When are you going to learn that good beef has to be bloody to ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... there was a sliver of flame, a sharp crack at which the three steeds of the trio of youthful cowboys jumped slightly, and there writhed on the trail a venomous rattle-snake, its head now a shapeless mass where the bullet from Bud's gun had almost ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... effect this division we had to have some sort of scales. I went up to the single store to see what I could do. The storekeeper was a drawling, slow, down-east Yankee, perpetually chewing a long sliver or straw, talking exclusively through his nose, keen for a bargain, grasping of the last cent in a trade, and yet singularly interesting and agreeable. His sense of dry humour had a good deal to do with this. He had no gold scales to lend or to hire, ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... these wild, rough trips. Dogs' feet are tender, and are liable to injury from various causes. On the smooth glare ice the pads of the feet would sometimes wear so thin that they bled a good deal. Then on the rough roads there was always the danger of their breaking off a claw or running a sliver through the webbing between the toes. Many of the wise old dogs that had become accustomed to these shoes, and thus knew their value, would suddenly stop the whole train, and by holding up an injured foot very ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... withdrawn, and the brown forest again is seen to cover all the land—when, I say, this has been witnessed, the stranger (if a woman, certainly) will hardly fail to thank me for this discovery; for such I do verily consider it to be, as much as was Colon's first lighting on this huge sliver of ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... It is then "passed through the willow, the scuthing machine, and the spreading machine, in order to be opened, cleaned, and evenly spread. By the carding engine the fibres are combed out, and laid parallel to each other, and the fleece is compressed into sliver. The sliver is repeatedly drawn and doubled in the drawing frame, more perfectly to strengthen the fibres and to equalize the grist. The roving frame, by rollers and spindles, produces a coarse loose thread, which the mule or throstle spins into yarn. To make the warp, the twist is transferred from ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... nigh as thin as a sliver, and he whined like a Moose-hide cur; So Clancy clothed him and nursed him as a mother nurses a child; Lifted him on the toboggan, wrapped him in robes of fur, Then with the dogs sore straining started to ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... slit, two cuts with the point of the knife, approximate width of the scion and down along the bark to the length the scion is to be inserted, then the scion is placed. The next step is to cut off the little sliver of bark which is pushed out, at the point where it does not contact the scion. In this tree, two scions were placed, the scions being wrapped tightly with waxed muslin which was prepared beforehand, using strips about one-half inch wide. Enough ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... in it three hundred feet high, just like a sliver of green jade laced with silver; and millions of wild bees live up in the rocks; and you can hear the fat cocoanuts falling from the palms; and you order an ivory-white servant to sling you a long yellow hammock with tassels on it like ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... essay first—that would be easiest. There was a hollow in the bole of the tree in a great crotch high above the ground. Here she cached all of her treasure except a single knifelike sliver. With this she descended to the ground and searching out a slender sapling that grew arrow-straight she hacked and sawed until she could break it off without splitting the wood. It was just the right diameter for the shaft of a spear—a hunting ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... one would suspect him of anything except tight boots, for his mouth and forehead were wrinkled as if he were suffering from acute cornitis; you might call it "an injured air," for a man who has just run a sliver in his toe shows ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent |
