"Preen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is that," said his wife. "I never thought they would soon get one to step so readily into auld Kirstin's shoon. She gets through far mair than ever Kirstin did in the course of the day, and the hoose is like a new preen (pin)." ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... breakfast, and told him that he should be above such nonsense, and that as an officer he ought to set the men a better example. He shook his weatherbeaten head ominously, but answered with characteristic caution, "Mebbe aye, mebbe na, Doctor," he said; "I didna ca' it a ghaist. I canna' say I preen my faith in sea-bogles an' the like, though there's a mony as claims to ha' seen a' that and waur. I'm no easy feared, but maybe your ain bluid would run a bit cauld, mun, if instead o' speerin' aboot it in daylicht ye were wi' me last night, an' seed an awfu' like shape, white ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the aviary, where Methuselah, in effect, was sitting on his perch, most tremulous and woebegone. His feathers shuddered visibly; he could no longer preen himself. "Listen to what he says," the Frenchman exclaimed, in a very serious voice. "It is your last, last chance. If the secret is ever to be unravelled at all, by Methuselah's aid, now is, without doubt, the ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... girls when they attempt to assume the light and airy graces of the real article. Some of the men have so deeply entered into their parts that they have attained absolute self-forgetfulness, with the result that they leap and preen about in a manner quite startling to the dispassionate spectator. My career so far has not been a personal triumph. In the middle of a number, the other night, the dancing master clapped his hands violently together, a signal he uses when he ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... the King to his fathers' place, Where the tombs of the Sun-born stand: Where the gray apes swing, and the peacocks preen On fretted pillar and jewelled screen, And the wild boar couch in the house of the Queen On the drift of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... hovered past, a bee filled the air with his drone, or a bird settled for a moment upon the stairs near-by to preen a ruffled feather, while soft and drowsy with distance came the ceaseless ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... chain of pure logic. He despised self-deceivers. He always kept himself free from prejudice and all its wiles. He took life as he found it; but he did not excuse it and himself with the familiar hypocrisies that make the comfortable classes preen themselves on being the guardians and saviours of the ignorant, incapable masses. When old Lockyer said one day that this was the function of the "upper classes," Norman retorted: "Perhaps. But, if so, how do they ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... Thus, referring to guillemots and their practice of nibbling each other's feet, and the interest the mate always takes in this proceeding, which probably relieves irritation caused by insects, Edmund Selous remarks: "When they nibble and preen each other they may, I think, be rightly said to cosset and caress, the expression and pose of the bird receiving the benefit being often beatific."[196] Among mammals, such as the dog, we have what closely resembles a kiss, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... were on the girl in the blue dress. She did not observe that she herself was dancing opposite Andy, while Pendrilla Lusk dragged with drooping head in the line across from the amiably grinning Doss Provine. Finding herself suddenly in the lead and successful, Huldah began to preen her feathers a bit. She withdrew a hand from the girl on her right to arrange the small string of blue glass ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan |
