"Clumsy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and not very much bigger, but with a grace, a dignity, an air that was very wonderful indeed. He was a dark boy with his hair carelessly tossed over his forehead; he was very clean and he had beautiful hands. To Peter's rough and clumsy figure he seemed everything that a boy should be, and, in his mind, he had called him "Steerforth." As this boy approached there suddenly burst into view a discordant crowd with some one in their midst. They were shouting and laughing, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... produced a beautiful model. It was of the Bleriot type, and finished perfectly down to the minutest detail. Every wire and brace on it was silvered with aluminum paint, and it even bore a small figure at its steering wheel. Beside it the other models looked almost clumsy. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... recur from time to time in the Yoga-sutras, need to be understood, though there are no exact English equivalents. As they must be used to avoid clumsy circumlocutions, it is necessary to explain them. It is said: "Yoga is Samadhi." Samadhi is a state in which the consciousness is so dissociated from the body that the latter remains insensible. It is a state ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... the man. "It wor a pity as the old man were so werry 'ard. I wor young and I did it rare and clumsy; it wor to pay a debt, a big, big debt. I 'ad put my 'and to a bit of paper widhout knowing wot it meant, and I wor made to pay for it, and the notes they seemed real 'andy. Well, well, I did it badly, I ha' larnt the right way since from some prison pals. I would ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... his heart about to burst with hate. He did not even think of the second revolver in the holster at his side. With only his left hand now to use, the weapon could only have given clumsy service. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... draft, as they cut into the ground, than the draft due to the sliding friction upon the moldboard. Davidson and Chase say, however, that the draft of a disk plow is often heavier in proportion to the work done and the plow itself is more clumsy than the moldboard plow. For ordinary dry-farm purposes the disk plow has no advantage over the modern moldboard plow. Many of the dry-farm soils are of a heavy clay and become very sticky during certain seasons of the year. In such soils the ...
— Dry-Farming • John A. Widtsoe
... will!" said Crabbe, giving Pauline's shoulder a clumsy, caressing pat; "Miss Cordova has her points, but she is not Us, she is not We of the grand emotional parts! Just a bundle of emotions, nerves and impulses—that's ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... queer aplomb, his good-humored familiarity on first acquaintance, delighted most of his visitors, it offended many. It was lacking in tact. Often it was a clumsy attempt to be jovial too soon, as when he addressed Greeley by the name of "Horace" almost on first sight. His devices for putting men on the familiar footing lacked originality. The frequency with which he called upon a tall visitor ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... upon father and child. He was not responsible for it. The start of a frightened pony, its sudden attempt to bolt, the pulling of a rein which had brought the animal against him just as he was lifting his gun to fire at a rising bird—what were those things? Only the clumsy machinery used by implacable Fate to bring about that which had been willed somewhere, far off in the dark ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... clumsy as are the large single-tube tires, it is quite practicable to carry an extra one, though we did not. One is pretty sure to have punctures,—though two in twenty-six ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... his career was throughout consistent. He trod in the footsteps of his father, and with inherited aptitude moulded antique traditions into harmony with the taste of the times. Compared with such a man, Peak felt himself a bungler. The wonder was that his clumsy lying had ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... judgments. Your judgments of others are in reality the most complete betrayal of yourself. What you think of them is the key to your own soul. Your careless utterances are like the boomerang of some clumsy savage, often missing the mark toward {33} which it is thrown, and returning to smite the ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... history of another friend's superfluous ingenuity will contribute to introduce a similar remark. He had a daughter of about fourteen years old, as I remember, fat and clumsy; and though the father adored, and desired others to adore her, yet being aware, perhaps, that she was not what the French call paitrie des graces, and thinking, I suppose, that the old maxim of beginning to laugh ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... immortal! The most elegant compositions of classic Rome were converted into the psalms of a breviary, or the prayers of a missal. Livy and Tacitus "hide their diminished heads" to preserve the legend of a saint, and immortal truths were converted into clumsy fictions. It happened that the most voluminous authors were the greatest sufferers; these were preferred, because their volume being the greatest, most profitably repaid their destroying industry, and furnished ampler scope for future transcription. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... originality. Through the political influence of that great king this poetry spread over Europe; in Italy, its home, it assumed a French color, and thence the heroes of French tragedy went with the Anjous to Spain; it passed with Henrietta Maria to England, and we Germans, as a matter of course, built our clumsy temples to the powdered Olympus of Versailles. The most famous high-priest of this religion was Gottsched, that wonderful long wig whom our dear Goethe has so admirably described ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... quirt whirled in the air and fell with a resounding crack, but the stallion merely switched his tail and started forward at a clumsy stumbling trot. The thunder of the host was too hoarse for applause; they saw a victory and a defeat but what they had wanted was blood, and a death. They had had a promise and a taste; now they hungered for ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... represented by his friend Dodsley as a man of great tenderness and generosity, kind to all that were within his influence; but, if once offended, not easily appeased; inattentive to economy, and careless of his expenses; in his person he was larger than the middle-size, with something clumsy in his form; very negligent of his clothes, and remarkable for wearing his grey hair in a particular manner, for he held that the fashion was no rule of dress, and that every man was to suit his appearance to his natural form. His mind was not very ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... and secured into shape and dried in the sun, or up a chimney, or otherwise a strong cane may be steamed (or boiled) and dried in like manner; few people, I opine, however, care to carry out from a town two long roughly-shaped rods of 5 ft. or 6 ft. long in this clumsy fashion. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... inwardly with a sense of inferiority in her estimation. One of his fingers had been frosted last winter, and with the first twinge of cold weather it was beginning to look very red and sad and clumsy, as if it had just remembered its ancient woe; he glanced from it once more at the delicate ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... like," he answered, and then conquering any fear he might have felt, he added—"But gentlemen, assertions are not proofs. This latter tale is too clumsy an imitation of the first we have just heard not to make a man of sense discredit it. Let us hear what the men have ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... himself. To this he agreed that he certainly would, and bade me keep my own counsel and not alarm the women. As to Martin, I would do well, he said, to make sure of him before he could do any harm. He gave me the guns done up in a truss of straw to avoid detection, and with this clumsy parcel slung across the ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... Ducking under the clumsy fist which beat the air above his head, Gregory swung again for the islander's chin. With a snarl of rage, the big man lowered his head. Then his angry growl changed quickly to a grunt of pain as he took the blow full in the forehead. Reeling dizzily, his hand sought his girdle. His fingers closed ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... of fishermen came within range of the girls' vision that first week or ten days. And that couple, in their clumsy canoe, were never near enough for the girls of Central ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... development, and which was placed by him blindly at the disposition of another. There was in it, no doubt, filial devotion, domestic attachment; there was also the fascination of one spirit by another spirit. It was a poor, awkward, and clumsy organization, which stood with lowered head and supplicating eyes before a lofty and profound, a powerful and superior intellect. Lastly, and above all, it was gratitude. Gratitude so pushed to its extremest limit, that we do not know to ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... alone? No, indeed; they wear the wings for style, but they travel any distance in an instant by WISHING. The wishing-carpet of the Arabian Nights was a sensible idea—but our earthly idea of angels flying these awful distances with their clumsy wings ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... Hoping to have a chance of attacking their rear, Frederick ordered the cavalry to saddle, and the whole army to be in readiness, and then sat down to dinner with his officers at noon. Little did he dream, at the time, that the slow and clumsy movement that he was watching was intended, by the enemy, to end in a flank attack ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... was, to be sure! The black portion of the crew—Portuguese natives from the Western and Canary Islands—were doing their work all right in a clumsy fashion; but the farmers, and bakers, and draymen were being driven about mercilessly amid a perfect hurricane of profanity and blows. And right here I must say that, accustomed as I had always been to bad language all my life, what I now heard was a revelation to me. I would not, if I could, attempt ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Thomas a Kempis?—the name had come across her in her reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of getting some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory. She took up the little, old, clumsy book with some curiosity; it had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time. Maggie turned from ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... bruising its keen edge against the rocky barriers of the eternal and the unknown. Wiser than his fellows, he knew that he was no wiser than before; stronger than they, he knew the weakness of all strength; brave as the bravest, bravery seemed to him but a clumsy exhibition of vanity at best, and altogether contemptible from the moment it began to seek occasions for showing itself. He could have understood playing the coward for sake of examining the sensation, ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... evidenced in all experience, because independent of all experience. The study of mathematics for use in other departments drew him into investigations whose results made it a new science. He reformed its clumsy nomenclature, also the algebraic use of letters for quantities; he introduced system into the use of exponents to denote the powers of a quantity, thus opening the way for the binomial theorem; he was the first to throw clear light on the negative roots of equations; his is the theorem by ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... into his mind that this method of advertising was clumsy, and not especially effective; followed by the further thought that a much better plan would be to set agoing upon the streets a really gentlemanly-looking man, clad in the best garments that the tailoring people manufactured—while ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... sight of the British uniforms and the machine guns was a great encouragement. The road was so narrow that they had to turn their cars into a field to let us pass. We had just come up with a number of farm waggons, and the clumsy Flemish carts, with their huge horses, the grey armoured cars, with their blazing headlights, and our four red motor-buses, made a strange scene in the darkness of the night. At last we reached Ghent utterly tired out, though personally I had slept a sort of nightmare sleep on the top step of a bus ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... puncheons, dive under one another playfully, sending huge waves to the banks on either side. They gape hideously with their tremendous jaws, which look as though they had been split much too far back in the head by a rude hatchet—the tops of all the teeth having apparently been lopped off by the same clumsy blow. They laugh too, with a demoniacal "Ha! ha! ha!" as if they rejoiced in their excessive plainness, and knew that we—you and I, reader—are regarding them with ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... them I played a clumsy detective in proving that the two avoided each other and that there had been some interwovenness of interests in the past. Several times when I asked Father Michel to join us at table he gave me flimsy excuses, and once the duke pleaded indisposition when I ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... niggers, but does precious little himself. In stature he is mostly tall, thin, and active. He moves with a quick, shuffling gait, which is almost noiseless. Some of his women folk are beautiful, while others are fat and clumsy, and are never likely to have their portraits hung on the walls ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... the reported cases do not show it to be any more difficult, to consider the motive behind a combination of men or the motive inspiring a series of related acts. The real trouble comes only in the Federal anti-trust act, because the machinery of this clumsy statute, a bill in equity, imposes upon judges the duty ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... their whole sum of practical wisdom can be told in four words—BE SILENT AND SAFE. They are amazed at the 'folly' of those who make sacrifices at the shrine of sincerity; and while sagacious enough to perceive that religion is a clumsy political contrivance, are not wanting in the prudence which dictates at least a ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... had to fetch for his beloved mistress; but, restless from prolonged inactivity and the smell of strange beasts, he hurled himself in the direction pointed; and his speed, once he got going, was as surprising as that of the elephant or rhinoceros and other clumsy-looking animals, and in very truth, his ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... and receives my most unbounded admiration. It is one of the neatest changes of base I ever witnessed. I have seen remarkable feats performed by the prestidigitateur on the stage; but they were clumsy compared with this. I thought it was nationalism I was looking at. But, "presto, change!" I look again, and the only thing visible is the question as to "whether great private corporations shall control legislatures and city councils, and charge their own ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... recall many evening rambles with him over the high lands that look down on London; but the memory I cherish most is linked with a crowded street, where the clumsy and the coarse jostled the old man eloquent, as if he had been earthly, of the earth. It was in the Strand: he pointed out to me the window of a room in the office of the "Morning Post," where he had consumed much midnight oil; and then for half an hour he talked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Plague take her for a blind old Baggage! That such a patch as Barnard should have had The Honour to have sav'd our General's life. That Barnard! that mock-man! that clumsy forgery Of Heaven's Image. Any other heart But mine own would have turn'd splenetic to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... see that thou art too clumsy to row; perhaps thou wilt do better to drive the salmon into the nets.' And Kullervo asked again whether he should use all his strength, and he received the same answer as before. So he set to work beating the water to scare the ...
— Finnish Legends for English Children • R. Eivind
... though there was yet in it the heart of gaiety. There moved now in the steps a sense of mystery—a consciousness of close infinity unfolding, far more subtly signified than by the clumsy shift of words. And she welcomed all the mystery—greeted it with outstretched arms—was glad of it, and eager-impetuous to know the new worlds and the ways undreamed of. Minute after minute, rhapsody on rhapsody, she wooed the near, untouchable delights ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... for Dosia's inspection. From the open door of a closet beyond, a pair of shoes was distinctly visible—Harry's shoes, which the wife laughingly put back into place as she went and closed the door. It was impossible not to see that even those clumsy, monstrously thick-soled things were touched with sentiment for her because the feet of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... him were not a part of his world, really. Their thoughts, their motions, their reactions, were slow and clumsy in comparison with his own. Once the Nipe had been conquered, what purpose would there be in the life of Bartholomew Stanton? He was surrounded by people, but he was not one of them. He was immersed in a society that was not his own because it was not, could not be, geared to his abilities ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... cobbler, who had served Buonaparte when a subaltern, might have risen in the same manner, had their skill equalled the silversmith's. Not even Napoleon's example could persuade the Parisians to wear ill-shaped hats and clumsy boots; but he, in his own person, adhered, to the last, to his original connection ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... He took her into his bed and played with her, and in playing he forgot his grief. A little before seven he got up and dressed. He washed Dossie and dressed her as well as he could, with tender, clumsy fingers that fumbled over all her little strings and buttons. Pain, and pleasure poignant as pain, thrilled him with every soft contact with her darling body. He tried to brush her hair as Winny brushed it, all in ducks' tails ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... there are no fairies. Cousin Cramchild tells little folks so in his Conversations. Well, perhaps there are none—in Boston, U.S., where he was raised. There are only a clumsy lot of spirits there, who can't make people hear without thumping on the table: but they get their living thereby, and I suppose that is all they want. And Aunt Agitate, in her Arguments on political economy, says there are none. ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... ravenously hungry. Well, he was too tired to go farther that night; and in default of a meal, the best thing he could do was sleep. First, however, he unlaced his larrigans, and with the thongs made shift to set a clumsy snare in a rabbit track a few paces back among the spruces. Then, close under the lee of a black wall of fir-trees standing out beyond the forest skirts, he clawed himself a deep trench in the snow. In one end of this trench he built a little fire, of broken deadwood and green birch saplings ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... will not dare to show herself.' However, the prince would have her come; and she first washed her face and hands, and then went in and curtsied to him, and he reached her the golden slipper. Then she took her clumsy shoe off her left foot, and put on the golden slipper; and it fitted her as if it had been made for her. And when he drew near and looked at her face he knew her, and said, 'This is the right bride.' But the mother and both the sisters were frightened, and turned pale with anger as he took ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... The thought of what I had blurted out lay heavy on my mind afterwards, and if it had not seemed a far-fetched and even school-missish thing to do, I would have sent a line to Robert asking him to erase that clumsy and impertinent boast from his memory. If he is stupid enough or awkward enough to repeat anything of our conversation, and give Miss Van Buren the impression that I tried to make a wager concerning her, it will be all up with ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... youth always is clumsy. The business of youth is to fight and to mate. Wherever there is young blood, there is "boot and horse," and John Barclay in his early twenties felt in him the call for combat. It came with the events that were forming about him. For the war ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... was precipitated by diplomats and rulers, and, assuming that all these statesmen sincerely desired a peaceful solution of the questions raised by the Austrian ultimatum, (which is by no means clear,) it was the result of ineffective diplomacy and clumsy diplomacy at that. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... fashion of performing this function, the French taking it au serieux, and going through it histrionically, as it were; the Belgian being more careless and good-natured. There lingers still the habit of 'leading' or plombe-ing a clumsy, troublesome relic of old times. Such small articles as hat-cases, hand-bags, etc., are subjected to it; an officer devoted to the duty comes with a huge pair of 'pincers' with some neat little leaden discs, which he squeezes on the strings which ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... obligatory in the lever, as in the verge, to have an uneven number of teeth in the wheel. While nearly all have 15 teeth, we might make them of 14 or 16; occasionally we find some in complicated watches of 12 teeth, and in old English watches, of 30, which is a clumsy arrangement, and if the pallets embrace only three teeth in the latter, the pallet center cannot be pitched on ...
— An Analysis of the Lever Escapement • H. R. Playtner
... am clumsy, I am hard, I am suspicious—wicked. I am a savage, with no more self-restraint than I ever had. What sort of a figure must I cut in his eyes—and in yours? Tell me! Am I not a ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... friend; when a man is blessed with such wheels as these (striking the clumsy tires with his cane) he ought at least to have the merit of punctuality. The deuce! one doesn't get into that thing for pleasure; I have business that is devilishly pressing or I wouldn't trust my bones to it. And that horse, which you call Rougeot, ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... Bhutias to tall, slim Hindustanis. Likewise in character individuals are as different as the strong, firm tree standing open-faced, four-square to all the world and the creeping, insinuating parasite; as the intelligent, industrious ant and the clumsy, plodding beetle; as the plucky boar and the timid hare; as the rough forest tribesman ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... well," McKay approved, noting the easy grace of the crew. In the bow a tall, slender fellow stood with arms folded, balancing himself to the sway of the rather clumsy craft and watching the water ahead. In the stern, on a little platform whence he could look over the heads of the others and catch any signal from the lookout, a squat, dark-faced steersman lounged against his crude rudder. Between these two the paddlers stood, each with one foot on the bottom of ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... slug, "a monstrous man crushing a tender slug under his clumsy hoofs. Birds I can tolerate. They are not so ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... would have miss-stayed under such handling as we have to-day, to say nothing of the clumsy look of it," continued the new captain. "I shouldn't wish to be out in a gale with a crew as slack as ours ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... the actors of the period, collected into one focus, and pointed and irradiated by the power of genius. As Scott, while carelessly galloping in his youth through Liddesdale, and listening to ballads and old-world stories, was "making himself" into the mighty minstrel of the border—so this big, clumsy, overgrown student, seated in the pit of Drury Lane, or exalted to the one-shilling gallery of Covent Garden, was silently growing into the greatest poet of the stage that, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... in. His usual walk is by pauses, as if (from the same vacuity of thought which made Dryden's clown whistle) he was telling his steps: and first paid his clumsy respects to my mother; then to my sister; next to me, as if I was already his wife, and therefore to be last in his notice; and sitting down by me, told us in general what weather it was. Very cold he made it; but I was warm enough. Then addressing ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the mill, were as far away from it as they could go. Their houses were set back upon either acclivity which rose from the gorge that the stream had worn, dotting the hill-sides in every direction. There was a clumsy town-hall, there were three or four churches, there was a high school and a low tavern. It was, on the whole, a village of importance, but the great mill was somehow its soul and center. A fair farming and grazing country stretched ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... not sought the present quarrel. He had merely blundered in that clumsy way of his, which was no doubt a part of the inheritance bequeathed to him by his ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... waistcoat,' I said, 'which the clumsy fellow who renovated this bust always stuffed into the Leonardos which he was called upon to botch—you still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... going there also. Tom Merryweather has granulated lids, and I promised to touch them up for him. Save a doctor's fee and be good practice for me. I'm clumsy with my thumbs,' said Tom, bound to be near ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... only a founderman; his house had one room below and a partition above; and Mrs. Gilkan's casual fare could not be compared to Mrs. Heydrick's inviting amplitude. Yet there was Fanny Gilkan, erect and flaming haired, who could walk as far as he could himself, and carry her father's clumsy ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... neither, now I think of it:—Thou art so homely, and so awkward a creature! Hast such a boatswain-like air!—People would think she had picked thee up in Wapping, or Rotherhithe; or in going to see some new ship launched, or to view the docks at Chatham, or Portsmouth. So gaudy and so clumsy! Thy tawdriness won't do with Charlotte!—So sit thee down contented, Belford: although I think, in a whimsical way, as now, I mentioned Charlotte to thee once before.* Yet would I fain secure thy morals too, if matrimony will do it.—Let me see!—Now I have it.—— Has not the widow ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... see, between the open paper screens, men and women ascending the steps, to kneel and pray before the entrance of the temple. They kneel with such naive reverence, so gracefully and so naturally, that the kneeling of our Occidental devotees seems a clumsy stumbling by comparison. Some only join their hands; others clap them three times loudly and slowly; then they bow their heads, pray silently for a moment, and rise and depart. The shortness of the prayers impresses me as something novel and interesting. From time to time I ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the rest of the code. Literature can never conform to the dictates of pure euphony, while grammar, which has been shaped not in the interests of prosody, but for the service of thought, bars the way with its clumsy inalterable polysyllables and the monotonous sing-song of its inflexions. On the other hand, among a hundred ways of saying a thing, there are more than ninety that a care for euphony may reasonably forbid. All who have consciously practised the art ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... admission; and a dragon with a singularly mild and harmless expression appeared inside, and asked him gently what he wanted. The King looked at him in surprise; for, although he was decidedly small for a dragon, he was certainly much too large and too clumsy to live in a house ...
— All the Way to Fairyland - Fairy Stories • Evelyn Sharp
... him; a gray flannel shirt with a turn-over collar, which was fastened at the throat by a flashy necktie, rather carelessly knotted; a red cotton handkerchief was just visible in one of his pockets; there were coarse, clumsy boots on his feet, and he wore a wide-brimmed, ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... both and with some real pains (when I was stupid or sleepy) to me. 'Twas the way he had, too, of teaching me that which he would have me conceive him to be—of fashioning in my heart and mind the character he would there wear. A clumsy, forecastle method, and most pathetically engaging, to be sure! but in effect unapproached: for to this day, when I know him as he was, the man he would appear to be sticks in my heart and will not be supplanted. Nor would I willingly yield the wistful ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... close to his side, while he showed her what he had chosen; the pale-pink collars—"You were always gone on pink, weren't you?" he asked—the silk stockings and the vanity garters. With clumsy fingers he tried to ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... says he to this poor lady, 'I wonder how long I shall keep thee, madonna, a week—a month—a year? Venus knoweth, for you amuse me, sweet. Rise, rise, dear my lady, my Dolores of Joy, rise and aid me with thy counsel, for here hath this misfortunate clumsy Captain fool blundered into our amorous paradise, this tender Cyprian isle sacred to our passion. Yet here is he profaning our joys with his base material presence. How then shall we rid ourselves of this offence? The knife—this lover ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... proposed a resolution for a committee of the whole house, to consider such measures as might relieve the owners and occupiers of real property, and establish a more equitable apportionment of the public burdens. Sir Charles Wood, in an awkward and clumsy speech, confuted Mr. Disraeli, no difficult matter even in such a speech, for the honourable leader of "the country party" had collected his statistics carelessly, and used them illogically. His speech was also deficient in the eloquence so striking generally in his elaborate orations. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... irritated Higgins, even while it went to his heart. Bessy was rocking herself violently backwards and forwards, as was her wont (Margaret knew by this time) when she was agitated, Her sister Mary was tying on her bonnet (in great clumsy bows, as suited her great clumsy fingers), to go to her fustian-cutting, blubbering out loud the while, and evidently longing to be away from a scene that distressed her. Margaret came in upon this scene. She stood for ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... A clumsy vehicle was some distance in advance, and seemed to be standing still, so slow was the movement. Ida was nearer to it than the others, and as she passed it she swung safely to one side, giving several disconcerting blasts ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... cut on the brow," said Harry, "and a slight one behind the ear. I won't move the clumsy bandage, though, till we get him up, when it can be made more ship-shape. Now, Tom, you must let us put you in the potatoe-bag and ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... The clumsy wheels of several old-fashioned coaches were heard, and the gentlemen and ladies composing the bridal-party came through the church door with the sudden and gladsome effect of a burst of sunshine. The whole ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... More than a century later, they would have noted the slow, clumsy airplanes of the early 1900's. From our gradual progress to the big planes and bombers of today, they could probably chart our next steps toward ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... we have often remarked, large and somewhat clumsy. Petrea had great desire to unform it, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... Mabel would say, "Whyever should you?" and of all imaginable ordeals the idea of exposing before Mabel his feeling about England ... he would tell her when it was done, if it came off. He could say then, in what he knew to be the clumsy way in which he had learnt to hide his ideas from her, he could ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... Jeff, almost standin' up in his excitement. "Why not, my boy? I could take you there, chair or no chair. Didn't I go in a litter once, halfway across Africa, when a clumsy Zulu beater let a dying rhino gore me in the hip? Yes, and bossed a caravan of sixty men, and me flat on my back! I'm better able to move now than I was then, too. And I'm ready to try it. Another year of this, and I'd be under the ground. I'm sick of being cooped up. ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... may have mistranslated this passage, which might be more appropriately read, who put him to death for the sins of men. This clumsy legend of St Thomas may amuse our readers; but probably derives its principal features from the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... their backs when they pulled—at nothing! We should have had pity for them, for they never even pretended to be seamen; but we were shorthanded in a heavy ship, and the more our arms ached, the louder grew our curses at their clumsy 'sodgerin'.' ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... nearer to him. This made me think, and I examined him more critically. Then I noticed several things about him, that, at first, had escaped my notice. They were these: (one) that although he was mounted he was wearing walking clothes—he had on long trousers and thick, clumsy boots; (two) that his ears and neck were perfectly colourless, of an unnatural and startling white; (three) that despite the incongruity of his attire, no one but myself seemed to see him. On he rode, neither looking to the left nor to the right, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... vein. Here it measures from six to eight feet in diameter, diminishing to four and a half and even three below. The sloping roof has been defended from collapse by large pillars of the rock, left standing as in the old Egyptian quarries; it shows the clumsy but efficient practice that preceded timbering. The material worked was evidently the pink-coloured and silver-scaled micaceous schist; but there was also a whitish quartz, rich in geodes and veinlets of dark-brown and ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... the whites one vast ambush, and to them a sure and ever-present shield. Every tree trunk was a breastwork ready prepared for battle; every bush, every moss-covered boulder, was a defence against assault, from behind which, themselves unseen, they watched with fierce derision the movements of their clumsy white enemy. Lurking, skulking, travelling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail that only a master in woodcraft could follow, while, on the other hand, they could dog a white man's footsteps as a hound runs a fox. Their silence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible prowess ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... had only just come into the country, had bought it as it stood, with the walls about it and the ground belonging to it, together with the plate, wine, and furniture, the old sundial, the poultry, the horse, and the woman-servant. Jacquotte was the very pattern of a working housekeeper, with her clumsy figure, and her bodice, always of the same dark brown print with large red spots on it, which fitted her so tightly that it looked as if the material must give way if she moved at all. Her colorless face, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... farm-yard fail to shame the nursery, if the mother bear beautiful and well-organized children, Heaven be thanked for a merciful interference with the operation of its own laws! Is the mother in a farm-house ever regarded as a sacred being? Look at her hands! Look at her face! Look at her bent and clumsy form! Is it more important to raise fine colts than fine men and women? Is human life to be made secondary and subordinate to animal life? Is not she who should receive the tenderest and most considerate ministries of the farmer's home, in all its appointments and in all its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... with direct taxation, and Annual Parliaments must unavoidably follow. The clumsy simplicity of the one arrangement would, in the eyes of its Admirers, match strikingly with the palpable expediency of the other. Such a union is equally suitable to an age of gross barbarism and an age of false philosophy. It is amusing to hear ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... pupil and French interpreter, lost no time in turning the Lockeian sensationalism upon the metaphysics of the seventeenth century. He contended that the French had rightly spurned the latter as a clumsy product of the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the shed hesitatingly, and touched his cap as if half in clumsy courtesy and half in timid appeal. "Mesters," he said, "good-day ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to her generation if she did not resent the trespasses which the world regularly commits upon pioneers and artists. For all the superb vitality of her frontier, it faces—and she knows it faces—the degradation of its wild freedom and beauty by clumsy towns, obese vulgarity, the uniform of a monotonous standardization. Her heroic days endure but a brief period before extinction comes. Then her high-hearted pioneers survive half as curiosities in a new order; and their spirits, transmitted to the artists who are their ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... drunkenly under Frank Corson's clumsy football-type tackle, and swung his arm like a pivoting beam. The blow was a lucky one. His fist smashed low on Corson's jaw, numbing the nerves of his neck ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... tripods, but a few have rounded or flat bottoms and a few are supplied with annular stands. The walls are thick and the shapes are uncouth or clumsy. The paste is coarse, poorly baked, and friable; near the surface it is a warm reddish or yellowish gray; within the mass it ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... Bishop or Abbot thought it his business to renew his clumsy old Saxon minster, and we have few cathedrals whose present structure does not date from the days of the Conqueror or his sons. Walkelyn, Bishop of Winchester, obtained a grant from William of as much timber from Hempage Wood as could be cut in ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... am, indeed, and can set ye course by dead reckoning an need be. Your work is likely enough, though had you butted your timbers it had been better—so and so!" And in this I saw she was right enough, and my work seemed more clumsy now ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... silk gloves; in one of the fingers there was a hole. She carried a pink parasol, and wore a large straw hat overtrimmed with roses. Her face with its little red-rimmed eyes, freckled and flushed complexion, her clumsy thick-set figure, fitted ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... scarcely to touch the uneven surface of the descent. He looked as if galloping in air, and tossed his head fiercely as though to shake the rising sun out of his eyes. The bull seemed continually gathering himself for a great leap, his clumsy bulk heaving from side to side. But a quarter of the distance had been traversed when the great curves of the lasso sprang forward, and, amidst a hoarse murmur from the boys, caught the bull below the horns. But that was ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... Socialism than the rich: "Much more likely to obstruct the way to Socialism," says Mr. Wells, "is the ignorance, the want of courage, the stupid want of imagination in the very poor, too shy and timid and clumsy to face any change they can evade! But even with them popular education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next generation we will find ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... 'which is nonsense' says Prof. Skeat. But the sentence is an example of ellipse, a figure which Chatterton affected a good deal, and fully expressed would run 'She—not willing to take much, ever doth heed not to take much', which would of course be intolerably clumsy ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... with some difficulty, like a clumsy automaton animated by unwilling springs, the fat scoundrel lurched awkwardly ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... understanding, endeavours to his utmost to cultivate the good-humour and happiness of others, and to contribute to the ease and comfort of all his acquaintance, however low in rank fortune may have placed him, or however clumsy he may be in his figure or demeanour, hath, in the truest sense of the word, a ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... Drunk with love and ready to face anything, he scrambled after the Moor... At the sound of his clumsy footsteps she turned and put her finger to her lips, as if to say "Hush" and with the other hand she tossed him a little scented garland made of jasmine flowers. Tartarin bent to pick it up, but as he was somewhat overweight and much encumbered by his weapons, the operation ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... was obscure, ill penned, and not easy to be understood. The bill, therefore, was neither approved nor negatived. If it had been approved, the treasury order would have been annulled, though in a clumsy and objectionable manner. If it had been negatived, and returned to Congress, no doubt it would have been passed by two thirds of both houses, and in that way have become a law, and abrogated the order. But it was not approved, it was not returned; it was retained. It had passed the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done—for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady's dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: "Let me" very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... and affixed the seal in the unpoetic guise of an adhesive stamp; nor did his perturbed and clumsy movements at all lessen the comedy of the performance. Sir John looked on with a malign enjoyment; and Otto chafed, regretting, when too late, the unnecessary royalty of his command and gesture. But ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and dressing the old man, then seated him in a rude arm-chair, resting on clumsy wooden castors, and poured out for him a small wine-glass full of raw brandy. Once or twice a year, usually after the payment of delayed interest, Giles received a share of the brandy; but he never learned to expect it. Then a long hickory staff ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... of both the great arts; but in severity and precision, true of sculpture. To return to our illustration: this poor little girl was more interesting to Edward Frere, he being a painter, because she was poorly dressed, and wore these clumsy shoes, and old red cap, and patched gown. May we sculpture her so? No. We may sculpture her naked, if we like; but not ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay. Upon a time she braced her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and debacle. The sea staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the bay-shore over against the fort. She sighted her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various |
