"Middle distance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chosen silks and bits of weavings for her medium, using them as a painter uses colors upon his palette. A stretch of pale blue silk, with outlined hills lying against it, made for her a sky and background, while a middle distance of flossy white stitches, advancing into well-defined daisies, brought the foreground to one's very feet. Flower-laden apple branches against the sky were lightly sketched in embroidery stitches, like the daisies. It was a delicious bit of color and so well managed as to be as efficient a wall ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... traversed. The whole Brazilian plain seemed to lie beneath us, extending away and away until it ended in dim blue mists upon the farthest sky-line. In the foreground was the long slope, strewn with rocks and dotted with tree-ferns; farther off in the middle distance, looking over the saddle-back hill, I could just see the yellow and green mass of bamboos through which we had passed; and then, gradually, the vegetation increased until it formed the huge forest which extended ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Next to her is Auntie Cord (a fragment of whose history I have just sent to a magazine). She is the cook; was in slavery more than forty years; and the self- satisfied wench, the last of the group, is the little baby's American nurse-maid. In the middle distance my mother-in-law's coachman (up on errand) has taken a position unsolicited to help out the picture. No, that is not true. He was waiting there a minute or two before the photographer came. In the extreme background, under the archway, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of French was small, but it ran to that, and for his purpose it was ample. The French temperament is not stolid. When the French temperament sees a man running rapidly and pointing into the middle distance and hears him shouting, 'La! La! Vite! Vite!' it does not stop to make formal inquiries. It sprints like a mustang. It did so now, with the happy result that a moment later George was racing down the road, the centre and recognized leader of an enthusiastic ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... room of detention at a quarter past four. As he came out into the grounds he espied in the middle distance somebody being carried on a stretcher in the direction of the School House. At the same moment Parker loomed in sight, walking swiftly towards the School shop, his mobile features shining with the rapt ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... suitable for a slate sketch. The long slopes of the downs were white with snow; but it was a dull grayish white, for there was no sunshine, and the gray-white of the slate-pencil did it justice enough. In the middle distance rose the windmill, and a thatched cattle shed and some palings made an admirable foreground. On the top and edges of these lay the snow, outlining them in white, which again the slate-pencil could imitate effectively. There only wanted something darker than the slate itself to do those ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... minuteness of view, beat him. As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into "big words about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the foreground: and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the middle distance or the background. What would we not have given to have had Macaulay's History of England continued down to his own time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits, romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century, the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... and stole across the floor, very gently drew back one of the curtains and looked out. It was dark and she could see nothing— only the Cathedral like a grey web against a sky black as ink. A lamp, across the Green, threw a splash of orange in the middle distance—no other light. The Cathedral seemed to be very close to ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... village Zebdeh, then over a green hill with a prospect of the sea. Caesarea visible at a distance, and in the middle distance Jit and Zeita. Near us were ruins of a strong place called Burtaa, said to have a supply of delicious water. Our journey was all over short evergreens rising from stony ground. So lonely—none in sight but ourselves for hours after ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... whether on the slope of the hills by the river-side, in the middle distance, or near the mountains which form the horizon, are seen hundreds of little villages, and many a white villa scattered among the green vines as daisies on the turf. To the left and right are St. Pere and Akin, two hamlets, which seem ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... in the foreground should be greener, to throw back the middle distance. That is the peak of South Moor exactly, if ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Purbeck and on to Swanage, soon to be the most important town of all, and ugliest of the three. Margaret's train reappeared as promised, and was greeted with approval by her aunt. It came to a standstill in the middle distance, and there it had been planned that Tibby should meet her, and drive her, and a tea-basket, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... Italian towns. Then the moon rose, unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and Ralph, leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle distance, felt his spirit enlarged and pacified. For the first time, as his senses thrilled to the deep touch of beauty, he asked himself if out of these floating and fugitive vibrations he might not build something concrete and stable, if even such dull common cares as now oppressed him ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... darkness like fireflies. Out on San Francisco Bay the lights flashed from the mastheads of ships at anchor or from brightly lighted ferryboats plying from mole to mole, while far to the left, Lake Merritt lay like a gray sheet amid the shadows. In the middle distance off Yerba Buena Island two United States gunboats were at anchor, one of them sending the rays of its powerful searchlight here and there across the water, and making a veritable path of silver far out ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... environment of picturesque mountains, and within these towering ramparts reposed the little village of Lovdal, the prominent object in which was the church, with its pure white walls, gables, plain grey spire and red roof, standing on a little eminence in the middle distance. Then came a patch of greenery formed by the apple trees of our most comfortable farmhouse. Around it clustered the red-roofed wooden houses of the neighbours, and there were two or three flagstaffs always conspicuous in the clear air. On my arrival they had hoisted the Union ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... handled, mostly with the palette-knife, the colour in some parts excellent, the canvas in others loaded with mere clay. But it was the scene, and not the art or want of it, that riveted my notice. The foreground was of sand and scrub and wreckwood; in the middle distance the many-hued and smooth expanse of a lagoon, enclosed by a wall of breakers; beyond, a blue strip of ocean. The sky was cloudless, and I could hear the surf break. For the place was Midway Island; the point of view the very spot at which I had landed ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... moist, reminiscent of summer's breath while also prophetic of winter's bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... (by modern standards); a clean-shaven, pink-faced, respectably dressed, fairly energetic, unintellectual, passably sociable, well-to-do, public-school- and-'varsity sort of city. One knows in one's own life certain bright and pleasant figures; people who occupy the nearer middle distance, unobtrusive but not negligible; wardens of the marches between acquaintanceship and friendship. It is always nice to meet them, and in parting one looks back at them once. They are, healthily and simply, the most fitting product of a not perfect environment; good-sorts; ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... The "Middle Distance," or as I would call it "The Meeting House Neighborhood," is composed of those households from Sites 21 to 41; "the Hotel Neighborhood," of those from Site 42 to 95; and these all, whether regarded as one or as two sections, go habitually to the village by the "Mizzen-Top road," ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... to get the thirteen of us to the Town Hall to have our passports vises. And the Commandant is rounding up his Corps, and Ursula Dearmer is heaven knows where, and Mrs. Lambert only somewhere in the middle distance, and Mrs. Torrence's beautiful eyes are blazing at the slip-sloppiness of it all. Things were very different at the —— Hospital, ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... what he had done, and remained standing under the trees, all the other men having strayed silently away. He saw Melbury and his daughter pass down a glade without looking back. While they moved slowly through it a lady appeared on horseback in the middle distance, the line of her progress converging upon that of Melbury's. They met, Melbury took off his hat, and she reined in her horse. A conversation was evidently in progress between Grace and her father and this equestrian, in whom he was almost ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... winding road that fringes the common, you see it standing there gazing a little wistfully, yet with a quiet air of semi-detachment, out over the wide expanse of green. Half right and half left are two monstrous blocks of red brick flats overlooking it with a thousand envious eyes. The middle distance is dotted pleasantly with hawthorn bushes and the pretty pieces of sandwich-paper that are always the harbingers of London's Spring. Beyond these things, and far away to the front, you may detect on clear days ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various |
