"Muddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the heroes of Canada, Australia and New Zealand? In Ireland, for the moment, things are in a muddle. "What is the trouble with the Emerald Isle?" was the question, to which the Irishman made instant reply: "Oh, in South Ireland we are all Roman Catholics, and in North Ireland we are all Protestants, and I wish to heaven we were all agnostics, and then we could live ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... bit their pencils and tore their hair, Down, a-down, a-down—hey down! But those blessed bills, they wouldn't come square, With a down; 'Midst muddle and smudge it is hard to fix If a six is a nine or a nine is a six, With a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Duck fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is more disinterested than even in Ghosts, for it turns back on the reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... beneath the light of the carriage lamp. "No, don't make the attempt to explain anything to me. Don't try to reconcile your frankness now with your pretense then, because you'll certainly make a muddle of it, and because no such attempt is necessary to be made to me. I know something of the girl and her moods—not a great deal, perhaps, but enough to prevent my doing you an injustice. You are ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... head up at a blowhole a few yards ahead of the team, and they are all on top of him before one can say "knife"! Then one has to rush in with the whip—and everyone of the team of eleven jumps over the harness of the dog next to him, and the harnesses become a muddle that takes much patience to unravel, not to mention care lest the whole team should get away with the sledge and its load, and leave one behind.... I never did get left the whole of this depot journey, but I was often very near it, and several times had ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... afterwards I tried to reason it all out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill your empty room—on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt, congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of the matter. I am evidently not "an artist"—that at any rate I gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write about something they had never "lived." ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... I'm 'bad,' of course, but come on. I'll fetch you all father's tubes and brushes that are in such a muddle, and you can sort them right near the well, and watch John fix it, and take care of Fayette; I'm going in and help Cleena, in any ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... for war purposes, of so much ship space, was having its effect on the lumber trade. The market, even as far as Britain, was in urgent need of timber, and the timber was ready for the market; but the exigencies, or, as some Canadians were inclined to argue, the muddle of shipping conditions, were holding up this, as well as many other of the ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... show a natural avidity for what may be described as the human side of a contest as well as for the dramatic events. But, whether it be prosecuted by sea or by land, war is largely a matter of efficient and adequate organization. It is a common saying that we muddle through our wars, but we could not afford to muddle in face of the threat which the enemy's unrestricted submarine campaign represented. It is impossible, therefore, to approach the history of the successful efforts made by sea to overcome this menace without ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... who had been a slave to serve with the white man as a soldier. Necessity forced the acceptance of the Negro as a soldier. In spite of the long years of controversy with its arguments of racial inferiority,[47] out of the muddle of fact and fancy came the deliberate decision to employ Negro troops. This act, in itself, as a historical fact, refuted the former theories of southern statesmen. The Negro was thus a factor in both the Union and Confederate armies in the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... officials, if you take into account the time now spent vainly by special investigating committees, grand juries, district attorneys, reform organizations, and bewildered office holders, in trying to find their way through a dark muddle. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India by saintly Chinese missionaries at the epoch of our Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of a ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... fake," growled John Minute. "I wired for confirmation, and discovered my Paris people had not sent me any message. I only got the wire just before the train started. I have been spending all the afternoon getting on to the phone to Paris to untangle the muddle. Why did you wish I ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... precisely on our subject, or rather a legend, not an anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief, you see, you say, yet you don't believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one like that. We are all in a muddle over there now and all through your science. Once there used to be atoms, five senses, four elements, and then everything hung together somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we've learned that ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn't necessarily muddle one's life because one can't quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... always a delightful companion, and perhaps at his gayest on these occasions. "A man's holiday," he would say, "is his garden," and he set out to enjoy himself and to make everyone about him enjoy themselves too. I told him the old schoolboy muddle about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco and saying: "We shall this day light up such a fire in England as I trust shall never be put out." He had not heard it before and, though amused, appeared preoccupied, ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... found herself alone with her lacerated feelings. After soothing them with a good cry, she set to work thinking seriously. There was no doubt she had muddled things badly, but there was no use leaving them in a muddle when a word or two fitly spoken might set ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... circumstances"? Was he calculating on the arrival of a Japanese patrol? Had he already tipped off to his consul in San Francisco the purpose of the expedition, sure of a reward equal to what his share would have been? If so, Rainey had made a muddle of his attempt to sound Tamada. He felt guilty, glad that Lund could not see his face, and he ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... leaders of certain papers, leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. It is useless Chesterton sighing ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... girls are so tiresome and have made such a muddle about the Krampuses for the staff. The money didn't come out right and Keller said that Markus had taken some but Markus said not taken only kept. Of course Markus complained to Frau Doktor and her father ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... nobly patient and humane (he was the late Mr. Wakley), cast a look of strong encouragement in my direction. Then, we had the doctor who had made the examination, and the usual tests as to whether the child was born alive; but he was a timid, muddle-headed doctor, and got confused and contradictory, and wouldn't say this, and couldn't answer for that, and the immaculate broker was too much for him, and our side slid back again. However, I tried again, and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... neatness, but she understood its apparent confusion, and could generally lay her hand in a moment upon anything she wanted. This afternoon, however, she rummaged for her atlas in vain. She turned books and papers over and over in her futile search, till the desk was in a chaotic muddle. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... to lead the way. I've the greatest possible regard for our friend here,—but her book is a bad book, a thoroughly rotten book, an unblushing compilation from half-a-dozen works of established reputation, in pilfering from which she has almost always managed to misapprehend her facts, and to muddle her dates. Then she writes to me and asks me to do the best I can for her. I have done the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... is spared me, Tom; they are all well. But just the same, it's a bad muddle. And the worst of it is I'm thousands of miles off, held up by army regulations, when I ought to get home for ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... to work together. You see, they are all little bodies and tribes and bits of tribes, each under its own leader, and everyone thinks himself a general and acts just as he likes, and that's where they often get in a muddle, good fighters as they are. Look at them now. There's another lot yonder going slowly down from that hill into the hollow and coming creeping ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... that we're not within shouting distance of the future. We talk as if we could see the end, and we're nowhere near it, we're in all the muddle of the middle—that's why we're hampered with Miss Quincey and other interesting relics of ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... largely anarchic: parents and schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other, there is serious trouble: ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... different things," he replied tolerantly,—"some fame, some pleasure. Mr. Dowling, for instance, has no other ambition than to muddle round the golf links a few strokes better ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... should consider more conscientiously those who recruit their ranks, who, if started right without danger of debt, will have freedom to advance. The present muddle has come about in part because no one has taken the trouble to investigate the reasons. The young family with $3000 a year has ideals for the manners and morals of the children which are not satisfied ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... waiting so long for you!" A servant opened the door to bring him a message. Oakley dismissed him angrily. What did he want to go down to the Continental for to drink and talk politics to a lot of muddle-pated fools when he had a brother in Paris who was an artist and a letter from him lay unread in his hand? His patience and his temper were going. Leslie was careless and unfeeling. She ought to come; he ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... financial muddle partly smoothed out, his genius began to bloom in the congenial air of Mary's companionship. The summer of 1815 spent in rambles in various parts of the country, saw the creation of Alastor. Early in ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... democratic aims of the civilized world. England and France have groped their way through centuries towards a vague ideal. America proudly began her existence by a proclamation of the equal rights of man. She proudly proclaims them now; but the world is involved in such a complicated muddle, that the utterances of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (to say nothing of their intellectual and political ancestor Jean Jacques Rousseau) require amplification. The political thought of the older ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... part with O'Neal, in spite of the poor fellow's entreaties to be allowed to remain with him. Miss Macdonald had only passports for three and the danger was urgent. He was a faithful and affectionate friend, this O'Neal, if a little boastful and muddle-headed. He could shortly afterwards have escaped to France—as O'Sullivan did—in a French ship, if he had not insisted on going to Skye to try to fetch off the Prince. He missed the Prince, and fell into the hands ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... is," said Mrs. Fisher, scrunching heavily over the pebbles towards the hidden corner. "Well, that accounts for it. The muddle that man Droitwich made in his department in the war was a national scandal. It amounted to misappropriation of ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Worm,' said Mrs. Smith. 'We be rather in a muddle, to tell the truth, for my son is just dropped in from Indy a day sooner than we expected, and the pig-killer is coming presently to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... say these things if you really thought you were in a hopeless muddle. I have gone through it all this term, and I know. I have tried to laugh, and I have drunk until I didn't care what happened, but it is all no use. I have made a mess of everything, and there is no one to blame except myself. And then this utterly idiotic row comes on the ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, Mid-Channel, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has intervened disastrously in the destinies ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... mercy of God. Mediaevals would simply have said that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for being horribly sinful and for ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... equally true that M. M. —— actually obtained his wife, and that Mynheer Van Holland paid for her. I dare say all this can be reconciled with the eternal fitness of things; but I protest I don't see how it is to be done. It is "all a muddle," in my mind. I cannot even affirm that the banditti were ever hanged; and I am quite sure that the unlucky Dutch merchant, whose goods were so comically mixed up with this whole history, never had any poetical or material justice for his loss of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Dolly. Take care! You'll muddle all my papers. [Taking bills out of his hands, and closing down the writing-desk.] I want to have a little talk with Renie—you'd better join them ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... this psychological muddle in tones that sounded harsh as the cawing of homing ravens ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... turned out, indeed, on investigation, to be in gross excess of fair compensation. Palmerston's action nearly threw Europe into war; Russia protested, and France, who had offered to mediate, was aggravated by a diplomatic muddle to the verge of breaking off negotiations. A vote of censure was passed by the Opposition in the House of Lords, which had the effect of making Lord John take up the cause of Palmerston in the Commons. The question was discussed in a famous four days' debate. "It contained," says ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... "Just muddle him. Nancy would be the same girl, but he'd get to puzzling over her and tagging ideas on her—and to what end, Doris? The girl has the right to her own path and you have, by the grace of God, pushed obstacles from before her, in heaven's name give her fair play ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... done all in his power to conciliate the different parties, but has now concluded that Paris must be conquered by the troops of Versailles. Every day there comes more disturbing news. How will it all end? When shall we get out of this muddle? En attendant, we live ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... will gladly accompany you. (Aside) Everything is in such a muddle here, that I must go and look for Vernon. The advice and clear-sightedness of my old friend, the doctor, will be of service in ferreting out what it is that disturbs this household, for there is something or other. Ferdinand, I will follow you. Ladies, we will ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... this, Lawrence," said Jennie Cassavant. "Magen admits that the world in general is a muddle, and she thinks offices are heaven because by comparison with sweat-shops they ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... possible that I shall be the last prisoner for blasphemy in England. That alone is a circumstance of distinction, which gives my story a special character, quite apart from my individuality. As a muddle-headed acquaintance said, intending to be complimentary, Some men are born to greatness, others achieve it, and I ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... us we weren't to ask anybody else to do shopping for us," said Wendy demurely. "When you've not been told not to do anything, you're not disobedient if you don't do it—oh! I'm getting rather in a muddle, but you ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... sentiments was the most likely to appeal to Dick Dudley, for he is one of those who look upon sorrow and suffering as bad management on the part of some one, since the world is really such an awfully jolly place, if only people didn't make a muddle of their lives. He says it is all very well to talk of high ideals, you can't live up to them, the best you can do is to live up to the highest practical ideal. But then his standard of ideal is very much higher since he saw Pauline for the first time. Pauline blushed when a strange man walked ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... called "Here's a poor brute done in." Not a bit of it. I was not touched then either.... At last the bombardment stopped, and we all got out. I noticed about forty hens. Some were pulped. Others had had their heads and legs cut off. In the muddle three horses lay dead. Their saddles were in ribbons. Equipment, revolvers, swords, all that had been left above the cellar had vanished, but there were bits of them to be seen on the roof. My rifle, which had been torn from my hands, was in ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... election, valuable time had been wasted, legislative preparations had been thrown away, and everything was now back again in just the same condition as when the King made up his mind to dismiss the Melbourne Administration. The whole blame for the muddle rested on the King, who now found himself compelled to take up again with Lord Melbourne just as if nothing had happened. The King, indeed, made an attempt to induce Lord Grey to come out of his retirement and form another Ministry; ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... was alone in the world. I had been reading, reading, reading; my brain was one dark and misty muddle of Kant, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and a few others. I read them one after another, as quickly as possible; the mixture had the same effect upon my mind as the indiscriminate contents of taffy-shop would have upon Sigmund's stomach—it ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... gets the waggon out, An' hitches up the sorrels, An' rides ten miles tew meetin', he Ain't braced for pious quarrels: No, sir, he ain't! that waggon rolls From corduroy to puddle, An' that thar farmer gets his brains Inter an easy muddle. ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... incompetence of females who could not teach their menials to "cook a dinner which was not a disgrace to any decent household." When not virulently aspersing the mutton, he was expressing his opinion of muddle-headed weakness which would permit household bills to mount in a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped his intellectual manhood in the useless effort to support ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... more unbelievable." He sighed. "If these men about us realized the terrible ordeal that lies ahead! Misgoverned; unprepared—I shudder at the thought of the sacrifices we must make, many of them in vain. But I suppose that somehow, some day, we shall muddle through." ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... the permanent War Office Officials had given more attention to buttons and braids and caps than to business-like organisations of fighting efficiency. The administration was, as it always had been, a chaos of muddle. The higher ranks were rotten with inefficiency, and the lower, aggravated and bewildered by change after change, had come to look upon soldiering as a sort of game, the rules of ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... of the fish, and was in great danger of being drawn into the water. The girls came up just at the right moment, held him firm, and did all they could to disentangle his beard from the line; but in vain, beard and line were in a hopeless muddle. Nothing remained but to produce the scissors and cut the beard, by which a small ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real, living ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the operation of the laws of probabilities and chances, rather than by any intelligent selection and cultivation of material. The case, indeed, is simply a subdivision of the vast subject: haphazard muddle in the conduct of life. A cry has been raised for the superman, and a cry has been raised for a method of anthropometry. For the lack of these two, it has been said, all governments have been doomed to defeat. The study of the endocrines will by no means supply a panacea. But as it will furnish ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... touching. In the matter of what he admired, where no questions of acquisition came in, he and his shopping-man agreed less. Leslie here showed flashes of proper spirit. He also read Ruskin in the train. Peter had small allegiance there; he even, when irritated, called Ruskin a muddle-head. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... Never again shall I return to that life. I have saved my wages this summer and am going back into the world to begin life all over again. This time, with God's help, I shall not make such a muddle of it as I ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... To throw it away, voluntarily, is an unpardonable sin. The suicide's punishment should be loss of immortality. Well, I found work to do, of all sorts, in America, and elsewhere. And a year ago—she died. I should have come straight home, only I was booked for that muddle on the frontier they called 'a war.' I got fever after Targai; was invalided home; and here I am recruiting and finishing my book. Now you can understand why loveliness in a woman, fills me with a sort of panic, ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... of the secretaries in Portland Place would have been loud had they seen this letter and realized the muddle of difficulties into which Earl Russell had at last thrown himself under the impulse of the American Minister; but, nevertheless, these letters upset from top to bottom the results of the private secretary's diplomatic education forty years ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... I could have seen Eagle just once again," I heard myself thinking, as one hears the ticking of a watch under a pillow. But I felt a strange, throbbing eagerness to know quickly the great secret of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, I saw tearing through the sky, far ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was her own fault that it was so. She was incompetent, utterly incompetent. He had, as he had promised, given her some work to do during these last weeks, come copying, some arranging of letters, and she had mismanaged it all. She was a muddle- headed, ill-educated, careless, conceited and self-opinionated woman, and it did not make it any the pleasanter for Ronder to be aware, as he now was, that Brandon had been quite right to dismiss her from her Library post which she had ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... the new-born rill, a mere thread of water, build a Lilliputian dam, and muddle the clear outflow as it broke, and then build again. He had the thought that she had suddenly become younger, more like a ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... the brush, cursed Tenlow's stupidity. To have let Collie go on and have followed him under cover would have been the only sensible plan. Rapidly approximating the outcome of this muddle, Saunders untied his pony and rode back toward the ranch, taking an unused and ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... remember it. Heart o' Dreams Camp, Huddleston, Michigan; post-office, Calderville. When the victim of your ready gun rises from his couch and strikes out for the northwest you will not lose sight of him. If you do you'll muddle everything. Your hand baggage has been planted safely with the baggage master at the railway station at Tiffin, seven miles from where we stand, and here's the check for it. Once more you shall renew your acquaintance with scented ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... are fixed on the mouldings of the ceiling, while a jumble of thoughts mix and muddle themselves in my head. Was Brindley Wood a dream? or is this a dream? Surely one or other must be, and, if this is not a dream, what is it? Is it reality, is it truth? And, if it is, how on earth did any thing ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Froissart and Boswell, he excels in proportion to his unconsciousness of the fact; his colors run truer. For lesser gobblers, who have not genius, the best way to lose consciousness is just to IT themselves go; if they endeavor to paint artistically the muddle will be worse. To such the proverb of the cobbler and his last is of perennial warning. As a barber once sagely remarked to me, "You can't trim a beard well, unless you're born to it." It is possible in some degree to ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... you muddle me so—but I am coming to it. I went down them dratted stairs, and there I see a wonderful ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... things had taken their own course at the chateau, and the course had been somewhat erratic. There is nothing so costly as muddle, and Gustave Lenoble had of late begun to perceive that he had the maximum of expense with the minimum of comfort. Meanwhile the kind old aunt at Beaubocage gave her nieces much valuable advice against the time when they should be old enough to assume the management of their father's house. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... new folk at the Friary," she continued, carelessly. "Oh, they are only moving in to-day, and they will be in a muddle for a week, I should think. I don't think we can intrude for ten ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... down from sacred to secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men. The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too far from the Gods. So the Gods tried a new method: let loose a new great force ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... second degree. Were I to enter into details, you would indeed have a laugh. 'I must needs,' he explained, 'have the company of two girls in my studies to enable me to read at all, and to keep likewise my brain clear. Otherwise, if left to myself, my head gets all in a muddle.' Time after time, he further expounded to his young attendants, how extremely honourable and extremely pure were the two words representing woman, that they are more valuable and precious than the auspicious ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... he replied. "Haven't I told you, and haven't you seen for yourself, that I never lose an opportunity? More than that. It has been my rule in life either to make friends with the Mammon of Unrighteousness—he's a muddle-headed ass is Mammon, and you can steer clear of his unrighteousness if you're sharp enough—or else to cast my bread upon the waters in the certainty of finding it again after many days. In the case in ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... I'm hers, and after I'm dead I'm hers, so that's all right," he said to himself. "I haven't got to muddle things up any more." ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got Evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about "heredity being able to work up the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration," {242a} or of "the principle of (natural) ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... Jehovah. The gates are promised to Israel, therefore she will get them. The English have already an army of 35,000 men in the Peshawur Valley. Russia is gathering a force, and ere long the two countries will be brought face to face. The end of the whole muddle will be that England will take charge of Afghan. Thirty-three years ago Disraeli wrote his novel called "Tancred." In this novel he makes the Queen of England the Empress of India, and one of her favourite officers is made Earl Beaconsfield; so far fancy ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... another muddle of it, I admit! My lord Faruskiar, of whom I had made a hero—by telegraph—for the readers of the Twentieth. Century. Decidedly my good intentions ought certainly to qualify me as one of the best paviers of a road ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... might be better to tell Jenny to go to Bartletts. After all, it's quicker that way, and she'll be able to tell the boy to bring the things back. She needn't wait. All the same she's stupid, she'll make a muddle of it as likely as not. And Womball's boy is livelier than Bartletts'. That's something after all. But if she goes out at two-thirty she'll never be back by four—unless she went by Smith's lane of course—she might do that ... Oh, dear, these stairs are a trial ... yes, she ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... modest fit, no sham. "Was it?—was it just as my prick now is?" Her story was exciting me, I pulled her belly up to mine, and my prick, a right good stiff one was between us. "I suppose it were," said she, "I don't recollect, all seems in a muddle, he hurt me dreadful, I screamed, he put something over my mouth, and I don't know no more; but he was doing it right up, and I were hollowing,—and ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... few hundred yards of the mission-house there was a jetty, and at the end of the jetty was Her Majesty's gunboat Badger, a small schooner-rigged wooden vessel commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Muddle, one of the most irascible men that ever breathed, and who had sat on more Consuls than any one else ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... out of the aunts' clutches yesterday morning on the plea of going home to tidy up. Though the wedding took place from their house, all the preparatory muddle happened here, and it will take days and days to go through Kathie's rooms alone, and decide what to keep, what to give away, and what ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... America!' Somehow in that way. 'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Trojan, than I can tell you by your asking me. It is much, very much more than I deserve, and, indeed, I'm not in the least worthy of it. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid it's no good. You see I'm such a stupid sort of girl—I muddle things so. It would never do for me to attempt to manage a big place like 'The Flutes'—and then I don't think I shall ever marry. I don't think I am that sort of girl. You have been an awfully good friend to me, and I'm more grateful to you than I can say. ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... could stop it somehow," and fell asleep somewhat gratified because he had deliberately not wound up his alarum-clock. He had the delicious feeling—a touch of spite in it—that this would bother Time and muddle it. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... prating— She always is so very aggravating; I'd like to drop a lump of deadly pison In her next cup of "best strong-flavoured Hyson." I do declare my brain's all in a fuddle— Fo-hi, do help me out of this sad muddle! I'll sacrifice another guinea-pig, For mortals, then, I needn't care ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... I was just dumb and miserable. I couldn't think of anything to say. And now he has gone away imagining that I want to marry Jimmie McBride—I don't in the least, I wouldn't think of marrying Jimmie; he isn't grown up enough. But Master Jervie and I got into a dreadful muddle of misunderstanding and we both hurt each other's feelings. The reason I sent him away was not because I didn't care for him, but because I cared for him so much. I was afraid he would regret it in the future—and I couldn't stand ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... with them; and when I saw once the millions of books in the Rue de la Musee, I asked the keeper what use they were for, and he said, 'to make men wise, my dear.' But Bac the cobbler, who was with me,—it was a fete day—Bac, he said, 'Do you not believe that, Bebee? they only muddle folk's brains; for one book tells them one thing, and another book another, and so on, till they are dazed with all the contrary lying; and if you see a bookish man, be sure you see a very poor creature who could not hoe a patch, or kill a pig, or stitch ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... door, it is not enough even to have piled up a little ahead. Every man of red blood and backbone wants to do his best work, wants to do work that he loves, work into which he can throw himself with heart and soul and with all his mind and strength. Merely to muddle through with some half-detested work, not making an utter failure of it, is no satisfaction when the day's work is done. Not only the man himself, but all of us, lose when he who might have been a great manufacturer and organizer of industry fritters away his life and his talents ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... and drink and keep folks warm, and of Italian frame-makers, and of barbers, and of brokers, and of dealers in dogs and singing-birds. From these, in a narrow and a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel. Stumping with fresh vigour, he goes in at the dark greasy entry, pushes ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... far more accurately suggested by the symbols of touch and taste than by those of hearing and sight. True, analytic thought follows swiftly upon the contact, the apprehension, the union: and we, in our muddle-headed way, have persuaded ourselves that this is the essential part of knowledge—that it is, in fact, more important to cook the hare than to catch it. But when we get rid of this illusion and go back to the more primitive ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... be gauged by anyone who will read pp. 481-484 in William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, by the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton. Cuthbert was a puzzle-pated old boy. The silence as to Will's authorship on the part of this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635-36, cannot outweigh the explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed by his friends ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... ship also "draws water." Therefore, logically, a Hydrographer is a ship. But a ship is never put into a witness-box, where it would be quite at sea, but in the dock, where it could be quite at home. "Truly," writes our Puzzled Correspondent, "there is a muddle somewhere." Q. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... power," madness not inappropriately rules the hour. Once in a hundred years a six months' carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind the facets ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. About the muddle of June they closed Viviani. Susy Clemens went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany for the baths. Clara, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Moorish and Italian motives jostle in headlong arabesques, where the vulgarest routine stone-chipping is interlocked with designs and forms of rare beauty and significance. Here and there among the turgid muddle, out of the impact of unassimilated things, comes a spark of real poetry. And that spark can be said—as truly as anything of the sort can be said—to be the motive force of the whole movement of renovation in Spanish poetry. Of course ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of woman does not!" Briggs objected quickly. "She was the kind who does not make a will at all. Leaves everything in a muddle. No sense of responsibility. I have always contended that since the law classes women with minors and children they should not be trusted with ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... without any definite symbols, just a muddle of tea-leaves, is useless for the purpose of divination, beyond giving an indication of the state of the consultant's mind, so vague and undecided in its character that it obscures everything. Tell such a one the reason for the failure of divining, and recommend a more reliable state ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... newsboys, etc., and Mr. Hailes is going to help me to get a scrumptious little house, whence I can get to it by underground rail. Oh, you may shake your head, Mr. Hailes, but if you will not help me, I shall set my unassisted genius to work, and you'll only suffer agonies in thinking of the muddle I ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cajoled by one of their own ilk into this unspeakable muddle, were, after all, he reflected, of the sort he had scorned with all his sailor repugnance to airs and pretensions. Cap'n Sproul possessed a peculiarly grim sense of humor. This indignant assemblage ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet "Dutch interior" effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into what ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... a sub-committee shelved, Godfrey Isaacs allowed to issue a misleading report without correction from the Post Office. It all may spell corruption: but it need not. No one familiar with the workings of a Government department is likely to be surprised at any amount of muddle and incompetence. Matters are forgotten and then in the effort to make up for lost time important steps are simply omitted. Officials are pig-headed and unreasonable. And as to ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... sufficient attention has not. been paid to the lofty position of the character, as distinguished from the prowess, that this version gives to Cuchulain. The first verse, put in Cuchulain's mouth, strikes a new note, contrasting alike with the muddle-headed bargaining of Ferdia and Maev, and the somewhat fussy anxiety of Fergus. The contrast between the way in which Cuchulain receives Fergus's report of the valour of Ferdia, and that in which Ferdia receives the praises of Cuchulain from his charioteer, is well worked out; ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... marked the place when the reading was interrupted with a crimson paper-knife, and often Jimbo would move it several pages farther on without any of them discovering the gap. Jane Anne, however, who made no pretence of listening to 'Daddy's muddle- stories,' was beginning to realise what went on in Mother's mind underground. She hardly seized the pathos, but she saw and understood enough to help. And she was in many ways a little second edition—a phrase the muddle-stories never knew, alas!—of ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... to-day," she said to herself, "but I do not propose to go with him. I shall get there first and see how the land lies, before he comes to muddle up things with his sordid anxieties about his ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... in the singular muddle, he pointed out, seemed to be whether or not the poor fellow had known that the boat was upset. Well, who could say what he knew, an intoxicated man in a blind passion? Not Carlisle, certainly, plunged suddenly into the sea and intensely occupied with saving her life. How, for ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... latest papers from England, that Balfour says we'll muddle through this war somehow," he said. "He must have known you, Rigby. With the courage of the damned you carry a fearsome lot of impedimenta, and you muddle quite adequately. The lady you have traduced has herself been seriously ill, and that is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
