"Fiasco" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... news, or at least in a fever of impatience, and that therefore 'twould be the more painful to tell her the truth. But when the captain's servant let the three of us in at the front door (Tom and I had waited while Falconer briefly reported our fiasco to General Clinton) and we found her waiting for us upon the stairs, her face was pale with a set and tragic wofulness, as if tidings of our failure had preceded us. There was, perhaps, an instant's last flutter of hope against hope, a momentary ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... bivouacs from inside, while the other ranks stood stark naked round the field and enjoyed the pleasures of a cold shower-bath. We spent our time training and providing working parties, one of which, consisting of 400 men under Capt. Jeffries, for work at Zillebeke, proved an even greater fiasco than its predecessor in May. For on this occasion, not only was the night very short, but the guides failed to find the work, and the party eventually returned to bivouacs, having done nothing except wander about the ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... fair face grows diabolical. "Then let me explain." Margaret makes a movement towards her, but she waves her back. "Pray let me explain, Margaret. Our dear Marian is so intensely dull that she wants a word in season. We all know why she objects to a marriage of any sort. She made a fiasco of her own first marriage, and ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... bring over a number of his countrymen from their native land in order that they should become soldier settlers—that is to say, they were promised fifty acres of land a head if they would undertake to perform military service when needed. The result was a fiasco. The unfortunate Irishmen came out, but found nothing prepared for them. They were insulted, moreover, by the negroes, who took to calling them "white slaves" as a mark of contempt for the ragged clothes to which they found themselves ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... corners, and the back of the hall became aggressive. The girl had sat with white, pained face, understanding little save that Lewis was talking nonsense and losing all grip on his hearers. In spite of herself she was contrasting this fiasco with the pithy words of Mr. Stocks. When the meeting became unruly she looked for some display of character, some proof of power. Mr. Stocks would have fiercely cowed the opposition, or at least ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... business," growled Mobray. "Confirmation came last night of Burgoyne's capitulation, and this means that General Gates's army will at once effect a juncture with Washington's, and the combined force will give us more than we bargained to fight. Burgoyne's fiasco makes it all the more necessary that we hold Philadelphia, and so, as our one chance, we must, ere the union is effected, capture the forts on the Delaware, that our warships and supplies may come to us, lest, when ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away the old wood, and cut the tree down to the living shoots. But, in the first place, the great system of English Toryism was far too large for narrow minds; the importation required time, and in France a tardy success is no better than a fiasco. So far, moreover, from adopting a policy of redemption, and looking for new forces where God puts them, these petty great folk took a dislike to any capacity that did not issue from their midst; and, lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... possible with Terry. He had lived about nine months among the "Colonels" when he made that outburst; and with no chance at any more strenuous excitement than our gymnastics gave us—save for our escape fiasco. I don't suppose Terry had ever lived so long with neither Love, Combat, nor Danger to employ his superabundant energies, and he was irritable. Neither Jeff nor I found it so wearing. I was so much interested intellectually that ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... writhed again in anguish as she thought of it. It must not be. She said to herself that it would turn her hair gray, that it would strike her with worse than paralysis. Surely her brilliant life was not to end in such a fiasco as this. For the first time for many years hot tears blinded those fine eyes that had hitherto looked with such careless scorn on ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... meeting of these two and Fate, with the help of Irish temper and the Pinckney conscience, was making a fine fiasco ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... fiasco of 1614, affairs went from bad to worse. Nobles and Huguenots contended between themselves, and both against the court favorites. As many as five distinct uprisings occurred. Marie de' Medici was forced to relinquish the government, but Louis ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... journal of the trip reads to a man accustomed to bush life like the fable of The Babes in the Wood; yet he managed to blunder through. On his second expedition he was amply provided, and most of his companions were experienced men, but it proved a miserable fiasco. ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... Ten years after the fiasco of his first canvases in the Salon came an invitation to England and the alluring project of a Dore gallery. The Dore Bible and Tennyson, with other works, had paved the way for a right royal reception. The streets of London, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... said Sourabaya, of course, and took it for granted that he would stay with one of the Tesmans. One of us even wondered what sort of reception he would get; for it was known that Julius Tesman was unreasonably bitter about the Tropical Belt Coal fiasco. But Davidson set us right. It was nothing of the kind. Heyst went to stay in Schomberg's hotel, going ashore in the hotel launch. Not that Schomberg would think of sending his launch alongside a mere trader like the Sissie. But she had been meeting a coastal mail-packet, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... reeled off twenty yards or more toward Brimfield's goal did Carmine discover that he had been cruelly deceived by the Miter Hill right end! Even Mr. Robey, who had been viewing the game rather grimly, had to swing on his heel to hide a smile at that fiasco. But, if the subs didn't do much in the way of attack, they at least held the enemy from crossing their line, and the weird contest at last came to a close with the one-sided score ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... themselves made this crime a race question. The success of the impending "revolution," for which he and his confreres had labored so long, depended in large measure upon the maintenance of their race prestige, which would be injured in the eyes of the world by such a fiasco. While they might yet win by sheer force, their cause would suffer in the court of morals, where they might stand convicted as pirates, instead of being applauded as patriots. Even the negroes would have the laugh on them,—the people whom they hoped to make approve and justify their own despoilment. ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... "After the bird fiasco," said Sir Lulworth, "the militant section made a demonstration of a more aggressive nature; they assembled in force on the opening day of the Royal Academy Exhibition and destroyed some three or four hundred of the pictures. This proved an ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... by missionaries or conservative white men cannot give what Young China needs. After throwing off the native superstitions of centuries, it would be a dismal fiasco to take on the European superstitions which have been discarded here by all progressive people. It is only where progressive Chinese themselves are in control that there is scope for the renaissance spirit of the ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... loud voice that there might be no question that our would-be terrorizers should hear me, for I was tiring of this nerve-racking fiasco. It had occurred to me, too, that the whole business was but a plan to frighten us back into the valley of death from which we had escaped, that we might be quickly disposed of by the ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in the course of a few days when no result was forthcoming; but they were all back again presently when the Maxim Gorky fiasco came along. The distinguished revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, as a sort of advance agent for Gorky, had already called upon Clemens to enlist his sympathy in their mission, which was to secure funds in the cause of Russian emancipation. Clemens gave his sympathy, and now promised his aid, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... power on the Continent which Germany has feared and has always been loath openly to quarrel with, is Russia. Through the setback she received in the Far East in 1905, her influence steadily decreased in the Balkans and the recent fiasco of Russian machinations during the Balkan war, has made her become a secondary factor for decades to come. Germany, through her keen Intelligence Department, foresaw the result of the Russo-Japanese conflict and immediately ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... pulled him, not only over the chalk line, but all over the stage. They played havoc with him. And then the manager had to go on and make a speech, besides, because the "Purse of Gold" aroused dissatisfaction. The fiasco was hideous. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... lightly. "Why, if he fails, my little scheme is a miserable fiasco! I shan't be able to marry you at all; that is, unless you ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... Column, its coming, its movements generally. We felt a little disappointed at the delays which the opposition it had encountered rendered unavoidable. But we were not despondent, nor hyper-critical—not yet. The bombardments might be written down a fiasco, and what after all did it matter whether relief came to-morrow, or not till the day following. Still, these delays upset plans and calculations. They upset bets and wagers, and the "bad losers" who villified both Briton and Boer with delightful impartiality. They upset diary-writers—prospective ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... or something appropriate like that," Bruce suggested, although there was too much truth in the jest for him to smile. This attempt to recover the sunken boat was literally that. If it was gone, he was done. His work, all that he had been through, was wasted effort; the whole an expensive fiasco proving that the ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Fetich feticxo. Fetichism feticxismo. Fetid malbonodora. Fetter kateno. Feud malpacego. Feudal feuxdala. Feudality feuxdaleco. Fever febro. Feverish febra. Few kelkaj, malmultaj. Fiance fiancxo. Fiance fiancxino. Fiasco fiasko. Fibre fibro. Fickle sxangxebla. Fictitious fiktiva. Fiddle violono. Fiddler violonisto. Fidelity fideleco. Fidget movadigxi. Fie! fi! Field kampo. Fierce kruelega. Fiery fervorega. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... was aware of an odd sense of intimacy. "Everything we have to be glad for now, Rudolph, is the rivet in grandfather's neck. It is rather a fiasco, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... The miserable fiasco of a delirious Revolution went careering through the giddy maze of treachery and madness until a frenzied wave of rapine and disorder swept all the noblewomen of the Imperial household into a barricaded fortress around ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... gang. Our town and treasure were thus left undefended for forty-eight hours, while a daring criminal and his associates mingled unsuspected with all classes. We have always regarded the present system—facetiously called police protection—as a farce. This latter fiasco will probably confirm the idea with the public at large. We, unlike a contemporary, have no morbid sympathy with crime—embroidered or otherwise; our wishes, as loyal subjects, are confined to a short shrift and a high gallows for all who dare ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... last act I will send you the whole, although you are so great a man of the world. Till then be of good cheer, and remember that if you are abused you have willed it so. I also rejoice in the FIASCO of my "Faust" overture, because in it I see a purifying and wholesome punishment for having published the work in despite of my better judgment; the same religious feeling I had in London when I was bespattered with mud on all sides. This ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... makes tragedy and comedy, and death is more joyful in Rostand than life in Maeterlinck. The same apparent contradiction holds good in the case of the drama of "L'Aiglon," now being performed with so much success. Although the hero is a weakling, the subject a fiasco, the end a premature death and a personal disillusionment, yet, in spite of this theme, which might have been chosen for its depressing qualities, the unconquerable paean of the praise of things, the ungovernable gaiety of the poet's song swells so high that at the end it seems to drown all the ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... would remember when you saw her so," said Mrs. Orton Beg. "It was just after that unhappy marriage fiasco. She had run away, and sought an asylum here, and when you were so struck by her appearance, I could not help thinking it was a thousand pities that you had not met ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... each other better. In November, 1906, Prince Buelow publicly thanked America for her attitude at Algeciras, implying that it was due to her representative's conciliatory and reconciliatory conduct that the Conference did not end in a fiasco. "This," said the Chancellor, "was the second great service to the world rendered by America; the other," he added, "being the bringing about of peace ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... regiment moved back to its old quarters near the fort, and remained there till ordered to Washington. In this unfortunate fiasco the regiment lost about two hundred men by desertion, from which depletion it never recovered. When ordered to the seat of war, I think there were not much above 700 men, and the regiment never saw the time when it had full ranks—that fact alone accounts for its not being ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... Farragut reported to the Navy Department his return to New Orleans. The Government, however, had taken warning by the fiasco of the previous season; and, far from urging the admiral on, now sought to impress him with the need for caution. As the great object of opening the Mississippi and obtaining control of it remained, and necessarily must remain, the first of the Government's aims in the Southwest, ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... that book, stood out in his mind, and he knew that never had there been such a fiasco as would ensue if the long lost and deeply mourned hero of it should return! His return in the spirit was so gloatingly related, so triumphantly averred, that his return in the flesh would ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... in those which appear to be in the process of active development or retrogression. Suffice to say, I was terribly cut up over the way my first serious affair of the heart turned out, and tried my best to hate myself for letting it worry me. Somehow I was able to attribute the fiasco to an inborn sense of shyness that has always made me faint-hearted, dilatory and unaggressive. No doubt if I had gone about it roughshod and fiery I could have played hob with the excellent jeweller's peace of mind, to say the least, but alas! I succeeded only in approaching at ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... listened through a half-hour of their singing, was not a little relieved to learn that she would not be called upon to fulfil her engagement, and the company of benefactors went home foiled but not too much disappointed for a good laugh over their fiasco before they parted. The affair set Hester thinking; and before morning she was ready with a scheme to which she begged her mother to gain ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... all! Some one was fooling him!—only he has managed—I'm convinced of that—to regain possession of the green box. As I impressed on you just after the fiasco, there was some one in one of the presses, and now it is evident that Caw captured that person after we had left. Unfortunately, it means that a fourth person has knowledge of the diamonds. Still, my friend, ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... time pirating, unsuccessfully, until one day in a sloop he attempted a raid on an Arab town at Boyn. This attempt proved a fiasco, and Williams was caught by the Arabs, cruelly tortured, and finally killed by a lance thrust. He was so loved and admired by the Madagascar natives that his friend and benefactor, King Dempaino, seized the Arab chief of Boyn ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... Kimberley held an unctuous telegraphic palaver, which may diplomatically be viewed as the beginning of the end. This humiliating end was hastened by the fiasco of Majuba on the 27th of February, though before it came to pass Sir Frederick Roberts was despatched with reinforcements to Natal. Sir Evelyn Wood assumed temporary command of the forces after Colley's death. Colonel Wood was asked by Lord Kimberley ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... strange dogs who cannot decide whether they wish to fight or be friends. For ten minutes, regardless of the jeers of the spectators and the proddings of their handlers, the great brown beasts rubbed heads as amicably as a yoke of oxen. Then, just as we had made up our minds that it was a fiasco and that there would be no bull-fight pictures, there was a sudden angry bellow, the two great heads came together with a thud like a pile-driver, and the fight was on. The next twenty minutes Hawkinson and I spent in alternately setting up his camera within ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... set to work with enthusiasm. But alas, after one trial of the completed work, which ended in confusion owing to the countless mistakes the boys had made in copying the score, he rewrote the whole composition. Fearing another fiasco from amateur copyists, the young composer wrote out all the parts himself. This took three months. With the help of a friend who advanced funds, the mass was performed at Saint Roch, and was well spoken of by ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... member of the War Cabinet and Secretary of the Labour Party, he seems to have resembled one of those twin salad bottles from which oil and vinegar can be dispensed alternately but not together. The attempt to combine the two functions could only end, as it began, in a double fiasco. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... of the army. The new Secretary of War, John Armstrong, ironically referred to Procter and Harrison as being always in terror of each other, the one actually flying from his supposed pursuer after his fiasco at Fort Stephenson, the other waiting only for the arrival of Croghan at Seneca to begin a camp conflagration and flight to ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... man of his own quality who had ridden with him from Edinburgh was George Livingstone, Lord Linlithgow's son, whose troop of Life Guards had been taken from him in the general re-arrangement of regiments that had followed the fiasco of Salisbury; and he had left his companion on the road to make for Lord Strathmore's house at Glamis. For a week of unwonted quiet, the last he was to know on earth, Dundee rested at Dudhope. Then his enemies found him. On the morning of the 26th Hamilton's ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... gone, and Otto knew the length and breadth of his miscarriage, and how he had done the contrary of all that he intended, he stood stupefied. A fiasco so complete and sweeping was laughable, even to himself; and he laughed aloud in his wrath. Upon this mood there followed the sharpest violence of remorse; and to that again, as he recalled his provocation, anger succeeded afresh. So he was tossed in spirit; now bewailing his inconsequence ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... succeeding numbers brought further brain-racking profundities, there was a large ebullition of disgust. Cotta began to write of complaints and cancelled subscriptions; and ere long it looked as if the Horen would prove a big fiasco. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... dead. I withdrew, delighted. They had come, of course, to assist at my failure. I had often observed to Julian how curiously lacking I was in dramatic instinct, and Julian had predicted to Eva and her aunt and uncle a glorious fiasco. They were furious at their hopes being so egregiously disappointed. Had they dreamt of a success they would have declined to be present. Indeed, half-way through Act Two, I saw them creeping away ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... and the history and progress of English science, discovery, and invention. To Professor S. F. Rigaud is due the credit for the most part of working out the crooked and entangled history of the Zachean fiasco, which has apparently depreciated the real value of these papers. Professor Rigaud's papers may be seen in the Royal Institution Journal, 1831, volume ii, pages 267-271, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, iii, 125, and in the Appx to Bradley's Works. Now to pick up a few dropped stitches. ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... wealthy colony of German Rappites, or Harmonists, who sold out New Harmony, Indiana, to old Robert Owen sixty years ago, (where Owen's grand fiasco occurred,) and removed to Economy, Pa., held their annual festival on the 15th of February in the usual solemn manner. Father Rapp is dead long ago, and of the thousand energetic religious and industrious enthusiasts ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... I was about sick of Dunn and Collins, and anyhow I was wondering where the devil Hutton's gang could have gone after their fiasco in the swamp. "They may have meant to join Hutton. But I found what the wolves left—and ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... of November 17, only an hour before the raid was to take place, it was announced that the wrong type of shells had been delivered to the artillery. Barely in time to avert a fiasco, the affair was cancelled. Two nights afterwards, when the wind luckily was again from the right direction, the raid was carried out. The Germans, of whom some were found in gas-helmets, had no inkling of our plan. B Company, though ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... had developed no special aptitude as an army commander. In this connection the important fact should he recalled that Generals Barnard and Meigs, officers of the highest training and distinction, at the request of General Grant, shortly after the fiasco of Bermuda Hundred, had been sent by the Washington authorities to make an investigation of General Butler's fitness for command in the field, and had with due deliberation reported that while "General Butler was a man of rare and great ability, he had not had ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... need therefore to be provided. As a matter of fact, not more than one person in twenty-five can repeat correctly even one of these songs that "everybody knows," and we may as well recognize this fact at the outset and thus prevent a probable fiasco. There are three ways of placing the songs ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... experiment in planning—and one almost inevitably shallow and presumptuous—of the long series that may be necessary before a clear light breaks upon the road humanity must follow. But we decline to be forced by this one intellectual fiasco towards the laissez faire of the Individualist and the Marxist, or to accept the Normal Social Life with its atmosphere of hens and cows and dung, its incessant toil, its servitude of women, and its endless repetitions as the only tolerable life conceivable for ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... when life presses hard on a man, and it pressed hard on Baxter now. Fate had played him a sorry trick. It had put him in a position where he had to choose between two courses, each as disagreeable as the other. He must either face a possible second fiasco like that of last night, or else he must abandon his post and cease to mount ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... strength. No power short of death could make these mad men wear the uniform of their service. They would not fight, except with their fellows, and it was for that reason the regiment had not gone to war, but stayed in a stockade, reasoning with the new troops. The autumn campaign had been a fiasco, but here were the Englishmen. All the regiment marched back to guard them, and the hairy enemy, armed with blow-pipes, rejoiced in the forest. Five of the crew had died, but there lined up on the Governor's verandah two-and-twenty men marked ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling |
