"Flabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... though nominally under control of their mistresses and wives, who are generally hideous specimens of womanhood, and whose features present the traits of sensuality, cruelty and avarice as clearly expressed as if traced there by Belial himself. The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and other places of public resort, and loud in appearance as they are obscene in talk, are, in the estimation of every self-respecting man, eminently fitted by Lucifer for ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... between Mrs. Turpin and her lodger were becoming less strained. For the first time in her life the flabby, foolish woman had to do with a person of firm will and bright intelligence; not being vicious of temper, she necessarily felt herself submitting to domination, and darkly surmised that the rule might in some way be for her good. All the sluggard and the slattern in her, all the obstinacy ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... came the cook, barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket; he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... loose eends, stiddier bein' plaited up stiff an' tight an' personable, an' yer face burned pink in the sun, stiddier like yer skin ginerally looks, fine an' white ez a pan o' fraish milk, an' the flabby, slinksy skirt o' that yaller calico dress 'thout no starch in it, a-flappin' an' whirlin' in the wind—shucks! I dun'no' whut the man could hev thought o' ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... countries as far off as Finland, we get a flood of imported and domestic Swisses of all sad sorts, with all possible faults—from too many holes, that make a flabby, wobbly cheese, to too few—cracked, dried-up, collapsed or utterly ruined by molding inside. So it will pay you to buy only the kind already marked genuine in Switzerland. For there cheese such as Saanen takes six years to ripen, improves ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... now she and I were talking it over together. "We won't give you up, my child," I said, "to a common man! Only if some prince comes from foreign lands, and blows his trumpet at our door." But things didn't turn out our way. Now there he sits—the man who is going to tear her away—fat and flabby! Staring and smirking at her! He likes it! Oh, confound you! Well, now they've finished eating and are getting up; ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... senses reeled before the blaze and the glory of this, the most magnificent of the dwellings of man. Finally, a pair of curtains, crusted with gold, were parted, and their guide handed them over to a negro mute who stood within. A heavy, fat, brown-skinned man, with a large, flabby, hairless face was pacing up and down the small apartment, and he turned upon them as they entered with an abominable and threatening smile. His loose lips and pendulous cheeks were those of a gross old woman, but above ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was helpless before this clear-eyed, supple athlete who walked like a god from Olympus. One can't lap up half a dozen highballs a day for an indeterminate number of years, without getting flabby, nor can he spend himself in feeble dissipations and have reserves of strength to call upon when needed. The tongue went dry in his mouth. He began ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... immobile the waist muscles, prevent their getting strong. Anyone who is accustomed to corsets, when she leaves them off for a day will complain of "such a tired feeling, as if she would break in two." This is easily accounted for, the muscles, unused to the task of holding up the body, are flabby and useless. These same muscles when called on, at the moment of delivery, are totally unfit for their work, hence comes a large amount of the unnecessary suffering. The remedy is—discard the corsets, bear with the tiredness for a week or two and regularly practice the exercises recommended ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... feet tall, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, and weighed about two hundred pounds of flabby flesh, mostly covered by filthy garments. His head was pyramidal in shape, and covered by a mass of unkempt red hair. He had practically no forehead. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. His nose was flat and bent to one side, ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... the supper that Saturday night. I sat at a table with a deaf girl, two dirty men, and a fat, flabby female with pop eyes, and not a one of them acted as if he possessed the ability to speak. Except the deaf girl, who did ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... changed. As I saw him that afternoon he was a very slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders and flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward clean beauty. You had an instinctive sense that so he had been from the beginning. You felt he was not only drifting through life, eating what came in his ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... back on it, it will not matter so much. It is simply a promise that I made to God." This man had not told his vow. It was a secret between himself and his Lord. He was not driven to the performance of it by public opinion. He was not urged to it, as flabby Herod, "for the sake of those that sat with him." He was urged to it by his own unstained ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... his hand in the flabby stuffed glove that served the Scarecrow for a hand, and the Scarecrow pressed it so cordially that the straw ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... glance of fury at the large flabby countenance of the righteous arbiter of his doom, whilst his hands closed themselves with an involuntary gesture of menace. Then the tide of anger ebbed; a contemptuous smile parted his lips. And, bowing with an air of light mockery to the court, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... your minds the Cruchots. All three took snuff, and had long ceased to repress the habit of snivelling or to remove the brown blotches which strewed the frills of their dingy shirts and the yellowing creases of their crumpled collars. Their flabby cravats were twisted into ropes as soon as they wound them about their throats. The enormous quantity of linen which allowed these people to have their clothing washed only once in six months, and to keep it during that time in the depths of their closets, ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... altogether, for their lack of purpose and continuity makes them lose rather than gain muscular energy. A man or woman who would gather strength from gymnastic exercise must set about it systematically and with a will. He must put mind and energy into the work, or else continue to have flabby ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl's golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something like a wrinkle. Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... dress, Aline opened the folding doors of the drawing-room. Only the centre lamp was lighted, but she recognized the two men. They were sitting together, and arose as she entered. The burly Second Reader wore a dismayed countenance. His cheeks were flabby, his eyes red. The other was a timid little man who never had ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... necessary for the special hand. Tight hands need to be massaged to limber the fingers and stretch the web of flesh between them. The loose, flabby hand may also be strengthened and rendered firm by massage; but this is often a more difficult task than to stretch the right hand. If technical training is properly given, it is sure to render the ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... the entire bird. Tender, easily broken skin indicates a young bird; tougher skin indicates an older one. The skin should be whole and unbroken; likewise, when pressed with the fingers, it should be neither flabby nor stiff, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... really be. All such conduct is inconsistent with Christianity; but we are not to say, therefore, that it is incompatible with Christianity. Thank God! that is a very different matter. But as long as you and I have two things—viz. strong and hot desires, and weak and flabby wills—so long shall we, in this world full of combustibles, not be beyond the possibility of a dreadful conflagration being kindled by some devil-blown sparks. There are plenty of dry sticks lying about ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... aren't they, father? Now I come to think of it, they are very, very sad. I didn't do one right thing to-day 'cept to make myself pretty. Miss Winstead was so angry, and so was nurse, but when I am with them I don't mind a bit being naughty. I wouldn't be a flabby good girl ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... thus foolishly and pessimistically, who should loom upon his horizon but—of all people in the world—the Haddock, the fishy, flabby, stale, unprofitable Haddock! Most certainly Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like this. A beautiful confection of pearly-grey, pearl-buttoned flannel draped his droopy form, a pearly-grey silk tie, pearl-pinned, encircled his lofty collar, pearly-grey silk socks spanned the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... will. Thanks, Nichols," said McGuire, following him to the door and offering a flabby hand. "Don't mind what I've said to-night. I think we understand each other. Stryker will see that the house is locked when the young people come up. Keep your men to the mark and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... and the other Loons seemed much impressed by his defiance. But suddenly there came a sharp report and Panta Loon instantly disappeared, to the great astonishment of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and Woot the Wanderer, who saw on the spot where the big fellow had stood a little heap of flabby, wrinkled skin that looked like a collapsed ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... souls in the commercial community, whose secret heroes were the oil tycoons of a bygone era or the old-time Stock Exchange clan united under the totems of the bull or the bear. But the day of the rugged individualist was long departed; only the flabby individualist remained. And he had the forms to fill out and the inspectors to contend with, and the rationing to worry about and the taxes to meet and the quotas to fulfill. But in the long run, he managed. The business man worked for ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... affected even social moments. Later, when Milly became sophisticated enough to generalize, she complained that the men were "all one kind"; they could "talk of nothing but business to a woman." Even their physique, heavy and flabby, showed the office habit, in contrast with the bony and ruddy Englishmen, who drifted through the city from time to time. That Chicago was a huge pool into which all races and peoples drained,—that ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... to the obvious master of the house, a big, heavily-built, massive-framed man of sixty or thereabouts, who sat in state on the right-hand side of the hearth. Brent took in certain details of his appearance at a glance: the broad, flabby, parchment-hued face, wide mouth, square jaw, and small, shrewd eyes; the suit of dead-black broadcloth, and the ample black neckcloth swathed about an old-fashioned collar; he noted, too, the fob which dangled from Alderman Crood's waist, and its ancient seals ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... at the Earth calendar dial that was automatically correlated with the Saarkkadic calendar just above it. Fifty-nine next week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to show for it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face, ...
— In Case of Fire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... creatures of Pal-ul-don. And other eyes there were, eyes she did not see, but that saw her and watched her every move—fierce eyes, greedy eyes, cunning and cruel. They watched her, and a red tongue licked flabby, pendulous lips. They watched her, and a half-human brain ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the man replied, "we have not enough. Our shoulders are getting soft and our leg muscles are getting flabby. Now if the Taitai would only go out for twenty miles every day instead of for two miles every ten days as she does now, we would be delighted to remain in your service." Was ever stranger complaint made by ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... then that the vigilant watcher unclosed her flabby lids, slowly, and without start or exclamation, much as a dozing cat blinks when a redder sparkle from the fire dazzles her out of dreams. One hard wink, one bewildered stare, and Pbillis was awake ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... anticipating some fun—for to the German comrades of this officer the ill-treatment of a prisoner was certainly fun—these men drew nearer, and, hearing his words, one of them—a huge, fat, unwieldy person, with flabby cheeks and pendulous chin, to say nothing of the huge girth which he presented—giggled and chortled loudly, and suddenly placed a heavy hand on the lieutenant's shoulder—a hand the weight of which caused ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list - I've got a little list Of social offenders who might well be underground, And who never would be missed - who never would be missed! There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs - All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs - All children who are up in dates, and floor you with 'em flat - All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like THAT - And all third persons who on spoiling TETE-E-TETES ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... vaguely that he had never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this, he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy" Burgundy was no more than a flabby, vin ordinaire beside it. Not that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in his veins, he summed it up ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... have left me the victor. But there is an etiquette just as there is in fencing, and I refrained. I looked at this Englishman and I wondered how I should attack him. His ears were large and prominent. Could I seize them I might drag him to the ground. I rushed in, but I was betrayed by this flabby glove, and twice I lost my hold. He struck me, but I cared little for his blows, and again I seized him by the ear. He fell, and I rolled upon him and thumped his head upon ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... eight times stronger, and from this fact it may fairly be inferred that the presence of alcohol, as in the tincture, directly opposes the specific action of the plant. This herb bears further in some districts the names "Flop Top," "Cow Flop," and "Flabby Dock." It was stated in the Times Telescope, 1822, "the women of the poorer class in Derbyshire used to indulge in copious draughts of Foxglove tea, as a cheap means of obtaining the pleasures of intoxication. This was found to produce a great exhilaration of the spirits, with other singular ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... birth of the child it is easy to feel through the mother's abdominal wall, which has now become lax and flabby, the organs which lie beneath it. The top of the womb, once just below the edge of the ribs, may now be found about the level of the uppermost part of the hip bones, a position which it keeps until detachment of the after- birth begins. As the after-birth peels off, the firmly ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... gills are red, the eyes full, and the whole fish firm and stiff, they are fresh and good; if on the contrary, the gills are pale, the eyes sunken, the flesh flabby, they are stale. ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... less well-bred she would have been patronising. She looked younger than her years in spite of her little cap and the sedateness of attire then common to women past their youth. Lady Constance Mortlake had the high bust and stomach of advanced years; her flabby cheeks were streaked with good living. Her expression was shrewd and humorous, however, and her eyes were kinder than her tongue. Mrs. Nunn rose with vast ceremony and presented her niece to these two august dames, and as Anne courtesied, Lady Hunsdon said, smiling, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... vision of brilliantly coloured silks and satins and rouged faces passing away through some doors, and then before we had satisfied our eyes, several flabby-faced men suddenly came out and called imperatively to us to stop and go away. We could not go farther, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... his unsteady fingers—the expensive-looking, gold-tipped cigarette of the old days. Peter was Peter. Ten years had made little difference. There were queer little hollow places in his cheeks, and under the jaw-bone, and at the base of the head, and a flabby, parchment-like appearance about the skin. That was all that made him different from the Peter ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... paying the lady a visit, he was received by an ugly, dirtily-garbed old woman, though with a smiling countenance, who, at his request, furnished him eggs and milk. At length the sultana appeared—an old dame with a short, squat figure, a nose flabby at the end, and eyes destitute of brows or lashes, but blessed with a smiling face. Her dress consisted of an old barsati, dirtier even than her maid's. Her fingers were covered with rings of copper ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... practical and almost rudely healthy young man, with an unreflecting belief in the existence of things he had seen, and considerable doubt concerning those which he had not seen. In his heart he regarded sentiment as the expression of a flabby nature in a feeble body. Once or twice he had casually redressing-case, with its array of silver toilet articles, the solid front of his chiffonnier, the carved arms of his favorite lounging-chair, even the etchings and prints on ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... Judy. "I wish you had said your say. I believe you could get ahead of the fabulous monster in open combat. She is, after all, a very flabby, fabulous monster and one prick would ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... himself, on his way to embark at Greenwich, for Scotland. I remember a double line of soldiers along the road, several very fussy horsemen riding to and fro, a troop of Cavalry, and a carriage, in which sat a very fat elderly man, with a pale flabby face, without beard or whisker, but fringed with the curls of a large brown wig. That is all I remember, or care to remember, of George ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... only one of the Dix' nurses I saw in Fredericksburg, and her large, flat, flabby face was almost hideous with its lack of eye-brows and lashes; but this hideousness must have been her recommendation, as she could not have been more than twenty ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... a look askance at them—for it was the clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight forth at any object, whether human or inanimate, "where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?" ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... well-dressed man with a diamond pin in his scarf—walked up and down Fitz's office awaiting his arrival—a short, thick-set, large-paunched man with a heavy jaw, a straight line of a mouth, two little restless eyes wobbling about in a pulp of wrinkles, flabby cheeks, a nose that was too small for the area it failed to ornament, and a gray stubbly beard shaven so closely at its edges that it looked as if its owner might either wear it on his chin or put it in his pocket ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... guess that Bobbs had not been long attending to his present work. "You'll find," said Bobbs, "that young men in our air do not need the restraints which are necessary to you English. Their fathers and mothers were not soft and flabby before them, as was the case with yours, I think." Lord Marylebone looked across the table, I am told, at Sir Kennington Oval, and nothing afterwards was said ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... time. The reading-lamp was never lighted. There was no season o' social converse. Every merchant but Eph Hill grew fat an' round, an' complained of indigestion an' sick-headache. Sam looked like a moored balloon. Seemed so their morals grew fat an' flabby an' shif'less an' in need of exercise. Their morals travelled too, but they travelled from mouth to mouth, as ye might say, an' very fast. More'n half of 'em give up church an' went off on the country roads every Sunday. All along the pike from Pointview to Jerusalem Corners ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... clergyman seemed to receive a decided shock as he rolled up out of his chair. He stood before the candidate to whom the Elder had introduced him and forgot to look at the ceiling. He had been caught off his guard, and through the momentary look of recognition there flitted across his flabby features an expression that was far from ecclesiastical. But it was gone as quickly as it had come, and the Reverend Mr. Means was once more his complacent ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... Not exactly ill but, you know.... It's awful with these ladies! Sits up at cards till three every morning, and pulls her waist into the shape of a wine-glass. And the lady is flabby and fat, and carries the weight of a good many years on ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... brain-workers are generally exercised a good deal; for the constitutional exercise of such is usually walking. But in large town such men give fair play to no other thews and sinews. More especially the arms of such men are very flabby. The muscle is soft, and slender. If the fore legs of a horse were like that, you could not ride him but at the risk ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... her way through the outskirts of potato-barrels and flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-aproned butcher who stood in ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... had never laid hands on him. At any rate not for a crime of importance. He had been clapped in jail once, but merely for debt; and he had carried this off with flying colours by pushing past the startled usher in church and squatting his great flabby bulk in the governor's pew of the next Sunday morning. He was a thief, a chronic bankrupt, a counterfeiter, an illicit liquor seller. It was all perfectly well known; but not once had a constable brought ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... fisxkaptado. Fishing-line hokfadeno. Fish-market fisxvendejo. Fishmonger fisxvendisto. Fissure fendeto. Fist pugno. Fit (illness) atako. Fit for, to be tauxgi. Fitly alkonvena. Five kvin. Fix fiksi. Fixed fiksa. Fixity fikseco. Flabby mola. Flag standardo. Flag (navy) flago. Flagon botelego. Flagstone sxtonplato. Flagrant flagranta. Flail drasxilo. Flake negxero, floko. Flambeau torcxo. Flame flami. Flame flamo. Flank flanko. Flannel flanelo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... 'ARCOURT's a hum, and LABBY makes a chap go squirmish. Dull as ditchwater the whole thing. One longs e'en for a Hirish skirmish; But PARNELL's fo par, and his spite, 'ave knocked the sparkle out of PADDY. No; Parlyment's a played-out fraud, flabby and footy, flat and faddy. The Season's similar. Season? Bah? By sech a name it ain't worth calling. Shoulders like these and carves like those was not quite made for pantry-sprawling; But wot's the use? Trot myself ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... because the late king, thanks to the confidence he had in me, used me as the real advocate of his independent policy whenever the insistence of the western powers that we too should declare war on Russia grew too strong, and the opposition of his cabinet too flabby for his liking. Then the play was staged—I do not know how often—when I was called back here and ordered to write for His Majesty a more pro-Russian dispatch, and Mr. von Manteuffel resigned, and I requested to be instructed by His Majesty to follow Mr. von Manteuffel, after the dispatch was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... devitalized condition; yet, thousands do, and with careful nursing, manage to bring into the world several sickly children. The spinal distortion is one of the ordinary consequences of lacing. No one who laces habitually can have a straight or strong back. The muscles being unbalanced become flabby or contracted, unable to support the trunk of the body erect, and a curvature, usually a double curvature, of the spine is the consequence. And if anything were needed to aggravate the spinal curvature, intensify the compression of the internal viscera, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... to tame and a new land to develop. For these ends they sacrificed much. It is for us to attack with equal courage the evils of the present. Life has outwardly become easy for many of us; our spiritual muscle easily becomes flabby. But there are new tasks equally importunate, equally worthy of our loyalty and sacrifice, hard enough to stir our blood. The times call for new idealism, new courage, new effort; the purpose of this book will not be attained unless the reader carries away from its perusal some new realization ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Speaker; and it had to be signed before the close of the session or it could not become a law. I heard rumours that some anti-corporation bills were going to be "lost" by the Chief Clerk, so that they might not be signed; and I kept my eye on him. He was a fat-faced, stupid-looking, flabby creature—by name D. H. Dickason—who did not appear capable of doing anything very daring. I saw the chairman of the Enrolling Committee place our bill on Dickason's desk, among those waiting for the Speaker's signature; and—while the House was busy—I ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... heart, none the less does an ideal of male purity, of the masculine subdued to gentle virtues, make strong appeal to the imagination in her sex. To the everyday man, Kite seemed a mere pale grotesque, a creature of flabby foolishness. But Olga Hannaford was not the only girl who had dreamed of devoting her life to him. If she could believe his assurance (and she all but did believe it), for her alone had he felt anything worthy to be called love, to her alone had he spoken words of tenderness. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... was low, of stone and timber. It was evident that Tobias was well-to-do. Valerius pounded upon the door; the heavy shutter of a window swung open, and a man's head peered out. It was a pink head, very bald, with flabby cheeks, a full-moon face, and pursed lips, and the beaked Hebraic nose of ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... poor creatures," said Sara, with a curling lip; "your weak theologians have become flabby politicians—their one rule of action is to avoid everything which demands even the possibility of self-sacrifice or ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... newspapers. It was plain to be seen that the stereotyped rubber-stamped kind of official news that got into the papers did not satisfy them. Many's the time I heard bitter curses heaped upon the Hobenzollerns by lips that were flabby and colorless ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... man would under a jab like that, and I looked for him either to begin breakin' the peace or start lyin' out of it. There's considerable beef to Egbert, you know. He'd probably weigh in at a hundred and eighty, with all that flabby meat on him, and if it wa'n't for that sort of cheap look to his face you might take him for a real man. But he don't show any more fight than a cow. He don't even put in any indignant "Not guilty!" He just shrugs his shoulders and ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... all but forgotten the performances. They were, as I declared at the outset, far from perfect, far from satisfactory. The Ring was depressing. Rosa Sucher, who visited us some years ago, was a flabby Sieglinde. The Siegmund, Herr Burgstalles, a lanky, awkward young fellow from over the hills somewhere. He was sad. Ernst Kraus, an old acquaintance, was a familiar Siegfried. Demeter Popovici you remember with ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... elemental lines of a forgotten face again confronted Thalassa beneath the flabby contours of age. It was like looking at a familiar outline covered by a mask—a transparent mask. He stood stock still with uplifted lamp, like a man in a trance, but his eyes never left ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... reject the idea that society can be organized by intelligence, and war ended by eliminating its causes from the social order. On the contrary they cling to the orthodox contention that war is a necessary and salutary thing, and proclaim that the American fibre was growing weak and flabby from luxury and peace, curiously ignoring the fact that their own economic class, the small percentage of our population owning sixty per cent. of the wealth of the country, and which therefore should be most debilitated by luxury, was most ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... they'll never rise to anything better," he says emphatically. "The higher the civilisation of a nation is the higher the position of its women. A nation of men who ride and let the women carry the burdens is bound to be rotten and flabby." ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... obliged to submit to their discourtesy. Of all the guests Mdlle. Selpdorf alone stood erect, forgetting, in her indignation, to join in the general obeisance. The Grand Duke, looking up, found her flushed and flashing, and superlatively handsome. His flabby cheeks twitched, ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... morning, occasionally having anxious consultations with certain sickly men whom I supposed to be superannuated bookkeepers, in impoverished circumstances, and rather pallid from the want of nutritious food. One of them, dressed in rusty black, with a flabby white neckcloth, I took for an ex-clergyman; he was absorbed in the last number of the "Independent," though I observed, at length, that he was only studying the list of failures, a department to which, as it struck me, he himself peculiarly appertained. All of these, I afterwards ascertained ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... her hand; through its flabby sides she could feel with her fingers the single five-franc piece which it yet contained. Somehow, that had to be disposed of or provided for; five francs was a serious matter to Annette. She looked round; the man in the ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no color now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss something ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... Malinowsky, as he pushed his way in. His face was purple, he had fat, flabby cheeks and a moustache like two wisps of ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... went, as I had heard negroes do under stress of great excitement. What could it mean? Again my eyes fell upon the queer, bandaged thing which must be my hand. Had there been an accident? I could not remember, and while my mind was still wrestling with the question in a helpless, flabby way, I heard the swish of skirts at the door, and there ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... in an easy chair in his familiar attitude, with one leg crossed high above the other. His cheeks, which were so flabby that they looked heavier below, were twitching violently; but he wore the air of a man little concerned in what the two ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... same man. His illness seemed to have robbed him permanently of what was left him of the spring of manhood. It was as if his juices had been sucked from his veins and arteries and tissues, leaving him flabby, irresolute, compared to his former self. Even as Lund shadowed ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... of the essential, as opposed to the material, welfare of the poor, it can easily be over-valued. Extreme thrift, like extreme cleanliness, has often a singularly dehumanising effect. It hardens the nature of its votaries, just as gaining what they have not earned most frequently makes men flabby. Thrift, as highly recommended, leads the poor man into the spiritual squalor of the lower middle-class. It is all right as a means of living, but lamentable as an end of life. If a penny saved is a penny earned, then a penny earned by work is ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... anywhere, if I were you. They will make you less elastic. The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there's a fortune in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck, the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings—a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven—and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... Bosengate had one of those men, who, except when they sit on juries, are never seen without a little brown bag, and the appearance of having been interrupted in a drink. Pale and shiny, with large loose eyes shifting from side to side, he had an underdone voice and uneasy flabby hands. Mr. Bosengate disliked sitting next to him. Beyond this commercial traveller sat a dark pale young man with spectacles; beyond him again, a short old man with grey moustache, mutton chops, and innumerable wrinkles; and the front row was completed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the lids. The florid countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. His clear voice, well fuelled by a full, though rather flabby frame, rolls into all the galleries and corners of the vast building without effort; his gestures are even and well balanced; and you are, in fact, surprised to see how good a natural orator he is. You went to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... by a very intelligent physician, who practised twenty years among them, and informs me that few of the richer sort live to be fifty, but die of a sort of atrophy, their cold blood just stagnating by degrees among their flabby fat. They eat too much, he says; take little exercise; and, above all, have no nervous excitement. The affection is known in this part of the country by the name of the Quaker's disease, and more than one-half of them go out so. I think this curious, though not worth coming ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... which she would never have felt in the old days in the overseer's cottage. In his working dress, with his fine throat bared by his blue shirt, there was a splendid vitality about her lover beside which Jonathan appeared flabby and over-weighted with flesh. But dressed in imitation of the work of Gay's London tailor, the miller lost the distinction which nature had given him without acquiring the one conferred ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... are forced against the membrane and ligaments surrounding the joint, tearing one or both to a greater or less extent. The wrist and ankle are the joints more commonly sprained, and this injury is more likely to occur in persons with flabby muscles and relaxed ligaments, as in the so-called "weak-ankled." The damage to the parts holding the joint in place may be of any degree, from the tearing of a few fibers of the membrane enwrapping the joint to its complete ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bryant's in ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... over the land agent's flabby body, poking the folds of fat here and there over Major Stover's ribs. At ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... dared him to produce the birch rod, there was nothing whatever for it but to comply. He rose and walked slowly and very unwillingly across the room. He unlocked the door of a big cupboard in the wall, and, poking in his large, soft, flabby hand, presently produced what looked in Diana's eyes a very terrible instrument. It was a rod, clean, slender, and with, as she afterwards expressed it, temper all over it. It flashed through her little mind by and by that, if she could really secure this ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... Sleary: a stout man as already mentioned, with one fixed eye, and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a muddled head which was never sober ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... One was flabby, large, and overdressed, with a pasty complexion and eyes like a fish, in which was a lack of all moral sense. She hurried after the girl and took her by the shoulder just as she reached the top of the stairs that ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... crying. She had redd up her house for the last time and put on her black merino. Her mouth was wide open while she listened. If yon had, addressed her you would have thought her polite and stupid. Look at her. A flabby-faced woman she is now, with a swollen body, and no one has heeded her much these thirty years. I can tell you something; it is almost droll. Nanny Webster was once a gay flirt, and in Airlie Square there is a weaver with an unsteady head who thought all the earth of her. His loom has ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... matters sexual, in matters political, in matters social, and matters financial you will find that the flabby, narrow-chested, under- trained mind that hides in the excellent-looking body of the typical young Englishman is encumbered with an elaborate duplicity. Under the cloak of a fine tradition of good form and fair appearances you will find some intricate disbeliefs, some ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... had effected visible changes in the outer man. One noted most readily that the face had grown fuller in its lower parts, and was far less browned than formerly. The large, heavy countenance, with its square jaws masked now under increased flesh, its beginnings of a double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect of pallor, was no longer lacking in individual distinction. It was palpably the visage of a dictator. The moustache had been cut down to military brevity, and the line of mouth below it was eloquent ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... was five-foot two; his chest measurement was less than proportionate to his height. His muscles, so far as they existed, were flabby. He moved his arms to exercise their powers; then, realising his weariness, went slowly to bed. Bates was a little tiny man, but ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... shaved, his blue suit was shabby and soiled. He was fatter, and his whole body was flabby and uncared for. Maggie saw at once that he had been drinking, not very much, but enough to make him a little uncertain on his feet and unsteady in his gaze. Maggie, when she saw him, felt nothing but a rush of pity and desire to protect him. Very ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... developed little personal traits that exasperated their mates unreasonably. Mulcher had a way of breathing aloud through his coarse lips that chafed Hogan's temper. For hours at a time the Irishman would stare at those flabby spewing lips, filled with a desire to maul them. Yet before this isolation, he had never observed that ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... she answered. But her eyes were strangely cold, and the smile upon her lips was conventional and frosty. The hand that he held in his own was cold, too, and somewhat limp and flabby. ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... perfection. How the old fishwomen, the natural guardians of this northern frankincense, chatter and squabble! With their blue petticoats tucked up above their knees, how they pick off the stray pieces of raw haddock, or cod, and, with creaking jaws, chew them; and while they ruminate, bask their own flabby carcasses in the sun! With the dried tail of a herring sticking out of their saffron-coloured, shrivelled chops, Lord! how they gaped when I passed by, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... trusted. Then, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders and impatient exclamation, turned back to the table. Fred, shivering and helpless, stood by the fire, uttering confused directions, and rubbing miserably his own flabby hands; his wife, crying, scolding, and incapable, stood at the end of the table, offering no assistance, but wondering when ever Nettie would come back. Dr Rider took the patient in his arms, and, beckoning Mrs Smith to go before him, carried the child up-stairs. There the good ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... King was "light and curby in the 'ock." "You're a wise 'un, you are!" retorted the wrathful and ever-eloquent Rake, "there's more strength in his clean flat legs, bless him! than in all the round, thick, mill-posts of your half-breds, that have no more tendon than a bit of wood, and are just as flabby as a sponge!" Which hit the dealer home just as his hat was hit over his eyes; Rake's arguments ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... see anything as flabby as these military youths!" said Irgens. "Look at them; they do not walk past like other ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... was rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it, stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon every day; and many and many a day did I dine ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... for growth is unlimited, as in the case of our mental and spiritual faculties, the need for exercise is still more urgent. To neglect to exercise a given limb, or organ, or sense, or faculty, would result in its becoming weak, flabby, and in the last resort useless. In childhood, when the stress of Nature's expansive forces is strongest, the neglect of exercise will, for obvious reasons, have most serious consequences. If a healthy child were kept in bed ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... white, almost transparant fat. The flesh of the second quality is soft, and rather red compared with the pinkish-white meat of choice kinds; the fat is more scanty, and the general appearance coarser. The poorest lamb has yellow fat, and lean, flabby red meat, which keeps but a short time. Test the freshness of lamb by touching the kidney-fat; if it is soft and moist the meat is on the verge of spoiling; a bad smell indicates that it is already tainted; it is utterly ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson
... in God there is nothing left to struggle with. My point is that whatever there may be to struggle with there is nothing to be afraid of. Freedom from struggle would profit us not at all. On the contrary, it would render us nerveless, flabby, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... flabby, and red; And N was a Nerve, like a bit of white thread. O was some Opium, a fool chose to take; And P were the Pins used to keep him awake. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no colour now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss something which neither ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... output of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race. For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him questions, but within ten minutes the savage ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... regarded the new departure, at the outset, as something of a joke. Rock too had ridiculed the idea openly. But when the cannery fleet got fish while the Italian's boats came in but scantily-laden, Mascola's laugh changed to a scowl and Rock's flabby forehead was creased with ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... merely another Charles was being created to dance between her and her desire. This was too far from what she wanted, and she could not see how it could lead to it; there was altogether too much talk. What he said was very fine but it merely gathered a rather flabby set of people round him—and most exasperatingly he liked it and them... ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... In feeble flabby arms, the true circular operation is very easily performed, and with good results. A circular sweep of the knife is made through the skin alone, which is drawn up by an assistant, while the surgeon separates it from the fascia; another circular cut through fascia and ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... to take this flabby creature seriously, even as a criminal. Lady Georgina's lips relaxed. 'Doosid clever,' she admitted, looking ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... "How-do-you-do?" but he rolled his big eyes sideways at me in his flabby face (it was easier than moving his face) ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... men sat facing each other. A glass of whisky was cupped in Anson's closed hand. His clothes, unbrushed and unpressed, flapped about his huge figure. His throat bagged with flabby dewlaps. His head was bullet-shaped, his eyes fierce, his mouth loose-lipped and brutal. He made a strange contrast to his companion. Druce was lithe, well made and gifted with a sort of Satanic handsomeness. He was ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... authority. A Lancashire jury will generally be unwilling to do what a judge tells them. And then Judge Bramber has a peculiar way of telling a jury. If he has a strong opinion of his own he never leaves the jury in doubt about it. Some judges are—what I call flabby, Mr. Caldigate. They are a little afraid of responsibility, and leave the jury and the counsel to fight it out among them. Sir John did it very well, no doubt;—very well. He made the best he could of that postage stamp, though I don't know that it will go for much. ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration, confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... green-lit spaces. They came out in a clearing, before dusk. Beside the clearing was a brook, with a crude cradle—sign of a not very successful gold miner. Before a log cabin, in a sway-sided rocker, creaked a tall, white, flabby woman, once nearly beautiful, now rubbed at the edges. She rose, huddling her wrapper about her bosom, as they drove into the clearing and picked their way ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... is life to be sustained for any considerable time in that rarefied medium?" inquired I, "when it is asserted that even in ascending high mountains, the texture of the soft parts of the human body becomes so loose and flabby from diminished atmospheric pressure as to cause one, so to speak, to sweat blood,—which oozes perceptibly from the mouth and nose and eyes, and even from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... And they were popular, too, in their way, and Chas might easily have married some socially prominent girl with money, instead of bringing a nameless saleslady into the family. It was impossible for Carlisle not to contrast her aunt's flabby sentimentalism with her own and her mother's sane, brilliant ambitiousness. If nothing succeeds like success, how doubly true it was ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... his master's side, cocked his ears, and wagged his tail,—so far his education was perfect. We say he bounded clumsily, for it must be remembered that he was still a very young pup, with soft, flabby muscles. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... from the provinces of Laguna, Batangas and Cavite; the worst from Mindanao. The latter, in consequence of careless treatment, is very impure, and generally contains a quantity of bad beans. The coffee beans of Mindanao are of a yellowish-white color and flabby; those of Laguna are smaller, but much ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... should work or else she will need a doctor." Habits affect looks. If one is energetic and happy in doing her work, her face will reflect the contentment. If one hates work, the face will reflect discontent, the vital organs will grow flabby and affect the health, and looks will suffer. Enthusiasm in work stimulates the vital organs, causes circulation of the blood and makes the eye bright and the skin to take on a more ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... with the silver flowers. It was little fatigue, now, except to the spirits, to nurse poor George. He was shrunk to skin and bone, and so light as to startle those who had been accustomed to lift him. It was grievous, however, to look at the ghastly stretched features, the flabby tremulous little arms, and the suffering expression of countenance. To hear his feeble cry was worse still. Oliver was really glad to take Mildred away from seeing and hearing him, as long as the child would be quiet with Roger: so he asked her to filter more ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... being a scholar, "there's nothing dangerous about my theory. Instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer—far safer and saner than the usual order. Men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives." ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer |
