"Time out of mind" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... obstinately set against him and his viands, and the new school being finished, the eating-room was closed. If there had been no other reason, sympathy with the Palfreys, that respectable family who had lived in the parish time out of mind, would have determined all well-to-do people to decline Freely's goods. Besides, he had absconded with his mother's guineas: who knew what else he had done, in Jamaica or elsewhere, before he came to Grimworth, worming himself into families under ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... wearied argument of The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: "Time is short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love." This thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was—time out of mind—unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... the whole globe. To our ancestors from time out of mind the civilized world was but the lands adjacent to the Mediterranean and, at most, vague stretches of Persia, India, and China. Not much over four hundred years ago was America discovered and the globe circumnavigated for the first ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... his grand collection of "Highland Tales," Mr. Campbell very truly says: "The tales represent the actual everyday life of those who tell them, with great fidelity. They have done the same, in all likelihood, time out of mind, and that which is not true of the present is, in all probability, true of the past; and therefore something may be learned of forgotten ways of life."[55] Readers of Mr. Campbell's books well know how he has traced out from these traditions from the nursery, identical customs with Highland ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... case—easier I always thought, than the probate case I won over a contested signature charge filed by certain heirs under a will. In this case I merely went to the dead man's earlier home and learned his history. Time out of mind he, a thrifty and respected German, had held some petty county office or other; and by going over old county warrants and receipts signed in forty years by my man, I discovered what I already knew—that ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... may be, but quite as good, we think, in matter, as many a saw and dogma that have been flung at our foolish world, time out of mind. ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... you should know 'tis very truth! Being a Brandon you must know of the feud hath cursed and rent our families time out of mind, the bitter faction ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... say an outsider, as the non-professional has been termed time out of mind, watching our conduct for a few days and nights, would conclude that, though quite harmless, we are all a little mad. For the actor's funny habit of injecting old, old lines of old, old plays into his ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... plot of a comedy, and prove the honesty of their approval by "borrowing" whatever they can make useful. French tragedies they despise—(though a century ago the new English tragedies were generally Corneille or Racine in disguise). As to Shakespeare, it has time out of mind been an article of faith with the insolent insulars that he is quite above any Frenchman's reach. One by one they are driven from their foolish prejudices, and made to confess that Frenchmen may equal them in some serious things, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... to school at a village hard by, of which he had been dictator time out of mind; but as he never paid for my board, nor supplied me with clothes, books, and other necessaries I required, my condition was very ragged and contemptible, and the schoolmaster, who, through fear of my grandfather, taught me gratis, gave himself no concern about the progress I made under his instruction. ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute. Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the point ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... watched me all my life. My smallest action, my most trivial habit, was familiar to them. They had seen me grow before their eyes—dutiful, obedient, diligent, honest, sober, truthful. In their hearts they knew that I deserved all these epithets. They themselves time out of mind had applied them to me. I stood now, at my early age, and on my own account, on the threshold of a career of honorable trade, surely as worthy now as it was when Sir William began at it far more humbly. Yet with all these creditable things known to them, I could ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... work, from their first sound sleep: there they lie, stretched as unconsciously as the corn in the fields which they have reaped in the sweat of their brow. But wake they must—there is no help for it. The stable-boys are the first on the alert—every one anxious to win the reward which, time out of mind, has been given to the person, who, on the occasion of a fire, is the first to reach the engine-house with harnessed horses. Here and there a light is seen at a cottage lattice—a window is opened—the men come running ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... is a mistake. The Ports had been seated at Islam time out of mind. Congreve had visited there, and his seat, that is the bench on which he sometimes sat, used to be shown. CROKER. On the way to Islam, Johnson told Boswell about the dedication of his Plan to Lord Chesterfield. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... may imagine that it did not please me. Meanwhile the old huntsman, whose family was about as ancient as ours, and whose ancestors had officiated in his capacity for the ancestors of his master time out of mind, told me story after story about the Brandons of yore. I turned from the stories to more legitimate history, and found the legends were tolerably true. I learned to glow at this discovery; the pride, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
