"Muddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hideous muddle of things.' he said at last—'a hideous muddle. Nothing to fear, for everything has happened. Nothing to hope for, for nothing can happen any more. Fortune wasted, friends wasted, genius wasted, heart wasted, life wasted. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... returned to the chief's hut. He was not there, so I lay down to think out the situation; but my head was in a hopeless muddle. I went into the ravine again, and, watching the soldiers, wondered how the unhappy ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... law, and passed in the next years a series of acts consolidating and mitigating the law, and repealing many old statutes. A measure of equal importance was his establishment in 1829 of the metropolitan police force, which at last put an end to the old chaotic muddle described by Colquhoun of parish officers and constables. Other significant legal changes marked the opening of a new era. Eldon was the very incarnation of the spirit of obstruction; and the Court of Chancery, over which he presided for a quarter of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the general one of winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... looked such a sight," he muttered, as he began to bathe his stiff and swollen features. "The brute!" he said, after a few moments. "I wish I'd told uncle, though, that I beat him well. But, oh, dear! what a muddle it all seems! I wish I'd hit him twice as hard," he said, with ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... a muddle about a run and found themselves in the common but embarrassing position of being both at the wicket-keeper's end. The ball had gone to Eric and he had only to throw it in to Charles, who was bowling, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various
... agreed. "Only, you see, we like the muddle to be made by the other side. But, in this case, the muddle is on our side. The change, as you say, seems to leave our friend Stephen's interests unaffected. That is, of course, what poor Jeffrey Blackmore thought. But he was mistaken. The effect of ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... failure of the campaign. In order to get good water for troops nothing should be neglected or overlooked, and no kind of compromise should be permitted. There is perhaps not a single act in war more criminal and more worthy of death than to allow troops to muddle along and get what water they can, under local arrangements, when a pure ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... pretended to any skill in tactics, but after three years at the 'Varsity—none of us had had a 'Varsity education—a man insensibly contracted the habit of clear thinking. At least, he could automatically co-ordinate his ideas, and the jealousy of these muddle-headed Colonels was inconceivable. We would understand that it was his duty to force on the retirement of his Colonel, who had been in the conspiracy against him; to make his Adjutant resign or exchange; and ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... now in a terrible muddle, The deputy deities all are at fault They splutter and splash like a pig in a puddle And dickens a one of 'em's earning his salt. For Thespis as Jove is a terrible blunder, Too nervous and timid—too easy and weak— Whenever he's called on to lighten or thunder, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... derivation, "a drawer of water." But a 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." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... Adam," said Blondet, turning to the Pole, "will have proved to you that the 'perfect lady' represents the intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it by something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... go on digging and knowing all the time as them lads is breaking their necks over the cliff side. Never was in such a muddle as this before. Why didn't they say what ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... tasted her voice. Yet the act of reflexion was not suspended; he found himself rejoicing that she was so weak in argument, so inevitably verbose. The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not an humiliation but a delight to him; it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense, the most passing of fashions, the veriest of delusions, and that she was meant for something divinely different—for privacy, for him, for love. He took no measure of the duration of ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... can't contrive to 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 exactly cover all proper ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... what is left for man to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to the ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle and muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for making men and women over again according to certain fantastic images existing in the minds of the promoters. "Mon Dieu!" exclaimed the visiting Frenchman. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... set off sharply, so that now and again she had to run a few paces to keep up with him. He took her round by the back of the theatre and into a muddle of streets that led thence. The quiet of the night closed about them; Truda was ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... succeeding "PREPARE FOR ATTACK" in the defence programme, was not expected that night, and we gossiped and talked war and new gunnery devices much as usual. No story goes so well at mess as the account of some fatuous muddle brought about by the administrative bewilderments that are apparently inevitable in the monster armies of to-day. This was one told with quiet relish ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... the man who wound it up thinks the whole cause of the muddle rests with the man who is trying to ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... produced a terrible muddle, for there had not even been a copy taken of the plaint. The judge, that is to say, his secretary and the assistant debated for a long time upon such an unheard-of affair. Finally it was decided to write a report of ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 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; but Lord Grey was not to be prevailed upon ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in time she learned that here more than anywhere else she could be of service to the man. He had an awe-inspiring way of piling up his desk with scraps of paper, cuttings, and slips, and stray manuscripts, and it was always under the most appalling muddle that the one small, indispensable news-slip ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great, eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is for—a nation that cannot ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... about. I dont understand these democratic games; and I'm afraid I'm too old to learn. What can I do but sit in the window of my club, which consists mostly of retired Indian Civil servants? We look on at the muddle and the folly and amateurishness; and we ask each other where a single fortnight of it ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... don't quite understand is how he came to know she was in Ballymoy. I'll find that out later on. In the meanwhile I think I'd better go into Ballymoy after all. It's a nuisance, for I was extremely comfortable on the yacht, but I can't leave things in the muddle they're in now, and there's nobody else about the place I could trust ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... not involve a great additional band of 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
... 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 above the big bulk ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... man 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method, order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his favourite maxims—it was the rule of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... it was no longer a question of giving. Everything came from her and belonged to her. She was the womb of his thoughts and feelings. She was his roots in life and his blossoming. She was the only fixed point in the chaotic muddle of things, giving a certain reality to the world ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... time our sphere began revolving Until the present writing there had been A glimmer of a promise of resolving The muddle we are in: ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... It fretted him; he looked years older; he looked worried and harassed; he longed for a chance to come to grips in an encounter that would ease the strain. Physical action it must be, for his brain was a muddle of passion and hatred in which clear thoughts, schemes, plans, plots, were swallowed and lost. He wanted to come into physical contact with the men and things that were thwarting him; he wanted to feel the thud and jar of blows; to ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... reassured in a certain way, and in strong hopes that, at all events, such a muddle would be established as to bewilder the jury, Mr. Jos. Larkin, with still an awful foreboding weighing at his heart, knocked at the vicar's door, and was shown into the study. A solitary candle being placed, to make things bright and pleasant for the visitor, who did not look so himself, the vicar, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... you are a short-sport!" she burst forth. "Any fellow that'll go on making debts when he can't pay his old ones, that'll get things in a muddle and run off and let somebody else face the racket ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... declared that the masterpieces would console them. As for the rest of it, there's only one thing more to be said. What I might be in other places I don't know: I'm the wrong man in the wrong place here. Let me muddle on for the future in my own way, with my own few friends; and ask me anything else in the world, as long as you don't ask me to make any more calls ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... 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 child, and ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... so," he returned, dryly; "in some cases it is best to reserve one's opinion; but of course at Mr. Williams's age it is a grave matter;" then he drew his chair closer to the fire. "Life's an awful muddle, Livy, as that man said in Hard Times; fancy the loneliness of a young creature like that; why, she cannot be more than two- or three-and-twenty, and her lawful protector ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... with such an intention," Harry went on resolutely. "We came to join Yaspard in a quest which ended in a muddle." ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... companions or he would never have consented to their operating the cruiser without the aid of a seasoned navigator. As for the boys themselves, they anticipated many difficulties and some hazards, but, with the confidence of youth, they expected to "muddle through," and, as Neil said, what they didn't know now they ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... "What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried. "What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... left my shoes behind me, that's all"; and she ran indoors, jumping from mat to mat, and without even so much as bidding Tom goodbye, who rode home, not thinking much about his business, but lost in a muddle of most contradictory presentations, a constant glimmer of Catharine's ankles, wonderment at her accident—was it all true?—the strange look when she disclaimed the honour of his rescue and expounded her philosophy, and the fall between his shoulders. When he slept, his sleep was ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... of thinking? My head's all in a muddle. It's bad, no matter how you look at it. I sold my very youth to one I cannot love, just for a piece of bread, and from one day to another he ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... castle will 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 ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... familiarity, knowledge of words and ways, sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong together. It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it. No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet clearly explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of English people like ourselves. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... and in the most broken up English I ever heard, said we could come at once, but got into a muddle over terms till Gunson joined in, and spoke to her in German, when the ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Boyle afforded another illustration of his "strange admixture of shrewdness and muddle-headedness." On an occasion when, it must be emphasized, he was entirely sober, he was discovered going out into the garden at twelve o'clock at night with a hand-candle in order to ascertain what was the correct ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... must now call Dicky, so as not to muddle the narration—pointed to the reddy thing that ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... our authority for the several mutinous outbreaks which occurred during the voyage; and Prickett wrote with a vagueness—using such phrases as "this day" and "this time," without adding a date—that helped him to muddle his narrative in the parts which we want to have, but which he did not want ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... inexpressibly sacred about it, yet she found herself tongue-tied. Instead of the one definite thing to say, a muddle of ideas fluttered in her brain. After all, could he understand? Was there not a difference which prevented him from comprehending the motives which, for her, were impelling? For all her harking back to the primitive ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... respected. Go to any of the great summer schools and you will meet, among the attending teachers, hundreds of faithful, conscientious men and women who could tell you if they would (and some of them will) of the muddle in which their minds are left after some of the lectures to which they have listened. Why should they fail to be depressed? The whole weight of academic authority seems to be against them. The entire machinery of educational administration is wheeling them with relentless force into paths that seem ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... "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
... his hand, though it is quite evident that his mind is still on the trouble in the shops). Glad to see you back in Foxon Falls, Jonathan. I heard you'd arrived, and would have dropped in on you, but things are in a muddle here ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... never quite sober at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half- stupefied condition. As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased with him. There's no doubt about the validity of the marriage. And what makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she's taken good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for Harman. ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... the world, treasured up out of respect for 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... not knowing what she thought about it all, nor what she should think—her head was all in a muddle. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... mislaid her glasses, worked her shuttle at hazard in and out of that picture of intricate pattern called Life, and having tangled and knotted together the crimson thread of passion, the golden thread of youth and the honest brown of a deep, undemonstrative love, she left the disentanglement of the muddle in the hands of Olivia, Duchess ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... evening. But it was so. Darius Clayhanger had been nervous as to the manner in which the boy would acquit himself in the bit of business which had been confided to him. It was the boy's first bit of business. Straightforward as it was, the boy might muddle it, might omit a portion of it, might say the wrong thing, might forget. Darius hoped for the best, but he was afraid. He saw in his son an amiable irresponsible fool. He compared Edwin at sixteen with himself at the same age. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... against his abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart of a matter. Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a world, in spite of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... 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
... qualify yourselves for it, as a man does for his work. Don't think you can undertake it otherwise. . . . If you are called to man's work, do not exact a woman's privileges—the privilege of inaccuracy, of weakness, ye muddle-heads. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by which alone you can make God's business succeed; for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to inefficiency, to sketchy ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... of the traction muddle was sufficient to afford a background of plausibility for this highminded renunciation. There was something likable in Charles Holton. His volubility, which had prejudiced her against him in the beginning, seemed now to speak for a frankness that appealed to her. There was ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Ingred, "and a most uncomfortable one, I should say. I went to his house once for a music lesson, and it looked in a fearful muddle. Good old Bantam! We must give her congrats! She'll soon get things into order there! I believe she adores little Kenneth. I've often seen her taking him about the town. She shall have my blessing, ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... be useful to them; in the time of M. Cousin, the course, so far, did but little harm; at the present day, impregnated with neo-Kantism, it injects into minds of eighteen, seventeen, and even sixteen years, a metaphysical muddle as cumbersome as the scholasticism of the fourteenth century, terribly indigestible and unhealthy for the stomachs of novices; the swallow even to bursting and throw it off at the examination just as it comes, entirely raw for lack ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and inflexible, ignorant of science, indifferent to progress, contemptuous of ideas. And then suddenly, almost overnight, this terrified people finds itself at war with a nation ruled and disciplined' by modern experts, scientists and technicians. The awful muddle that was in England during the first two years of the war has not yet been told in print; but thousands know it, and some day it will be written, and it will finish forever the prestige of the British ruling caste. They rushed off an expedition ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... that even the Sailing Instructions, cast-iron as they were, contemplated a fleet in order, not one in process of forming order; and that to bring-to helter-skelter, regardless of order, was to obey the letter rather than the spirit. Muddle-headed as Mathews seems to have been, what he was trying to do was clear enough; and the duty of a subordinate was to carry out his evident aim. An order does not necessarily supersede its predecessor, unless the two are incompatible. The whole incident, from ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... while at Eton he had already become possessed by a dark suspicion concerning him. This is proved by the episode of Dr. Lind's visit during his fever. Then and ever afterwards he expected monstrous treatment at his hands, although the elder gentleman was nothing worse than a muddle-headed squire. It has more than once occurred to me that this fever may have been a turning point in his history, and that a delusion, engendered by delirium, may have fixed itself upon his mind, owing to some imperfection in the process of recovery. But the theory is too speculative ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... again the next afternoon about three miles to Rehencourt, and there found a terrible muddle. A.S.C., two brigades R.F.A., our Brigade Headquarters, all trying to billet in one small village. We found a large billet marked up for our two batteries, and the machine gun company, and, while we were trying to fit in, an A.S.C. Colonel, who was town major, came bustling round ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... the Moon wholly disappeared when immersed in the Earth's shadow. Crabtree is stated by Flamsteed[140] to have observed this eclipse, but he does not plainly state that he lost sight of the Moon. Crabtree or his editor dates this eclipse for April 4; Ferguson for April 15. There appears to be some muddle as between "old style" and "new style." Ferguson professing to be N.S. is evidently wrong. Hevelius gives the double date, 15/25, which ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... difficulty, his healthy physical instincts sent him to healthy physical remedies for relief. "My mind's in a muddle," said ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... of us, who are sympathetic by nature, would never smile again. I don't think when God made us, and sent us into the world to live our own lives, that He meant us to feel like that. One can't mix up other people's lives with one's own; it would make an awful muddle." ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... fruits of compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her to be in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self-conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave—the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign" showing, for the painted picture of life. Beyond which let me add that here immediately is a prime specimen ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... an old seal will pop his 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 only time to seize a strap ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... fortune for food, as the stories go, and when he had only a quarter million dollars left (a paltry sum today but a considerable one in those days when gold was scarce and monetary standards in a worse muddle than today) Apicius took his own life, fearing that he might have to starve to death ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... whole library of horse practice, and muddle and mull over the Mendelian Law until I'm dizzy, like the clod that I am; but she is the genius. She doesn't have to study law. She just knows it in some witch-like, intuitional way. All she has to do is size up a bunch of mares with her eyes, and feel them over a little with her hands, and hunt ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... participation in them was not a whit less cool and keen than it had always been, he had still found abundant time for the wooing of Diana. He had assumed a kind of guardian's attitude in the matter of her relations to the Vavasours—who in business affairs had proved both greedy and muddle-headed; he had flattered her woman's vanity by the insight he had freely allowed her into the possibilities and the difficulties of his own Parliamentary position, and of his relations to Ferrier; and he had kept alive a kind of perpetual ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... there is a good deal of "scauting." The axle of a wheelbarrow revolving without grease, and causing an ear-piercing sound, is said to be giving forth a "scrupeting" noise. What can be more explicit, and at the same time so aggravating, as to be told that you are a "mix-muddle"? A person who mixes up his commissions may feel a little abashed. A person who muddles his affairs may not be altogether proud of his achievements. But to be a mix-muddle, to both mix and muddle, to morally fumble without tact, and display a totally imbecile wandering; ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... I'll muddle up the pair of them, bedevil them completely, and Amphitryon's whole household, too, and keep it up till my father has his fill of her whom he loves: then all shall know the truth, but not before. And finally Jupiter will renew the former harmony between Alcmena ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... recent insubordination and violence is—curious. Exasperating too.... I don't quite grasp it.... It's the same thing whether you look at the suffrage business or the labour people or at this Irish muddle. People may be too safe. You see we live at the end of a series of secure generations in which none of the great things of life have changed materially. We've grown up with no sense of danger—that is to say, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... and the Prussian war with Denmark was renewed. There was a general feeling of shame over Palmerston's bluster followed by a meek British inaction. The debate came on a vote of censure, July 8, in the course of which Derby characterized governmental policy as one of "meddle and muddle." The censure was carried in the Lords by nine votes, but was defeated in the Commons by a ministerial majority of eighteen. It was the sharpest political crisis of Palmerston's Ministry during the Civil War. Every ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... applies to the well quite as much as to the sick. I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last. The process with them may be accomplished without pain. With the sick, pain gives ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... I am afraid I shall have to talk business. I shall be too busy to come over to-morrow." He laughed. "You see I have left all my other clients' affairs, to come after my stray lamb: I expect I shall find them in a pretty muddle. Now, my dear, before I go I should like you to tell me exactly what you would like to do. As I have explained to you, you are now the mistress of a very large fortune with which you can do absolutely what you like. Would you like to live ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... 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 question I took ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... chief, who infused his own life and vigour into what was before a weak administration. Cavour was a born man of business; he hated disorder in everything—except, indeed, dress, in which his carelessness was proverbial. He had not the common belief that, muddle them how you may, there will always be a providence which looks after the affairs of the State and prevents the collapse that would attend a private commercial enterprise conducted on the same system. He took in hand the financial renewal of Piedmont in the ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... it depends now whether we've luck in the questions," said Winona. "I think we'd better put the books away. We shall only muddle ourselves if we try any more to-night. Aunt Harriet says we're not to get up at five to-morrow. We shall have quite a hard enough day as ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... Government inspectors are expensive luxuries, and by no means always efficient. A fat Government appointment is a nice thing—for the appointee, as Mr. Sanders is aware, but it is not profitable to the tax-payers of the country to multiply them too extensively. In my opinion the easiest way out of the muddle is to strike back and to hit ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... a great number of Russian and foreign books, pamphlets, and articles in the magazines, to make calculations, to refer to logarithms, to think and to write; then again to read, calculate, and think; but as soon as I took up a book or began to think, my thoughts were in a muddle, my eyes began blinking, I would get up from the table with a sigh and begin walking about the big rooms of my deserted country-house. When I was tired of walking about I would stand still at my study window, and, looking across the wide courtyard, over the pond and the bare young birch-trees ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the 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 why she is not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that village long; we were neither of us used to keeping accounts, and we got them in a complete muddle. So I had to leave behind my little grave, and the only home ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... merely perished, being done in some fugitive medium; and the walls are now covered with the works of Vasari himself and his pupils and do not matter, while the ceiling is a muddle of undistinguished paint. There are many statues which also do not matter; but at the raised end is Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and the first Medici Pope, and at the other a colossal modern statue ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... shortest possible space of time I can allow for this? Ahem!—say a month." So he gives him a month. "Then," says he, next, "what is the shortest possible time we can allow for an engagement and a marriage? Say six weeks. Good. Six weeks be it. Only, hang it, this muddle has to last for six weeks! Well, it can't be helped. I can't give any more trouble to the bothering plot; and, as after all, there's a capital character for Mr. HARE, and not at all a bad one for Miss RORKE, with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things, remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in revulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous situation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left, after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a fine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are seeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... everything, Anne, dearie. Since I got your phone I've been in a regular muddle, believe ME. Cornelia Bryant was never ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 them. But it is as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... her brother over the hopelessness of their position, used the child's time-honoured reproach against the parent. "Papa and mama should not have had children if they were going to make such a muddle as this," she argued. Bessie had not wanted to be born, she declared. Her father and mother were responsible. They must at least say what was to be done. Papa, she declared to Bernard, should ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... muddle my brains any more with your idiotic reasonings! Take him along, and give ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... he offered the Whig leader his alliance for the overthrow of Addington and the formation of a Ministry of the talented men of all parties. Here, then, is the origin of the broad-bottomed or All the Talents Administrations which produced so singular a muddle after the death of Pitt. The Fox-Grenville bargain cannot be styled immoral like that of Fox and North in 1782; for it expressly excluded all compromise on matters of conviction. Nevertheless it ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... telegram I sent this morning to—a friend in Russia, and there seems to be some muddle at the ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... had stolen the money to speculate with or to extricate himself from some business muddle she did not pause to wonder. He had lost it; that was sufficiently evident from his depression. When his powers of bluff failed ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... mislay your exercise-book, you drop your arithmetic in the mud, your pencil breaks, and when you open your knife to sharpen the pencil you split your nail. On such a day you jam your thumb in doors, and muddle the messages you are sent on by grown-ups. You upset your tea, and your bread-and-butter won't hold together for a moment. And when at last you get to bed usually in disgrace it is no comfort at all to you to know that not a single bit of it is ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... annihilation. When an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks, splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice, Jimmie's team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole wheels, on the sidewalk. The fearful coming of the engine could break up the most intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had been swearing for the ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... Jackson, in a deep whisper; "and don't muddle your brains with any more of that Pharaoh. You'll need all your strength ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... time, the decision of the Supreme War Council was, in spite of President Wilson's opposition to the plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. Only those who went through it can ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... you know" He paused. "It's all been a muddle, and I've no objection to your coming along ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... that this involves progress if the enterprise itself is dully conceived and most of it does seem to me to be dully conceived. In the absence of penetrating criticism, any impudent industrious person may set up as an "expert," organise and direct the confused good intentions at large, and muddle disastrously with the problem in hand. The "expert" quack and the bureaucratic intriguer increase and multiply in a dull-minded, uncritical, strenuous period as disease germs ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... her marriage the perplexed girl had a talk with her father. Later she wondered if the hours alone with the sick man had not led to her decision to marry. The father talked of his life and advised the daughter to avoid being led into another such muddle. He abused Tom Willard, and that led Elizabeth to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man became excited and tried to get out of bed. When she would not let him walk about he began to complain. "I've never been let alone," he said. "Although I've worked hard I've not ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... clerk all in a muddle. You see, he'd never had a prescription like that to fill before. It made him tired, 'cause he thought the kid was ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... founded on nothing and dreams touched with moonshine—and you make a Micawber. Put in a dash of assurance and a good thimbleful of hypocrisy, and Pecksniff is the product. Leave out the assurance, replacing it with cowardice, and the result is Doctor Chillip or Uriah Heap. Muddle the whole with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... mostly very 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 ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... meteoric feathers playfully down upon the serious face of Phyllis—its seriousness was apparent 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 ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... 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, even while a part of me still leaps up instinctively ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... intervened, listening and watching him uneasily, "you'd better go yourself and tell them. He'll muddle it." ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... people used to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle transportation. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... of any kind, and should be very sorry to do so. I thought it was now generally admitted that the more work a man has to do, the less he can afford to muddle himself in any way. But as I have never tried the experiment in using either alcohol or tobacco, and cannot afford to do it, I have no comparative experience to offer. It might be beneficial; I ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... to talk much about that, dear No. 6," answered her sister. "They had cried almost as much as they could do in one day, and were stupified by the new misfortune, besides which, they had a feeling all the time of having brought it on themselves by being dreadfully naughty. It was a sad muddle altogether, I must confess. The shock upon the poor children's minds at the time must have been very great, for the memory of that bereavement clung to them through grown-up life, as a very unpleasant ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... needless muddle was apparent. Evasions were of no use; therefore Dunois admitted that there was no way to correct the blunder but to send the army all the way back to Blois, and let it begin over again and come up on the other side this time, according to Joan's ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... whatever the right phrase is. My sympathies are all the other way—with the many, the poor devils who run about the streets and don't go to church. Don't stare, Tom; mind, I'm telling you all that's in my heart—as far as I know it—but it's all a muddle. You must be gentle with me if you want to land me. Now I've seen a deal of this sort of religion; I was bred up in it, and I can't stand it. If nineteen-twentieths of the world are to be left to uncovenanted mercies, and that sort of thing, which means in plain English to go to hell, and the ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... petty annoyances of life can wear away the strong bulwarks of trust and friendship formed by years of understanding? Our particular bulwarks were becoming quite shaky through nothing else but having to muddle through the dull sordid grind of cooking and housework by ourselves. We were getting disillusioned with each other. No 'jaundiced eye that casts discolouration' could look more jaundiced than Henry's when I asked him to dry up the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... the family pride in his composition, he resolved not to muddle the blood of the Witheringtons by any cross from Cateaton Street or Mincing Lane; and after a proper degree of research, he selected the daughter of a Scotch earl, who went to London with a bevy of nine in a Leith smack to ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... Chinese troops near Tientsin. Suddenly all these points were declared to be in doubt. Round the question of the length of time the Indemnities might be postponed, and the actual amount of the increase in the Customs Tariff, there appeared to be an inexplicable muddle largely owing to the intervention of so many agents and to the fact that the exchange of views had been almost entirely verbal, unofficial, and secret. It would be wearisome to analyse a dispute which belongs to the peculiar atmosphere of Peking diplomacy; but the vast difficulties ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... would be highly distasteful here. My overweening airs as a boy have not been forgotten, and I have always been looked on as an interloper. Depend on it, poor old Brooks fancies the muddle in his accounts was a suggestion of my malice! Imagine the feelings of Hiltonbury, when I, his supplanter, begin to tighten ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... starching, and ironing the fine things. With a little management much can be accomplished, provided the mistress be industrious, energetic, and willing to lend a helping hand. Let washing-week be not the excuse for having everything in a muddle; and although "things" cannot be cleaned so thoroughly, and so much time spent upon them, as ordinarily, yet the house may be kept tidy and clear from litter without a great deal of exertion either on the part of the mistress ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... 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 made it sick. In my crude, ungainly, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... calls a success, would be proud of me; and Penelope, who has learned to think with the rest of the world, would be proud of me—proud to present me to her friends—to splendid fellows like Talcott and his muddle-headed companion." He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee with his long forefinger, and his face broke into a bitter smile as he spoke more quietly. "David, I have seen Penelope. I came to New York just to ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... 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 ...
— A Memory Of The Southern Seas - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Everard Dominey, for the first twenty-six years of his life, had lived as an ordinary young Englishman of his position,—Eton, Oxford, a few years in the Army, a few years about town, during which he had succeeded in making a still more hopeless muddle of his already encumbered estates: a few months of tragedy, and then a blank. Afterwards ten years—at first in the cities, then in the dark places of Africa—years of which no man knew anything. The Everard Dominey of ten years ago had been, without a doubt, good-looking. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eat all the diseased cow flesh in the neighborhood! Well, I received him like a dog, and then he let it all out—blurted out the whole thing, and a pretty mess it is! It appears that Burle only paid him in driblets and had got himself into a muddle—a confusion of figures which the devil himself couldn't disentangle. In short, Burle owes the butcher two thousand francs, and Gagneux threatens that he'll inform the colonel if he is not paid. To make matters worse, Burle, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... in despair, "I shall not go again. Monsieur Bongrand is right, you could never bear the sight. Everything is ticketed. All the town is coming and going just as in the street; the handsome furniture is being ruined, they even stand upon it; the whole place is such a muddle that a hen couldn't find her chicks. You'd think there had been a fire. Lots of things are in the courtyard; the closets are all open, and nothing in them. Oh! the poor dear man, it's well he died, the sight ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... Rule of Three Are the laws of earth and sky; Yet fools will muddle all true thought, And pride will have its cry; The banners with their deadly words Go reeling on unfurled, And sin and sadness march along To the ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... and the bitter scorn poured on German fussiness by travelling Britons. The ways of one nation are certainly not the ways of another in this respect. Directly I cross the German frontier I know that I am safe from muddle and mistakes, that I need not look after myself or my luggage, that I cannot get into a wrong train or alight at a wrong station, or suffer any injury through carelessness or mismanagement. Everything is managed ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... and Dr. Galbraith both maintain that mamma is admirable, because she doesn't trouble her head about churches and creeds any longer. She used to do so once, but now she thinks only of what is morally right or wrong, and leaves the ecclesiastical muddle for the divines to get out of as best they can. Mamma used to dread bringing us to Morne when we were younger; we were always so outrageous here; and we told her it was Aunt Fulda who made us so, because she is too good, and the balance of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... While theatrical affairs abroad are in their present condition, while Meyerbeer and Verdi reign supreme, while theatrical managers, singers, conductors, newspapers, and the public are under their immediate influence, there is no need for you to mix yourself up with this muddle. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... told 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 know what ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... 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 nations of Europe is tired out. It is for ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... queer sort of muddle altogether, and Angel hardly knew whether she felt more like laughing or crying over it. She sat down in the window ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... seems to have left no trace behind. With The Wild 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... thought, with a whimsical turn, of Pheidippides, the youth who used his legs to such good purpose; who "ran like fire,"—shouted, "Rejoice, we conquer!"—then "died in the shout for his meed." How simple life once was, according to Browning and the rest! What a muddle it was to-day, according to Harry Wakefield! And all because a girl had refused him! He had been trying all along not to think of Dorothy Ray, but by the time he had reached the summit of the hill,—that little ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... I suppose I was right; I suppose things did turn out all the better in the end for having been left to settle themselves—at any rate whether they did or did not, the whole thing was in too great a muddle for me to venture to tackle it so long as Ellen was upon the scene; now, however, that she was removed, all my interest in my godson revived, and I turned over many times in my mind, what I had better ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... 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 may ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cavity, could raise or depress itself in the water at pleasure by a pneumatic operation upon the entral air tube pervading its shell. Its tentacula, sent abroad over the summit of the shell, searched the sea for prey. The creature had an ink-bag, with which it could muddle the water around it, to protect itself from more powerful animals, and, strange to say, this has been found so well preserved that an artist has used it in one instance as a paint, wherewith to delineate ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... however, quite surprising to see the rough way in which some people allow themselves to be served, and the muddle in which they prefer to live rather than do anything themselves that they consider menial; as if an untidy house, slovenly servants, badly cooked and coarsely served food, are not likely to do much more to lower their self-respect ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... seems to be nothing to them. I had a terrible turn with Butcher two days ago, and now this man Smithson has been too much for me. They treat me like a tailor, and expect me to cut my scenery to fit their theatre.... I wish you'd come back, chicken. I'm in a dreadful muddle. I've been working till I can't see, and I've been reading The Tempest till my mind is as salt as a dried haddock.... But I've drawn a marvellous Caliban, part fish, part frog, part man ... Life emerging from the sea. I'm sure now that we're all spawned from the sea, and that life ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... Mr. North, you'd be in a worse muddle than ever," Willa told him candidly. "Dad always said you could take care of the pat hands against you if you froze out the four-flushers.—Don't scold Vernon, please. Remember, he's just balancing; a push ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... also be awake and active at five. He will look out on the world with anthropomorphic (or rather with paedomorphic) eyes. He will be living on a great flat earth—unless some officious person has tried to muddle his wits by telling him the earth is round; amidst trees, animals, men, houses, engines, utensils, that are all capable of being good or naughty, all fond of nice things and hostile to nasty ones, all thumpable and perishable, and all conceivably esurient. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells |
