"Bungler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not relieving all three of you," the Black Doctor snapped. "You and Dr. Alvarez will remain on duty and conduct the ship's program without a Red Doctor until a man is sent to replace this bungler. That also is provided ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... never tell you what a really wretched musician I am. In my inmost heart I know I am a bungler and an absolute failure. You should see me when I say to myself, 'It ought to go now,' and sit down to the piano and put together some miserable rubbish, which I fling away again like an idiot. I know quite well the kind of musical trash I produce.... Believe me, it is no good expecting me to do ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... think it lost time to attend lectures on this branch. He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the reports of the police, his secret correspondence with his private agents, &c. He carefully returned every thing to its place, after having used it: compared with him the most methodical clerk would have been but a bungler. ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... calls a pocket. Nothing can be clearer; it is as easy as "playing upon this pipe," for which Hamlet gives Guildenstern such lucid directions. But this intelligent Me, who steps forward as the senior partner in our dual personality, turns out to be a terrible bungler. He misses those glancing hits which the hard-featured young professional person calls "carroms," and insists on pocketing his own ball instead of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... training? And that lazy wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient, what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers, when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more earnest, more industrious, more loving to the poor? I speak of actual cases. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... drawings made by my own hand?" asked Kaunitz, with a firey glance of anger in his eyes. "Because he is an ass does the churl dare to criticise my drawings? Let him bring the body of the coach to the palace, and I will show him that he is a bungler and knows nothing of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... glad to do his share. Education must (3) also give the individual training in technique, or the skill required in his different activities; not to do this is at best but to leave him a well-informed and well-intentioned bungler, falling far short ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... it with a heavy foot, and by this time was in a rage with both him and myself, but I always was a bungler, and, having adopted this means in a hurry, I could at the time see no other easy way out. Timothy's hold on life, as you may have apprehended, was ever of the slightest, and I suppose I always knew that he must ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... The valiant fate-confronter, The soldier brave, and blunter Of speech than BISMARCK's self? This bungler all-disgracing, This braggart all-debasing. This spurious sportsman, chasing No nobler ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... destroying almost every fox and marten that he had caught. All known methods to catch or kill the animal were resorted to, but with the cunning that its prehistoric ancestors had handed down to it, it avoided every pitfall. The fox is a poor bungler compared with the wolverine. The result of all this was that Richard Gray had no fur in the spring with which to pay his debt at the ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... Plymouth last year, with her masts rolling about until her shrouds were like iron bars on one side and hanging in festoons upon the other? The meanest sloop that ever sailed out of France would have overmatched her, and then it would be on me, and not on this Devonport bungler, that a ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all men and proves Palus a consummate artist as a gladiator. Not only would the populace howl a bungler or coward off the sand, they know every shade of excellence; only a superlatively perfect swordsman could kindle their enthusiasm and keep it at white heat year after ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... he rasped. 'And you're so hopelessly not an artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem true, you're going to make even a true thing seem as if you'd made it up. You're a miserable bungler. And ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... you are simply splendid," she went on, "the dearest old bungler I know. You remind me of the Faulkners' ostrich, which goes on tapping at the window when it has been opened and there ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... to me," said the cold, hard voice with quiet passion. "Your silly scruples aren't going to outweigh a nation's need. There it is in your pocket. Be careful you don't use too much. If you fail again, remember, you'll earn your own living. Oh, you bungler! When I ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... slowly to Voban, and, pricking him with his sword, said, "You are a bungler, barber. Now listen. I never wronged you; I have only been your blister. I prick your sores at home. Tut! tut! they prick them openly in the market-place. I gave you life a minute ago; I give you freedom now. Some day I may ask that life for a day's use, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Tavannes laughed. "Bungler!" he cried. "Were you in my troop I would dip your trigger-finger in boiling oil to teach you to shoot! But you weary me, dogs. I must teach you a lesson, must I?" And he lifted a pistol and levelled it. The crowd did not know whether it was the one he had discharged or another, but they gave ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... has the privilege of bettering out condition if we have the brain and the industry to do it. Energy and intelligence come to the front, and have the right to be there. A skillful workman gets double the pay of a bungler, and deserves it. Of course there will always be rich and poor, and sick and sound, and I don't see how that can be changed. But no door is shut against ability, black or white. Before the year 2400 we shall have a chrome-yellow president and a black-and-tan secretary of the treasury. ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... said the Sieur de Corasse; "you are but a bungler. You promised to show yourself to me ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... own interpreter, and he will make it plain at last, so that the man who runs may read, that he is no such bungler in his workmanship as to fashion the organism of a woman without giving her at the same time the corresponding strength. We have too much belief in him to believe that the power given to us is in such niggardly ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... among them the unknown bungler that had fired the fatal shot, started in haste for Paris. Claire, frantic with grief, entered the room where her father lay on his deathbed, there to remain; and Risler, being advised of the catastrophe, came to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in company with Krag. They listened a while to the music, and Shaping said 'Have you heard more beautiful sounds? This is my world and my music.' Krag stamped with his foot, and laughed. 'You must do better than that, if I am to admire it. Let us pass over, and see this bungler at work.' Shaping consented, and they passed over to the island. Swaylone was not able to see their presence. Shaping stood behind him, and breathed thoughts into his soul, so that his music became ten times lovelier, and people listening ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... "He was a genius! Yes, what did I tell you? Your very words imply a comparison as you say them. For I?—what am I? A miserable bungler, a wretched dilettant—or have you another word for it? Oh, never mind—don't be afraid to say it!—I'm not sensitive tonight. I can bear to hear your real opinion of me; for it could not possibly be lower than ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... be returned without any ulterior thought. He responded gladly to Jacqueline's advances; he thought her charming, and amused himself thoroughly with her: and he thought so well of her that he was not far from thinking Olivier rather a bungler not to be able to be happy with her and to make ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... patriarchal air of benevolent respectability which his predecessor Calcraft had acquired during a short experience as a family butler; but as an executioner that kindly old gentleman had been a sad bungler in his time compared with the scientific and expeditious Marwood. The Horncastle shoemaker was saving, businesslike, pious and thoughtful. Like Peace, he had interests outside his ordinary profession. He had at one time propounded a scheme for the abolition ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... the work. He had bad luck hiring a burglar for you. He lost his head when he ran away with another person's motor-car and had to hand the marked bill to a country justice. He showed bad judgment when he tried to fool me with a fancy lie. But you are the real bungler, Senhor Alcatrante. Any capable diplomat could tell ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... first sight, to bring into a sermon all the Circles of the Globe and all the frightful terms of Astronomy; but I will assure you, Sir, it is to be done! because it has been. But not by every bungler and ordinary text-divider; but by a man ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... and Guilt (for Guilt, howe'er The face of Courage it may wear, 490 Is still a coward at the heart) At fear-created phantoms start. The priest—that very word implies That he's both innocent and wise— Yet fears to travel in the dark, Unless escorted by his clerk. But let not every bungler deem Too lightly of so deep a scheme; For reputation of the art, Each ghost must act a proper part, 500 Observe Decorum's needful grace, And keep the laws of Time and Place; Must change, with happy variation, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... it. I must tell you more of Crochard, some day. Beside him, I am a mere bungler—I realise it more deeply each time I meet him. And I assure you that I am ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... himself a great artist—one of the foremost of our time. It is said that he caused the life of the great architect, Apollodorus—who carried out such noble works for Trajan—to be extinguished—and why? because formerly that illustrious man had treated the imperial bungler as a mere dabbler, and would not accept his plan for the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... coup was not premeditated. But why, why, had he let her escape so easily? If only he had been a little quicker about following her, and had not wasted time looking for Higgs! She had had time to get clear away; and he, bungler that he was, had thought it of little consequence, and had afterwards stood poring over a catalogue in the hall, having decided that her morals were no business of his. Ass ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... a mere bungler and the whole matter must be set right without delay. This was rather a large task, but the Professor went at it in a large way. He did it in the approved German manner. Germany would be forever disgraced ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... shriek to him that he was a fool and a bungler; that throats were not to be cut in that fashion, with hackings and sawing at the gullet. Knew the clumsy fumbler nothing of big blood-vessels?... ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... file of carriages. I witnessed this heartrending spectacle; I saw the ominous procession. In the midst of all the tumult, clamour, and singing, interrupted by frequent discharges of musketry, which the hand of a monster or a bungler might so easily render fatal, I saw the Queen preserving most courageous tranquillity of soul, and an air of nobleness and inexpressible dignity, and my eyes were suffused with tears of admiration and grief.—"Memoirs ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... parent, "to you as our first musician, for sincere truth instead of empty flattery. I want to find out from you if my boy has such genuine talent that you can make a really good musician of him." "Naturally, I was called on to play," says Moscheles, in his "Autobiography," "and I was bungler enough to do it with some conceit. My mother having decked me out in my Sunday best, I played my best piece, Beethoven's 'Sonata Pathetique.' But what was my astonishment on finding that I was neither interrupted by bravos nor overwhelmed by ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... not know if the best among them have suffered anything from the lack of the human lapidary's skill. He often, at the best, is a mere bungler, and while he makes sure to bring out the brilliancy, laps off other finer qualities the lack of which no spark or brilliancy can compensate," I replied, by no means convinced, and thinking all the time of Mrs. Le Grande who had certainly received plenty of polishing touches, ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... strong enough to resist the persuasive power of convenience: that a latitudinarian baker, whose bread was honourably free from alum, would command the custom of any dyspeptic Puseyite; that an Arminian with the toothache would prefer a skilful Calvinistic dentist to a bungler stanch against the doctrines of Election and Final Perseverance, who would be likely to break the tooth in his head; and that a Plymouth Brother, who had a well furnished grocery shop in a favourable vicinage, would occasionally have the pleasure of furnishing sugar or vinegar to orthodox families ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Gervaise was beginning to be looked down upon. She was no longer so expert. She bungled her work to such an extent that the mistress had reduced her wages to two francs a day, the price paid to the clumsiest bungler. But she was still proud, reminding everyone of her former status as boss of her own shop. When Madame Fauconnier hired Madame Putois, Gervaise was so annoyed at having to work beside her former employee that she stayed ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... separated from each other. The governors and officials must not be classified as educated or uneducated on the evidence of their letters; all alike employed professional scribes, of whom one might be skilful and the next a bungler whose communications must be guessed at rather than read. Occasionally a Babylonian word is followed by the corresponding Canaanite word, also in cuneiform, but marked as a translation. Like the Egyptian kings, so the Asiatic sovereigns had each his staff of scribes. ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... sheaves do not make a harvest. I am a stupid bungler, spoiling canvas and wasting paint, or else you are as obtuse as the critics who may one day hover hungrily over it. Try the aid of one more clew, and if you fail to catch my purpose, I will dash my brush all loaded with ochre, right into those ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... you see, he can't keep from weeping. The other one too came not twenty minutes ago, Father Lorenza, the Jesuit who became the Contessina's confessor after Abbe Pisoni, and who undid what the other had done. Yes, a handsome man he is, but a fine bungler all the same, a perfect killjoy with all the crafty hindrances which he brought into that divorce affair. I wish you had been here to see what a big sign of the cross he made after he had knelt down. He didn't cry, he didn't: he seemed to be saying that as things ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... once, and before long you won't be the worst bungler with your tongue that lives west ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... people outside, civilians, who confidently and contemptuously declared him to be a bungler; a patient, hard-working bungler. These were the men who saw few of his successes, and always contrived to smell out his failures. These people were those who had no understanding of the difficulties of a handful of men pitted against a country eaten up with every form of criminal ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the hymen ruthlessly, he would hurt the woman cruelly, probably cause her to bleed freely from the wounded parts, and shock her seriously! All of which would be a score against the husband, would brand him as a brute, or a bungler, and so tend to make his "sun-aimed arrow alight in ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... even, to treat everything as if Perry were the guilty man. He would work with that idea always in mind. In the meantime he would go with Braceway as long as the Braceway theories seemed to have any foundation at all. He did not want to run the risk of being shown up as a bungler. He was anxious to be "in on" ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... and arranges them in some artistic form, which results in a masterpiece. The public does not know the reason why, but it will instantly realize that the work of the artist is in some mysterious way superior to the work of the bungler. Thus it is that the mind of the composer works spontaneously in selecting the musical jewels for the diadem which is to crown him with fame. During the process of inspiration he does not realize that he is selecting ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... fowler, who was a terrible bungler and could n't hit a bird at a dozen paces, sold his soul to the Devil in order to become a Freischutz. The fiend was to come for him in seven years, but must be always able to name the animal at which he was shooting, otherwise the compact was to be nullified. After that day the ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Precinct. Rochester The Cyclists Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M. Astigmatism The Coal Picker Storm-Racked Convalescence Patience Apology A Petition A Blockhead Stupidity Irony Happiness The Last Quarter of the Moon A Tale of Starvation The Foreigner Absence A Gift The Bungler Fool's Money Bags Miscast I Miscast II Anticipation Vintage The Tree of Scarlet Berries Obligation The Taxi The Giver of Stars The Temple Epitaph of a Young Poet Who Died Before Having Achieved Success In ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Duane, laughing as Delancy Grandcourt's bulk appeared among the trees along Hurryon Water. "Lord! what a bungler ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... they spent the afternoons on the Sixth Form ground, carefully criticizing every stroke. The theory of the game lay pat to the tongue, but in practice John was a shocking bungler. At his small preparatory school in the New Forest, he had not been taught the elementary principles of either racquets or cricket; but he had a good eye, played a capital game of golf, rode and shot well for a small boy. ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... bungler even in its disgusting trade, And botching, patching, leaving still behind Something of which its masters are afraid, States to be curbed and thoughts to be confined, Conspiracy or congress to be made, Cobbling at manacles for ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... himself, "and it's watertight. I can make a watertight stopple for a bottle with a long strip of paper, but you got to know how to wind it," he added, with clumsy disregard of his companion's mood. Tom was a hopeless bungler in ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... comparatively few people will ever see them. But if you are an artist in conversation, everyone who comes in contact with you will see your life-picture, which you have been painting ever since you began to talk. Everyone knows whether you are an artist or a bungler. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... A many-limbed and shambling creature, which was not made a spirit by the power of an idea, it fluttered amid all the culture of a people,—amid the ideas and modes of the state, the church, the family, the world of society,—like a bungler among paint-pots; but the paints still remained paints on the canvas, instead of being blended and transfigured into a thing of beauty. It was the organ of society, but not of the essential truths which ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... character have driven a splendid trade in Moabite antiquities ever since the discovery of the Moabite stone. On the other hand, the forger, if forgery there be, is assuredly no clumsy and ignorant bungler, as the makers of the Moabite pottery were confidently alleged to be by those who disputed its genuineness. It is, of course, part of his craft, and not, perhaps, much more than the 'prentice part, to give to the sheepskins on which the text is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... says Richard, 'and send the barber. Also, the next time the Archduke desires murder done let him find a fellow who knows his trade. This one is a bungler. Here's the third time to my knowledge he has missed. Off ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their meals, and hardly ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... has opened himself more to me in the last few weeks, and I like him. But the man who now writes the survey of foreign literature in the "Westminster Review" might have just read my book: this he cannot have done, or else he is a thorough bungler; for he (1) understands me only as representing the personal God (apparently the one in the clouds, as you once expressed it, a-straddle, riding) and leaving out everything besides; (2) that the last twenty-seven chapters of the book of Isaiah are not, as one has hitherto conceived, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... analogy stops. Both Rachel and her forerunner, Anne Turner, were scamps, and both got into serious trouble—Anne into deeper and deadlier hot water than Rachel—but between the two women there is only superficial comparison. Rachel was a botcher and a bungler, a ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... bungler I am!" she exclaimed with half-amused regret. "The truth is, I am so glad, and when I am very happy I always make ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Doctor Watson. We are wont to scoff in a patronising manner at that humble follower of the great investigator, but, as a matter of fact, we should have been just as dull ourselves. We should not even have risen to the modest level of a Scotland Yard Bungler. We should ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... skirted round the northern squadron, Disko waving his hand to friend after friend, and anchored as nearly as a racing yacht at the end of the season. The Bank fleet pass good seamanship in silence; but a bungler is jeered ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... fewest have the key. And then how your Blockhead (Dummkopf) studies not their Meaning; but simply whether they are well or ill cut, what he calls Moral or Immoral! Still worse is it with your Bungler (Pfuscher): such I have seen reading some Rousseau, with pretences of interpretation; and mistaking the ill-cut Serpent-of-Eternity for a common poisonous reptile.' Was the Professor apprehensive lest an Editor, selected as the present boasts himself, might ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... he can hardly be accused of undue optimism. Speaking as one of his readers, I found no difficulty at all in being patient. I have always had a weakness for official detectives, and have resented the term "Scotland Yard bungler" almost as if it were a personal affront; and now I feel that my resentment is justified. Scotland Yard does not bungle; and the advice I shall give for the future to any eager-eyed, enthusiastic young murderer burning to embark on his professional career is, don't ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... is a bungler in every one of them. The man who will do anything well must confine himself to doing a very few things. Yet while the things a man can produce to advantage are few, the things he wants to consume are many. Exchange makes possible at the same time concentration ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... Anna-Rose try to make up for Anna-Felicitas's shortcomings by a double zeal, a double willingness and cheerfulness. Anna-Felicitas was a born dreamer, a born bungler with her hands and feet. She not only never from first to last succeeded in filling the thirty hot-water bottles, which were her care, in thirty minutes, which was her duty, but every time she met a pail standing about she knocked against it and it fell ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... corrupt good manners! You are a mere bungler in delicate matters, Evje. You made a bad choice ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... the subject. This made no difference, however. He had pledged himself to wait until she did care. Therefore he sedulously maintained his mask. Miss Hargrove should be made to believe that she had added much to the pleasure of the excursion, and there he would stop. And Burt on his mettle was no bungler. The test would come in his ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... thousand scudi. Take your hat off! Since the world was, Has she seen no greater master, Nor—" He was then interrupted By a man with gray moustaches, Who his shoulder tapped and scornful Said: "You are mistaken; never Saw the world a greater bungler! I say ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... classical subject, deserves especial notice. It is a thorough criticism of all the dramas of Euripides, in which he takes a view of the dramatist exactly the reverse of that maintained by Walter Savage Landor—asserting that he was a bungler in the tragic art, and far too much addicted to foisting his stupid moralisings into his plays. Another article in the Westminster, on the Prussian Constitution, is worthy of remark for its thoroughness. The whole machinery of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... depressed. Any sneaking hopes he might have held that he was not dead were now destroyed. The evidence of his friends was enough to convince any one. It convinced him. Now that it was too late, his act of self-sacrifice appeared supremely stupid and ridiculous. Bitterly he attacked himself as a bungler and an ass. He assured himself he should have made a fight for it; should have fought for his wife: and against Maddox. Instead of which he weakly had effaced himself, had surrendered his rights, had abandoned his wife at a ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... not know how to treat the idiot. Never one to suffer fools gladly, he grew irritable and would almost certainly have said something that would have put the garrulous young bungler in his place, had not the latter suddenly remembered something, just as he was on the point of ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... that he had no talent for concealment; that he was a sad bungler in the management of any business which was not open and above-board. This impertinent, disagreeable little coxcomb of a New Yorker, without a warning sound to announce his coming, had suddenly stepped between him and Stumpy, who held the hidden treasure in his hand. ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... other, 'that you are, as I have told you already, a bungler and murderer, for is not my brother dead of your bleeding, and you deserve ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... is: for the self-same reason which induces people, in other matters which are taught, to punish the mal-performance of a service. So they, the Lacedaemonians, visit penalties on the boy who is detected thieving as being but a sorry bungler in the art. So to steal as many cheeses as possible (off the shrine of Orthia (17)) was a feat to be encouraged; but, at the same moment, others were enjoined to scourge the thief, which would point a moral not ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... the sulphur, a wild overflow in the quicksilver, or a flaw in the bellows, or a pupil who failed to replenish the fuel, by falling asleep by the furnace. The invisible foes seldom vouchsafe to make themselves visible where they can frustrate the bungler as they mock at his toils from their ambush. But the mightier adventurers, equally foiled in despite of their patience and skill, would have said, 'Not with us rests the fault; we neglected no caution, we failed from no oversight. But ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... you, Heart's-Ease!" exclaimed Ernest, calling Violet by one of her old childish names, "But Harry lives for you, and you for him; and God knows there is no life left for me. But you are right: I am a coward and a bungler, because I can create no life. I give myself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... said he. "Am I such a farcical bungler, Watson, that I should erect an obvious dummy, and expect that some of the sharpest men in Europe would be deceived by it? We have been in this room two hours, and Mrs. Hudson has made some change in that figure ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... both his guitar and his neck, exclaiming, "That he would rather prepare breakfast every morning betwixt this and the day of judgment, than commit a task of such consequence to an inexperienced bungler like his companion." ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... on this, God's harp supernal, stretched but to be stricken once. Hoary Time is a beginner, Life a bungler, Death a dunce. But I will not fear to match them—no, by God, I will not fear, I will learn you, I will play you and the stars stand still ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... I will take no notice of it; it is against something written very lately; and indeed I know not what to say, nor do I care; and so you are a saucy rogue for losing your money to-day at Stoyte's; to let that bungler beat you, my Stella, are not you ashamed? well, I forgive you this once, never do so again; no, noooo. Kiss and be friends, sirrah.—Come, let me go sleep, I go earlier to bed than formerly; and have not been out so late these two months; but the ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... my hand, a nervous laugh. The candle spluttered out, and the thing was over at last, with a groan that floated up to me in the dark. He got himself away somehow. The night swallowed his form. He was a horrible bungler. Horrible. I heard the quick crunch-crunch of the gravel under his boots. He was running. Absolutely running, with nowhere to go to. And he was ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... but was presently swept off the stool and denominated "a little bungler." Being pushed unceremoniously to one side—which was precisely what I wished—he usurped my place, and proceeded to accompany himself: for he could play as well as sing. I hied me to the window-recess. And while I sat there and looked out on the still ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... contemptuously: "Peyrolles is a bungler. Leave it to me. I will find Lagardere for you and deal with him as he deserves ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... his fingers loose impatiently. "Care? Yes, this I care, bungler: I care because of all three of thee, thou alone wert covetous enough to obey my conditions. With thee alive, there was hope of thy friends' speedy death. With thee dead, which of the others will wipe his fellow from his path for me? Why, think ye, did I fawn on John Pearse? But to ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... his official career and perhaps his life hung in the balance. To fail of arresting the desperado was to brand himself a bungler and to expose himself to the contempt of other sure-shot ruffians. However, having faced death many times in the desert and on the range, he advanced steadily, apparently undisturbed by the warnings he ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... you a body, right and strong, With sturdy little limbs and chest and neck For fun and fighting with your little mates, Great feats and voyages in the breathless world Of out-of-doors,—He gave you me for this, And I was such a bungler, that is all!" O, the old lie—that thought was not the worst. I never have been truthful with myself. For by the door where lurked one ghostly thought I stood with crazy hands to thrust it back If it should ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... injured and the dead woman remained on the deck. The skipper was in a black mood. He knew his people well enough to see that this unfortunate affair would weaken his power among them. They would say that the saints were against his enterprises and ambitions; that his luck was gone; that he was a bungler and so not fit to give orders to full-grown men. He understood all this as if he could hear their grumbled words—nay, as well as if he could read the very hearts of them. He turned to Nick Leary. Nick had already bandaged his face ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... dear Madame," murmured the artist, interrupting Presley's impatient retort; "I am a mere bungler. You don't mean quite that, I am sure. I am too sensitive. It is my cross. Beauty," he closed his sore eyes with a little expression of pain, "beauty ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... room. More quick work! The amateur's method had been very simple. He knew that the loan had been made and the bonds sent to the bank. So he forged a check, certified it himself, and collected the securities. Of course, he was a bungler and ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... which they your virtue make, Is in your power; you need but stoop and take. Your beauteous images must be allow'd By all, but some vile poets of the crowd. 50 But how should any sign-post dauber know The worth of Titian or of Angelo? Hard features every bungler can command; To draw true beauty ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... inimitable grace, clearness, and pathos, I have no ambition to imitate Timaeus, who, when writing his history, hoped to surpass Thucydides himself in eloquence, and to show that Philistius was but an ignorant bungler, and so plunges into an account of the speeches and battles of his heroes, proving himself not ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... farmer has the feel and the habit of good work. The really successful man in any calling or profession is he who does his work conscientiously and as well as he can. The sloven becomes the bungler, and the bungler is on the high road to failure. It is always a pleasant thing to see a man do his work well and artistically. It is the habit, the policy, the attitude of thus doing that tell in the long run. A farmer may by chance get a good crop by seeding on unplowed stubble land, ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... was just a plain, every-day bungler. He began by urging the obstinate horse with voice and whip; but at each fresh application the creature merely laid back his ears, shook his head, and set his feet more resolutely against all progress. At last the driver worked himself ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... theories be true, the boast of the Atheist, that God is wasteful and a bungler, in that he wastefully scatters his sunlight, and sun-heat, in all directions into space, is set at naught. Nature has been misinterpreted. No sunlight nor sun-heat is disclosed, except in the direction ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Everybody may be deceived. They built him a beautiful black scaffold; they allowed him to turn toward the window where his mistress was; they cut the neck of his shirt with scissors, but the executioner was a bungler, accustomed to hang, and not to decapitate, so that he was obliged to strike three or four times to cut the head off, and at last he only managed by the aid of a knife which he drew from his girdle, and with which he chopped so well that he got the neck in half. Bravo! you are brave!" continued the ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... mademoiselle is doubtless yours," said Claparon, holding himself very straight and looking at Birotteau; "hey! you are not a bungler. None of the roses you distil can be compared with her; and perhaps it is because you have ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... "And I should be glad if you would release him. He is a traitor to his country and something of a bungler, but I can ...
— The Boy Allies Under the Sea • Robert L. Drake
... on the yellow head, this unfortunate bungler, who had been in love with Norah since he had worn knickerbockers, and Norah held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for her), take her ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... Tregoz who shot," one of the men said. "The sentry who was here was a bungler with a bow. None whom we know but Tregoz could have made sure of that mark, bright as the night is. Well it was, Lord, that you were not sleeping ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... towards the pole, but another boy got hold of it—rather a bungler he seemed; so Ernest left him to puff and blow by himself in his vain efforts at getting up, and went on to one of the swinging ropes. He seized it well above his head, and pressing his knees and feet against it, steadily drew himself ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and none had said, "Quantum mutatus ab illo!" Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature for playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might not call myself as wholesome a morsel for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... alive and well, but an old man again." And so he did find him, to his great joy. From that time his pride disappeared, and whenever any one called him "Professor" he would exclaim: "Ah, what folly that is! There are gentlemen in Venice and professors in Padua, but I am a bungler." ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... me willing to be swallowed up in the abyss of waters, wherein I had perished unseen, un- pitied, without wondering eyes, tears of pity, lectures of mortality, and none had said, "Quantum mutatus ab illo!" Not that I am ashamed of the anatomy of my parts, or can accuse nature of playing the bungler in any part of me, or my own vicious life for contracting any shameful disease upon me, whereby I might not call myself as wholesome a morsel for the worms ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... anxious to vindicate his mistress's maidenly reserve. "I stole it from her. The hand is a reminiscence. After gazing at it so often, and even holding it once for an instant, when Hilda was not thinking of me, I should be a bungler indeed, if I could not now reproduce it to something like ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... male companions. Bed on such an occasion was not to be thought of, so we visited the theatre and cafe chantants, ending the evening with a supper at the Metropole (previously ordered by the fur merchants) which proved that money, even in Irkutsk, will convert a culinary bungler into a very passable chef. Our departure for the North took place very early on the morning of January 19, and I have since heard that nothing would induce our merry little hostess to seek her couch until the tingle of our sleigh bells ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... Medcroft before the breakfast was over. It may have been due to the spell of her eyes or to the call of her voice, but it remains an unchallenged fact that he no longer thought of Medcroft as a stupid bungler; instead, he had come to regard him as a good and irreproachable Samaritan. All of which goes to prove that a divinity shapes our ends, rough hew ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... enormously increased by this faculty of letting it alone on the one hand, and of using it singly and with concentration on the other. It becomes a true tool, which a master-workman lays down when done with, but which only a bungler carries about with him all the time to show that he is the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... of anthropological interest with which I regarded his frontal bone seemed to strike the poor man dumb, and he took a hurried departure. Could he have been ignorant that ours is, in general, greater than the Periclean for the very reason that the Divinity is neither the devil nor a bungler; that three thousand years of human consciousness is not nothing; that a whole is greater than its part, and a butterfly than a chrysalis? But it was the assumption that it was therefore in any way great in the abstract that ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... was happening now had taken place but a week before, Ranjoor Singh would have found himself in a fine fix, for all except I would have there and then denounced him for a bungler, or a knave. But now the other daffadars who clustered around him and me said one to the other, "Let us see what our sahib makes of it!" The men sent word to know what was being revealed through two long hours of talk, and Chatar Singh went back ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... young woman she seems," he admitted. "I fear that I should only be a bungler in your profession, Mr. Quest, but if there is anything I can do to help you to discover her whereabouts, you can count upon me. Personally, I am convinced that Craig will return to me with some plausible explanation as to what has happened. In that case he will ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have called life was nothing but its prelude—amusement, sport to kill the time with. I never lived till I knew her, till I loved her—entirely and only loved her. People have often said of me, not to my face, but behind my back, that in most things I was but a botcher and a bungler. It may be so; for I had not then found in what I could show myself a master. I should like to see the man who outdoes me in the talent of love. A miserable life it is, full of anguish and tears; but it is so natural, so dear to me, that I could ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... are a murderess, Belle," he said solemnly. "And you are a bungler, too. You could not ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... How we shall kiss each other!' said Frederick. 'She used to kiss me, and then look in my face to be sure I was the right person, and then set to again! But, Margaret, what a bungler you are! I never saw such a little awkward, good-for-nothing pair of hands. Run away, and wash them, ready to cut bread-and-butter for me, and leave the fire. I'll manage it. Lighting fires is one ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... correct, they must get near enough to attack us with assegais. They are more dangerous so. I remembered what an old Boer had said to me at Buluwayo: "The Zulu with his assegai is an enemy to be feared; with a gun, he is a bungler." ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... a bungler in talk, but every sentence from his pen was elegant. He once said, "I carry no loose change in my pocket, but I can draw for a thousand pounds." Burke said of Goldsmith, "He writes like an angel, but he talks like poor Poll." Franklin was by no ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... fall a prey to the savage Mantis! The peaceable Locust, if missed, protests against the attack with a few kicks; the carnivorous Mantis, who is in the habit of feasting on Wasps far more powerful than the Tachytes, would protest by eating the bungler; the game would devour the hunter, an excellent catch. Mantis-paralysing is a most perilous trade and admits of no half-successes; you have to excel in it from the first, under pain of death. No, the surgical art of the Tachytes is not an acquired art. Whence then does it come, if not from the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... Pentillie Castle by Tamar and High Sheriff of Cornwall, was an amiable gentleman of indolent habits and no great stock of brains. On receiving Sandercock's message and instant appeal for help, he cursed his Under-Sheriff for a drunken bungler, and reluctantly prepared to ride West and ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
