"Flabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I will. Thanks, Nichols," said McGuire, following him to the door and offering a flabby hand. "Don't mind what I've said to-night. I think we understand each other. Stryker will see that the house is locked when the young people come up. Keep your men to the mark and take ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... The face one stone, like those Assyrian kings! One sees in carvings, watching men flayed red Horribly laughable in leaps and writhes; That face — utterly evil, clouded round With evil like a smoke — it turns smiles sour! ... And Nero there, the flabby cheeks astrain And sweating agony... long agony... Imperishable, unappeasable For ever... well... it droops the mouth. Till I Look up. There's one blue patch no smoke dares touch. Sky, clear, ineffable, alive with light, Always the same... Before, I never knew Rest and green peace. ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... thin or stretchy small mammal skins for mounting is to leave the membrane of skin-muscles on the body skin. This holds a flabby skin in shape and lends strength to a frail one. In spite of this the legs of most wild rabbits must be handled very gingerly, as they have no lining membrane like the body. For finishing mouth, nose, ...
— Taxidermy • Leon Luther Pray
... increasing through his reminiscences; that he was expending on me the stormy emotions I revived by reminding him of the coquetries of that hateful Beatrix,—just think of it! that cold, unhealthy nature, so persistent yet so flabby, something between a mollusk and a bit of coral, dares to call ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... impotence, which they count for conduct and integrity. This sort of social prizemen infests the administration, the army, the magistracy, the chambers, the courts. They diminish and level down the country and constitute, in some manner, in the body politic, a lymph which infects it and renders it flabby. These honest folk call men of talent immoral or rogues. If such rogues require to be paid for their services, at least their services are there; whereas the other sort do harm and are respected by the mob; but, happily for France, elegant youth stigmatizes them ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... umbilical cord, and the chances in a torn cord are still more remote. The changes in the cord are as follows: First it shrinks from the ligature towards the navel; this change may begin early, and is rarely delayed beyond thirty hours; the cord becomes flabby, and there is a distinct inflammatory circle round its insertion. The next change is that of desiccation or mummification; the cord becomes reddish-brown, then flattened and shrivelled, then translucent and of the colour of parchment, and falls off about the fifth day. The third stage, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... not crying. She had redd up her house for the last time and put on her black merino. Her mouth was wide open while she listened. If yon had, addressed her you would have thought her polite and stupid. Look at her. A flabby-faced woman she is now, with a swollen body, and no one has heeded her much these thirty years. I can tell you something; it is almost droll. Nanny Webster was once a gay flirt, and in Airlie Square ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... maybe you are just out of the profound philosophical complexities and pathetic problems of "Les Miserables." Perhaps you have immersed yourself again in the paradoxes of "Vanity Fair," or have been pumping up the flabby tires of your better nature with the fresh air of "David Copperfield." It is possible that "Tess of the Durbervilles," or "A Window in Thrums" has been newly received, and has been enlightening your mind and conscience as to your relations to the ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... glance of inquiry round him to see who could be trusted. Then, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders and impatient exclamation, turned back to the table. Fred, shivering and helpless, stood by the fire, uttering confused directions, and rubbing miserably his own flabby hands; his wife, crying, scolding, and incapable, stood at the end of the table, offering no assistance, but wondering when ever Nettie would come back. Dr Rider took the patient in his arms, and, beckoning Mrs Smith to go before him, carried the child up-stairs. There the ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... evacuations were rare; it is believed that he passed several weeks without any, but the secretion of urine seemed more regular. He died after fasting fifty-three days. On dissection the stomach was found loose and flabby. The gall bladder was distended with a dark, muddy-looking bile. The mesentery, stomach and intestines were excessively thin and transparent. There was ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... in the struggle, and still so over-fond of your species—seem futile. Who knows which of us is right ?—or if our difference of opinion may not be a difference in our years? If all who love one another were of the same opinion, living would be monotonous, and conversation flabby. So cheer up. You are ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... each other. A glass of whisky was cupped in Anson's closed hand. His clothes, unbrushed and unpressed, flapped about his huge figure. His throat bagged with flabby dewlaps. His head was bullet-shaped, his eyes fierce, his mouth loose-lipped and brutal. He made a strange contrast to his companion. Druce was lithe, well made and gifted with a sort of Satanic handsomeness. He ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... what a fool he was when out of hearing. The tanner partly suspected this; and it put his nature upon edge; for he always drove his opinions in as if they were so many tenpenny nails, which the other man must either clinch or strike back into his teeth outright. He would rather have that than flabby silence, as if ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the light, the hideousness, not the grace and serenity of old age, was revealed. His white hair, thin and half-combed, straggled over the dark-red, purple-veined skin of his head; his cheeks were flabby bags of bristly, wrinkled leather; his mouth was a sunken, irregular slit, losing itself in the hanging folds at the corners, and even the life, gathered into his small, restless gray eyes, was half quenched under the red ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... of the sow and more of the wolf about him than of old. His shaggy whiskers were touched with gray, and there was something hard and fierce about his face. The old inflamed and flabby look had been hammered out of him in the hard school from which ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... occasionally having anxious consultations with certain sickly men whom I supposed to be superannuated bookkeepers, in impoverished circumstances, and rather pallid from the want of nutritious food. One of them, dressed in rusty black, with a flabby white neckcloth, I took for an ex-clergyman; he was absorbed in the last number of the "Independent," though I observed, at length, that he was only studying the list of failures, a department to which, as it struck me, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... Madame Mesurat. She was one of those women whose stalwart build and masculine presence would allow of their dressing in men's clothes without attracting attention. She had a pear-shaped head, cheeks that hung flabby as if they had been emptied of air, a pompous nose that drooped till it very nearly touched a projecting underlip like a bracket, giving her an expression of determined contempt which she very certainly had never felt. In short, she suggested the absurd idea of a solemn, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... side of consciousness, and Anaesthesia (lack of sensation) in certain areas of the skin and in certain of the special senses; second, Lethargy, in which consciousness seems to disappear entirely; the subject not being sensitive to any stimulations by eye, ear, skin, etc., and the body being flabby and pliable as in natural sleep; third, Somnambulism, so called from its analogies to the ordinary sleep-walking condition to which many persons are subject. This last covers the phenomena of ordinary ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... his vigor. He became inactive, and more cowardly and prudent than ever. He grew fat and flabby. No one who had studied this great body, piled up in a lump, apparently without bones or muscles, would ever have had the idea of accusing the ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... lord. He's not like one of those English cats, with jist a dash of speed about 'em, and nothing more—brutes that they put in training half a dozen times in as many months. Thim animals pick up a lot of loose, flabby flesh in no time, and loses it in less; and, in course, av' they gets a sweat too much, there's nothin left in 'em; not a hapoth. Brien's a different guess sort of ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... little vortices of whirring, rotating force, and whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced—but replaced dead, flabby, useless. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on "feeling," they are failures. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... pain in my side," said the Blue-gum. "I do hope and trust it isn't white-ants. It would be simply horrible, if it were. Fancy getting white-ants at my time of life! Here I have lived on this mountain, tree and sapling, for over a hundred years; and to think those nasty, white, flabby little things should get me at last ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... reef is uncovered, small rock-cod, slim eels, parrot-fish, perch, soles, the lovely blue-spotted sting-ray, catfish, flathead, etc., are poked out unceremoniously with spears or sharp-pointed sticks from labyrinthine mazes, or from the concealment afforded by the flabby folds and fringes of the skeleton-less coral (ALCYONARIA), or from among the weeds and stones—a kind of additional sense leading the black to the discovery of fish in places that a white man would never dream of investigating. At this opportune time, too, huge, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... wish to develop my muscles. That's why I do Swedish exercises every morning. It's ridiculous how flabby girls are. There isn't a girl in my lecture I can't put down. If you like, I'll teach you my exercises," said Nora, her mouth full of tea-cake, and her expression ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... exerted by the church in the direction indicated partakes too strongly of the eleemosynary nature to make it acceptable to any save the most degraded—the weak-chinned, flabby-natured horde of men and women who rally instinctively to the drum-taps of the street-corner Salvationist, or seek warmth and cheer on cold winter nights, and if possible more substantial benefits, from the ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... real stroke, mesdames, it was only a warning!" was the explanation conveyed to us in loud tones, with no reserve of whispered delicacy, when we expressed regret at monsieur's detention below stairs; a partially paralyzed leg, dragged painfully after the latter's flabby figure, being the obvious ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the other aunt, might almost have been convinced that such determination must be for an object. However, Gillian encountered the fog in vain, though she walked up and down the path till her clothes were quite limp and flabby with damp. All the view that rewarded her was the outline of the shrubs looming through the mist like distant forests as mountains. Moreover, she got a scolding from Aunt Ada, who met her coming in, and was horrified at the misty atmosphere which she was said to have brought in, and ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... trophy that he hoped to have hung up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic contemplation—this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair, with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby folds? It is true that here were the identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... were four others who stood near the open windows, their hands resting on the iron gratings, and conversing by signs and shouts with the prisoners whom Maslova had met in the passageway. One of these, who was serving a sentence for theft, was a flabby, large, heavy, red-haired woman with white-yellow freckles over her face, and a stout neck which was exposed by the open waist collar. In a hoarse voice she shouted indecent words through the window. Beside her stood a woman of the size of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... use of moist dressings leads to a third variety of weak ulcer—namely, one in which the granulations become large, soft, pale, and flabby, projecting beyond the level of the skin and overlapping the edges, which become pale and sodden. The term "proud flesh" is popularly applied to ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... knotted, his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and his forehead a murderer's, broad and low. The littleness of his eye was hidden under his bushy eyebrows. His nose, long, sharp, and flabby, nearly met his mouth. Barkilphedro, properly attired, as an emperor, would have somewhat resembled Domitian. His face of muddy yellow might have been modelled in slimy paste—his immovable cheeks were like putty; he had all kinds of ugly refractory wrinkles; the angle of his ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... building a character is as scientific as that of developing one's muscles. Many a man, finding himself with certain muscles flabby and powerless takes that as his natural condition, and regards their weakness as a kind of destiny imposed upon him; but anyone who understands a little of the human body is aware that by continued exercise those muscles can be brought into ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... confronted with the problem of restoring promptness of movement, erectness of carriage, poise and flexibility to numbers of men whose muscles have been given a one-sided development by the constant performance of one kind of manual work, or have grown flabby by long sitting at a desk, and the task would have been much less successfully tackled without the aid of the Swedish methods. In schools these exercises may be used with real benefit given two conditions, small classes and a really skilled instructor. For ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... white, almost transparant fat. The flesh of the second quality is soft, and rather red compared with the pinkish-white meat of choice kinds; the fat is more scanty, and the general appearance coarser. The poorest lamb has yellow fat, and lean, flabby red meat, which keeps but a short time. Test the freshness of lamb by touching the kidney-fat; if it is soft and moist the meat is on the verge of spoiling; a bad smell indicates that it is already tainted; it ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson
... and I were talking it over together. "We won't give you up, my child," I said, "to a common man! Only if some prince comes from foreign lands, and blows his trumpet at our door." But things didn't turn out our way. Now there he sits—the man who is going to tear her away—fat and flabby! Staring and smirking at her! He likes it! Oh, confound you! Well, now they've finished eating and are getting up; ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... girdling the trees of a new purchase, Scorch'd ankle-deep by the hot sand, hauling my boat down the shallow river, Where the panther walks to and fro on a limb overhead, where the buck turns furiously at the hunter, Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock, where the otter is feeding on fish, Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou, Where the black bear is searching for roots or honey, where the beaver pats the mud with his paddle-shaped tall; Over the growing sugar, over ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of face, with a large mouth and two very big brown eyes. He was enormously fat, but it was not fat of the flabby type. Though he called himself Ali, it was, as Bones admitted, "sheer swank" to do so, for this man had "coast" written ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... what should happen," continues he. "The balloon, which was quite flabby and soft when I ascended, was now taut, and fully distended. Soon the hydrogen gas began to escape in considerable quantities by the neck of the balloon, and then, from time to time, I pulled open the valve to give it two issues at once; and I continued thus to mount upwards, all the time ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... toward the house, the wet grass is making my long gown drenched and flabby. We have reached the garden-door whence I issued, and by ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... dipped about them. Off shore the sea-lions bobbed their thick, flabby black heads inquiringly in the water and climbed ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... that," replied Madelene. "Most of us prefer people like those flabby sea creatures that are tossed aimlessly about by the waves and have no permanent shape or real purposes and desires, but take whatever their feeble tentacles can hold without effort." Del winced, and ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... non-joining habit! You would think that anybody, however dull, might consider his hands, and guess by the look of them that they must be made to work, and help, and take hold of somebody else's hands! Miserable, useless, flabby paws, those of the non-joiner; that he feeds and dresses himself with, and then hangs to his selfish sides, or puts behind ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... your heads," replied Tom. He sat upright and sagged forward weakly. The strength seemed to flow suddenly from his body; his legs and arms felt flabby and useless. "Whew!" he exclaimed. "I'll have to do better than this. Weak as a baby!" Bracing himself on one arm, he flexed the other ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... point all her pride leaves her. Gervaise had divested herself of all her old self-respect, coquetry and need of sentiment, propriety and politeness. You might have kicked her, no matter where, she did not feel kicks for she had become too fat and flabby. Lantier had altogether neglected her; he no longer escorted her or even bothered to give her a pinch now and again. She did not seem to notice this finish of a long liaison slowly spun out, and ending ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... was disgraceful. She snubbed him, ignored him, tramped on him, and Jim was growing positively flabby. He spent most of his time writing letters to the board of health and playing solitaire. He was a ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to pour oil upon the troubled waters," said the flabby, florid man, looking up from his cards at the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... would stick his tongue out from the smallest kind of exertion. He had just been shipped in off the Montana cattle range and had never had a rope on him, unless it was when he was branded. Like a great over-grown booby of a boy, he was flabby in flesh, and he could not endure any sort of exertion without discomfort. At one time I became ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... most readily that the face had grown fuller in its lower parts, and was far less browned than formerly. The large, heavy countenance, with its square jaws masked now under increased flesh, its beginnings of a double-chin, and its slightly flabby effect of pallor, was no longer lacking in individual distinction. It was palpably the visage of a dictator. The moustache had been cut down to military brevity, and the line of mouth below it was ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... The lover never asks his fair one if she admires Donizetti's compositions, but tenderly inquires if she loves beef-steak pies. This sordid vice of greediness is rapidly brutalizing natures not originally spiritual; every other passion is sinking, oppressed by flabby folds of fat, into helplessness. All the mental energies are crushed beneath the oily mass. Sensibility is smothered in, the feculent steams of roast beef, and delicacy stained by the waste drippings of porter. ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... just as there is in fencing, and I refrained. I looked at this Englishman and I wondered how I should attack him. His ears were large and prominent. Could I seize them I might drag him to the ground. I rushed in, but I was betrayed by this flabby glove, and twice I lost my hold. He struck me, but I cared little for his blows, and again I seized him by the ear. He fell, and I rolled upon him and thumped ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a look askance at them,—for it was the clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, nowadays, looked straightforth at any object, whether human or inanimate,—"where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?" ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the cabin and on deck, but he was not the same man. His illness seemed to have robbed him permanently of what was left him of the spring of manhood. It was as if his juices had been sucked from his veins and arteries and tissues, leaving him flabby, irresolute, compared to his former self. Even as Lund shadowed Rainey, so ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... club. After steaming myself for half an hour and taking a cold plunge, an alcohol rub and a cocktail, I feel younger than ever; but the sight of my fellow men in the bath revolts me. Almost without exception they have flabby, pendulous stomachs out of all proportion to the rest of their bodies. Most of them are bald and their feet are excessively ugly, so that, as they lie stretched out on glass slabs to be rubbed down with salt ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... was nearly forty years old. He was a man of middle height, slightly bald, and already disposed to obesity. He had his father's face, a long face with broad features; beneath his skin one could divine the fat to which were due the flabby roundness of his features, and his yellowish, waxy complexion. Though his massive square head still recalled the peasant, his physiognomy was transfigured, lit up from within as it were, when his drooping eyelids were raised and his eyes awoke to life. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... help it," Drake said blandly. "I was drawn back by the memory of the natural beauties of your planet. The very thought of the fat, flabby face of old Belgezad, decorated with a bulbous nose that is renowned throughout the Galaxy, was irresistible. So ...
— Heist Job on Thizar • Gordon Randall Garrett
... large pine table, the rest of those assembled seated themselves, and for some time preserved an unbroken silence. During this pause I scrutinized the persons present. Next to me, on my right, sat a flabby man, with ill-marked, baggy features and injected eyes. He was, as I learned afterwards, an eclectic doctor, who had tried his hand at medicine and several of its quackish variations, finally settling down on eclecticism, which I believe professes ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... swinging from side to side, but it did not quite fall—not then. The congressman's cheeks hung flabby, his forehead was wet, and he shook from head to foot; but he clenched his jaws and made one ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... card. For that reason I fear that I have been a little brutal. Now please don't hurry away. You have shot your bolt. Already Mr. Shopland is turning the thing over in his mind. Was I lurking outside that night, Mr. Shopland, to guide that young man's flabby arm? He scarcely seemed man enough for a murderer, did he, when he sat quaking on that stool in Soto's Bar while Mr. Ledsam tortured him? I beg you again not to hurry, Miss Hyslop. At any rate wait while my servants fetch you a taxi. It was clouding over when I came ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... soul of a Bald Eagle in the body of a Poland China sow and you begin to have some idea of Fatty Matthews. Fat filled his boots as with water and he made a "squnching" sound when he walked; fat rolled along his jowls; fat made his very forehead flabby; fat almost buried his eyes. But nothing could conceal the hawk-line of his nose or the gleam of those half-buried eyes. His hair was short-cropped, grey, and stood on end like bristles, and he was in the habit of using his panting ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... but far, infinitely far, beyond my reach. Nevertheless, I may attempt to describe her as she appears to me. Let me begin with that part of my ideal which has been inherited from Diana. My ideal woman has a sound body. She has bone, not brittle sticks of phosphate of lime. She has muscles, not flabby, slender ribbons of empty sarcolemma. She has blood, not a thin leucocytic ichor. I have no sympathy with that pseudo-civilization which apparently has for its object the destruction of the human race by the production of a race of bodiless women. If ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... gentleman whom it represented, and to whom it bore much the same resemblance as a balloon soaring skywards, fully inflated, bears to that same object with half the gas let out of it in a condition of flabby and wobbling semi-collapse. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... horribly unfamiliar in his manner frightened her. He came a step further into the hall and picking up a dark muffler from a chair, wound it round his neck. She saw that his face was livid, and looked suddenly flabby, and that ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... end overcome him, he was doing it for her sake. She did not feel, therefore, that she had the right to withdraw from him. The thing about it all that gave her a wonderful feeling of relief, and at the same time made her morally flabby and carried her away, was the passion of his will and the undaunted assurance of ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... at the birth saw that something was the matter with the child. It was little and frail, and as weak as threads of cotton. Its body was flat, and its legs and arms were helpless and flabby. Then all the men said, "That is ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... for a rest at Atlantic City, because their old Easter dinner might go down the wrong side. Honest, mama, to—to think how you're letting a crowd of old, flabby women that aren't fit even to wipe your shoes make a regular servant out of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... was a man at his cups. His platform was the straight article uncontaminated by ice or flabby sparkling-water; and chasers and the like of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Kennedy could no longer feel the pulse at the wrist. As he worked, I began to see what he was after. The reading on the graded scale of the height of the column of mercury indicated, I knew, blood pressure. This time, as he worked, I noted also the flabby skin of Pitts as well as the small and sluggish pupils ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... Mr. Ely's, was one of his warmest admirers, and thought he would make an unexceptionable son-in-law, in spite of his being of no particular 'family'. Mr. Farquhar was susceptible on the point of 'blood'—his own circulating fluid, which animated a short and somewhat flabby person, being, he considered, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... cold, flabby way of yours. You think it is all good and wise and kind. It's like a silly mother with a spoilt child. You've not spirit enough to scold, and all the while you are thinking me ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... upon the lids. The florid countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. His clear voice, well fuelled by a full, though rather flabby frame, rolls into all the galleries and corners of the vast building without effort; his gestures are even and well balanced; and you are, in fact, surprised to see how good a natural orator he is. You went to hear him, expecting to find some justification ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... to inaugurate, and with it all the wilderness to tame and a new land to develop. For these ends they sacrificed much. It is for us to attack with equal courage the evils of the present. Life has outwardly become easy for many of us; our spiritual muscle easily becomes flabby. But there are new tasks equally importunate, equally worthy of our loyalty and sacrifice, hard enough to stir our blood. The times call for new idealism, new courage, new effort; the purpose of this book will not be attained unless the reader carries away from its perusal some new ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... mind—the marsh temper. He could not have done it half so well in painting as he has done by the abstraction of wood-outline. The characteristic of a manly mind, or body, is to be gentle in temper, and firm in constitution; the contrary essence of a froggy mind and body is to be angular in temper, and flabby in constitution. I have enlarged Bewick's orator-frog for you, Plate I. c., and I think you will feel that he is entirely expressed in those ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... colossal mental power and nameless evil glowing in the dark depths of the two abnormally large eyes that stared fixedly out from under the heavy forehead. The thing had no nose. The mouth opening, surrounded by a rosette of flabby gray skin, was a mere slit. The entire skull and face were covered with small, closely overlapping scales of ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... not quite so sure about that," rejoined Hazard thoughtfully. "I am never afraid of pure atheism; it is the flabby kind of sentimental deism that annoys me, because it is as slippery as air. If you will tell her honestly what your skepticism means, I ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... palliate. Lie (noun), untruth, falsehood, falsity, fiction, fabrication, mendacity, canard, fib, story. Lie (verb), prevaricate, falsify, equivocate, quibble, shuffle, dodge, fence, fib. Likeness, resemblance, similitude, similarity, semblance, analogy. Limp, flaccid, flabby, flimsy. List, roll, catalogue, register, roster, schedule, inventory. Loud, resonant, clarion, stentorian, sonorous. Low, base, abject, servile, slavish, menial. Loyal, faithful, true, constant, staunch, unwavering, steadfast. Lurk, skulk, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... hundred and sixty-fifth birthday, more especially since at no time in my life have I studied the arts of the Stone-Cutter, or been a master in the Science of Quarrying. Nor is it easy at my advanced age, with a back no longer sinewy, and muscles grown flabby from lack of active exercise, for me to lift a virgin sheet of stone from the ground to the surface of my writing-desk without a derrick, but these are, after all, minor difficulties, and I shall let no such insignificant obstacles stand between me and the great purpose I have in mind. I shall ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... to God I were sure of what you say!' moaned Miss Madden, with vehemence which seemed extraordinary in such a feeble, flabby person. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... no fun to the supper that Saturday night. I sat at a table with a deaf girl, two dirty men, and a fat, flabby female with pop eyes, and not a one of them acted as if he possessed the ability to speak. Except the deaf girl, who did tell me ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... break in pinching, and if you nip the skin with your nails, it will make a dent; the fat will be soft and pulpy, like lard. If the lean be tough, and the fat flabby and spongy, feeling rough, it is old, especially if the rind be stubborn, and you cannot nip it with your nails. Little kernels, like nail-shot, in the fat, are a sign that it is measly, and dangerous ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... tall, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, and weighed about two hundred pounds of flabby flesh, mostly covered by filthy garments. His head was pyramidal in shape, and covered by a mass of unkempt red hair. He had practically no forehead. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. His nose was flat and bent to one side, ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... so thick that he could discern nothing but a short, squat man, in brown clothes and white hat, heavily striding to and fro. A negro was crouching outside, his knees cuddled in his arms to keep warm: a field-hand, you could be sure from the face, a grisly patch of flabby black, with a dull eluding word of something, you could not tell what, in the points of eyes,—treachery or gloom. The prisoner stopped, cursing him about something: the only answer was a lazy rub ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... they had been pinched, and extravasated blood had stagnated between their membranes. They contained nothing, as far as we examined, but a slimy bloody froth. Their coats were remarkably smooth, thin, and flabby. The wrinkles of the stomach were totally obliterated. The internal coat of the stomach and duodenum, especially about the orifices of the former, was prodigiously inflamed and excoriated. The redness of the white of the ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... Jurgis could not stay angry. The poor fellow looked like a homeless ghost, with his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling into his eyes; he was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his appearance. His muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft and flabby. He had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him with delicacies. It was better, he said, that he should not eat, it was a saving. About the end of March he had got hold of Ona's bankbook, and ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... eminently practical and almost rudely healthy young man, with an unreflecting belief in the existence of things he had seen, and considerable doubt concerning those which he had not seen. In his heart he regarded sentiment as the expression of a flabby nature in a feeble body. Once or twice he had casually redressing-case, with its array of silver toilet articles, the solid front of his chiffonnier, the carved arms of his favorite lounging-chair, even the etchings and prints on the walls. Suddenly, as he looked ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this, he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy" Burgundy was no more than a flabby, vin ordinaire beside it. Not that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in his veins, he summed it up to ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... visage, spotted with pimples and blue blotches of close-shaven beard,—his spectral glance of admiration through those detestable blue spectacles. She imagined that she felt the clammy touch of his long, skinny fingers, and cold, flabby palm. She reflected upon the probability, nay, the certainty, that she must marry this man, for whom she felt such an invincible repugnance, and in a frenzy of dismay and terror she screamed aloud and started up as if to fly. Then, recollecting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... was helpless before this clear-eyed, supple athlete who walked like a god from Olympus. One can't lap up half a dozen highballs a day for an indeterminate number of years, without getting flabby, nor can he spend himself in feeble dissipations and have reserves of strength to call upon when needed. The tongue went dry in his mouth. He began to ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... of the waves. It did not float, but darted about at its own will. It had an object; was advancing somewhere rapidly. The thing had something of the form of a jester's bauble with points, which hung flabby and undulating. It seemed covered with a dust incapable of being washed away by the water. It was more than horrible; it was foul. It seemed to be seeking the darker portion of the cavern, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... hat and turned away. Northrup got an unpleasant impression of the man's head in the back. It was flat and his neck met it in flabby folds that wrinkled under certain emotions as other men's foreheads did. The expressive neck was ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... I've ever seen roll a cigarette properly, Jimmy," she said. "Everybody else leaves them all flabby at the ends." ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... coined that phrase: 'The Melting-Pot,' the title to his play caught the popular fancy of a shibboleth-crazy nation, and provided pap for the fanciful, for the theorists, for the flabby idealists and doctrinaires. If I melt lead and iron and copper and silver and gold in the same pot, I get a bastard metal, do I not? It is not, as a fused product, worth a tinker's hoot. Why, even Zangwill is not an advocate of the melting-pot. He is a Jew, proud of it, and extremely ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... tale of obstetrical fact and fancy, told plushily, of course, against the dangerous little ears of Jeanette, and at its conclusion Mrs. Peopping's steel-bead bag, half finished, lay in a huddle at her feet, her pink and flabby face turned reminiscently toward ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... in matters political, in matters social, and matters financial you will find that the flabby, narrow-chested, under- trained mind that hides in the excellent-looking body of the typical young Englishman is encumbered with an elaborate duplicity. Under the cloak of a fine tradition of good form and fair appearances you will find some intricate disbeliefs, some odd practices. You will trace ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... pity, as a being who had deliberately chosen to shut himself off from civilization, for a period of many years. He was taking the place of one who was going home—and the man was in a desperate hurry to get away. He looked ill, withal he was so fat, for he was very fat and flabby, extraordinarily white, with circles beneath his puffy eyes blacker and more marked than those on the other faces. The departing official shook hands hurriedly with Mercier, and kissed his old companions good-bye ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... to his incantation, Geoffrey suddenly came upon Wigram. Wigram had been a fellow-passenger on board the steamer. He was an old Etonian; and this was really the only bond between the two men. For Wigram was short, fat and flabby, dull-eyed and pasty-faced. He spoke with a drawl; he had literary pretensions and he was ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... but even in that event, Miela explained, it would result in little; for generations of comparative inactivity and the colder climate had made them inclined to stoutness. Their wing muscles were weak and flabby, and with their greater weight of body they flew ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... ached and their senses reeled before the blaze and the glory of this, the most magnificent of the dwellings of man. Finally, a pair of curtains, crusted with gold, were parted, and their guide handed them over to a negro mute who stood within. A heavy, fat, brown-skinned man, with a large, flabby, hairless face was pacing up and down the small apartment, and he turned upon them as they entered with an abominable and threatening smile. His loose lips and pendulous cheeks were those of a gross old woman, but above ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hand grasped by another that was flabby and unpleasantly moist; and found himself looking into a face that was red, with heavy rolls of unhealthy fat terminating in a double chin and a thick, apoplectic neck—a huge, round face, with ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... to. But our genial Ike is not like that." Wally consumed a mouthful of sole. "Ike Goble is a bad citizen. He paws! He's a slinker and a prowler and a leerer. He's a pest and a worm! He's fat and soft and flabby. He has a greasy soul, a withered heart, and an eye like a codfish. Not knocking him, of course!" added Wally magnanimously. "Far be it from me to knock anyone! But, speaking with the utmost respect and viewing him in the most favorable ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... between Mrs. Turpin and her lodger were becoming less strained. For the first time in her life the flabby, foolish woman had to do with a person of firm will and bright intelligence; not being vicious of temper, she necessarily felt herself submitting to domination, and darkly surmised that the rule might in some way be for her good. All the sluggard and the slattern in her, all the obstinacy ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... Vlasova on the street. He was a dapper old man, who always wore a black silk neckerchief around his red, flabby neck, and a thick, lilac-colored waistcoat of velvet around his body. On his sharp, glistening nose there always sat a pair of glasses with tortoise-shell rims, which secured him the sobriquet ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... what he will live on. He comes from a hard country, is tough, and when you and I are going around shivering in an overcoat, he will be going around in his shirt sleeves. That is the stuff we want here, not the first kind, with flabby hands and sapped vitality.' Sure enough the bookkeeper did not wear well, and falling into the hands of the police, some months later, he was deported under the three-year limitation law, and the country was better ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... frankincense, chatter and squabble! With their blue petticoats tucked up above their knees, how they pick off the stray pieces of raw haddock, or cod, and, with creaking jaws, chew them; and while they ruminate, bask their own flabby carcasses in the sun! With the dried tail of a herring sticking out of their saffron-coloured, shrivelled chops, Lord! how they gaped when I passed by, hurriedly, like ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... two penn'orth not being larger than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it, stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon every day; and many and many a day did ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... industrial output of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race. For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him questions, but within ten minutes the savage was sound asleep. When awakened the old chief said: "Ideas make me so sleepy." Similarly, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... good spell then, your honour. I hardly know myself now, for I am flabby and short of wind. Still, I am sorry to leave the chateau, for I have had the best time I ever had, in my life. Everyone was mighty kind, and seemed to think that I had done great things in helping to rescue Miss Anne, whereas I did nothing at all, ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... Their homes were empty most o' the time. The reading-lamp was never lighted. There was no season o' social converse. Every merchant but Eph Hill grew fat an' round, an' complained of indigestion an' sick-headache. Sam looked like a moored balloon. Seemed so their morals grew fat an' flabby an' shif'less an' in need of exercise. Their morals travelled too, but they travelled from mouth to mouth, as ye might say, an' very fast. More'n half of 'em give up church an' went off on the country roads every Sunday. All along the pike from ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... no means particular in her dress; which consisted of a woollen plaid, very much faded, and both ragged and dirty. Her large mutch with its broad frills formed a sort of glory round her head, setting off to no advantage her pock-marked, flabby face, wide mouth and yellow projecting teeth. She had a comical, good-natured obliquity of vision in her prominent light-grey eyes, which were very red about the rims; and Flora thought, as she read with an inquiring eye the countenance of their landlady, that without being positively disgusting, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... falteringly was a little fellow in white gaiters, with an albino's face and scanty hair that stood erect in bunches. But that tactless friend's interruption simply furnished Le Merquier with a pretext for an immediate and natural transition. A hideous smile parted his flabby lips. "The honorable Monsieur Sarigue refers to the Caisse Territoriale; we proceed to answer him." The Paganetti den of thieves seemed to be, in truth, very familiar to him. In a few concise, keen words he threw light into the inmost depths of that dark lair, pointed out all the snares, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet |
