"Sprawl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried, tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the outfit," I went on, "that have got any sprawl to them; and they are old Tom their bunged-up horse, and ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... a Decadent to draw the curtains after breakfast, light candles, place the flask of Green Chartreuse and a liqueur-glass on the table, drop one drip of the liquid into the glass, burn a stinking pastille of incense, place a Birmingham "god" or an opening lily before him, ruffle his hair, and sprawl on the sofa with a wicked French novel he could not read—hoping for ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... cemeteries whose dead came to their ends, shod in accordance with the grim phrase of their times, there remains one just outside the town of Tombstone to the north. Here straggling mesquite bushes grow on the summit of the ridge; cacti and ocatilla sprawl over the sun-baked earth hiding between their thorny stems the headboards and the long narrow heaps of stones which no man could mistake. Some of these headboards still bear traces of black-lettered epitaphs which tell how death came to strong men in the full flush of youth. But the vast ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... as my fist runs to size, set it down to that quill, dear old pal; Correspondents is on to me lately, complains as I write like a gal. Sixteen words to the page, and slopscrawly, all dashes and blobs. Well, it's true; But a quill and big sprawl is the fashion, so wot is a feller ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... finishing his tea went on deck with the cook, and gave himself up to all the delights of a quiet sprawl. Fatigued with their exertions, neither of them moved until nine o'clock, and then, with a farewell glance in the direction in which Dick might be expected to come, ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... rocks. The earth on which men have lived, where the work of their hand is evident, with all the sentiment of the presence of man, with smoke arising from numberless homes, is foreign to Mr. Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and these are waste places, where the salt of the ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... the ground, however, touching mother earth again with a jerk that nearly dislocated my ankles, besides making me fall sideways all a-sprawl, than the baboon, giving vent to a vicious snarl, caught hold of my left leg with both his paws, just as a dog might seize a bone, and bit me savagely with his ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... as we feel inclined to sit down and let men sprawl all over us, or run into people with knives. I never heard such stuff. A mountain ledge, a well-balanced load, a driver you can trust to let you pick your own way, and I'm your mule. But—the other things—no!" said Billy, with a stamp of ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... shadows Of the ancient oaks for pleasure, Roasting clams as in the old days When the Tamals lived upon it. Gone are now the limpid shallows; Gone the oysters and the mussels, And no more are grassy meadows Dappled with the spreading oak trees; For great factories, grim and sordid, Sprawl in squalid blocks around it, And the smoke of forge and furnace Rise from ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... grew hotter and hotter, They swam just as if they were hunting an otter. 'Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex All wading with gentlemen up to their necks, And view them so prettily tumble and sprawl In a great smoking kettle as big as our hall; And to-day many persons of rank and condition Were boil'd, by command of ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... portion of the year. The comparatively light weight of the dogs enables them to walk without sinking much; and even when the snow is so soft as to be incapable of supporting them, they are still able to sprawl along more easily than any other species of quadruped could do. Four are usually attached to a sledge, which they haul with great vigour; being followed by a driver on snow-shoes, whose severe lash is brought to bear so powerfully on the backs of the poor animals, should any of them be observed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... certain grim Titanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: "Perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered." There is no modern writer who possesses so large a profusion of figurative language. His works are also full of the pithiest and most memorable ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... holding Watts in a sitting posture by a firm grip on his collar, allowed the limp figure to sprawl headlong again. He wanted to plunge both hands deeply into his trousers pockets, because men of his type associate attitude so closely with thought that the one is apt to become almost dependent on the other. And so, for the moment, the ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... [astronomical units of distance] astronomical unit, AU, light-year, parsec. [metric units of length] nanometer, nm, micron, micrometer, millimicron, millimeter, mm, centimeter, cm, meter, kilometer, km. pedometer, perambulator; scale &c. (measurement) 466. V. be long &c. adj.; stretch out, sprawl; extend to, reach to, stretch to; make a long arm, "drag its slow length along." render long &c. adj.; lengthen, extend, elongate; stretch; prolong, produce, protract; let out, draw out, spin out|!; drawl. enfilade, look along, view in perspective. distend (expand) 194. Adj. long, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... went on a reconnoitering expedition to the end of the passage, and reported that the jump-off there was higher than himself but he could get down. I now crawled through the hole and found the passage to be a "crawl" or rather a "sprawl," from fifteen to eighteen inches high, but having an ample width varying from three to six feet. The smooth, straight floor has a steep downward inclination and is ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen |
