"Whirligig" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... A jay with skyblue shaft Set in blunt wing, skimmed screaming on ahead. She followed him. A murrey squirrel eyed Her warily, cocked upon tail-plumed haunch, Then, skipping the whirligig of last-year leaves, Whisked himself out of sight and reappeared Leering about the hole of a young beech; And every time she thought to corner him He scrambled round on little scratchy hands To peek at her about the other side. She lost him, bolting branch to branch, at last— The impudent brat! ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... is!" said General Webb, proudly, gesturing over the railing of the small balcony upon which they stood. "The Whirligig!" ...
— Minor Detail • John Michael Sharkey
... not? to be sure I would!" replied Annie Hovenden, lightly laughing. "Come; explain to me quickly what is the meaning of this little whirligig, so delicately wrought that it might be a plaything for Queen Mab. See! I will put ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... great breaking up next day, and the old omnibus went off to the station with Bacon hanging on behind, the bicycle boy and his iron whirligig atop, and heads popping out of all the windows for last good-byes. Our party and the Hammonds were going by boat, and were all ready to start for the pier when Boo and little Harry were missing. Molly, the maid, and both boys ran different ways to find them; and all sorts of dreadful ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... attired in fragments of ribbons and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child's paper whirligig. Behind him was his servant bending under the load of a crate of mud toys. The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai watched ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... accommodating his gait to the shorter stride of his companion. Mr. Stanton, having recovered from his momentary annoyance, was curious about this odd member of his own profession. Was it possible that in the whirligig of time a future could lie before one so uncouth and rustical? A democracy was an unaccountable thing, and these rude westerners might have to ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... respite. era, epoch; time of life, age, year, date; decade &c (period) 108; moment, &c (instant) 113. glass of time, sands of time, march of time, Father Time, ravages of time; arrow of time; river of time, whirligig of time, noiseless foot of time; scythe. V. continue last endure, go on, remain, persist; intervene; elapse &c 109; hold out. take time, take up time, fill time, occupy time. pass time, pass away time, spend time, while away time, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... anthropologist, may often in large part correspond to impulses that are by no means dead in us, but rather sleep; and are hence liable to be reawakened, if the environment happens to supply the appropriate stimulus. Witness the fact that survivals, especially when the whirligig of social change brings the uneducated temporarily to the fore, have a way of blossoming forth into revivals; and the state may in consequence have to undergo something equivalent to an operation for appendicitis. ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... cried St. George, resting his hand affectionately on the inventor's shoulder. "There isn't a chair in my house that isn't happier when you sit in it. What have you discovered?—some new whirligig?" ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... and woman too, are naturally animals of chase; the greatest still finds something to follow, and there is no one too humble not to be an object of prey to another. Thus, confining our view to the village of Hazeldean, we behold in this whirligig Dr. Riccabocca spurring his hobby after Lenny Fairfield; and Miss Jemima, on her decorous side-saddle, whipping after Dr. Riccabocca. Why, with so long and intimate a conviction of the villany of our sex, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... of the Egyptians. There are only the fundamental doctrines to work on, the more penetrating notes of the harmony to listen to. Thus the outline of the philosophy is able to be studied without any complication, and we have no whirligig of priestly talk to confuse it. Examined in this way, working only from cold stones and dry papyri, we are confronted with the old "Eat, drink, and be merry," which is at once the happiest and most ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... is founded on the Turkish history in the reign of Selinus I. Mr. Philips and Mr. Winstanley have ascribed a comedy to this author, called Cupid's Whirligig, tho' Democritus and Heraclitus were not more different in their temper, than his genius was opposite to comedy, besides the true author was one Mr. E. S. who in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... you, Pat." As he spoke, Tom slowly picked himself up, and steadying himself by Polly's shoulder, issued his commands, and the procession fell into line. First, the big dog, barking at intervals; then the good-natured Irishman, trundling "that divil of a whirligig," as he disrespectfully called the idolized velocipede; then the wounded hero, supported by the faithful Polly; and Maud brought up the rear in tears, ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... his party pride a parting dig. (Enter Quezox and McDuff) Quezox: My Liege, McDuff, who fills a council seat Within the party which has long controlled Affairs politic in these tropic Isles, Would fain resign the office he now holds. Francos, consolingly: Events march on, and as the whirligig Of time revolves, so 'tis with politics. To-day one soars aloft on Vict'ry's wings; Tomorrow Fate those pinions proud may clip. 'Tis here Philosophy a cooling draught Kindly present to him who, from his seat, Is thrust by Fortune's hand, which killeth not, But only ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... sorry for it." And then he took his leave, and Janetta went to her room to bathe her hot face and to wonder at the way in which the whirligig of Time brings ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like certain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... need for reflection. He longed to sit in some secluded spot in order to think. At present, his brain was a mere whirligig, and all things about him seemingly danced to the same tune. Stationary objects were become unstable in the eyes of Soames, and the solid earth, burst free of its moorings, no longer afforded him a safe foothold. There was a humming in his ears; and a mist floated before his eyes. ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... beauty, but of its usefulness in holding the sand in place; but, alas, "all men have not faith," and where the historian wrote Hudsonia tomentosa the antipathetic compositor set up Hudsonia tormentosa. That compositor was a Cape Cod man,—I would wager a dinner upon it. "Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," I hear him mutter, as he slips the ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... shouting it before the wrong-doer's door, now expose it by representing its various forms. The comic poets denounce not only the thief, the fool, the miser, but the advocates of war, the flatterers of the populace, the sophists who set up Whirligig[42] in the place of Zeus, the thin-blooded tragedian in league with the sophists, who preaches against the flesh. Where facts are insufficient he has recourse to fancy, and exaggerates the wronged truth the more strongly to enforce it (here follows a characteristic illustration.) ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... circle whirled that smaller element which came to the Capital to spend money—not to make it. Diamonds flash, point lace flounces flaunt! Who will stop that mighty whirligig to inspect whether the champagne is real, or the turtle ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... its existence he knew, but what she thought of it, or imagined he himself thought of it, he had not at any period inquired. Whatsoever her point of view might be, he knew it would be unbiassed, clear minded and wholly just. She had asked no question and made no comment. The rapid, whirligig existence of the well-known fashionable groups, including in their circles varieties of the Mrs. Gareth-Lawless type, were to be seen at smart functions and to be read of in newspapers and fashion reports, if one's taste ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were done right—but they are not and, never will be, while this whirligig world of mistakes spins round, and all Adam's children, to the end of the chapter, will continue sinning to-day and repenting tomorrow, falling the next and bewailing it the day after. If Leoline had gone to bed directly, like a good, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... the slightest agitation of the intellectual atmosphere sets your average parson into a tempest of pumping like the jointed ligneous youth attached to the eccentric of a boy's whirligig. His philosophy of life may be boiled down into a single sentence: Carry on and you will be happy. Did ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... all, were not wholly undirected. I found an intelligent guide, who was at the same time an old acquaintance. The whirligig of time brings about, not merely its revenges, but also its compensations and coincidences. Twenty-two years ago, when I was studying German as a boy in the old city of Frankfort, guests from the South of France came to visit the amiable family with whom I was residing. There were M. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... was no wonder that the little world of upper Canada opened its eyes at such a Star Chamber sentence as this, pronounced in the year of Grace 1828. It seemed as if the whirligig of time had brought back the days of Bartemus Ferguson and The Niagara Spectator.[125] It was an open question with many persons, even among those who were upon the whole favourable to the measures of the Government, whether the prosecution should have been ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... that the whirligig of time will ever bring Paisiello and his contemporaries into popularity again in England, but in Italy there has been of late years a remarkable revival of interest in the works of the eighteenth century. Some years ago the Argentina Theatre in Rome devoted its ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically whirled, in which only children ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... the Public Library is now a shelter for freed people from Fernandina. Did the Rebels know it, they would doubtless upturn their aristocratic noses, and exclaim in disgust, "To what base uses," etc. We confess that it was highly satisfactory to us to see how the tables are turned, now that "the whirligig of time has brought about its revenges." We saw the market-place, in which slaves were sometimes sold; but we were told that the buying and selling at auction were usually done in Charleston. The arsenal, a large stone structure, was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... Philipse married Colonel Roger Morris, in the king's service, and cards were duly sent to Mount Vernon. But the whirligig of time equalizes all things, and, in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six, General Washington, Commander of the Continental Army, occupied the mansion of Colonel Morris, the Colonel and his lady being fugitive Tories. In his diary, Washington records this significant item: "Dined ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... play the cur and slinking sybarite, and desert the colours on the eve of the decisive fight. Of course I have done no work for I do not know how long; and here you can triumph. I have been reduced to writing verses for amusement. A fact. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, after all. But I'll have them buried with me, I think, for I have not the heart to burn them while I live. Do write. I shall go to the mountains as soon as the weather clears; on the way thither, I marry ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often the case here, and we do not know why it may not be in heaven, that the ones that are turned over and shook up, and the dust knocked out of them, and their metaphorical coat tail filled with boots, find that the whirligig of time has placed them above the parties who smote them, and we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors when they come ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... the whip over ourselves, have trained ourselves to do it, and have done it so long that now we seem unable to stop. In another chapter there is fully described (in Dorothy Canfield's vivid words) the squirrel-cage whirligig of modern society life. Modern business life is not much better. Men compel themselves to the endless task of amassing money without knowing why they amass it. They make money, that they may enlarge their factories, to make more ploughs, to get more money, to enlarge their factories, ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon them.' I was one, sir, in this interlude;:—one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one:—'By the Lord, fool, I am not mad;'—But do you remember? 'Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? An you smile not, he's gagged'? And thus the whirligig of ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... in such manner, that I, who sat upon one of the lowest Benches, saw further above her Shoe than I can think fit to acquaint you with. I could no longer endure these Enormities; wherefore just as my Girl was going to be made a Whirligig, I ran in, seized on the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... she, "how things come round and about, Life is but a whirligig. Leastways, we poor women, our lives are all cut upon one pattern. Wasn't I for washing out my Gerard's mole in his young days? 'Oh, fie! here's a foul blot,' quo' I; and scrubbed away at it I did till I made the poor wight cry; so then I thought 'twas time to give over. And now says you to me, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... chalk sea was raised up, and remained dry land, until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game whose spoils have rejoiced your geologists. How long it remained in that condition cannot be said; but "the whirligig of time [72] brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land, with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to be cold and lifeless. Superficial imitations of Niobe and the Belvedere Apollo have no attraction for a generation educated by the marbles of the Parthenon. Dull reproductions of Raphael's manner at his worst cannot delight men satiated with Raphael's manner at his best. Whether the whirligig of time will bring about a revenge for the Eclectics yet remains to be seen. Taste is so capricious, or rather the conditions which create taste are so complex and inscrutable, that even this, which now seems impossible, may happen in the future. But a modest ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and a miserable death in an almshouse. 'Soon after, however,' says the record, 'many epitaphs honoured his memory: the greatness of his merit was universally confessed, and his Lusiad was translated into various languages.' 'The whirligig of time brings its revenges,' as your own illustrious Singer saith. How think you myself and my friend VASCO de GAMA here look upon the fallen state of our beloved native land? In vain he ventured for her. In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... Scot by his tongue," said another; "and an he will come out o' his whirligig there, I'se gie him his tartan plaid fu' ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the wife, and the whirligig of Time brought in his revenges. The lady now found herself the most important member of her sex, in a dwelling filled with men. She had few women about her person, and the confidant of a great dame in old romance ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... Truly 'the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges.' To this point the reason of civilised nations has come, or at least is coming fast, after some fifteen hundred years of unreason, and of a literature of unreason, which discoursed ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... another village eight miles nearer. Here there is a large caravanserai. Near the entrance is a hole-in-the-wall sort of a shop wherein I espy a man presiding over a tempting assortment of cantaloupes, grapes, and pears. The whirligig of fortune has favored me today with tea, blotting-paper ekmek, and grapes for breakfast; later on two small watermelons, and at 2 P.M. blotting-paper ekmek and an infinitesimal quantity of yaort (now called mast). It is unnecessary to add that I arrive in this village with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... with cans of food rolling all over the floor. 'Go faster,' one of them shouted to the taxi man, 'or I'll fire a can of pickled beets at your head.' We hired a motor-boat to take us over and then they retired from the game. Some whirligig, take it ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Brethren, (the word brethren comes from the tabernacle, because we {99}all breathe therein), if you are drowsy I'll rouse you, I'll beat a tattoo upon the parchment case of your conscience, and I'll whisk the devil like a whirligig among you. Now let me ask you a question seriously. Did you ever see any body eat any hasty-pudding? What faces they make when it scalds their mouths! Phoo, phoo, phoo! What faces will you all make when old Nick nicks you? Now unto a bowl of punch I compare matrimony; there's the sweet ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... the chickens, and then I asked about Tista, and he told me that I should not see him any more, and then—then I felt this passion—here in the chest, and everything went round and round and round like a whirligig at the Termini, and I fell right down, mamma, down upon the bricks—I know, my frock is all dusty still, here, look, and here, but what does it matter? Patience! I fell down like ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... some instances have been multiplied. It is thus a noteworthy fact that Bjoernson, although four years the junior of Ibsen, enjoyed a vogue among English readers for a score of years during which the name of Ibsen was absolutely unknown to them. The whirligig of time has brought in its revenges of late years, and the long neglected older author has had more than the proportional share of our attention than is fairly ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... equally foreign.) "Suppose I tell you that I knew Mr. Sam Johnson, and did not like him? that I was at that very ball at Madame Cornelis', which you have mentioned in one of your little—what do you call them?—bah! my memory begins to fail me—in one of your little Whirligig Papers? Suppose I tell you that Sir Joshua has been here, in this ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... whirligig of time were here inserted, but have since been omitted, as they were found to occur in ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... you will now see what I mean by Rest. Rest is the loosing of the chains which bind us to the whirligig of the world, it is the passing into the centre of the Cyclone; it is the Stilling of Thought. For (with regard to this last) it is Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind, which binds us to outer things. The outer things themselves are all right. It is only ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... imagine the grave group, as they came up one by one from below, that morning of first disappointment, and stood (with a whirligig of jubilant mosquitoes spinning about each head) looking out across the waste, seeing the sky and the marsh meet in the east, the north, and the west, and receiving with patient silence the father's suggestion that the hills would, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... a woman entered carrying an oblong chopping-bowl in which lay her chopping-knife. She set it down and stooped forward, turning the bowl as if it were a whirligig. Then she commenced dancing; and when she turned her back toward the stranger he saw that she was hollow. She had no back, backbone, or insides, but only lungs ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... they all went together for a ramble in the Highgate Fields. The elder Master Hawke took his drum, and the younger had Mrs. Strutt's parasol; Miss Duckling's two brother's had a kite and a boat; and Charley Lighthair a whirligig. They flew the kite high up till they could hardly see it, and sent card-messengers of every colour up to it: they swam their boat in the pond; and when it sailed beyond their reach, Mr. Strutt pulled it back with his walking-cane: ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... stands by, stolid and immovable; the Magyar blood is not in her, hers is the languorous Oriental blood, the supple, sinuous movements of the Levant. She watches this bacchanalian whirligig with a sneer upon her thin, red lips. Beside her Eros Bela too is still, the scowl has darkened on his face, his one eye leers across the group of twirling dancers to that one couple ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Aristophanes, and the philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig." "Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that—that Zeus is gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... You are trying to duplicate your dreams, dreams without a hint of the sun. The painter at least copies or interprets real life; while the composer dips his finger in the air, making endless sound-scrolls—noises with long tails and whirligig decorations like foolish fireworks—though I think the art of the future will be pyrotechnics. Mad, mad, I tell you! But whether mad or not matters little in our land of freedom, where all men are born unequal, where only the artists are sad. They are ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... useless we throw it on the dust-heap, but when it is sufficiently old, sufficiently broken, and sufficiently useless we give money for it, put it into a museum, and read papers over it which people come long distances to hear. By-and-by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is re-discovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilisation. So when ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler |
