"Niggling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... green and drab, and everything so small. Why, he could walk round the whole enclosure in ten minutes. Geoffrey Barrington was accustomed to country houses in England, with their broad acres and their lavish luxuriance of scent and blossom. This niggling landscape art of the Japanese seemed to him ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... his life at Headquarters. When the expedition to Staten Island was in question, he asked Washington, through Lafayette, to give him the command of a battalion which happened to be without a field-officer. Washington refused, partly from those motives of policy to which he ever showed an almost niggling adherence, but more because he could not spare his most useful aide. Hamilton, who was bursting for action of any sort, retired to his detested little office in angry disappointment. But he was a philosopher. He adjusted himself to the Inevitable, and dismissed the matter from his mind, after ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... 61 s.), are nondescript studies in which no specific sign of Donatello appears. The five winged Putti (Frame 7, No. 40 f.) and the two studies of the Madonna (Frame 7, No. 38 f.) are more Donatellesque, but they show the niggling touch of some draughtsman who tried to make a sketch by mere indications with his pen. There is also a study in brown wash of the Baptistery Magdalen: probably made from, and not for, the statue. The Louvre has an ink sketch (No. 2225, Reynolds and ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... one praises the failures in which he alone discovers all that is lacking in the eyes of the public. He is whimsical to the last degree. His friends have seen him destroy a finished picture because, in his eyes, it looked too smooth. "It is overdone," he would say; "it is niggling work." ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... a man of power, but model like a cursed niggling prude. You're bitten with the new madness. You're the Bryan of art. 'The dear people' is your cry. Damn the people! They don't know a good thing when they see it. Why consider the millions? Consider the few, those who have the taste ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... political ideal, if the victors of to-morrow are not to become the oppressors of the day after. The inspiration and outcome of a reforming movement ought to be freedom and a generous spirit, not niggling restrictions and regulations. ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... not even very much interested, for I was trying to make the trees to look different one from the other, which is an extremely difficult thing: I had not succeeded and I was niggling away. He continued ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... any one who will take the trouble to read a whole volume of the modern Variorum. There has been much editing, much comment, but singularly little criticism of Shakespeare; a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack. The pendulum has swung violently from niggling and insensitive textual quibble to that equally distressing exercise of human ingenuity, idealistic encomium, of which there is a typical example in the opening sentence of Mr Masefield's remarks upon ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Headquarters. When the expedition to Staten Island was in question, he asked Washington, through Lafayette, to give him the command of a battalion which happened to be without a field-officer. Washington refused, partly from those motives of policy to which he ever showed an almost niggling adherence, but more because he could not spare his most useful aide. Hamilton, who was bursting for action of any sort, retired to his detested little office in angry disappointment. But he was a philosopher. He adjusted himself to the Inevitable, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Luckily, I had lashed my desk to my washing-stand, or that would have flown off, as I did off my chair. I don't think I shall know what to make of solid ground under my feet. The rolling and pitching of a ship of this size, with such tall masts, is quite unlike the little niggling sort of work on a steamer—it is the difference between grinding along a bad road in a four-wheeler, and riding well to hounds in a close country on a good hunter. I was horribly tired for about five days, but now I rather like it, and never know whether it blows or not ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon |
