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Disarray   Listen
noun
Disarray  n.  
1.
Want of array or regular order; disorder; confusion. "Disrank the troops, set all in disarray."
2.
Confused attire; undress.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Disarray" Quotes from Famous Books



... view, All is strange yet nothing new; Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong; Phrase that time has flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and elegy ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... without finding our convictions sometimes shaken. The biting satire, which seems only like cool common-sense and justice taking their keenest tone; the masterly array, or perhaps we should rather say disarray, of facts, dates, and arguments; the bold assumptions which, by their very case and confidence, bear down the reader's knowledge and judgment; the clear, unadorned style, made for convincing and conquering—all these qualities, and others too, unite with almost matchless force to make the worse seem ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... transform the sentence from nonsense into sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an inchoate mass of color into a picture, disarray into an object of beauty; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, when it finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of perfection in which humanity is transformed into ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... be in vain, and the hope of the world a delusion. It is only the believer who can never despair, who knows that his work will endure and enrich the world—that there will be no collapse or final disarray, that the world is no blot nor blank, but means intensely and means good. It is that faith which makes endeavour and surrender worth while; that faith—the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... occasion of his last visit to Gateshead. None of the furniture, I am happy to say, suffered very severely during the encounter. The table, under which my booted feet were disposed happened somehow to have a rather violent oscillation imparted to it, disarranging direfully what was already in direful disarray. The lamp, standing alone in the midst of confusion, suffered a partial eclipse; and my favourite Dublin meerschaum successfully resisted the dilapidating effect of a fall of several feet. So much for tableaux vivants in real life. Now I will just see if there is ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn

... the writing-table; in the rest of the room confusion and disarray, rifled bookcases and dismantled walls. Fresh squares of wall-paper outlined in cobwebs marked the places where the great maps had hung. The soul of the room was gone from it with the portrait of the late Mrs. Tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... to the table, where she was standing when I entered, and seemed, after a moment, to busy herself in arranging the books scattered in disarray on the green cloth. But she had a secret object—to regain possession of the paper spiral that lay there neglected, its pin sticking up beside the lamp-stand. Her light hand, hovering hither and thither, had by a series of cunning manoeuvres got the offending object behind a pile ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... with heat all day. She caught a look at Claybrook in the seat beside her. He was as fresh and cool as though he had not been exposed to the weather at all. Instinctively she reached a restraining hand to her hair. It was blowing in wild disarray. A sudden stretch of stately old houses sitting well back on either side of the street, partly hidden by double rows of trees, caused her fresh doubts as to the fitness of her attire. In her shirtwaist and skirt she felt like ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... humility. In short, he gave me an opportunity of studying John Bull, as I may say, stripped naked—his greed, his usuriousness, his hypocrisy, his perfidy of the back-stairs, all swelled to the superlative—such as was well worth the little disarray and fluster of our passage in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... At the turn by the window, where potted posies stood, he encountered Rosalie Dysart in canoe costume—sleeves rolled up, hair loosened, becomingly tanned, and entirely captivating in her thoughtfully arranged disarray. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... her rigging's disarray Told of a worse disaster than the last; Like draggled hair dishevelled hung the stay, Drooping and beating on the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... One arm was outstretched, the head a little back, the face quiet, with nothing in it of wrath or fear or pain. The storm had not hurt him. There was little disarray. It was much as though he had thrown himself down there, beside the water, with a sigh for the pleasure of rest. The younger Cary waited motionless for the blood to come back to his heart and the mist before his eyes to clear. It cleared; he saw plainly his brother, guide, and friend, and ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... evidences of panic. Stateroom doors were open, people in all stages of disarray were hurrying wildly along, or clinging frantically to each other. The hysterical sobs of women, piercing cries from the thin voices of children, deep-toned curses and wild ejaculations from men sounded on every hand. People were donning life-preservers, some putting ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... start up from the ground, his colour deepening with discomfiture as he glanced at the disarray of the room, littered with playthings, displaced cushions, newspapers, with which he had been playing bo-peep, drawing materials, all in as much confusion as the hair, which, in an unguarded moment, he had placed at ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Summer—I have seen World on world of summer green— Summer earth and summer sky, Fields of summer turning by; Hills beyond us fall away, Tumbled slopes in disarray, Fold and melt into a plain: Fire and gold ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton

... and shoulders were right under him, so that he looked almost perpendicularly down upon them. Her face was as pale as ivory; every drop of blood seemed to have left it; the same with her neck and bosom; her limbs had dropped anyhow, in disarray; a fur jacket was untidily cast over her black muslin dress. But her waved hair, fresh from the weekly visit of the professional coiffeur, remained in the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... artistic chatter ... when a couple of Guardias civiles, who had doubtless those days been looking for marauders, approached them. They heard something of apses, squinches, ogives, and other terms as suspicious or as dangerous ... and observing the disarray of those who thus discoursed, their long beards, their excited mien, the lateness of the hour, the solitude of the place, and obeying especially that axiomatic certainty of the Spanish police to blunder, they angrily ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... In the obscure disarray of that thing, happening like a cataclysm, it was in her feminine head that some gleam of reason survived. He was lost to the world in their embraced stillness. But she said, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... bade them get the fire lit, and stalked out upon his crutch, with his hand on my shoulder, leaving them in a disarray, and silenced by his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... muscular Mexican with a swarthy, wrinkled face, broad but well-cut. His big, thin-lipped mouth showed an amazing disarray of strong yellow teeth when he smiled. His little black eyes were shrewd and full of fire. Although he was sixty years old, there was little grey in the thick black hair that hung almost to his shoulders. He wore a ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... forward to the Court, and when he came there, he beheld sleeping rooms, and halls, and chambers, and the most beautiful buildings ever seen. And he went into the hall to disarray, and there came youths and pages and disarrayed him, and all as they entered saluted him. And two knights came and drew his hunting dress from about him, and clothed him in a vesture of silk and gold. And the hall was prepared, and behold he ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 3 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards

... Owen, and his death one week before the war ended, it should be noted that these poems are not all in their final form. Owen had only had a few of his poems published during his lifetime, and his papers were in a state of disarray when Siegfried Sassoon, his friend and fellow poet, put together this volume. The 1920 edition was the first edition of Owen's poems, the 1921 reprint (of which this is a transcript) added one more—and nothing else happened until Edmund Blunden's ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen

... silver mounted, hung from a knot in his sash—the last being an almost invariable adjunct, more for utility than ornament, of a South American gentleman's dress to this hour. Excepting when his occasional nervous contortions brought about disarray, there was a certain precision in his attire curiously at variance with the unsightly disorder around; especially in the belittered Ghetto, forward of the main-mast, wholly occupied by ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... always been the chamber of inquisition and the scene of punishment; but it stuck so rigorously in his mind that he must instantly approach the door and prove its untruth. As he went, he struck upon a drawer left open in the business table. It was the money-drawer, a measure of his father's disarray: the money-drawer - perhaps a pointing providence! Who is to decide, when even divines differ between a providence and a temptation? or who, sitting calmly under his own vine, is to pass a judgment on the doings of a poor, hunted dog, slavishly afraid, slavishly rebellious, ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... there, his face all scarred by red scratches, without collar or neck-tie, having hastily resumed his clothes. He appeared furious as he surprised her in his disarray. She let him lead her as though she were a child. He drew her to his room ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... flowers are withered quite away And drop their petals wan! yet, perfumes bring And sprinkle round, and sweetest balsams lay;— Nay, perish perfumes since thine shall not stay! In purple mantle lies he, and around, The weeping Loves his weapons disarray, His sandals loose, with water bathe his wound, And fan him with soft wings ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Ranging the varied landscape o'er, Far as the looming Dome—no more. One look he gives, then turns aside, Solace he summons from his pride: "So be it! They await me now Who wrought this stinging overthrow; They wait me; not as on the day Of Pope's impelled retreat in disarray— By me impelled—when toward yon Dome The clouds of war came rolling home" The burst, the bitterness was spent, The heart-burst bitterly turbulent, And ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... into the shed long since, but which will cumber the earth, I fear, till June, at least. Quantities of chips are strewn about, and on removing them we find the yellow stalks of grass sprouting underneath. Nature does her best to beautify this disarray. The grass springs up most industriously, especially in sheltered and sunny angles of the buildings, or round the door-steps,—a locality which seems particularly favorable to its growth; for it is already high enough to bend over and wave in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... might be inferred from the disarray. One was that Mr. Edwards was generous to his son Jim, and another was that there was no Mrs. Edwards. Further, it might be easily enough guessed that Jim had been lured from the study of Latin, in which pretty Miss Ware, who was ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson

... sinews they tore, how many knees and spines they mashed and how many grown men and youths they to death bashed! With the first gleam of morning grey the Infidels broke and fled away, in disorder and disarray; and the Moslems followed them till middle-day and took over twenty-thousand of them, whom they brought to their tents in bonds to stay. Then Gharib sat down before the gate of Cufa and commanded a herald to proclaim pardon and protection for every ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... made an effort to rouse herself and raised her hand. But the hand fell again, and the word half-formed upon her lips died away. Nothing could be more piteous, more disarmed. Yet even her disarray and helplessness were lovely; she was noble in her defeat; her very abandonment breathed youth and purity; the man's ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the English ranks they glided, stabbing horses, slaying their iron-clad riders, doubly increasing the confusion of that wild whirl of horsemen, whose trim and gallant ranks had been thrown into utter disarray. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... cross-bearing prelate, drew back before this impetuous assault, which was given force by the troops who crowded in to the rescue of the king. The Moors soon yielded to the desperate onset, and were driven back in wild disarray. ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris

... delight. It was ravishing, no doubt about that! It supplied the only lack of which the disclosure of sly old Skipper John had informed her. And she tossed her dark head in a proper saucy fashion, and she touched a strand of hair to deliberate disarray, and smoothed her apron; and then she tripped into the kitchen to exercise the wiles of the little siren ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan

... has been an economy in disarray because of a quarter century of nearly continuous warfare. An apparently durable peace was established after the death of rebel leader Jonas SAVIMBI in February 2002, but consequences from the conflict continue including the impact of widespread land mines. Subsistence agriculture ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... difficulty. It seemed a vague thing in the light of her latest discovery, though she could never meet Clara in disagreement without a qualm. But she made the plunge that evening, before Clara left for the Bullers', while she was at her dressing-table in the half-disarray which brings out all the softness and the disarming physical charm of women. From her low chair Flora spoke laughingly of Ella's perturbation. Clara paused, with the powder puff in her hand, while she listened to Flora's explanation of how Ella feared that some one might, after all these ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain

... little dot, with golden hair and laughing eyes, a pink ribbon round a tress that hung roguishly over her left cheek. She smiled at me as she passed where I sat on the roadside under the poplars, her face was an angel's set in a disarray of gold. In her hand she carried an empty jug, almost as big as herself and she was going to her home, one of the inhabited houses nearest the fighting line. The day had been a very quiet one and the village ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... horror that it seemed undwelt in. The hall was in order, and the tart and rosy lairds of Etterick looked down from their Raeburn canvases on certain signs of habitation; but the drawing-rooms were dingy with coverings and all the large rooms were in the same tidy disarray. Then, wise from experience, she led the way to Lewis's sanctum, and found there a pretty luncheon-table and every token of men's presence. Soon the four tenants arrived, hot and breathless, from the hill, to find Bertha Afflint deep in rods and guns, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... with its sunken Roman bath and descending marble steps, was fruitless, as were the glances he sent into Paula's wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... of Order, &c] Disorder — N. disorder; derangement &c 61; irregularity; anomaly &c (unconformity) 83; anarchy, anarchism; want of method; untidiness &c adj.; disunion; discord &c 24. confusion; confusedness &c adj.; mishmash, mix; disarray, jumble, huddle, litter, lumber; cahotage^; farrago; mess, mash, muddle, muss [U.S.], hash, hodgepodge; hotch-potch^, hotch-pot^; imbroglio, chaos, omnium gatherum [Lat.], medley; mere mixture &c 41; fortuitous concourse of atoms, disjecta membra [Lat.], rudis indigestaque moles [Lat.] [Ovid]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... of the month of August was a time of grave crisis for the Russians, and it is the opinion of the best military critics that the Turks, with a little more initiative and power of combination, might have thrown the Russians back on the Danube in utter disarray. From this extremity the invaders were saved by the lack among the Turks of the above-named gifts, on which, rather than on mere bravery, the issue of campaigns and the fate of nations now ultimately depend. True to their old renown, the Turks showed ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... out,—'Heads or tails?' where'er we be. Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, 95 Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,—disentangle them who may. Baron de Tott's Memoirs beside them lie, And some odd volumes of old chemistry. Near those a most inexplicable thing, 100 With lead in the middle—I'm conjecturing How to make Henry understand; but no— I'll leave, as Spenser says, with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... Disarray and ruin met my sight at every hand. Shot and shell had made wicked havoc. Houses where, as a hostage, I had dined, were battered and broken; public buildings were shapeless masses, and dogs and thieves prowled among the ruins. Drunken ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... that it was his comrade Amis, who had delivered him from death, and won for him the daughter of the King of France to be his wife. And straightway he fell upon him, and began weeping greatly, and kissed him. And when his wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in disarray, weeping and distressed exceedingly, for she remembered that it was he who had slain the false Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, and said to him, Abide with us until God's will be accomplished ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... clattering horsemen, thundered out of the village. John Girder also stood upon his threshold, now looking at his honoured right hand, which had been so lately shaken by a marquis and a lord, and now giving a glance into the interior of his mansion, which manifested all the disarray of the late revel, as if balancing the distinction which he had attained with the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... gorse-embattled brae, With equal eager feet they dash, And on the moorland summit clash, Friend mix'd with foe in stormy disarray: Once more the Northern charge asserts its right, As with the driving rain They drive them down the plain: That star alone before Drummossie gilds ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... as he stood in the centre of that tiny moonlit amphitheatre. His head was bowed a little, and his shoulders drooped a little, for he was old. A thick, shaggy beard fell in a silvery sheen over his breast. His hair, gray as the underwing of the owl whose note he forged, straggled in uncut disarray from under the drooping rim of a battered and weatherworn hat. His coat was of buckskin, and it was short at the sleeves—four inches too short; and the legs of his trousers were cut off between the knees and the ankles, giving him a still ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... slew, Down with the bridle-hand drew The foe from the saddle and threw Underfoot there in the fray— Ranged like a storm or stood like a rock In the wave of a stormy day; Till suddenly shock upon shock Staggered the mass from without, Drove it in wild disarray, For our men gallopt up with a cheer and a shout, And the foemen surged, and wavered and reeled Up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, out of the field, And ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... down to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and perverted public opinion. Like Gulliver, it was bound when asleep, and it must continue fettered while its intellect remains torpid. Some day it will awake, stretch its mighty limbs, burst its feeble bonds, and hurl in disarray to the earth the whole host of liliputian officials and dignitaries who are strutting in the pride of ownership on its great body, the czar tumbling first from his ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... point: for if we fall among the potsherds we shall hobble on but lamely. Since thou art raised unto a high command in the army, and hast a dragoon to hold thy solid and stately piece of horse-flesh, I cannot but take it into my fancy that thou hast some commission of array or disarray to execute hereabout. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... curtains, and bright rugs. The door of the guest room stood open and she could see that it was filled with fresh flowers and ready for occupancy. The door of her sister's room was slightly ajar and she pushed it open and stood looking inside. In her state of disarray she made a shocking contrast to the flowerlike figure busy before a dressing table. Linda was dark, narrow, rawboned, overgrown in height, and forthright of disposition. Eileen was a tiny woman, delicately moulded, exquisitely colored, and one of the most perfectly successful tendrils ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... Louis, aware of his brother's peril, despatched Bisset, the English knight, with a message assuring the count of speedy aid; but, ere the Englishman reached the Count of Anjou, he met the French cavalry flying in disarray. Bisset reined ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar

... forth And overhang its side, While by the lake below appears The darkening cloud of Saxon spears. At weary bay each shattered band, Eying their foemen, sternly stand; Their banners stream like tattered sail, That flings its fragments to the gale, And broken arms and disarray Marked the ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... In a moment, roused up suddenly from sleep, and forgetting every thing but those tender recollections of gentle care in infancy, and kindness all through life, the child of nature startled out of bed, drew the bolt, and in beauteous disarray, fell into that ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... as she stood leaning against the wall, motionless save for the surging of her breast, there was about her the same strange, feral inscrutableness. He was baffled, he could not tell what she was thinking. She seemed, unconquered, to triumph over her disarray and the agitation of her body. Then, with an involuntary gesture she raised her hands to her hair, smoothing it, and without seeming haste left the room, not so much as glancing at him, closing the door ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... and uncomfortable, but most of the company made the best of it. Mlle. Frahender grew pale and ill, and her hair flew about in the most comic disarray. Cosily ensconced in a corner, Maurice sketched the various attitudes his companions assumed with every antic of the lightly-laden, wave-tossed Soulacroup. Hunched up on the seat, Esperance clung to the rigging. Genevieve clutched at her when a wave pitched the boat too far over. The others, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt

... our service. He was a pitiful image of shabby gentility and the dinginess of "reduced circumstances." He would have been, I suppose, some fifty years of age; but his pale haggard unwholesome visage, his plaintive drooping carriage and the irremediable disarray of his apparel seemed to add to the burden of his days and tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled under a month's neglect of the razor. In all this rusty forlornness lurked ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James

... La Sarriette, in her picturesque disarray, looked charming. Frizzy hair fell over her brow like vine branches. Her bare arms and neck, indeed all the rosy flesh she showed, bloomed with the freshness of peach and cherry. She had playfully hung some cherries on her ears, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... solemn pledge had passed between them—a spiritual troth which nothing in this world could either touch or tarnish. Neither Peter's marriage nor the rash promise Nan had given to Roger could impinge on it. It would carry them through the complex disarray of this world to the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... lovely thing; On disarray it lays its wing, Teaching simplicity to sing. It has a meek and lowly grace, Quiet as a nun's face. Lo — I will have thee in this place! Tranquil well of deep delight, Transparent as the water, bright ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... hate the haunts o' men, But we had to come to town to get the mail. And we're ridin' home at daybreak—'cause the air is cooler then— All 'cept one of us that stopped behind in jail. Shorty's nose won't bear paradin', Bill's off eye is darkly fadin', All our toilets show a touch of disarray, For we found that City life is a constant round of strife And we aint the breed for shyin' ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various

... full instructions, the surgeon departed. "Miss Carrington has already insisted on helping. I've sampled Wilson's wardrobe, but his things would split up if you tried to get into them. Go out and borrow or buy some anywhere. You can't expect to meet Miss Carrington in that most fantastic disarray. I've taken quarters at the Burrard House, and it's not your turn until to-morrow. The Colonel has graciously signified his approval of ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... upon another table, was a tray from which he had evidently dined and also a brandy bottle with several recumbent bottles of soda. Although he had so lately arrived at the hotel he had contrived to diffuse his traps over the room in an organised disarray which represented a long and careless occupation if it did not represent t'le scene of a scuffle. His pipe was in ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... of hunger. Then he glanced at Grenfell, who lay fast asleep close by, with his blanket falling away from him. The man's face was half buried among the withered needles which were thick in his unkempt hair, and he lay huddled together, grotesque and unsightly in ragged disarray. Weston vacantly noticed the puffiness of his cheeks, and the bagginess beneath his eyes. The stamp of indulgence was very plain upon him, and the younger man, who had led a simple, strenuous life, was sensible of a ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... write a prescription, followed by Clive's mother-in-law, who had cast Rosa's fine Cashmere shawl over her shoulders, to hide her disarray. "You here still, Mr. Pendennis!" she exclaims. She knew I was there. Had not she changed her dress ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... drawn his eyes upward. There, overhead, was Miss Lorne coming down the stairs from the upper floor in a state of nervous excitement, with a bedroom candle in her shaking hand, a loose gown flung on over her nightdress, and her hair streaming over her shoulders in glorious disarray. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... pine-trees are shaken, they yield to thy shocks, And, crashing, they tumble in wild disarray; The rocks fly before thee—thou seizest the rocks And whirlst ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... attic and as he thrust his head out, up and down the street there were a dozen echoes to the noise of his window sash, and heads in every kind of night disarray appeared. Enquiries were being shouted. "They are coming!" bawled a policeman, hammering at the door; "the Martians are coming!" and hurried ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams, were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up a picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the first light of dawn, glancing ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... whom the dying man had sent for, appeared for a moment in the throng, gave an order, then vanished, leaving the terrified expression of his face reflected upon a score of others. Jenkins showed himself in that way for a moment, cravat untied, waistcoat open, cuffs soiled and rumpled, in all the disarray of the battle he was waging upstairs against a terrible opponent. He was at once surrounded, pressed with questions. Certainly the monkeys flattening their short noses against the bars of the cage, awed by the unusual uproar and very attentive to what was taking place, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... now sacred to his memory, the major found on every hand evidences that Elmendorf had indeed been at work. Out from their accustomed places on the shelves the books had been dragged, and were now stacked up about the room in perplexing disarray. Some lay open upon the table, others on the desk near the north window, his father's favorite seat, and here some of the rarest of the collection were now piled ten and fifteen deep. On the table in loose sheets were some pencilled memoranda on names, authors, and dates ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King

... let her come to where the dead thing lay on its back with the knees drawn up. Some woman had already covered the face with a handkerchief, and dark blood was oozing out from under it. Olive crouched down beside its pitiful disarray. ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... expression which gives the reader a tangible idea of the effect of a good guard. That pose, which is in some degree observant, marks so plainly a duellist of the first rank that a feeling of inferiority came into Max's soul, and produced the same disarray of powers which demoralizes a gambler when, in presence of a master or a lucky hand, he loses his self-possession and ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... been dropped when nuns and pupils fled. They had not been left in disorder: the rows had been laid out evenly, a handkerchief thrown over each cushion. And that orderly arrest of life seemed sadder than any scene of disarray. It symbolized the senseless paralysis of a whole nation's activities. Here were a houseful of women and children, yesterday engaged in a useful task and now aimlessly astray over the earth. And in hundreds of such houses, in dozens, in hundreds of open towns, the hand of time had been stopped, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... sorry." Isabel ran her eyes with a touch of whimsical solicitude over Hyde's tall easy figure and the exquisite keeping of his white clothes. Difficult to connect him with the bloody disarray of war! "Were you too left lying ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... going to make of him?" "A sailor," replied my father, "Captain Sibille has agreed to take him with him to Toulon." Then the good Mme. Barairon, towards whom I have always felt the warmest gratitude, observed to my father that the French navy was in complete disarray, that the poor state of the country's finances would not allow its rapid refurbishment, and, furthermore, its inferiority vis—vis the English navy was such that it would spend most of its time in harbour. She said that she could not think ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... itself, was not frightful, but coming so unexpectedly it startled Stella, and she involuntarily jumped, and her glass and plate fell to the floor with a crash; and strawberries, cakes, and milk fell in a scattered and somewhat unpleasant disarray. ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells

... in the women's dressing tent sat a young, wistful-faced girl, chin in hand, unheeding the chatter of the women about her or the picturesque disarray of the surrounding objects. Her eyes had been so long accustomed to the glitter and tinsel of circus fineries that she saw nothing unusual in a picture that might have held a ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo

... studio. On his way thither he had recoiled, shivering, from the empty desolation of the house. In the general disarray of the ticketed furniture and stripped walls, all artistic charm had disappeared. And he said to himself, with a grim twist of the mouth, that if the house had grown ugly and commonplace, that only made it a better setting for the ugly ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... day, but he had done no more than take the books from their shelves and leave them in confused heaps. He had promised that he would make the attic tidy again, when his mother complained of the room's disarray. His mind would become quiet, perhaps, if he were to spend a little time now in replacing the books on the shelves in the order in which he wished them to be. He sat down on the floor and contemplated them. Most of these volumes, new and ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine

... the city, on what this greatest thing in the world might be. And he hoped with gentle skepticism that the enthusiasm was warranted. A young man opened the car door as they stopped. His face was flushed, Eddinger noted, hair pushed back in disarray, his shirt torn open ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... ready on the bed, fluffy and light and sheer, a white dream of a dress, with two unopened florist's boxes beside it, but there was no picturesque disarray of excited toilet-making in her big, brightly lighted room, and no dream-promoting candlelight. And there were no pennants or football trophies disfiguring the daintily flowered wall paper, and no pictures ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... called from each to each across The hideous disarray (For terrible had been their loss): "O, this ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood

... in the morning when George Dupont closed the door and came down the steps to the street. The first faint streaks of dawn were in the sky, and he noticed this with annoyance, because he knew that his hair was in disarray and his whole aspect disorderly; yet he dared not take a cab, because he feared to attract attention at home. When he reached the sidewalk, he glanced about him to make sure that no one had seen him leave the house, then started down the street, ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair

... Louvre, there have I seen The sumptuously-feathered angel pierce Prone Lucifer, descending. Looked he fierce, Showing the fight a fair one? Too serene! The young Pharsalians did not disarray Less willingly their locks of floating silk: That suckling mouth of his upon the milk Of heaven might still be feasting through the fray. Oh, Raphael! when men the Fiend do fight, They conquer not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... lips, she pray'd alone, She praying, disarray'd and warm From slumber, deep her wavy form In the dark ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... hungry. She came sooner than he had expected, setting the wild disarray of her hair in some hurried order. Her eyes were quick and curious as she looked up at him. She shrugged her shoulders behind his back and extended her hands ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... Confused splutter. M. de Malseigne's sword breaks; he snatches Commandant Denoue's: the sentry is wounded. M. de Malseigne, whom one is loath to kill, does force egress,—followed by Chateau-Vieux all in disarray; a spectacle to Nanci. M. de Malseigne walks at a sharp pace, yet never runs; wheeling from time to time, with menaces and movements of fence; and so reaches Denoue's house, unhurt; which house Chateau-Vieux, in an agitated manner, invests,—hindered as yet ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... out of the complex disarray of his little world effects a new harmony is an artist. He who fashioned the first cup, shaping it according to his ideal,—for no prototype existed,—and in response to his needs; he who, taking this elementary form, wrought upon it with his fingers and embellished it according ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes

... at each turn one sees huge pitchers and water-jugs and jars that might have held the forty thieves. At one booth harness is sold and high Turkish saddles, at another pannier baskets for mules. A flood of colour on the pavement of a covered way—a great disarray of little shrivelled lemons, with stalks in many cases, for they have been gathered hard by. In the centre of the market-place are all the meat and fish shops, and there one may see huge sturgeon and salmon ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... fair as foreign! Who is here In disarray of princely gear? Here were a lass whose royal port Might make an awe in Heaven's court; But sorrowing beauty testifies In tears that journey from her eyes, To touches of interior pain; And on her hand a sanguine ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... golden light of the new-risen sun stood a breathless, wild-eyed man and a steaming horse. Smothered in dust and grime, his clothes in disarray, the left sleeve of his doublet hanging in rags, this young man opened his lips to speak, yet for ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... so many baiocchi a pound; and their blood, which is more esteemed than their flesh, hawked about the streets in cakes: of course we are too humane to hint to them their coming destiny. In front of the elegant Borghese entrance, and round the Park lodge, all strewn about in picturesque disarray, we behold one of those numerous herds of goats, which come in every morning, to be milked at the different houseouse doors: their udders at present are brimful, and almost touch the lintel of the gate where they are standing—"gravido ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... these eyes smiled slowly. She was seeing in this lover of her rival a singularly delightful looking young man, for all his dust and disarray, a slender, bronzed, hardy-looking young man, with dark, disordered hair straying across a white brow, and audacious, eager eyes in which the fear of death, so lately glimpsed, ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... was sober, even stately. But soon, either from the steep, insecure nature of the ground or from less obvious and material cause, her pace quickened until it became a run. She ran neatly, deftly, all of a piece as a boy runs, no trace of disarray or feminine floundering in her action. More than ever, indeed, did she appear a fine nymph-like creature; so that, watching her flight Tom Verity was touched alike with self-reproach and admiration. For he had succeeded ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong; Phrase that time hath flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... am glad to see you," panted Katherine, all in disarray, which she endeavored to set right by an agitated touch here and there. "Now, Jack, I'm going to take you to the smoking-room, but you'll have to behave yourself as you walk along the deck. I won't be made a spectacle ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr

... said Marcia. She and Galen were alone with Pertinax, who looked splendid in his official toga. She was herself in disarray. Her woman had tried to dress her hair on the way in the litter; one long coil of it was tumbling on her shoulder. ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... bend wildly from the balustrade, a sight for a painter. Across the way Flora, holding back her grandmother, silently leans out, another picture. In the ranks near Charlie a disarray continues even after Kincaid has got the battered Mandeville again into the saddle, and while Mandeville is rejecting sympathy with a ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... he tell, in one brief sentence, all the whole night's happenings?—for all that must be included in the explanation of what his luckless disarray meant. ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London

... appeared at the hatch of the doorway above. Her hair hung in disarray over her well-developed shoulders, and recent tears had left their furrows on a painted ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... about you in order to go off with the heathen! You men are so monopolizing! He wants to be let love the inky-eyed Jewess, but I must not say a kind word to you! Oh, what am I to do now?" and in pretending to repair the disarray of her hair, down came a luxuriant tress. "What does it matter which way I turn? All roads lead to the river or the railroad—a step into the cold water or repose on the track of the iron horse, and no one will ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... remembrance, careful-careless kiss, That does not wake to hope with waking day, And at the hour of bed-time does not say: "That was for rapture, that for peace, but this Burns for the night's more terrible auspices, And pangs and sweets of doubt and disarray!"— Yet in one kiss two hearts found once the way From perfect ignorance to ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... if anything, the confusion was greater than above; but here, too, was an exit through to the rear street—and a moment later he was sauntering past the front of an unkempt little pawnshop, closed for the night, over whose door, in the murk of a distant street lamp, three balls hung in sagging disarray, tawny with age, and across whose dirty, unwashed windows, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... from the plain Upwafted by the winds the smoke aspired 635 Savoury, but unacceptable to those Above; such hatred in their hearts they bore To Priam, to the people of the brave Spear-practised Priam, and to sacred Troy. Big with great purposes and proud, they sat, 640 Not disarray'd, but in fair form disposed Of even ranks, and watch'd their numerous fires, As when around the clear bright moon, the stars Shine in full splendor, and the winds are hush'd, The groves, the mountain-tops, the headland-heights ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... as when the rose unblown Slides white from its warm sheath some morn in May! Under the sloping waist, aslant, her zone Clings as it slips in tender disarray; One knee, out-thrust a little, keeps it so Lingering ere it fall; her lovely face Gazes as o'er her own Eternity! Those armless radiant shoulders, long ago Perchance held arms out wide with yearning grace For Adon by ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... This disarray of the Turkish attack diminished the fire their bow-guns could bring to bear on the Christian line, for the leading galleys masked the batteries of those that followed. Along the allied left and centre, lying in even array bows to the attack, the guns roared ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... Disable kripli. Disadvantage malutilo. Disagree malkonsenti. Disagreement malkonsento. Disappear malaperi. Disappoint malkontentigi. Disappointment malkontentigo. Disapprove malaprobi. Disarm senarmigi. Disarray konfuzego. Disarrange malordigi. Disaster malfelicxego. Disastrous ruiniga. Disavow malkonfesi. Disband disigi. Disbelieve malkredi. Disburse elspezi. Disbursement elspezo. Disc disko. Discard forigi, forjxeti. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... cathedral at Bruges. He must have made up his mind to travel rather suddenly, for, in spite of the weather, he had neither overcoat nor umbrella—merely the frock coat and silk hat of Piccadilly. But there was no spot of rain on him, and no sign of disarray. ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett

... loose disarray Of vulgar newness, premature decay; A tavern, crazy with its whiskey brawls, With "Slaves at Auction!" garnishing its walls; Without, surrounded by a motley crowd, The shrewd-eyed salesman, garrulous and loud, A squire or colonel in his pride of place, Known at free fights, the caucus, and the race, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... lived in a toy-strewn home, Though feeble he be and gray, Will yearn, no matter how far he roam, For the glorious disarray Of the little home with its littered floor That was his in the by-gone days; And his heart will throb as it throbbed before, When he ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest

... Martinique and Santa Lucia made signal for a fleet to windward, which proved to be a body of French supply ships, twenty-six in number, under convoy of a frigate. Both the British and the French squadrons were in disarray, sails unbent, ships on the heel or partially disarmed, crews ashore for wood and water. In both, signals flew at once for certain ships to get under way, and in both the orders were executed with a rapidity ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... himself and Laura seemed charming, intimate, unconventional, and full of opportunities. Never had she appeared prettier to him. She wore a little pink flannel dressing-sack with full sleeves, and her hair, carelessly twisted into great piles, was in a beautiful disarray, curling about her cheeks and ears. "I didn't see anything of you at ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... time soever he shall go Forth with his faithful crew, by night or day, By water or by land, will shame the foe, With memorable rout and disarray; And this too late Romagna's sons shall know. Led against former friends in bloody fray, Who shall bedew the campaign with their blood, By Santern, Po, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... Bowker," he explained to Craig, humbly conscious of his own disarray and toiler's unkemptness. "She would be greatly obliged if you will give her a few minutes of your time. She begs you to excuse the informality. She has sent me in her carriage, and it will be a great satisfaction to her if ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... Her cap was off, her hair tangled loosely over her forehead. In her disarray she looked prettier than he had ever remembered her. There was something provoking about the large, dreamy eyes, the red lips that parted at ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... the eyes of maternal love of Rosa's to recognize our jaunty Dick in the emaciated, fleshless face that lay imbedded in the disarray of the cot. Dick's blue eyes were sunken and dim, his lips chalky and parched. He made no sign of recognition when Rosa drew back with her arm under his head to ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... the downfall of one of those sovereign existences, the disarray of ceremonies, of dignities, of grandeurs, caused by death and especially by sudden death, only Saint-Simon might have found words to tell you. With his delicate, carefully kept hands, the Marquis de Monpavon ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... themselves at their ease. But the very moment that they find themselves in the presence of those who are their superiors, the fear of not being able to occupy the front rank throws them into such a state of mental disarray that they entirely lose their assurance and that appearance of poise by whose aid they are ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke

... gloom Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat; Ridged high against the evening bloom, The Old Town rises, street on street; With lamps bejewelled, straight ahead, Like rampired walls the houses lean, All spired and domed and turreted, Sheer to the valley's darkling green; Ranged in mysterious disarray, The Castle, menacing and austere, Looms through the lingering last of day; And in the silver dusk you hear, Reverberated from crag and scar, Bold bugles blowing ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... no longer sang nor twittered nor cheeped in the thickets around, but all passion throbbed in the voice of Esther when she spoke these words. She stood there with her hair in disarray transfigured like a tree in autumn on which the sunlight shines when the gale has died, but from which the leaves will soon fall because winter is at hand. Yet her lover was so little moved by her ordeal that he went back to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... man sprawled in Captain Dabney's easy chair at the farther end of the cabin table. The table was littered with the debris of a meal, which Charley Bo Yip was phlegmatically and deftly clearing away, and Martin stared across the board's disarray at Wild Bob Carew's disdainful face. The erstwhile commander of the schooner Dawn, his comrades' unscrupulous enemy, his own rival, was the same aloof, superior rogue he remembered from the ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... end of World War II, we turned a similar challenge into an historic opportunity and, I might add, an historic achievement. An old order was in disarray; political and economic institutions were shattered. In that period, this Nation and its partners built new institutions, new mechanisms of mutual support and cooperation. Today, as then, we face an historic opportunity. If we act imaginatively and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Gerald R. Ford • Gerald R. Ford

... from Moab to the trade already started in figs and dates. So Pilate is in the business, Peter ejaculated, for Peter did not think that a Jew should have any dealings with Gentiles, and this opinion, abruptly expressed, threw the discourse again into disarray. But Pilate is in Jerusalem, Joseph began. And has he brought the Roman eagles with him? Peter interrupted. And seeing that these eagles would lead them far from the point which he was anxious to have settled—whether ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... is an economy in disarray because of a quarter century of nearly continuous warfare. Despite its abundant natural resources, output per capita is among the world's lowest. Subsistence agriculture provides the main livelihood for 85% of the population. Oil production and the supporting activities are vital to the economy, ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... were leaving their shakedowns and retiring for necessary purposes. (14) This was the instant for the Thebans to fling themselves upon them; they plied their weapons with good effect, blow upon blow. Order was pitted against disorder, preparation against disarray. When, however, those who escaped from the thick of the business had retired to the nearest rising ground, the Lacedaemonian polemarch, who might have taken as many heavy, or light, infantry of the allies as he wanted, and thus have held the ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon

... watering-trough with a float valve. Before the dugout stood a patriarchal juniper, in the shade of which two saddled horses stood droop-hipped, comfortably asleep. Waking, as Pete drew near, they adjusted their disarray in some confusion and eyed the newcomers with bright-eyed inquiry. Midnight, tripping by, hailed them with a civil ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... beneath the sombre pines, and the largest of them bore a straggling legend announcing that it was Horton's store and hotel. A mixed company of bush ranchers, free prospectors, axemen, and miners lounged outside it in picturesque disarray, and high above rose a dim white line of ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... Even at that distance, and to eyes so inexperienced as those of Wilbur, it needed but a glance to know that something was wrong with her. It was not that she failed to ride the waves with even keel, it was not that her rigging was in disarray, nor that her sails were disordered. Her distance was too great to make out such details. But in precisely the same manner as a trained physician glances at a doomed patient, and from that indefinable look in the face of ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... clergyman of the parish, bearing, in the "fair round belly with fat capon lined," the sign and symbol affixed by Shakspeare to the "Justice of Peace," entered the apartment. He gazed with some surprise upon two persons, who, notwithstanding some slight disarray in their apparel from all the events which had lately taken place, still bore the appearance of belonging to the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... ye, sisters, must set me right if I err. When we had seen the last of you, dear Birdalone, that early morning, we turned back again to the house as speedily and as covertly as we might, lest the witch might espy our disarray and question us thereover. Then we went to the wonder-coffer, and gat thereout raiment for that which we had given away, which was easy for us to do, whereas the witch-mistress was so slothful that she had given to us the words of might wherewith to compel the coffer ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... Anne hurled herself into the heavenly places in turbulence and disarray. It had been her wont to come, punctual to some holy, foreappointed hour, with firm hands folded, with a back that, even in bowing, preserved its pride; with meek eyes, close-lidded; with breathing hushed for the calm passage of her prayer; herself marshalling the procession of her ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... and when the joy that stormed through the room made it sure that the exhibition needed no interpreter, Fat Joe turned and hid his face. Miriam rose languidly and joined the other girl in an examination of his handiwork. Smooth face tinted by the firelight, copper hair almost dishevelled in its disarray, she was an exquisitely lovely thing. In her alto voice she expressed ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... as possessed him now. It had been on the surface, and he had used her name without any deep stir of the waters far down in his soul. But the Young Doctor was fingering the doors of his inner life—all at once this conviction came to him—and the past rushed upon him with all its disarray and ignominy, its sorrow, joy, elation and loss. Not since he had left the scene of his defeat, not since the farewell to his dead Carmen, that sweet summer day when he had put the lovely, ruined being away with her words, "Jean Jacques—ah, my beautiful Jean Jacques," ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... start with; these are factors already in the problem that do not have to be accounted for. To the fox, as to the crow, anything that looks like design or a trap, anything that does not match with the haphazard look and general disarray of objects in nature, will put it on its guard. A deadfall is a contrivance that is not in keeping with the usual fortuitous disarray of sticks and stones in the fields and woods. The odor of the man's hand would also be there, and this of itself would ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs

... Kedzie's mental disarray was the overwhelming influence of infinite money. For the first time in her life she could disregard price-marks entirely. Curiously, that took away half the fun of the thing. It seemed practically impossible for her to be extravagant. She would ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... turn my view, All is strange, yet nothing new; Endless labour all along, Endless labour to be wrong; Phrase that time has flung away; Uncouth words in disarray, Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode, and elegy, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... year 1991 witnessed about a 17% drop in industrial production because of energy and input shortages and labor unrest. In recent years the agricultural sector has had to contend with flooding, mismanagement, shortages of inputs, and disarray caused by the dismantling of cooperatives. A shortage of fuel and equipment in 1991 contributed to a lackluster harvest, a problem compounded by corruption and a poor distribution system. The new government is loosening the tight central controls of CEAUSESCU'S ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Beldham now, and Brett, Barker, and Hogsflesh, where be they? Brett, of all bowlers fleetest yet That drove the bails in disarray? And Small that would, like Orpheus, play Till wild bulls followed his minstrelsy? {2} Booker, and Quiddington, and May? Beneath ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang

... confused vision of an apologetic smile in a pretty young face, of red curls knocked into disarray—and of amazingly short shorts ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin

... of the various animals, birds, insects, and flowers which are, apparently without rhyme or reason, placed in one great disarray in the Stuart pictures is said to have been heraldic and symbolic. The sunbeam coming from a cloud, the white falchion, and the chained hart are heraldic ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes

... broadcloth, and white silk and blue gingham nestled side by side with a friendly disregard of the fact that their paths in life would not often bring them together. The whole room was in a wild state of disarray. The only orderly object in ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... long white fingers strayed mechanically to her tumbled hair. The elegant precision of her toilette had given place to a most distracting disarray. She felt her cheeks burning still, and the lace at her bosom ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... seemed unmoored at last; it wavered and swung in a nightmare blackness deeper than any she had known. In her physical prostration and mental disarray the thought of suicide was with her. How face Bertram now,—Bertram with his tenacious hopes? How face her husband—ever—ever—in the far future? Her disgrace lived and she was to see it. But, in the swinging chaos, it was that thought that kept her from frenzy; the thought that ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... door-way that connected the chapel with the abbey, and was instantaneously buried under a pyramid of ghostly carcasses, that fell over him and each other, and lay a rolling chaos of animated rotundities, sprawling and bawling in unseemly disarray, and sending forth the names of all the saints in and out of heaven, amidst the clashing of swords, the ringing of bucklers, the clattering of helmets, the twanging of bow-strings, the whizzing of arrows, the ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... don't want to make her cross," said he, and turned inland; but the way was no less beautiful. The pines were tired of running after us, but great cork trees marched beside the road, like an army of crusaders in disarray, half in, half out, of armour. Above, rose the Mountains of the Moors, whose very name seemed to ring with the distant echo of a Saracen war song; and here and there, on a bare, wild hillside, towered all that was left of some ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... up excitedly. He was dressed in the Arab garments I had seen in his cupboard that day when Grim and I called on him, with a scholar's turban that made him look very distinguished in spite of his disarray. ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy

... Guard, which was their favourite opera. In matters artistic they had a similarity of taste. They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted "Bad News", suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)

... wearing his thick mop of black hair in a round topknot secured by a hide loop. He wore a skin tunic, now in considerable disarray, which was held in place ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... through the bamboo chick and almost tearing it from its fastenings. "Give me ice quickly." She looked haggard and distracted. Dark circles ringed her eyes; her sleeves rolled above the elbows revealed rounded arms from which water dripped; her skirt was splashed; her blouse and hair were in disarray. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... and cheerless, although a fire was struggling for life in a miniature stove. In one corner was a table strewn with papers. Back from the window which faced the tracks was a man, a kit of cobbler's tools, in the disarray of daily use, on the bench beside him. He halted, with his hammer in the air, at ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... feet, with unloosed hair, as though roused from her bed, beautiful in her disarray, and crying aloud, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... a dry and burning throat, he rose and going to the washstand drank deep and thirstily from a water-bottle; then set himself resolutely to repair the disarray of his wits and consider what was ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... time, therefore, facing about to retreat from this imaginary body of horse, they came of necessity, and without design, full upon their pursuers, whom unhappily the intoxication of victory had by this time brought into the most careless disarray. These, almost to a man, the rebels annihilated: universal consternation followed amongst the royalists; Father Murphy led them to Ferns, and thence to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... And how young Launcelot gained his Guenovere,— A foundling, too, or of uncertain strain? And when one morning, coming from the bath, He crossed the Princess on the palace-stair, And kissed her there in her sweet disarray, Nor met the death he dreamed of in her eyes, He knew himself a hero of old romance,— Not seconding, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... an artistic disarray," she explained. "It's hard work because I've slipped into the habit of being prim and precise, and I had to bend a pin intentionally. Four girls already have warned me about my hair falling down. It worries me a lot and yet it doesn't give the same effect as yours. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... at the first sounds that had reached her of human voices. Her face was blanched, her eyelids were trembling, her lips were restless, her nostrils quivered, her whole being seemed to be overcome by a vertigo of dread, and, in the horrible disarray of all her sensations her brain, on its wakening from its dolorous sleep of three delirious days, was tottering and reeling at its welcome ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... pain. And those of pain were amazingly distinct. They were yells; they were howls. And suddenly, as we approached the ship, but before we could make out any sign of her, we came upon a boat. We had to swerve to clear her. She seemed to have dropped out of the fight in utter disarray; she lay with no oars out, and full of men who writhed and tumbled over each other, shrieking as if they had been flayed. Above the writhing figures in the middle of the boat, a tall man, upright in the stern-sheets, raved awful imprecations ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... hasten'd to the field; (That day the son his father's buckler bore;) Then snatch'd a lance, and issued from the door. Soon as the prospect open'd to his view, His wounded eyes the scene of sorrow knew; Dire disarray! the tumult of the fight, The wall in ruins, and the Greeks in flight. As when old ocean's silent surface sleeps, The waves just heaving on the purple deeps: While yet the expected tempest hangs on high, Weighs down the cloud, and blackens ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... side; he fell into a profound sleep. He was full upon his back, his broad chest heaving in the gray cotton undershirt, his mouth wide open with its upper fringe of hair in disarray and agitated by his breath. Soon he began to snore, a deafening clamor that set some loose object in the dark part of the room to vibrating with a tapping sound. Susan stealthily raised herself upon her elbow, looked ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... bloodshed from their earliest youth and trained by such a master in the art of war as Dragut. That warrior, his great curved scimitar red to the hilt, the blood dripping from a gash in his cheek, his clothing torn and in disarray, followed by a gigantic negro bearing a flaming torch, was ever in the thickest of the fray. Behind him his lieutenants Othman and Selim strove to emulate his prowess, while all around surged his ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... herself, "I knew that joy cometh." She looked in the mirror and was ashamed of the disarray she saw there, yet thought that, even so, a man who loved her might perhaps find her fair. As a last thought, she took Roddy's two yellow roses and stuck them in the bosom of her gown. Then she went back to the stoep and, showing ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... our pleasure. We mostly were late, and so there would be a tight race to see who would arrive at table first. A dozen heated horses were turned out unceremoniously, a dozen saddles and bridles dumped down anywhere anyhow, and their occupants, with wet dishevelled hair and clothing in glorious disarray, would appear at table averring ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... own, which is more than can be said of most edifices in these days. It is two stories high, with a third story of attic chambers in the gable-roof. When I first visited it, early in June, it looked pretty much as it did during the old clergyman's lifetime, showing all the dust and disarray that might be supposed to have gathered about him in the course of sixty years of occupancy. The rooms seemed never to have been painted; at all events, the walls and panels, as well as the huge cross-beams, had a venerable and most dismal tinge of brown. The furniture consisted of high-backed, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had come to town for a few days from Skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the announcement of Beaufort's failure. It had been represented to them that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. It was one of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they "owed it to society" to show themselves at the Opera, and even ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton



Words linked to "Disarray" :   haze, disorder, mess, disarrange, order, mystification, jumble, messiness, obfuscation, mental confusion, cognitive state, perplexity, scramble, modify, throw together, state of mind, confusedness, alter, daze



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