"Pickings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... territory,—you must do that,—and he'll be coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time? 'T won't be inconveniencing you, because I know that there's precious few pickings to be got out of these Central India States—even though you pretend to be correspondent ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... our enemies," said Thal placidly, "and the pickings would be good." He added: "We should be ambushed because the Lady Fani refused to marry the Lord Ghek. She is Don Loris' daughter, and to refuse to marry a man is naturally a deadly insult. So he should ravage ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... gone and seen through the riddle that knocked me silly, Frank. That's just what it must mean—the pay-car would offer fat pickings, all in cash; and they've held up their flight to Canada just to try and gobble it. Oh! what a slick game, with Todd giving false information, and perhaps just leading the police further and further away from Bloomsbury tonight, so as to leave the pay-car ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... as they are often frugal people, they gradually put by a good deal of money. The servants of Europeans are also largely drawn from this class, and a capable servant is able to secure wages which, together with pickings in the shape of tips and perquisites, enable him to save. The low-caste people of a village often present a brilliant appearance when they turn out in holiday attire on some festal day, and the gold ornaments of the women sufficiently indicate their prosperous condition. That ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... P'raps they'll chuck British jockeys next! Much good their Grong Pree, ancetrer, will be then, my boy. Our 'osses, our jockeys, and our bookies has bin the making of French Sport,—and werrv nice little pickings there's bin out of it take it all round. Wot'll Ler Hig Life, and Hart, and Leagues o' Patriots, and miles o' bullyvards, and COOK's Tourists and Awful Towers do for Parry without hus, I wonder? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 14, 1891. • Various
... and I do love to buy respectability—reasonable. Wonder how long we can keep it up, Hank? We're safe as long as the good little boys like George Babbitt and all the nice respectable labor-leaders think you and me are rugged patriots. There's swell pickings for an honest politician here, Hank: a whole city working to provide cigars and fried chicken and dry martinis for us, and rallying to our banner with indignation, oh, fierce indignation, whenever some squealer like this fellow Seneca Doane comes ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... advice strikes me as quite sensible. Wherever mining and other schemes are floated, there are men who make a good living out of the operations. They're trained to the business; they've control of the money; and when a new thing's put on the market, they consider they've the first claim on the pickings. As a rule, that notion ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... good pickings here," said Davy Crockett, "but they'll soon be too many for us. Come on, Ned, boy! Our place is behind ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... under my tunic and passed on before the loss was discovered. Some of the British could be seen at times picking over the sour refuse in the barrels. This amused the Germans very much. We endeavoured to get cookhouse jobs for the pickings to be had, but could not do so. At a later date, when the Canadian Red Cross, Lady Farquhar, Mrs. Hamilton Gault and our families were sending us packages regularly, we made out ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... "Bon aubaine. Nice pickings. It is a misery what they pay me here. I am, oh, so poor, and I have children, many babies. You will not tell them—the police—you dare ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... to make something out of it—always happens. Well, as you'd told me you'd got the pickings of a cool half million, I felt I couldn't go wrong in covering you. So I came down with five hundred of needful. Got them to promise to let the rest stand till I had done myself the pleasure of a run ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... that itself is the worst kind of hardship. I don't think that there's much doin' these times for the natives, not to mention the strangers, though 'tis the strangers get the pickings wherever they go. We'll have a look at the newspaper and see what's doin' anyway. (Reads from the advertisement columns) "Wanted a respectable man, to act as a coachman to His Lordship the Bishop. He must have a good appearance, have sober habits, and a knowledge of horses ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... enough, was in the man she regarded as the most consummate villain in the world, Pratinas. Ahenobarbus might have his debts paid by his father, and forego risk and crime if he did not absolutely need Drusus's fortune; but Pratinas, she knew, must have planned to secure rich pickings of his own, and if Ahenobarbus married permanently, all these were lost; and the Greeks never turned back or let another turn back, when there was a fortune before them. It was a fearful sort of confidence. Drusus had been warned promptly by Agias. Old Mamercus had straightway taken every precaution, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... by vice as Mentor and Telemachus by virtue, travelled like the latter, in search of their father, "panis angelorum,"—the only Latin words which the old fellow's memory had retained. They went about scraping up the pickings of the Grand-I-Vert, and those of the adjacent chateaux; for between them, in their busiest and most prosperous years, they had never contrived to make as much as three hundred and sixty fathoms of rope. In the first place, no dealer within a radius of fifty miles ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... and look at the scarlet perricut." Finally both men and women: "Lave her alone, mother; it's that Ross that's wasting the woman."—"Well, if I was a man I'd know my tack."—"Wouldn't trust. It comes with Caesar anyway; the Lord prospers him; she'll have her pickings. Nothing bates religion in this world. It's like going to the shop with an ould Manx shilling—you get your pen'orth of taffy and twelve pence out."—"Lend's a hand with the jough then, boy. None left? Aw, Caesar's wonderful ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... his long white apron and bib waits as serving-man. Onkel Johann, however, sits at table. The aunt and Moidel are busy dishing below: they will have their share of good things when they go to the return feasts. Of pickings and leavings there are none: it would be an insult to send away a half-emptied plate; and for the same reason no dish is left untouched, though it is a banquet that might even satiate a work-house. Soup, sausage, roast veal, baked apples and stewed prunes; stewed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... boys who first conceived the idea had taken the cream of the pickings. And from a portion of the money secured through the sale of these beautiful pearls they had purchased everything needed to fill the heart of a ...
— With Trapper Jim in the North Woods • Lawrence J. Leslie
... notoriety as yet, of avaricious character, unscrupulous nature, and with a small following of fellow bandits and a large animosity for Americans. His ambition was to emulate the brilliant Villa. But pickings had been poor of late, no more than that of stealing a few horses from across the border. To Burkhardt, who had heard of him and sought him out, he listened with interest and bargained with zest. Five thousand in gold for fifty men was like pearls from Paradise. And whatever this Yankee's own private ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... slacken more and more ("King of Prussia coming," said the Austrian deserters to us); and that, on November 6th, Treskow, looking out from Neisse, found the Austrian trenches empty, Generals Harsch and Deville hurrying over the Hills homewards,—pickings to be had of them by Treskow,—and Neisse Siege a thing finished. [TAGEBUCH, &c. ("Diary of the Siege of Neisse," 4th August, 26th October, 6th November, 1758, "1 A.M. suddenly"), in Seyfarth, Beylagen, ii. 468-472: of Treskow's own writing; brief ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... valuables as turquoises, Pushmeena, rupees, &c. This fact would perhaps account for their being so often in a ruined state — Gulab Singh having, probably, taken a look at their foundations in search of such valuable pickings. The reason my informant gave me for the unwillingness of the people, however poor, to sell their superabundant ornaments, was that they regarded them as sacred, and held them as their own property during their lifetime ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... pickings, when de white people would have everybody to come and help. Us niggers would help. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... the plundered and dismantled castle all too vast for a lord of the manor shorn of all his ancient rights; too large for the landowner whose woods had been sold piecemeal, until he could scarce draw nine thousand francs of income from the pickings ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly garnered largesse of great cities—these formed ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... never audited; nobody bothered about such things on Nepenthe, with all that south wind hanging about. If they had been he would have squared the auditor up to any sum—a hundred francs, almost; it was worth while. Pickings, he called hem. The place, the system suited him down to the ground. He had lived all his life on pickings. He was a retail welsher; he lacked ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... a fortune if we caught him full," he said thoughtfully. "They say he takes no prizes. Just helps himself to what he wants like a highwayman, and then sheers off and looks out for another. Rare pickings he must have had among some of those fat East Indiamen. Here's to our falling in with him!" and we clicked our mugs on that ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... you go at it straight, like a webfoot to water. What's your boast?—your mother's disgrace! You shame your mother. Your whole life's a ballad o' bastardy. You cry up the woman's infamy to hook at a father. You swell and strut on her pickings. You're a cock forced from the smoke of the dunghill! You shame your mother, damned adventurer! You train your boy for a swindler after your own pattern; you twirl him in your curst harlequinade to a damnation as sure as your own. The day you crossed my threshold the devils ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... minister looked up from his pudding. He was very spiritual, but he had had poor pickings in his previous boarding place, and he could not help a certain abstract enjoyment over Miss ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... the dogs of our company,-? brutes of diverse temperament, experience, and behavior. There were the captain's two, Trumpet and Jip, who, by virtue of their reflected rank and authority, held places of privilege and pickings under the table, and were jealous and overbearing as became a captain's favorites, snubbing and bullying their more accomplished and versatile guests, the circus dogs, with skipper-like growls and snarls and snaps. And there was our own ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... leaders had his own ugly gang of riders and his own ill fame long before young Joaquin Murieta ceased dealing monte; and every one was getting rich pickings from pack trains, stage-coaches, valley ranches, and miners' cabins. Yet within six months they all turned over their bands and became lieutenants of the nineteen-year-old boy. That list of victims at Murphy's Diggings, his superior breeding, and his finer intelligence gave him high standing from ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... I feel is founded on a fear that the acceptance may be a temptation to you to let fall the bone (hard as it is) which is in your mouth and must afford tolerable pickings, for the shadow of independence. You cannot propose to become independent on what the low state of interest could afford you from such a principal as you mention; and the most graceful excuse for the acceptance, would be, that it left you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... abroad and been lost to sight. The young man did not know at what point in his financial decline Mr. Newell had parted company with his wife and daughter; "though you may bet your hat," he philosophically concluded, "that the old girl hung on as long as there were any pickings." He did not himself know Mr. Newell's address, but opined that it might be extracted from a certain official at the Consulate, if Garnett could give a sufficiently good reason for the request; and here in fact Mrs. Newell's emissary ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... that jackal;— I've heard them in the Ephesian ruins howl[497] By night, as do that mercenary pack all, Power's base purveyors, who for pickings prowl, And scent the prey their masters would attack all. However, the poor jackals are less foul (As being the brave lions' keen providers) Than human ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... round to Boulogne," he says. "Mother and the rest'll be glad to see you, and you can slip over to Newhaven with Uncle Aurette. Or you can ship with me, like most o' your men, and take a turn at King George's loose trade. There's plenty pickings," he says. ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... down at his festal garments and smiled. "I expect I'll be pickings for your Happy Family when they see me in these ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... etc., etc. I hope the Sewing machine was in honor and exposed as a surtout on the banquet's table, and that only the guano-claim successfully recovered from Venezuela, and other equally innocent pickings paid the piper. Vive la bagatelle, and Seward's alter ego at ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... value of his wares; it was his object to turn a small certain profit on his expenditure. It is reckoned that an energetic, business-like old bookseller will turn over 150,000 volumes in a year. In this vast number there must be pickings for the humble collector who cannot afford to encounter the children of Israel at Sotheby's or at the ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... States are also joining in the rumpus, as I guess they're anxious to be in the "top dog" so as to get some pickings after the scrap. Then in August we got the tip to get ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... recovered his good looks, in the opinion of Chariclea: once more the maid-servant and the notes, with reproaches for his long neglect; once more, too, the throng of parasites; they saw that there were still pickings to be had. Dinias arrived at her house, by agreement, at about bedtime, and was already inside, when Demonax—whether he had an understanding with his wife in the matter, as some say, or had got his information independently—sprang out from concealment, gave orders to his servants to make ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... my increased skill, and all I had learned from the books, were responsible for this increase of twenty dollars. Judging by my rate of development, I might hope before I died to be a night watchman for sixty dollars a month, or a policeman actually receiving a hundred dollars with pickings. ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... rather gravely. Gold mines worth developing are singularly hard to find, and when found generally need a large capital to work them, while the company financier gets the pickings. The steady following up of one consistent plan more commended itself to me, and prospecting in mid-winter would try the strength of a giant. Still, if my partners were bent on it they would naturally expect me to humor them in the matter, and there ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... alone for that. It gets him all the religious business of the county; and there are nice pickings among the charities, and endowments, and purchases of building sites, and trust deeds; I dare say it brings him in two or three hundred a year, eh?' And Wylder laughed again. 'It has broken up his hard, proud heart,' he says; 'but ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... deceased Isaac Moskava who had brought him to Russia, he said. They had been fellow fugitives to Canada, and Isaac, who had friends in a dozen Soviets, had painted an entrancing picture of the pickings which were to be had in Petrograd. They worked their way across Canada and shipped on a Swedish barque, working their passage before the mast. At Stockholm Issy had found a friend, who forwarded them carriage paid to the capital, whereafter ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... and Kaempfaert imagined that Kaffrath was in the conspiracy to sell out and leave them with no particularly valuable pickings. It was very sad. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... the deadly monotony and loneliness of Louisbourg was to be found in the bad bargains and worse entertainment offered by the camp-followers, who quickly gathered, like a flock of vultures, to pick the carcass to the bone. There were few pickings to be had, but these human parasites held on until the bones were bare. Of course, they gave an inordinate amount of trouble. They always do. But well-organized armies keep them in their place; while militiamen ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... hoodwink Mrs. Grundy for Mrs. Hilliard's sake, scrupulously meeting and leaving the lady outside the corporation limits, a ruse which deceived nobody save the deceivers. Nor was it effective now. Ruth passed Mrs. Bowers's argus-eyed bay window, as did Shelby, and Mrs. Grundy had her speculative pickings of ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... pickings, or else he tempted an attack of dyspepsia by bolting his food, for inside of ten minutes he was around again. Tom, who had not yet got away on ...
— Air Service Boys Flying for Victory - or, Bombing the Last German Stronghold • Charles Amory Beach
... very happy state, doubtless, to those who dislike too quiet a life, and a very honourable one, for war is honor itself; but I did not speak of that, Cleonice. I would only say that this man of might loves thee—that he is rich, rich, rich. Pretty pickings at Plataea; and we have known losses, my child, sad losses. And if you do not love him, why, you can but smile and talk as if you did, and when the Spartan goes home, you will lose a ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Megatherium, ready jointed for cooking. It was as big as an elephant, you see, so there was a good deal of meat on it. And if they wanted fish, the Ichthyosaurus was asked for,—he was twenty to forty feet long, so there was plenty of him. And for poultry there was the Plesiosaurus; there were nice pickings on that too. Then the other children could wish for other things. But when people had dinner-parties it was nearly always Megatheriums; and Ichthyosaurus, because his fins were a great delicacy ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... leaving good pickings of meat on each; score them in squares, pour a little melted butter on them, and sprinkle them with pepper and salt: put them in a dish; set them in a Dutch oven for half or three quarters of an hour, according to the thickness of the meat; keep turning them till they are quite hot ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... these of one thousand years since—or indeed in any times, for the matter of that. So let us finish with Ceolwulf, just noting that a year or two later his pagan lords seem to have found much of the spoil of monasteries, and the pickings of earl and churl, of folkland and bookland, sticking to his fingers, instead of finding its way to their coffers. This was far from their meaning in setting him up in the high places of Mercia. So they strip him and thrust him out, and he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... enough to pay for knowing? Government wage is poor pickings for watching here in the rain. How ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy |
