"Skyscraper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... neighbours. Where sky-scrapers are there must be no commemorative statues, no monuments raised to merely human heroes. The effigy of Washington in Wall Street has no more dignity than a tin soldier. And as the skyscraper makes houses of a common size ridiculous, so it loses its splendour when it stands alone. Nothing can surpass in ugliness the twenty storeys of thin horror that is called the Flat-iron; and it is ugly because it is isolated in Madison Square, a place of reasonable dimensions. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... the electric motor to the "vertical railway," or elevator, made possible the steel skyscraper. The elevator, of course, is an old device. It was improved and developed in America by Elisha Graves Otis, an inventor who lived and died before the Civil War and whose sons afterward erected a great business on foundations laid by him. The ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... modern relentless march uptown of commercialism, all that remained of its one-time glory had been swept away. The house fell into decay and ruin, and while waiting for it to be pulled down entirely, to make room for an up-to-date skyscraper, the present owners had rented it just to pay the taxes. And a queer collection of tenants they had secured. A quick-lunch-counter man occupied the basement: a theatrical costumer had the front parlor, with armor and wigs, and other bizarre exhibits in the window. Up one fight of stairs ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... the rusty Prince Albert and the black string tie who had been wont to haunt our back steps and front offices with his carefully wrapped bundle, retreated in bewildered defeat before the clanging blows of steel on steel that meant the erection of the first twenty-story skyscraper. "As slick," we used to say, "as a lightning-rod agent." Of what use his wares on a building whose tower was robed in clouds and which used the chain lightning for a necklace? The Fourth Avenue antique dealer had another curio to add to his collection of andirons, knockers, ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... folks the other day, and they tell me that Emporia is now growing to be some town. The bank is putting up a four-story brick building, which is going to be looked on as the village skyscraper. ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... the congested quarters of great cities, man's ingenuity is taxed to devise effective ways of augmenting his space-potency, and he expands in a vertical direction. This third-dimensional extension, typified in the tunnel and in the skyscraper, is but the latest phase of a conquest of space which began with the line of the pioneer's trail through ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... point where all 10 will recognize the substitution. The same holds true of the shortening or lengthening of the time-interval between the two presentations. The third variable factor is the similarity itself. If instead of one church, not another church, but a theatre or a skyscraper is shown, that is, if the similarity value of 80 per cent sinks down to a similarity of 60 per cent or 50 per cent, the number of those who recognize the substitution will again become larger; if, on the other hand, the substituted card shows the same church, only from a slightly ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... which bulged in back as if something were being carried in the rear pocket. And there he stood, a poor little figure, heedless of the merry throngs that passed, his wistful gaze fixed upon a four-story chocolate cake, a sort of edible skyscraper, with a tiny dome of a glazed cherry upon the top of it. And of all the surging throng on Main Street that bleak, autumnal night, none noticed this ...
— Pee-wee Harris on the Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... used to tell him,—and always full of schemes for avoidin' real work. For a year or so past he's held the hot air chair on the front end of one of these sightseein' chariots, cheerin' the out of town buyers and wheat belt tourists with the flippest line of skyscraper statistics handed out through any megaphone in town. They tell me that when Snick would fix his fake eye on the sidewalk, and roll the good one up at the Metropolitan tower, he'd have his passengers so dizzy they'd grab one another ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... he crossed his slim legs beside a small table in an all-night lunch room, buried somewhere in the deep recesses of this same skyscraper, "that fellow sent the message about the easterly breeze that blew west and I located the station at that hotel. This morning I went over to see how the place looked. It's a wonderful hotel, that one; palm garden ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... "drygoods store" occupying the ground floor. Georgie tied his lathered trotter to a telegraph pole, and stood for a moment looking at the building critically: it seemed shabby, and he thought his grandfather ought to replace it with a fourteen-story skyscraper, or even a higher one, such as he had lately seen in New York—when he stopped there for a few days of recreation and rest on his way home from the bereaved school. About the entryway to the stairs were various tin signs, announcing the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... more beautiful and far less impressive than it is now. It could not boast half a dozen buildings, public or private, worthy of a second glance. Its tallest skyscraper stopped at nine stories, and that towered a good two stories over its nearest rival. The bridges across the river connecting the three divisions of the city were turned slowly and laboriously by ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... was a futile one. The tremendous mountain of ebony rock appeared to have been driven up out of the earth during some volcanic disturbance, and as we stumbled blindly along we thought it would be easier to scale the outside wall of a New York skyscraper than the slippery sides of the obstruction in ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... all gone?" he queried, speaking as to himself. "Only a skyscraper standing here or there? And the bridges and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... largest and the newest of these buildings Gray went, a white tile and stone skyscraper, the entire lower floor of which was devoted to an impressive banking room. He sent his card in to the president, and spent perhaps ten minutes with that gentleman. He had called merely to get acquainted, so he explained; he wished to meet only the heads ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway trackwalker, purblind from gloom; the coalstoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the color of dead Chinese; six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Chaldeans and Sumerians are all dead and gone, but they continue to influence our own lives in everything we do, in the letters we write, in the language we use, in the complicated mathematical problems which we must solve before we can build a bridge or a skyscraper. ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... itself, it was not the spectacle before me that gripped and held me, but an associated idea. As it was the first time I had ever seen a skyscraper lift itself above the clouds, so it naturally reminded me of the first time I had seen a mountaintop above the clouds. This was Krakatoa Island, a conical mountain rising from the sea in the Straits of Sunda, but since submerged ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... all great achievements to dreamers, for men who lack vivid imaginations are incapable of conceiving big enterprises. No matter how practical the thing accomplished, it requires this faculty, no less than a poem or a picture. Every bridge, every skyscraper, every mechanical invention, every great work which man has wrought in steel and stone and concrete, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... elation and worried fear, the swiftly-maturing young Corpsman walked slowly through the beautiful park that surrounded the great stainless-steel skyscraper that housed the cadets during their training period. His thoughts were as twisted as were the meandering paths and walks he ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story studio building on the main street of the city. Practically every other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall. Most American merchants would ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... why we are ahead of you in space?" he had said, staring with dignity at the tall blonde at a nearby table. "It is because of your bourgeois sentimentality. You do not like risking men. You build a skyscraper in New York to house some insurance company. Two or three construction workers are maimed or killed on the job. One of your coal mines collapses and fifty men are trapped. Yet, look. You are afraid of losing men in space because of what the people at home might ...
— Last Resort • Stephen Bartholomew
... mounted on a thick base of insulating material, and each post bore at its top, like a stalk with a single drooping flower, a deep, highly polished reflector, pointing inward and downward. The whole effect was not unlike the skeleton of a miniature skyscraper. ...
— The Infra-Medians • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... of men sat in a skyscraper at Cape Hatteras, with their table running parallel to a huge floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the clouded sky and gray waves of the Atlantic. They were the respected directors of Union Transport, and, like most men ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... may go unnoticed for years but eventually it takes its toll. Then comes a great longing to get away from it all. If family income is independent of salary earned by a city job, there is nothing to the problem. Free from a desk in some skyscraper that father must tend from nine to five, such a family can select its country home hours away from the city. Ideal! But few are so fortunate. Most of us consider ourselves lucky to have that city job. It is to be treated with respect and for us the answer lies in locating just ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... riverbanks. Go out into the country for ledges on hillsides. Every road cut, cliff, bank, excavation, or quarry shows rocks and minerals. Railroad cuts, rock pits, dump piles around mines, building sites—they'll all yield specimens. Some of the best mineral specimens collected in New York City came from skyscraper and subway excavations. Help a New England farmer clear his field and you'll have more rocks than you know ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... thus designate a space of about three square feet—which comprised Hamar's lodging—had the advantage of being situated in the top storey of a skyscraper—at least a skyscraper for that part of the city. From its window could be seen, high above the serried ranks of chimney-pots on the opposite side of the street, those two newly erected buildings: William Carman's chewing gum factory in Hearnes Street, and Mark Goddard's eight-storied ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the reports of damage wrought by the earthquake came in, the conviction grew that one of the safest places during the earthquake shock was on one of the upper floors of the skyscraper office buildings or hotels. As a matter of fact, not a single person, so far as can be learned, lost his or her life or was seriously injured in any of the tall, steel frame structures in the city, although they rocked during the quake like a ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... American film company to display himself in emotional dramas for the educational improvement of the British working classes. In his dream he had to rescue the heroine from the clutches of the villains who had carried her off. They had imprisoned her at the top of a "skyscraper" building and locked the lift, but Joe climbed the fire escape and caught the beautiful girl in his arms. The villains, who were on the watch, set fire to the building, and when Joe attempted to climb out of the window with the heroine clinging round ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... Silver. "I've got this Jayville-near-Tarrytown correctly estimated as sure as North River is the Hudson and East River ain't a river. Why, there are people living in four blocks of Broadway who never saw any kind of a building except a skyscraper in their lives! A good, live hustling Western man ought to get conspicuous enough here inside of three months to incur either ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... barrow, mound, mole; steeps, bluff, cliff, craig^, tor^, peak, pike, clough^; escarpment, edge, ledge, brae; dizzy height. tower, pillar, column, obelisk, monument, steeple, spire, minaret, campanile, turret, dome, cupola; skyscraper. pole, pikestaff, maypole, flagstaff; top mast, topgallant mast. ceiling &c (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c (angel) 244 [Obs.]; batophobia^. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... build another huge skyscraper on Broadway, at Eleventh, and I see the political pot is beginning to bubble all through ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... giving London the once-over, and let me tell you that it's nothing but a bunch of fog and out-of-date buildings that no live American burg would stand for one minute. You may not believe it, but there ain't one first-class skyscraper in the whole works. And the same thing goes for that crowd of crabs and snobs Down East, and next time you hear some zob from Yahooville-on-the-Hudson chewing the rag and bulling and trying to get your goat, you tell ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... life had threaded his way to the cart, there were fresh sensations taking precedence of the Roland—"Explosion in a Pennsylvania mine. Three hundred miners cut off." "Fire in a factory in a thirteen-story skyscraper. Four hundred working-girls perish in ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann |
