"Muddled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and he returned with perfect confidence that he was not there. A search was now made in all the negro-houses in the neighborhood; but kicks, cuts, and other abuses failed to elicit any information of his whereabouts. At length Dunn began to feel the deadening effects of the liquor, and was so muddled that he could not stand up; then, taking possession of a bed in one of the houses, he stretched himself upon it in superlative contempt of every thing official, and almost simultaneously fell into a ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... Thurcae, Hysidorus, habundare, and even haspirafio; or in abhominor, where it bolstered up the derivation from homo: or it might change its place from one consonant to another, as in calchographus, cartha. Papias found it a great trouble, and indeed was quite muddled with it, placing hyppocrita, hippomanes among the h's, but hippopedes and several others under the i's, though without depriving them of initial h. In France, h between two short i's was considered to need support, and so we find michi, nichil, occurring quite regularly. The difficulty ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... but she was not without her virtues. She was faithful, and would slave herself to death for those she loved; but she was old for work, and the 'ache,' as she called it, had got into her bones. She had slept on the floor for two nights, and her poor old back was tired, and her head muddled with the confusion and her mistress's fretful fussiness. Biddy could have worked well if any one had told her exactly what to do, but between one order and another—between Mr. Cyril's impatience and Miss Mollie's incapable, ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... till I nearly screamed. I cannot think how I stood her all the other days. At last Charles and his father started for the station, and then came your telegram warning me that Aunt Juley was coming by that train, and Paul—oh, rather horrible—said that I had muddled ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... mile distant, having a long ditch and a broken-down fence as a foreground, there rose against the muddled-gray sky, a huge dust-heap of a dirty-black color—being, in fact, one of those immense mounds of cinders, ashes, and other emptyings from dust-holes and bins, which have conferred celebrity on certain suburban neighborhoods of a great city. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the ceiling above her head, he invited her confidence by a few perfectly chosen expressions of comprehension and sympathy. The acuteness and activity of his mental processes delighted her while he questioned her. After the slovenly methods of Madame, after the loose reasoning and the muddled thinking of all the women she met in the course of her work, there was a positive pleasure in following the exactness and inflexibility of his logic. His reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or tangled skeins to ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... old, old story, the story of every war that England had gone into and "muddled through" somehow; but with two differences. Her soldiers had never had to fight an enemy in the skies before, and—there was no time now to straighten out the muddle, even if every able-bodied man in the United Kingdom had been trained ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... Mississippi River water in the big bend below Natchez," said I, fascinated, gazing at the be-muddled drip. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... see, is said of the temple of the heart; but somehow things went rather cross-cut that evening—they got muddled in my head. It seemed as if I was the door-keeper of my shop, and at the same time as if my shop, spreading out and dimly vanishing in the sacred gloom, was the temple of the Holy Ghost, out of which I had to keep the sin. And with the thought, a great ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... are not. But you can't bring yourself down to the world of compromises, which is the world of action. You have lost the practical touch. You muddled your fight with Stocks because you couldn't get out of touch with your own little world in practice, however you might manage it in theory. You can't be single-hearted. Twenty impulses are always pulling ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... man, who was getting muddled by his wife's eloquence,' how am I to feed her? they won't sell me fodder ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... voyage, and from him, after an hour's cross-questioning, La Pommeraye at last elicited the truth. The remembrance of the horrors through which he had passed, and his terror of De Roberval's wrath if it were discovered that he had related the story of the desertion of Marguerite, seemed to have muddled the poor fellow's wits, and his tale was wild and incoherent. But he stuck manfully to his assertion that he had ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... a far corner struck up "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here!" which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the lights suddenly went out; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... lasting. Hitherto, however, I had found pleasure only in the new ideas which I discovered to arise from that conviction, and in the forming of brilliant plans for a moral, active future, while all the time my life had been continuing along its old petty, muddled, pleasure-seeking course, and the same virtuous thoughts which I and my adored friend Dimitri ("my own marvellous Mitia," as I used to call him to myself in a whisper) had been wont to exchange with one ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing. We believed it, yet could not believe it.... I came out of a muddled stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt were torn open, and Sanderson's ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... There was doubtless in her mind considerable confusion on the subject, for she did not know whether Lord Chiltern or Mr. Finn was the suitor whom she most feared,—and she was aware, after a sort of muddled fashion, that the claims of these two wicked young men were antagonistic to each other. But they were both regarded by her as emanations from the same source of iniquity, and, therefore, without going deeply into the ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken mother sate so calmly—not to drop from the seat, which would have been worse than absurd of me. Well, all this has blackened Rome to me. I can't think about the Caesars in the old strain of thought; the antique words get muddled and blurred with warm dashes of modern, every-day tears and fresh grave-clay. Rome is spoiled to me—there's the truth. Still, one lives through one's associations when not too strong, and I have arrived ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... intolerant, and not many-sided. That was where (partly where) she fell foul of her children, who saw sharply and clearly all around things and gave to each side its value. They knew Mrs. Hilary to be a muddled bigot, whose mind was stuffed with concrete instances and insusceptible of abstract reason. If anyone had asked her what she knew of psycho-analysis, she would have replied, in effect, that she knew Rosalind, and that was enough, more than enough, of psycho-analysis ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... on through the northern part of the lower peninsula of Michigan, and I must say, that although my business affairs were considerably muddled, I never made a more enjoyable trip than this. After my separation with Flo. I had often declared that I would never marry again; and I now saw where I might have made a serious mistake, had I adhered to that declaration. With a wife full of hope, and a determination ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... vain to their primary state. We must watch the evolution and revelation of the secret hid in natural life, as it moves through the ascending cycles of the biological kingdom. The idea of evolution, when it is not muddled, is synthetic—not analytic; it explains the simplest in the light of the complex, the beginning in the light of the end, and not vice versa. In a word, it follows the ways of nature, the footsteps of fact, instead of inventing a wilful backward path of its own. And nature explains ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... cleared his throat. "Be that as it may, basic changes were made in Marxist teachings to fit into Stalin's and later Khrushchev's new concepts of the worker's State. And the Soviet Union muddled through, as the British have it. Today, the Soviet Complex is as powerful as ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... she done it? Why had she come at all? Why had she mixed and muddled in this sordid tangle which was none of her bright business? And why—chief of all whys—had she rashly and sentimentally offered to give up her holidays at home for the futile endeavor to make Christmas merry for these ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Though he never was taught anything he learnt a great deal in the pothouses and the taverns. And he never forgot anything. Why if he were alive now and sitting at this table he could tell you stories until to-morrow. He used to tell me so many that they quite muddled my head and even now I can't tell the tail of one from the head of the other. That's ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... business, I could make nothing of them; my answers never agreed with the key, but I fully agreed with the poor man who said so despairingly, 'Wat wi' faeth, and wat wi' the earth goin' round the sun, and wat wi' the railways all a whuzzin' and a buzzin', I'm clean muddled, confoozled, and bet!' and flinging the book out of sight, I gave myself up to the luxury ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... said, fumbling nervously all over his clothes, "I've given it to the cabman. Of all the infernal idiocy! I knew I should. I had a presentiment that I should get it muddled up with my other money and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... all day; the frozen ground was slippery as an icepond. She had not been out of the house for weeks past, and the day had so flurried her that she felt muddled and stupid—felt that Rosa had pushed her out of the house and her man was running away ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... hands behind his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to drive him forth ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the plebs in the towns annexed, and their entering in varying degrees upon the rights the plebs had won at Rome. She went forward taking things as they came, and making what arrangements seemed most feasible in each case. She made no plans in advance; but muddled trough like an Englishman. She had no Greek or French turn for thinking things out beforehand; her empire grew, in the main, like the British, upon a subconscious impulse to expand. She conquered Italy because she ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... I thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn't, like the outraged wife of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it epochally shut after me. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... While here and there a policeman, stamping To keep himself warm or sedately tramping Hither and thither, paced his beat; Or peered where out of the blizzard's welter Some wretched being had crept to shelter, And now, drenched through by the sleet, a muddled Blur of a man and his ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... sullen and scowling-faced. In the latter case, he would come into the office where Denison worked (he had left the schooner of which he was supercargo, and was now "overseering" Solo-Solo) and try to grasp the muddled condition of his financial affairs. Then, with much variegated language, he would stride away, cursing the servants and the place and everything in general, mount his horse, and ride off again to the society of the loafers, ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... as well see it. There's stuff in that girl. I don't despair of her yet. She has a head for business. I wouldn't have your dear little head muddled with business, but your daughter's a different person. She has nothing whatever to live on except what I allow her, and unless she is to starve she has got ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... true; yet consider my circumstances—my honour was engaged, and I did not know how to get out. Besides, I was for five years often drunk, always muddled; they carried me from tavern to tavern, to ale-houses and brandy-shops, and brought me acquainted with such strange dogs. "There goes the prettiest fellow in the world," says one, "for managing a jury: make him yours. There's another can pick you ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... av the siction wuz Finnigin; Whiniver the kyars got offen the thrack, An' muddled up things t' th' divil an' back, Finnigin writ it to Flannigan, Afther the wrick wuz all on ag'in; That is, this Finnigin ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... while the drunkard is an active instrument of annoyance and peril. There are probably fewer who sink into an absolutely beastly condition by intemperance in food than by intemperance in drink; but of persons who do not expose themselves to open scandal, those whose brains are muddled, whose sensibilities are coarsened, and whose working power is impaired by over-eating, are more numerous than those in whom similar effects are produced by over-free indulgence in intoxicating drinks. Intemperance in amusements, also, is not uncommon, and would ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Renaissance were ready to give this old mediaeval epic stuff a definitive and durable artistic shape, there came to the hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers, and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote, and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis of Gaul and all ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... results were in the main involuntary; but it is only just to add that Smart was not above assisting nature to take her course. Thus, some years before the opening of the story, he had deliberately buried one poor lady alive in a cave containing sulphide of mercury. Never ask me why. I am as muddled by this as I am over his further conduct in leaving with the corpse every possible clue in the way of letters and ciphers that could bring his guilt home to him. In any ordinary novel he would have been convicted in a few chapters; but A Tail ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... standing in front of him. His head was throbbing with the knock-down blow he had received, and he had not yet had time to gather the exact meaning of his sensations. The words Palmer Billy used suggested journeying, and somewhere in the muddled confusion of his mind there was a decided impulse ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... after he had dealt for some time. "Please place your money on the cards or I may get muddled ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... around her with a tape measure noting the figures down on a small piece of paper which was then sent to the maker, who presently returned it with an angry letter stating that those proportions were altogether impossible in any woman. Apparently Rose had muddled them all up; and it was a long time before the figure was finished and sent to the Pavilion in a long basket to take on itself the robes and the hieratic pose of the Empress. Later, it wore with the same patience the marvellous hat of the "Girl in ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... for the prisoners is carried so far, in attempting to reform, as to lead the prisoners to believe that they are injured persons instead of transgressors, which is, in our opinion, wrong, and has a bad tendency." Is not the writer here a little muddled? or would he hold up these reformers as so absurd a set as to think of reforming men by making them believe they are good already and really sinned against? Indeed, would not the labors of such men of straw be bad? True, the writer pretends to found his objections to ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... she had collapsed altogether. All the time before, her hot childish heart had been telling her that her father could not really be so cruel, that he did not really mean to send her away among strangers, away from dear, muddled old Misrule and all her sisters and brothers; he was only saying it to frighten her, she kept saying to herself, and she would show him she was not ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... very good? The 'attack' (to speak learnedly) was so plucky and odd. I have thought of it repeatedly since. I have just made a delightful dinner by myself in the Cafe Felix, where I am an old established beggar, and am just smoking a cigar over my coffee. I came last night from Autun, and I am muddled about my plans. The world is such a dance! - Ever your ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it, at only fifteen cents a glass. The best of our company tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. The poor mortal closed his "bargain" with the dramseller, and what did he get? A hardened conscience, a ruined home, a diseased body, a muddled brain, a heartbroken wife, wretched children, disappointed friends, triumphant enemies, days of remorse, nights of anguish, an unwept deathbed, an unhonored grave. And only to think that he is only one of many thousands! "What fools these ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of each was a cluster of lingering men and women, merry or disputatious. Mid-Easter was inviting repose and festivity; to-morrow would see culmination of riot, and after that it would only depend upon pecuniary resources how long the muddled interval between holiday and renewed ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... act of cutting the plum tree down. Ah! let fools believe if they could that she was angry with the boy! She had never felt anger less or pride more. While others talked and argued, shilly-shallied, made love, muddled and made mistakes, her grandson, the man of the race that always ruled, had cut the knot for himself, without hesitation and without compunction, without consulting anyone or asking anyone's leave. That was the way the de Tracys had always ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... had been muddled; and an attempt to make a merchant of him having fallen through, he found himself, on his father's death, aged eighteen, 'without education, profession, or employment,' and his whole fortune, during his mother's life, consisting of a copyhold farm of 20 acres, producing ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... and the others followed. Those of the crew who had raised their muddled heads to see what the trouble was, laid them down again with grunts of disappointment. Alwin was left ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... out some broken excuses, to which I very impatiently listened; and so thoroughly muddled did his brain appear, that he either could not or would not comprehend the possibility of Mrs. Allerton and her children being turned out of house and home, as he expressed it, and over and over again asked me if nothing could yet be done to prevent it. I was completely ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... said the sergeant. "Things look quite muddled up to me. Now turn a little and look yonder, out ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... of all these things when he is sober. He drinks to drown the past and repentance. He doesn't know that a healthy-minded man doesn't waste time in repenting. He doesn't know how easy it is to reform, and is too weak-willed to try. He gets a muddled idea that the past can't be mended. He finds it easy to get drink and borrow money on the strength of his next quarter's allowance, so he soon gets a quarter or two behind, and sometimes gets into ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... Mattresse Aimable's muddled mind could not get hold of this new Philip. For years she had thought him a monster, and here he was, a great and valiant gentleman to the world. He had done a thing that Jean would rather have cut off his hand—both hands—than do, and yet here he was, an admiral, a prince, and a sovereign ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... frockcoat and a brown top-hat, but I thought it best to let her get a strangle-hold on the intricacies of the situation as quickly as possible. If I had tried to explain the affair without the aid of illustrations I should have talked all day and left her muddled up as to who was going to marry whom, ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... crystal, bottomed with gravel like a fountain, shaped like a great crescent whose curves were haunted of forest trees grim and awesome with the solemnity of the primeval? That its exact location was known to Tawabinisay alone, that the trail to it was purposely blinded and muddled with the crossing of many little ponds, that the route was laborious—all those things, along with the minor details so dear to winter fire-chats, were matters of notoriety. Probably more expeditions to Kawagama have been planned—in February—than would fill a volume with an account of anticipated ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... don't say so! What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers, muddled all the men of business, and ruined most of the artists: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you're a genius, master of masters, ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... love of truth by the simple fact that he tacitly passes over the second. And with regard to the subject of the fourth chapter—marriage, republicanism, and capital punishment—Strauss himself seems to have been aware that they could only have been muddled and obscured by being associated with the Darwinian theory expounded in the third chapter; for he carefully avoids all reference to this theory when discussing them. But the question, "Are we still Christians?" destroys ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... protest was no longer muddled, but defined. "You mustn't do that," he said, with authority. "Suppose a man is riding a runaway horse and he loses his nerve and throws himself off and is killed—is that as good a way as if he sat tight and fought hard until the ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... he went on to say, "I wouldn't want to have anybody hear what I'm going to tell you now. It certainly is a shame how I've muddled this thing up, and I guess I deserve all I'm getting in the shape of worry. It's going to be a lesson to me, I give you ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... is. He's got all muddled up in some theological tangle. Knox fellows come over here and they argue all night sometimes, and Mac doesn't seem to know where he's at in regard to the Bible." John laughed easily. "Never mind, Betsey, I'm acting physician to ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... of their absence. They had slipped away and left me with a prisoner that I didn't know what to do with; with an inquiry by the American Department of State hanging over me; with Torrence to reckon with, and, in general, a muddled head that only a vast number of lucid explanations could restore ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... the lieutenant, in a loud voice, explaining to the men outside the wood, that they were to suppose the bridge on the river below was held by the enemy. Now they were to march to the attack in such and such a manner. The lieutenant had no gift of expression. The orderly, listening from habit, got muddled. And when the lieutenant began it all again he ceased to hear. He knew he must go. He stood up. It surprised him that the leaves were glittering in the sun, and the chips of wood reflecting white from the ground. For him a change had come over the world. But for the ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... think people that talk over their victuals are like to say anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with strong drink ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... pretend to believe a thing at which his reason revolted. We are simplifying life—simplifying truth. The man who serves his fellowmen best is he who simplifies. The learned man used to be the one who muddled things, who scrambled thought, who took reason away, and instead, thrust upon us faith, with a threat of punishment if we did not accept it, and an offer ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... from the far side of the court black and white imps discharged against me ineffectual arrows. The picture appears arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock analysed the dream of Alan Armadale. The summer-house and court were muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland; the imps conveyed from Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress; the bearded and robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it figured in the hand of Samuel ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deserting Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that the most crowded households often contain the loneliest nurseries, and that the rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered infancy; but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found herself feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to her charged with ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... score on his classmates on the fly-leaf of one of his books. Jimmy was a far harsher judge than the teacher. He marked them either wrong or right; he gave no credit for trying, or for their stumbling efforts to express their muddled ideas and incomplete grasp. He found their games fun at first, but quickly grew bored. When he tried to introduce a note of strategy they ignored him because they did not understand. They made rules as they went along and changed them as they saw fit. Then, instead of complying with ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... everything had been delightful, the other that it had all been very stupid, and the expression made even more difference than the complexion, in one so fair, fresh, and rosy, in the other so sallow and muddled. Jessie looked so sweet and bright, that when she had gone Miss Ogilvie could not help exclaiming, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... upon this unsafe topic, are Lord Alvanley's description of a man who "muddled away his fortune in paying his tradesmen's bills"; Lord Orford's definition of timber, "an excrescence on the face of the earth, placed there by Providence for the payment of debts"; and Pelham's argument, that it is respectable to be arrested, because it shows that the ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... previously, had declared it to be a culpable and idiotic measure. There were long discussions concerning the right of a German prince to occupy the throne of Spain; as the question gradually became more and more intricate and muddled it seemed as if everyone must be wrong, no one right; so that it was impossible to tell from which side the provocation came, and the only part of the entire business that was clear to the eyes of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... view, had gone first in search of Smallbones, but had found him and the Ancient so deeply engaged in potations from the liberal supply of the Emperor to all English guests, that there was no getting him apart, and he was too much muddled to comprehend if he could ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... straightened and tried to pull his muddled wits out of the fog that was fast enveloping them. Dimly he sensed the importance of this discovery which Joe had forced upon him. In flashes of normalcy he knew that he must see all he could of their moonshine operations. ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... painting of this picture a certain candour amounting to stupidity—an uncertainty—a naive, groping sort of brush work. It seemed to be technically, almost deliberately, muddled. ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... Presbyterian, Independent, and Sectary. How could an Army burning with these notions bind itself to be the silent servant of a Parliament whose behaviour hitherto, on the religious question generally, and on the political question very often, had been so muddled and fatuous? Better surely for the Army to raise its own political flag and coerce Parliament into the right way! That this had not been done had been owing partly to the unwillingness of Cromwell, Ireton, and the other chiefs to take the responsibility all at once of heading a movement ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... nose is over the registers half the time in winter to see if any gas is escaping from the furnace. And as to this Gretchen, it is possible there was some woman with him on the ship, or in New York, and he may be a little muddled there. You can inquire at the ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... impulsive, as daring, as reckless, as inconstant, as improvident of the morrow, as a savage or a child, he would not have accomplished the exploration of half a continent. Men who weigh consequences are not of the stuff to win empires. Had Radisson haggled as to the means, he would have missed or muddled the end. He went ahead; and when the way did not open, he went round, or crawled over, or carved his ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... once more. I had always wanted to go to that great port of the Mediterranean, where one has new colors and strange customs, and where the people sing when they talk. But how extraordinary to have come to Paris—and what a trip lay before us. I was much muddled about the whole thing. Probably I was to be deported. But why from Marseilles? Where was Marseilles anyway? I was probably all wrong about its location. Who cared, after all? At least we were leaving the pointings and the sneers and the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... full kirtle of gray wool, falling to my ankles, and a white apron. There was a white blouse with a wide, turned-back collar, and a scarlet bodice, laced with black cords over a green tongue. I was soon in such a desperate tangle over these divers garments, so utterly muddled as to which to put on first, and which side forward, and which end up, and where and how by the grace of God to fasten them, that M. Etienne, with roars of laughter, came unsteadily to my aid. He insisted on stuffing the whole ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... met together by accident, as the others had done, on nearing the fort, and would have been in sooner, had not Big Waller been obliged to take charge of poor Bertram, who, owing to the suddenness and violence of all these recent events in savage life, had got into a muddled condition of mind that rendered him peculiarly helpless. But they knew nothing of March Marston—they had expected to find ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... guest on one of these occasions, and I met him for the first time then. Emerson was—not to speak disrespectfully—in a much muddled state of his distinguished mind, on Andover Hill. His blazing seer's gaze took us all in, politely; it burned straight on, with its own philosophic fire; but it wore, at ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... of the misgivings that not infrequently had troubled him. His comrade, he believed, really had been a famous mineralogist, but now he was a frail and broken man with a half-muddled brain who could not be trusted to keep the fire going beneath the pots while he cooked a meal. He was also a prey to maudlin fancies, and it seemed quite possible that the mine was no more than a creation of his disordered imagination. There were only two things that ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... tentacles north and south and east and west, of the mushroom houses which arose without order or system, of the changing system of education, the changing ideas towards parents—everything spasmodic, growing, muddled. Similarly, Mr. E.M. Forster, in Howard's End, shows the old house so dear to the heart of Mrs. Wilcox, as the symbol of permanence in an unfixed society which is homeless, restless, changing. Even if we look ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... had risen above them in fortune. He had reached that period of drunkenness, and it took a vast quantity of stout liquor to bring him up to it, where his voice began to grow hoarse, his ready tongue to trip, his brain to be most completely muddled, and his legs to be most unreliable instruments of locomotion. The men about the table nodded and winked to each ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... life. First, sweetly innocent, delicately palatable, its blush like a maiden of sixteen; then glowing with a riper development, more passionate in hue, a siren vintage; finally, thin, waning and watery, with only memories of the deeper, rosy-hued days. Now here, my good, but muddled friend, is your youthful maiden!" Holding toward the lamp a glass, clear as crystal, with luster like a gem. "Dancing eyes; a figure upright as a reed; the bearing of a nymph; the soul of a water lily before it has opened its leaves to the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... anything you like," smiled Lorna. "Rachel gets very muddled about me. I've such a sneaking weakness for Naples that I believe she thinks I'm an Italian at heart. That's a crime Rachel absolutely can't forgive. 'Foreign' is the last word ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... rectory children' of the early chapters, their vague father, and their muddled but affectionate home life, are things of pure ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... and so patient that I can never thank him sufficiently—or you, Mr. Garfield, for discovering him. I feel quite myself again. And it was all so sudden. At first, the treatment gave me no relief, my brain seemed so muddled, but quite suddenly one day I found that I could recollect the past—all that happened to me on that terrible night. And in three days the Professor announced that I ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... muddled my way along with the crowd, among which there were very long faces, very short faces, and faces from which nothing could be extracted—the comic faces always kept behind! As a matter of policy I got behind the man who had the longest and most quizzical face; for he gave out ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... you, little one!" he exclaimed, as soon as he recognized Felicite. "I wanted to see you; your affairs are getting muddled!" ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... century, was becoming more and more the illegitimate offspring of immaturity in thought and feeling. We were the slaves of our newspapers; each morning a library was thrown on our doorstep. But what a jumbled, inconsequent, muddled-up library! It was the best that could be made in such a hurry, and it satisfied most of us, though I believe there were conservative people who opened it only to read the marriage and the death notices. The latter came ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... With the muddled feeling of sleep still upon him he unlocked his own door and went through to the bathroom, where he hastily washed his face in cold water. Then as he dried it with a bath-towel he took a quick survey of the room. All was exactly ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... of the liquor, doubtless adulterated, mounted to my head. As I had gulped it down at a breath, drunkenness seized me promptly; I felt that I was becoming muddled, then I experienced a lucid moment, then confusion followed. Then consciousness left me, I leaned my elbows on the table and ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... laugh at the memory, until I think how silvery were these three wine-muddled old heads, and then I feel "the pity, oh, the pity ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... the house on sporting or other expeditions. He was when at home silent and queer, refusing to make my mother's game at piquet of evenings, but plunging into all sorts of musty old books, with which he muddled his brains; more at ease laughing and chatting with the pipers and maids in the servants' hall, than with the gentry in the drawing-room; always cutting jibes and jokes at Mrs. Barry, at which she (who was rather a slow woman at repartee) ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... himself mad drunk indeed if he thought he could contest a point with her. Being known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson, some water-side heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest, harboured muddled notions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she was named after, or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster. But, Abbey was only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had been christened at Limehouse Church, some ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... their time and their powers to the study of social diplomacy. It is reserved for people intellectually very high or very low in the scale to lead a really simple life. The average mind of the world is terribly muddled on most points, and altogether beside itself as regards its individual existence; for a union of much imagination, unbounded vanity, and unfathomable ignorance can never take the place of an intellect, while such a combination cannot fail to ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... upon, the girl who answered to the name of MacLauren stood up. The lecture under discussion was concerned with a matter called perpetuation of type. Under fire of questions it developed that the pupil in hand was sadly muddled ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... have it your own way," said the Rat. He was getting rather muddled about it himself, and presently he retired into a corner, where he could be heard muttering, "Learn 'em, teach 'em, teach 'em, learn 'em!" till the Badger told him rather sharply ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... his bare legs as he awkwardly clambered into the rear seat beside the sex-muddled creature in a boy's suit and a girl's hat. Miss Juliana and the godly Merle in the front seat had very definitely drawn aloof from the outcasts. They chatted on matters at large in the most polite and social ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... door said, How do you do, my children? What are you doing here?' 'Official business, godmother.' 'Oho!' says this wicked Fairy. '- Tape!' And then the business all went wrong, whatever it was, and the servants' heads became so addled and muddled that they thought they ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... technically. And—oh, yes! they give you originals—frightful originals, like nothing you've ever had before; and they put a little note at the top of the page telling you to do them first, and you get so muddled trying to think fast that you can't think at all. I know a girl who spent all the two hours trying to think out an original, and just as she got ready to write it down the bell rang and she had to hand ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... In spite of his muddled state the fellow appeared to possess a sense of direction, for the boy soon found that he had come upon a narrow path leading along the cliff at a safe ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... silly, muddled-brained, flat-headed idiot!" yelled Dyke, as he raced along over the plain, his steed sending the red sand flying at every spurn of its hoofs as it stretched itself out. "I'll be there first, and cut him off. You can't do it—you can't ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... to-morrow.' And he kept it. 'You have given it to the Church,' he declared. I said to him: 'You're a scoundrel,' I said. 'No,' said he, 'I'm not a scoundrel, but I'm broad-minded.' But that wasn't he, that was some one else. I've muddled him with some one else ... without noticing it. Come, another glass and that's enough. Take away the bottle, Ivan. I've been telling lies. Why didn't you stop me, Ivan, and tell me ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was, indeed, a confused and muddled world. Things moved crazily, depending wholly upon blind chance. One works steadily, even for years, bending all his energies to one single point, and what is the result? Nothing! Another turns the knob of a door, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... and nodded. He signaled with his eyes that Winter was to make Evelyn Forbes understand that she had just escaped being the victim of an extraordinary outrage. Muddled as his thoughts were, he grasped the essential fact that Scotland Yard was better posted in the secret history of the Innesmore Mansions crime than he had given the department credit for before the dramatic ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... making their way into the hall, and after Joseph had held a dispute with the man who had shown them into their place, and who had muddled the tickets and their numbers, they settled ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... his own country and constant association with the Burmese and Japanese had blended and confused the original belief that he had learnt in far-away Canton. To this basis was added the grossest form of superstition, and the wildest fancies of a brain muddled with the fumes of opium, but the one thing clear to him was, that a Joss, though an immortal being, was able to ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... 'Admiration'!" shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf," and they sailed off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... insisting on the high probability of the story for the defence, though that, too, was dependent in important details upon the prisoner's mere private statements to his counsel. The jury, being by this time sufficiently muddled by his impartiality, were dismissed, with the exhortation to allow due weight to every fact and probability in determining their ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... this bunch from the water hole. Perhaps the wind and sand storms had muddled the tracks, but Drew still had faith in the Pima. And Rennie's party had followed with the knowledge of the Mexican's bolt hole to the south. Why, right now they could have circled ahead—could be waiting for Kitchell again as they had at the pass. An attack could give him a thin chance of ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... really declared between France and Britain and fighting took place in Europe as well as in America. And in America things went ill for the British. Defeats and disasters followed each other, things were muddled and went wrong continually. For truth to tell the British had no great leader either in England or in America, while the French had the Marquess Montcalm, one of the best soldiers in the ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... some five years ago and was now alone in the world, for his three children had died in their infancy. Slyme's reference to drink had roused Philpot's indignation; he felt that it was directed against himself. The muddled condition of his brain did not permit him to take up the cudgels in his own behalf, but he knew that although Owen was a tee-totaller himself, he ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... is muddled and murky, But the course she's resolved to pursue Is true to her mind, which we constantly find A l'Enver(s) et ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... Perplexed, almost muddled, Wayne strove in vain to find a reason for the elimination of the matter that had interrupted his cruise and brought him to Rose-Cross, the maddest yachtsman on the Atlantic. Why should Guilford forbid the topic as though its discussion were ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... general election is that the party organisations—obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious funds—appoint about 1,200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half of these ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... said Frances, 'but I'm afraid I'm getting rather muddled. Your grandfather—what was ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... you I did everything. I was a waitress, and a very bad one. I broke plates. I muddled orders. Finally I was very rude to a customer and I went on to try something else. I forget what came next. I think it was the stage. I travelled for a year with a touring company. That was hard work, too, but I liked it. After that ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... tattoo, and in the absorbing nature of his occupation he never thought of Nevins' charge except as something to be attended to later, and not until guard-mount of another day, when his head was muddled with the potations of an all-night session and the befogging cocktails of the morning, did Mr. Gleason approach the engineer upon the subject, and then ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... a light entered my muddled outlook because of this astonishing information that accounted for much I had not been able to reconcile with her isolated life. From the moment she had mimicked the cook I had been kept in a state of wonderment. I had felt her superiority; I had marveled ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris |
