"Clumsiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... between a travelling trunk, a Gladstone bag, and a hatbox. About L600 went in a tobacco tin in a dressing-bag. L10 in gold and a number of L5 notes the stout man pocketed. Occasionally he objurgated Mr. Ledbetter's clumsiness, and urged him to hurry, and several times he appealed to ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... relations all tried to dissuade him. "Be wise," said they, "and remain where you are safe, seeing that no business summons you from the lake. Few of our kindred have had dealings with the human race without suffering from their curiosity or clumsiness; and, do them what good you may, in the long run you will reap nothing but ingratitude. From how many waters have they not already banished us? Wherefore let well alone, and stay ...
— Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... spite of his clumsiness the chemist is actually making things that he wants and cannot get elsewhere. The calcium carbide that he manufactures from inorganic material serves as the raw material for producing all sorts of organic compounds. The electric furnace was first employed on a large ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... seeming clumsiness of his bulk, was a redoubtable swimmer; and almost before Barnes had decided clearly on his proper course of action those heavy, grunting snorts and vast expulsions of breath were at his ear. Enormously loud they sounded, shot thus close along ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... affection, which would have been most delightful to behold in infants, and which, in men so old, was inexpressibly touching: Nicholas could observe that the last old gentleman was something stouter than his brother; this, and a slight additional shade of clumsiness in his gait and stature, formed the only perceptible difference between them. Nobody could have ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places. There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... American standards the force was well trained. But the poor Indians and half-breeds that made up its bulk were so overwhelmed with the solemnity of the extraordinary occasion that they were even more ox-like in their clumsiness and nearer frightened apes in demeanor than in their native jungles. The quaking fear of making a mis-step caused them to keep their eyes riveted on the lips of our compatriot, from which, instead of the words of wrath ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... 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
... exclaimed John, very 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 ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... holyday dresses out of the guard-house, which, when put on, had more the appearance of being intended for the stage than the field of battle. Their quilted petticoats, sattin boots, and their fans, had a mixture of clumsiness and effeminacy that ill ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... to turn her in the stall, and she all but fell down. He felt a little surprise at her clumsiness, but did not grasp its meaning until he led her to the door, where she stepped painfully over the low door-sill and all but fell again. He led her a step or two further, and she went almost to ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... 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 ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... have been halfway to the lake when a man emerged from the same window of the drawing-room, ran to the terrace steps, stumbled down them so awkwardly that he nearly fell, and swore at his own clumsiness in so doing. He negotiated the next flight more carefully, but quickened his pace again into a run when he reached the open. The girl's figure was hardly visible, but he knew she was there, and the distance between pursued and ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... few seconds no sound was heard save the muffled thunder of the hoofs, at which the nearest buffaloes looked up with startled inquiry in their gaze. Another moment, and the danger was appreciated. The mighty host went off with pig-like clumsiness—tails up and manes tossing. Quickly the pace changed to desperate agility as the pursuing savages, unable to restrain themselves, relieved their feelings with ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... Green. "Hold in!" "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
... 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 matrix, it had about the size ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... twenty-five years in the army, had saved a small sum of money, and bought himself a few acres of land a mile and a half from Moscow. He could scarcely read and write; but in spite of his external clumsiness and coarseness, he was shrewd and cunning, and even, on occasion, capable of sharp practice, like many Little Russians. He was a fearful egoist, obstinate as an ox, and in general exceedingly impolite, especially with ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... all is!" said Mrs. Malcolm. But she was wondering why men are so queer with their wives—resent so much the slightest social clumsiness on their part, while in other women—provided the offense is not too great—it merely amuses them. Even the guarded manners of Sir John had been disturbed. For a moment he had been very angry with the shadow that bore his name; one could tell by the swift glance he had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... heavily, with the blind clambering motions of an amphibious beast, clumsy. Again the moon shone with faint luminosity on his white wet figure, on the stooping back and the rounded loins. But it looked defeated now, his body, it clambered and fell with slow clumsiness. He was breathing hoarsely too, like an animal that is suffering. He sat slack and motionless in the boat, his head blunt and blind like a seal's, his whole appearance inhuman, unknowing. Gudrun shuddered as she mechanically followed his boat. Birkin rowed ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... susceptibility of magnetic influences. I insert some account of this biography at the request of many who have been interested by slight references to it. The book, a thick and heavy volume, written with true German patience, some would say clumsiness, has not, probably, and may not be translated into other languages. As to my own mental position on these subjects it may be briefly expressed by a dialogue between several persons who honor me with a portion of friendly confidence and of criticism, and myself expressed ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... soft, round breasts, strangely distinct in outline to his fingers as he strained the tight jacket over them, rose and fell stormily; in a troubled flash of memory he seemed to be handling some throbbing, shot bird. His own clumsiness and strange, heady elation he attributed to the shock of the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... serious. We must admit that, on the whole, private business has been managed much better than public business, both in this country and abroad. To a considerable extent, however, the inefficiency of municipal and state undertakings has been due to the clumsiness and corruption of political systems, and can be cured by political reform. That public affairs can be managed as successfully as private business has been demonstrated on many occasions. The parcel post offers a much more economical ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... 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 outcast poet to die amid the trappings of vulgar respectability; ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... except railways and telegraphs, which have become a military and political necessity, growing out of the progress of neighboring powers—while many of their fabrics are still made by hand, and their mints, presses, and fire-engines are of almost primeval clumsiness, the Russians eagerly grasp at all novelties, and are wonderfully quick in the comprehension of their uses and advantages. A similar comparison might be made in reference to the freedom of internal trade, and the encouragement given to every industrial pursuit among the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... village. Nelson was a great fighter; and it was therefore considered dangerous to quarrel with him. Stephenson was so unfortunate as not to be able to please this pitman by the way in which he drew him out of the pit; and Nelson swore at him grossly because of the alleged clumsiness of his brakeing. George defended himself, and appealed to the testimony of the other workmen. But Nelson had not been accustomed to George's style of self-assertion; and, after a great deal of abuse, he threatened to kick the brakesman, who defied ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... used. The fact was that up to this time all the electric actions invented had proved more or less unreliable, and Willis, who had an artistic reputation to lose, refused to employ them. As an instance of their clumsiness we may mention that the best contact they could get was made by dipping a platinum point in a cell containing mercury! Other forms of contact rapidly oxidized and went ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... jargon, rendered somewhat more barbarous than usual by intoxication. Frequently one of them would address one of the players in language more forcible than choice, as he applauded some piece of FINESSE, or condemned some clumsiness on the part of the two youths who were struggling about in the centre, under the impression they were wrestling. There were but two moderate wrestlers in the parish, and those two were George Hawker and James Stockbridge. And James ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... 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, ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... honour, as he afterwards abundantly proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself 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 a particular ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... owned that puppy long enough to feel like leaving him at home, so the little lump of funny black curls and clumsiness had to go to ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of clumsiness!" Dallisa's voice, even thinned by the nightmare ringing in my head, held concentrated scorn. "Perhaps I shall release him, to find Rakhal when you failed! The Terrans have a price on Rakhal's head, too. And at least this man will not confuse himself ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... time, however, things began to look so odd, that they ventured, his wife and Mary, to exchange glances full of doubt and wonder. He hung so much over the side of the chair, that if it had not been one of cyclopean clumsiness and weight, he would have borne it to the floor. A leaden tint was darkening the pallor of his face. They were becoming alarmed, and finally braving everything his wife timidly said, "Tom!" and then more sharply repeated it, and finally cried the appellative loudly, ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... 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 ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... heavy faces. Despite the war and all the trouble it has meant, 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... off the Commercial Road. In its windows unredeemed 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 upon Mr. Hyams, argued, protested ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... obediently so that he could get at the snarl better. Timothy worked away in silence, his knees braced in the soft ground. His fingers were never very good at this sort of thing, and right now they seemed to become clumsiness personified. They trembled so that the snarl seemed to grow worse and worse with each moment. He gritted his teeth and tried his best to control his hands and his heart, which raced and beat so loudly above the crouching girl. He was quite sure ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... earnest effort to reproduce the spirit desired. Undoubtedly the lasting success of early American craftsmanship has been due to the perfect treatment of proportions, as related one to the other. That these are not imitations is proved by an occasional clumsiness which would be impossible, if they were exact copies of their more highly ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... extend beyond eight or sixteen bars at the utmost, and then he is invariably in nubibus... the works of the composer give us invariably the idea of an enthusiastic school-boy, whose parts are by no means on a par with his enthusiasm, who WILL be original whether he CAN or not. There is a clumsiness about his harmonies in the midst of their affected strangeness, a sickliness about his melodies despite their evidently FORCED unlikeness to familiar phrases, an utter ignorance of design everywhere apparent in his lengthened works...The entire works of Chopin present a motley ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... more cholerick. "Cuss your clumsiness," says he, "can't you come to a graffick without punching your ugly hed Into ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... staff and patients; for by day or 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 Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Jay back to Number Eighteen Mabel Place, Brown Borough. Chloris gave an unromantic snort and sat with unnecessary clumsiness upon Jay's toe. So Jay returned, falling suddenly out of the music of the sea into the band-of-hopeful music of distant ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... outlook is different in winter than in summer. In the former season he goes back and forth to work in the dark, or at best, in the cold twilight. He is not only more depressed but he is clumsier in his heavier clothing. If the enervating influence of these factors is combined with a greater clumsiness due to cold and perhaps to colds, it is not difficult to account for this type of seasonal distribution of accidents. A study of the accidents of 1917 indicated that 13 per cent. occurred between 5 and 6 P. M. when artificial lighting is generally in use to ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... the Tuesday, the day Priscilla and Fritzing left Baker's and moved into Creeper Cottage, that the fickle goddess who had let them nestle for more than a week beneath her wing got tired of them and shook them out. Perhaps she was vexed by their clumsiness at pretending, perhaps she thought she had done more than enough for them, perhaps she was an epicure in words and did not like a cottage called Creeper; anyhow she shook them out. And if they had had eyes to see they would not have walked into ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... about it and other matters as he rode back. Helen Dalton was finer than her picture. He had, no doubt, been awkward and had hurt her by his clumsiness, while she had got a painful shock, but had borne it with unflinching pluck. Her calm had not deceived him, since he knew what it cost, and her smile had roused his pity because it was so brave. Then his anger against Charnock returned with extra force. ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... concerts—his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement- -and to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a conclusion. He was not only a great favourite among ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails of the hurricane-deck. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 a mother's heart bleed. She muttered: ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... 'to a place and to companions more 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 ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... the table. His eyes were all but invisible. There was no ursine clumsiness in his movements, as he walked to and fro in the bar-room. As became a feline, he walked in silence and on his toes. He was thinking of many a shady incident in his past career, and he knew that with the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... masses are the burden not only of the South, but of the American people at large. Ignorant labor is shiftless and wasteful labor. The growth of varied and inter-related manufactures cannot rest upon a labor element of clumsiness and stupidity. Civil duties demand intelligence and morals. The best patriotism of the South joins hands with that of the North in the elevation of the lowly and ignorant. What has been done is only the initiation of the ten times more which must ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... Casimir, who seemed angry at his own clumsiness, "I missed. But there are more days than one in a week, and my turn will come yet! Did you get a good ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... the least graceful designs of the series; though the clumsiness in the contours of the leading figures is indeed a fault which often occurs in the painter's best works, but it is here unredeemed by the rest of the composition. The group of the suitors, however, represented ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... through the shallow water in their sea-boots. They were blue with cold, and begged for a little tea or coffee. Hot cakes and coffee happened to be just ready; so the fellows had a hearty breakfast and went away. With prolonged clumsiness the pilot shook the hand of the lady who had entertained him; and in two days after the boat sailed into the cove again amid nasty weather, and the master came ashore with a set of gaudy wooden bowls painted black ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... 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 him at those moments. For our general impression of a man's gesture or play of feature is made ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... afterwards benefactors of mankind. Look into it more carefully and understand it! I too wanted to do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity, not stupidity even, simply clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now that it has failed.... (Everything seems stupid when it fails.) By that stupidity I only wanted to put myself into an independent position, to take the first step, to obtain means, and then everything would ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... staring in his face with a bewilderment which was not without its humorous side. He was too much a man of the world, this great picture producer, to be at a loss for words, to receive an introduction with any degree of clumsiness. ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... assign himself to a place any better than that accorded each member of the clans who rallied about this Southern lady transplanted to the Western plains. Repulsed in his first unskilled, impetuous advance; hurt, stung, cut to the quick as much at his own clumsiness and failure to make himself understood as at the actual rebuff received. Franklin none the less in time recovered sufficient equanimity to seek to avail himself of such advantages as still remained; and he resolved grimly that he would persist until at ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... own weapon, an air-gun which I can fire 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 ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... expected never to be at her side again, and now that he was so, and knew what she had come to 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 ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... careful that nothing should get out of order. 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
... 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 on the mouth. She lay ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... 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 'em trust to the instincts Nature, she's given 'em; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... unfoldment of each is, in fact, an inexorable condition precedent for the normal development to full and abiding maturity of the higher and more refined muscularity, just as conversely the awkwardness and clumsiness of adolescence mark a temporary loss of balance in the opposite direction. If this general conception be correct, then nature does not finish the basis of her pyramid in the way Ross, Mercier, and others have assumed, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... suffered almost a human bereavement. And then, the audience, for this night, 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. Of course he could obtain another trained ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... killing, that Rawdon Crawley, watching the operations from the other room, could hardly restrain his laughter as he saw the Lieutenant's entire discomfiture; the start he gave, the pause, and the perfect clumsiness with which he at length condescended to take the finger which ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a society called the Fabians, which once exercised considerable influence, followed this shrewd and sound strategic hint to avoid mere emotional attack on the cruelty of Capitalism; and to concentrate on its clumsiness, its ludicrous incapacity to do its own work. This campaign succeeded, in the sense that while (in the educated world) it was the Socialist who looked the fool at the beginning of that campaign, it is the Anti-Socialist who looks the fool ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... himself talking with the youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy moment on the bench at Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added to the clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to Morgan that he might abuse him, Pemberton, as much as he liked, but must never abuse his parents. To this Morgan had the easy retort that he hadn't dreamed of abusing them; which appeared to be true: it put Pemberton ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... him fix a longing eye on the landing-stage as we drew near it, so I managed, by an adroit movement, to jerk his cap into the water, and in the excitement of recovering that, and his indignation at my clumsiness, he forgot ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... for 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 ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... him; what he wants of you is merciful fiction. Destiny, to his apprehension, is always either vapid, or clumsy, or brutal; and he feels certain that, do your worst, you can never rival the brutality, the clumsiness, or the vapidity of destiny. If you are silly, he can at least laugh at you; if you are clumsy or brutal, he has his remedy; and meanwhile there is always the chance that you may turn out to be graceful and entertaining. But to bully ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... that the machine 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 a whitesmith, of hammered iron soldered together, but having used ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra of eighty men there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb, or bad kidneys, or a brutal wife, or katzenjammer—and one is enough. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beauty that it will be almost unbearable. If half as much ingenuity ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... figures sprang into action. Jock had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed to place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology, stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... fruits as took their fancy, but after they had helped themselves to one or two, they felt satisfied. Goody Liu, however, had never before touched such delicacies. These were, in addition, made small, dainty, and without the least semblance of clumsiness, so when she and Pan Erh had served themselves to a few of each sort, half the contents of the dish vanished. But what remained of them were then, at the instance of lady Feng, put into two plates, and sent, together with a partition-box, to Wen Kuan and the other singing ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... at the man! That's the fourth time he's landed his line in a bush! He'll fall into that pool if he's not—mercy!—there he goes! Did you ever see such a genius for clumsiness?" ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... after 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 ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... needs, and John pays for it, wondering what sort of clumsiness he will display in the wearing ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... a sort 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 outrigger. We could not help wondering both at the ingenuity and the clumsiness of ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... poetry, traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines either their ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... her laugh at his efforts to help her by picking up the hot platter, a sense of his own clumsiness and size and general roughness overcame him. She was too far removed, he told himself, from his kind to make it possible for her ever to ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... Little Herbert, 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
... charcoal furnace, the tools, which produced this echantillon, were heated. I have no hesitation in saying, that, considered as an extraordinary specimen of art, it is a failure. The ornaments are common place; the lining is decidedly bad; and there is a clumsiness of finish throughout the whole. The head-bands—as indeed are those of Bozerian—are clumsily managed: and I may say that it exhibits a manifest inferiority even to the productions of Mackinlay, Hering, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... be able to appreciate the contrast between the bow heads in Plates III. and IV., and those in Plates V. and VI. It is in the two 'cello bow heads that the greatest resemblance is seen. But even here one can easily note the unwonted massiveness, almost amounting to clumsiness, in that of Dodd; while the Tourte is full of lightness, strength and vigour. There is more or less of sluggishness observable in most of the preceding bows, but the Tourte is ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... dramatic songs will be entirely missed if the reader does not bear in mind the mimetic skill of the amateur Japanese dancer and his power as a contortionist. Clever dancers often use their powers in a humorous pretence of clumsiness. Of the freer sort of songs ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... new boy, John slaved at "footer," and displayed a curious inaptitude for squash racquets. At all games Caesar and Scaife were precociously proficient. John's clumsiness annoyed them. Often the Caterpillar joined him and Fluff, giving them to understand that this must be regarded as an act of grace and condescension which might be suitably acknowledged at ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... spoke of this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of 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 ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... There is no squabbling amongst them. Enough fishes are thrown in to keep them occupied for a few minutes. The speed with which the guillemot cuts the water is truly amazing. Once more one has an opportunity of noticing the clumsiness of the penguin when it tries to leave the water. At either end of the tank a platform with transverse bars is let down for the convenience of the birds, but the silly penguin, instead of going to the ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... menace in his voice which it was impossible to overlook. Savaroff scowled at me more truculently than ever. It was obvious that both of them were entirely ignorant of Sonia's part in the affair, and suspected me of some extraordinary bit of clumsiness. I prepared myself for some ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... money, yet left the case. The new method was incomparably more subtle than the old: it afforded an opportunity of a hitherto unimagined delicacy; the wielders of the scissors were aghast at a skill which put their own clumsiness to shame, and which to a previous generation would have seemed the wildest fantasy. Yet so strong is habit, that even when the picking of pockets was a recognised industry, the superfluous scissors still survived, and many a rogue has hanged ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... himself, knew that life or death hung upon the issue of the next ten minutes. Upon Street alone devolved the life of the little girl. A second's hesitation at the wrong stage of the operation, a slip of bistoury or scalpel, a tremor of the wrist, a single instant's clumsiness of the fingers, and the Enemy—watching for every chance, intent for every momentarily opened chink or cranny wherein he could thrust his lean fingers—entered the frail tenement with a leap, a rushing, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... 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 of ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... have augured well from his apparent clumsiness, but for what he had heard of him. For Carlos Santander, though having the repute of a swaggerer, with some suspicion of cowardice, had proved himself a dangerous adversary by twice killing his man. His ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... disadvantageous forms. To realise his characteristic power, we should take one of the great French novelists whom we admire for the exquisite proportions of his story, the unity of the interest and the skill—so unlike our common English clumsiness—with which all details are duly subordinated. He should have, too, the comparative weakness of French novelists, a defective perception of character, a certain unwillingness in art as in politics to allow individual ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... farmers of this more fastidious day, but Martin was dressed no worse than any of his neighbors and far better than many. Health, vigor, sturdiness, self-reliance shone from him, and once his make-up had ceased to obtrude its clumsiness, he struck one as handsome. His was a commanding physique, hard as the grim plains from which he wrested ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... away," strictly literal; and the whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which I know not any other verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether equals. For most people have not a distinct idea of the clumsiness and massiveness of a large wave. The word "wave" is used too generally of ripples and breakers, and bendings in light drapery or grass: it does not by itself convey a perfect image. But the word "mound" is heavy, large, dark, definite; there is no mistaking the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... I've made bold ter come over ter drink a dish of tea with you.'" The girl put the brush under her arm, still further spread her feet, put her hands behind some pretended coat-tails, let the brush slip from under her arms, so that it fell to the floor with a racket, stooped with an affectation of clumsiness which seemed impossible to the lithe figure, while mumbling something inarticulate in an apparent paroxysm of embarrassment,—which quickly became a genuine ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... fourth difficulty. 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 melt easily ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... 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
... did give Mrs. Hilbrough his arm, and Phillida was startled and amused, when Mr. Hilbrough, after pausing an instant to remember which of his stout arms he was to offer, presented his left elbow. Despite much internal levity and external clumsiness, Hilbrough played his role to the satisfaction of his anxious wife, and Phillida looked at him inquiringly after she was seated as though to discover what transformation had taken place ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... 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 ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... the head, bringing the heaviest of the work upon the horns! The gear is a little better than this—as little as you please—while for Carts and Waggons there are few school-boys of twelve to fifteen in America who would not beat the average of all I have seen in Italy. Their clumsiness and stupidity are so atrocious that the owners do well in employing asses to draw them: no man of feeling or spirit could endure the horse-laughs they must extort from any animal of tolerable sagacity. To see a stout, two-handed man coming home with his donkey-load ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... 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 ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... be found, though a long hunt for it produced a great many more plants, and so the trouble was not wasted. The prickly pear was covered with ripe purple fruit a little way down, and we refreshed ourselves with them, I managing—in my clumsiness—to get into my fingers two or three of the little sheaves of needles which are planted on the outside of the fruit, and thus providing myself with occupation for leisure moments for three or four days after in taking ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... indulged to the great entertainment of all, but of none more than Andy, who was in the thick of the row, and in a divided ecstasy between the "blaky-moor's" turban and cymbals and the trumpeter's jokes and music; the latter articles having a certain resemblance, by-the-bye, to the former in clumsiness and noise, and therefore suited to Andy's taste. Whenever occasion offered, Andy got near the big drum, too, and gave it a thump, delighted with the result ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... not let me detain you. 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 ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... up into a powerful young fellow, taller than his master by well-nigh a head, and his equal in exercises requiring strength rather than quickness and skill. His duties at table had been delegated to another, for there was a certain clumsiness in Osgod's strength that no teaching could correct; and in his eagerness to serve his master he so frequently spilled the contents of a cup, or upset a platter, that even Egbert acknowledged that it was hopeless to attempt to make a skilful servitor ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... operation of 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 is hardly worth mentioning. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... made a deep impression. "You must know, then, that this ineptitude, inflicted on me by an eccentric editor for translation, drove me to madness, and not an hour ago I cast it from my window in disgust. It is a novel entirely devoid of taste and tact, and it had the clumsiness to alight on my landlord's head. Being a man of small nature, he retaliated by demanding ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... beasts, an 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
... give a regular and not inelegant 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 ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... it was that he felt his clumsiness deserved no less an issue to the adventure. Confound that little Don Manuel for bobbing up at such an inconvenient time! It ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... pelts 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... thing he said which struck me as worth listening to, was this—that Miss Verinder had declined to be questioned by him, and had spoken to him with a perfectly incomprehensible rudeness and contempt. I thought this curious—but I attributed it mainly to some clumsiness on the Superintendent's part which might have offended the young lady. After that, I put it by in my mind, and applied myself, single-handed, to the case. It ended, as you are aware, in the discovery of the smear on the door, and in Mr. ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... and the motion of a steamer when they put the table-racks on. Seen from the pavement, or from the top of another omnibus, it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the single example, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses coming towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in the collective uncouthness which becomes of a tremendous grandeur. The procession bears onward whole populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and lurching with the elephantine gait of things which ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... he 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 ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... brought him this accomplishment, and in his clumsiness of speech and manner he envied this sprightly youth who had become so much of a celebrity in his thoughts that he actually took a certain pleasure in walking past the Bent residence just because it was where Roscoe and his well-to-do ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... to have considered in advance the clumsiness of such an argument, and proved the divine laws and works by the Scriptures, and not by temporal analogies and worldly reason. For it is written that the divine commandments are justified in and by themselves, and not by any ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... slashes. When she had untied the string which fastened the cloth, she poured some of the beans upon the table and ordered me to shell them quickly and carefully. I obey her mandate and with careful fingers separate the beans from the filthy pods which contain them; but she, accusing my clumsiness, hastily snatched them and, skillfully tearing off the pods with her teeth, spat them upon the ground, where they looked like dead flies. I wondered, then, at the ingenuity of poverty and its expedients for emergency. (So ardent a ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the neatest splints he could extemporize from slabs of stripped-off bark; and the next half-hour was a trying one to both of them. Sometimes Vane assisted him with suggestions—once he reviled his clumsiness—and sometimes he lay silent with his face awry and his lips tight silent; but at length it was done and Carroll ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... his wife's writing-table to wheel it near. By some clumsiness his foot catches in one of its spidery claws, and with a crash it topples over. Away goes the writing case, flying open and scattering the contents far and wide. The crash shocks baby's nerves, baby begins to cry, and the new-made mamma ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... appeared: he lifted his foot to get into it and though through clumsiness he stumbled and hurt himself rather badly, so that for some time he did not know where anything was, yet he managed it and getting into the boat, floated on the big river, which, as the River of Time, flows to Constantinople in the map on the walls of the Nikolaevsky High School. With ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... thousands of miles from the nearest land, drifting he knew not whither at the mercy of wind and wave, with no hope of rescue and with the certainty that in a day or two at most the fabric which bore him would be so completely enveloped in the flames kindled by his own clumsiness that it would no longer be tenable, and the only alternative open to him would be that of perishing in the fire or flinging himself into the sea, there to battle despairingly for an extra hour or two of life?" He could not believe ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... 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
... a fool and lost his head, handled her roughly, spoken to her wildly, words only intended for gentle moods, softer purposes. Shrewd little Beth, whose wide, blue eyes had seen right down into the depths of his heart. He had been clumsy, if nothing else, and he had always thought that clumsiness was inexcusable. He had a guilty sense that while Beth was still the little lady to her finger tips, born to a natural nobility, he, the Grand Duke Peter, had been the boor, the vulgar proletarian. The look in her eyes had shamed him as the look in his own eyes had shamed her. She had ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... of sympathy than a gift? The gift is one of these obvious contrivances—like the wheel or the lever—which smooth and simplify earthly life, and the charm of whose utility no obviousness can stale. But of course any contrivance can be rendered futile by clumsiness or negligence. There is a sort of Christmas giver who says pettishly: "Oh! I don't know what to give to So-and-So this Christmas! What a bother! I shall write and tell her to choose something herself, and send the bill to me!" And he writes. And though he does not suspect it, what he really writes, ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... refuses to be humanized—between man's fingers and the actual element he works in, has interrupted that instinctive aesthetic movement of the human hands, which, even in the midst of the most utter clumsiness and grossness, can never fail to introduce some touch of beauty into ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys |
