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Crookedness   Listen
noun
Crookedness  n.  The condition or quality of being crooked; hence, deformity of body or of mind; deviation from moral rectitude; perverseness.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Crookedness" Quotes from Famous Books



... bad. Crookedness in real estate transactions is bad. We don't want to waste our time, however, in feeling worried about it. What we want to do is to show the other fellow that our ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... systematically searched her cabin. Vil Holland, who had watched continually from his notch in the hills. She had been right in the first place, and the others had been wrong. Everybody disliked Bethune, and disliking him, had attributed to him all the crookedness of the hill country, and all the time, under their very noses, Vil Holland was the real plotter—and they liked him! She could see it all, now—how, with Bethune for the scapegoat, he was enabled, unsuspected, to plan and carry out his various schemes, ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx

... that "a true lover never did run a straight course," and the sincerity of present writer's affection is incontestably proved by his apparent crookedness of running, and keeping dark outside the illuminating rays of thy moon-like countenance. The cause is the unforeseen cataclysm of a decree from my family astrologer or dowyboghee, whom I have anxiously consulted upon our joint matrimonial ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... which was invaluable—for, as Lady de Brantefield confidently affirmed, King John of France, and the Black Prince, had sat and supped at it. I marvelled much in silence—for I had been sharply reproved for some observation I had unwittingly made on the littleness and crookedness of a dark, corner-chimneyed nook shown us for the banqueting-room; and I had fallen into complete disgrace for having called the winding staircases, leading to the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... addressing himself to the bottles under the counter, the smeary glasses he breathed upon while wiping with a soiled and odoriferous cloth, that the boss was "bug—plumb bug." Nevertheless, his own understanding of "crookedness" warned him that the man had method, and he was anxious to discover the direction in which it was moving. Therefore he watched Beasley's doings with appreciative eyes, and his interest grew ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... is wicked above all things. The enemy of man is subtle and watchful beyond conception. Instead of being on the way of goodness, I am just finding out the wickedness of my nature, its crookedness, its impurity, its darkness. I want deep humility and forgetfulness of self. I am just emerging out of gross darkness and my sight is but dim, so that my iniquities are not wholly plain to ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... who had become involved in crime, yet were too manly to sanction a crookedness they ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey

... would have surrendered eventually. But the ease with which the stranger made the jump from one to five convinced Ling Foo that there could be no harm in boosting five to ten. If there was a taint of crookedness anywhere, that would be on the other side. Ling Foo knew where the beads were, and he would transfer them for one thousand gold. Smart business, nothing more than that. He had the ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... as any scene in France could show. Little groups of French and Norman and Breton nobles chattered together in their bright silks and fur-tipped mantles, with slender swords dangling from embroidered belts, vying with each other in the length and crookedness of their turned-up shoes. Anglo-Saxons looked on, in long fur-lined cloaks, tight breeches, and leathern hose swathed with bands of many colored cloth. Stern-faced northerners, Poles and Germans, in fur caps and with colored girdles and clumsy shoes, or with ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton

... peaks of pride are leveled, Lifted up the lowly plain, Crookedness made straight, while crudeness Now gives way to ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson

... least part of that image; which image of God, and light of nature, was con-created with man, and was perfect: viz. so perfect as the sphere of humanity and state of innocency did require; there was no sinful darkness, crookedness, or imperfection in it; and whatsoever was evident by, or consonant to this pure and perfect light of nature, in respect either of theory or practice, was doubtless of divine right, because correspondent to that divine law of God's image naturally engraved in Adam's ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London

... aberrations of human nature caused by dull and unpleasant weather. And this is very singular in this humanitarian age, when excuse is found for nearly every moral delinquency in heredity or environment, that the greatest factor of discontent and crookedness, the weather, should be left out of consideration altogether. The relation of crime to the temperature and the humidity of the atmosphere is not taken into account. Yet crime and eccentricity of conduct are very ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... but I haven't ever noticed it. There is plenty of crookedness goes on in the canyon. And no one, Indian or white man, ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm

... humour, or rhyme for poetry, which are the common errors of young people, and have a train of ill consequences. The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness; the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... although the several buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement. And if we consider that nevertheless there have been ...
— A Discourse on Method • Rene Descartes

... Netherlands, he proposed to make another of his great marches, namely into Italy, there to join his friend Prince Eugene in an invasion of France from the south-east. This plan was made impossible by the crookedness of the kings of Prussia and Denmark, and some others of the Allies. Swallowing this disappointment also, as best he might, Marlborough started from the Dyle and advanced on the great and important stronghold of Namur, ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead

... "Crookedness and straightness are in their nature opposite and cannot dwell together more than frost and fire; for one who has become religious, and practises the way of straight behavior, a false and crooked way of speech ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... and now you shall be a man! You have looked for happiness in the wrong direction. Don't you want to go out and do good, enlighten your fellow-men, and be useful? For your clear vision can penetrate the perversion and crookedness which ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg

... be directed, where two sleep in a bed, to change every night, or every week, their sides of the bed; which will prevent their tendency to sleep always on the same side; which is not only liable to produce crookedness, but also to occasion diseases by the internal parts being so long kept in uniform contact as to grow together. For the same reason they should not be allowed to sit always on the same side of the fire or window, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... for granted a natural tendency to crookedness. I don't—I don't. What I take for granted is a natural tendency to straightness, when it gets its way. It doesn't always get it, though, especially in a ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... and fearless face that it was extremely valuable to its owner in concealing a crookedness as resourceful as that of a fox, and a moral cowardice which made him a spineless tool in evil hands. A shock of tumbled red hair over a fighting face added to the appearance of combative strength. The Honorable Asa was conventionally dressed, and his linen was white, but his ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... was written in a remarkably cramped hand, on several very dirty sheets of blue ruled foolscap, folded with much care and crookedness, and fastened with a red wafer which bore the distinct impression of an extremely hard knuckle. It ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne

... remember—both of them—how different everything was when they were young men just entering on life. When Mr. Newberry and Mr. Dick Overend were young, men went into congress from pure patriotism; there was no such thing as graft or crookedness, as they both admitted, in those days; and as for the United States Senate—here their voices were almost hushed in awe—why, when they were ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... axe-grinders, vain nincompoops, honest mediocrities, and the handful who combined honesty with sagacity and sagacity with strength. At beefy luncheon-tables, and in gorgeous, stuffy bars tapestried with Lincrusta-Walton, he had listened to the innumerable tales of the town, in which greed, crookedness, ambition, rectitude, hatred, and sexual love were extraordinarily mixed—the last being by far the smallest ingredient. He liked the town; he revelled in it. It seemed to him splendid in its ineradicable, ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... the inhabited side of the house. Staggering after Magdalen, with the basket of keys in one hand and the candle in the other, old Mazey sorrowfully compared her figure with the straightness of the poplar, and her disposition with the crookedness of Sin, all the way across "Freeze-your-Bones," and all the way upstairs to her own door. Arrived at that destination, he peremptorily refused to give her the candle until he had first seen her safely inside the room. The conditions being complied with, he resigned ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... and keep on trimming me! The work is here and I did it. They know it and I know it. If nobody but myself and my God know, we know. And no official or unofficial crookedness can wipe ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... It is so silly of people—I don't mean you, for you are such a tiny, and couldn't know better—but it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald

... dare," he said thoughtfully. "The crookedness of this place ought to shut off any glow from the outside. Let's go on a little ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory

... disease in children characterized by crookedness of the spine and long bones resulting from scrofula ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... in battle without cunning or stratagem is the best sport. Gambling, however, as a sport, is not so. Those that are respectable never use the language of the Mlechchas, nor do they adopt deceitfulness in their behaviour. War carried on without crookedness and cunning, this is the act of men that are honest. Do not, O Sakuni, playing desperately, win of us that wealth with which according to our abilities, we strive to learn how to benefit the Brahmanas. Even enemies ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... the night before—and it had ended with an ultimatum: "The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook lacked but one thing," she had naively written, "and that one thing was that his crookedness required a leading string to guide it into channels that were worthy of his genius." In a word, SHE would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them—or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... hear a clicking of bottles and a rustling of straw; and then, behold, a veritable fairy issuing from the bowels of the earth, with flushes of red suffusing the ribbed, bewrinkled face, as the old figure straightens its crookedness to carry the dusty bottle securely, steadily, lest the cloudy settling at the bottom should be disturbed. What a merry little feast then began! We had learned where the glasses were kept; we had been busily scouring them while our hostess was below. Then wine and glasses, along ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... unusually good chance to get glimpses of this filthy underworld, even if he does not frequent the squalid quarters of the astrologers. Bushels of mail bring this superstition and mental crookedness to his study, and his material allows him to observe every variety of illogical thought. If a letter comes to his collection which presents itself as a new specimen that ought to be analyzed a little further, nothing is needed but a short word of reply. It will at ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... know how ye done ut," Fallon began. "'Twas th' handiest bit av two-fisted wor-rk Oi iver see'd. 'Tis well ye've had ut out wid Shtromberg. Fer all his crookedness, he's a bether man thin th' boss, an' he'll not be layin' that lickin' up ag'in yez. 'Twas a foight av his own pickin', an' he knows ye've got ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... the class generally held up by the press is one and the same with that already noticed under the preceding head—the criminal. Further, news gatherers are at great pains to ferret out and dole out to the public daily whatever serves to excite, and especially whatever shows the moral crookedness of the Negro, and that the years of freedom already enjoyed by him have simply brought forth a generation of vipers. Too often, from the lowest to the highest court, the records are so manipulated as to show the moral obliquity of the Negro. It is a potent fact that public opinion of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... quiet any longer, John," put in Paul very heatedly. "We thought it a good time to have it out with these fellows for their crookedness." ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... came to me naturally. I inherited it, and if I have excelled in any particular branch it is because of my father's teachings. He was a square sport, and one that had no use for anything that savored of crookedness. There was nothing whatever of the Puritan in his makeup, and from my early youth he allowed me to participate in any sort of game that took my fancy. He had no idea at that time of my ever becoming ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... argument from general consequences, however, does not go down into the depths of things. There is always something morally crooked and inordinate in an action itself, the general consequences whereof are bad. It remains to point out the moral crookedness, inordination, and unreasonableness, that is intrinsic to the act of suicide, apart from its consequences. We find the inordination in this, that suicide is an act falling upon undue matter, being an act destructive of that which the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... boy. In such moods a fellow would like to be everywhere at the same time, ruling, regulating and putting things into order. He feels that he's responsible for everything; and it hurts him to see so much crookedness in the world. I know very well how it is. But you must consider the means and remedies at your disposal. How are you going ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... the style of it. It seemeth to me that nothing is ever done in a straightforward manner any more. Is life full of naught but crookedness and devious windings and turnings? Let me go to the queen openly, I ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison

... right on this. Don't let a lot of foolish people influence you; people who can't ever see any real good in success and who blame everything on luck and crookedness. And Bill ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... "'Bije put his note in the safe? A note promisin' to pay all he'd stole! And left it there where it could be found? Why, that's pretty nigh unbelievable, Mr. Sylvester! He might just as well have confessed his crookedness and be ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln

... Private Detectives," "The Zenith Spiritualist Church, Messages by Rev. Lulu Paughouse," "The International Order of Live Ones, Seattle Wigwam," and "Mme. Lavourie, Sulphur Baths." The dead air of the hallway suggested petty crookedness. Milt felt that he ought to fight somebody but, there being no one to fight, he banged along the flapping boards of the second-floor hallway to the ground-glass door of Silberfarb the Society Tailor, who was also, as an afterthought on a straggly placard, "Pressng ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... decision and yet of accommodation, and it seemed to our friend that a young artist would work none the worse for having her seated at his side reading Chenier's iambics. They were newly married, he supposed, and evidently their path of life had none of the mocking crookedness of some others. They asked little; but what need to ask more than such quiet summer days by a shady stream, with a comrade all amiability, to say nothing of art and books and a wide unmenaced horizon? To spend such a morning, to stroll back to dinner in the red-tiled ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James

... best of Brahmanas, Sacrifices, Gift, Asceticism, the Vedas, and Truth—these five holy things are ever present in conduct that is called virtuous. Having subjugated lust and wrath, pride, avarice, and crookedness, they that take pleasure in virtue because it is virtue, are regarded as really virtuous and worthy of the approbation of persons that are virtuous. These persons who are devoted to sacrifices, and study of the Vedas have no independent behaviour. They follow only the practices of the honest and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... and the analysis of so much mud and offal may tell upon me. Physical monstrosities are attractive to physiologists or rather to pathologists. But an anthropologist prefers normal nobleness of mind, and shudders at sight and contact with intellectual and moral crookedness. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... But the author allows himself to run riot in the use of antitheses and contrasts. He arraigns the poor inhabitants of Samaria with pitiless severity. Whatever is good, just, beautiful, lofty, and chaste in love, proceeds from Jerusalem; whatever savors of hypocrisy, crookedness, dogmatism, absurdity, sensuality, proceeds from Samaria. The author is particularly implacable toward the hypocrites, and toward the blind fanatics with their narrow-mindedness. The personification of certain types of ghetto fanatics is a transparent ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... my prayers reg'lar! Oh, Lord! Once I stole a halter and I ask Your forgiveness. And I left a neighbour's gate open on purpose so the stock got into his cornfield, but I ain't a bad man naturally, and this is the first real crookedness I ever done intentionally. Lord," he pleaded, "hear my humble prayer ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... be nothing in the Wild West show to which any exception can be taken, and it is my purpose, as a part owner in the show, and I have put in the contracts with my partners, that no crookedness nor rowdyism will be permitted by attaches of the I show. We will assist the local authorities, too, in ridding the show of the sort of camp-followers who frequently make traveling shows the scapegoat for their misdoings. We propose to have our show efficiently and honestly ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger

... president of the local jockey club, and the joy of his life was to take his place in the judges' stand, and sway the destinies of the lean, keen-faced trainers who drove the trotting horses. He had the eye of a lynx for the detection of any crookedness in driving, and his voice would ring out over the track like the trump of doom, conveying fines and penalties to the luckless trickster who was trying to get some unfair advantage in the start. His voice, a deep basso, rarely ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay

... are needed who have a natural sense of wonder.... You must wonder at man's achievements, at man's stupidity, at his honesty, crookedness, courage, cowardice—at everything that is remarkable about him wherever and whenever it appears. If you haven't this sense of wonder, you will never write a novel or become a great reporter, because you simply won't see anything to write about. Men will be doing amazing things ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... Abbot, and the colonel is so busy that he thinks little of it. The investigation is giving him a world of insight into the crookedness of the late administration, and has put him in possession of facts and given rise to theories that are of unusual interest, and so, when he hears that Abbot was able to leave the hospital and ride slowly in to the railway and so on ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... strong and firm, though hideous to behold, on higher ground than the poor dilapidated hovels at the water's edge, where fever was always breaking out, which yet made, as they supported each other in their crookedness, and leaned over their own wavering reflections, such a picturesque sketch that it seemed a shame to supplant them by such brand new red brick, such blue ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley

... sunbeams. It made no matter. Eleanor could not comprehend how more loveliness could have been crowded into the enjoyment of two hours. On her pony she had full freedom for the use of her eyes; the road was excellent, and winding in and out through all the crookedness of the valley they threaded, she took it at all points of view. Nothing could be more varied. The valley itself, rich and wooded, with the little river running its course, marked by a thick embowering of trees; the hills that enclosed the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner

... was watched like a hawk by the boy from Virginia, for Jack felt sure the fellow was up to crookedness. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish

... legal claim of any kind could be made against him and he was perfectly aware of the fact. The proprietor of the establishment was a thoroughly unscrupulous individual with a shady record, and the games played there were open to a suspicion of crookedness. My friend had previously been told that. He had only to let the loss go unpaid and ignore the whole incident, without the slightest fear of consequences, so far as ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... the old man's being right about the crookedness of the stream. If you have ever noticed an ant running over the floor you will have an idea how the Wye runs through this beautiful country. If it comes to a hill it doesn't just pass it and let you see one side of it, but it goes as far around it as it can, and then goes back again, and goes ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton

... shortened. Besides which, I see that many of our difficulties arise from obscure and remote causes—obscure like the shape of bones, for whose strange curves there is no familiar term. We must endeavour to understand the crookedness and unfamiliar curves of the conditions of life. Beyond that still there are other ideas. Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible. For my thought is like a ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... the finest actress and stool-pigeon in the whole detective world of graft and crookedness—lighted a cigarette at the gas-burner, and laughed ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... righteous, is synonymous with law,' is obvious enough; and it may not be out of place to add that in French the word droit has, with almost savage irony, been selected as the technical name, not of law simply, but of legal procedure with all its crookedness.[13] Still it seems more in the ordinary course of things to explain this linguistic identification of law with justice, by supposing conformity to justice to have been the primitive element in the formation of the notion of law, than by supposing 'conformity to law to have ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... clerk to Eldrick & Pascoe, solicitors, of Barford, a young man who earnestly desired to get on in life, by hook or by crook, with no objection whatever to crookedness, so long as it could be performed in safety and secrecy, had once during one of his periodical visits to the town Reference Library, lighted on a maxim of that other unscrupulous person, Prince Talleyrand, which had pleased him greatly. "With time and patience," said ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher

... in a voice under perfect control. "Still up to your old crookedness, are you? It's a wonder to me they've let ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... names of passengers; a half-dozen cabriolets looking at each other irresolutely and facing all possible ways; two score of unwashed loungers, in red neck-kerchiefs and velvet jackets, smoking rank, rakish, black cigars; several streets of equal crookedness and filthiness abutting against a grimy church, whence beggars, old women, and priests emerge continually; and far above all, as if suspended in the air, a grim, battlemented castle, a defence, as it seems, against the snowy mountains which march upon Bellinzona ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... Soubise. They have not the acute pain of being turned back into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day or every week even that M. le Cure breakfasts at the chateau; but there must nevertheless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He lives like a laborer, and yet he is treated like a gentleman. The latter character must seem to him sometimes a rather heavy irony on the other. But to the ideal cure, of course, all characters are equal; he thinks neither too ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various

... bounds. This kind of education has a smack of practicality in that it sharpens the wits for the struggle for existence that makes up much of the experience of city folk, but it also tends to develop a crookedness in mental and moral habits through the constant effort to get ahead of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... time, especially when hasting on to yet greater mercies? For my remembrance recalls me, and pleasant is it to me, O Lord, to confess to Thee, by what inward goads Thou tamedst me; and how Thou hast evened me, lowering the mountains and hills of my high imaginations, straightening my crookedness, and smoothing my rough ways; and how Thou also subduedst the brother of my heart, Alypius, unto the name of Thy Only Begotten, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he would not at first vouchsafe to have inserted in our writings. For rather would he have them savour ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.' Can I say what I do not know? 'You may offer an opinion.' And will the blindness and crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light and certainty of science? 'I will only ask you to give such an explanation of the good as you have given already of temperance and justice.' I wish that I could, but in my ...
— The Republic • Plato

... Be careful! Miss B. is, up to this point, merely puzzled over things. She doesn't suspect her uncle of any crookedness, I'm sure. So we shall have to tread softly ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... little wooden chair, with backs, having seats for two, so that, instead of being crowded and disturbing each other, the children sit in couples with plenty of room and air, and in perfect physical comfort. No hollow chests, no bent backs, no crookedness here. Happy and comfortable as princes these children sit in their chairs, having their feet on the floor, and their backs where they ought to be, namely, as ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... without reason for exasperation. He was severely attacked for his theories about the curved line of beauty, which was branded as a foolish attempt to prove crookedness elegant, and himself vulgarly caricatured. It was even asserted that the theory ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. 'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!' ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... churches, because the teachings they received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the wide-spread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... hasten straight to Lopez, and Lopez, Driscoll foresaw, would interpret his scruples into a disguised acceptance. The crookedness of the game left the American no other trump, and he played it—against immediate death. Lopez, of course, would send him under guard to Juarez, but Driscoll thought he could trust that staunch old ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun and kissed his feet and stood before him; and the King said to him, "I desire thou go ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... thousand dollars, of course, if they don't take the case out of court. It has served its turn. It's an ugly crusher for the Loring management. Hawk's allegations charge all sorts of crookedness, and neither Loring nor Kent seemed to have a word to say for themselves. I understand Kent was in court, either in person or by attorney, when the receivership order was made, and that he hadn't a word to ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... he. "When I get out I am going to lead an honest life and take care of my money. It does not pay to get money by crookedness. Such money ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds

... were of incredible crookedness, though the Rev. Timothy makes no mention of this fact: "They were at first designed to accommodate individuals, and laid out from house to house," and thus the traveller found himself quite as often landed in a ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... and nature than a woman. And it struck me then that, if nature had created her thus that she should react upon me more than upon any other man, nature had meant her to be mine, and that my right had been trodden under foot by this marriage. Who knows whether all the crookedness of the world does not spring from the non-fulfilment of certain laws, and whether that be not the cause of ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... certain area, at a certain inclination, may be quite unlike the discharge found to be due to those conditions by this table, and that difference may be owing partly to greater or less roughness on the inside of the pipe, unequal flow of water through the joints into the pipe, crookedness of the pipes, want of accuracy in their being placed, so that the fall may not be uniform throughout, or the ends of the pipes may be shoved a little to one side, so that the continuity of the channel is partially broken; and, indeed, from various ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French



Words linked to "Crookedness" :   shape, dishonesty, tortuosity, crooked, straightness, distorted shape, tortuousness, deviousness



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