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Sketchy   /skˈɛtʃi/   Listen
Sketchy

adjective
1.
Giving only major points; lacking completeness.  Synonym: unelaborated.  "Details of the plan remain sketchy"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sketchy" Quotes from Famous Books



... necessary antagonism of the interests of the individual to the common-weal, of "Wealth against Commonwealth," that went with that. While most men had to go propertyless in a world that was privately owned, the assertion of equality was an empty lie. For the rest, primordial Socialism was entirely sketchy and experimental. It was wild as the talk of school-boys. It disregarded the most obvious needs. It did not provide for any principle of government, or for the maintenance of collective thought and social determination, it offered no safeguards and guarantees ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... could see there was no crowd at Marmion, as soon as he got there, though indeed there was a rush, which directed itself to the only vehicle in waiting outside of the small, lonely, hut-like station, so distant from the village that, as far as one looked along the sandy, sketchy road which was supposed to lead to it, one saw only an empty land on either side. Six or eight men in "dusters," carrying parcels and handbags, projected themselves upon the solitary, rickety carry-all, so that Ransom could read his own fate, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture. Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—far more hideous ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... rushing past. Enticing odours arose from the kitchen. The grocery wagon came, and came again. The girls went home. A sketchy lunch was eaten off the kitchen table, and father stayed down town. The girls reappeared. They overran the kitchen, peeling oranges and pineapples and bananas for "heavenly hash." Marguerite grew cross. ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... much better," George said to his mother, a few minutes after their arrival, on the night they got home. He stood with a towel in her doorway, concluding some sketchy ablutions before going downstairs to a supper which Fanny was hastily preparing for them. Isabel had not telegraphed; Fanny was taken by surprise when they drove up in a station cab at eleven o'clock; and George instantly ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... he stood in the doorway looking well about him before he lifted a loosened plank in the flooring and took from beneath it the grand old weapon of the Williams family. Nor did his eye lighten with any pleasurable excitement as he sat himself down in a shadowy corner and began some sketchy experiments with the mechanism. The allure of first sight was gone. In Mr. Williams' bed-chamber, with Sam clamoring for possession, it had seemed to Penrod that nothing in the world was so desirable as to have that revolver in his own hands—it was his ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... a taste of flannel, Durtal had nodded a sketchy affirmative, knowing full well that if he ventured on the least comment he would have to endure an incoherent harangue on all the butchers in ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... on! Not too much furniture, and not too much symmetry either. An agreeable and original higgledy-piggledyness! The room was lighted by a fairly large oil-lamp, with a paper shade hand-painted in a design of cupids—delightful personal design, rough, sketchy, adorable! She had ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... masque of night he could just make out the sketchy forms of a river-barge and two steamers anchored a few yards out. From their masts he could see the dull glow of red where a meagre lamp was hung, and he heard the hoarse voice of a man calling out to some one across the river. As if in answer, the rattle of a chain came from the ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... information about the creature the executive at the Celestial Developments Company had talked so vaguely of. And the tale the convalescent had told him of the thing on the asteroid was as fantastic as it was sketchy. ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst

... what the Man saw from his Hillside) appearing to us as a sequence of risings and sinkings with correlated intensities; a slope springing up in proportion as the previously seen one rushed down; the movements of the eye, slight and sketchy in themselves, awakening the composite dynamic memory of all our experience of the impetus gained by switch-back descent. Moreover this sequence, being a sequence, will awaken expectation of repetition, hence sense of rythm; the long chain of peaks ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee

... Rembrandt? Any of his pictures that show this slovenliness, are, we should suspect, in those parts merely sketched in—a method agreeable to his practice, which was to work upon and upon, glazing, and heaping colour—a method which required, in the first instance, a loose and undefined sketchy manner. Some few years ago there was a picture by him exhibited at the Institution, Pall-Mall—dead game, wonderfully painted, and evidently unfinished; a boy in the background was, as we might term ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... excursions of the place, and meet, as I have done, with social friends, and kind hearts, and lovely forms, and your own delightful feelings will be my excuse for extending my notice somewhat beyond my usual sketchy style. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... ingrate that I am, to-day I should be content—simply to be; even a cabbage ought to be happy in such perfect summer weather. T. B. Aldrich is in—as much as he ever is supposed to be; but I recall now that I read his sketchy book the other night, while I was brushing my hair, giving it a sort of 'good time generally,' letting it run wild a little before going to sleep. I read 'Pierre Antoine's Date Tree' quite through, and liked—the last part very much ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... it did not matter at all. He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for introduction. We met freely on that platform, and it was pleasant to us to talk on so many subjects outside of personal interest. He had travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way, of much that he had observed that was extremely entertaining in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... know all about everything, but what chance has one at Dunbude? Do you know, till you came here, I never got any sensible conversation with anybody.' And she sighed gently as she put her head on one side to take a good view of her sketchy little picture. Lady Hilda's profile was certainly very handsome, and she showed it to excellent advantage when she put her head on one side. Ernest looked at her and thought so to himself; and Lady Hilda's quick eye, glancing sideways for a second from the paper, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... beat their way back to the platform, pulled together and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder where he could have seen her. He had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures. She was clearly an American, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... at home. Along with the sink may be installed an electric dishwasher, depending, of course, on whether the family considers its benefits equal to the expense involved. If mother is to do the work, it may be warranted; but where her efforts are limited to one or two sketchy meals on Thursdays and Sunday evenings, one might well interview the person who is monitor of the service wing the bulk of the time. Dishwashers, cake mixers, complicated fruit juice extractors, and similar ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... Luisa gave birth to a boy who bore the name of Julio, and although he did not show in his somewhat sketchy features any striking resemblance to his grandmother, still he had the black hair and eyes and olive skin of a brunette. Welcome! . . . This WAS ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... such a mercy I had a decent meal to offer you," Poppy went on. "Often the commissariat department is a bit sketchy on Sunday, in—well, in these days of the cleaned slate. But you see, Lionel Gordon, of the Twentieth Century Theatre, was to tell me, this afternoon, what decision he had come to about the engagement ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... too highly finished; nothing of the pittore improvisatore. A party of this kind should be more sketchy in its style; the outline ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... The sketchy nature of Japanese poetry, especially in this five-line stanza, may be illustrated further by two poems quoted by Prof. B. H. Chamberlain in his "Things ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... needs were first the assurance that Doris was safe, and next the privacy of his own rooms, a bath, and a change of clothing. Obviously, he could not present himself to Doris in the sketchy ensemble he presented now; or could he? He decided that he could, and must. To remain in his present state of suspense a moment longer than he need ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... entrance of the Bijou Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled. Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy, faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small, irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark, unenduring little flower—yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... his pipe, and his face wore a sinister look as he took down a rather sketchy map of the wilds beyond the prairie belt. After studying it keenly, he sank into an attitude of concentrated thought. The stove crackled, its pipe glowing red; driving snow lashed the shiplap walls; and the wind moaned drearily about the house. Its occupant, however, was ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... and "Albert the Good," who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... swift illumination up above—a rocket. The scene in which I am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The crest of our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots of light. The trench is shored ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... realised later on that her daughter had escaped much trouble, as in 1836 the Balzac family threatened M. de Montzaigle with a lawsuit on the subject of his son, who was left to wander about Paris without food, shoes, or clothes. We cannot suppose that any one with such sketchy views of the duties of a father could have been a particularly satisfactory husband; but perhaps Laurence died before she had time to discover ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... to hear something of what this restless speculative scientific generation is thinking and doing. But I can't read with much pleasure the fragmentary review literature of the day. The "Cornhill" and that class of books I can't stand, and sketchy writings. The best specimens of light reading I have seen of late are Charlotte Yonge's "Pupils of St. John the Divine," and Guizot's "St. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... window, Mr. Carrington saw that her ladyship's back was turned, and he then gave this candid, if somewhat sketchy, account of his interview ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston

... weak and meagre—but it is still simple and natural, and has not borrowed any of those adventitious aids to which we have alluded above. It bears throughout an air of probability, untinctured by romance, and has the strong impress of truth and fidelity to nature. Sketchy and vivacious, always humorous and sometimes witty; it has many scenes and portraits, which in terseness and energy, will compare with any of its predecessors; and occasionally there are touches of genuine ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various

... speaking, there is but little similarity between the above sketchy trifle and the celebrated "Moon-Story" of Mr. Locke; but as both have the character of hoaxes (although the one is in a tone of banter, the other of downright earnest), and as both hoaxes are on the same subject, the moon—moreover, as both attempt to give plausibility by scientific ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... She knew how other girls had gone out with Willis in his smart car and come back to give rather sketchy accounts of the evening's pleasure jaunt. Her friend Linda had tried it once and remarked later that Willis was some speed and that Madeline had the right hunch to keep away ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... not to divide, because, he said, it was very important that we should present a substantial unity to India. This is upon the question of either House considering a Bill like the Bill that is now on the Table—a mere skeleton of a Bill if you like. I see it has been called vague and sketchy. It cannot be anything else, on the broad principle set ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)

... have two sets of drawings. The ones for us can be sketchy, and need not have too much exactitude of design. We know what we're doing—at ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... narrative makes his entrance at once in his character as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they presented so many imperfectly harmonized features, that they never became real, with the exception, of course, of the story-teller himself. But the vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter, the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... popularized by F. O'Brien. [Footnote: This is the type "E". of Melville's overrated classification—Ed.] In a few of the outlying suburbs of Melanesia and the lower half of Amnesia, we had found a few designs which showed sketchy promise of originality: coral reefs in quaint forms had been begun, outlining a scheme of decoration in contrast with the austere mountains and valleys. But everywhere these had been abandoned. Either the appropriation ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... the rather sketchy suggestions of Mrs. Standish, the girl had prefigured Aunt Abby as a skittish female of three-score years and odd; a gabbling creature with a wealth of empty gesticulation and a parrot's vacant eye; semi-irresponsible, prone to bright colours and an ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... were mere duffers. So when he speaks of Whistler, as we shall presently see, his blame is so exaggerated that it produces a revulsion in the mind of the reader. He said Whistler's painting consisted in throwing a pot of paint in the public's face. Well! we may say Whistler is somewhat sketchy and careless or wanting in colour, but it is quite possible to keep ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... architectural subjects which are to be picked up in the stores. There is a good deal of choice among these. We have ourselves published one or two, from originals by Mr. Botch, which will answer as well as anything we know, being admirable in color and architectural feeling, and just sketchy enough. Pains should generally be taken not to make an elaborate picture of an architectural sketch, and the processes preliminary to making a highly-finished water-color painting, such as laying a ground-color of neutral orange, and sponging it partly out, cutting out foreground lights ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various

... Freda's opinion that spite had actuated the circulation of the damaging paper, she and her chums had exhibited an admirable restraint concerning it. They had evidently accepted Adrienne's sketchy explanation of it ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft

... in description and meditation that Byron excelled. "Description," as he said in Don Juan, "was his forte." His manner is indeed peculiar, and is almost unequalled; rapid, sketchy, full of vigour; the selection happy, the strokes few and bold. In spite of the reverence which we feel for the genius of Mr. Wordsworth we cannot but think that the minuteness of his descriptions often diminishes their effect. He has accustomed himself to gaze on nature ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... a galley "for'ard," too, where the boys cooked their rather sketchy meals, and into this the girls poked ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler

... a sketchy sort of arrangement, but it worked very well. Sometimes Peter provided the meals which Emma cooked, for he was expert at snaring, crabbing, shrimping, and fishing. Sometimes the spirit moved Cassius ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... she found herself. She could, at length, look at the door she supposed led into Mrs. Sherman's room, without such a quick contraction of the heart as caused her breath to come in labored gasps, could make some sort of sketchy outline of the part she was foreordained to take in the coming interview, and not find herself barren of resource, even if Mrs. Sherman should say so-and-so, ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann

... took us to the theatre one night, and there was rather a good ballet. These poor dancers! They, like others, have lost their nearest and dearest in the war, but they still have to dance. Of course they call themselves "The Allies," and one saw rather a stale ballet-girl in very sketchy clothes dancing with a red, yellow, and black flag draped across her. Poor Belgium! It was such a travesty ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... the book is delightfully sketchy and chatty, thoroughly feminine and entrancing. The writer represents herself as a doctor's daughter in a country town, who has married an Englishman, and after two years abroad has come home to live. Both husband and wife prefer the country to the city, and they make of their modest estate a mundane ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... mon ami. It is inevitable that Turkey fights if Germany goes to war. England, France, Russia know it. Ask yourself, then, how enormous to us the value of those plans—tentative, sketchy, perhaps, yet the inception and foundation of those German-made and German-armed fortifications which today line the Dardanelles and the adjacent waters within the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... The reader of these sketchy studies of fishing in Norway has been fairly warned already not to expect exciting records of slaughter amongst salmon. Of course, no angler would be at a loss to explain away his poor bags; his excuses are proverbial, they are an old joke, they have long been a proverb. When people hear ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... greater part—are those in real character. His very genius was for unaffected simplicity; attitudinizing recipes could never have been adopted by him with satisfaction to himself. Some of his slight, more sketchy portraits, as yet unexperimented upon by his powerful, frequently rather too powerful, colouring, his deep browns and yellows, are unrivalled. Such is his Kitty Fisher, not long since exhibited in the British ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... of course, a very sketchy statement of the ground-work of "Fors," but to most readers nowadays as comprehensible as, at the time of its publication, it was incomprehensible. For when, long after "Fors" had been written, Ruskin found other writers advocating the same principles and calling themselves Socialists, ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... sat and consumed cocktails and saw back in his life to Alaska, and lived over the grim years in which he had battled for his eleven millions. For a while murder ate at his heart, and wild ideas and sketchy plans of killing his betrayers flashed through his mind. That was what that young man should have done instead of killing himself. He should have gone gunning. Daylight unlocked his grip and took out his automatic ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... sure. I used to think so, but I'm beginning to have my doubts about it. One comforts the whole world in a slipshod, sketchy kind of way; but one could do ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... laughs low At ruddy RASPER'S keenly-whispered mot— RASPER, a soul all strictures, Holds the great world a field for sketchy chaff. Many love not the man, but how they laugh At his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various

... at least, I intimated that I was a lonely old affectionate man with this and that to offer, and she intimated that that wasn't enough. It was all—" he laughed—"It was all extremely sketchy!" ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris

... with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers. In the apple orchard the young grass was powdered with gold, and the long grey shadows of the trees barred the ground like the sketchy ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... The Hunt, by FINCH MASON, published by Messrs. FORES. Rather too spring-like a title for a sporting book, as it suggests hunting for flowers. Sketchy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various

... &c adj.; fall short of &c 304; lack &c (be insufficient) 640; neglect &c 460. Adj. incomplete; imperfect &c 651; unfinished; uncompleted &c (complete) &c 729; defective, deficient, wanting, lacking, failing; in default, in arrear^; short of; hollow, meager, lame, halfand-half, perfunctory, sketchy; crude &c (unprepared) 674. mutilated, garbled, docked, lopped, truncated. in progress, in hand; going on, proceeding. Adv. incompletely &c adj.; by halves. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... like the notion of a diary; that sort of historical view would involve less danger of precipitating a discussion of the two schemes of life for the future. "It's awfully kind of you, Alice, to propose such a thing, and you mustn't make it a burden. Any sort of little sketchy record will do; mother can read between ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... this brief and very sketchy analysis of German femininity in the war, I reiterate views expressed on previous visits to Germany, that German women are not standing the anxiety of the war as well as those ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... driving his car to-day, as he occasionally liked to do, then asked, why was a Settlement? And as well as she could Carlisle retailed her rather sketchy information: how "they" planned to buy the deserted Dabney House, make it the headquarters for all the organized charities of the city, and use the rest of the great pile for working-men's clubs, night classes, lodgings, gymnasiums and so forth. Thanks to the influence of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... a quick but rather sketchy list. "And your own overcoat and sweater—or I won't let you go. Promise." Her fingers turned in his and ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeeping money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never been niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road, had been those sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves when their household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car and ordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus, and Neapolitan ice cream. The men in the ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... temperamental and sketchy. The boards which formed the floor were never even nailed down; they were fine, wide planks without a knot in them, and they looked so well that we merely fitted them together as closely as we could and lightheartedly let them go at that. Neither did we properly chink the ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... conviction was borne in on me that the stratagem had at least saved us from immediate capture. Like most men who ride I had very sketchy ideas of what three miles afoot is like—at night—in high heels. The latter affliction was common to both Miss Emory and myself. She had on a sort of bedroom slipper, and I wore the usual cowboy boots. We began ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... globe and the body he had been shown and then added what he had deduced from the sketchy explanations he had been given. The ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton

... after another of them came filing in, bronzed, rugged, radiating a beauty of youth and health that no sketchy exigence of apparel could obscure, some one already seated at the table would put a foot on a chair opposite him and send it spinning out into the middle of the floor as a hint to the new-comer that that was his reserved seat. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... simple, and apparently pagan, way of stating the case; they will be considered in due time. The reader is asked to refrain from parting company with the writer, if his prejudices are aroused, until the consonance of this sketchy account of the basis of morality with Christianity and all ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... to subdue her. He knew now that it was going to take much longer than the outside margin he had allowed to build the plant. If a driven well failed, he must try out the Prebles'. Perhaps Dick's knowledge of irrigation would prove to be sketchy and that water supply too would prove inadequate. He believed still that his plans for the plant itself would not ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie

... "execution sketchy; coloring quiet, to be in keeping with the place and subject, but pure. You know the scene better than I, so work away, Giotto. Motto—'Will ye pay or toll it, mother?' Price twenty-five guineas. Take it to What's-his-name's, and if it sells we'll go to Arcadia, Giotto ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... wife, a faded, washed-out looking lady, with a perpetual simper on her face, and clad in a lavender muslin gown with ribbons of the same description, she looked wonderfully light and airy. In fact she had a sketchy appearance as if she required to be touched up here and there, to make her appear solid, which was of great service to her in her theatrical career, as it enabled her to paint on the background of herself any ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... diaries on his travels are sketchy throughout, and more laconic and objective: for example, at ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... Penrod had rather vaguely debated plans for a self-mutilation such as would make his appearance as the Child Sir Lancelot inexpedient on public grounds; it was a heroic and attractive thought, but the results of some extremely sketchy preliminary experiments caused him to ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... ideas about the new countries are pretty sketchy," he said. "People always talk to me about the fearfully hot climate of Australia, and seem mildly surprised if I remark that we have about a dozen different climates, and that we have snow and ice, and very decent winter ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... pretty freely on the merits of the work, without the smallest consideration for the feelings of the artist. Fortunately they had nothing but good to say about it. Sam Scott, indeed, objected a little to the sketchy manner in which some of the subordinate accessories were touched in, and remarked that the two large hairs on the mole were almost invisible; but Jefferson persisted in maintaining that the work was "fuss rate," ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne

... perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalisation. You have to be like Rodin, Michelangelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... and sketchy picture of religious life in India so far as it can be gathered from the older Brahmanic books has reference mainly to the kingdoms of the Kuru-Pancalas and Videha in 800-600 B.C. Another picture, somewhat ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... first flush of youth. Bryant's poetic style was always pure and correct, without any tincture of affectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not important, consisting mainly of papers of the Salmagundi variety contributed to the Talisman, an annual published in 1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, Tales of the {518} Glauber Spa, 1832; and impressions of Europe, entitled, Letters of a Traveler, issued in two series, in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, a remarkable achievement for a man of his age, and not ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... reproduction, he glanced at first casually over the dozen or more sketches and studies on the succeeding pages. Many of them represented studies of women's heads and figures, with little or no attempt to obtain a likeness. Some were half-draped, showing in a sketchy way the long graceful lines of the half-nude figure, of bare shoulders and breasts, of gauze-like fabrics that but illy concealed impressive charms. Suddenly his eyes narrowed and a sharp exclamation fell from his lips. He bent ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... as the point from which expeditions start and to which they return. Doubtless an extended stay in the country would show him that problems of administration and possibilities of development could be even more absorbing; but such things are very sketchy to him ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... stare at the water, I took a good long look at him. He interested me much—because he was so exceptionally uninteresting; a pallid, anaemic, indefinite hobbledehoy, with a high, narrow forehead, and sketchy features. He had watery, restless eyes of an insipid light blue; thin, yellow hair, almost white in its paleness; and twitching hands that played nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. This shadowy ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... the information about the country is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be,” I protested. “No one knows anything about it really. Here’s the file of the United Services’ Institute. Read ...
— The Man Who Would Be King • Rudyard Kipling

... story was supplied by a three-year-old. The pattern was added. An older child would not be content with so sketchy an account. But it seems to compass a three-year-old's most significant associations with a stable. The title is one in actual use by a ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell

... [Footnote 55: Sketchy, because in this case, "O. Henry" leaders are the important thing—and they give sufficient clue ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... is beyond the scope of this book to enter into a detailed account of the tiger, discussing his structure, habits, and characteristics, it may aid the reader if I give a sketchy general outline of some of the more prominent points of interest connected with the monarch of the jungle, the cruel, cunning, ferocious king of the cat tribe, the beautiful ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... dimples, mere man becomes but as a piece of damp blotting-paper. Pringle was seventeen and a half, and consequently too old to take note of such frivolous attributes; but all the same he had a sort of vague, sketchy impression that it would be pleasanter to run up a lively century against the O.B.s with Miss Lorimer as a spectator than in her absence. He felt pleased that she ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse

... brilliant, can sustain its energy when the demands upon it are constant, and all legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not recollect in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent conventionalism of light and shade, sketchy forms continually less and less developed, the walls and the faces drawn with the same stucco color, alike opaque, and all the shades on flesh, dress, or stone, laid in with the same arbitrary brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind wasting its strength and substance ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... the 126th brigade took over the front, a sketchy business in view of the position, and the N.Z's. marched back. One of the officers, during the day, had called out to us in characteristic Colonial fashion, "Well, boys, are you going up to finish it?" whereupon ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson

... while he got out his tobacco and laid a sheaf of papers on the table, and waited while their envoy, laying Bassett's map on the table, proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the trail beyond the pass, some sketchy ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... inaccuracy, of weakness, ye muddle-heads. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by which alone you can make God's business succeed; for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to inefficiency, to sketchy ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne

... saw Geoffrey's bicycle leaning against the porch. "I expect she's in the drawing-room with her grandfather. There seem to be lights everywhere. Well, I'm going to make a bee-line for the dining-room for grub. We had a very sketchy lunch, no tea, and no dinner, so I think we've ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler

... Cargan. "I ain't no Charles Dana Gibson with words. My talk's a little rough and sketchy, I guess. But here's the outline, plain as I can make it. Two thousand a year from Hayden. Twenty thousand in two seconds if you hand that package ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... and 'loyal' seeker," Gravener said. "It was a sketchy design of her late husband's, and he handed it on to her; setting apart in his will a sum of money of which she was to enjoy the interest for life, but of which, should she eventually see her opportunity—the matter was left largely to her discretion—she would best honour his memory by determining ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James

... make—the fact that no matter what marvels the future may bring, the people who will live then will take them in a matter-of-fact way. Their conversation will be cigarettes, "sag-paste," drinks, women. References to the scientific marvels around them will be casual and sketchy. How many million words of an average car owner's conversation would you have to report to give a visitor from 1700 an idea of internal combustion engines? The author, if skillful, can convey that information ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... and found that the Riet had to be crossed. 'I was given to understand that the Modder was fordable everywhere,' says Lord Methuen in his official despatch. One cannot read the account of the operations without being struck by the casual, sketchy knowledge which cost us so dearly. The soldiers slogged their way through, as they have slogged it before; but the task might have been made much lighter for them had we but clearly known what it was that we were trying to do. On the other hand, it is but fair to Lord Methuen ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... lacked polish. They knew little about springing smartly to attention and nothing whatsoever about the interior economy of a 6-inch gun. Their attire was sketchy, to say the least of it. Even the admiral wore grey flannel trousers, a once white sweater, and coloured muffler, and it is to be feared that an officer from a battleship might have referred to them collectively as a "something lot of pirates." Pirates they may have ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling

... us too far afield to discuss the origin of French Socialism, even in this sketchy fashion, but I can state with the assurance that is born of intimate knowledge that French Socialism shows as little sign of having been inspired by alien influences, Jewish or other, as British and American Socialism. I stress this point ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo

... sketchy way was the firm of Andrea Contini and Company established and lodged, being at the time in a very shadowy state, theoretically and practically, though it was destined to play a more prominent part in affairs than either of the ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... it is so sketchy that you'd never make out what it's supposed to be unless you knew already what you were looking for. To us the head of a dog is fairly plain. If you know enough to fill in the gaps you can see it was meant to be a big shaggy dog ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee

... Rubens' method, and which strictly belongs to his colouring, from which arises what may be not improperly designated flimsiness, that is, the leaving too much of the first getting in of his picture, the first transparent sketchy brown. If in some respect this gives force to the more solid parts, by the contrast of the transparent with the opaque, yet is it rather a flashy force, in which the means become too visible; an entire substance is wanted; we come too immediately ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... in the motor-car: and though Robert, in a different and more sketchy costume, would have been a gallant Batavian warrior, there would be a certain indecorousness in permitting my fancy to make the necessary changes. I had to content myself, therefore, with things as they were; with the teuf-teuf of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... neighbouring island of Hachijo[u] by girls well fitted themselves to give grace to the beautiful tissue, an obi (sash) of fawn and scarlet into which was woven the shadowy figure, here and there, of a landscape—sketchy but suggestive. The belt which girded it within was of egg coloured crape, and the orange tissue broadened and hung down to add its touch of carefully contrasted colour. The hair was built high in the taka-shimada style, tied on top ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville

... is a second survey of our ground, somewhat more detailed than the first, but woefully sketchy. Everyone who has studied MSS. of any class or period would detect omissions in it which for him would vitiate the whole story. The best I can hope is that the assertions in it are not incorrect, and ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James

... situation with Van Rycke's unfailing patience and aplomb. The Cargo-master seemed in nowise tired by his wasted day and Dane knew that Van would probably sit up half the night, going over for the hundredth time Traxt Cam's sketchy recordings in another painstaking attempt to discover why and how the other Free Trader had succeeded where the Queen's men were up against ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... best work on our recent literature is Pattee, A History of American Literature since 1870 (Century Co., 1915), which deals with two hundred or more writers. A more sketchy attempt at a contemporaneous history is Vedder, American Writers of To-day (Silver, 1894, revised 1910), devoted to nineteen writers whom the author ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... Sunday afternoon one beholds some weird and wonderful costumes. On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed. He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large Testament under his arm. He wore, among other things, a pair of white spats, a long-tailed coat and a high hat. It ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... ears with cotton-wool," said a Midshipman whose acquaintance with the classics was still a recent, if sketchy acquisition. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too thin and sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full fields have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand, and quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very poet's flower, I thought; not fit for gathering up, and proving a nuisance in the pastures, therefore ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... toiletting or untoiletting, or by the weaker sex in the smoking-room, the Baron begs to commend "THACKERAY's Portraits of Himself," as interesting to Thackerayans, and "A Maiden Speech," in Murray, for August, the latter being rather too sketchy, though in its sketchiness artistic, as, like Sam Weller's love-letter, it makes you "wish as there was more ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various

... republic across the sea was at this period of his life a little sketchy. He knew that there had been unpleasantness between England and the United States in seventeen-something and again in eighteen-something, but that things had eventually been straightened out by Miss ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... that the work to be done here is necessarily more sketchy in character, though none the less taken from life in every detail, the aim in both cases being the same,—to give, as far as possible, the heart of the problem as it is seen by the worker, as well as by the eyes that ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell

... query came back, the old need to know what he had been before putting on this present very casual body. Was his present state a reward or a penance? From the time of leaving the office to the last item in that sketchy dinner, he had been put upon by persons and circumstances. It was time to know what life ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... pockets of his overcoat copies of the Times, and with the permission of the Court, read again with unction his own criticism, to every word of which he said he still adhered. "All Mr. Whistler's work is unfinished. It is sketchy. He, no doubt, possesses artistic qualities, and he has got appreciation of qualities of tone, but he is not complete, and all his works are in the nature of sketching. I have expressed, and still adhere to the opinion, that these pictures only come 'one step ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... passage through this upper end of Red Canyon we refer to our journal: sketchy notes jotted down, usually in the evening just before retiring, by the light of a camp-fire, or the flickering flame of a candle. Under the date of Friday, September the ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... nose is what you would call a "beak," and I am afraid her cheek bones are too high for good proportion, and I know that her hair is not always so carefully dressed as it should be, but what is the difference when the hair is crowned with a halo? I can't swear to any of these things; they're sketchy impressions. The only thing I am absolutely sure about is the inner light that shines to an unbelievable degree. I wish she had more time and I wish I had more time and that she and I might become such friends as you and I are. I can't tell you, dear, how much I think ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... the Dragon may take as little interest in Ellaline's clothes as he has taken in Ellaline's self, or that, being used to the costumes of the Bengalese, which, perhaps, are somewhat sketchy, he may be thankful that his ward ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... the viscid crust, the precursors of Atlantic, Pacific, and the Indian Seas. Wrinklings of the crust, produced by the cooling and consequent contraction, gave rise at first to baby mountain ranges, and afterwards to the earliest rough draughts of the still very vague and sketchy continents. The world grew daily more complex and more diverse; it progressed, in accordance with the Spencerian law, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and so forth, as aforesaid, with ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... had been for years in coasters, then in the Mediterranean, and last in the West Indian trade. He had never been round the Capes. He could just write a kind of sketchy hand, and didn't care for writing at all. Both were thorough good seamen of course, and between those two old chaps I felt like a ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad

... can easily decide the kind of plan that best suits himself and his particular grade of work. On the one hand, the plan should not be so detailed as to become burdensome to follow in the lesson hour. On the other hand, it should not be so brief and sketchy as not to bring out the significant ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... ought to say, the famous manuscript ends. Indeed, this late Marseilles part of it was very hurried and sketchy. The main object which he had in view—or rather which, in the first inception of the idea, I had suggested he should have in view—namely, "to interest, perhaps encourage, at any rate to stimulate the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... American popularity of Charles Kingsley has been rather declining, the credit of his brother Henry has been gradually rising. Those who have complained of something rather shallow and sketchy in some of his former books will find far more solid and faithful work in this. Indeed, he undertakes rather more than he can carry through, and the capacious plot, well handled at first, gets into some confusion and ends in a rather ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... this sketchy outline of the literature on the subject, it should be fairly evident that there has been available to the mechanician an enormous quantity of information about mechanical linkages and other devices. Whatever one may think of the quality of ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson

... removed to Paris. He belongs to no school, and such art as he produces is peculiarly his own, save a leaven of influences from Velasquez and the Japanese. His art is the perfection of delicacy, both in color and in line. Apparently very sketchy, it is in reality the maximum of effect with the minimum of display. It has the pictorial charm of mystery and suggestiveness, and the technical effect of light, air, and space. There is nothing better produced in modern painting than his present work, and in earlier years he painted portraits ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke

... are all pretty well understood; likewise the general conditions of sedimentation are reasonably clear,—but the close interpretation of these conditions, to enable us to predict the extent of one of these deposits, or to explain its presence in one place and absence in another, is in an early and sketchy stage. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith

... short of &c. 304; lack &c. (be insufficient) 640; neglect &c. 460. Adj. incomplete; imperfect &c. 651; unfinished; uncompleted &c. (see complete &c. 729); defective, deficient, wanting, lacking, failing; in default, in arrear[obs3]; short of; hollow, meager, lame, halfand-half, perfunctory, sketchy; crude &c. (unprepared) 674. mutilated, garbled, docked, lopped, truncated. in progress, in hand; going on, proceeding. Adv. incompletely &c. adj.; by ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... this venture. He had landed in Baya de le Cruz—now Tampa Bay—on the day before Easter. The Indians had some gold which they said came "from the north." Cabeca, who was treasurer of the expedition, strongly advised against proceeding through a totally unknown country on this very sketchy information. But Narvaez consulted the pilot, who said he knew of a harbor some distance to the west, ordered the ships to meet him there, and with forty horsemen and two hundred and sixty men on foot, struck boldly ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... little more than a skit, and the plot—if the thin, sketchy incident that stood in its place may be called one—served only as an excuse for a continuous fusillade of local hits, often of a personal character. These not only kept the audience in a fever of merriment, but long afterward furnished Mexican official and social circles with topics ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... a lot of seafaring out of Konassa, and there are several other busy seaports we know of. But no one in any of them ever heard of navigation out of sight of land, let alone trying it. There's nothing but pilotage, and even that's pretty sketchy. And, there's this thing." He crossed to the workbench, picked up the ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole

... day was already breaking, and the electric light burned dimly in the general wash of grayness. About him the atmosphere had a strangely sketchy effect, as if it had been laid on crudely with a few strokes ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... sketchy, I will admit," said Yoritomo. "It is not as solidly based as our other reconstructions of his background. The pattern of his raids indicates, however, that his knowledge of the materials he wants and their locations comes from vocal sources—television advertising, eaves-dropping, ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... wolfish voracity devoured the meal which had been meant for us. They had pocket-flasks with them, and as they attacked them with frequency the talk grew louder and wilder. By degrees it was possible to comprehend the extraordinary disaster which had befallen us, at least in a sketchy outline of which the detail was filled in later. Tony, it appeared, was the master of a small power-schooner which had been fitting out in San Francisco for a filibustering trip to the Mexican coast. His three companions were the crew. None ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... laughter at the other two-thirds (and a little because of the indistinct articulation of one or two of the players). Of course when I say "plausible" I don't exactly mean that any Brigade Headquarters was run on the sketchy lines of General Archibald Root's, or that the gallant author or anybody else who was in the beastly thing ever thought of the Great War as a devastating joke, but rather that if it be true, as has been rumoured, that not all generals were miracles of wisdom and forbearance; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 21, 1920 • Various

... can't stand for this!" he groaned, and the tragedy in his voice contrasted so quaintly with his comic appearance, bareheaded, hair ruffled, and costume sketchy, that I felt rising symptoms of hysteria, which had to be controlled. "I must get you and the mater and Milly into safety somehow. To-night is the limit. Mater's more dead than alive, and Mill isn't ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... "musical idea" she had mentioned in her letter; on which she took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at her piano, gave him, with a sentiment of which the very first notes thrilled him, the accompaniment of his song. She phrased the words with her sketchy sweetness, and he sat there as if he had been held in a velvet vise, throbbing with the emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of the young artist in the presence for the first time of "production"—the proofs of his book, the hanging ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James

... his fatigues forgotten, very carefully extricated himself from among the slumberers and followed. He congratulated himself upon the fact that his preparations for the night had been extremely sketchy, had in fact consisted merely in removing his coat and riding-boots. Once safe outside the cabin, he pulled on the boots, smoothed his hair with his fingers, knotted the handkerchief more becomingly about his throat, and went in pursuit ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... interest was tempered by the happenings of the first week. Doubtless he would have made a desperate struggle, but it would have been useless. Not even conversion can make new habits overnight, and in his first two years at college Joe had been known to teachers and students alike as distinctly a sketchy student, wholly ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... few, So easily and swift I drew, Sufficed for my design; My sketchy, superficial hand Drew solids at a dash—and spanned A surface with ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... was not a good one. As a sample of the groundman's art it was sketchy and amateurish; it lacked finish. Clephane won the toss, took a hasty glance at the corrugated turf, and decided to bat first. The wicket was hardly likely to ...
— The Politeness of Princes - and Other School Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... The above sketchy division may perhaps add to the visitor's alien interest in Continental cafe-life, showing something of its system and rationale. These elaborate and varied concoctions, noxious and innoxious, are not, it must be understood, tossed off in the frenzied instantaneity of the American ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... discompose it! As we shall perhaps see it our duty ultimately to deposit these Six Paper-Bags in the British Museum, farther description, and all vituperation of them, may be spared. Biography or Autobiography of Teufelsdrockh there is, clearly enough, none to be gleaned here: at most some sketchy, shadowy fugitive likeness of him may, by unheard-of efforts, partly of intellect, partly of imagination, on the side of Editor and of Reader, rise up between them. Only as a gaseous-chaotic Appendix to that aqueous-chaotic Volume can the contents of the Six Bags hover round ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... illustrations already given. Their study will, I believe, give some insight into the mental characteristics of the Chiriquians. That their art, so far as these figures are concerned, was not serious is indicated by the sketchy, unsystematic nature of the work, and more especially by the grotesque and occasionally amusing ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes

... a somewhat hurried and sketchy luncheon a telegram was handed to him. It was from Max Wisler, the San Francisco detective, and it said laconically, "Don't let A. ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... they made their way through the streets of Cynthiana, where the acrid smoke of burning caught at throats, adding to the torturous thirst which dried a man's mouth when he tore cartridge paper with his teeth. Drew and Croxton took sketchy orders from Captain Quirk, their eyes red-rimmed with fatigue above their powder-blackened lips and chins. Fan out, be eyes and ears for the column moving ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... improved, I think. He is as cheerful and as inconsequent as ever, and his plans for the future seem to me, although I am not a practical woman of business, more sketchy than well defined. Sometimes, after listening to him, I have come to the conclusion that even so attractive a quality as absolute optimism can be overdone, and that the principle of never crossing a bridge before you come to it can reasonably be ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... exactly, measuring quantities with precision, taking nothing for granted, leaving nothing to the imagination. That cookery articles, even if read, are certainly not acted upon, is proved by the monotony of the suburban dinner. And they are not acted upon because the reader finds them incomplete, "sketchy," ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... first place, Giotto never finished highly. He was not, indeed, a loose or sketchy painter, but he was by no means a delicate one. His lines, as the story of the circle would lead us to expect, are always firm, but they are never fine. Even in his smallest tempera pictures the touch is bold and somewhat heavy: in his fresco work the handling is ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin

... which they brought with them and illustrated, has never ceased to work powerfully among our people. Why not bring the children into direct contact with these characters in the intermediate grades, not by short and sketchy stories, but by full life pictures of these men and their surroundings? We have not been wholly lacking in literary artists who have worked up a part of these materials into a more durable and acceptable form for our schools. We need to make an abundant use of this and other history for ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry

... chiefly to Alson Clark's over-sketchy and intemperately colored Panama pictures. The most interesting thing here is Ernest Lawson's "Beginning of Winter," on wall B, a representative work by one of the most successful ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney

... Marchand is like a minor Milton—the comparison is not one to be pressed—de Vlaminck is like Keats. He is the most lyrical of the younger Frenchmen; the flash and sparkle of his pictures is the wonderfully close expression of a tremblingly delighted sensibility. Yet there is nothing sketchy about them. Consider his landscape (No. 65), and you will be astonished to find what a solid, self-supporting design these delicately graded tones and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... be brought out in London. It will not stand the ghost of a chance unless well mounted. Music light and sketchy; remarkable for a Chorus of Fishermen, well known as the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... quite possible to conceive a little sketchy woodcut no larger than a cut in Punch, and drawn by a master like Charles Keene, or the German Adolf Menzel, giving us all the essence of any picture by Hogarth even more effectively, more agreeably, than any of Hogarth's most finished engravings. And ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier

... came to a standstill before a wedge of figures in front of a prominent canvas. A nude female figure stood upright, facing the spectator, with both arms upraised to fasten a pomegranate blossom in the tightly twisted hair: an indefinite heap of sketchy clothing lay upon ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross



Words linked to "Sketchy" :   sketch, unelaborated, sketchiness, incomplete, uncomplete



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