"Thumbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those produced in Leipzig. In a long letter addressed (February 13th, 1769) to Friederike Oeser he thus expounds the artistic ideals at which he had then arrived: "A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher, and he who has laboriously thumbed the pages of many books regards with contempt the simple, easy book of nature; and yet nothing is true except what is simple—certainly a sorry recommendation for true wisdom. Let him who goes the way of simplicity go it in quiet. Modesty and circumspection are the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... by the river bank; and when it was eaten, sat for a time on the scooped-out brink while Avon ran at their feet—Arthur Miles searching again in the thumbed pages of The Tempest for a hint that might perchance have escaped him; Tilda as sedulously intent on a page of a ladies' newspaper in which the bread had ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as he thumbed over the typewritten sheets in his hands, "you say there has been a murder committed here. With this tenant, Marsh, and a patrolman, getting into action so soon after the shot, a body couldn't possibly be moved out of the house—certainly, ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... schoolhouse was still used. Every day one of the daughters assembles her smaller brothers and sisters there and school keeps. The district library contained nearly one hundred readable books which were well thumbed. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... road, from road to private office and recognized authority. Sophy had left her early work far behind. She had her own desk now in the busy workshop, and it was she who allotted the piece-work, marked it in her much-thumbed ledger—that powerful ledger which, at the week's end, decided just how plump or thin each pay-envelope would be. So the shop and office at T. A. Buck's were bound together by many ties of affection and sympathy and loyalty; and these bonds were ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... in a state of intense depression. Her attic was so suffocating that she could not stay in it, but there was a general sitting-room downstairs, and she went there and contrived to make herself as wretched as she could over a well-thumbed novel which another girl had left behind ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... from the cottage with pious love an ancient and much-thumbed book, on whose fly-leaf was written 'Jason Fletcher, His Bible.' Then, having no longer any reason to conceal the early history of the deceased, she related to the village gossips—as a warning against trusting too fully to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was the hero. But in the rural districts the people worshipped Gladstone, and neither knew nor cared for any other politician. His was the name to conjure with. His picture hung in every cottage. His speeches were studied and thumbed by hard hands till the paper was frayed into tatters. It was Gladstone who had won the vote for the labourer, and it was Gladstone who was to lead them into the Land of Promise. "Three Acres and a Cow," from being a joke, had passed into a watchword, though Gladstone ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... afternoon I had the honour of being introduced to Dr. Robinson, whose Greek Lexicon I had often thumbed with advantage. He appeared to be from 45 to 50 years of age. His manners were exceedingly simple and unostentatious,—the constant characteristics of true greatness. I looked upon him with high respect and veneration. He is ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... some day arraying my manly form in a scarlet jacket and wearing a sword, I ought to put it on with my mathematics, which are not my forte, you know. So now I'm drawing circles and triangles at every available moment, and my logarithm tables are thumbed almost to death. Don't imagine you're the ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... she opened a small handbag, producing therefrom many sheets of paper, a much-thumbed copy of Shakespeare, and a pencil. She was tempted to begin with a description of the particular bit of country upon which she looked, for long ago she had decided upon Bear Flat for the locale of the story. But ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... herds, forty per cent cripples, walking on crutches. Think of it! Two per cent loss, under herd, a sleet over the range for six weeks, against your ten per cent kill on an open range. You must have a slatterly, sore-thumbed lot of men ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... journal from a pile of newspapers and magazines of half a dozen countries, all thumbed and ragged from perusals that had embraced the most trivial advertisements, and all still precious because by their aid one's spirit could fly home. This London journal contained at the bottom of a page, amid ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... page is thumbed no more, E'en Catullus has no choice! There is endless, precious lore, Such as I ne'er knew before, In the music ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... beings, male and female, which were called homunculi. The old philosophers doubted the possibility of this operation, but Paracelsus asserts positively that it can be done. I picked up once for a song on a barrow at London Bridge a little book in German. It was dirty and thumbed, many of the pages were torn, and the binding scarcely held the leaves together. It was called Die Sphinx and was edited by a certain Dr Emil Besetzny. It contained the most extraordinary account I have ever read of certain spirits generated by Johann-Ferdinand, Count von Kueffstein, ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... no surplus furniture nor display nor setting forth of useless things. Every article you see has its use. The little shelf of books, well-thumbed, displays no "Trilby" nor "Quest of the Golden Girl"—not an anachronism any where. Curtains, chairs, tables, and the one or two pictures—all ring true. In the kitchen are washtubs and butter-ladles and bowls; and the lantern hanging by the chimney, with a dipped candle inside, has a carefully ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... lady, her condescending friend, was a grocer's daughter! Niobe, at this precise point of the conversation, bestowed a ghastly grin upon the new allies, and producing from her reticule a well-soiled and much be-thumbed volume (whether of plays, or a novel, I could not discern), commenced perusing it with an avidity apparently unchecked by its disgusting odour, the which powerfully assailed me. I, too, was allowed by my loquacious widow, now that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 472 - Vol. XVII. No. 472., Saturday, January 22, 1831 • Various
... Affairs of a Bibliomaniac"—was written in a room to which many a box stall is palatial, and his sole library was a dilapidated edition of Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Cruden's "Concordance of the Bible," and a well-thumbed copy of the King James version of the Bible. He detested the revised version. The genius of this man at this time did not depend on scholarship or surroundings, but on the companionship of his fellows and the unconventionality ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... froze) while he illustrated a point by reference to the much-thumbed pages. He was very keen, and not very articulate. I knew just enough to be an intelligent listener, and, though hungry, was delighted to hear ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... was back in the Sunday School of his boyhood. He smelled again that polite stuffiness to be found only in church parlors; he recalled the case of drab Sunday School books: "Hetty, a Humble Heroine" and "Josephus, a Lad of Palestine;" he thumbed once more the high-colored text-cards which no boy wanted but no boy liked to throw away, because they were somehow sacred; he was tortured by the stumbling rote of thirty-five years ago, as in the vast Zenith ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... diphtheria. As for clothing, he had nothing to offer. The secrets of his outward appearance were known to him alone, but they were of a nature to discourage the hope of raising money on coat or trousers. A few well-thumbed volumes of Russian authors could not be expected to find a brilliant sale in Munich at a moment's notice. He looked about, and he saw that there was nothing, and he turned ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... a hurry." She thumbed the telephone-book swiftly in search of her number, but young Wharton was not ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... a number of English bank-notes for one hundred pounds, and flourished them about and thumbed them over, and laughed above them with drunken cunning and triumph. A man lounged by us this minute, and took such special notice of us both that I was compelled to notice him. He was a swarthy bearded fellow in ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... that I shall be able to sail a ship through distant seas as well as Drake or Cavendish, or Sir Martin Frobisher, or Sir Richard Grenville, or the great Christopher Columbus himself,—ay, and maybe to imitate their gallant deeds," he continued, holding up a small well-thumbed volume. "I have not made as much progress this morning as I expected to do, for I have ever and anon been watching yonder fine ship, which has long been in sight, striving to beat down Channel against this light westerly breeze, but for some time past ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... table and sometimes a home-made chair or two, though usually chests in which clothing and furs are stored are utilized also as seats. A closet built at one side holds the meager supply of dishes. On a mantelshelf the clock ticks, if the cabin boasts one, and by its side rests a well-thumbed Bible. ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... precise circumstances, would have paralyzed the average person. It didn't quite paralyze Mihul. She dropped forward, doubled up and struggling for breath, but already twisting around toward Trigger. Trigger stepped across her, picked up the Denton, shifted its setting, thumbed it to twelve-hour stunner max, and let Mihul have ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... not many—perhaps ten or a dozen. There was a volume of Shakespeare's plays, an "Ivanhoe," a much-thumbed "Lady of the Lake," a book of miscellaneous poems, a coverless "Tennyson," a dilapidated "Little Lord Fauntleroy," and two or three books of ancient and medieval history. But, though Mrs. Carew looked carefully through ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... return hereafter to the character of Richard II in speaking of Henry VI. There is only one passage more, the description of his entrance into London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote here, if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by rote, so praised and painted; but its beauty surmounts all ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... allowed the jackies in their amusements. With boxing, broadsword, and single-stick play, drill and skylarking, the hours of daylight were whiled away; and by night the men off duty would gather about the forecastle lantern to play with greasy, well-thumbed cards, or warble tender ditties to black-eyed Susans far across the Atlantic. Patriotic melodies formed no small part of Jack's musical repertoire. Of these, this one, written by a landsman, was for a long time popular among the tuneful souls of the forecastle, ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... terribly logical. In his cabin—a comfortable room with a fine big stove—he had a picture of his wife and daughters, all very rigid and uncomfortable. He also had three books. They included neither Burns nor Scott. One was the Bible, thumbed by his grandfather and his father till the paper had worn yellow and thin at the sides. The second, I am sorry to say, was called The Beautiful White Devil. The third was an odd volume of Froude in the Everyman edition. It dealt with ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... examination and criticism, plant them out. I must not omit to speak of the V.A.A.s' distribution of moral and economic diaries of the type already referred to. The villagers, in the spirit of boy-scoutism, are "advised to do one good thing in a day." I saw several of these diaries, well thumbed by their authors after having been laboured at for a year. One young farmer noted down on the space for January 2 that he said his prayers and then went daikon[24] pulling, and that daikon pulling (like our mangold ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the Native Son from the window, where he had been studying the well-thumbed pamphlet containing the homestead law. "If we want to play dead safe on this, we all better quit the outfit before we go. Call for our time. I don't like the way some ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... the house into the garden, and took my way toward the river. I passed an arbor in which Stella and I had loved to sit and watch the stream, and talk and read Miss Austen's novels. Stella was there now, with a well-thumbed copy of "Pride ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... perfectly well-bred and even kindly manner of the stranger forbade close intimacy. He was a most regular attendant at church, not only on Sundays, but at the weekly-prayer meetings and occasional festivals, and the missionary noticed that his Bible looked as if it were a well-thumbed one. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... me. They could read, and write, and cypher. They were little farmers, and gardeners, and seamstresses, and housewives. Nor had their religious and moral training been neglected. The good Book lay well thumbed and dogeared on the kitchen shelf. The sound of the "church-going bell" had never been heard by those children, but every Sunday the mother gathered them about her, and they read together from the New Testament. "It is ten years," said the matron, "since I have seen a church. I ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... his long carving-knife and poised himself for a blow at President Hutchinson's back. I simply pressed the little silver stud on my belt, the Krupp-Tatta popped obediently out of the holster into my open hand. I thumbed off the safety and swung up; when my sights closed on the rising hand that held ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... of the dreams that most of us cultivate about old age. I, too, look forward to a cottage under the high beech woods, to a well-thumbed Boswell, and to a garden where I shall mulch my rose-trees and watch the buds coming with as rich a satisfaction as any that the hot battle of the day has given me. But there is another thing I shall ask for. On the lower shelf of the bookcase, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... "I know all that. I was just ribbing the bat-snatcher here." He thumbed a cigarette out of his tunic, touched his lighter to it. He frowned, stared at the lighter, tried it again. "It doesn't work. Damn it!" he barked explosively, "I don't ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... Betty Sheridan, for another scornful time, was rereading the well-thumbed copy of the Sentinel, her fine back arched like a prize cat's, George Remington in his small mahogany office adjoining, neck low and heels high, was codifying, over and over again, the small planks of his platform, stuffing the knot holes which afforded peeps ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... I was one happy man, and I thanked that feller as I thumbed over the bills, but when I got up to a hundred and seventy I begun to feel queer. Looked like I'd made good money on ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... whistled through the streets, it stole into the firesides, it clinked glasses in bar-rooms, it lifted the gray hairs of our wise men in conventions, it thrilled through the lectures in college halls, it rustled the thumbed book leaves of the schoolrooms. This wind blew upon all vanes of all the churches of the country and turned them one way, — toward war. It blew, and shook out as if by magic a flag whose device was unknown to soldier or sailor before, but whose every ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... The well-thumbed books in the village library she had read, as well as those in the possession of her aunt. She had tried needlework, problems of patience, and the translation of a few chapters of an Italian novel into English in order to occupy ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... interested me, but these extracts from the two great English poets, though there were many things in them that I did not well understand, I read again and again, with increasing pleasure at every perusal, till I had nearly committed them to memory, and almost thumbed the old book into nonenity. But of all the books that I read at this period, there was none that went to my heart like Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress.' I read it and re-read it night and day; I took it to bed with me and hugged it to my bosom while I slept; every different edition that I could ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... it meant, generally. The springs of all his inkpots got critically tested, pencils got twisted in and out till they refused to twist again, desks got ransacked, and their contents mixed in glorious and hopeless confusion, photographs got thumbed, books got dog- eared; and the sole profit to the honest merchant was the healthy exercise of putting everything tidy after his visitors had left, and the satisfaction of expressing his feelings in language strictly selected from ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... liberal arts people but tend not to talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves and shelves of well-thumbed books ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... drifted towards Jim and Aurora several times during the evening, and he thumbed his chin in a troubled way. He had been thinking it was almost time to try fresh fields; but it was not going to be so easy a matter to shift as ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... that had welcomed, in steady measure, every newcomer to the family, that had ticked the solemn requiem of the dead, and had kept company with the watcher at the bedside. There were the big, restful beds and the old, open fireplace, and the old family Bible, thumbed with the fingers of hands long since still, and wet with the tears of eyes long since closed, holding the simple annals of the family and the heart and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Senator Kerotski thumbed his chin morosely. "You're probably right. Apparently, once those hunches come to a precog, they get everything in a flash and then they can't get another thing—ever. I wish we could get our hands on one who was halfway ...
— Fifty Per Cent Prophet • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Lebe was only a girls' teacher, and nobody would pay much for teaching girls. But lean and rusty as he was, the rebbe's pupils regarded him with entire respect, and followed his pointer with earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet, or the thumbed ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... dinginess, perhaps, there is nothing to equal a London office, with its floors strewed with newspapers from all parts of the world, parliamentary reports, and its shelves creaking under books of all sorts, thumbed to the last extremity. Notwithstanding these appearances, however, there is discipline—there is real order in the apparent disorder of things. Those newspapers that are lying in heaps have to be accurately filed; those books of reference ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... an envelope of loose papers. He laid some of them on my desk and thumbed a few others with an ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... of crockery. These latter necessaries hung upon the walls, which, in that portion of the establishment devoted to the lady of the caravan, were ornamented with such gayer and lighter decorations as a triangle and a couple of well-thumbed tambourines. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of familiarity, glanced at a new magazine, and then sat down at the desk and picked up a book she had never noticed before. She was surprised to find it a copy of "Society and Solitude" that did not match the well-thumbed set of Emerson—one of the few "sets" Ware owned. She passed her hand over the green covers, that were well worn and scratched in places. The fact that the minister boasted in his humorous way of never wasting money on bindings caused Sylvia to examine this volume with ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... by Rousseau, and in his library was a well-thumbed copy of the "Social Contract." marked and re- marked on page and margin. Paine and Jefferson were the only men connected with the strenuous times of Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six who had a distinct literary ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... threw down the pack, and picked up his hand. His suspicious eyes never rose above the level of the faces at the table; but when he had thumbed his cards and looked from one to the other of the remaining players to read the weather-signals, he perceived on Scott's face an unwonted expression, and looked to where the scout's gaze was turned for an explanation of ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... of Asmodeus, that well-gloved right hand would have been revealed as resting upon the handle of a heavy revolver, and the contents of the tourist-looking portmanteau been known as some thirty-eight thousand dollars in well-thumbed currency and greasy checks ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... should like to know what influenced him." All women were more or less suspicious, he reflected, and some of them were highly intuitive; still, he could not believe that this was all Willis Marsh's doing. As he mused he idly thumbed the pages of a magazine. He was about to lay it down when his eye caught a well-known face, and he started, then glanced at the date of issue. It was a duplicate of that copy which had affected him so deeply in Cherry's house at Kalvik. ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... vengeance, for to him does it belong," exclaimed the convict, drawing a dirty looking and well-thumbed Testament from his pocket, and turning over leaf after leaf as though seeking for ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... returned his friend in a measured voice, "I use the word impotent in the meaning attached to it in Holy Writ, and as my beloved and well-thumbed Thesaurus uses it: impotent, powerless, unarmed, weaponless, paralytic, crippled, inoperative, ineffectual, inadequate. Think of the strong man bound for a lifetime, Goliath—of a dumb and palsied genius gazing out ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Tamar and little Margery good-night, and the sleepy little handmaid stumped off to her bed; and white old Tamar, who had not spoken so much for a month before, put on her solemn round spectacles, and by her dipt candle read her chapter in the ponderous Bible she had thumbed so well, and her white lips told over the words as she read ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... just mentioned, no unique incidents distinguished our voyage. I saw little of the captain. He was at work. In the library I often found books he had left open, especially books on natural history. He had thumbed through my work on the great ocean depths, and the margins were covered with his notes, which sometimes contradicted my theories and formulations. But the captain remained content with this method of refining my work, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Aurelia led forward little Eugene in a tailed red coat, long-breasted buff waistcoat, buff tights and knitted stockings, with a deep frilled collar under the flowing locks on his shoulders, in curls which emulated a wig. She had been helping him to prepare "his tasks" from the well-thumbed but strongly-bound books which had served poor Archie before him. They were deposited on the window-seat to wait till the bowls of bread and milk were discussed, since tea and coffee were only a special afternoon treat not considered as wholesome for children; so that Aurelia ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eye the Prime Minister thumbed his notes. He spoke of falling revenue, stagnation of trade, strikes, and the increase of violence. Police had actually been killed and the riot leaders were on trial. Presently he came ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... were no silver utensils any more in the house of Glenwarlock; years ago the last of them had vanished—and retired to a wooden chair at the end of the hearth, under the lamp that hung on the wall. But on his way he had taken from a shelf an old, much-thumbed folio which Mr. Simon had lent him—the journal of George Fox, and the panorama which then for a while kept passing before his mind's eye, was not a little different from that passing before Lord Mergwain's. What a study to a spirit able to watch the unrolling ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... in the scheme,—that is, never when the colonel was about. As the weeks rolled by and one combination after the other failed, and the well-thumbed bundle of papers in the big blue envelope was returned with various comments. "In view of our present financial engagements we are unable to undertake your very attractive railroad scheme," or the more curt "Not suited ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... she had kept for seven years. Many of the pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial "I am going to keep a diary for my children." Yet as she thumbed over the pages the eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time—in 1908, when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale—she had been flattered because "Touch down" ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... old Jonas Evans, now a sergeant of militia, was quietly reading his well-thumbed Bible, while others around him were shuffling a greasy pack of cards, and filling the air with reeking tobacco-smoke and strange soldiers' oaths. When a temporary lull, in the somewhat tumultuous variety of noises occurred, ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... verse, though I turned away my eyes as quickly as possible; that verse, to the best of my memory, ran thus: "Say, lovely Lesbia, when thy swain." Upon the ground lay a box of patches, a periwig, and two or three well thumbed books of songs. Such was the reception-room of Beau Fielding, one indifferently well calculated to exhibit the propensities of a man, half bully, half fribble; a poet, a fop, a fighter, a beauty, a walking museum of all odd humours, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Haven't I? Even when I was a little girl, and you were a big boy, you seemed to find something in me which made it worth while for you to leave the other big boys and stay with me and talk about my books. Will I ever forget how you read some of them aloud to me? I never open now my thumbed little copy of 'Cranford' without hearing your laughing voice stumbling over the mincing phrases, and as for 'Little Women,' I believe that I worshiped in you ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... the Bible was deposited—a book which, alas! for seven years had not been opened by either of the guilty pair. Having got what she wanted, she sat down by the table, opened the volume at a place well thumbed, and began to read aloud a chapter in the Corinthians, which Thomas Dodds, the more by reason that he had heard it read two hundred and fifty times, knew by heart. This being finished, she turned up a psalm, yea, that very psalm which Janet Dodds had sung every Sunday ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... who sets out in the morning with his well-thumbed Baedeker to examine the curiosities of a foreign town, but I do not follow in his steps; his eagerness after knowledge, his devotion to duty, compel my respect, but excite me to no imitation. I ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... The Esquimau would not exchange his blinding waste of snow and dark fields of water for the luxuriance of tropic vegetation. Why should we exchange the glories of the land we live in for the footworn and sight-worn, the thumbed and fingered beauties of other lands? If we desire novelty and adventure, seek it in the unexplored regions of the great Northwest; if we crave grandeur, visit the Yellowstone and the fastnesses of the Rockies; if we wish the sublime, gaze in the mighty chasm of the Canon of the Colorado, where ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... helluo librorum, and up to the close of a busy, laborious life, was a keen student and admirer of the ancient classical literature of his honourable profession. When an old man, it was no uncommon sight to see him whiling away a leisure hour with a well-thumbed Greek copy of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates for his sofa companion. In a home so graced by all the amenities of lettered and scientific tastes, the subject of these remarks could not but enjoy, when a youth, many and great educational advantages. The tutorial shortcomings, ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and songs as true to Ireland as ever MacNeill's or Conyngham's were to Scotland; and firmly do we hope to see with every second lad in Ireland a volume of honest, noble, Irish ballads, as well thumbed as a Lowland Burns or a French Beranger, and sweetly shall yet come to us from every milking-field and harvest-home songs not too proudly joined to the sweetest ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... studying her part of Elizabetta in the opera of Roberto Devereux, which she is to bring out in Havana, but the creaking of the Norma is sadly at variance with harmony. A pale German youth, in dressing-gown and slippers, is studying Schiller. An ingenious youngster is carefully conning a well-thumbed note, which looks like a milliner's girl's last billet-doux. The little possede is burning brown paper within an inch of the curtains of a state-room, while the steward is dragging it from him. Others are gradually dropping into their berths, like ripe ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... Phebe reached home again he was more like his former self. He asked her many questions about the sea, which he had never seen, and told her what he had been doing while she was away. An old, well-thumbed translation of Plato's Dialogues was lying on the carved dresser behind him, in which he had been reading every night. Instead ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... rose, went jingling to her, thumbed a strand of her bright hair, touched her soft cheek with his fingers, which smelled of leather and horses. Grasping her by the elbow, he led ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... once uttered the identical sentiments being voiced by these serfs of the coal seams. Harvey Trueman has been a deep student of the teachings of that convention. On the shelves of his library are the well-thumbed writings of Washington and the Adamses and Thomas Jefferson. He is a firm believer of the doctrines enunciated at Faneuil Hall, ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... the stability of their national bankers. It was no use drawing invidious comparisons between a weighty glittering guinea, fresh started from the mint of Mammon, and the homely unpretending well-thumbed issue of the North; it was no use hinting that a system which professed to dispense with bullion must of necessity be a mere illusion, which would go down with the first blast of misfortune, as easily as its fragile notes could ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Procureur of the Republic, Lascoux, who transmitted them to the Colonel President. The Commission summoned the accused to appear. The accused himself was his own bill of indictment. They searched him, that is to say, they "thumbed" him. The accusing document was short. Two or three lines. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... and many a time have I seen him under the orchard trees following close at the heels of the grunting beast while reading his office. His old breviary, like his soutane, is very much the worse for wear, the leaves having been thumbed nearly to the colour of chocolate; but if he had a new one now, he would find it hard to believe that it had the same virtue as the other. Notwithstanding his years, he can do harder work than watching a pig. I have seen him haymaking and reaping, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the Chronicles, but he knew the families of Rehoboth better. These latter were engraved on the palms of his hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart. As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt. Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an account on the fly-sheet of the Bible, and seemed satisfied when he discovered that his illness would not involve ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... a hundred singers are called upon to execute a florid piece of music which many have never seen nor heard; the accompaniment is played at sight from a mere figured bass, on a tumble-down instrument two hundred years old, and the singers, both the soloists and the chorus, sing from thumbed bits of manuscript parts written in old-fashioned characters on paper often green with age. No one has ever denied the extraordinary musical facility of Italians, but if the outside world knew how Italian church music is performed it would be ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... thumbed the letters over dumbly, spelling out a long word here and there or scrutinizing some obscure handwriting curiously, as if it were Chinese, or an Indian sign on a rock. Then, shoving back his chair, he watched Hardy's face as he ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... fascinated ear the version seemed the only possible one. The secret was that Sir George laid hold of the kernel of a subject, and worked outwards—an expositor, not a controversialist. When evening waned he would turn to Epictetus, and then to a well-thumbed New Testament. It was the ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... long ago, when he took his abilities for granted. Now he was getting old enough to have to verify them. He thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, then picked up the glove and put it ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... his pocket a much-thumbed, crudely drawn map and spread it out on the table. How he obtained it, the boys never learned exactly, but they heard later that a treacherous attendant of the ivory dealer had sold it to him for a ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... was missing! Half a dozen times he thumbed the letters in the packages over before he would admit that the one for which he ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to get ready, as he intended to go a considerable distance that day, and he wished to reach a particular spot before the heat of noon. So Martin and Barney despatched breakfast in as short a time as possible, and the hermit read them a chapter out of his large and well-thumbed Bible, after which they equipped themselves for ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... the required sum. The native thumbed it, pocketed it, lifted his coat from a nail behind the door and started across the ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... have been born under the same roof, sucked the same milk, conned the same horn-book, thumbed the same Testament, together:—for we have been more ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... see—" He thumbed the book for a while, murmuring words which I could not catch; then thrust it behind his back with a finger between its pages, straightened himself up, ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... They were little wooden drums, covered round the sides with leather, and fitted vertically in niches in the walls.[27] A spindle running through the centre, enabled them to revolve at the slightest push. They were generally in rows of eight and ten, and well thumbed and worn they looked, but others of larger dimensions were placed by themselves, decorated with the words "Um mani panee," in the Lanza ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... recall to mind the face of its good conductor, nor of any of his scholars; but I have before me a strong general image of the interior of his establishment. I remember the reverence with which I was wont to carry to his seat a well-thumbed duodecimo, the History of Greece by Oliver Goldsmith. I remember the mental agonies I endured in attempting to master the art and mystery of penmanship; a craft in which, alas, I remained too short a time under Mr. R—— ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... songs, Simple and beautiful as Truth and Nature, Of him whose whitened locks on Rydal Mount Are lifted yet by morning breezes blowing From the green hills, immortal in his lays. And for myself, obedient to her wish, I searched our landlord's proffered library,— A well-thumbed Bunyan, with its nice wood pictures Of scaly fiends and angels not unlike them; Watts' unmelodious psalms; Astrology's Last home, a musty pile of almanacs, And an old chronicle of border wars And Indian history. And, as I read A story of the marriage of the Chief Of Saugus to the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... parade. Well, let me see," he thumbed through the clipboard, "I guess there's always room for a few laughs. ...
— Martian V.F.W. • G.L. Vandenburg
... one window, fitted with small diamond-shaped panes in heavy wood-work, through which poured a broad, but subdued, stream of light. On one side of the window was an ancient armoire, containing the Dominie's library, not gilt and lettered but well thumbed and worn. On the other his huge chest of drawers, on which lay, alas! for the benefit of the rising generations, a new birch rod, of large dimensions. The table was in the centre of the room, and the ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... shriek. Yet he longed to hear something stir. Oh! for the stamp of a horse from the stable or the low of a cow from the byre! But they were all under the brownie's spell, and he was coming—toeless feet, and thumbed but fingerless hands! as if he was made with stockings, and hum'le mittens! Was it the want of toes that made him able to come and go so quietly?—Another hour crept by; when lo, a mighty sun-trumpet blew in the throat of the black cock! Fergus sprang to his feet with the start it gave him—but ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... the baffled, fighting and disordered others, for whom nothing that they can see with their mortal eyes is enough, and who'll be restless all their days with their queer little maps and their mysterious, thumbed directions to some island or other that they'll never reach and never even ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... claims on our veneration too frequently forgotten, not because I desire to dim the fame of his eminent successor. Few of the present generation of geologists have read Playfair's "Illustrations," fewer still the original "Theory of the Earth;" the more is the pity; but which of us has not thumbed every page of the "Principles of Geology?" I think that he who writes fairly the history of his own progress in geological thought, will not be able to separate his debt to Hutton from his obligations to Lyell; and the history of ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the Wizard of the North was wont to gather, and the Hunchback is accordingly 'sensational.' It has in fact been called extravagant—yes, forced and unnatural. Even ordinary readers were apt to say as much of it. We well remember meeting many years ago in a well-thumbed circulating-library copy of the Hunchback of Notre Dame the following doggerel on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... was a rag carpet on the floor; a pine bureau neatly varnished; a half dozen plain but whole chairs; a bedstead, upon which the bedding was scrupulously neat; a pine table, upon which lay a much-thumbed leather-bound family Bible and a few religious books; and between the windows, over the bureau, hung a common engraving of Christ upon the Cross. The windows themselves looked upon the back of the ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... seated at a corner of the dresser, deeply engrossed in the intricacies of the mysterious game of forty-five, before which the mind of the dull Saxon remains bewildered in hopeless incapacity. Presently the well-thumbed pack is laid aside, and one of the constables addresses himself to the task of closing and barring up the shutters, thus shutting out all chance of any present being picked off by a shot through the window, as was done when Miss Gardiner was wounded under ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... faded carpet, a grandfather's clock and two eighteenth century prints of Petrograd. All the rooms were square, so Russian with their placid family portraits, their old tables and chairs, not beautiful save for their fidelity, and old thumbed editions of Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov in the bookshelves. Clocks, old slow clocks, all telling different time, all over the house. The house was very neat, but in odd corners there were all those odd family things that Russians collect, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... pulled two large armfuls of good hay, which she spread neatly on the fire-bars. Next, journey by journey, passing Miss Fowler's white face at the morning-room window each time, she brought down in the towel-covered clothes-basket, on the wheel-barrow, thumbed and used Hentys, Marryats, Levers, Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices, schoolbooks, and atlases, unrelated piles of the Motor Cyclist, the Light Car, and catalogues of Olympia Exhibitions; the remnants of a fleet of sailing-ships ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... a carriage, with ladies for companions, at their command? The coach had come down the hill on purpose to conduct Messieurs les voyageurs; how did these gentlemen suppose a pere de famille was to make his living if the fashion of walking came in? And the rusty red vest was thumbed by the gnarled hand of the father, who was also an orator; and a high-peaked hat swept the ground before the hard-hearted gentlemen. All the tragedy of the situation had come about from the fact that the tourists, also, had gotten themselves up in costume. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... packet from my pocket, and turned the pages of them again as I had turned them—aye, fifty times—in the days which had passed. Thumbed and dirty as they were (for a seaman's pocket isn't lined with silk); thumbed and dirty, I say, and crumpled out of shape, they were the first bit of Ruth Bellenden's writing that ever I called my own, and precious to me beyond ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... it is to be at home," she said, as the sunlight, creeping around the room, shone on the green cover of a much-thumbed book of French fairy-tales, and then slanted off to touch the edge of a blue and gold Tennyson; "how good it ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... madame, and from such books as your eyes furnish." And for all her air of mockery, I was, as I remember, much pleased with this speech. It had come from some well-thumbed romance, I doubt not. I was always an eager reader of such ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... try to describe the last musical party at which we assisted. A scramble amid piles of unbound music; the right cahier found, snatched up, and opened at the well-thumbed solo with which she has already contended for many a long hour, and now hopes to execute for our applause. Alas! the piano sounds as if it had the pip; the paralytic keys halt, and stammer, and tremble, or else run into each other like ink ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... had tightened at Porter's tone when he began, but he had relaxed by the time the millionaire had finished, and was even managing to look smugly tolerant. Elshawe had thumbed the button on his minirecorder when the conversation had begun, and he was chuckling mentally at the thought of what was going down on the thin, magnetite-impregnated, plastic thread that was hissing ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... for their rarity or their early dates, for their previous ownership or the beauty of their binding—for any reason except the one that makes them books rather than curiosities. These collections are not libraries in the intellectual or the literary sense. Three well thumbed volumes in the attic of one who loves them are a better library for him than those on which Pierpont Morgan spent ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... up his camping gear at all, he headed for the road, thumbed a ride to Jarviston, where he arrived before eight o'clock. Somebody had started ringing ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... ink had been expressly forbidden, the only book in the house was a thumbed and torn primer, but Dame Joan, after much grumbling at fine ladies' whims, vouchsafed to send up a distaff, some wool, a piece of unbleached linen, and a ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge |
