Quotes4study

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle, all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered with horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! There was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with the plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. A heap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower part--such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. The blood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a large pool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spot which is still pointed out.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

28:7. It shall have the two edges joined in the top on both sides, that they may be closed together.

THE BOOK OF EXODUS     OLD TESTAMENT

"Lord Robert St. Simon," announced our page-boy, throwing open the door. A gentleman entered, with a pleasant, cultured face, high-nosed and pale, with something perhaps of petulance about the mouth, and with the steady, well-opened eye of a man whose pleasant lot it had ever been to command and to be obeyed. His manner was brisk, and yet his general appearance gave an undue impression of age, for he had a slight forward stoop and a little bend of the knees as he walked. His hair, too, as he swept off his very curly-brimmed hat, was grizzled round the edges and thin upon the top. As to his dress, it was careful to the verge of foppishness, with high collar, black frock-coat, white waistcoat, yellow gloves, patent-leather shoes, and light-coloured gaiters. He advanced slowly into the room, turning his head from left to right, and swinging in his right hand the cord which held his golden eyeglasses.

Arthur Conan Doyle     The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"It is simplicity itself," said he; "my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession."

Arthur Conan Doyle     The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

My friend rose lazily from his armchair and stood with his hands in the pockets of his dressing-gown, looking over my shoulder. It was a bright, crisp February morning, and the snow of the day before still lay deep upon the ground, shimmering brightly in the wintry sun. Down the centre of Baker Street it had been ploughed into a brown crumbly band by the traffic, but at either side and on the heaped-up edges of the foot-paths it still lay as white as when it fell. The grey pavement had been cleaned and scraped, but was still dangerously slippery, so that there were fewer passengers than usual. Indeed, from the direction of the Metropolitan Station no one was coming save the single gentleman whose eccentric conduct had drawn my attention.

Arthur Conan Doyle     The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet heal completely only as the result of a vital force from within.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T., a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of France to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime, had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune, some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a meagre income which had survived no one knew how.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

And while Gregor gushed out these words, hardly knowing what he was saying, he made his way over to the chest of drawers - this was easily done, probably because of the practise he had already had in bed - where he now tried to get himself upright. He really did want to open the door, really did want to let them see him and to speak with the chief clerk; the others were being so insistent, and he was curious to learn what they would say when they caught sight of him. If they were shocked then it would no longer be Gregor's responsibility and he could rest. If, however, they took everything calmly he would still have no reason to be upset, and if he hurried he really could be at the station for eight o'clock. The first few times he tried to climb up on the smooth chest of drawers he just slid down again, but he finally gave himself one last swing and stood there upright; the lower part of his body was in serious pain but he no longer gave any attention to it. Now he let himself fall against the back of a nearby chair and held tightly to the edges of it with his little legs. By now he had also calmed down, and kept quiet so that he could listen to what the chief clerk was saying.

Franz Kafka     Metamorphosis

Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes war. It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle, from the lie of yesterday. It, the future, behaves like the past. It, pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though Utopia had no longer any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade has two edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

"You do well to boast of it," said Andrea, who, without becoming angry, as Caderousse feared, at this new extortion, quietly resigned the ring. Caderousse looked so closely at it that Andrea well knew that he was examining to see if all the edges were perfect.

Alexandre Dumas, Pere     The Count of Monte Cristo

"Oh, no, for when I had taken out the thread I required, I hemmed the edges over again."

Alexandre Dumas, Pere     The Count of Monte Cristo

We had agreed to descend the Rhine in a boat from Strasbourg to Rotterdam, whence we might take shipping for London. During this voyage we passed many willowy islands and saw several beautiful towns. We stayed a day at Mannheim, and on the fifth from our departure from Strasbourg, arrived at Mainz. The course of the Rhine below Mainz becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards with green sloping banks and a meandering river and populous towns occupy the scene.

Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley     Frankenstein

There were bayonets at the edges of the room, bayonets pricking up among the delegates; the Military Revolutionary Committee was arming everybody, Bolshevism was arming for the decisive battle with Kerensky, the sound of whose trumpets came up the south-west wind.... In the meanwhile nobody went home; on the contrary hundreds of newcomers filtered in, filling the great room solid with stern-faced soldiers and workmen who stood for hours and hours, indefatigably intent. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and human breathing, and the smell of coarse clothes and sweat.

John Reed     Ten Days That Shook the World

Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on; I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a slumberous offence to the company's eyesight, and assisted me up to bed with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned saving on exceptional occasions.

Charles Dickens     Great Expectations

But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens, Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the philosophers in my library gilded on the edges."

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon the castus. In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet; you think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet that one walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances; so, when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea is that now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The ruffian has two heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne, and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When a man has no longer anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime; he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says un reguise.--What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The convict calls himself a fagot.--And finally, what name do malefactors give to their prison? The college. A whole penitentiary system can be evolved from that word.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

In theoretical investigations these problems are usually treated as of two dimensions only, everything being referred to the plane passing through the luminous point and perpendicular to the diffracting edges, supposed to be straight and parallel. In strictness this idea is appropriate only when the source is a luminous line, emitting cylindrical waves, such as might be obtained from a luminous point with the aid of a cylindrical lens. When, in order to apply Huygens's principle, the wave is supposed to be broken up, the phase is the same at every element of the surface of resolution which lies upon a line perpendicular to the plane of reference, and thus the effect of the whole line, or rather infinitesimal strip, is related in a constant manner to that of the element which lies in the plane of reference, and may be considered to be represented thereby. The same method of representation is applicable to spherical waves, issuing from a _point_, if the radius of curvature be large; for, although there is variation of phase along the length of the infinitesimal strip, the whole effect depends practically upon that of the central parts where the phase is sensibly constant.[10] Entry: 10

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 4 "Diameter" to "Dinarchus"     1910-1911

The new England of the 16th century breaks with the past in most of its fashions. Never again does an Englishman return to the piked shoes. High fashion under Henry VIII. is all for broad toes, so broad that the sumptuary laws, from banning long toes, swing about to condemn excess in the new guise. Under Henry VII. the medieval influence is still strong in the body-clothing. A bravely dressed man will go in long hose, cut close to the body, and a short vest under which the shirt is seen at waist and wrist. Over this he will wear the open gown, lined with fur, and cut short as a jacket but having the sleeves hanging below the knee. Such sleeves are commonly slashed open at the sides to allow the forearm to pass through. Shorter false sleeves of this pattern had become popular in the age of Edward IV. Graver men will wear, in place of this short gown, a long one dropping to the broad shoe-toes, the sleeves wide-mouthed (fig. 37). Sometimes it hangs loosely; sometimes it has the girdle with purse and beads. Notaries and scriveners add to the girdle a penner, or pen-case, and a stoppered ink-bottle. Wide hats are found, crowned with huge plumes of feathers, but the characteristic headgear is that made familiar by portraits of Henry VII., a low-crowned cap whose upturned brim is nicked at one side. A few sober men wear coats differing little from the short gown of forty years before. Among ladies the butterfly head-dress and the steeple cap passed out of fashion, and a grave headgear comes in which has been compared with a dog-kennel, a hood-cap thrown over head and shoulders, the front being edged with a broad band which was often enriched with needlework, the ends falling in lappets to the breast. This band is stiffened until the face looks out as from the open gable-end of a house. The gown is simple in form, close-fitting to the body, the cuffs turned up with fur and the skirts long. A girdle is worn loosely drawn below the waist, its long strap letting the metal pendant fall nearly to the feet. Long cloaks, plainly cut, are gathered at the neck with a pair of long cords, like tasselled bell-pulls. While Henry VIII. is spending his father's hoards we have a splendid court, gallantly dressed in new fashions. His own broad figure, in cloth of gold, velvet and damask, plaits, puffs and slashes, stiff with jewels, is well known through scores of portraits, and may stand for the high-water mark of the modes of his age. The Hampton Court picture of the earl of Surrey is characteristic of a great lord's dress of a somewhat soberer style (see fig. 38). The king, proud of his own broad shoulders, set the fashion to accent this breadth, and it will be seen that the earl's figure, leaving out the head and hose, all but fills a perfect square. Such men have the air of playing-card knaves. Surrey's cap is flat, with a rich brooch and a small side-feather. His short doublet of the new style is open in front to show a white shirt covered with black embroidery whose ruffles cover his wrists. His over-garment or jerkin has vast sleeves, rounded, puffed and slashed. Under the doublet are seen wide trunk-breeches. He goes all in scarlet, even to the shoes, which are of moderate size. The girdle carries a sword with the new guard and a dagger of the Renascence art, graced with a vast tassel. All is in the new fashion, nothing recalling the earlier century save the hose and the immodest _braguette_ which, seen in the latter half of the fourteen-hundreds, is defiantly displayed in the dress and armour of this age of Henry VIII. Even the hair follows the new French mode and is cropped close. Other fashionable suits of the time give us the tight doublets, loose upper sleeves and trunk hose as a mass of small slashes and puffs, a fashion which came in from the Germans and Switzers whom Henry saw in the imperial service. Such clothing goes with the shoes whose broad toes are slashed with silk, and the wide and flat caps with slashed edges, bushed with feathers, which headgear was often allowed to hang upon the shoulders by a pair of knotted bonnet-strings, while a skull-cap covered the head. With all this fantasy the dress of simpler folk has little concern, and a man in a plain, short-skirted doublet, with a flat cap, trunk breeches, long hose and plain shoes, has nothing grotesque or unserviceable in his attire. The new sumptuary laws, which were not allowed to become a dead letter, had their influence in restraining middle-class extravagance. No man under a knight's degree was to wear a neck-chain of gold or gilded, or a "garded or pinched shirte." Brooches of goldsmith's work were for none below a gentleman. Women whose husbands could not afford to maintain a light horse for the king's service had no business with gowns or petticoats of silk, chains of gold, French hoods, or bonnets of velvet. This French hood is the small bonnet, two of whose many forms may be seen in the best-known portraits of Mary of England and Mary, queen of Scots--a cap stiffened with wires. With its introduction the fashionable skirt began to lose its graceful folds and to spread stiffly outward in straight lines from the tight-laced waist, the front being open to show a petticoat as stiff and enriched as the skirt. The neck of the gown, cut low and square, showed the _partlet_ of fine linen pleated to the neck. In the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most men and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age. In the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder has, as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so lavishly upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman's gown and hood and the man's doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are plain enough, even the shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary, indeed, added to the statute book more stringent laws against display of rich apparel, laws that would fine even a gentleman of under £20 a year if silk were found in his cap or shoe. Small ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and most wrists are ruffled. The ruff, which began simply enough in the first half of this century as a little cambric collar with a goffered edge, is for all of us the distinguishing note of Elizabethan dress. It grew wide and flapping, therefore it was stiffened upon wires and spread from a concealed frame, row on row of ruffs being added one above the other until the wearer, man or woman, seemed to carry the head in a cambric charger. Starch, cursed as a devilish liquor by the new Puritan, gave it help, and English dress acquired a deformity which can only be compared with the great farthingale or with the last follies of the wig. The skirt of a woman of fashion, which had already begun to jut from the waist, was drawn out before the end of Elizabeth's reign at right angles from the waist until the dame had that air of standing within a great drum which Sir Roger de Coverley remarked in the portrait of an ancestress. Elizabeth herself, long-waisted and of meagre body, set the fashions of her court, other women pinching their waists into the long and straight stomacher ending in a peak before. She herself followed her father's taste in ornament, and on great days was set about like the Madonna of a popular shrine with decorations of all kinds, patterns in pearl, quiltings, slashings, puffings and broidery, tassels and rich buttons. Among men the important change is the disappearance of the last of the long hose, all men taking to trunk-hose and nether-stocks or stockings, while their doublets tend to follow the same long-waisted fashion as the bodices of the women, whose doublets and jerkins, buttoned up the breast, bring the Puritan satirists against them. Of these satirists Philip Stubbes is the best-known, his _Anatomie of Abuses_, published in 1583, being a very wardrobe of Elizabethan fashions, although false or dyed hair, the ruff and its starch, and the ear-rings worn by some women and many men draw his hottest anger. William Harrison sings on a like note about the same time, declaiming especially against the mutability of fashion, declaring that the imported Spanish, French and German guises made it easier to inveigh against such enormities than to describe the English attire with any certainty. For him women were become men, and men transformed into monsters. "Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at home with his fine carsey hosen and a mean slop; his coat, gown and cloak of brown, blue or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or fur and a doublet of sad tawny or black velvet or other comely silk, without such cuts and garish colours as are worn in these days, and never brought in but by the consent of the French, who think themselves the gayest men when they have most diversities of jags and change of colours about them." He adds that "certes of all estates our merchants do least alter their attire ... for albeit that which they wear be very fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth a great piece of the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses." But as for the "younger sort" of citizens' wives, Harrison finds in their attire "all kind of curiosity ... in far greater measure than in women of a higher calling." Entry: FIG

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 4 "Coquelin" to "Costume"     1910-1911