"Clutter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scene is important before you attempt to present it. Unless it does influence the action of the story or is necessary for the understanding of what is to come it has no place in the narrative, no matter how great may be its beauties or how artistic your description of them. Above all things, never clutter your story with commonplaces and details which would serve to picture any one of a hundred different places. "When a tale begins, 'The golden orb of day was slowly sinking among the hills, shedding an effulgent glory over the distant ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... braces {}; other italics are shown conventionally with lines. Boldface type is shown by marks. Individual bold or CAPITALIZED words within an italicized phrase should be read as non-italic, though the extra lines have been omitted to reduce clutter.] ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... smell. It looks scragglier and scragglier. It gets brittle. Its needles begin to fall. Pretty soon it's nothing but a clutter. It must be dreadful to start as a Christmas tree and end by being nothing but a clutter. ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... laboratory was a thick-legged table cluttered with lengths of wire, vacuum tubes, transistors, a soldering gun, a couple of meters, and the other various paraphernalia of an electronics workshop. In the center of the table, surrounded by the clutter, sat an oblong box. It didn't look like much; it was just an eighteen by twelve by ten box, made of black plastic, featureless, except for a couple of dials and knobs on the top of it, and a pair of copper studs sticking out ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... town and the farm on Sugar Creek. After retiring from office, he became a venturesome speculator, capitalizing his wide political acquaintance in the sale of shares in all manner of mining and plantation companies, and dying suddenly, had left his estate in a sad clutter. ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... capacities to bear out the original. Yet in this instance, if the translation be faithful, it is clearly, but not, to our apprehension, elegantly done. I am apprehensive that the language generally has a strong tendency to repetition and redundancy of forms, and to clutter up, as it were, general ideas with particular meanings. At three o'clock I went to dine with Mr. Siveright, at the North West Company's House. The party was large, including the officers from the garrison. Conversation took a political turn. Colonel Lawrence defended the propriety of his ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... saics, from this distance, seem like doves basking 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 to be a ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... evaluate them, and if the members of the Association say, "Well, that's a variety we should grow," then they will grow it. If they feel it isn't as good as some they already have, they throw it away and that's the end of it. But they don't clutter up the variety situation with a lot of poor stuff. And they make profits, because always two heads are better than one, even though one is a sheep's head, as the old saying goes. Well, when you get four or five or more in a group ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... "You can drink water, but don't vote for it. Oh, that's a big help." He rummaged through the clutter on his desk and came up with a crude chart. "Any ...
— The Plague • Teddy Keller
... may be admitted at once that these lists, however inadequate they must be, and however unsatisfactory in themselves, may have a humble utility of their own as a first aid to the ignorant. At least, they may serve to remind a man lost in a maze amid the clatter and the clutter of our own time, that after all this century of ours is the heir of the ages, and that it is for us to profit by the best that the past has bequeathed to us. Even the most expertly selected list could do ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... engrossed in his own thoughts that he did not hear the clutter of a horse's feet behind him, just as he struck the long stretch of the comparatively straight path along the Reservoir. But Mutineer did, and pricked up his ears. Mutineer could not talk articulately, but all true lovers of horses ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... way through the clutter of men lying, some still as death, some writhing and gurgling horrid sounds. I had got about eight feet when across the hideous noises broke a laugh like a pleased kid. I whirled. He'd lifted his big shoulders up from the straw and was laughing after me from under those thick black lashes; his ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... and stared into the moon-broken gloom on his left. Something was there, fifty feet away, that drew him down through the muck which lay knee deep in the right-of-way ditch. It was what was left of the cutter's cabin, a clutter of burned logs, a wind scattered heap of ash. Even there, within arm's reach of the railroad, there had been ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however, rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of Hadrian's stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass of the place, but leave ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... 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
... after compartment, which had once housed the great Stede Bonnet. Instead of its old immaculate and almost scholarly appearance, the place now had an air of desolation. It reeked of filth, stale tobacco-smoke, and the spilled lees of liquor. In the clutter on the cabin table lay two bulging sacks and ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... 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 ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... it. But, you see, my notion is, to try to give my fam'ly the sort o' stuff that's nourishin'. Not just somethin' to eat, but food. I don't believe their stummicks realize they belong to poor folks. I'm not envyin' the rich, mind you. Dear no! I wouldn't be hired to clutter up my insides with the messes I see goin' up to the tables of some I work for. Cocktails, an' entrys, an' foody-de-gra-gra, an' suchlike. No! I believe in reel, straight nourishment. The things that builds up your bones, an' gives you red blood, an' good muscle, so's you can hold down ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... was jerking and bumping to a standstill. Sixty yards away was a little, bluish-gray frame building, by far the most pretentious of the clutter of shacks, flaunting the legend, "Prairie City." Beyond the station was the to-be-expected general store and post-office. A bit farther on a saloon. Beyond that another, and then straggling at intervals a dozen rough, rambling, one-storied board ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... things that had led him away from adventure into wool, and were now leading him as far from wool as might be, he was tempted. What if, in spite of Nan, he should risk it and tell Dick, once for all, why he was going away, make it clear so there should be no after-persuasions, no clutter of half understanding? He was tired of thinking about his life as a life. The temptation to such morose musing had come upon him in the last six months, and once yielded to, he felt the egotistical disease of it through his very blood and bones. If he were Catholic, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the "kitchen" first, and there the clutter of empty pots and pans told their own story. From the dining-room the others caught sight of the tardy pair and a wild hubbub ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... rooms were on the second floor in the north wing of the big house. But where Scotty's was usually neat as a barracks squad room, the result of his service in the Marines, Rick's was usually a clutter of apparatus. Living on Spindrift Island with the example of his father and the other scientists to follow, it was natural that he should be interested in science. He was more fortunate than most boys with such an interest, because ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... the majestic upper hall abruptly into a wild little cluttered sewing-room, and thence into a wilder but more spacious bedroom, large curtains at the windows, large roses on the carpet, and over all objects in the room a clutter of miscellaneous articles, as if Ella's band-boxes, bureaus, and work-baskets habitually refused to ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... got one," said Miss Sally, "so it's no use wasting talk on it. One's all I want. Another one wouldn't be no good but to clutter up the house." ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... comfortable beam. I knew her at once as a slow sailor, and bound to develop a decidedly disagreeable roll in any considerable sea. She was heavily sparred, and to my eye her canvas appeared unduly weather-beaten and rotten. Indeed there was unnecessary clutter aloft, and an amount of litter about the deck which evidenced lack of seamanship; nor did the general appearance of such stray members of the crew as met my notice add appreciably to my ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... 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, and presently ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... Marshall?" he asked as I sat down and began to wonder how he ever conducted his work in the choatic clutter of stuff on ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... and entered the room to meet wild confusion—and his room-mate. The room was a clutter of suit-cases, trunks, clothes, banners, unpacked furniture, pillows, pictures, golf-sticks, tennis-rackets, and photographs—dozens of photographs, all of them of girls apparently. In the middle of the room a boy was on his knees before an open trunk. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... the meantime, his own infirmity was playing his part, and plagued him to purpose; to which he cried out, "Thou mayest work thy will, pain, and torment me with all the power thou hast, but thou shalt never make me say that thou art an evil." This story that they make such a clutter withal, what has it to do, I fain would know, with the contempt of pain? He only fights it with words, and in the meantime, if the shootings and dolours he felt did not move him, why did he interrupt ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... picnic along the 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 they took in temporarily ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... partly pulls down the shade.] Lower still—that will do. [As she speaks she goes about the room, giving the tables a push here and the chairs a jerk there, and generally arranging the vases and ornaments.] Men hate a clutter of chairs and tables. [Stopping and taking up a hand mirror from the table, she faces the windows.] I really think I'm too pale ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... 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 for Ford's ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... contrast's wall Is down, and all opposed 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 By your elimination stands to-day, ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... 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
... agreeable Architecture disordered; so that I can compare em to nothing but to the Night-Goblins that take a Pleasure to over-turn the Disposition of Plates and Dishes in the Kitchens of your housewifely Maids. Well, after all this Racket and Clutter, this is too dear, that is their Aversion; another thing is charming, but not wanted: The Ladies are cured of the Spleen, but I am not a Shilling the better for it. Lord! what signifies one poor Pot of Tea, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele |
