"Thistledown" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... material, utmost delicacy marked the operations of the card. Any real strain must have torn to atoms the fine amber coils in which it ejected the strips of shining sliver. Enormous waste marked the operation. Beneath the machine rose mounds of dust and dirt, and fluff, light as thistledown; while as much was sucked away into the air ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Sun had on a crown Wrought of gilded thistledown, And a scarf of velvet vapor, And a raveled-rainbow gown; And his tinsel-tangled hair, Tossed and lost upon the air, With glossier and ...
— Riley Child-Rhymes • James Whitcomb Riley
... headstrong and independent, and so she must be driven with a tight rein and strong hand, and yet she is so apt to leave at a moment's notice if anything offends her, that she must be driven with a light rein and a hand as light and gentle as a bit of thistledown floating on a zephyr. This is a hard combination to attain. It is like trying to drive a skittish and headstrong horse, densely constructed of lamp-chimneys and window glass, down a rough cobble-stoned ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... in the flowers, Blue sky and floating clouds, Soft Summer air; Bright yellow butterfly, His gauzy wings to try, Floats like the thistledown, Without a care. ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... blue, and the sun so bright, that an eternal summer seemed to reign over this prospect. Thistledown floated round them, enraptured by the serenity, of the ether. The heat danced over the corn, and, pervading all, was a soft, insensible hum, like the murmur of bright minutes holding revel between ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hardly more than a memory. In her fagged and floating mind only one sensation had the weight of reality; it was the bodily burden of her child. But for it she would have felt as rootless as the whiffs of thistledown the wind blew past her. Her child was like a load that held her down, and yet like a hand that pulled her to her feet. She said to herself that she must get up ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the waking state. When I arrived at the bottom of the garden near the beloved little lake, I felt myself rising from the ground like a bird about to take flight. At first I floated aimlessly as thistledown, then I passed over the wall and took a south-west direction, the direction of Oceanica; I had no trace of wings, and I lay on my back in an agony of dizziness and nausea as I travelled with frightful rapidity, with the swiftness of a stone shot from a sling. The stars whirled madly ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... servant, held three horses in the shadow, so close that it was incredible I had not heard their trampling. Now the lovers mounted and were off like thistledown ere ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... oak-leaf hat he had for his crown; His shirt it was by spiders spun; With doublet wove of thistledown, His trousers up with points were done; His stockings, of apple-rind, they tie With eye-lash plucked from his mother's eye, His shoes were made of a mouse's skin, Nicely tann'd ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... and alive with fish of many varieties. Sometimes there floated on the surface of the water Portuguese men-of-war, most beautiful of created things, like iridescent bubbles, with long silken filaments, delicately lined in pink, purple and entrancing blue. Lighter than thistledown, fitted to drift with the merest zephyr, they can nevertheless force their way against a breeze. Harmless as a soap-bubble in appearance, each of them is charged with virulent poison, and when Dick touched one with his hand ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... as these interesting, much more to embalm them in literature, requires some magical touch either in the hand of the author or the heart of the reader. They are the thistledown of literature, creatures of a contemplative idleness as pure as childhood's own, the sun's impartial photography on the film of a rambler's eye; yet in these few pages are condensed some thousands, probably, of Hawthorne's days. The life they depict has been called ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry |
