"Clutter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this way all day long. Aunt Almira was never properly through her work. Things were always "in a clutter." She did not find time from morning till night (to hear her tell it) to "clean herself up like ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... Mr. Lockhart pointed out, 'is not to the Tale of a Tub, but to the History of John Bull' (part ii. ch 12 and 13). Jack, who hangs himself, is however the youngest of the three brothers of The Tale of a Tub, 'that have made such a clutter in the work' (ib. chap ii). Jack was unwillingly convinced by Habbakkuk's argument that to save his life he must hang himself. Sir Roger, he was promised, before the rope was well about his neck, would break in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... of the absolute shows itself. For we do not like qualifying adverbs. [Footnote: Cf. Freud's discussion of absolutism in dreams, Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VI, especially pp. 288, et seq.] They clutter up sentences, and interfere with irresistible feeling. We prefer most to more, least to less, we dislike the words rather, perhaps, if, or, but, toward, not quite, almost, temporarily, partly. Yet nearly ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... small', that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is 'grungy' or {crufty}. 2. /v./ To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter: "I'm cleaning up my account." "I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg free ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... for those. It's enough to make a dog sick. There's nothing done that you don't do yourself, unless you stand over these loafers with a club. I'm sick of the whole business—and I've lost my hat; wish to God I'd never dreamed of givin' this rotten fool dance. Clutter the whole place up with a lot of feemales. I sure did lose my presence of mind when I got ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... your mind, Marshall?" he asked as I sat down and began to wonder how he ever conducted his work in the choatic clutter of stuff on the top ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... kind in all the length and breadth of Blue Cement Ridge, and that was in the menagerie! Even as she looked it vanished. Peggy faced about and ran back to the road in the direction of the stockade, Lo bounding before her. But another surprise awaited her. There was the clutter of short wings under the branches, and the sunlight flashed upon the iris throat of a wood-duck as it swung out of sight past her. But in this single glance Peggy recognized one of the latest and most precious of her acquisitions. There ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... very probably few who have tried it would dispute that it is somewhat difficult to "meet" an ordinary Englishman to whom you are not known in a railway carriage. With the big 'uns, however, the business appears to be simple enough. Foolish doings do clutter up one's luggage with letters of introduction when all that is needed to board round with the most celebrated people in England is a glance at a "Who's Who" in a ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... stories, "Robinson Crusoe," "Sappho," "Mr. Barnes of New York," a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, "The Arabian Nights' Entertainment," "Studies of the Human Form Divine," "The Little Minister," and a clutter of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that crispness one finds in such articles upon a doctor's ante-room table. Upon the wall, above the sideboard, was an old framed lithograph of Miss Della Fox in "Wang"; ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... had passed since Hazlitt had wept on the stairs as he left Rachel's room. Dry-eyed now and clear-headed, he sat one winter afternoon against his chosen background—the swarm and clutter of a law court. His brief-cases were packed. His law books had been bundled back to ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... whole house live. The front room, cool all summer because it faced north, and warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there. The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray walls, and the six or seven photographs that were arranged together on ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... rickshaw to the river. He picked out the Hankow among the clutter of shipping, anchored not far from shore, and out of reach of the swift current which rushed dangerously down midchannel. Black smoke issued from her single chubby funnel. Blue-coated coolies sped to and fro on her single narrow deck. Bobbie MacLaurin leaned far out across the ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... person," she replied; adding with a whimsical twinkle, "they're all like the dishes, Aunt Ellen,—bound to accumulate crumbs and scraps, and do nothing but clutter up." ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... is a lock strong enough to keep my badness shut up. Any way my room is in such a clutter I don't know how ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... to the discerning a clue to the real man behind the mask which he assumed—which he had been forced to assume in order to earn a living. When he reached the apartment, a few minutes after his encounter on the bridge, and switched the electric light on, the gleams fell upon an astonishing clutter of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... from the moral and personal to the menial characteristics of Mr. Johnson's speeches, we find that his brain is to be classed with notable cases of arrested development. He has strong forces in his nature, but in their outlet through his mind they are dissipated into a confusing clutter of unrelated thoughts and inapplicable phrases. He seems to possess neither the power nor the perception of coherent thinking and logical arrangement. He does not appear to be aware that prepossessions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... was rarely empty coming or going. There were more singers and musicians and artist folk, and bevies of young girls with their inevitable followings of young men, while mammas and aunts and chaperons seemed to clutter all the ways of the Big House and to fill a couple of motor cars when ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... was at 6,000 yards, 10 degrees to the right and 10 degrees below the F-94. The lock-on was held for ninety seconds as the ground controller watched both the UFO and the F-94 make a turn and come toward the ground radar site. Just as the target entered the "ground clutter"—the permanent and solid target near the radar station caused by the radar beam's striking the ground—the lock-on was broken. The target seemed to pull away swiftly from the jet interceptor. At almost this exact instant the tower operators reported that they had lost visual ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... files will be determined largely by local conditions. The point is to have things where they can be found readily under an appropriate heading; and to have them accessible to others besides the company clerk. Keep a copy of everything, as nearly as possible, but do not clutter up your company files with unimportant items. Keep your orderly room looking as neat ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... It clutter'd here, it chuckled there; It stirr'd the old wife's mettle: She shifted in her elbow-chair, And ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... a great, rusty, grimy clutter of work-benches, vises, tools, iron in bars and rods, and all sorts of old iron scraps and things that looked as if ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard
... natural battleground. Once a great procession marched toward them, carrying red banners and huge pictures of a coarse-faced man with a black mustache—Verkan Vall recognized the environment as Fourth Level Europo-American Sector. Finally, as the transposition-rate slowed, they saw a clutter of miserable thatched huts, in the rear of a granite wall of a Fourth Level Hulgun temple of Yat-Zar—a temple not yet infiltrated by Transtemporal Mining Corporation agents. Finally, they were at their destination. ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal point of the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... upon visiting my indisposed fair-one. Dorcas made officious excuses for her. I cursed the wench in her hearing for her impertinence; and stamped and made a clutter; which was improved into an apprehension to the lady that I would have flung her faithful confidante from the top of the stairs to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... footman belonging to a family which were well acquainted there; the servants conversed with him very freely, as my Lady Such-a-one's new man, while he entertained them with abundance of merry stories, until dinner was upon the table. Then taking advantage of that clutter in which they were, he slily lighted a fire-ball at the fire-side, clapped it into a closet on the side of the stairs in which the foul clothes were kept, and then perceiving the smoke, cried out with the utmost vehemence, Fire, fire. This naturally drew ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... denote a kind of adhesion or tenacity, as in cleave, clay, cling, climb, clamber, clammy, clasp, to clasp, to clip, to clinch, cloak, clog, close, to close, a clod, a clot, as a clot of blood, clouted cream, a clutter, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... slowly, as if reluctant to abandon the starry prospect without, to find him bending over a clutter of things scattered about his half-emptied case. She had been about to say that she must see to unpacking some of her ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... with the clutter of bringing the poor gentleman into the house, as above, were first angry and very high with the master of the house for suffering such a fellow, as they called him, to be brought out of the grave into their house; but being answered that ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... public highway leaving a clutter of greasy paper and swill (not, a pretty name, but neither is it a pretty object!) for other people to walk or drive past, and to make a breeding place for flies, and furnish nourishment for rats, choose a disgusting way to repay the land-owner for the liberty ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... than you do, I reckon," Mason cut in dryly. "I was told five different times, by one stranger and four of these here trouble-peddlin' friends that clutter the country. That's all right, Ford. A little slip like that—" He held out his hand ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... further side. A man swiftly bundled together the properties and drew them off. A tired looking man in evening dress, with a hideously painted face and long waxed moustaches, stood in the wings amid performing dogs, some free, some in basket cages, and amid the waiting clutter of apparatus that at once was rushed upon the stage. Andrew and Elodie moved clear and at the bottom of the iron staircase he motioned to her to ascend first. She clutched him by the arm and gulped down ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... things flow together Into a vast monotony, where night And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life, Are synonyms. What now—what now to me Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers That clutter up the world? You were my song! Now, let discord scream! You were my flower! Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not Plant things above your grave—(the common balm Of the conventional woe for its own wound!) Amid sensations rendered negative ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... clutter of the shop gained but fleeting notice from Louise. Her gaze almost immediately fastened upon the figure of the bewhiskered old man, with spectacles and sou'wester both pushed back on his bald crown, who mildly looked upon her—his smile somehow impressing ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... from the willow-fringed water lanes, and saw across the wider shield of glistering water the white cube of the Nishat Bagh Pavilion—the Garden of Joy, made for Jehangir the Mogul—standing by the water's edge, and at its foot a great throng and clutter of boats, amidst whose snaky prows we pushed our way and landed, something stiff after sitting for two hours in a ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... to bed much cheered; but he dreamed of walking about Miss Ruth's studio, and admiring her pictures, when, to his dismay, he found Mary had followed him, and was saying she couldn't bear things all of a clutter. ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... she could see nothing except a misty confusion. In a few moments the flotsam came thicker. Splintered piling, huge square-hewn timbers with fragments of twisted iron or broken bolts came floating into sight. A confusion of wreckage began to clutter the shore, and into ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... in the morning sun. I cross the last rill, mount the last hilltop on my journey, and lo, at the foot of the gently sloping heath are the orchards and palms of Amsheet. Further below is Jbail, or ancient Byblus, looking like a clutter of cliffs on the shore. Farewell to the mountain heights, and the arid wilderness! Welcome the fertile plains, and hopeful strands. In half an hour I reach the immense building—the first or the last of the village, according to your direction—which, from the top of the hill, I thought ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and her friendship with the great Dr Swift, the hope of the Tories. Indeed, it made her a great woman with the clergy in Dublin, that she knew so much of his sayings and doings, and in what high company he was got, and the clutter he made in London. Much was true, as I knew under his own hand. Much was idle twattle and the giddiness of a woman that will be talking. Now, one day, she visited me, dressed out in the last London mode, and talked as I knotted, ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... us, possessing the most imperfect and rudimentary Christianity, is so transcendent and lofty, it is hard to keep it clear before our eyes, especially when all the shabby little necessities of daily life come in to clutter up the foreground, and hide the great distance. Men may live up at Darjeeling there on the heights for weeks, and never see the Himalayas towering opposite. The lower hills are clear; the peaks are wreathed in cloud. So the little aims, the nearer purposes, stand out distinct ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... from side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness above the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various |
