"Meticulous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grimly. "I shall take all these to the laboratory at the Food Controller's Headquarters, where Mrs. Marrow will submit each tuber to a meticulous test in order to satisfy herself as to its bona fides. You will be gratified to hear that, should your potatoes prove to be all they seem, the Controller will issue you a blue card, registering you as a certified vendor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... a curious contradiction. Half of it consisted of tremendous generalities, which made the hearer gasp with a kind of mental deflation. The other side consisted of specific statements of the most meticulous kind. And these contradictory forms of attack upon the intelligence with whom he was in conversation were mixed together in the most admired disorder. I remember well a lady who met Mr. Townsend for the first time at a luncheon-party in London, telling me that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... portrait, which he refused, having no desire, he said with a shiver, to see his face on cheese and butter wrappers. Some of the criticisms were glowing, others absurd as criticisms occasionally are. Chopin wrote to Titus the same rhapsodical protestations and finally declared in meticulous peevishness, "I will no longer read what people write about me." This has the familiar ring of the true artist who cares nothing for the newspapers but reads them religiously after his own and his ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... be applied particularly to the conventions of the drama; since that is necessarily the most democratic of all the arts. And it will be found generally that most of the theatrical conventions rest on a real artistic basis. The Greek Unities, for instance, were not proper objects of the meticulous and trivial imitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. But still less were they the right objects for the equally trivial and far more vulgar impatience of men like Macaulay. That a tale should, if possible, be told of ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... paint eyes), Chet was momentarily at a loss. Miss Kate had not told him to stop painting when the chicken was completed. Miss Kate was at the other end of the sunny garden walk, bending over a wheel chair. So Chet went on painting, placidly. One by one, with meticulous nicety, he painted all his fingernails a bright and cheery yellow. Then he did the whole of his left thumb and was starting on the second joint of the index finger when Miss Kate came up behind him and took the brush gently from his ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... precluded by his political tenets from protecting Irish agriculture against foreign competition, or assisting it with the resources of the State, Mr. Gladstone aimed at alleviating the distress due to the decadence of a national industry by defining with meticulous nicety the respective shares which the two parties engaged in agriculture—landlord and tenant—were to derive from its dwindling returns. He believed that the proportion of diminishing profits due to the landlord, because of the ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... flanked by Louis Philippe candlesticks, the whole reflected in a gilt-framed mirror extending to the ceiling. Across the middle of the room stretched a reproduction Louis Quinze table with ormolu mounts, and on it were stacked regular piles of magazines, French and English. Everything was in meticulous order. The parquet shone with a glassy finish. From the corner a tall clock ticked loudly, deliberately. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... he decided, he'd be in Pleasant Street; and later he dressed with the most meticulous care. A growing doubt seized him as he mounted the outside steps of the Ammidons' impressive house; but he crushed it down and firmly rapped with the polished ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... shadowy accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait of Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we also have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of all that we Celts ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... and women who fuss and fume over trifles who never falter or fret when their larger purposes are blocked or deferred. Some cannot stand detail who plan wisely and with patience. Vice versa, there are meticulous folk, little people, whose petty obstacles are met with patience and cheerfulness, who revel in minute detail, but who want returns soon and cannot wait a long time. We are not to ask of any man whether ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... was not a man, for example, to leave the changing of studs from one shirt to another till the morrow. Had it been practicable, he would have brushed his hair the night before. Constance already loved to watch his meticulous preparations. She saw him now go into his old bedroom and return with a paper collar, which he put on the dressing-table next to a black necktie. His shop-suit was laid ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... reproved,' not the flitting and ineffectual fear of death, but the instant, dwelling terror of the responsibilities and revenges of life. Their speech, indeed, is timid; they report lions in the path; they counsel a meticulous footing; but their serene, marred faces are more eloquent and tell another story. 'Where they have gone, we will go also, not very greatly fearing; what they have endured unbroken, we also, God helping us, will make ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little. But we can bring one person more out along these Highways and then convince a fourth and a fifth and a fiftieth and a thousandth. By then we'll be shoved back off the stage while the big wheels grind painfully slow but exceedingly meticulous." ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... on the 15th. I am particular about the date, not entirely as a result of a desire for meticulous accuracy. All who started on the South-West Campaign will remember their Cape Peninsula experience after the heat and burden of the Rebellion. The authorities might have chosen most of our camping grounds about Cape Town with the genial purpose of providing a kind of military ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... of maiden-aunthood in its acute stages, now assumed complete control of my destinies; and for a time it looked as though I were in a fair way to become what the great Egyptian ruler, King Ptush the Third was referring to in many of his State papers as a "Meticulous Mollycoddle." To begin with, Aunt Jerusha was a strong believer in the New Thought School of Infantile Development, and when I was barely six weeks old she began strapping me on a board like an Eskimo baby, and suspending me thus restrained to a peg in the wall, where, helpless, I was required ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... had a general interest in the potentialities of Naapu. I say potentialities advisedly, for he was not directly concerned, so far as I know, with any existing business there. He frequented everybody, and asked questions in the meticulous German way. He wandered all over the island—islands, I should say, for once or twice I saw him banging off in a creaky motor-boat to the other jewels of the necklace. Guesses as to his real business were free and frequent. He was a pearl-smuggler; ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the fifth morning, and I was too stiff to make much of a journey. I climbed to the edge of the glacier once again in the hope of discovering an approach. I examined every foot of the ground with meticulous care. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... then!" said Adelaide, quickly, and went to her room to put on with a haste none the less meticulous her small velvet hat, her veil, her spotless, pale gloves, her muff, ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... the smoke-wrack flying abaft, and trudging steadily for the mouth of the harbour. I stood there, I think, fully three minutes before I moved or took action, but during that space of time I had jumped at the conclusion. I was not wanted aboard. Was it Day? No; the idea was absurd, as he was most meticulous in his observation of the conventions. It certainly was not the Prince. The inference was only too obvious. The hour of sailing ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... long as merchants of standing in London or New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada when peace with France ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker |
