"Toy with" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inscriptions, could have foreseen the dreadful inroads of the trading spirit, if in a moment of prophetic rapture they could have watched the painful decay of caste which permits a lady to dabble in bonnets, to toy with the making of fancy frames, to cut dresses almost like a dressmaker, and, horror of horrors, to send in bills to her customers, surely they would have refrained from the tomb in order to stem the tide of advancing demoralisation. But they are ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. July 4, 1891 • Various
... "again hath his mouth spoken it.—And didst thou not do this for the sake of a Midianitish woman, one of the spawn of prelacy, a toy with which the arch-enemy's trap is baited? Didst thou not do all this for the sake of ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the night in the small rest-house at Den Pasar which the government maintains for the use of its officials. I have said that we passed the night, mark you; I refuse to toy with the truth to the extent of saying that we slept. Why they call it a rest-house I cannot imagine. Never that I can recall, save only in a zoo, have I found myself on such intimate terms with so many forms of animal life as in that passangrahan. Cockroaches nearly as large as mice (before you ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... ne'er was your true love," said he, "For I'm more bold than true; Though I'm the knight that came at dark To kiss and toy with you." ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... said Foster; "the living I fear not, but I trifle not nor toy with my dead neighbours of the churchyard. I promise you, it requires a good heart to live so near it. Worthy Master Holdforth, the afternoon's lecturer of Saint Antonlin's, had a sore fright there the last time ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... your feet in a few days, but this morning you look so feeble, and seem so nervous and depressed. Do tell me what has happened and what has become of your beautiful hair; oh you had such a wealth of tresses, I really loved to toy with them. Was your head so painful that the doctor ordered them to ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... scarcely indulges in declamation, as other modern prophets do, and yet her sentences are exquisitely melodious and full. She seldom runs a thought to death (after the manner of some prophets, who, when they catch a little one, toy with it until they kill it), but she leaves you at the end of one of her brief, rich, melancholy sentences, with plenty of food for future cogitation. I can't express to you the charm of them; they seem to me like the sound of country bells—provoking I don't know what vein of musing and meditation, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... presence in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home to toy with ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Democrat or Anarchist or any other species of dangerous reactionary. The bourgeois tail is harder to lose. It consists of animistic, theological and dualistic habits of thought, issuing in utopianism and non-materialistic idealism. For, if I may be permitted to toy with the Hegelian dialectic in the manner of Marx, no man can be a fruitful idealist until he has ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... is clearly wrong. If the ideals of the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the fault ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... joyful mysteries. A beam of the sun would fall upon her to warm her pale beauty and make it glow, the wind of mid-June play softly in her hair, and fold her in a child's embrace. Then again she would toy with her ring. "Ring, ring, he will come again, and put thee where thou shouldest be. Meantime lie still until he ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... chaos which can be brought into harmonious order only by wit. If one does not jest and toy with the elements of passion, it forms thick masses ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... I love to stroke its polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-checked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive! You glow like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost expect to see you move! I ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... every sentence; he sighed in each pause; he sighed ere he opened his mouth. At last, finding it desirable to add ease to his other charms, he drew forth to aid him an ample silk pocket-handkerchief. This was to be the graceful toy with which his unoccupied hands were to trifle. He went to work with a certain energy. He folded the red-and-yellow square cornerwise; he whipped it open with a waft; again he folded it in narrower compass; he made of it a handsome band. To what purpose ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well not to salute her on the steps of the library! He had done well to leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... actions would be anything but fatherly. Therefore, when he again clasped my waist, and made me lean against him, I did not repulse him, for his conduct was in furtherance of our plans; and I also permitted him, (though with extreme disgust on my part,) to toy with my breasts, and kiss me again and again, all of which he did under cover of his holy privileges as a father! The moment had then arrived for me to play my part; and though the old rascal's conduct and person were loathsome to me in the extreme, ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... trouble that makes us melancholy. The actuality is too stern a thing for sentiment. We linger to weep over a picture, but from the original we should quickly turn our eyes away. There is no pathos in real misery: no luxury in real grief. We do not toy with sharp swords nor hug a gnawing fox to our breast for choice. When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them. However they may have suffered from it at first, the recollection has ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... corn my footsteps led; 45 Her files of road-elms, high above my head In long-drawn vista, rustling in the breeze; Or where her pathways straggle as they please By lonely farms and secret villages. But lo! the Alps ascending white in air, [11] 50 Toy with the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight |
