"Hands down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... valentine all ready; directed it to the Grand Duke in a delicate, ladylike way, and took it with my own hands down to ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... Philanthropist, getting up and thrusting his hands down into his trousers-pockets, 'I don't go about measuring people for caps. If people find I have any about me that fit 'em, they can put 'em on and wear 'em, if they like. That's their look out: ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... night, after Hester had beat her hands down into the mattress and implored Gerald to close his accusing eyes, she sat up in bed, waiting for the first streak of dawn to show itself, railing at the pain ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... turned the trick right enough, but don't flatter yourself that you did it. If it hadn't been for a sheer accident that no man alive could foresee or prevent, I'd have won hands down. I haven't been beaten by you, and so I don't bear grudge. And I've no intention of bringing a libel action to gratify your longing for the limelight. I'll just sit tight and let the Hudson Bay ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... to see what was the matter. I got a few more words in. 'Cheer up, old man. We're winning hands down.' ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... corollary of evolution. Individual development is intimately related to racial development. Indeed, racial development would be impossible without heredity in the individual. The individual must carry on and transmit what the race hands down to him. This will be evident when we explain ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Rogers to the sailor. "Stand by to wear ship!" Then he mounted the cabin, and emitted a sailorly yell to the crew. "All hands down from aloft! Weather ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... And after licking me hands down, you think you can square it by swinging the old shovel that way?" She did not quite know whether to feel ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... hands down upon his chair as though to raise himself up, and an expression of such mingled rage and terror swept across his features as, once seen, could not easily be forgotten. But so quickly did it pass that perhaps Mrs. Bellamy, who was watching, was the only one in all that company to observe ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... fresh reason to hunt me—some fresh impulse—God knows what or why. How can we tell out here, buried in the snows of fifteen winters. Well!" He struck his hands down on the table edge and stood up. He drew his mouth into a crooked smile and looked at the other two as a naughty child looks at its doting but disapproving elders. The smile transfigured his ugliness. "I've a fancy to see that picture. Want to be reminded of what ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens, is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection—a survival of the fittest in the guise ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... members, threaten resignation as a body when Sir N. Macready gave up the position of Adjutant-General to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, owing to an attempt made from Downing Street to civilianize the Adjutant-General's department. The Army Council beat Downing Street, hands down. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... equitably between a laugh and a snort. "No: nor in Hoboken!" he retorted. "Listen, 'bo," he added, after a moment's thought. "You got to have a smooth shell in Nuh Yawk. The human eye only sees the surface. Get me? And it judges by the surface." He smoothed his hands down his dapper trunk with ineffable complacency. "Thirty-eight dollars, this. Bernholz Brothers, around on Broadway. Look it ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... run, he burst into laughter, and the strange spectral Ha! ha! ha! that ran along the inside of the hill, as it were, completed their fear, and they stopped their ears with their hands, and scuttled away down the hill. But now David seized them, and pulling their hands down from their heads, he said, "See here! what a nice place with the stones sticking out like seats. Why, it's like a little house; let us stay and play a bit here." It was a little hollow in the hill side surrounded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... last then seemed to satisfy her. "Very good. May we wait again to talk of it till she has done so?" He showed, with his hands down in his pockets and his shoulders expressively up, a certain disappointment. Soon enough, none the less, his gentleness was all back and his patience once more exemplary. "Of course I give you time. Especially," he smiled, "as it's time that ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... commercial and financial rivals? What about these damned Socialists, with their brass-lunged bazoo, howling about monopoly and capitalism and all the rest of it? Eh, what? Just one squeeze," here Flint closed his corded, veinous fingers, "just one tightening of the fist, and—all over! We win, hands down!" ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... He could not comprehend how any one could dare not to vote for Fisher major; and absorbed in that wonder he continued to hold up his hand long after the two tellers had agreed their figure, and the captain had ordered "hands down." ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... exclaimed Mr. Fenn, "glad to see you back again. 'M back again myself. Ye crags 'n' peaks 'm with you once again." As he nourished his silk hat he saw the consternation on Brotherton's big, moon face. Walking behind the counter he clapped both hands down on Brotherton's big shoulders. "Georgy, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Regarding marriage the decree hands down the following ruling: "Only such marriages are valid as are entered into in the presence of the parish priest, or the local ordinary, or of a priest delegated for the purpose by either of these, and of two witnesses." Again: "To the above law are amenable all persons baptized in the ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... way, mon Lieutenant, we would take no prisoners, hands up or hands down," he said; "we are ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... gives a sudden command of "Hands down!" Immediately all hands are brought down softly on the desk in front of each player of Group A, hands wide open, palms downward, and again the player with the ball tries to hide it under ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... at the donkeys' heads, or with the men who stand behind them, and keep continually hitting and shouting at the poor still beasts, to make them prance. Sometimes a party of two or three will be seen closely examining one of these 'Jerusalem ponies,' passing their hands down his legs or quietly looking on, while the proprietor's ash stick descends on the patient brute's back, making a dull hollow sound. As you walk in front of a long line of donkeys, the lads seize the animals by their nostrils and show their large teeth, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... had been running for the Elbe, but yesterday's muck-up put me off, and I changed my mind—I'll tell you why presently—and decided to sail to the Eider along with the Johannes and get through that way. It cleared from the east next day, and I raced him there, winning hands down, left him at Tnning, and in three days was in the Baltic. It was just a week after I ran ashore that I wired to you. You see, I had come to the conclusion that that chap was ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... her hands down; he forced her to look at him; for a long moment his eyes searched her face ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... the glass to see if she couldn't find out, leaning her hands down on the dresser-top. But the pretty white-enamel-framed mirror showed her just the same Joy as ever. Her heavy bronze-gold braids swung forward, and their ends coiled down on the dresser-top. Between them ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... more wars with the Cardinal, no Field of the Cloth of Gold. You, Comte d'Esgrignon, in short, are supping in the company of one Blondet, younger son of a miserable provincial magistrate, with whom you would not shake hands down yonder; and in ten years' time you may sit beside him among peers of the realm. Believe in yourself after that, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... were gone. Hands down, without a struggle, the Paliser estate was rooked. No fault of his though, and mechanically he adjusted that ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... And remember that no matter if only half a man is behind this gun it 'll shoot just the same. Keep those hands up, Bill! Now turn around. Back up to me. And let me tell you something: you can whirl about and bring your hands down on my head, but that won't stop a bullet in your belly. The same place," he said, coolly, "that Conniston shot ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... in nervous exasperation. He went to the piano, and brought his hands down in a discordant ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... and put their hands down into the hole. Yes, it was warm at the bottom—so warm that Pelle found it necessary to pull out his hand and say: "Oh, my word!" They considered a little, and then went on scraping out the hole as carefully as if their lives depended on it. In a little while straw appeared ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... stirred and awoke and thrilled. To-night, with a vague sense of guilt which made the escapade but the more electric, while his daughter had imagined that he was getting himself sedately into his long-tailed, sedate nightgown, he was beaming warmly upon the highly entertained group of ranch hands down in the men's bunk-house, whither, by the way, he ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... to stand to learn my kind of stage dancing is with the left toe pointed left oblique, and the right toe right oblique. Have your knees together, heels together, with the weight equally distributed between the feet, hands down at the side, arms relaxed, heads up and direct your gaze straight ahead on a ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... for it is an old faded yellow manuscript scrap in our drawer—thus rebukes an Englishman's aspiration to be independent of foreigners: A French cook dresses his dinner for him, and a Swiss valet dresses him for his dinner. He hands down his lady, decked with pearls that never grew in the shell of a British oyster, and her waving plume of ostrich-feathers certainly never formed the tail of a barn-door fowl. The viands of his table are from all countries of the world; his wines are from the banks of the Rhine and the Rhone. In his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... Caesar?" cried Murray, who now submitted himself entirely to the slave's direction and let him press his hands down with a thrusting movement upon one of the floor-boards, with the result that the square trap glided away smoothly as if running upon rollers, while a dark opening appeared, showing a flight of ladder stairs running down into what seemed ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... He had pitted his will against hers and won, hands down, and she felt distinctly resentful. But she knew that in a strange, unforeseen way their quarrel had hurt her inexplicably. She had hated meeting the cool, aloof expression of his eyes, and now, urged by some emotion of which she was, as yet, ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... performance, making no pretensions to the character of a philosophical history, but a clear, easy narrative, sometimes interrupted by sententious disquisition, of transactions down to the Conquest. Like Grote, though not precisely for the same reason, Milton hands down picturesque legendary matter as he finds it, and it is to those who would see English history in its romantic aspect that, in these days of exact research, his work is chiefly to be recommended. It is also memorable for what he never saw himself, the engraved ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... were some Southern soldiers went through. I and two friends of mine were together. Those soldiers caught us and made us put our hands down at our knees, and tied 'em, and run ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... intend to enter the revolver contest, but it offered so easy to his hand that he went in and won hands down. His arm was lame, but his nerves, not fevered by whisky, swiftly recovered tone. He was careful, however, not to go beyond the limits of the contest as he should have done had his arm possessed all of its proper cunning. He had no real competitor but Dan, who had been drinking ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland |
