"Patchwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... below us looked like the patchwork-quilt of a giantess, stitched together with well-knit hedges. There were rectangles of apple-green clover, canary-yellow squares of mustard, green pastures of ochre stubble, rich green strips of beets, and rolling areas ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... better adapted to the lecture-room than to the tea-table. There is quite enough of it, I fear too much,—in these pages. But the reader must take the reports of our talks as they were jotted down. A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of Gobelin tapestry; but it has ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to-day ain't tomorrer. They're both light-complected. It's jest like patchwork. Put light an' dark together, I say, or you won't git no figger. Here, le's have a mite o' cake! Mis' Tolman's a proper good cook, if her childern have all turned out ducks, an' took to the water. Every one on 'em's took back as much as ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... wrapped in a cheap and ragged checked cotton kerchief, was horrid with rebellious locks of hair, like the bristles of a wild boar. Her red and wrinkled neck was disgusting, and her little shawl failed entirely to conceal a chest tanned brown by the sun, dust, and mud. Her gown was patchwork; her shoes gaped as though they were grinning at a face as full of holes as the gown. And what an apron! a plaster would have been less filthy. This moving and fetid rag must have stunk in the nostrils of dainty folks ten yards away. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... The church, admirably primitive and curious, reminded me of the two or three oldest churches of Rome—St. Clement and St. Agnes. The interior is rich in grimly mystical mosaics of the twelfth century and the patchwork of precious fragments in the pavement not inferior to that of St. Mark's. But the terribly distinct Apostles are ranged against their dead gold backgrounds as stiffly as grenadiers presenting arms—intensely personal sentinels ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... take any pains to strengthen yourself against these moods, but give way to them and sink down into them as into a luxurious feather bed; so that I often fear I shall lose you altogether some day, and find nothing but a patchwork of whims and prejudices sitting at that ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... artfully transposed; Charles Wilmot's (1774) was only an abridgment like Florian's, but not so skilfully executed; and the version published by Miss Smirke in 1818, to accompany her brother's plates, was merely a patchwork production made out of former translations. On the latest, Mr. A. J. Duffield's, it would be in every sense of the word impertinent in me to offer an opinion here. I had not even seen it when the present undertaking was proposed to me, and since then ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... she. Aunt Hannah was making a crazy patchwork quilt, and she frowned hard at a triangular piece of red silk and circular piece of pink, wondering how to fit them ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... Pollock's showing, he was cool and intellectual enough; for, on that showing, he adapted into his narrative, very subtly, circumstances which were entirely false. If, as Mr. Pollock holds, Prance was astute enough to make a consistent patchwork of fact and lie, how can it be argued that, with the information at his command, he could not invent ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... credit from (1) the miracles with which they abound. (2) The numerous contradictions of each by the others. (3) The fact that the story of the hero, the doctrines, the miracles, were current long before the supposed dates of the Gospels, so that these Gospels are simply a patchwork ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... was worked up into a patchwork quilt, and of the rest my mother made a jacket for my sister. My mother could not look upon those things without tears; neither could I! Why is it that grown people will be so inconsiderate about a ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... miles to the north-west, two midget mountains wavered in the sky. John Wesley nodded at their unforgotten shapes and pieced this vast landscape to the patchwork map in his head. Those toy hills were San Mateo and Magdalena. Pringle had passed that way on a bygone year, headed east. He ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... a passing amusement at the expense of Simeon's mother, and she tried to make her mind a blank and go to sleep. Toward morning she must have lost consciousness, for she dreamed—or thought she dreamed—that old Mrs. Ponsonby sat in her hard wooden rocking-chair by the window—the chair with the patchwork cushion fastened by three tape bows to the ribs of its back; the chair Simeon had often told her was "mother's favorite." The old lady rocked slowly, and her large head and heavy figure were silhouetted against the transparent window shade. A sound of wheels came from the street, and she ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... the alleyway from ours. The Ponsonby house was next to us, on the right, and between us were only a fence, a hedge of box, and a sprawly acacia tree that shaded Miss Ponsonby's window, where she always sat sewing—patchwork, as I'm alive—when she wasn't working around the house. Patchwork seemed to be Miss Ponsonby's sole and only dissipation ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... pride in skill of needle-craft, found riotous expansion in quilt-piecing. A thrifty economy, too, a desire to use up all the fragments and bits of stuffs which were necessarily cut out in the shaping, chiefly of women's and children's garments, helped to make the patchwork a satisfaction. The amount of labor, of careful fitting, neat piecing, and elaborate quilting, the thousands of stitches that went into one of these patchwork quilts, are to-day almost painful to regard. Women revelled in intricate and difficult patchwork; ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... free Levi's castle, I should even invite you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ash-cake ready ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... running down the old man's face when, on our going to the house, he showed me the cradle close to his bed, a rude, old-fashioned, high-topped thing, such as the poorest families used years ago. There was a pillow, or cushion, in it, and a little patchwork quilt, which, he said, Mandy Ann pieced and made. He showed me, too, a second or third school reader, soiled and worn and pencil marked, and showing that ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... prearranged projection on the S.E. corner, so that on all sides the main building has thrown out limbs. Simpson has almost completed his ice cavern, light-tight lining, niches, floor and all. Wright and Forde have almost completed the absolute hut, a patchwork building for which the framework only was brought—but it will be very ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... mosaic, the mere materials of which—lapis lazuli, malachite, pearl, and a hundred other precious things—were worth a fortune, and made a thousand times more valuable by the artistic skill of the manufacturer. I toss together brilliant words by the handful, and make a rude sort of patchwork, but can record no adequate idea of what I saw in this suite of rooms; and the taste, the subdued splendor, so that it did not shine too high, but was all tempered into an effect at once grand and soft,—this was quite as remarkable as the gorgeous material. I have seen ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is of much importance," he said. "No man is big enough to grasp all of life. That is the foolish fancy of children. The grown man knows he cannot see life at one great sweep. It cannot be comprehended so. One has to realise that he lives in a patchwork of ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... duty and burned all night; should, unluckily, the fire be out he lost no time in rekindling it with birch-bark and cypress branches, placed heavier pieces on the mounting flame, and ran back to snuggle under the brown woollen blankets and patchwork quilt till the comforting warmth once more ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... strung together some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas. It rests upon no authority; it is in no sense, like "Rahero," a native story; but a patchwork of details of manners and the impressions of a traveller. It may seem strange, when the scene is laid upon these profligate islands, to make the story hinge on love. But love is not less known in the Marquesas ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It was not a genuine kind at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations—a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. Its oldest ancestor in one sense, though not in another—the Greek romance—was ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... seems to unfold itself to our view like an immense and variegated map, the predominant colour of which is green in all its shades and tints. The irregular division of the country into fields made it resemble a patchwork counterpane. The size of the houses, churches, fortresses, was so considerably diminished as to make them resemble nothing so much as those playthings manufactured at Carlsruhe. This was the effect produced by a microscopic train, which whistled very faintly to attract our attention, and which ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... right. The trousers were neither long nor short. They dwindled down and stopped at my calves, half-way above my ankles. What I hated most was that the seams were not in the right places. It was a patchwork, and there were seams down the front of the legs where the crease ought to be. I didn't want to wear the suit, but mother said it looked fine on me, and if she said so I knew it must be true. I wore it all fall ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... of the bedstead. There were of course none of the little dainty luxuries about it with which I was familiar in my mother's bedroom. A long, low window opposite the head of the bed threw a strong light upon it. There were check curtains drawn round it, and a patchwork-quilt, and rough, homespun linen. Every thing was clean, but coarse and frugal—such as I expected to find about my Sark patient, in the ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... She had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt. ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... magic, like her gown. The narrow rounds of the ladder had become broad steps of polished wood, and it seemed as if she was mounting the polished stairway of some fairy-built pagoda. When she reached the deck everything was changed. The ragged patchwork which had served so long as a sail had become a beautiful sheet of canvas that rolled and floated proudly in the river breeze. Below were the dirty fishing smacks which Lu-san was used to, but here was a stately ship, larger and fairer than any she ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... (usually about half an acre each) scattered over the manor, and separated, not by fences or hedges, but by banks of unplowed turf. The appearance of a manor, when under cultivation, has been likened to a vast checkerboard or a patchwork quilt. [18] The reason for the intermixture of strips seems to have been to make sure that each farmer had a portion both of the good land and of the bad. It is obvious that this arrangement compelled all the peasants to labor according to a common ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the foreground, I see, behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with grottoes, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... they saw the "tin can on the shingle" between them and their prey. The Monitor and Merrimac then began their epoch-making fight. The patchwork engines of the deep-draught Merrimac made her as unhandy as if she had been water-logged, while the light-draught Monitor could not only play round her when close-to but maneuver all over the surrounding shallows as well. The Merrimac ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... strict instructions that they were to be landed on opposite sides of the river. The little maid speedily became a general pet on board the Serpent, and was soon the proud possessor of several models of ships, two patchwork quilts, several carved tobacco boxes, and other specimens of sailors' handiwork. Small as she was, she had evidently a strong idea of her own importance, and received these presents and attentions with a pretty ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he exclaimed, ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... disabled his right arm, and being well off through the payment of some ransoms, he had come home partly to look after his family, and partly to provide himself with a full suit of English harness, his present suit being a patchwork of relics of numerous battle-fields. Only one thing he desired, a true Spanish sword, not only Toledo or Bilboa in name, but nature. He had seen execution done by the weapons of the soldiers of the Great Captain, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... also depends on its farms and natural resources. American farmers took heart in 1961—from a billion dollar rise in farm income—and from a hopeful start on reducing the farm surpluses. But we are still operating under a patchwork accumulation of old laws, which cost us $1 billion a year in CCC carrying charges alone, yet fail to halt rural poverty or ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... shrank from the stranger's side, gazed at him for a moment, in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor. Feathertop, likewise, had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld, not the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the sordid patchwork of his real composition, stript ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... finished his contract in 1527, having left for himself a greater fame in the masonry of the central tower, whose base he rebuilt after the old stone spire had been destroyed by fire, and especially in the tomb of Cardinal d'Amboise, than ever he will gain by the patchwork of the west facade. What he could do with a free hand and his own designs to begin with, may be imagined from the fact that he built the Bureau des Finances on the opposite side of the Parvis and laid the first plans for the Palais de Justice. No wonder that he worked at Havre, at Beauvais, and ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... and the marshalling of large bodies of facts were being written. Moreover, many of his researches were allowed to drop, and only resumed after an interval of years. Thus a rigidly chronological series of letters would present a patchwork of subjects, each of which would be difficult to follow. The Table of Contents will show in what way I have attempted to avoid ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the top he was extremely thankful that the sturdy physician was behind to steady him. Miss Martha called to say that she had left a lighted lamp in the bedroom. Beyond the fact that the room itself was of good size Galusha noticed little concerning it, little except the bed, which was large and patchwork-quilted and ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... means. Not even to woman, in spite of the poets. It induces intense concentration for the time, consequently looms larger in the affairs of life than the million other scraps that go to make up the vast patchwork. But it is as well to remember that it is but an occasional patch in the quilt, even if it be of the most vivid hue. And there is a lot to be got out of the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... in Aunt Jane's room, ten minutes hemming, ten minutes seaming, and ten minutes basting patchwork squares together. I ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... with fatherly confidence, and Luther unlocked to him, as to a father, his heart and its cares. Upon his wishing to confess to him all his many small sins, Staupitz insisted first on distinguishing between what were really sins, and what were not; as for self-imagined sins, or such a patchwork of offences as Luther laid before him, he would not listen to them; that was not the kind of seriousness, he would say, that God wished to have. Luther tormented himself with a system of penance, consisting of actual ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... close of four and a half months' hard work, the ladies of a certain Dorcas Society were so delighted with the completion of a beautiful silk patchwork quilt for the dear curate that everybody kissed everybody else, except, of course, the bashful young man himself, who only kissed his sisters, whom he had called for, to escort home. There were just a gross of osculations altogether. How much longer ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... respectably for a day or two; but the house was rather dull, she missed Nelly, wanted to run in the street, and longed to see mamma. She amused herself as well as she could with picture-books, patchwork, and the old cat; but, not being a quiet, proper, little Rosamond sort of a child, she got tired of hemming neat pocket-handkerchiefs, and putting her needle carefully away when she had done. She wanted to romp and shout, and slide ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... with its two additions. He remembered the spare anchor-chain, new and black-painted, that hung under the house suspended from the floor- beams, and ordered it to be used on the hospital as well. Other boys brought the coffin, a grotesque patchwork of packing-cases, and under his directions they laid Hughie Drummond in it. Half a dozen boys carried it down the beach, while he rode on the back of another, his arms around the black's neck, one hand clutching ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... sat on a roughly-made but comfortable garden sofa, and was knitting on a strong stocking in sweet composure. A gay-coloured parallelogram stared out from the grass beside him; for there, covered with a patchwork quilt, lay, in a great basket, the baby, the little girl, the pride of the household, fast asleep. So the curate could not be said to be exactly idle, though he was taking a delicious morning rest. His wife meanwhile—a large-hearted, practical woman—was making all things comfortable ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... there was no patchwork about that. Brown himself had supplied the essentials, trusting that the most of his guests could have no notion whatever of the excessively high cost of turkeys that season, or of the price of the especial ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... her face full of wrinkles, lay in bed under a red and green patchwork quilt, with her day-cap on. That is, the one who was going to be Grandma Parlin some time ...
— Little Grandmother • Sophie May
... theological professor Revelation is a piece of crazy quilt patchwork, so full of symbols that have no intelligent meaning, symbols that can be interpreted by twenty different expositors in twenty different ways, is so full of monsters and nightmare doings that only an unbalanced mind could have written it and one equally unbalanced would alone attempt ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... a generous yard from his patchwork-quilt, put it over the child's shoulders, and the ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... an enemy, transcended the bounds of human vengeance. It was justly anathematized by all Entente peoples as the loathsome creation of a frenzied people. But shortly afterward the Entente governments themselves, their turn having come, wrought what Russians of all parties regard as a political patchwork of variegated injustice more odious far, because its authors claimed to be considered as the devoted friends of their victims and the champions of right. Whereas the Brest-Litovsk Treaty provided for a federative Slav state, with provincial diets and a federal parliament, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Hodgson after his final reading; I can hardly say that I conversed with him, for our patchwork interview could not deserve that name. At the same time I noted with interest the Philosopher's expression as he and Mrs. Liscombe turned over a pile of music. If I had not known him so well I should have been deceived by that grave and interested ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... hard-muscled, capable shoulder; but if you knew Jean at all, you would not do either. First you would notice an old wooden cradle, painted blue, that stood in a corner. A button-eyed, blank-faced rag doll, the size of a baby at the fist-sucking age, was tucked neatly under the red-and-white patchwork quilt made to fit the cradle. Hanging directly over the cradle by a stirrup was Jean's first saddle,—a cheap pigskin affair with harsh straps and buckles, that her father had sent East for. Jean never had liked that saddle, even when it was new. She used to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... had crept up to the foot of the bed, and now lay on it like a broad blue sword speckled as with rust by the patchwork counterpane. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... people active and influential in intellectual things—are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have at some time or ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... have "done all that could reasonably be expected in a work of this nature."—L. Murray's Gram., Introd., p. 9. He that sees with other men's eyes, is peculiarly liable to errors and inconsistencies: uniformity is seldom found in patchwork, or accuracy in secondhand literature. Correctness of language is in the mind, rather than in the hand or the tongue; and, in order to secure it, some originality of thought is necessary. A delineation from new surveys is not the less original because the same region has been sketched before; ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... governs the world, there is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to DIFFER from their progenitors. The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork—part resemblance, part contrast. In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in early childhood, and before ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... voice was a remembering of long muletrains jingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchwork curtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deep roads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks from Valencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on their way to the Sepulchre, wandering minstrels, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... his head. A shout and an expression indicative of astonishment escaped from the singer, who stood, like one transfixed, gazing at Paul. The shout made O'Grady lift up his head, and they had ample time to contemplate the strange figure before them. His dress was of the most extraordinary patchwork, though blue and white predominated. On his head, instead of a hat, he wore a wisp of straw, secured by a handkerchief; his feet were also protected by wisps of straw, and round his waist he wore a belt with an axe stuck in it. Altogether, ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... rich enough to do as he pleased. His great aim was exploration. He used to make all kinds of a row because there was nothing left to explore now, only patchwork and filling in, he said. He filled in well enough—he had a lot of talents—great on mechanics and electricity. Had all kinds of boats and motorcars, and was one of the ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... make the toast announced the point from which they start, but to which they never return. So I shall not stick to my text, but only be particular to have all I say my own, and not make the mistake of a minister whose sermon was a patchwork from a variety of authors, to whom he gave no credit. There was an intoxicated wag in the audience who had read about everything, and he announced the authors as the minister went on. The clergyman gave ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Warrender," she said. "I guess the woman that's married him thinks he's A1 and gilt-edged now, poor soul. But he's just a miserable patchwork mummy really, and there isn't any white ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... in several instances that the thread by which the marvellous patchwork of unrelated and varying local myths is joined together, is an ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... it her dark hair was smoothly banded, and from its demure shelter her eyes looked gravely out. Her vest was a fine tawny brown, of a sprigged pattern, both gown and vest as artistically harmonious as the product of an Eastern loom. Pieces of both were sewn into a patchwork quilt, ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... Margaret Fuller heard of a rare virtue, she wished to possess it and adorn herself with it; so that she finally became a sort of brilliant external patchwork, dazzling to the eye, but internally quite different. There is a certain truth in this, but it is not a whole truth; for there is Socrates—a compendium of all the ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the manner Hawthorne describes. It ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... in the stillness every beating of her heart. She stood by the bed. It was covered, not with its usual counterpane of patchwork stars, the work of Elspie's diligent hand through many a long year, and on which her own baby-fingers had been first taught to sew—but with a large white sheet. She stood, scarce knowing whether to fly or not, until she heard a footstep on the stairs. ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... "Cinderella," and going shopping with mother, and our little tea-parties, and the Dutch dolls we made up in the long front chamber. O, don't you remember, Laura? What different pieces we have got into our remembrances already! I feel as if I was making patchwork. Some-time, may-be, I shall tell somebody about living here. Well, they will be beautiful stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to live in. You will see ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... cabin at the big map of the United States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed through the transparent overlay on which this voyage of ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... which stood a carved high-post bedstead—glory of the Macys and envy of their neighbors—with its curtains of big figured chintz, brown sunflowers sprawling over a white ground, drawn aside in the daytime to display the marvelous patchwork of the quilt beneath. Fuel was scarce even then on the sandy isle; and economy compelled Mr. and Mrs. Macy to make use of this living-room as a bedchamber also, since Thomas Macy confessed to "bein rather tender," and to liking a warm room to sleep In, though his neighbors often ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... walls either stained to a dismal brown or quite frankly left to their rather characterless pink. This home was different. Even the pungent oak logs crackling in the fireplace did so with indefinable distinction. The general tone of the surroundings was as little in keeping with the patchwork personality of its mistress as one could imagine. It was as if the singular completeness of Mrs. Flint's home left no time nor energy for a finished individuality. Claire got all this in the briefest ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... brown hills, neither tree nor shrub growing; yet the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... indulge in, morning, noon, and night. It is difficult to imagine anything more calculated to destroy consecutive and considered thought than the enormous variety of inconsequential topics that assails one every time one opens a newspaper. The mind becomes completely fuddled with the heterogeneous patchwork of entirely useless information. The only method I have discovered by which one can acquire the important news and yet retain the serenity of one's mind is that of having such news only as she knows will be of use ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... angry with the other. They wished each other good-night, going through the usual forms in the coolest manner possible. Molly went up to her little bedroom, clean and neat as a bedroom could be, with draperies of small delicate patchwork—bed-curtains, window-curtains, and counter-pane; a japanned toilette-table, full of little boxes, with a small looking- glass affixed to it, that distorted every face that was so unwise as to look in it. This room had been to the child one of the most dainty and ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... furniture, and the one which drew the attention of the visitors with the most powerful attraction. It was a large clumsy four-post bedstead, hung with blue and white homespun curtains, and covered with a gay patchwork quilt. The curtains on both sides were drawn back, and the face and figure of the sleeper were in full view. She lay as if under the influence of a narcotic, so still that her breathing could scarcely be distinguished. Two ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... and the men sewed on their own buttons. In time, however, the men had to forego even that luxury, and were obliged to remain buttonless, for they themselves were dragged into the dizzy whirl and set to making patchwork squares. ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... head must have golden breast, and a golden breast must have a golden trunk, and golden trunk golden legs, and golden legs must rest on feet of gold. That will stand, and that will represent me better than this patchwork affair of which I dreamed. So he set him up the golden image in the plain of Dura. That represented himself as he regarded himself, the image seen in vision represented him as he was in reality, as God saw him. ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... protection to slave property." Jefferson Davis contemptuously stigmatized all the schemes of compromise as "quack nostrums," and he sneered justly enough at those who spun fine arguments of legal texture, and consumed time "discussing abstract questions, reading patchwork from the opinions of men now mingled with ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the workers. "We can trust no one but Sir Charles Dilke in Parliament to understand the principles of factory legislation," wrote Mr. Sidney Webb in comment on some destructive Government proposals as to industrial law. This appreciation of the fundamental ideal underlying our legislative patchwork of eccentricities went hand in hand with a half- humorous and half-lenient understanding of his countrymen's attitude to such questions. "We passed Acts in advance of other nations," he said, "before we began to look for the doctrines that underlay ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... defiance as she scrambled to her feet. "I'm not going to give up all my good times and take to fancy work, when it's as much as I can do to sew on my own buttons. He can stay in the house, and sing songs and sew patchwork all day long, if he wants to, but I'm not going to give up all my frolics; need I, boys?" she concluded, in a mutinous outburst, quite at variance with her recent plea ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... following the course of Nature, and not the purposes of politics, or the accumulated patchwork of occasional accommodation, this vast, expensive department may be methodized, its service proportioned to its necessities, and its payments subjected to the inspection of the superior minister of finance, who is to judge ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... annexed provinces present a strangely complex patchwork and oft-repeated palimpsest, civilization after civilization overlapping each other. If Alsace-Lorraine has produced no Titan either in literature or art, she yet shows a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of a series of rooms, which have been "knocked into one" by the removal of the partition walls. As all of these rooms were not of the same height, the ceiling of the hall presents a curious patchwork appearance. A long counter occupies one end of the hall, at which liquors and refreshments are served. There is a stage at another side, on which low farces are performed, and a tall Punch and Judy box occupies a conspicuous position. Benches ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... have no time to finish the book; just the part that concerns the Cure will be wanting," he explained to a correspondent. A good deal else was lacking when it was published, the whole resembling a patchwork of odds and ends of the crudest and least harmonious design. Its central figure is Veronique, the wife of a Limoges banker named Grasselin, and greatly her senior, to whom she has been married by her parents before ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... black, and his fair eyes looked quite startling in so dark a face. Of all the beggar-men that I had seen or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness. He was clothed with tatters of old ships' canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin. About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the one thing solid in ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mast fitted, and to keep the water out, and she'll do." He chuckled grimly. Her lines were crude, and she had been built up, you could see, as Pascoe came across timber that was anywhere near being possible. Her strakes were a patchwork of various kinds of wood, though when she was tarred their diversity would be hidden from all but the searching of the elements. It was astonishing that Pascoe had done so well. It was still more astonishing that he should ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... However, the view they take of the matter rather pleases me than otherwise. If they like, I am not unwilling they should think a dozen ladies and gentlemen aided at the compilation of the book. Strange patchwork it must seem to them—this chapter being penned by Mr., and that by Miss or Mrs. Bell; that character or scene being delineated by the husband, that other by the wife! The gentleman, of course, doing the ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... each other perfectly. They approached as warily as two foxes. When the roll was finally spread out on the counter, the dim lamplight flickered over a patchwork quilt of the familiar log-cabin pattern, gay with colors as varied as ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... complain? Nor is there lack of labour—To rehearse, Day after day, poor scraps of prose and verse; To bear each other's spirit, pride, and spite; To hide in rant the heart ache of the night; To dress in gaudy patchwork, and to force The mind to think on the appointed course; - This is laborious, and may be defined The bootless labour of the thriftless mind. There is a veteran Dame: I see her stand Intent and pensive with her book in hand; Awhile her thoughts she forces on her part, Then dwells on ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... showed on his face. His voice and his laughter rumbled from his throat, leaving his face unchanged, only his pupils waxed and waned like a cat's in the dark. He was covered with a patchwork of skins and tatters of cloth, and as he set meat before us, venison, it came to me that he must hunt his food in the dark, always in the dark. That cold whiteness was not of the good God's sunlight. As we ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... wish that we could all of us lead two lives. I don't mean I wish that we could live twice as long—though, in reality, it would come to the same thing. But I would like to live the two lives which I want to lead, and only do lead in a sort of patchwork-quilt kind of way. I would like to live a life in which I could wander gipsy-like over the face of the globe—seeing everything, doing everything, meeting everybody. I should also like to live a purely vegetable existence in some ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... other to the recluse Mr. Belamour. The space that lay between the two wings, on the garden front, was roofed over, and paved with stone, descending in several broad shallow steps at the centre and ends, guarded at each angle by huge carved eagles, the crest of the builder, of the most regular patchwork, and kept, in spite of the owner's non-residence, in perfect order. The strange thing was that this fair and stately place, basking in the sunshine of early June, should be left in complete solitude save for the hermit in the opposite wing, the three children, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of undraped loveliness not least among them; but these were pictures that did but insist coarsely upon the roundness of women's bodies. The windows of these rooms were obscured with draperies, their floors a carpet patchwork; the china ornaments on their mantels were of a class apart. After the first onset several of the women who had apartments to let said she would not do for them, and in effect dismissed her. This also struck her ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... technical difficulties which must be worked out, measure by measure, but unless the student can form some idea of the work in its larger proportions his finished performance may resemble a kind of musical patchwork. Behind every composition is the architectural plan of the composer. The student should endeavor, first of all, to discover this plan, and then he should build in the manner in which the composer would have had ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... sent us donations of work, and much more will be acceptable. Sheets, pillow cases, underclothing or patchwork, basted ready for sewing, will be very thankfully received. The work in the sewing classes includes patchwork, the making of dresses, all kinds of other garments, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 44, No. 6, June, 1890 • Various
... possibly be understood at once. Though this overture is clarity itself to our ears, it is terribly complicated, and the style was absolutely new. I doubt whether the players quite knew, as our players know now, what they were doing; for here was something quite alien from the patchwork of four-bar measures which constituted the ordinary symphonic novelty at that time. There was no "form"—no statement of first and second subject, no working-out section measured off with compass and ruler, no recapitulation and coda; and mid-nineteenth century ears and ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... overskirts and high hats, and sit at the table with the family; where there are rag carpets and "painted chamber-sets;" where they feed calves and young turkeys, and string apples to dry in the summer, and make wonderful patchwork quilts, and wax flowers, and worsted work, perhaps, in the long winters; where they go to church and to sewing societies from miles about, over tremendous hills and pitches, with happy-go-lucky wagons and harnesses that never come to grief; where they have ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... there is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution, growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned argument. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... frequent talk of him, from some notes and fragments that have escaped hebdomadal burnings, from a visit that I paid to Woodbridge in the summer of 1889, and from reminiscences and unpublished letters furnished by friends of FitzGerald, I purpose to weave a patchwork article, which shall in some ways supplement Mr Aldis Wright's edition of his Letters. {70} Those letters surely will take a high place in literature, on their own merits, quite apart from the interest that attaches to the translator ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood—poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was evident the stiff, ricketty, incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abortive characters, composed of heterogeneous materials, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Lund, grinning at them. "If enny of you saw a man hurtin' a dog, you'd probably fetch him a wallop. But you don't think ennything of scarin' the life out of a half-baked kid an' markin' up his hide like a patchwork quilt. Thet kid's stayin' aft after this. One of you monkey with him, an' you'll do jest what he's bin doin', wish you was dead ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... speaking when addressed, and a willing messenger. Mervyn first forgot her presence, then tolerated her saucer eyes, then found her capable of running his errands, and lastly began to care to please her. Honora had devised employment for her, by putting a drawer of patchwork at her disposal, and suggesting that she should make a workbag for each of Robert's 139 school girls; and the occupation this afforded her was such a public benefit, that Robert was content to pay the tax ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank— the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... deeply, her tired body yielding to the greater activity of her thought. The scene was lost to her. Her gaze sped beyond the maze of corrals, and the more distant patchwork of fenced pastures to the western boundary of her beloved Rainbow Hill Valley. There was nothing but grass, endless grass, until the purple line of the wood-clad mountains was reached. And here it was that her regard found a resting ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... my darling! Such odds and ends! I cannot congratulate you upon your kindred, for I do not get on at all with these patchwork combinations, that are one-third man and the other two-thirds a vulgar fraction of bull or hawk or goat or serpent or ape or jackal or what not. Priapos is the only male myth who comes here in anything like the semblance ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... wall, their deep window-seats serving as bookcase and sideboard: holding the Bible and almanac, the old lady's best bonnet, a pot or two of preserves, a nosegay of spring flowers, and a tea-caddy. An old-fashioned four-post bedstead stood in one corner, covered with a patchwork quilt; in another was an impromptu bed, spread on the floor, and occupied by a woman and two children, apparently asleep. A table, covered with oil-cloth, with some cups and saucers on it, stood between the bed and a dresser cupboard, containing rows of shining ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... introducing a multiplicity of narrators, either writing a patchwork story in which all take a hand, or placing narration within narration as in the "Arabian Nights." The method of allowing a number of persons consecutively to carry on the plot is very attractive, since it offers a way of introducing a personally interested narrator without making ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... grey sky swept over me and a moist air met my face; a great plain rushed up to me from the edge of the clouds; on two sides it touched the sky, and on two sides between it and the clouds a line of low hills lay. One line of hills brooded grey in the distance, the other stood a patchwork of little square green fields, with a few white cottages about it. The plain was an archipelago of a million islands each about a yard square or less, and everyone of them was red with heather. I was back on the Bog of Allen again after many years, and it was just the same as ever, though I ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany |
