"Tapering off" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... each, with a staff in his left hand, five or six feet long, about three or four inches in diameter at one end, and tapering off to a point at the other. In his right hand he held a small stick of hard wood, six or nine inches long, with which he commenced his music by striking the small stick on the larger one, beating time all the while with his ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... me a very fine one, but tastes differ, and to the Lady Capilla it seemed quite the reverse. Rising indignantly, she marched away, her queue running in through the window and gradually tapering off the interview, as it were. Prince Champou saw that he had missed his opportunity, and resolved to repair his error. Straightway he forged an order on Beersheba for thirty yards of love-lock. To serve this writ he sent his business partner; for the Prince ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... by cutting out two at once, in this manner: cut off three breadths, and with a long rule and a pencil, mark and cut off the gores; thus from one breadth cut off two gores the whole length, each gore one fourth of the breadth at the bottom, and tapering off to a point at the top. The other two breadths are to have a gore cut off from each, which is one fourth wide at the top and two fourths at bottom. Arrange these pieces right and they will make two chemises, one having four seams and the other three. This is a much easier way of cutting than sewing ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long—by Bierce, by Dreiser, by Phillips, by Fuller—by Mary MacLanes and by Upton Sinclairs—by ploughboy poets from the Middle West and by jitney geniuses in Greenwich Village—assaults gradually tapering off to a mere sophomoric brashness and deviltry. And all of them like snow-ballings of Verdun. All of them petered out and ineffectual. The normal, the typical American book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as the normal book of Griswold's day. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... over the other as he stood. He was like an image of pale radiant gold, and I could have sworn that the light came from within rather than fell upon him, for the night was very dark. He held the flute to his lips, and as I looked, I became aware that the noise of the rushing water was tapering off into a murmur scarcely louder than that of a summer bee in the heart of a rose. Therefore the music rose like a fountain of crystal drops, cold, clear, and of an entrancing sweetness, and the face above it was such that I ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck |
