"Whirligig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... executed a whirligig on one leg, and then embraced the amazed Mrs. M'Donagh fraternally. 'My uncle's son's wife! an' a darling purty face you ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a childs paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant, bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched them with shrieks ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling
... now and then pausing to laugh boisterously at some recollection. As his whirligig tale touched upon indecent episodes, his voice lowered and he sought for convenient euphemisms, helped out by sympathetic nods. Mrs. Preston made several attempts to interrupt his aimless, wandering talk; but he started again each time, excited by the presence of the doctor. His mind ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... thing I remember, after my whirligig flight over the Paris pavement, is a crowd of faces above me and someone pawing at my collar and holding my wrist. This someone, a man, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... meanwhile without a thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like certain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whom Peter Blagden is always ready to grow maudlin; and it is this immaculate woman—who never existed,—that will be until the end of Avis' matrimonial existence the standard by which Avis is measured and found wanting. And thus again the whirligig of time, by an odd ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... desert the colours on the eve of the decisive fight. Of course I have done no work for I do not know how long; and here you can triumph. I have been reduced to writing verses for amusement. A fact. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, after all. But I'll have them buried with me, I think, for I have not the heart to burn them while I live. Do write. I shall go to the mountains as soon as the weather ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trembled and the earth shook. Before the Liglid's house it sat down and wept and sighed for fully five minutes, while within doors the Liglid turned all the colours of the rainbow with fright. 'His face was fine,' said Tobene afterwards: 'just like those whirligig things at the end of magic-lantern shows.' From which remark you may judge that Tobene did not share his grandfather's alarm, nor did Tilsa, nor ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... "You—you adorable whirligig!" he laughed. "I am a stronger animal than you. It would be as easy for me to murder you as it would be for you to kill one of those flies on the window-pane. Do you quite understand ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... see what I mean by Rest. Rest is the loosing of the chains which bind us to the whirligig of the world, it is the passing into the centre of the Cyclone; it is the Stilling of Thought. For (with regard to this last) it is Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind, which binds us to outer things. The outer ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... for it." And then he took his leave, and Janetta went to her room to bathe her hot face and to wonder at the way in which the whirligig of Time brings ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... marked emphasis on the last sentence, to lead Massy away from the track in case . . . but he did not doubt of now holding his success. The chief engineer seemed nonplused, like a slow man invited to catch hold of a whirligig of some sort. ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... in their several fashions—regarded literature as a serious pursuit, and they were followed by the "illustrious obscure" ones whose names are now sunk in the night. How the whirligig of time sweeps us through change after change! Any of us can buy for shillings books which would have cost our predecessors pounds; we can have access to all the wit, poetry, and learning of our generation at a cost of three guineas a year. For little more than a shilling ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... had secured Lenny Fairfield, and might therefore be considered to have ridden his hobby in the great whirligig with adroitness and success. But Miss Jemima was still driving round in her car, bundling the reins, and flourishing the whip, without apparently having got an inch nearer to the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... principle, your malice defeats itself; for your censure is too violent. And yet, (looking to her with a leering smile,) she is the first woman in the world, could she but restrain that wicked tongue of hers;—she would be the only woman, could she but command that little whirligig.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... suitors but see those young ladies who may wish to change their maiden state of single blessedness, at home, where they are engaged living their simple lives out in the ordinary avocations of the family circle; and not only abroad, in the whirligig of society, where they have no opportunities for ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... correspond to impulses that are by no means dead in us, but rather sleep; and are hence liable to be reawakened, if the environment happens to supply the appropriate stimulus. Witness the fact that survivals, especially when the whirligig of social change brings the uneducated temporarily to the fore, have a way of blossoming forth into revivals; and the state may in consequence have to undergo something equivalent to an operation for appendicitis. The study of so-called survivals, therefore, is a most ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... whirligig of time brings in his revenges—Louis XI. escaped. He had been buried in a crypt at Clery, and had been forgotten. In 1889 the abbe Saget, cure of Clery, opened the vault and found the body intact. Louis XI. had this sepulchre made for himself during his lifetime. Now ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... trying to compass the inane. You are trying to duplicate your dreams, dreams without a hint of the sun. The painter at least copies or interprets real life; while the composer dips his finger in the air, making endless sound-scrolls—noises with long tails and whirligig decorations like foolish fireworks—though I think the art of the future will be pyrotechnics. Mad, mad, I tell you! But whether mad or not matters little in our land of freedom, where all men are born unequal, where only the artists are sad. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the same moment Crefton became aware that he was not the only human witness of the scene; a bent and withered old woman, whom he recognized at once as Martha Pillamon, of sinister reputation, had limped down the cottage path to the water's edge, and was gazing fixedly at the gruesome whirligig of dying birds that went in horrible procession round the pool. Presently her voice rang out in a shrill note ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... Jewess stands by, stolid and immovable; the Magyar blood is not in her, hers is the languorous Oriental blood, the supple, sinuous movements of the Levant. She watches this bacchanalian whirligig with a sneer upon her thin, red lips. Beside her Eros Bela too is still, the scowl has darkened on his face, his one eye leers across the group of twirling dancers to that one couple close ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of dress and of manners, the Puritan triumph has been complete. Even their worst enemies have come over to their side, and the 'whirligig of time has brought about ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... her white organdie frock, with its whirligig design of too much Valenciennes lace, her hair worn high and revealing an unsuspectedly white nape of neck, Lilly regarded her parents across a little table-display ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... built of course upon a most absurd and uncertain foundation. In prose, no sensible person could ever take the doctor seriously. A freak of genius—nothing more; a mere desire to seem clever and singular. But what a Nemesis the whirligig of time has brought around with it! By a strange irony of fate, those admired verses are now almost entirely forgotten; poor Eliza has survived only as our awful example of artificial pathos; and the zoological heresies, at which the eighteenth century shrugged its fat shoulders ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... modes of attack. The men who once exposed wrong-doing by shouting it before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh. Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... library, I remarked. There were books all round the room, and one of those whirligig square book-cases. I saw in front a Bible and a Concordance, Shakespeare and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's book, and other classical works and books of grave aspect. I contrived to give it a turn, and on the side next the wall I got a glimpse of Barnum's Rhyming Dictionary, and several Dictionaries ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... handkerchief which hung so obtrusively from the pocket of his swallow-tailed coat. But what mainly occasioned a righteous indignation was, that the scoundrelly popinjay, while he cut a fandango here, and a whirligig there, did not seem to have the remotest idea in the world of such a thing as keeping time ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... now in vogue. But all we have to do, I believe, is to wait. Nominalism, and that "Sensationalism" which has sprung from Nominalism, are running fast to seed; Comtism seems to me its supreme effort: after which the whirligig of Time may bring round its revenges: and Realism, and we who hold the Realist creeds, may have our turn. Only wait. When a grave, able, and authoritative philosopher explains a mother's love of her newborn babe, as Professor Bain has ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude;:—one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one:—'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad;'—But do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagged'? And thus the whirligig of ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the camp had paid it many a visit, and its household gods lay broken upon the hearth. The tortilla stone and comal, red earthen ollas, calabash cups, bedsteads and benches of the cana vaquera, a whirligig spindle, an old stringless jarana or bandolon, with other like effects, lay in fragments upon the floor. Mingling with these were cheap coloured wood-prints, of saints and Saviour, that had been dragged from the walls, and with the torn leaves of an old Spanish misa, ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... I tell you that I knew Mr. Sam Johnson, and did not like him? that I was at that very ball at Madame Cornelis', which you have mentioned in one of your little—what do you call them?—bah! my memory begins to fail me—in one of your little Whirligig Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... decline, were never so considerable as rumor said; in the long-run she bores you with her French gayeties and sprightliness: her character for gallantry is too notorious. She quite corrupted Marwitz, in this and a subsequent visit; turned the poor girl's head into a French whirligig, and undermined any little moral principle she had. She was on the road to Berlin,"—of which anon, for it is not quite nothing to us;—"but she was in no hurry, and would right willingly have gone with us." And it required all our female diplomacy to get her under ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... be interested in knowing that Mr. T. Roosevelt is likely to be the next Republican nominee for President. Within the last six weeks it has become quite manifest that Taft cannot be elected. ... And so you see, the whirligig of time has made another turn. Big Business in New York is looking to Roosevelt as a statesman who is practical. The West regards him as the champion of the plain people. He is keeping silent, but no doubt like the negro lady he is quite willing ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon. Dull reproductions of Raphael's manner at his worst cannot delight men satiated with Raphael's manner at his best. Whether the whirligig of time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be seen. Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems impossible, may happen in the future. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... destiny. The laughter at Jews, too, may be a survival of the old Jew-baiting spirit (though one would have thought that even the British public must have begun to realise, and to reflect gloomily, that the whirligig of time has so far revolved as to enable the Jews to bait the Gentiles). Or this laughter may be explained by the fact which alone can explain why the public laughs at Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Niggers. Jews, after all, are foreigners, strangers. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... summer's afternoon they all went together for a ramble in the Highgate Fields. The elder Master Hawke took his drum, and the younger had Mrs. Strutt's parasol; Miss Duckling's two brother's had a kite and a boat; and Charley Lighthair a whirligig. They flew the kite high up till they could hardly see it, and sent card-messengers of every colour up to it: they swam their boat in the pond; and when it sailed beyond their reach, Mr. Strutt pulled it back with his ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... laughter. ANTONIA's literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she had met and so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have threatened the smooth sailing of her costly household. A merry-go-round of creditors required a corresponding whirligig of receipts. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... lazy-like, and looked at me. Then I noticed how big he was. Seemed to me he was all of seven foot high and broad according. And rigged up—my soul! He had on a wide, felt hat, with a whirligig top onto it, and a light checked suit, and gloves, and slung more style than a barber on Sunday. If I'D wore them kind of duds they'd have had me down to Danvers, clanking chains and picking straws, but on this young ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... changes the whirligig of time brings in. It was my part one morning in 1900, some thirty years afterwards, to tell the son of Mr. Gould of his father's offer and to say ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... protested a gallon of such stuff would not produce the slightest effect, it seemed to me—though there might have been some delusion in the idea, arising from ignorance of Russian customs—that my head went round like a whirligig; and by the time I took my leave of these experienced young friends and retired to my room at the Hotel de Venise, it did likewise occur to me—though that too may have been a mere notion—that there was a hive of bees in each ear. Upon due consideration of all ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... have considered this courteous; but he was a man who never remembered a grudge, until ready to pay it back with compound interest. West's adolescent passion for the immediate reform of politics had long since softened, and nowadays when the whirligig of affairs threw the two men together, as it did not infrequently, they met on the easiest and friendliest terms. West liked Plonny, as everybody did, and of Plonny's sincere liking for him he never had ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and England as international moneylenders by financing Argentina; and a great company has been formed in New York to promote international activity, on the part of Americans, in foreign countries. "And thus the whirligig of time," assisted by the eclipse of civilization in Europe, "brings in his revenges" and turns debtors into creditors. In the meantime it need hardly be said that investment at home has become for the time being a matter of ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... became the wife, and the whirligig of Time brought in his revenges. The lady now found herself the most important member of her sex, in a dwelling filled with men. She had few women about her person, and the confidant of a great dame in old romance is, frequently enough, her chamberlain. These young men had no chance of marriage, ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... Richard," cried St. George, resting his hand affectionately on the inventor's shoulder. "There isn't a chair in my house that isn't happier when you sit in it. What have you discovered?—some new whirligig?" ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... yelped, and all the time kept growing bigger and bigger. Some came head first pawing the air as they fell; some tail first, looking scared to death; but most miserable of all were those that came down tumbling over and over. It made them so dizzy to come down in that whirligig fashion, that they staggered about when they tried to stand. Carry felt truly sorry for them, and yet she couldn't help laughing. And the cats and dogs who ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... need for reflection. He longed to sit in some secluded spot in order to think. At present, his brain was a mere whirligig, and all things about him seemingly danced to the same tune. Stationary objects were become unstable in the eyes of Soames, and the solid earth, burst free of its moorings, no longer afforded him a safe foothold. There was a humming ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... different from what it is, a different spirit and another name would have been prominent in it, and Agassiz would not have passed away while fighting what he felt to be—at least for the present—a losing battle. It is possible that the "whirligig of time" may still "bring in his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... December Rose The Fire Song A Parting The Gift of Life Incompatibilities The Stolen God—Lazarus to Dives Winter Sea-shells Hope The Prodigal's Return The Skylark Saturday Song The Champion The Garden Refused These Little Ones The Despot The Magic Ring Philosophy The Whirligig of Time Magic Windflowers As it is Before Winter The Vault—after Sedgmoor Surrender Values In the People's Park Wedding Day The Last Defeat May Day Gretna Green The Eternal The Point of View: I The Point of View: II Mary of Magdala The Home-coming Age to Youth In ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... EVELYN RAYMOND. Illustrated by RUTH ROLLINS. She is called "The Whirligig" because she is so apt to be blown about by her emotions. It is not until she goes to live with an old aunt and uncle and is thrown upon her own resources, that she develops a steadier and stronger ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... set in London had been very different from Peter's literary world, and they were therefore acclaimed citizens of two very different circles. Peter, too, had his reviewing articles in many papers—the whole whirligig of Fleet Street. (How little a time, by the way, since that dreadful day when he had sat on that seat on the Embankment and talked to the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... The whirligig of time continued as ever to speed on its course, and bring round in due season its destined revenges. The health, mental and bodily, of Miss Brandon rapidly improved under the kind and judicious treatment of Mr. and Mrs. Derwent; and long before the attainment of her majority, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... taxi with cans of food rolling all over the floor. 'Go faster,' one of them shouted to the taxi man, 'or I'll fire a can of pickled beets at your head.' We hired a motor-boat to take us over and then they retired from the game. Some whirligig, take it from me! ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a judgment free and far away from his passionate antagonisms. I found in the simple life of the community where I was brought up the same human things, in a small way, that I was subsequently to come in contact with in a larger way in the whirligig of political life in the Capitol of the Nation. I found the same relative bigness and the same relative smallness, the same petty jealousies and rivalries which manifest themselves in the larger fields of a great nation's life; the same good nature, and the same deep humanity expressing ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... The Whirligig of Time! Its latest turn see In this phenomenon who hails from Guernsey. We've often met, at pic-nics or at dances, Young ladies who were good at shooting—glances! And glances that, alas! have often filled us With tender feelings, if they have not killed us. We've met fair maidens, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... a strange irony of fate which brought together these two children of the same father, each with such different histories—the one reared in luxury and affluence, never having known want; the other dragged up in the gutter, all unsexed and besmirched by the life she had led. "The whirligig of time brings in its revenges," and it was the last thing in the world Mark Frettlby would have thought of seeing: Rosanna Moore's child, whom he fancied dead, under the same roof as his ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... is pursued by some one behind. Man, and woman too, are naturally animals of chase; the greatest still finds something to follow, and there is no one too humble not to be an object of prey to another. Thus, confining our view to the village of Hazeldean, we behold in this whirligig Dr. Riccabocca spurring his hobby after Lenny Fairfield; and Miss Jemima, on her decorous side-saddle, whipping after Dr. Riccabocca. Why, with so long and intimate a conviction of the villany of our sex, Miss Jemima should resolve ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... watched the majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion! thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth! thou best to be spared of all mankind!"—all of which are genuine epithets ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... cruel slave-driving is that we hold the whip over ourselves, have trained ourselves to do it, and have done it so long that now we seem unable to stop. In another chapter there is fully described (in Dorothy Canfield's vivid words) the squirrel-cage whirligig of modern society life. Modern business life is not much better. Men compel themselves to the endless task of amassing money without knowing why they amass it. They make money, that they may enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs, to get more money, to enlarge their factories, to make ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... visible remains of the Egyptians. There are only the fundamental doctrines to work on, the more penetrating notes of the harmony to listen to. Thus the outline of the philosophy is able to be studied without any complication, and we have no whirligig of priestly talk to confuse it. Examined in this way, working only from cold stones and dry papyri, we are confronted with the old "Eat, drink, and be merry," which is at once the happiest and most dangerous philosophy conceived by man. It is to be noticed that this way of ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall |
