"Clumsiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had written at the same time to Sir Charles that the real trouble arose from 'clumsiness of arrangement,' and quoted Lord Hartington's words ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... look too good," Winfree panted. "Cover yourself—I might hurt you out of sheer clumsiness." His chin and throat were covered with blood, now; blood enough to satisfy the most indignant consumer. The moment the measure was set again, Winfree lunged, trying to slip his blade beneath MacHenery's guard to strike his arm. ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... as a clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to have to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time, trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... pledges of all kinds, from old-time watches to seamen's boots, appealed to all tastes and requirements. Bundles of cigars, candidly described as "wonderful," were marked at absurdly low figures, while silver watches endeavored to excuse the clumsiness of their make by describing themselves as "strong workmen's." The side entrance, up a narrow alley, was surmounted by the usual three brass balls, and here Mr. Hyams' clients were wont to call. They entered as optimists, smiled confidently ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... my clumsiness!" he whispered; then stood still as death to see what had befallen. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... it was in this: that though she was no longer the woman child, yet with one flash of her gold-curtained eyes had she reduced me to my ancient schoolboy clumsiness. She was a woman, but, I was again an awkward, stammering boy, rebelliously declining to believe that a state she had come away from could retain any significance, industrial or otherwise. Nor, in the little time left ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... his best, according to his lights. He endeavored to improve the shining hour, and admired the busy little bee, as he had been taught to do in the nursery. If he had not the air of a thoroughbred, he had none of the plebeian clumsiness of the cart-horse. Though he was not the man to lead a forlorn hope, he was no coward; and though he had not invented gunpowder, he had the requisite intelligence to make use of already existing inventions ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... the smaller ones by the roots, and so fed on the leaves. The colossal breadth and weight of their hinder quarters, which can hardly be imagined without having been seen, become, on this view, of obvious service, instead of being an encumbrance: their apparent clumsiness disappears. With their great tails and their huge heels firmly fixed like a tripod on the ground, they could freely exert the full force of their most powerful arms and great claws. Strongly rooted, indeed, must that tree have been, which could have resisted ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the school reports were bad. It did not matter how many sins her boys were accused of, so long as they were not stupid, or inferior. If they seemed to brook insult, she hated them. And it was only a certain gaucherie, a gawkiness on Anna's part that irritated her against the girl. Certain forms of clumsiness, grossness, made the mother's eyes glow with curious rage. Otherwise she ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... "Pardon my clumsiness," he said to the lady. "I am, unfortunately, quite blind. But," he added, with a smile, to turn off the mishap, "even a blind man ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... country, have learnt from the ridicule which Europeans, on mixed aesthetic and moral grounds, pour on this statue, to dismiss it with an apologetic laugh. Yet it is fine—until you get near enough to see its clumsiness. I admired the great gesture of it. A hand fell on my shoulder, and a voice said, "Look hard at that, young man! That's the first time you've seen Liberty—and it will be the last till you turn your back on this country again." It was an American fellow-passenger, one of the tall, thin ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... party—of the certainty of success in the division lobby—to bring out his best powers. The splendid, rattling, self-confident debater of the coercion period now no longer exists, and Mr. Balfour has positively gone back to the clumsiness, stammering, and ineffectiveness of the pre-historic period of his life before he had taken up the Chief Secretaryship. That was bad enough; but what is worse is that the House is beginning to feel it. If you lose confidence in yourself, the world is certain to pretty soon follow your example. And ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... untouched by human clumsiness, rare and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Lisle took up his station behind the wall of turf pointed to. He had once upon a time been forcibly rebuked for his clumsiness at some unaccustomed task in the Canadian bush and had not resented it, but the faint movement of Gladwyne's shoulders had brought a warmth to his face. The girl ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... into telegraphy, and in a few years found himself in the Government Mail Service at Washington. By 1876, he was at the head of this Department, which he completely reorganized. He introduced the bag system in postal cars, and made war on waste and clumsiness. By virtue of this position he was the one man in the United States who had a comprehensive view of all railways and telegraphs. He was much more apt, consequently, than other men to develop the idea of a national ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... conceive. Thus Percell's melody, though often original and expressive, is nevertheless more often rude and ungraceful. In the words of a recent writer on this subject, "We are often surprised to find elegance and coarseness, symmetry and clumsiness, mixed in a way that would be unaccountable, did we not consider that, in all the arts, the taste is a faculty which is slowly formed, even in the most highly gifted minds." We suspect that the pageant saved King Arthur; the scenic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... could not believe their eyes. Thereupon some force seemed to shove Zinotchka; she laid her hands on Sasha's shoulders and let her head droop upon his waistcoat. Sasha laughed, muttered something incoherent, and with the clumsiness of a man head over ears in love, laid both hands on Zinotchka's face. And the weather, gentlemen, was exquisite. . . . The hill behind which the sun was setting, the two willows, the green bank, the sky—all together with Sasha and Zinotchka were reflected in the pond . . . perfect ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... visiting it on Roland now, throwing all the responsibility of her sin on his ugliness, his stupidity, his clumsiness, the heaviness of his intellect, and the vulgarity of his person. It was to this that it was owing that she had betrayed him, had driven one son to desperation, and had been forced to utter to the other the most agonizing confession that can make ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... his business, and shall not necessarily lose his position on having attained such knowledge. But there are so many more important things to be thought of, in the qualifications of a foreign resident, that his technical dexterity or clumsiness ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with Mr Petulengro, who directed him to Mumber Lane (Mumper's Dingle), near Willenhall, in Staffordshire, "the little dingle by the side of the great north road." Here Borrow encamped and shod little Ambrol, who kicked him over as a reminder of his clumsiness. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... modern party political journalism so bad? It is worse even than it intends to be. It praises its preposterous party leaders through thick and thin; but it somehow succeeds in making them look greater fools than they are. This clumsiness clings even to the photographs of public men, as they are snapshotted at public meetings. A sensitive politician (if there is such a thing) would, I should think, want to murder the man who snapshots ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... numerous experimental motors to-day is so stimulating to the imagination, there are so many stimulated persons at work upon them, that it is difficult to believe the obvious impossibility of most of them—their convulsiveness, clumsiness, and, in many cases, exasperating trail of stench will not be rapidly fined away.[6] I do not think that it is asking too much of the reader's faith in progress to assume that so far as a light powerful engine goes, comparatively noiseless, smooth-running, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... they do their best." This is praise indeed, when placed side by side with his dismissal of the women of Hamburg. They are plump, we are told, "but the little god Cupid is to blame, who often sets the sharpest of love's darts to his bow, but from naughtiness or clumsiness shoots too low, and hits the women of Hamburg not in the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... She had only to tighten her lips—and she became oblivious of her clumsiness and her cruelty, savouring with pleasure the pain of the situation, clasping it to her! Now and then a thought of Mr. Skellorn's tragedy shot through her brain, and the tenderness of pity welled up from somewhere within her and mingled exquisitely with her ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... by night he was ever ready to skip off on errands of mercy, his wooden leg clicking a vigorous tattoo to his rapid movements. He was especially proud of that wooden leg, a combination of joints and springs so wonderful that he was often heard to lament the clumsiness of the other leg ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Julian," I said, annoyed not only at my own clumsiness but at the absence of anything of Anne's old heroic spirit. "For his sake, at least, you must keep your head. Why, my dear woman, one look at your face, grown as desperate as it sometimes appears ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... and who, from his love of noble and eloquent attitudes, is determined to die standing. He ended with a final impressive gesture. However, as he came down from the tribune, the general coldness seemed to increase, not a single member applauded. With supreme clumsiness he had alluded to the secret scheming of Rome and the clergy, whose one object, in his opinion, was to recover the predominant position they had lost and restore monarchy in France at a more or ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... that mountain of slowness and stolidity, was not perhaps a fool, notwithstanding his outward clumsiness. A little attention is appreciated even by a ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... "Just my clumsiness," I said, ruefully looking at the flask, "I uncorked it, to see if it were really all he said, and I've spilled nearly the whole ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... stammering, shocked rage, began to curse Gordon's clumsiness, and, in his excitement, the wound bled more redly. "You will have to keep quiet," he was told, "for ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... unclosed his lips—a sign would not suffice—he must have a sentence to assure him; and then it was such joy to have her restored, and his fondness and solicitude were so tender and eager in their clumsiness, that his father-in-law was touched to ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... materials of an impromptu bar; and the Pioneer Band, accompanied by the resplendent asses, fill the other, and move shoreward to the inviting strains of Buffalo Gals, won't you come out to-night? It is a part of our programme that one of the asses shall, from sheer clumsiness, in the course of this embarkation, drop a dummy axe into the water, whereupon the mirth of the picnic can hardly be assuaged. Upon one occasion, the dummy axe floated, and the laugh turned rather ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... in the least knowing what to say. The statue meant nothing whatever to her, and had the original of Eutychides been placed by its side she would have been unable to understand that in copying it Stanton had transformed its dignity into clumsiness, its grace into vulgarity. Had she been at home in New York, she would have said frankly that she neither knew nor cared anything about the America; being in Boston, she had a superstitious feeling that such frankness would be ill-judged, and she therefore contented herself ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... hand. I lifted it down from the carriage. Divine Providence so ordered that it fell from my hands, and a whitish powder poured out of it. The whole box was full of that powder. The doctor was horribly frightened, and swore at me like anything for my clumsiness. I saw him, I tell you, he grew quite yellow. I merely asked whether this medicine might not be for the cattle, but he savagely snatched it from my hand, and said he would make our ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... was a picture of sturdy English vigour, stout-limbed, rosy-faced, clear eyed, open, and straight-forward looking, perhaps a little clumsy with the clumsiness of sixteen, especially when conscience required tearing spirits to be subdued to the endurance of the feeble. It was, however, a bright congratulating look that met him from the trio. The little girl started up, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... make toilettes, to sit for hours together before the mirror, and in the evening read novels by lamp-light. What a jest it would be to mock her, to make her stare at country work, to spoil her precious hands in the skin-roughening house-keeping work, and to laugh at her clumsiness. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... ladies were carried upstairs. Presently the grooms who had been thrown from the carriage came up and related what had happened, so far at least as they knew it themselves. Ashamed and confused by the reproaches which the old retainer showered upon them for their clumsiness, they were only too willing to follow his advice, which was to hold their tongues, and say nothing about the affair. The horses had bolted, after a short halt, just as the grooms were about to mount to their seats. That was the ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... zeal on his part, but if anything had depended upon coolness and skill, we might both have been drowned. I kept a firm hold upon my helpless charge, and managed to keep her head above the water, though my own was dragged under several times by the clumsiness of my ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... discussion thereupon ensued between him and the coachman as to the clumsiness of smiths in general, who when they pare away a horse's hoofs in order to shoe it, so often cut into the living flesh, which is very dangerous, and is ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... had debated with Uncle Ben and with Cousin Tom as to the expediency of our climbing with guns unloaded. But they, not being in the way themselves, assured me that there was nothing to fear, except through uncommon clumsiness; and that as for charging our guns at the top, even veteran troops could scarcely be trusted to perform it properly in the hurry, and the darkness, and the noise ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... the future are far more complete than yours could have been in regard to me,' Hugo answered smoothly. 'You betrayed some clumsiness. I shall profit by your mistakes. No one will see you go into the Safe Deposit except myself and a man whom I can trust. No one at all except myself will see you go into the vault. I can manage the operation alone. A little chloroform will quieten you for a time. The vault once closed will ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... places where the demons lie in wait for one, as they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in Bewick, who, desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all alive with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced or weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood thaws, and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real compensations of middle age. When one is young, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his school. Because of this, it was what would be called select; and just in that very fact lay one of the dangers Mrs. Lloyd most dreaded. Rich men's sons may be select from a social point of view, but they are apt to be quite the reverse from the moral standpoint. Frank Bowser, with all his clumsiness and lack of good manners, would be a far safer companion than Dick Wilding, the graceful, easy-mannered heir of ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... these obstacles based on fallacious reasoning or superstitious whim were those that were furnished by the clumsiness of the ships and the crudeness of the appliances for navigation. As already observed, the Spanish and Portuguese caravels of the fifteenth century were less swift and manageable craft than the Norwegian ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... Hair and moustache were his own, dyed and brushed cunningly. Yet, when he reeled against Green near the Albany, the inspector, who was an observant man, pushed him roughly aside with an anathema on his clumsiness. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Curtiss machines for the most part. In the pre-war years, once the Wright Brothers had accomplished their task, America's chief accomplishment consisted in the development of the 'Flying Boat,' alternatively named with characteristic American clumsiness, 'The Hydro-Aeroplane.' In February of 1911, Glenn Curtiss attached a float to a machine similar to that with which he won the first Gordon-Bennett Air Contest and made his first flying boat experiment. From this beginning he developed the boat ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... sixteen times without reloading, and which will kill at a hundred yards' distance. With a weapon unknown to me I might not only fail altogether, but I might not improbably do serious injury, by my clumsiness and inexperience, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... and strolled round the fountain, his cane behind his back, his chin in his collar. He had made the circle several times, then he blundered into some one. The fighting mood was gone now, the walk having calmed him. He murmured a short apology for his clumsiness and started on, without even looking ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... squeal of pain before the harbour was cleared. Morgan's cheek flushed at the first cry, and he almost lost grip of his oar. The slip was noted instantly, and a warning, "Steady at number three," recalled him to his task. Jeffreys gave him a look, and the Spaniard cursed volubly at his companion's clumsiness. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... Kennington! Leonard Upjohn described Kennington with that restrained humour which a strict adherence to the vocabulary of Sir Thomas Browne necessitated. With delicate sarcasm he narrated the last weeks, the patience with which Cronshaw bore the well-meaning clumsiness of the young student who had appointed himself his nurse, and the pitifulness of that divine vagabond in those hopelessly middle-class surroundings. Beauty from ashes, he quoted from Isaiah. It was a triumph of irony for that ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Victorine, Maggie waited on the table, very uncomfortable in her one good dress and stiff white apron. She stood off from the table, making awkward dabs at it from time to time. In her excess of deference she developed a clumsiness that was beyond all expression. She passed the plates upon the wrong side, and remembered herself with a broken apology at inopportune moments. She dropped a spoon, she spilled the ice-water. She handled the delft cups and platters ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... developed in the bill introduced by Senator Davis and passed by Congress. Reconstruction, as it was actually conducted later on, was wretchedly bungled, and was marked chiefly by bitterness in disputation and by clumsiness in practical arrangements, which culminated in that miserable disgrace known as the regime of the "carpet-baggers." How far Lincoln would have succeeded in saving the country from these humiliating processes, no one can say; but that he would have strenuously disapproved much that was done ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... when it comes under the notice of Mr. Dzierzon, he will himself prefer it to his own. It in fact combines all the good properties which a hive ought to possess, while it is free from the complication, clumsiness, vain whims, and decidedly objectionable features, which characterize most of the inventions which profess to be at all superior to the simple box, or ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... short, that a poem by Bragdon, while it might easily show the poet's fancy, could not fail to show also the produce-broker's clumsiness of touch. His charm was the spontaneity of his spoken words, his enthusiastic personality disarming all criticism; what the labored productions of his fancy might prove to be, I hardly dared think. It was this dread that induced me, upon receipt of the box, appalling in its bulk and unpleasantly ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... all specimens with the greatest care, and naturally had little patience with clumsiness; the following incident illustrates both his kindly spirit and his self-restraint. At one of the lectures he had handed down for inspection a very rare and costly fossil, from the coal-measures, I think; including the ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... much irritated, and more ashamed of his clumsiness than he cared to show. "How can a fellow have room to breathe in a bandbox like this! Come along, Philip; I'm going down to talk some more with ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... I, "the gray old man has many and strange tools," while to the cockerel I bowed and murmured, "Your pardon for my clumsiness. The fault was mine. Your ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... work had been completed. As Sam silently began to read, Mark bumped against him, knocking the translation from his hand. Sam's first reaction was anger at the boy's clumsiness. Then he became aware of the hope and the fear that lay behind Mark's excitement, and bit back the angry words which had almost ...
— Dead Man's Planet • William Morrison
... of the plains, now disinherited by human progress, the American bisons, are here more than portrayed; they are realized. Their essential characteristics, their strong mass, bulky without clumsiness, are made present and convincing in these two statues by A. Phimister Proctor, a master of animal sculpture. There is good reason for the living and sharp aspect of these plaster models. They are not copies of the permanent ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... there is a feeling that all able-bodied men and women are provided for. Here is none of the elegance and indolence of Athens, or of the ingenuity and cleverness of Constantinople, but a steadiness and drabness of a peasant clumsiness mark the new Sofia. It is neither so pleasant nor so promising a place as it was in 1915. The soil of the black years is ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... separate at the command of any bystander. To accustom them early to the hardships of a campaign, they were taught to steal their food from the mess-tables of their elders; if they were detected they were beaten for their clumsiness, and went without their dinner. Nothing was omitted, on the moral or physical side, to make them efficient members of a military state. Nor was the discipline relaxed when they reached years of maturity. For, in fact, the whole city was a camp. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... she dressed herself slowly, and with a certain clumsiness, took her little shopping bag and bought, with economy and taste, a very fair outfit of simple clothing for the seventy dollars she had gained on the strength of the peddler of embroideries; she passed the peddler's very shop on her way. Underwear, a black dress, rubber ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... those strong country lads were in another respect people of whom more might have been physically made. Oh for a drill-sergeant to teach them to stand upright, and to turn out their toes, and to get rid of that slouching, hulking gait which gives such a look of clumsiness and stupidity! If you could but have the well-developed muscles and the fresh complexion of the country with the smartness and alertness of the town! You have there the rough material of which a vast deal may be made; you have the water-worn pebble which will take on a beautiful polish. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... to go was good-natured, harmless Victor Seitz, a Detroit cigar maker, a German, and one of the slowest of created mortals. How he ever came to go into the cavalry was beyond the wildest surmises of his comrades. Why his supernatural slowness and clumsiness did not result in his being killed at least once a day, while in the service, was even still farther beyond the power of conjecture. No accident ever happened in the company that Seitz did not have some share in. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... feel that he was trying with all his might to be gentle and pacific. And she was aghast at her own stupid clumsiness, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... trouble he could while they tied his elbows and wrists together, offering sardonic suggestions and cursing their clumsiness. Renmark submitted quietly. When the operation was finished, the professor said with the calm confidence of one who has an empire ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... been very much neglected by popular favor. Its physical clumsiness, its lack of sporting competition in comparison with the airplane which must fight to keep itself up in the air, its lack of romance as contrasted with that of the airplane in war, have all tended to cast somewhat of a shadow over the lighter-than-air vessel and cause ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... The emphatic whom, with its heavy build (half-long vowel followed by labial consonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable immediately following. In whom did, however, we have an involuntary retardation that makes the locution sound "clumsy." This clumsiness is a phonetic verdict, quite apart from the dissatisfaction due to the grammatical factors which we have analyzed. The same prosodic objection does not apply to such parallel locutions as what did and when did. The vowels of what and when are shorter and their final consonants ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... maintains his preference for indirect narrative through the mouths of persons who witnessed the events to be described. I dare say that he would justify the device with great skill and convincingness. But it undoubtedly gives an effect of clumsiness. The first story in the volume, "Gaspar Ruiz," is a striking instance of complicated narrative machinery. This peculiarity also detracts from the realistic authority of the work. For by the time you have ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... wondering eyes of the buck changed. A glitter came into them. It had angered him to be so hustled. And moreover, the ponderous clumsiness of the bull filled him with contempt. When the bull charged him for the third time, he stamped his narrow, sharp hoofs in defiance, and stood with antlers down. At the last moment he jumped aside no farther than was absolutely ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of hot grease fell on the bad leg; and the king, who had sat up on his bed, threw himself back, exclaiming, "Ah! John, John, my grandfather turned you out of his house for a less matter!" and the clumsiness of John drew down upon him no other chastisement save this exclamation. (Vie de Saint Louis, by Queen Marguerite's confessor; Recueiz des Historiens de France, t. xx. p. 105; Vie de Saint Louis, by Lenain de Tillemont, t. v. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... except to a few school-girls of both sexes, it has a strong infusion of Borrow's satiric gift. As for the diatribes against gentility, Borrow has only done very clumsily what Thackeray had done long before without clumsiness. It can escape nobody who has read his books with a seeing eye that he was himself exceedingly proud, not merely of being a gentleman in the ethical sense, but of being one in the sense of station and extraction—as, by the way, the decriers of British snobbishness usually are, so that no special ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be enchanted.[1] This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was in ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... intended as an apology, or at least as an explanation of sorts. It was rather appealing in its boyish clumsiness, but she felt too numb, too utterly weary, ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... walk up and down the length of the long room, pushing aside the cushions irritably, and at one end knocking over a great bowl of flowers. He did not appear conscious of his clumsiness, and did not seem to see the maids who ran to mop up the water. At the next turn down the room he pushed between them as if they had not been there. Ranjoor Singh stood watching him, stroking a black beard reflectively; he was perfectly ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... there was never the slightest precedent for this modern detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we go eighty or ninety miles from home to place of business, or take an hour's spin of fifty miles to our week-end golf; every summer it has become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and facility; to Sir Thomas ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... conscious, Mistress Fiddy involuntarily sighed out "mother." Very motherly was the elder woman's assurance: "Yes, my dear, I'll serve as madam your mother in her absence, till madam herself comes; and she'll laugh at our confusion and clumsiness, I warrant." ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... crushing clumsiness to divert this strain of explanation, with questions about the quality of the soil in the wood where the ground was to be cleared and levelled ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... repeated efforts to drag him with her. At one of these efforts he embraces her with the clumsiness of a gorilla and makes several indecent gestures. HELEN utters suppressed cries for help.] Let go! This minute! Let go-o!! Oh, please, papa, Oh-o!! [She weeps, then suddenly cries out in an extremity of fear, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... thanking him. He hoped that she was not going to interrogate the Italian in his presence. Surely she would be incapable of such clumsiness! Still, women without imagination—and the majority of women were without imagination—did do the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... mean to him, the old friendship between them seemed no longer possible; certainly not from his side. He felt, in its place, all the confusion of a lover, anxious to speak and yet struck dumb with clumsiness and the fear, never absent no matter what the degree of encouragement, that his suit might not find favor with the lady when put ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... where it was moored, he took hold of the boat, drew it close in, and then, he on one side, the two lads on the other, they ran it right up ashore, and close to the glowing peat-stack, where, with a good deal of laughter at their clumsiness in skates ashore, the punt was turned over, and Dave propped one side up with a couple of short ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... Red Indian's moccasin, the uppers being made of two thicknesses of deer hide, which were kept on the foot by means of a narrow tape run through eyelets, while the soles were built up of several thicknesses of felt, amounting in all to about an inch and a half. They had an appearance of great clumsiness, but were, as a matter of fact, extremely light, springy, and comfortable. The thickness of the soles, the springiness of the felt, and the absence of heels made the boots particularly easy to march in, and the soldiers were thus able to cover great distances ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... of double canoe. This we found was intended to prevent the upsetting of the canoe, which was so narrow that it could not have maintained an upright position without the out-rigger. We could not help wondering both at the ingenuity and the clumsiness of this contrivance. ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... clumsiness of her wooden fingers, the woman of the south was a poor needlewoman, but was a fine dancer. The woman of the north was very expert in needlework, but her wooden legs made her a poor dancer. Each of these ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... of kindness. Once I caught him throwing half his dinner to a wretched little lad who had just come to the factory, and worked near him; and once again, as I was leaving the building on a rainy night, I came upon him on the stone steps at the door bending down with an almost pathetic clumsiness to pin the woolen shawl of a poor little mite, who, like so many others, worked with her shiftless father and mother to add to their weekly earnings. It was always the poorest and least cared for of the children whom he seemed to befriend, and very ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the inn window, and paying no heed to what I saw; only I remember that my eye lighted on Captain Hoseason down on the pier among his seamen, and speaking with some authority. And presently he came marching back towards the house, with no mark of a sailor's clumsiness, but carrying his fine, tall figure with a manly bearing, and still with the same sober, grave expression on his face. I wondered if it was possible that Ransome's stories could be true, and half disbelieved them; they fitted so ill ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the acting person from instant to instant. He is not bound to one setting, he has no technical difficulty in altering the whole scene with every smile and every frown. To be sure, the theater can give us changing sunshine and thunderclouds too. But it must go on at the slow pace and with the clumsiness with which the events in nature pass. The photoplay can flit from one to the other. Not more than one sixteenth of a second is needed to carry us from one corner of the globe to the other, from a jubilant setting to a mourning scene. The whole keyboard of the imagination may be used to ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... "Hold out!" called the steersmen as the boats met. Sam held wide, and by shouts instructed Mr. Mortimer how to cross the towropes; and Mr. Mortimer put on an extremely knowledgeable air, but obeyed him with so signal a clumsiness that the bargees desired to know where the Success to Commerce had shipped her ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... his strength and activity, I think he must always have had a clumsiness of movement. He was naturally awkward with his hands, and was unable to draw at all well. (The figure representing the aggregated cell- contents in 'Insectivorous Plants' was drawn by him.) This he always regretted much, and he frequently urged ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... been having thoughts regarding the girl who had now, he imagined, given him direct challenge. He was a little amazed by her boldness but did not stop to ask himself questions, she had openly invited him to pursue her. That was enough. His accustomed awkwardness and clumsiness went away and he leaped lightly over the extended tongues of wagons and buggies. He caught Clara in dark corner of the shed. Without a word he took her tightly into his arms and kissed her, first upon the neck and then ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when Mrs. Armiger's voice abruptly brought home to him the ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... middle-classes had not yet contracted the habit of frequently washing their bodies. From the front windows of the house one saw across Hampstead Heath towards London, and from the back windows one saw across the Heath towards Harrow. The house, in spite of its slight decrepitude and the clumsiness of its construction—the stairs were obviously an afterthought of the architect—had that air of comfortable kindliness which is only to be seen in houses which have been occupied by several generations of human beings. Mr. Haverstock was vaguely known as a sociologist. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... for his lowland neighbour's corn and oil. A began to accept from B the commodity which he could in turn deliver to C, while C in exchange for B's product gave to A what D had produced and bartered to C. The mere statement of such a transaction sufficiently presents its clumsiness, and the use of primitive forms of coin soon simplified the original process of bare barter. It is reasonable to suppose that as soon as the introduction of currency marked the abandonment of direct relations between purchaser and consumer an informal ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... last, though slowly, and not by the most brilliant road, out of the bondage of the humdrum and common, into the better life. The universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere, pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone, this is the weak side; the industry, the well-doing, the patient steady elaboration ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... and satisfaction, danger and security,—and if we once remove the idea of vicissitude from life, it all becomes an indolent and uninspiring affair. It is the process of change which is delightful, the finding out what we can do and what we cannot, going from ignorance to knowledge, from clumsiness to skill; even our relations with those whom we love are all bound up with the discoveries we make about them and the degree in which we can help them and affect them. What the mind instinctively dislikes is stationariness; and an existence in which there was ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a strange case was imprisoned one of the most vigorous intellects of the time. Vast strength hampered by clumsiness and associated with grievous disease, deep and massive powers of feeling limited by narrow though acute perceptions, were characteristic both of soul and body. These peculiarities were manifested from his early infancy. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... keep to a fixed arrangement of the position of everything on the work-table and to have all kept as clean as possible. To see the deft and unhurried work of a Japanese craftsman at printing is a great lesson, and a reproach to Western clumsiness. ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... respect still,—talent, ambition, intellect, and will. Do you think I would exchange these in a son of mine for the mere graces which a dancing-master can sell him? Fear not. Let us give but wealth to that intellect, and the world will see no clumsiness in the movements that march to its high places, and hear no discord in the laugh that triumphs over fools. But you have some news to communicate, or some proposal ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles. I had been a clumsy and awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing. The recollection of this experience gives me a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... state governments, in all these changes, are seen working smoothly, we have next to observe, by contrast, the clumsiness and inefficiency of the federal ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... I believe you, dear,' said Dick, who did not like to think that Kate was telling him a deliberate lie, and to avoid further discussion he suggested bed. Kate did not answer him, and he heard her trying to get undressed, and wondering at her clumsiness he asked himself if he should propose to unlace her stays for her. But he was afraid of irritating her, and thought it would be better to leave her alone to undo the knot as best she could. She tugged at the laces furiously, and thinking she might break them ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Wainsby likewise attempt a rallying-cry; but Stephen's retort, "Ain't foxes flesh and blood?" convicted him of clumsiness, and, buoyed on the uproar of cheers, Stephen pursued, "They are; to kill 'em in cold blood's beast-murder, so it is. What do we do? We give 'em a fair field—a fair field and no favour! We let ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... protection. It would, therefore, entirely prevent inconvenience, and so thwart the Sex in their martyrial propensities. Such a thing is not to be thought of. On the contrary, either to suffer from sunlight without an ugly, or to suffer from clumsiness with one, enables the unfortunate Sex to indulge in its favourite passion to the fullest extent possible in such cases. Admirable portion of creation! what merits are yours, what praise is called for fully to requite you! But, indeed, it ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... projected was so much in advance of the mechanical capability of the age that it was with the greatest difficulty it could be executed. When labouring upon his invention at Glasgow, Watt was baffled and thrown into despair by the clumsiness and incompetency of his workmen. Writing to Dr. Roebuck on one occasion, he said, "You ask what is the principal hindrance in erecting engines? It is always the smith-work." His first cylinder was made by ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... and caught up with the two. It proved to be one several years their senior, a young man in the holiday dress of a prosperous farmer. He whistled clearly an old border air and walked without dragging or clumsiness. Coming ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... and a dainty roundness of the wrist often indicate that Bastianini had a share in this class of work.[228] This relief has all the merits and demerits of the circular Piot Madonna in the Louvre.[229] Here, too, the handling of Bastianini has been detected, though there is a clumsiness which is seldom seen in the productions of that distinguished artist. The frame and the background, which are integral features of the composition, can leave no doubt as to the origin of this work. But the Piot relief has an interest which the London terra-cotta ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... exclaimed Dick, as the hunter referred to came thundering up the slope at a charge, on a horse that resembled its rider in size and not a little in clumsiness of appearance. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... following in a certain school. She defies analysis. You cannot label her. What she has done is not "Realism", neither is it "Romance". She displeases both by her ambiguity and by her lack of form. She has no infallible dramatic instinct. Even in Villette she preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her improbability. The progress of "the Novel" in our day is towards a perfection of form and ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... they were interrupted by a cry from Lub, who was on his hands and knees in the midst of the scrub, where he had evidently caught his foot in a vine, and gone sprawling down on account of his clumsiness. ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... falls under these influences, and he will experience not the slightest difficulty in doing so; indeed, he will find friendly hands extended to welcome and to help, the result on his character must be most beneficial. The clumsiness of rural life will soon depart; he will regard his home-made suit with as much pleasure as if it were made by a fashionable tailor, and he will soon learn to distinguish between the vicious and the virtuous, while he imitates the one ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... But, unless you have other plans, I beg you will come to dinner to-day at the Villa Planat. My nephew, the Comte de Fontaine, is a man it is essential that you should know. Ah, ha! And I propose to make up to you for my clumsiness by introducing you to five of the prettiest women in Paris. So, so, young man, your brow is clearing! I am fond of young people, and I like to see them happy. Their happiness reminds me of the good times of my youth, when adventures were not lacking, any more than duels. ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... prayerful determination, again and again thwarted by feet that recked not of rhythm or even of bare mechanical accuracy. Those feet, so apparently aimless, so little under control, were perhaps the most mirthful feet the scored failure in the dance. But the face, conscious of their clumsiness, was ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... of dealers tremble before this occult power, and subsidize it without a word—coachmakers, jewelers, tailors, and all. If any attempt is made to interfere with them, the servants reply with impudent retorts, or revenge themselves by the costly blunders of assumed clumsiness; and in these days they inquire into their master's character as, formerly, the master inquired into theirs. This mischief is now really at its height, and the law-courts are beginning to take cognizance of it; but in vain, for it cannot be remedied ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... cursed the bottle, the fence, the whiskey, Waldstricker, who'd sent him, and Tess and the unknown man, on whose account he'd been sent. His maledictions included everything except his own drunken clumsiness. ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... smashed into a freight somewhere near Pittsburgh this morning. There were hundreds of people killed. Oh, Lord, Ted! I didn't mean to break it to you like that." Dick was aghast at his own clumsiness as Ted leaned against the brick wall of the college building, his face white as chalk. "I wasn't thinking—guess I wasn't thinking about much of ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... succeeded this sudden and unexpected question. All knew that the boat was gone, and all knew that it had been lost by the widow's pertinacity and clumsiness; but no one felt disposed to betray her at that grave moment. Mulford left the bilge, and waded as far aft as it was at all prudent for him to proceed, in the vain hope that the boat might be there, fastened by its painter to the schooner's tafferel, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... thought cannot convey the deep desire that would have hurled me to his feet if Vanna had not held me with a firm restraining hand. Looking up in adoring love to the dark face was a ring of woodland creatures. I thought I could distinguish the white clouded robe of a snow-leopard, the soft clumsiness of a young bear, and many more, but these shifted and blurred like dream creatures—I could not be sure of them nor define their numbers. The eyes of the Player looked down upon their passionate delight with ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... there were all these women watching him. Especially the two in the front row, accompanied by the limping scoundrel to whom he had yesterday lent his arm on the Palace Road. The one who seemed the elder of the two scanned him with bold, black eyes, unaffectedly amused by his clumsiness; the other, whose face was hidden by a veil, looked at him but once or twice, yet Constans felt sure that she, too, was laughing at him. His position was becoming an intolerable one. Would the farce never come to ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... that fine living should be but the flower of fine feeling, and that such external graces, when they adorned a dull and vapid society, were as incongruous as the royal purple on a clown. Among certain of his new friends he found a clumsiness of manner somewhat absurdly allied with an attempt at Roman austerity; but he was fair-minded enough to see that the middle-class doctor or lawyer who tries to play the Cicero is, after all, a more respectable figure than the Marquess who apes Caligula or Commodus. Still, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... is small, because I dislike them, for in addition to their clumsiness, I know that when I have laid my hands upon my man, it will be ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... self-coloured breeds. SIZE AND SYMMETRY—The most desirable weight in show condition is, for a dog 24 lb., and for a bitch 22 lb. The dog must present an active, lively, lithe, and wiry appearance; lots of substance, at the same time free of clumsiness, as speed and endurance, as well as power, are very essential. They must be neither cloddy or cobby, but should be framed on the lines of speed, showing a graceful racing outline. TEMPERAMENT—Dogs that are very game are usually surly or snappish. The Irish Terrier as a breed is an exception, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... make herself useful. She lacked experience in a house like ours, but her willingness and cheerfulness more than made up for the clumsiness of her hands as she would say to Teresa, "Let me do that, dear Teresa; you are so tired, and you have so much work now." Teresa, accustomed as she was to perform everything herself, hesitated a little at first; but Paula would look at her in such a beseeching ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... every man is his own barber and surgeon, cutting off his beard or arm, as occasion demands. No unusual thing, for the warriors of Varvoo to saw off their own limbs, desperately wounded in battle. But owing to the clumsiness of the instrument employed—a flinty, serrated shell—the operation has been known to last several days. Nor will they suffer any friend to help them; maintaining, that a matter so nearly concerning a warrior is far better attended to by himself. Hence it may be said, that ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... dismounted, with the laborious clumsiness of the man brought up to other means of locomotion, tied Jane to a tree, and threw himself down at the foot ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... life might exhibit them, acted as a sure passport to Miss Verity's gentle heart. And the youth and good looks of the man approaching her became momentarily more incontestable. His bearing, too, notwithstanding the clumsiness of his shiny black over-garment, had a slightly ruffling, gallantly insolent air to it, eminently calculated to impress her ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... came about midday, was the tanks. I had never seen the German variety, but had heard that it was speedier and heavier than ours, but unwieldy. We did not see much of their speed, but we found out all about their clumsiness. Had the things been properly handled they should have gone through us like rotten wood. But the whole outfit was bungled. It looked good enough country for the use of them, but the men who made our position had had an eye to this possibility. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... clumsy shafts and containing figures of St. Mark and St. Luke in the middle and of St. Peter and St. Paul at the ends. Above in the pediment are a Virgin and Child with kneeling angels. Besides the innovation of the enlarged frieze, which reminds one of a door in the Certosa near Pavia, the clumsiness of the mouldings and the comparative poorness of the sculpture, though the figures are much better than any previously worked by native artists, suggest that the designer and workmen ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... seated herself on the lounge, leaving me to stand like a lout before her, ashamed of my youth and of the clumsiness ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... at this period that the art reaches its climax. The monumental grandeur of the Shang specimens is often allied to clumsiness; the later work, if more elaborate, is always less powerful. Nevertheless, it is to a later period that ninety-nine out of a hundred Chinese bronzes must be referred, and the great majority belong either to the Han and succeeding dynasties (220 B.C.-A.D. 400), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the time of report showed the first symptoms of the affection, which began with formication in the finger-tips. This gradually extended to the shoulders, and was attended with some uncertainty of tactile sense and clumsiness of movement, but actual anesthesia had never been demonstrated. This numbness had not invaded the trunk or lower extremities, although there was slight uncertainty in the gait. There had been a slowly progressing enlargement of the head, face, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... stables in Melbourne and Sydney to be properly brought up that they turn out well. So it is with the girls; they have to be finished off in Melbourne and Sydney. Their rosy cheeks and fresh complexion are retained, but their gaucheries of manner and clumsiness of figure ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... while it may be that the caution of the poor Levantine may enable him to avoid contact, but sooner or later, perhaps, the dreaded chance arrives; that bundle of linen, with the dark tearful eyes at the top of it, that labors along with the voluptuous clumsiness of Grisi —she has touched the poor Levantine with the hem of her sleeve! From that dread moment his peace is gone; his mind for ever hanging upon the fatal touch invites the blow which he fears; he watches for the symptoms ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... destruction of her sister had only been the first step of some gigantic plan which was to provide the opportunity for the mighty fighting machine overseas to strike. And he, who might have balked it, had made a rotten landing from the scout and delivered himself, helpless by his own clumsiness, into the hands of these men. The self-accusation ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... clumsiness, ill-breeding, stupidity, boorishness, fatuity, ill manners, unmannerliness, clownishness, folly, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... technic, dexterity, proficiency, expertness, facility, deftness, knack. Antonyms: maladroitness, empiricism, quackery, inexpertness, clumsiness. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... perceived the clumsiness of his tactics in remaining upstairs. He ought to have gone downstairs to meet his father and auntie, and left them to go up alone. His father was in an ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... awkwardness in attempting to mount, and the latter, as soon as he became aware of his master's intention, kicked, and sprang aside. The man sought to quiet him, patted his neck, and once more tried the difficult task of getting on his back; but the sight of the approaching strangers now added to his clumsiness, and rendered him even more helpless than before. He had scarcely put his foot in the stirrup, when the animal pranced, kicked and reared, jerking the reins from his owner's hands, and throwing him down on the pavement; after which he started at full speed ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... surprised to find how wonderfully the puppets followed the leading-strings; in spite of his clumsiness the story acted itself ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... sea quickly stopped our forward movement, and we began to drift backward over the spot where the skiff had been. Big Alec's black head and swarthy face popped up within arm's reach; and all unsuspecting and very angry with what he took to be the clumsiness of amateur sailors, he was hauled aboard. Also he was out of breath, for he had dived deep and stayed down ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet of finer if not of sturdier genius. The same sense of discord and inequality will be aroused on comparison of the worse with the better parts of "The Old Law." The clumsiness and dulness of the farcical interludes can hardly be paralleled in the rudest and hastiest scenes of Middleton's writing: while the sweet and noble dignity of the finer passages have the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... simplicity—not to say utility and comfort. If poetic diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical, abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... fit for thee. I am ashamed to stand in thy presence. I am dazzled by the brightness of thy countenance, crushed down by the thought of thy wisdom and power, uneasy lest I say or do something unfit for thee; lest I anger thee unawares in my ignorance, clumsiness; lest I betray to thee my own bad habits: and those bad habits I feel in thy presence as I never felt before. Thou art too condescending; thou honourest me too much; thou hast taken me for a better man than I am; thou knowest not what a poor miserable ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the Indian. Then, appreciating Tom's clumsiness, the Indian loosened his grasp for a moment to straighten some cords with which to bind his captive. As the red man stooped with gun under his arm, for an instant he turned his back. Tom, for once in his life not slow, in a flash ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... all the sails possible, yet the sailors beneath us, under Mr. Mellaire's direction, were setting triangular sails, like jibs, between the masts, and there were so many that they overlapped one another. The slowness and clumsiness with which the men handled these small sails led me ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-coloured stuff bodice, or how the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming lines, or how her brown stockings and thick-soled buckled shoes lost all that clumsiness which they must certainly have had when empty of her foot and ankle—of little use, unless you have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you might conjure up the image of a lovely woman, she ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... clumsiness. "I—yes—that is, I really knew nothing—" he stammered, feeling that each word added to it. If Hermione was unnoticeable, Mr. Newell had always been invisible. The young man had never so much as given him a thought, ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... coming literary ideals. Especially telling is his demolition of Klopstock's violent "Northernism," to which he opposes a far wider philosophy of grammar and style. The universality of poetry, as contrasted with a narrow "German" clumsiness, is blandly defended, and a joyous abandon is urged as something better than the meticulous anxiety of chauvinistic partisanism. In all his many criticisms of literature there are charm, wit, and elegance, an individuality and freedom in the reviewer, who, if less penetrating ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of trial to every one, admirably borne. Shopland remained in his chair, with only a casual glance at the newcomer. Francis rose to his feet with a half-stifled expression of anger at the clumsiness of his clerk. Sir Timothy, well-shaven and groomed, attired in a perfectly-fitting suit of grey flannel, nodded to Francis in friendly fashion and laid his Homburg hat upon the table with the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sacredness; but the origin and the precise nature of the beliefs concerning it I have not been able to learn. Only this I know, that to touch it with the foot is considered very wrong; and that if it be kicked or moved thus even by accident, the clumsiness must be atoned for by lifting the pillow to the forehead with the hands, and replacing it in its original position respectfully, with the word 'go-men,' signifying, I ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... powerless, and he stood now disarmed, his lip in his teeth, his face white, his chest heaving, before his opponent, who had at once recovered. With the blood-tinged tip of his sword resting on the ground, Andre-Louis surveyed him grimly, as we survey the prey that through our own clumsiness has escaped ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... protested; "the scoundrel has fooled you all along. Yes, of course," he pondered; "that explains the success of the trick, which otherwise was clumsy beyond belief; in fact, its clumsiness puzzled me. But how was I to guess?" He pulled himself up on the edge of another guffaw. "Look here, Dorothea, be sensible. It's clear as daylight the fellow was after Polly, and made you his cats- paw. Face it, my ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were a soldier. We tolerate from a man who has almost necessarily been deprived of a careful education much clumsiness and awkwardness of elocution. Soult did not speak much better than the Duke of Wellington, but he was listened to. He had, like the Duke, an air of ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... all clumsiness and fat legs and arms, did a good deal of hugging and squealing, and Miss Shake, Leonard's old governess, wept discreetly and worshipfully in ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... statuette in Dantan's style, also of Insarov. Anything cleverer and more spiteful could not be imagined. The young Bulgarian was represented as a ram standing on his hind-legs, butting forward with his horns. Dull solemnity and aggressiveness, obstinacy, clumsiness and narrowness were simply printed on the visage of the 'sire of the woolly flock,' and yet the likeness to Insarov was so striking that Bersenyev could ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... was kind. But, as conscientious artist, he was sensitively aware of makeshift. A great element of his success lay in the fact that he had trained the dog to appear the more clever of the two, to score off his pretended clumsiness and to complete his tricks. For years he had left uncultivated the art of being funny by himself. Without Prepimpin he felt lost, like a man in a sculling race with only one oar. He took off his make-up and dressed, a very much worried man. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... for a great deal of this earth's isolation: that it is relatively isolated by circumstances that are similar to the circumstances that make for relative isolation of the bottom of the ocean—except that there is a clumsiness of analogy now. To call ourselves deep-sea fishes has been convenient, but, in a quasi-existence, there is no convenience that will not sooner or later turn awkward—so, if there be denser regions aloft, these regions should now be regarded as analogues of far-submerged ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... which he found a seat beside her was unbecoming to a Yale senior. But, considering she was the girl he had been expecting to discover for years, his clumsiness bespoke the importance of the event. The merry laughter of the girls rang in his ears. Presently, a voice detached itself from the others, and came floating softly ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... thinking this, her smoky blue eyes met Ward's, and perhaps there was something in them that he had not seen there before. At all events, she was ashamed to see him colour suddenly, and become a little incoherent, and to have him turn to her his full attention, with a sort of boyish clumsiness that was touching in its way. Imaginary or not, the trifling episode troubled her, and as Madame Carter came majestically in and the little clock on the dresser pointed to the hour, she said her good-nights, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... said by Mr. Ogilvie. He was able to detect mistakes that were made by the village boys who served that Sunday morning, and he vowed to himself that the Monday Mass for the Emperor Napoleon should not be disfigured by such inaccuracy or clumsiness. He declined the usual invitation to stay to supper after Evening Prayer that he might have time to make perfection more perfect in the seclusion of his own room, and when he set out about six o'clock of a sun-drowsed morning in early August, apart from a faint anxiety about the Lavabo, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... ordinary peasant, came to town by the advice of his two cousins, who placed him in their uncle's house, in the hope that, as much by his silly tricks and his clumsiness, his want of brain, and his ignorance, he would be displeasing to the canon, who would kick him out of his will. Now this poor Chiquon, as the shepherd was named, had lived about a month alone with his old uncle, and finding more profit or ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac |
