"Piecemeal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slash; whittle; haggle, hackle, discind|, lacerate, scamble[obs3], mangle, gash, hash, slice. cut up, carve, dissect, anatomize; dislimb[obs3]; take to pieces, pull to pieces, pick to pieces, tear to pieces; tear to tatters, tear piecemeal, tear limb from limb; divellicate[obs3]; skin &c. 226; disintegrate, dismember, disbranch[obs3], disband; disperse &c. 73; dislocate, disjoint; break up; mince; comminute &c. (pulverize) 330; apportion &c. 786. part, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... played awhile, they heard a mighty tumult, and a wailing of men, and a croaking of Ravens, as they carried the men in their strength into the air, and, tearing them betwixt them, let them fall piecemeal to the earth. And during the tumult they saw a knight coming towards them, on a light grey horse, and the left foreleg of the horse was jet-black to the centre of his hoof. And the knight and the horse ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... remarkably different from anything which the author had yet published and from most of his subsequent work. It is not unnoteworthy that the batch of poems called in the later collected editions Switzerland, and completed at last by the piece called On the Terrace at Berne, appeared originally piecemeal, and with no indication of connection. The first of its numbers is here, To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking. It applies both the note of thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Science is the problem of Method. Hitherto man has worked on Nature only piecemeal. The understanding and the logic-faculty are allowed to usurp the rational and creative powers. One would say that scientists systematically shut themselves out of three-fourths of their minds, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... decentralization, increased autonomy for state enterprises, the foundation of a diversified banking system, the development of stock markets, the rapid growth of the non-state sector, and the opening to foreign trade and investment. China has generally implemented reforms in a gradualist or piecemeal fashion, including the sale of minority shares in four of China's largest state banks to foreign investors and refinements in foreign exchange and bond markets in 2005. After keeping its currency ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... all, your hucksters, that buy up the poor man's victuals by wholesale, and sell it to him again for unreasonable gains, by retail, and as we call it by piecemeal; they are got into a way, after a stinging rate, to play their game upon such by extortion: I mean such who buy up butter, cheese, eggs, bacon, &c. by wholesale, and sell it again, as they call it, by pennyworths, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... twenty-eighth century, or the year 2807 A.D., the moon had been completely hacked away and sent piecemeal into space, the job having required 86 years. I give, herewith, the result of John Jones's Dollar, both at the date when the moon was completely removed and also at the close of the ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... constellations and galaxies and all the universe are watching, God will hurl him down with a violence and ghastliness enough to persuade five hundred eternities that a rebellion against God must perish. God will not do it by piecemeal, God will not do it by small skirmish. He will wait until all the troops are massed, and then some day when in defiant and confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath of hell stalks forth, our champion, the son of David, will strike ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... these remains is a mutilated statue which they call the Venus de Milon. This is a statue which is so called from having been dug up some years ago, piecemeal, in the Island of Milos. There was quite a struggle for her between a French naval officer, the English, and the Turks. The French officer carried her off like another Helen, and she was given to Paris, old Louis Philippe being bridegroom ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... stamp, should have thus fallen into an association of the Prince-Cardinal or that her libellous stories of the Queen of France should have found eager promulgators, where the real diamonds of the famous necklace being taken apart were divided piecemeal among a horde of the most depraved sharpers that ever existed to make human nature ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... house, Mr. Tener writes to me, "I found it being gutted by his family, who would have carried it away piecemeal. They had already taken away the flooring of one of the rooms." Thereupon Mr. Tener had the house pulled down, with the result of seeing a statement made in a leading Nationalist paper that he was "evicting the tenants and pulling down ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... prefers to die! For her no jealous maids renounce their sleep, Contriving malices to make her weep; No iron-faced dames her character debate And spurn imploring mercy from the gate; But down she lies to a more peaceful end, For wolves do not calumniate, but rend— Sinks piecemeal to their maws, a willing prey, While resignation lubricates the way, And all her prospects brighten at the last: To wolves, not ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... project, to be completed approximately within the specified time. Only in this way can industry efficiently gear itself to the job ahead. Only in this way can the required planning and engineering be accomplished without the confusion and waste unavoidable a piecemeal approach. Furthermore, as I pointed out last year, the pressing nature of this problem must not lead us to solutions outside the bounds of sound fiscal management. As in the case of other pressing problems, there must be an adequate plan of financing. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... this is the way in which the creative artistic imagination proceeds. It has proved that a vast portion of all our thinking goes on unconsciously; and that the results may arise into consciousness piecemeal and gradually, checking each other as they come; or that they may come all at once, with all the completeness and definiteness of perceptions presented from without. The former is the case with the critical, and the latter with the artistic intellect. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... cool and shady avenue of mangoes and figs, and the archway, guarded by a porter's lodge and a detachment of the three hundred local police, we came in sight of the large, rambling residence, built piecemeal, like many an English country-house. There is little to recommend it save the fine view of the sea and the surrounding shrubbery-ground. I can well understand how, with the immense variety of flower and fruit suddenly presented to his eyes, the gentleman fresh ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... where reckless beings compose a scattered population, residing too far for the law to reach; or where if it could reach, the power of the government would prove much too weak to enforce obedience to it. To do justice to all parties, America should be examined and portrayed piecemeal, every state separately, for every state is different, running down the scale from refinement to a state of barbarism almost unprecedented; but each presenting matter for investigation and research, and curious examples of cause ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... on again till they saw the level of the dale and its stream piecemeal betwixt the leaves, and they had a glimpse of a man on the hither side of the stream; and again they went lower, till they were well-nigh on a level with the greensward of the dale; and as Birdalone knelt with head bent ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... defence. It was now gravely proposed, to build a fleet three times as powerful as that of the British, and station it near Singapore and Anjeer, to intercept the British vessels ere they reached China, and annihilate their fleet piecemeal. The forests were to be felled to supply materials: the only thing wanting was some English men-of-war, to serve as models. Again, Hou-chunn, the Marshal Ney of China, was ready to face the whole British fleet if ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... furnished the money for all these things we're so proud of having built, including the Mt. Desert cottages and the Wyoming hunting-lodge. It means that we've got to be able to read our book of the Black Art backwards as well as forwards, or the Powers we've conjured up will tear piecemeal both them and us. God! it makes me crawl to ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... him and Jack the terrible and wonderful adventures I had gone through since we last met. After I had finished the account, they made me go all over it again; and, when I had concluded the second recital, I had to go over it again, while they commented upon it piecemeal. They were much affected by what I told them of the probable fate of Avatea, and Peterkin could by no means brook the idea of the poor girl being converted into a long pig! As for Jack, he clenched his teeth, and shook his fist towards the sea, ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... shall be ascertainable. These minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure. The datum after it has made ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... has its origin more often than not in contusions, punctures, or wounds of the region severe enough to cause death of a small portion of the tissues. In this case the low vitality of the parts does not allow of the dead portion being removed piecemeal by a process of phagacytosis, as is usually the case with similar injuries elsewhere. Instead, the tissues around, aided by a process of suppuration, cast the offending portion off as a slough. It is the wound remaining after the ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... upon this little transaction, however. In some piecemeal fashion, a sentence here, a phrase elsewhere, with scores or hundreds of pages intervening, History does, indeed, make yawning allusion to some such trivial circumstance; refraining from comment in the most well-bred manner imaginable. It is only the ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... swift marches and counter- marches, by sudden attacks and surprises, above all by the dispatch of armed steamboats up the circuitous waterways into positions from which they could fall upon the enemy in reverse, he was able gradually to force back the rebels, to cut them off piecemeal in the field, and to seize upon their ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... hung over the town of Patusan like a hawk over a poultry-yard, but he devastated the open country. Whole villages, deserted, rotted on their blackened posts over the banks of clear streams, dropping piecemeal into the water the grass of their walls, the leaves of their roofs, with a curious effect of natural decay as if they had been a form of vegetation stricken by a blight at its very root. The two parties in Patusan were not sure which one this partisan most desired to plunder. The ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... think I've such a thing as a bone belonging to me no more than if I had been hermetically sealed in a register-boiler. I tell you I'm nothing but a huge fricandeau; you may cut me in slices, and take me out piecemeal.' ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... in the day of Elijah, who had sworn that neither rain nor dew should fall upon the earth; the eighth was the one in the time of Elisha, when an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver; the ninth is the famine that comes upon men piecemeal, from time to time; and the tenth will scourge men before the advent of Messiah, and this last will be "not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... him more conscious of womanhood than years of constant association with Beatrice. This love, riveting itself among the intricacies of his being, could not be torn out, and threatened to resist all piecemeal extraction. Wilfrid regained the command of his mind, and outwardly seemed recovered beyond all danger of relapse; but he did not deceive himself into believing that Emily was henceforth indifferent to him. ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... looking as if a score of bubbles were playing hop and skip,—for in the crinoline expansions the gentlemen's black pen-and-ink outlines were all lost. At length even these went; the music died; its soul went up with a long, broken cry; its body was put piecemeal into several green bags, shouldered by stout Germans, and carried quite out of sight. The servants gathered and set away such things as were most needful to be arranged, put out the lights, locked the doors and windows, and went to bed. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... met at the door of the lecture hall and went out into the street together. Schiller, who had been wanting to come into closer contact with Goethe for a long time, used the opportunity to begin a conversation. He opened with a comment on the lecture they had just heard, saying that such a piecemeal way of handling nature could not bring the layman any real satisfaction. Goethe, to whom this remark was heartily welcome, replied that such a style of scientific observation 'was uncanny even for the initiated, and that there must certainly be another way altogether, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... interesting, though never of so absorbing an interest as to hold the reader's attention more closely than was held that of the writer himself. It is a book to be read by piecemeal, and it may be laid down at any time. Indeed, one is not surprised, nor much distressed, when the author fails to grasp again his fallen pen after the eleventh part. I would not in any way detract from the literary value of a work which, as even critical La Harpe declares, "assures him one ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... organized plant or animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... to have been ambitious but easily contented with the show and surface of success, to have been incapable and contemptuous of thorough organization, and to have had little in the way of policy, and less perseverance in the pursuit of it. It is true that our piecemeal information comes largely from writers who somewhat despised them; but the known history of the Seleucid Empire, closed by an extraordinarily facile and ignominious collapse before Rome, supports the judgment that, taken one with another, its kings were shallow men and haphazard rulers who owed ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... had been otherwise, I should have purchased the ticket piecemeal. I cannot endure to travel all night. ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... and 69th New York. An impact followed that seemed to rock the globe. Wisconsin and New York retired whence they came, and it was all done in a moment. Other regiments took their places. McDowell was making a frontal attack and sending in his brigades piecemeal. The plateau was uneven; low ridges, shallow hollows, with clumps of pine and oak; one saw at a time but a segment of the field. The nature of the ground split the troops as with wedges; over all the Henry Hill the fighting now became from hand to hand, in the woods and in ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... MacKim, the strong man of Galloway, as he came forward. Stained with the black peat of the morasses, his armour cast off piecemeal that he might run the easier, his under-apparel torn almost from his great body, his hair matted with the blood which still oozed from an unwashed wound above ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... of the first one. These defects, which were the natural results of the somewhat hasty development of an experimental system, were of several kinds. In the first place, so large a growth had not been contemplated, and the extensions were made more or less piecemeal, instead of being on a regular plan; the location of the central station itself was very unfavorable, both as regards the facilities for obtaining coal and other supplies; the cost of water was excessive, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... Lilybaeum, bringing with them an army of seventy thousand men on board two hundred galleys, besides a thousand other vessels laden with engines of battery, chariots, corn, and other military stores, as if they did not intend to manage the war by piecemeal and in parts as heretofore, but to drive the Greeks altogether and at once out of all Sicily. And indeed it was a force sufficient to overpower the Siceliots, even though they had been at perfect union among themselves, and had never been enfeebled by intestine quarrels. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of torture, failed in their efforts, and declared themselves beaten, not knowing what further punishment to inflict, and marvelling that she still lived, with her body pierced through and through, and torn piecemeal by so many tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her. But that blessed saint, like a valiant athlete, took fresh courage and strength from the confession of her faith; all feeling of pain vanished, and ease returned to her at the mere utterance of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... vassal, slave to Tamburlaine, Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground That bears the honour of my royal weight; Stoop, villain, stoop! stoop; [198] for so he bids That may command thee piecemeal to be torn, Or scatter'd like the lofty cedar-trees Struck with the voice of ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part I. • Christopher Marlowe
... permit of holding even upon the immense bulk of the vessel, to say nothing of holding upon such a relatively tiny object as the power bar. As they flashed repeatedly through the warship, they saw piecemeal and sketchily her formidable armament and the hundreds of men of her crew, each man at battle station at the controls of some frightful engine of destruction. Suddenly they were cut off as a screen closed behind them—the Earth-men felt an instant of unreasoning terror as it seemed ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... and fairly wide education. The subjects of the groups are languages, mathematics, English history, and lastly science. One concession is made to girls which is not made to boys. They are allowed to pass in two subjects one year, and two others the next, and thus obtain their certificates piecemeal. Boys have to pass in all four subjects the same year. The High School sent in seventeen candidates for the examination in two or three of the subjects—History, Elementary Mathematics, French, German, and Latin,—and fifteen ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... statues, pictures, jewels, and curiosities, were sold and dispersed by the regicide powers; from this fate, happily, the royal collection of manuscripts and books was preserved; neither was it, like the archiepiscopal library at Lambeth, doled out piecemeal to Hugh Peters and his brother fanatics. This good service was mainly owing to Bolstrode Whitelocke. When the British Museum was founded, King George II. presented to it the whole of the royal library; and Ferrar's Concordance, with another similarly illustrated compilation by him, is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... large and more beautiful ones, in that Early English style of which Lincoln Cathedral was the first example on a large scale. In 1220 it was followed by Beverley Minster (see p. 189). The nave of Salisbury Cathedral was begun in 1240 (see p. 206), and a new Westminster Abbey grew piecemeal under Henry's own supervision during the greater part of the reign (see p. 205). Mental activity accompanied material activity. At Oxford there were reckoned 15,000 scholars. Most remarkable was the new departure taken by Walter de Merton, ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... the lips, and a disposition to glandular swelling; dyspnoea and difficulty of breathing; the voice hoarse and barking; the aspect of the face frightful, and of a dark colour; the pulse small, almost imperceptible." Sometimes the limbs drop off, piecemeal or ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... too strong for her, and she broke into a tempest of hysterical sobbing. It was no simulated grief that shook her slender frame and tore at her like some ravenous beast that would have rent her piecemeal with its horrible strength. It was a storm of real anguish and terror, of remorse and misery. It was the one wild outcry, in which the woman's feebler nature got the better of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... always been a tradition as to the value of this picture. Her father had spoken little of his wife to the children, and it was only piecemeal, as she grew into womanhood, that Miss Euphemia learnt from hints and half-told truths the story of her mother's shame. But Michael Joliffe was known to have considered this painting his wife's masterpiece, and old Mrs Janaway reported that Sophia had told her many a time it would fetch ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Atlantis was sinking into the depths of the sea.... Not as a ship sinks, but piecemeal, her walls and towers crumbling and toppling as a child's sand-castle crumbles under the attack of the lapping waves. Down they crashed, carrying their freight of black, clinging, human ants, while from the sea's depths ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... pursue the Romans, whereas he himself marched up toward the sources of the river and commanded that the elephants cross where the tributary streams converged. In this manner, while the water was temporarily dammed and torn piecemeal by the animals' bulk, he effected a crossing more easily below them. Scipio overtaken stood his ground and would have offered battle but for the fact that by night the Gauls in his army deserted. Embarrassed by this occurrence and still suffering from his wound he once more ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her Great Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of these was that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, Mrs. Harman had conveyed things ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and again dipping his unlovely lips into a steaming beaker of brandy-and-water, regarding himself as triumphant in the courts of Venus. But that false woman who sat at his side would have sold him piecemeal for money, as he would have sold the carcase of ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... logical sequence his supreme negative act, he is a man-eater. "He seized two of my companions and hurled them against the ground as if they were dogs, then he devoured them piecemeal, swallowing all—entrails and flesh and marrowy bones." Surely Ulysses is getting some experience on the line of that ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Among his tribes-men and kinsfolk in Houndsditch and the Minories there was great joy at first, and afterward bitter, endless litigation. They screamed and battled over the heritage like vultures over a mighty carrion, tearing it at length piecemeal. He did not keep a pet dog, and so no living creature regretted him, unless it were the thin, delicate girl, with white cheeks and hollow eyes, who came once, and knelt to pray by his grave for hours, her ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical weakness of ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the Mississippi from New Orleans, under a heavy but unwary guard, on a "tin-clad" steamer, to wear out the rest of the war in a Northern prison. Forbidden to gather even in pairs, they had yet moved freely about, often passing each other closely enough to exchange piecemeal counsels unnoticed, and all at once, at a tap of the boat's bell had sprung, man for man, upon their keepers and instantly were masters of them, of them, of their arms stacked on the boiler-deck and of the steamboat, which they had promptly run ashore on the East Louisiana side ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... "Dictator"—that is, the would-be "Dictator"—to allow him to burn up the wrecked houses wholesale without the tedious bother of pulling them down and handling the debris. The timorous committees would not countenance such an idea. Nothing but piecemeal tearing down of the wrecked houses tossed together by the mighty force of the water and destruction by never-dying bonfires would satisfy them. Yet all of them must come down. Most of the buildings reached by the flood have been examined, found unsafe and condemned. Can the ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... had been built in a piecemeal fashion by Victor Dubois himself, and he had been unconsciously guided all the while by his memories of the old farmhouse in Normandy in which he was born; so that the house really looked more like Normandy than like America. ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... another case of personal injury is stated, for which the injurer is to pay a sum of money; and yet our translators employ the same phraseology in both places. One, an instance of deliberate, wanton, killing by piecemeal. The other, an accidental, and comparatively slight injury—of the inflicter, in both cases, they say the same thing! "He shall surely be punished." Now, just the discrimination to be looked for where God legislates, is marked in the original. In the case of the servant ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... us, for every modern society now, is not so much to redistribute wealth; that at best can be only a means to an end; but to use our superfluous energy to the best purpose, no longer to waste it piecemeal. That problem we solved, to a great extent, in war. We have to solve it also in peace if the peace is to be worth having and is not to lead to further wars at home or abroad. The war itself has given us a great opportunity. It has ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... have been expected from its original appearance, not piecemeal but in the regular three-volume form, Esmond was not very much altered by its author in later issues. There was, indeed, a "revised" edition in 1858, in which a considerable number of minor changes, nearly all ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with strong expression.' Its fate was sad enough; attracting no notice, producing no profit, and at length becoming an incumbrance in the studio, the painter destroyed it with his own hands; or, more probably, cut it up and sold it piecemeal, for one of his biographers mentions having seen certain heads by Romney in which terror was strongly depicted, and which had evidently formed portions of some larger work. In the August following his arrival in town he quitted Dove Court for Bearbinder's Lane. Here he executed several ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... piecemeal gifts I cast, My fleeing self to save; And that's the thing must go at last, For ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... takes the book piecemeal, however, the author's statements of his own observations and analysis are so thorough and so admirable, his drawings so good, and the interest of many separate portions so great, that it seems ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... utmost care through the whole scene. I shall never forget the well-meaning feeble villain, stricken down by remorse and impending terror, and the dominative Baron bullying him the while, with words supplied piecemeal by the sufferer. ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... quite know what to make of Mr. BALFOUR, who politely represses his honest endeavours to elucidate the situation in Greece, and actually declared to-day that the difficulties of the Allies would only be increased by the hon. Member's attempts to deal with them piecemeal. Mr. LYNCH was not entirely done with, however. "Is that reply," he asked in a "got-him-this-time" manner, "given by reason of freedom of choice or ineludible necessity?" "Sir," replied the apologist of philosophic doubt with ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... liked, and the Major had been known to many of these Davao pioneers since the days when they had fought together against insurrectos, cholera, torturing sun, treachery; the days when capture had meant the agony of dissection piecemeal, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... within the peninsula, and began hastily to build a wall across the isthmus of Corinth with the hope of keeping back the invading army. Athens was left to care for itself. It was thus that Greece usually let itself be devoured piecemeal. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... can deal with our present system in this piecemeal way very much underrate the strength of the tremendous organization under which we live, and which appoints to each of us his place, and if we do not chance to fit it, grinds us down till we do. Nothing but a tremendous force ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... news of these tragic events reached London piecemeal. First came the news in the fall of 1609 that the Sea Adventure, with Somers, Gates, Newport, and Strachey, had been lost. This was a severe blow to the leaders of the company, who had planned to send De la Warr out with perhaps as many colonists ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... "People had told us that this hill was most dangerous, and that we would scarcely be able to cross it, for Morgan Bryan, the first to travel this way, had to take the wheels off his wagon and carry it piecemeal to the top, and had been three months on the journey from the Shanidore ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... where he manufactured his island "poteen." The disarray in which we found it was probably intentional, as a security against detection. Before we left the shed, the old fellow toppled the whole concern over, and dragged it away piecemeal. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... who landed with me broke the egg with hatchets, and making a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal, and roasted it. I had in vain entreated them not to meddle with ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... both alike Birds—Eyeless, Shagless, and returnless, too— Oh! day of death, oh! chaos of hard times!— And princes, dukes, and lords, they all stood still, Feeling within their pockets' silent depths; And sailors went a-moaning out to sea, And chew'd their cables piecemeal: then they wept, And slept on the abyss without a quid. All quids were gone, cigars were in their graves; The plant, their mother, had been rooted up; Pawnbrokers had a ton of pipes apiece, And "Antis" triumph'd. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and they go through the whole story again. The man was no more astonished at the foot than he had been at the head; he snatched up the leg and threw it out at the door. Before they had finished, the other leg, both arms, the body, the whole murdered traveler, in fact, came down piecemeal. No omelette all this time! The old hemp-seller grew ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... some able thinkers—the view, namely, that a vast store of knowledge is already contained in the subconscious mind of man (and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer experience to bring it to the surface; and that in the second stage of human psychology this process of crude and piecemeal externalization is taking place, in preparation for the final or third stage in which the knowledge will be re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a high and harmonious plane—something like ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... not have it, and very fiercely she dragged piecemeal from his reluctant lips the story of the surprised idyl. He had seen the princess with an arm round the Terror's ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... him did guard That piecemeal lay his armour scattered; And still fought hard that stalwart lord Until ...
— Axel Thordson and Fair Valborg - a ballad • Thomas J. Wise
... I had taken on board, and who landed with me, broke the egg with hatchets, and having made a hole in it, pulled out the young roc piecemeal and roasted it. I had earnestly entreated them not to meddle with the egg, but they would not ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... anything at all, let them be polished to perfection; let an author "keep his piece nine years," or ninety and nine, till he has made it as musical as he can—at least, as musical as his other performances. Not that we counsel dilatory and piecemeal composition. The thought must be struck off in the passion of the moment; the sword-blade must go red-hot to the anvil, and be forged in a few seconds: true; but after the forging, long and weary polishing and grinding ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... owing to that awful business sex. Women were handicapped; they had to fight much harder to achieve equal results. People didn't give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything.... Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to live it down. She wouldn't be put ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... and the torments of hell, till at last she broke down, and proposed to make a clean breast of it. She commenced by saying that Hughson had threatened to take her life if she told, and then again hesitated. But at length, by persistent efforts, the following facts were wrenched from her by piecemeal. She said that three negroes—giving their names—had been in the habit of meeting at the tavern, and talking about burning of the fort and city and murdering the people, and that Hughson and his wife had promised to help them; after which Hughson was to be governor and Cuff ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... inclosure of these fields within his land, had desired to buy the farm, having heard that Monsieur Margueron's chief ambition was to have his only son, then a mere tax-gatherer, made special collector of finances at Beaumont. The farmer, who knew he could sell the fields piecemeal to the count at a high price, was ready to pay Margueron even more than he ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... piecemeal and fitted up a small dynamo from some extensive ruins to southeastward. He brought wiring and several still intact incandescent lights. Before long Cliff Villa shone resplendent, to the awe and marvel of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... crags of this ravine, And in the shattered mass o'erwhelm thy form, Immured and morticed in a clasping rock. Thence, after age on age of durance done, Back to the daylight shall thou come, and there The eagle-hound of Zeus, red-ravening, fell With greed, shall tatter piecemeal all thy flesh To shreds and ragged vestiges of form— Yea, an unbidden guest, a day-long bane, That feeds, and feeds—yea, he shall gorge his fill On blackened fragments, from thy vitals gnawed. Look for no respite from that agony Until some other ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... duty in the prison, day or night. A few years ago the time of daily duty was reduced to twelve hours, with one hour at noon for dinner. Besides this, at times they must do a good deal of extra duty. Each is allowed ten days annual holiday, but is frequently obliged to take it piecemeal, a day or two at a time, so that he cannot go far away from the scene of his servitude. Their duties require unflagging attention and never-ceasing vigilance, which must be a heavy tax on the brain, and the twelve hours must be passed ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... burrowed among old graves like a mole. Robert Turold had fought a stout battle for the secret contained in those forgotten graves on a bleak headland, but the sea had beaten him in the long run, carrying off the stones piecemeal until only one remained, a sturdy pillar of granite which marked the bones of one who, some hundred and fifty years before had been "An English Gentleman and a Christian"—so much of the epitaph remained. Robert ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... quiet. Several times before Calton had been on the point of going to her and trying to get the secret out of her—that is, if she knew it; but now fate appeared to be playing into his hands, and a voluntary confession was much more likely to be true than one dragged piecemeal from unwilling lips. ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... sturdy democratic fashion, had to be endured. It died hard, but did come to an end, piecemeal. Tom Breeks then retired from the front, and became a unit once more. There were flourishes that indicated a termination of the proceedings, when another fellow was propelled in advance, and he, shuffling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... occupied. The Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region, but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this did, through Columbus, Indianapolis, ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... my friend, to rush at a bound to the extremes of friendship? You have drained the cup, offered in all sincerity, at a draught. It is true that a real feeling is never piecemeal; it must be whole, or it does not exist. Monsieur de Mortsauf," she added after a short silence, "is above all things loyal and brave. Perhaps for my sake you will forget what he said to you to-day; if he has ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... slow-burns me, smiting to the bone. O thou whose glance is beauty and whose heart All marble: O dark-eyebrowed maiden mine! Cling to thy goatherd, let him kiss thy lips, For there is sweetness in an empty kiss. Thou wilt not? Piecemeal I will rend the crown, The ivy-crown which, dear, I guard for thee, Inwov'n with scented parsley and with flowers: Oh I am desperate—what betides me, what?— Still art thou deaf? I'll doff my coat of skins And leap ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... of success, and immediately disappearing ignominiously; making frantic grasps and clutches with a hundred long arms and eager outstretched hands, and finally succeeding, by shoulders and fists, in bringing the wreath away piecemeal; and then they give themselves up to mutual embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... entertained the highest regard, so much trouble. Legations were peculiarly situated at times, he said. In reply to an intimation from the gentleman in waiting, he said, gentlemen of the diplomatic corps never paid in piecemeal. Here Thomas would put an end to the comedy by announcing the arrival of the 'Minister for Foreign Affairs,' and politely bowing out the retiring gentleman, who, you may well imagine, maintained a reluctant gravity. ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... firm as fine-art in metal, thought Marius) for which, as I said, he had caught his "refrain," from the lips of the young men, singing because they could not help it, in the streets of Pisa. And as oftenest happens also, with natures of genuinely poetic quality, those piecemeal beginnings came suddenly to harmonious completeness among the fortunate incidents, the physical heat and light, of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... triad of great English sailors by whom the principal part of Australia was revealed. A poet of our own time, in a line of singular felicity, has described it as the "last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space; "* (* Bernard O'Dowd, Dawnward, 1903.) and the piecemeal, partly mysterious, largely accidental dragging from the depths of the unknown of a land so immense and bountiful makes a romantic chapter in geographical history. All the great seafaring peoples contributed something towards the result. The Dutch especially evinced their enterprise in ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... German literature of those times so much has been written, and so exhaustively, that every one who takes any interest in it can be completely informed; in regard to it critics agree now pretty well; and what at present I intend to say piecemeal and disconnectedly concerning it, relates not so much to the way in which it was constituted in itself, as to its relation to me. I will therefore first speak of those things by which the public is particularly excited; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... great Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common. Mackaye had predicted failure, and every one of his predictions came true. The people did not rise. Whatever sympathy they had with us, they did not care to show it. The meeting broke up pitiably piecemeal, drenched and cowed, body and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... it our "environment," this patched up and piecemeal panorama of mad chaotic blunderings, which pushes us hither and thither; and they call it our "heredity," this confused and twisted amalgam of greeds and lusts and conscience-stricken reactions, which drives us backward and forward from ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... unable to move in the dense mass, he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intolerable eye, and would not turn away. And over his head was written in the rainbow, "I am the same, yesterday, ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... of consuming it? Does he really eat, that is to say, does he divide his food piecemeal, does he carve it into minute particles, which are afterwards ground by a chewing-apparatus? I think not. I never see a trace of solid nourishment on my captives' mouths. The Glow-worm does not eat in the strict sense of the word: he drinks his fill; he feeds ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... adventures of all kinds, without any particularly defined purpose. In truth, many people, and myself among the number, find some difficulty in reading the book as a connected narrative, and prefer to take it piecemeal. But in "Oliver Twist" there is a serious effort to work out a coherent plot, and real unity of conception. Whether that conception be based on probability, is another point. Oliver is the illegitimate son of a young lady who has lapsed from virtue under circumstances of great temptation, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... mighty queen of good and ill, Fortune; first marry, then enjoy thy fill Of lawful pleasures; but depart ere morn; Slip from her bed, or else thou shalt be torn Piecemeal by fiends; thy blood caroused in bowls, And thy four quarters blown to the top ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... the great key. The church door swung open, and, descending a few steps, they passed through a low-roofed passage into the church. All was in ruin. The gravestones in the pavement were started from their places; the vaults beneath yawned; the roof above was falling piecemeal; there were rents in the old tower; and mysterious passages, and side doors with crazy flights of wooden steps, leading down into the churchyard. Amid all this ruin, one thing only stood erect; it was a statue of a knight in armour, standing in ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the aid of such a map, or picture, that the pupil can, at a single view, see the sentence as an organic whole made up of many parts performing various functions and standing in various relations. Without such map he must labor under the disadvantage of seeing all these things by piecemeal or ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... applies to the west, though I cannot speak with any authority on that subject. Apparently this obvious action of the Germans is exactly what happened. When their northern front had been combed, we find forces subtracted piecemeal from the north, reaching an aggregate of thirty divisions, or at least nearly fifteen divisions more than had been anticipated. The doom ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... are now laid with infinite care on to the living model, and are made to approximate as closely as possible to the arrangement given in the first sketch, which, as it was not haphazard, but most carefully worked out, must of necessity be adhered to. They have often to be drawn piecemeal, as a model cannot by any means always retain the attitude sufficiently long for the design to be wholly carried out at one cast. This arrangement is effected with special reference to painting—that is to say, giving not only form ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... I have something to say about "Resurrection," which I have read not piecemeal, in parts, but as a whole, at one go. It is a remarkable artistic production. The least interesting part is all that is said of Nehludov's relations with Katusha; and the most interesting the princes, the generals, the ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... youth above him, finally in his completed torso. But each stage is finished relatively. Completion is relative to distance; the Brutus is finished or unfinished according to our standpoint, physical or aesthetic. Moreover, the treatment is not partial or piecemeal; the statue was in the marble from the beginning, and is an entity from its initial stage: in many ways each stage is equally fine. The paradox of Michael Angelo's technique is that his abozzo is really a finished study. The Victory also shows how the deep folds of drapery are bored preparatory ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... said Rob, looking round the room, 'that when Mr Gills was going in and out so often, these last few days, he was taking little things away, piecemeal, not ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... vindicate his purpose in our life: Why stay we on the earth unless to grow? Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out, That he or other god descended here And, once for all, showed simultaneously What, in its nature, never can be shown, Piecemeal or in succession;—showed, I say, The worth both absolute and relative 120 Of all his children from the birth of time, His instruments for all appointed work. I now go on to image—might we hear The judgment which should ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning |
