"Knobby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... lingering about the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made by the hippopotamus drifted it close under Billy's hand. Either ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... on the bottom, but like an eel he squirmed to the top before the other had time to get set. The champion's patrician head was thumped down into the mud and a knobby little fist played a painful tattoo on ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... searched the tender for a comfortable spot for his unprotected body, but scratchy, knobby pieces of wood, with a foundation of sharp chunks of coal, was not conducive to rest. A bullet rattling against the engine added to his irritation, and he looked over the edge and fired ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... alone, and before evening I turned into Hor's house. On the threshold of the cottage I was met by an old man—bald, short, broad-shouldered, and stout—Hor himself. I looked with curiosity at the man. The cut of his face recalled Socrates; there was the same high, knobby forehead, the same little eyes, the same snub nose. We went into the cottage together. The same Fedya brought me some milk and black bread. Hor sat down on a bench, and, quietly stroking his curly beard, entered into conversation with ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... with woad, whatever woad is; I remember reading about it in the histories of England; all the early Britons used it. And carrying nice, knobby stone creeks to stave in our heads! It would be nice to meet a hundred or a thousand of them, eh? Rather a different matter from dealing with a horde of those anthropoid ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... underneath his pillow in case any one should steal it during the night. Then he went to bed and tried to sleep. But he was too excited; besides the gold under his pillow made it so hard and knobby that it was ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... cabin and locked them firmly in a trunk, telling myself how nice it would be to read them in peace on my return. The spirit was willing, but—I found I must rush down to take just a peep to see if everyone was well, and the game ended with me sitting uncomfortably on the knobby edge of Mrs. Albert Murray's bunk, breathlessly ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... drawing an express wagon which had seen better days. The driver was a woman: she appeared to be one of those drab-tinted individuals who can never have felt a rosy emotion in all their lives. She stopped her horse, and beckoned Eric over to her with the knobby handle of ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... does not at least recognize Emperor Norton, a picturesque figure of its life. A heavy, elderly man, probably Jewish, who paraded the streets in a dingy uniform with conspicuous epaulets, a plumed hat, and a knobby cane. Whether he was a pretender or imagined that he was an emperor no one knew or seemed to care. He was good-natured, and he was humored. Everybody bought his scrip in fifty cents denomination. I was ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... long, unpleasant, knobby fingers into his pocket, and produced a crumpled cigarette, which he lit from ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the incongruous picture they made; she in her warm suit of softest duvetyn and rich with fur, he in his working clothes, swinging a dinner pail in one hand and in the other balancing her knobby packages. All she thought of was that this was Dale, the Prince who had once befriended her, whose make-believe presence had often gladdened her lonely childhood hours, and who was in danger now; and he looked down into the little face under its fringe of flame-red hair ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... I wish thee, Maggie! Hae, there's a ripp to thy auld baggie: [handful, belly] Tho' thou's howe-backit now, an' knaggie, [hollow-backed, knobby] I've seen the day, Thou could hae gane like ony staggie [colt] Out-owre ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... knobby-kneed, spoke with a squeak at the end of his deeper sentences, and about his tired eyes he had made a red circle with camwood. Round his head he had twisted a wire so tightly that it all but cut the flesh: this was ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... Hermann to speak to, I received on my hat a horrid rag-doll belonging to Hermann's eldest daughter. However, these youngsters were upon the whole well behaved. They had fair heads, round eyes, round little knobby noses, and they resembled their father a ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... a river six miles wide is the safest place that can be found at the South for insurrectionary conversation. Even there I used to wonder whether the Southerners had not given secret-service money to the alligators who occasionally stuck their knobby noses above the flood to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... abashed at Mary's fierce attack, made an attempt to speak, but Mary, vehemently interrupting, hurried on: "I know whereas I speak, Norma Bonkowski, I know, I know. I've gone through it all myself. I ain't never told you," and the knobby face burned a dull red, "I was county poor, where I come from in the state, an' sent to th' poor-house at four years old, myself, and I know, Norma, the miseries whereas I speak of. And the Lord helpin' me," with grim solemnity, ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... since, she had officially sailed. Jack and that Mary person were now in sweet and undisturbed possession of her house; Olivetta, on board the Plutonia, was this minute reposing at ease amid the luxuries of her cabin de luxe; and she, herself, Mrs. De Peyster, was lying on a folding-bed, a most knobby bed,—the man who invented cobblestone paving must have got his idea from such a bed as this,—in a boarding-house the like of which till this night she had never ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... man, and he wore a deerstalker cap and was dressed in dark grey. His neck was long and slender. Perhaps you know what gigs are,—huge, big, wooden things and very high and the horse, too, was huge and big and high, with knobby legs, a long face, a hard mouth, and a whacking trick of pacing. Smack, smack, smack, smack it went along the road, and hard by the church it shied ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... wild fear of crows, for it was due to them that he had been blind ever since, a few days after his birth, he had accompanied his mother across the reservation road to the sloughs beyond. He had trotted happily at her side as they went, but late in the evening had run one knobby leg into a hole in the prairie-dog village and taken a bad tumble. He had not been able to rise again, and, in struggling had got wedged upon his back between two mounds, so that he had to lie, ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Clanging. I am the Poker the straight and the strong, Prone in the fire grate, Black at the nether end, Knobby and nebulous. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various
... idol—the Imp—was performing her antics, the old woman's quick cackling laugh made Eva drop her head that her big hat might hide her face. When the "Drunkard's Family" were passing through their harrowing experiences, tears rolled unheeded down old Nancy's wrinkled cheeks as she sat with her knobby fingers tight clasped. ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... Mr. Shrig, reaching down for hat and knobby stick. "Ackvainted? I should say so, sir! A reg'lar bang-up blood, a downright 'eavy toddler—oh, I know Sir Jervas, ackvainted is the werry i-denti-cal name for it! So, with your permission, sir, I'll be padding ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... combed, Bean thought. The brows were heavy, and still curiously dark, which made them look threatening. The eyes were the coldest of gray, a match for the hair in colour, and set far back in caverns. The nose was blunt, the chin a mere knobby challenge, and between them was the unloveliest moustache Bean had ever been compelled to observe; short, ragged, faded in streaks. And wrinkles—wrinkles wheresoever there was room for them: across the forehead that lost itself in shining yellow scalp; under the eyes, down the cheeks, ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Flemish, of high cheek-bones and very red cheeks. The entire family was grouped about the bed—a boy of twelve years, a girl of nineteen, and a girl of three. Attending the case, was a little old woman, the grandmother, wearing a knitted knobby bonnet, sitting high on the top of her head and tied under her chin—a conical frame for her pert, dark eyes and firm mouth. She was a tiny woman, every detail of her in miniature, clearly defined, except the heavy, noisy wooden ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... began to be a regular thing for him to bring one home from Fallon, each trip, and the gay hunts that followed as she searched for it—sometimes to find the treasure in Martin's hat, sometimes under the buggy seat, sometimes in a knobby hump under the table-cloth at her plate—more than once brought his rare smile. For years afterward, the memory of one evening lingered with him. He was resting in an old chair tipped back against the house, thinking deeply, when the little girl, tired from her play, climbed into his lap ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... beauty, and all the coast is of the most retiring and humble description. Nature makes some compensation for this lowness by an eccentricity of indentation which looks very picturesque on the map, and sometimes striking, as where Lynn stretches out a slender arm with knobby Nahant at the end, like a New Zealand war club. We sit and watch this shore as we glide by with a placid delight. Its curves and low promontories are getting to be speckled with villages and dwellings, like the shores of the Bay of Naples; we see ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hanging above the fire, that its contents might be quite dry for supper. Through the little window, a foot and a half square, Cupples could see the remains of a hawthorn hedge, a hundred years old—a hedge no longer, but a row of knobby, gnarled trees, full of knees and elbows; and through the trees the remains of an orange-coloured sunset.—It was not a beautiful country, as I have said before; but the spring was beautiful, and the heavens ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... just outside the door of the garret bedroom stood a huge wicker travelling basket; a clumsy umbrella with a large knobby handle, like a man's umbrella, lay on the top of it partly covering a large pair ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... Felicia. "I'd love to unpack the burros. All the bundles are so knobby. Are there any doll dishes ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... bright young men in knobby business suits and white stiff collars, the office is lined with far brighter young men in much more businesslike khaki. They keep their hats on while they work for they know not when they may have to dash out again into the cold and the wind and the rain. They keep their coats on ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... moment Doctor Mayson opened the door of Rosamund's room and came out upon the landing—a tall, rosy and rather intellectual-looking man, with tranquil gray eyes, and hair thinning above the high knobby forehead. Dion had never seen him before. They ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Gentleman was thin and tall and sixty. He was dressed all in black, and wore the old-fashioned kind of glasses that won't stay on your nose. His hair was whiter and thinner than it had been last year, and he seemed to make more use of his big, knobby cane ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... girl, the child of this story, who was called Emmeline, of all names—pronounced Em'leen, of course—was just fifteen at the time of my visits to her mother. She had eyes like a hare's, a mouth which readily fell open, and brown locks caught back from her scared and knobby forehead. She was thin, and walked with her head poked a little forward, and she so manoeuvred her legs and long feet, of which one turned in rather and seemed trying to get in front of the other, that there was ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... country-girl of nineteen could have in such an unequal conflict; and my heart sank down low, very low. When I looked again at that obese president, puffing and wheezing there, his great belly distending and receding with each breath, and noted his three chins, fold above fold, and his knobby and knotty face, and his purple and splotchy complexion, and his repulsive cauliflower nose, and his cold and malignant eyes—a brute, every detail of him—my heart sank lower still. And when I noted that all were afraid of this man, and shrank and fidgeted in their seats when his eye ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... round the luggage van where we were trying to discover Marion's trunk. An unmannerly porter shoved me back, and I bumped into a man who had something hard and knobby in his hand. I looked round. He was a soldier in the regular khaki uniform with a rifle in his hand. The bayonet was fixed. I felt deeply thankful that it was pointing upwards and not in a horizontal direction when ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... West, an eminent city lawyer. Years after that, he was Judge West of the Superior Court. Now he was simply Joe West, a tall, lanky boy with a long rosy face and a high forehead. His arms came too far through his jacket sleeves, and showed his wrists, which looked unnaturally knobby and bony. He went barefoot all summer long, and was ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... I watch those gums and cheek-bones moving and stirring,—those knobby, bony spheres turning this way and that, as they gleamed in the light of the lamps and candles, and smaller spheres—the spheres of the eyes bereft ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Fair. Him a conscientious constable floored with a truncheon. But a shower of fists fell on the zealot's face, and he tottered back bleeding. Then the storm broke in all its fury. The upper air was black with staves, sticks, and umbrellas, mingled with the pallid hailstones of knobby fists. Yells and groans and hoots and battle-cries blent in grotesque chorus, like one of Dvorak's weird diabolical movements. Mortlake stood impassive, with arms folded, making no further effort, and the battle raged round him as the water swirls around some steadfast rock. A ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... impossible. He permitted the omnipresent Asiatic to make his exit, and then stepped briskly into the hall. There he found a figure which he had already forgotten. The inane Atkinson was still hanging about, humming and poking things with his knobby cane. The doctor's face had a spasm of disgust and decision, and he whispered rapidly to his companion: "I must lock the door again, or this rat will get in. But I shall be ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... looked he saw a black, ugly snout, and back of it a glistening, black and knobby body, moving along after Blake, who was making frantic efforts to ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... warned Ben, but too late. One wing flopped over, and caught in a knobby old branch of the apple tree, and in a minute there was a big hole ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... through his meal, and then ran up to grandmother's room. She put out her wrinkled hand, thin to be sure, but still slender and smooth, with no knobby joints. A proud sort of beauty illumined the old face, though the eyes were a ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... this grass some persons have recommended it as likely to be useful for forming meadows; but it is excessively bitter, and is not liked by cattle generally, though when starved they are sometimes observed to eat of it. There is a variety of it with knobby roots which is found to be a most troublesome and noxious weed in arable lands, particularly in some parts of the coast of Hampshire where it abounds. This variety was some years ago introduced into the ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... who was tall, spare, and bent, about sixty, and the possessor of a pleasant knobby face half surrounded by a gray beard that stretched from ear to ear beneath his lower jaw, dropped his paper and scrutinized the young men benevolently. They went over to him, and Larcher explained their intrusion with as good ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and tied behind over the apex of the triangle of the handkerchief, the three ends being then arranged fan-wise at the back. Add to this costume a sober-coloured silk parasol, not one of your green or red young tent-like, brutally masculine, knobby-sticked umbrellas, but a fair, lady-like parasol, which, being carefully rolled up, is carried handle foremost right in the middle of the head, also for dandy. Then a few strings of turquoise-blue beads, or ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the beach, between the shore front and the road. It was not a new place but was built in the hideous style of some thirty years ago with all sorts of little turned and knobby ornaments. We paused down the road a bit, though not long enough to attract attention. There were lights on every floor of the cottage, although most of ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... occupied years ago, however comfortless then, has a familiar air of welcome now. There is surely some little trace of self, some unseen spider-thread of attachment clinging to the walls, the old chair, the forlorn wash-stand, and the knobby four-poster, that holds the hardest of beds, the most consumptive of pillows, and a bolster as round, as white, and as hard, as a cathedral mass-candle. Heigho, Hotel Waverley! Here am I again; but where are the familiar faces? Where the brave ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Clair was an unfortunate gentleman, tall, low-spirited, loose-jointed, with fixed blue eyes and knobby black hair. His melancholy, Bep was assured, was due to two things—the superiority of his wife in the matter of a movable head, and the impossibility of ever getting a pair of trousers that would come near to him in the seat and stay away from him at the ankle. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... flow of blood from his nose, but it still pained him, and he was otherwise bruised and badly shaken by the buffets from Jabe's knobby fists. Judged by Percy's feelings, Jabe must have been all knuckles. Percy had to acknowledge that only Spurling's opportune appearance had saved him from being pounded unmercifully. But his pride had been injured far more than ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... bell-boy who had shown the unwelcome guest to his room came back to his bench in the office, he interrogated him, with a grin that was not altogether facetious: "Any revolvers lyin' round up in No. 20, or any of those knobby blue bottles?" ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... between a mirthless grin and a snarl. His long black hair curled under at the base of his skull, and his hands were covered with heavy gold and silver rings. There was one for each finger and thumb, and all of them were set with knobby ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry
... to see this man Finch,' ses 'Arry, shaking 'is knobby stick. 'Muffit, my name is, and I want to tell ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs |
