"Feckless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to forget, sometimes," I ran on bitterly, then checked myself; for I knew that my words were prompted by a feckless desire to hear her defense, by a fool's hope that it ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... anvil without breaking it, while it delivers a blow of ten tons with such a force as to be felt shaking the parish. It is therefore with a high degree of appropriateness that Mr. Nasmyth has discarded the feckless hammer with the broken shaft, and assumed for his emblem his own magnificent steam-hammer, at the same time reversing the family motto, which he has converted into "Non ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... quantity, portion. Feckless, feeble, powerless. Fell, strong and fiery. Fey, unlike yourself, strange, as if urged on by fate, or as persons are observed to be in the hour of approaching death or disaster. Fit, foot. Flit, to depart. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to hear it," said Mrs. Marshall. "He's a feckless young gentleman, and I often think as he's like to bring the old master's hairs with sorrow to the grave. Sir Beverley do set such store by him, always did from the day he brought him back from his dead mother in Paris, along with that French valet who carried him like as if ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... 'sixties, after seeing Baroona pass, by foreclosure, into the hands of a brainy and nosey financier. People who had known the poor gentleman when he was very emphatically in the flesh, and had listened to his palaver, and noticed his feckless way of going about things, were not surprised at the misfortune that had struck Buckley. Mrs. B. had then taken a small villa, near Sydney, where, in course of time, her son and daughter took positions of vantage, such ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... cupboard—and he's a pretty grisly object, isn't he? But I don't want to depress you with a recital of my woes. After all, life's sweet, sister—and you and I, thanks be to God, have the soul of the gipsy within us, which is made quite happy, poor feckless thing, by the sight of the sun or the music of ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... sec feckless wark," she was saying. "And Reuben threept me down, too. There he was in the peat loft when I went for the peats, and he had it all as fine as clerk after passon. 'It was Master Paul at the fire, certain sure,' he says, ower and ower again. 'What, ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... first person who acted in the emergency. She called for lights; and sternly rebuked the house-maid, who brought them, for not having closed the house door. "Ye feckless ne'er-do-weel!" cried the landlady; "the wind's blawn ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... on the Mall. Dr. Howlen told me. The manager of the hotel is abusing the Bents, and the Bents are abusing the manager. They are a feckless couple.' ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... Bindloose?—Isna that kind of fray aye about honour? and what for should the honour of a substantial, four-nooked, sclated house of three stories, no be foughten for, as weel as the credit of ony of these feckless callants that make such a fray about their reputation?—I promise you my house, the Cleikum, stood in the Auld Town of St. Ronan's before they were born, and it will stand there after they are hanged, as I trust some of them ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... no harm that thy father and mother were left to a set of feckless, brainless, idle serving-men and maids in their trouble? Why, none would so much as have seen to thy brother's poor body being laid in a decent grave had not I been at hand to take order for it as became a distant kinsman of my lord. I tell thee, Richard, there must be no ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence? Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. I was all for abandoning ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... feckless callant I once was, Patie,' answered Malcolm. 'There are many places where my student's serge gown will take me safely, where your corslet and lance would never find entrance. No one will know me again as I am now: will they, ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a cubit each way. I made a drink-offering to all the dead, first with honey and milk, then with wine, and thirdly with water, and I sprinkled white barley meal over the whole, praying earnestly to the poor feckless ghosts, and promising them that when I got back to Ithaca I would sacrifice a barren heifer for them, the best I had, and would load the pyre with good things. I also particularly promised that Teiresias should have a black sheep to himself, the best in all my flocks. When I had prayed ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... college, but I thought it was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace, which was, as usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his preoccupation, praying, as he did, that God would "remember in mercy fower puir, feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane beside the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "a fool," and that in the general sense of the term as used in Scripture; not merely a silly, untaught, feckless person, but a godless and an impious one. Thus, in the Book of Proverbs, Divine Wisdom is represented ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... enough—I've na patience wi' ye. Bonny enough—tricked oot in her furbelows, gallivantin' wi' every royster fra Pe'rith. Bonny enough—that be all ye think on. She's bin a proper parson's niece—the giddy, feckless creature, an she'd mak' ye a proper sort o' wife, Tony Garstin, ye great, ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... ye, laddie, I ken fine what ye'ra ettlin' at, but yon's a braw leddy, no like thae English folk, but a woman o' understandin', an' mair by token I'm thinkin' she'll be gleg aneugh to ken a body that'll serve her weel, an' see to the guidin' o' thae feckless queens o' servant lasses, for bad's the best o' them ye'll fin' hereawa'. Nae fear but her an' me'll put it up weel thegither, an' a' gude be ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you're young, and nothing seems impossible,' he said good-naturedly. 'Here, take off this string. My fingers are as feckless as ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... of Pure Reason, Maimon returned to Berlin to devote himself to the philosophical work that was to give him a pinnacle apart among the Kantians. Goethe and Schiller made flattering advances to him. Berlin society was at his feet. But he remained to the end, shiftless and feckless, uncouth and unmanageable, and not seldom when the taverns he frequented were closed, he would wander tipsily through the sleeping streets meditating suicide, or arguing metaphysics with ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... for the bairns," she went on, cheerfully. "They are good bairns. There are few that hae the sense and discretion of our Katie, and her mother's no' without judgment, though she is but a feckless body as to health, and has been a heavy handful to us. They'll be taken care of. The Lord is ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... smile; and he has fifty things to ask one, all about oneself. I can't describe what good it does one to meet him. The other day I met a cousin of his, a prosperous man of business. "Yes," he said, "poor Harry goes on in his feckless way. I gave him a bit of my mind the other day. I said, 'Oh, it's all very well to be always at everyone's beck and call, and ready to give up your time to anyone who asks you—it is very pleasant, of course, and everyone speaks well of you—but ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you wore, Wielding the club and the tawny skin, Now it is yours to be up and doing, Glaring like mad, and your youth renewing, Mindful of him whose guise you are in. If, when caught in a bit of a scrape, you Suffer a word of alarm to escape you, Showing yourself but a feckless knave, Then will your master at once undrape you, Then you'll again be the ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... and purser and Mr McGilpin, the assistant-surgeon; the latter saying that he had no stomach for consorting with "the meeletary," they being "a maist feckless set o' loons." ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... believes that his one beloved son will come to light and live again. He has made all arrangements accordingly: all his property is settled on that supposition. He knows that young Alan always was what he calls a 'feckless ne'er-do-weel;' but he loves him all the more for that. He cannot believe that he will die, without his son coming back to him; and he always has a bedroom ready, and a bottle of Alan's favourite wine cool from out the cellar; he has made me work him a pair of slippers from ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... now they ca' me fornicator, An' tease my name in kintry clatter, The mair they talk, I'm kent the better, E'en let them clash; An auld wife's tongue's a feckless ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... clique, but as its worst crimes were limited to the adroit theft of chickens or sheep, or some trick played on the local inhabitants, and as the Jokers were always at the forefront in any action, they turned a blind eye. I was young and feckless, and I longed desperately to belong to this raffish society, which I thought would raise my standing amongst my comrades; but it was in vain that I frequented the salle-d'armes to practice swordsmanship and the use of the pistol and carbine, and that ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... of southern people. Mrs. James was Devonshire, and (in Grandma's eyes) a mesalliance for Richard James. He lodged with the Devonshire girl's mother when he was a medical student in London, Heppie told me once; and even Heppie puts on superior airs with Mrs. James, whom she considers a feckless creature. I have an idea Heppie knew the doctor before he met his wife, and he was her One Romance; so naturally she thinks the "James Mystery" wouldn't have happened if he had married her instead. Of course, though, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hairy oubit, sae proud he crept alang, A feckless hairy oubit, and merrily he sang— 'My Minnie bad me bide at hame until I won my wings; I show her soon my soul's aboon the warks o' ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... a man of action. He wasted not a precious moment in feckless argument. It was hard that he should have to share this treasure with another. But in seven minutes he was at New Scotland Yard, and in fifteen he was back again to his great good fortune, with ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... confusion of political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to actual conditions. Feckless—that is what our politics is. It is literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and leadership, when life was crying ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... is that so many mothers take no care of their children, but send them out, half-clad, into the cold. Perhaps this lad's mother also was a feckless old woman, and devoid of character? Or perhaps she had no one to work for her, but was forced to sit with her legs crossed—a veritable invalid? Or perhaps she was just an old rogue who was in the habit of sending ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... but he set himself suavely enough to describe the instability of Spanish labour, its disposition to call strikes that were really larks, and the greater willingness with which it keeps its saints' days rather than the commandments; the feckless incapacity of the Spanish to exploit their own minerals and the evangelic part played in the shameful shoes by Scotch engineers; and the depleted state of the country in general, which he was careful to ascribe not so much to the presence of Catholicism as to the absence ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... "Feckless as ever!" he chided without severity. "You dismissed me on an impulse; and now you would take me back again with the same stupendous disregard for results. It is very evident you need some one to look after you, and ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... pretend to refer to him—or me—sometimes. It's the same in everything. She twists father round her little finger; and you can see all the time what she thinks—that there never was such a bad landlord, or such a miserable, feckless crew as the rest of us, before she came ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but he bowed his head silently. What a lot of good there was really in that splendid woman, and what a commanding, energetic, masterful way she had about her! To a feckless, undecided, faltering man like Arthur Berkeley there was something wonderfully attractive and magnificent, after all, in such an imperious resolute woman ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... that ye'd be after dinging, man?" cried a sharp voice behind him. "No that puir feckless body that has jist skippit aff. If sae, ye'll tak the wrang soo by the lugg, and I counsel you to let him bide, for he's high i' favour ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... curtains. I thought men were too feckless to have curtains without a woman. But, of course, your aunt did that! And a couch and a brass fender, and—is that a pianola? That is your desk. I thought men's desks were always untidy, and covered with dust and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... him richt," said another feelingly. "The puir feckless creature marrit after coortin' only eight year. Man, indeed, he had nae chance to ken the wumman in sic a short time. When I was coortin' I ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... improving the health of mothers and babies I would remind readers that there is no great country where effort is half so much needed as here; we are nearly twice as town and slum ridden as any other people; have grown to be further from nature and more feckless about food; we have damper air to breathe, and less sun to disinfect us. In New Zealand, with a climate somewhat similar to ours, the infant mortality rate has, as a result of a widespread educational campaign, been reduced within the last few years to 50 per 1,000 from 110 per ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... ye gane by yoursel?" cried Willy Coggle from the front of the loft, a daft body that was ayefar ben on all public occasions—"to think that our God's a Pagan image in need of sick feckless help as the like o' thine?" The which outcry of Willy raised a most extraordinary laugh at the fine paternoster, about the ashes of our ancestors, that Mr Dravel had been so vehemently rehearsing; ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... and the fun was all to begin again. Maybe we might forgive him that, for of such staple are good yarns spun, but why in heaven's name should bold Edmund Layton of Liddesdale go about to make himself and us miserable with feckless scruples that ruined the happy ending we had fairly earned? Either he was right to let CHARLES STUART escape that day in the mist, in return for former generosity, or he was wrong; and one would have expected him to make up his mind and there an end, and not fret himself into a pother and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... "Deep calleth unto deep," and the extreme deductions from the perverse notion that the act of dying is the signal for the infliction of an everlasting mental and moral sterility, finally convince us of the groundlessness of this feckless theology. According to these deductions of which I speak, one grievous offence against Divine or ecclesiastical law—such, for instance, as grave scandal or the omission to attend at mass—is sufficient to condemn a man ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... necessary. Less than that and the bullet will come through and impinge with great violence on the warrior behind. This fact is well known to all whose path in life leads them to the trenches; but for all that Tommy is a feckless lad. In some ways he bears a marked resemblance to that sagacious bird, the ostrich; and because of that resemblance, I have remarked on this question of disposing sandbags in terms of pain and grief. The easiest thing to do with a sandbag in a trench, if you don't ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... fair words maks foul wark; and the wrath o' the Almichty maun purge this toon or a' be dune. There's a heap o' graceless gaeins on in't; and that puir feckless body, the minister, never gies a pu' at the bridle o' salvation, to haud them aff o' the scaur (cliff) ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... but presently Mysie returned again, followed by Mrs. Halfpenny, grumbling that 'A' the bonnie napery that she had packed and carried sae mony miles by sea and land should be waured on a wheen silly feckless taupies that 'tis the leddies' wull to cocker up till not a lass of 'em will do a stroke of wark, nor gie a ceevil ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge |
