"Hobbletehoy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a quarter Gwen Gascoyne was at a particularly difficult and hobbledehoy stage of her development. She was tall for her age, and rather awkward in her manners, apt at present to be slapdash and independent, and decidedly lacking in "that repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere". Gwen could never keep still for five seconds, ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... space was more or less disfigured by stumps, dead and girdled trees, charred stubs, log-heaps, brush, and all the other unseemly accompaniments of the first eight or ten years of the existence of a new settlement. This period, in the history of a country, may be likened to the hobbledehoy condition in ourselves, when we have lost the graces of childhood, without having attained the finished ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... disappointing feature of this water wonderland that some of the "sea-gentlemen" are apt to hide, like hobbledehoy children, when visitors call. Indeed, a good many of them—such as the swimming-crabs, the burrowing-crabs, the sea-scorpions, and the eels—are night-feeders, and one cannot expect them to change their whole habits and customs to be seen of ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... train the silly, pretty woman drew otherwhither her hobbledehoy son, as indeed Claire Bulmer Townsend had aforetime drawn an armament of more mature and stolid members of my sex. I was always proud of my handsome mother, but without any aspirations, however theoretical, toward intimacy; and her periods of conscientious if vague ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... again too old; the eighth was a pale hobbledehoy; the ninth was a loathsome quack; the tenth had died that morning; the eleventh was busy; the twelfth was a veterinary surgeon; the thirteenth was an intern living at home with his widowed sister. Colorado? No, the widowed sister was positive he had never been there. The fourteenth was a handsome ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... that of others. But this in the case of a young man is surely right enough. His character is unformed. It is slowly evolving itself out of a chaos of doubt and disbelief. Before the growing insight and experience the diffidence recedes. A man rarely carries his shyness past the hobbledehoy period. Even if his own inward strength does not throw it off, the rubbings of the world generally smooth it down. You scarcely ever meet a really shy man—except in novels or on the stage, where, by the bye, he is much admired, especially by ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee protests that the very faults are symptomatic of excellence. He is like a sensitive mother, unable to deny that her awkward hobbledehoy of a son offends against the proprieties, but tacitly resolved to see proofs of virtues present or to come even in his clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like boasting. 'No author,' he says, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... first few perilous weeks throve amazingly. He ceased to be a pretty creature, pathetic in his helplessness, and grew into a gawky hobbledehoy, rough and rude ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant |
