"Lean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entered the hall with their precious load, another carriage drove up to the door. But this time it was only a miserable, rickety old basket-chaise, drawn by two lean jades with lowered heads ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... matter to control the saw so that it will cut squarely along the board, particularly when ripping. The eye must be the only guide in the disposition of the saw. Some boys make the saw run in one direction, and others cause it to lean the opposite way. After you have had some experience and know which way you lean, correct your habits by disposing the saw ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... trembling calf was loaded into the machine and we dropped him when the main herd was reached. Here he would be safe from attack, but I have often wondered if the mother found her baby again. At the next water hole a lean lynx circled warily around with his eye fixed hungrily on some wild ducks swimming too far from shore for him to reach. It seemed that the sinister desert mothered ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... round the King's little eyes, made sure that he was sent for—as had often been the case—to turn into Latin some jest the King had made. His gown fell about his kneeling shins, his cap was at his side, his lean, brown, and sly face, with the long nose and crafty ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... propriety. There is but one black sheep in the 2nd Life Guards, and that, in the eyes of the coal black colonel (him of the collieries), is the soft, enchanted, and enchained Mr. Heald. Poor Heald! Indignant Londonderry! How subservient, in truth, must be the lean subaltern ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of showing black, gave on another interior, whitewashed, and well illuminated by the kitchen gas. This other interior had, under a previous tenant of the property, been a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming a scullery before a greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pass through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard. And the light ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the White House in the morning, and after dinner, a long-skirted faded dressing-gown, belted around his waist, and slippers. His favorite attitude when listening—and he was a good listener—was to lean forward, and clasp his left knee with both hands, as if fondling it, and his face would then wear a sad and wearied look. But when the time came for him to give an opinion on what he had heard, or to tell a story which something 'reminded ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... chattered as he spoke, and his face was pinched and hollow-eyed from cold and exposure. But he was handsome, for all that— a fellow not much older than Zeb, lean and strongly made. His voice had ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... solitude. Here, in uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr. Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall. And during this time he was living, not only in his work, but with the man who had inspired it. The image of Aristophanes, in the half-shamed insolence, the disordered majesty, in which he is placed before the reader's mind, was present to him ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... there was never a change in the old man's raiment. The rusty frock coat—black where it was not green, grey along the seams, and ravelled at the skirts—the broad-brimmed and battered slouch hat, and the frayed string tie had seen fat years and lean years on all the tracks of the Jungle Circuit, and no man could say when these things had been new or their wearer had been young. Old Man Curry was a fixture, as familiar a sight as the fence about the track, and his shabby attire was as much a part of his quaint ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... as above, the old fellow sat for some time with his head between his knees, chewing, mumbling, and growling, like a lean old wolf, angry at ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... tomahawk he already had; and he perforce acquired keenness of eye, thorough acquaintance with woodcraft, and the power of standing the severest strains of fatigue, hardship and exposure. He lived out in the woods for many months with no food but meat, and no shelter whatever, unless he made a lean-to of brush or crawled ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... roving bears were seen, and wolves were bold. All wild animals, indeed, behaved abnormally, as if they, too, felt that nature was out of joint. The eggs of the grouse or partridge failed to hatch; even woodchucks were lean and scarce. So of the brooding hens at the settler's barn: the eggs would not hatch, and the hens, too, it is said, gave up laying eggs, perhaps from lack of food. Even the song birds fell into the "dumps" and neglected ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... a blank at top of my letter, not being determined which to address it to, so Farmer and Farmer's wife will please to divide our thanks. May your granaries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your envious neighbors lean, and your labourers busy, and you as idle and as happy as the day ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... hollow of the hay-rick a lean, hungry wolf crept out. At first in wonder she raised her eyes, which shone in the green light, astonished at this disturbance of her repose; and she seemed to take counsel within herself, whether this was the continuation of her sweet ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... half-past eight when this worthy, Monsieur Hector Gilliard of Maubeuge, turned up at the ale-house door in a tilt cart drawn by a donkey, and cried cheerily on the inhabitants. He was a lean, nervous flibbertigibbet of a man, with something the look of an actor, and something the look of a horse-jockey. He had evidently prospered without any of the favours of education; for he adhered with stern simplicity to the masculine gender, and in the course of the evening ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like this: Every time them coons drew a long breath it expanded ther tree so that it opened a crack, an' when their lungs filled the crack opened wide. Then, when they let out thar breath ag'in, ther crack closed tight ag'in. Unc' Fletch happened ter lean up ag'in ther tree jest ez ther crack closed, an' that's how his coat ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... tiles, instead of with thatch, the subdelegates would increase their taxation."—"People work, but merely to satisfy their prime necessities. . . . The fear of paying an extra crown makes an average man neglect a profit of four times the amount."[5229]—". . . Accordingly, lean cattle, poor implements, and bad manure-heaps even among those who might have been better off."[5230]—"If I earned any more," says a peasant, "it would be for the collector." Annual and illimitable spoliation "takes away even the desire for comforts." The majority, pusillanimous, distrustful, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... earning money for his Wife to spend on dresses and four-hundred-rupee bracelets, and inexpensive luxuries of that kind. He worked very hard, and sent her a letter or a post-card daily. She also wrote to him daily, and said that she was longing for him to come up to Simla. The Tertium Quid used to lean over her shoulder and laugh as she wrote the notes. Then the two would ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... might have spoken foolishness. And it was this half, my father's half, that loved Ham Belfort, and saw the solid sweetness of nature that made that huge body a temple of good will, so to speak. He had the kind of goodness that gives peace and rest to those who lean against it. His mill was one of the places—but we shall come to that by ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could look in on the group ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Nineteenth Street, almost in a straight line from where she stood. It was a morose, lean building, only two windows wide and five stories high, with a porcelain sign above the bell, "ROOMS." A wrinkled pod of a ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... help me With the love That casteth out my fear! Teach me to lean on thee, and feel That thou art very near; That no temptation is unseen, No childish grief too small, Since Thou, with patience infinite, Doth soothe ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... of men and birds; The alleys of no hope and of no words, The hidings where men reap not, though they plant; But toil and thirst — so dying and so born; — And toil and thirst to gather to their want, From the lean waste, beyond the daylight's scorn, — ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... little friend, the Gnome, and thanked him again and again for his aid, and was about to lean out of the doorway to also thank the Fairy Queen when ...
— The Magic Soap Bubble • David Cory
... familiar to her from her earliest infancy, and had ever looked so lovingly upon her; the kind arms wont to fold her in a fond embrace to that heart ever beating with such true, unalterable affection for her; that breast, where she might ever lean her aching head, and pour out all her sorrows, sure ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... and smiled. Dabney Courtney, in the next hammock, was leaning far over the side of his perilous perch and delivering himself of his morning speech. Tyler did not quite understand this young southern elegant. Monicker had two moods, both of which puzzled Tyler. When he awoke feeling gay he would lean over the extreme edge of his hammock and drawl, with an ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... the boy was full of mischief. The night the monk got away he had been sent to bed early because of some trick he had played. He slept in a little room at the head of the stairs leading to the second story. His window opened on a lean-to shed, and, as it was a warm evening, the sash was raised. Shortly after the youngster got to bed, something slipped over the back fence, and after prowling about the yard for a moment, climbed upon the shed and through the window into the room where Mike was just in the act of falling ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... that in these discretionary situations there is no such dangerous man as the innocent executant, the martinet, the person of routine, the soldier stifled in his uniform. I saw Werder after the capitulation. A little man, lean and bilious. Such was the opponent who reversed for us successively, like the premisses of an argument, the bank, the library, the art-museum, the theatre, the prefecture, the arsenal, the palace of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... him or her at the top of her voice. She was stout of figure, and, though she could not leave her chair, one felt, the moment that one first looked at her, that she was also tall of stature. Her back was as straight as a board, and never did she lean back in her seat. Also, her large grey head, with its keen, rugged features, remained always erect as she glanced about her in an imperious, challenging sort of way, with looks and gestures that clearly were unstudied. Though she had reached her seventy-sixth year, her face was still ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Genoa is mountainous, and the mountains crowd each other almost into the sea. Land that can be built upon or cultivated is scarce, and the narrow strips that are possible are on the sunny southern slopes. The air is delicious. The orange trees in December lean over the garden walls, heavy with golden spheres, and the grass is green on the hills, and when a light snow falls the roses blush through the soft veil of lace, and are modest but not ashamed, as they bow their ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... attained. To wit, that he was no extortioner, no unjust man, no adulterer, nor even as this Publican, and for that he fasted twice a week, and paid tithes of all that he possessed. So that you see he pretendeth to a double foundation for his salvation, a moral and a ceremonial one; but both very lean, weak, and feeble: For the first of his foundations, what is it more, if all be true that he saith, but a being removed a few inches from the vilest men in their vilest actions, a very slender matter to build my confidence ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... moment. Then she threw herself precipitately into her topic, as if she feared further delay would result in the evaporation of her boldness. "Monsignor, it is, as you say, unfortunate that I profess no religious convictions; and yet, as I have told you, I find that as the years pass I lean ever more strongly toward your Church. Now you will pardon me when I say that I am sure it is the avowed intention to make America dominantly Catholic that brings you to this country to work toward that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... That in your eyes 'twas easy to discover. Let her too know it. [Presses his hand. Now I will go in. Let the jest cease and earnest work begin; And if you undertake that till the end You'll be to her no less a faithful friend, A staff to lean on, and a help in need, Than I can be— [Turning to SVANHILD. Cancel it from the tables of your thought. Then it is I who triumph in very deed; You're happy, and for nothing else I fought. [To FALK. And, apropos—just now you spoke of cash, Trust me, 'tis little ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... prove? What does that prove when the midshipmite was found with his head in the mixedpickle jar? It proved that his head was lean, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this disappears, or at the end of about a month, they should be fed, in very small quantities. Too much will leave a portion to decay on the bottom and injure the water. The best possible food (except the angle-worm) is lean flesh of animals, boiled and hashed fine for the young fish. The flesh of other kinds of fish, when they are plenty and not very valuable, would be very good. These young fish should be kept in the first pond until a year old. Then let ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... his scalp. I've not left him unavenged, though. My mother was a red-skin, and belonged to this tribe, and I have no wish to quit them. But come, friend, you have done eating, and a man who can eat is not in a very bad way. Lean on us, and we will take you to our tents. They are not more than three ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... wheel. He has put the helm up, and soon the great ship, with swelling sails, breaks out of the current. He feels the change in an instant; the hands know it too. But the danger is not past. Leaving the wheel to another, he runs quickly forward to lean over the weather-rail. As he passes through the crowd on the fo'castle, the poor fellows cheer him ringingly. The fine old seaman doffs his cap and makes them a grand, ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... other cabs had been seized. They walked to the Hotel de l'Epee, jostled by the crowd, Sophia and Chirac in front, and Gerald following with the valise, whose weight caused him to lean over to the right and his left arm to rise. The avenue was long, straight, and misty with a floating dust. Sophia had a vivid sense of the romantic. They saw towers and spires, and Chirac talked to her slowly and carefully of the cathedral and the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... do it," said Miss Slocum, frankly. "Your heart is all right, Lorena Jane; but a warm heart will not make people forget that you lean your elbow on the table and put your food into your mouth with your knife. Such things jar on other people just as Flap-Jacks and the dish-cloth jar on you. Don't you understand? But your desire to improve shows that you are a very remarkable ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... planting corn in the high land. He would plant a few seeds and then put his planting stick in the ground and lean back on it. After a while the stick grew there and was a tail, and the man ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... fell on the town, I felt his lean claws clutch me down. It seemed as if the hands of death Were beating at my breast for breath; His arms were like a twisted rope Of rotten strands that tugged at hope. 'Listen, my father, listen well!' The wind went ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... exerting very little muscular motion, reminds us of what has been observed in the fattening of geese and oxen. It is well known how greatly darkness and repose favour this process. The nocturnal birds of Europe are lean, because, instead of feeding on fruits, like the guacharo, they live on the scanty produce of their prey. At the period commonly called, at Caripe, the oil harvest,* (* La cosecha de la manteca.) the Indians build huts ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... or a system. He was a small, lean, bony, sharp-nosed Scot who had fled Scotland during the Panic of '37, landed in New York, and stopped. He solemnly declared that he had never been west of the Hudson River nor north of 181st Street in the more than fifty years he had been in the country. He had a mind ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... secret, Dick. I read this morning in a noospaper that there was a natural affinity between Americans and the men of the British Dominions. Take it from me, there isn't—at least not with this American. I don't understand them one little bit. When I see your lean, tall Australians with the sun at the back of their eyes, I'm looking at men from another planet. Outside you and Peter, I never got to fathom a South African. The Canadians live over the fence from us, but you mix ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... the encounter, fully prepared for whatever might be said to her. She had heard of the language Jeffreys was accustomed to use towards people of all classes, and she did not suppose her sex and youth would enable her to escape. She was glad, however, to lean on Mr Willoughby's arm as they approached the house where the Chief Justice had taken up his quarters. Alice had a letter ready, requesting to see him on an important matter. In a short time the servant, to whom she had given the ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... trap. Adrian had taken refuge in the place where he slept above. It was a dreary, vacuous chamber, that once had held stones and other machinery of the mill now removed, the home of spiders and half-starved rats, that a lean black cat hunted continually. Across its ceiling ran great beams, whereof the interlacing ends, among which sharp draughts whistled, lost themselves in gloom, while, with an endless and exasperating sound, as of a knuckle upon a board, the ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... at hand and dragged him, panting and exhausted, to the shore, where he fell weakly on the turf, unable for a moment to utter a word. The man who leaned over him was lean, as dark as an Indian, and in a day when smoothly shaven features were the rule, his face was marked by a tangled growth of iron-gray beard. His hair hung to the fringed collar of his deerskin shirt, and straggled over his low brow in careless locks, instead of ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... so weak that she could scarcely stand, and Thornton took her in his arms and carried her to the sleigh; then springing in beside her he made her lean her tired head upon his shoulder as they drove to Prospect Hill. She did not seem frivolous to him now, but rather the noblest type of womanhood he had ever met. Few could do what she had done, and there was much of warmth and fervor in the clasp of his hand as he bade her good-by ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... canal has not been abandoned. Ah! that boat has interrupted my dreams, and I feel quite wretched. I had hoped that the last had passed twenty years ago. Here it comes with its lean horse, the rope tightening and stretching, a great black mass with ripples at the prow and a figure bearing against the rudder. A canal reminds me of my childhood; every child likes a canal. A canal recalls the first wonder. We all remember the wonder ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a 'showy woman' for one who looks like a 'shabby canoness.' 'Miss Porter,' she records, 'told me she was taken for me the other night, and talked to as such by a party of Americans. She is tall, lank, lean, and lackadaisical, dressed in the deepest black, with a battered black gauze hat, and the air of a regular Melpomene. I am the reverse of all this, and sans vanite, the best-dressed woman wherever I go. Last night I wore ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Lenore: a Variorum Monograph," 4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English, announced as about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles Lukens. Quaere whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New York, 1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... History as a progressive science, and lean specially on that side of it, the question will arise, how we justify our departure from ancient ways, and how we satisfy the world that there is reason and method in ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... to them, I knew them all—the Penfields, father and son, tall and lean with bony faces and sandy hair and eyebrows, and restless, pale blue eyes—Squire Land, small and ascetic, his lips constantly puckered as though he had tasted something unpleasant. Captain Proctor, stouter than when I had seen him last, with the benign ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... entreated to remember that though I believe in the Resurrection of CHRIST from Death, the same event is a "stumbling block" to many; and that I am "bound to treat with tenderness those who prefer to lean on the other, and, as they think, more secure foundation[635];" (viz. on the hypothesis that the Resurrection of the Son of Man is all a fable;)—I say, when I am so addressed, really, friends and Brethren, I am constrained ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... during the winter often fell to me. I remember that I did not bend my back to the work very willingly, especially when the cattle had been bedded with long rye straw, but there were compensations. I could lean on my fork handle and gaze at the spring landscape, I could see the budding trees and listen to the songs of the early birds and maybe catch the note of the first swallow in the air overhead. The farm boy always has the whole of nature ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... glance up at him. With his lean, strong face to the sun, his lithe body swinging rhythmically to his stride, he looked like an Indian chieftain. So he would have stalked through virgin forests. So, under different conditions, she might have been following his lead. But conditions were as they were. That is what she must keep in ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... I go when sorrow's at my door, On him I lean when burdens come my way, Together oft we talk our trials o'er And there is warmth in each good-night we say. A kindly neighbor! Wars and strife shall end When man has made the man next door ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... and listen; We lean from the mountain, or mast, And see but dull earth, or the glisten Of seas inconceivably vast: The dust of the one blurs our vision, The glare of the other our brain, Nor city nor island Elysian In all of ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... and full, even when there was scarce a puff of breath behind them. She felt so proud and happy to think that fate had given her the power to help William, and that he had consented to avail himself of the power. Once more he had begun to lean on her. As in the past, so in the future, he would derive support from his poor little misunderstood, but always ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... improper to observe, that M. HAUeY always first puts a frame into the hands of his pupils, and that he has made a law, to which he scrupulously adheres, not to lean too much towards the agreeable arts, unless the pupil manifest for ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... satisfied. He had married a transcendently beautiful woman, but he had no wife. Half the men of his acquaintance envied him, but he did not rejoice, nor plume himself. He wanted his wife to lean on him, to clothe the strength of his manhood with the grace of her womanhood—and his wife showed herself not only capable of standing alone, but of pushing him away with both hands. His mood underwent many changes, and finally he let her go, with some disgust, and a deep inward ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... considered internal resources more numerous, and of a far higher order than did his brother, yet, somehow, it was clear that he had not the same self-dependence that marked the other. He always wanted, as it. were, something to lean upon, although in truth he did not at all require it, had he properly understood himself. The truth is, like thousands, he did not begin to perceive, or check in time, those early tendencies that lead a heart naturally indolent, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... is a curious place he has there. A big shed of creosote-boards and felt roof, in the shape of a letter L, and at the side a small lean-to affair where he lives. One leg of the L is a workshop with an oil-engine to drive it; the other is for his plane, and opens at the end on the plank-road. As we came up a tall chap in a yellow leather suit all smeared with ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... in the street communicates itself to the room. Some of the ladies weep silently as they wait, much longer this time. Another horseman is at length heard clattering into the Platz, and they lean ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... lean hands went searching in his dressing-gown, and presently produced an old brown bag, held together at the neck ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... beetle hums and drones. The pink and gold in blooming wold,—the green hills mirrored in the lake! The deep, blue waters, zephyr-rolled, along the murmuring pebbles break. The maples screen the ferns, and lean the leafy lindens o'er the deep; The sapphire, set in emerald green, lies like an Orient gem asleep. The crimsoned west glows like the breast of Rhuddin [a] when he pipes in May, As downward droops the sun to rest, and ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... not to blame nor, in a measure, are the others. It is, as you say, the North—the crushing, terrible, alluring North—in whose primitive creed a good man does not mean a moral one, but one who accomplishes his purpose, even though that purpose be bad. End, and not means, is the ethics of the lean, lone land, where human life sinks into insignificance, beneath the immutable ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... little misty to us, a little out of focus. Uncle Richard Summer's contemporaries have nearly all gone—mostly long ago: one of the last, his old wife. At his home—I have been there often to see his son—he sits in a large rocking chair with a cushion in it, and a comfortable high back to lean upon. No one else ventures to sit in his chair, even when he is not there. It is not far from the window; and when he sits down he can lean his cane against the wall where he can easily reach ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... importance is the dinner that is eaten upon Christmas Day—wherefore does every woman brood and labour that her achievement of those meals may realize her high ideal! Especially does the preparation of the Great Supper compel exhaustive thought. Being of a vigil, the supper necessarily is "lean"; and custom has fixed unalterably the principal dishes of which it must be composed. Thus limited straitly, the making of it becomes a struggle of genius against material conditions; and its successful accomplishment ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... he took a farewell view of the scene of his late pleasure, and said: "O garden! thou art indeed charming, and delightful are thy fruits—delicious and exquisite; but of what benefit art thou to me? What have I now for all my labour and cunning? Am I not as lean as I was before?"—It is even so with man, remarks the Talmudist. Naked he comes into the world—naked must he go out of it, and of all his toils and labour he can carry nothing with him save the fruits ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... World Bank, growth was strong in 1994-97 and inflation was brought under control. In 1998, El Nino's impact on agriculture, the financial crisis in Asia, and instability in Brazilian markets undercut growth. And 1999 was another lean year for Peru, with the aftermath of El Nino and the Asian financial crisis working its way through the economy. Political instability resulting from the presidential election and FUJIMORI's subsequent departure from office limited growth in 2000. The downturn ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... and wearisomely teaches by example again and ever again, has always been an interesting act, in the various Provinces of Poland; not with the hope of getting fair or upright Judges, but Judges that will lean in the desirable direction. In a country overrun with endless lawsuits, debts, credits, feudal intricacies, claims, liabilities, how important to get Judges with the proper bias! And these once got, or lost till next term,—what is there to hope or to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... elsewhere. It was a self-humiliation which a lover would have avoided at all costs, he thought. Yet after a momentary reflection on his theory of Somerset's character, it seemed sufficiently natural that he should lean persistently on Paula, if only with a view of keeping himself linked to her memory, without thinking too profoundly of his own dignity. That the esteem in which she had held Somerset up to that hour suffered a tremendous blow by his apparent scrape was clearly visible in her, reticent ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... think it really necessary, but it sometimes helps to produce the proper mental state; singing softly also tends to harmonize the 'conditions,' as the professionals say. Don't argue and don't be too eager. Lean back and rest. Take a passive attitude toward the whole problem. I find the whole process very restful. Harris, will you turn ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Creole's hand almost by force, and gave it a painful grip, releasing it at last for Distin to turn to the nearest tree, lay his arm upon the trunk, and then lean his forehead against it ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... which it is built do not yield a whit in color to the best stone. The great building round this tower is very like the pictures of the Ducal Palace at Venice; and there is a long market area, with columns down the middle, from which hung shreds of rather lean-looking meat, that would do wonders under the hands of Cattermole or Haghe. In the tower there is a chime of bells that keep ringing perpetually. They not only play tunes of themselves, and every quarter of an hour, but an individual performs ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... such as the fats of meat and butter, the starch which makes up the larger part of the nutritive material of flour and potatoes and sugar and sweetmeats. Conversely, we have relatively too little of the protein of flesh-forming substances, like the lean of meat and fish and the gluten of wheat, which make muscle and sinew and which are the basis of blood, bone ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... off. Standing had risen from his chair. He had moved swiftly, his lean figure propelled towards the window by long, nervous strides. His voice came back to the man at the table, while his eyes gazed down upon the waters of Farewell Cove, over the widespread roofs of the great groundwood mill, the building of which was the result of his ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... dead, and her father a fugitive wanderer, she had been sent by her guardian, left so by the wishes of her parents, to a Northern school, and there had had no one upon whom to lean. ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... beautiful—and say my prayers there. At any hour I find others praying, men and women—they come in off Fifth Avenue quite naturally and cross themselves and bow to the Altar and kneel straight up—they don't just lean forward the way we do. I love to imitate them—cross myself and go down on one knee and dip my fingers in the font of Holy Water as I come away. Sometimes I wish I was a Catholic and could confess my sins. ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... very long. From end to end it was lit up by many lamps, which by the changeful colour of their light, and by the incessant snapping sounds with which they burned, I have since divined to be electric. At the extreme end an open door gave us a glimpse into what must have been a lean-to shed beside the chimney; and this, in strong contrast to the room, was painted with a red reverberation as from furnace-doors. The walls were lined with books and glazed cases, the tables crowded with the implements of chemical research; ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... hook on Kazedky and is makin' motions with his left hand. Bein' so tall, he has to lean over to pump his speech into the old fellow's ear; but every now and then he gets excited and, 'stead of bendin' himself, he lifts the Baron ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... means that all share more or less in them, and in a period of hard times all feel the stress to a greater or less degree. It surely ought not to be necessary to enter into any proof of this statement; the memory of the lean years which began in 1893 is still vivid, and we can contrast them with the conditions in this very year which is now closing. Disaster to great business enterprises can never have its effects limited to the men at the top. It spreads throughout, and while it is bad for everybody, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... melodies and powerful symphonies of light and this music of light exhibits the complexity and structure analogous to music. There is no physical relation between music, poetry, and light, but it is easy to lean upon the established terminology for purposes of discussion. Those who would build color-music identical to sound music are making the mistake of starting with a physical foundation instead of basing the art of light-expression upon psychological effects of light. In other words, a relation ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... short-weight fellows all day and when it came night he piled on all the weight he could just to lift himself out of the under-weight rut of the day's work. Fat kept Jim sociable—I don't mean that he was portly, but he was filled out well over the angles of youth. This was desirable, because a lean bachelor can't live with another lean one. I don't know why, except it's Nature's law. He hyenas in the same cage act the ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... plan, came to the lower lake and the old fort on the cliff, and, taking a great liking to the place, lingered in the neighborhood from day to day. They happened one evening upon a queer, secluded public-house across the lake, where they fell in with a long, lean, leathery young native, who appeared to be a guide and waterman, and told them stories of the hunting and fishing among the lakes and mountains in a vein of unconscious humor and a low, even, husky voice which the friends found ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... beaver in this particular, and thinks the animal has no other aim than to get the tree down, without any of the subtle calculation as to its mode or direction of falling. This attribute, he thinks, has been ascribed to them from the circumstance that most trees growing near water-courses, either lean bodily toward the stream, or stretch their largest limbs in that direction, to benefit by the space, the light, and the air to be found there. The beaver, of course, attacks those trees which are nearest at hand, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... together, to get some understanding of the plans, the Professor outlined his views: "We have been putting up our structures here in the way usually followed in all rural communities, where there is plenty of room, by first erecting a little shanty, and then adding another room to that, and a little lean-to on the other side, and as the family grows, enclosing the lean-to to make another room, and then adding to that, and so on, until the whole mass makes a more or less picturesque structure, and a fine thing for artists to rave over. But the interior comfort is quite another thing. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... cheerful effort than by any amount of love-making afterward. He little dreamed how completely won she was already. Her plan of receiving his "address" indefinitely had already lost its charms. She now simply longed to lean her weary head upon his shoulder and be petted and comforted a little. Unaware that the citadel could be had at any time for the asking, George began his sapping and mining operations with great vigor. He made Aun' Sheba sit down and give directions ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... Hansel to put his finger through the window bars, that she might see if he were getting fat; but the little fellow held out a bone instead, and as her eyes were dim with age, she mistook the bone for the boy's finger, and thought how thin and lean he was. When a whole month had passed without Hansel becoming the least bit fatter, the old witch lost patience and declared she would wait no longer. "Hurry, Gretel," she said to the little girl, "fill the pot with water, ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... wishful to ask thy advice. But why should not I tell thee outright that which troubles me? I am not used, at least for these many years, to dissemble. I can but trust thee in all; and lean on thy man's mercy to understand, and to ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... is observed. On New Year's eve the whole city keeps a festival with songs, feasting, games, and family parties in every house. When the great bell in the cathedral tolls the first stroke of midnight, every house opens wide its windows. People lean from the casements, glass in hand, and from a hundred thousand throats comes the cry: "Prosit Neujahr!" At the last stroke, the windows are closed and a midnight ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the needs, they were penned up for fattening, in the court, which gave rise to a horrible cackling, well calculated to rob us of our night's rest for a whole week. But a day was straightway set for the beginning of the feast, about the middle of November. In the court, in a lean-to built near the end of the house, and, strange to say, with a dove-cote over it, was the servants' room, in which, beside the cook, two house-maids slept, provided always they did any sleeping. The coachman was supposed, according ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... that evening she found she had not anticipated that artificial light would cast a somewhat pale (though not ghastly) reflection from the vibrant blue on to her features, similar in effect to (but not so marked as) the light that shines on the faces of those who lean over the burning brandy and raisins of "snapdragon," this interesting pallor seemed very aptly to bear witness to all that she had gone through. She did not look ill—she was satisfied as to that—she looked gorgeous ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... Brought up in a small and narrow German Court, the Prince Consort in the early years of her Majesty's reign was somewhat formal in his manners and punctilious in his demands. The published records of the reign show that he was inclined to lean too much to the wisdom, which was not always 'profitable to direct,' of Baron Stockmar, a trusted adviser of the Court, of autocratic instincts and strong prejudices, who failed to understand either the genius of the English constitution or the temper of the English ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... a half, the buckboard was pulled up in a fenced yard beside a small homestead. Here Jan parted with the man in the fur cap and never set eyes upon him again. His chain was now taken by a different sort of man; a very lean, spare, hard-bitten little man, with bright dark eyes and a leather-colored face. He thanked the fur-capped man for having kindly brought Jan along. Fur-cap deprecated thanks, but accepted a dollar. And then the leather-faced man led Jan away. They walked ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... semi-official journals manifested a steady tendency to lean toward the Republican opposition in the United States, down to the month of August, when the amendments proposed by various Senators bade fair to jeopardize the Treaties and render the promised military ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... I endeavour to follow the thread of my feelings, but I cannot tell you all. Often when I plough my low ground, I place my little boy on a chair which screws to the beam of the plough—its motion and that of the horses please him; he is perfectly happy and begins to chat. As I lean over the handle, various are the thoughts which crowd into my mind. I am now doing for him, I say, what my father formerly did for me, may God enable him to live that he may perform the same operations ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... was having forty winks when they entered his office. He was enormously fat, a fact notable in a country of lean men. Moreover, he had neither eyebrows nor hair, though his face announced him not more than thirty in spite of its triple chin. Mr. Haines was slumped far down in a big armchair out of which he overflowed prodigally. His feet ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine |
