"Confusing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... influential southern ministers hit upon the scheme of teaching illiterate Negroes the principles of Christianity by memory training or the teaching of religion without letters. This the clergy were wont to call religious instruction. The word instruction, however, as used in various documents, is rather confusing. Before the reactionary period all instruction of the colored people included the teaching of the rudiments of education as a means to convey Christian thought. But with the exception of a few Christians the southerners thereafter used the word instruction ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... easier than to understand her,' he replied contemptuously. 'She knows what has become of Ferrari; and she is confusing you in a cloud of nonsense, because she daren't own the truth. Let ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... constituted still, and under all the shortcomings of the defenders, a most imposing menace to an attacking fleet. To convey a precise impression of them by detailed verbal description would be difficult, and the attempt probably confusing. It may be said, in brief, that the town faces easterly, rising abruptly up a steep hill; that from its front there then projected a pier, nearly a thousand feet long, at whose end was a circular fort, carrying seventy guns in three ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... quiet last night. H. carried the bank box; I the case of matches; Martha the blankets and pillows, keeping an eye on the shells. We slept on piles of old newspapers. In the streets the roar seems so much more confusing, I feel sure I shall run right into the way of a shell. They seem to have five different sounds from the second of throwing them to the hollow echo wandering among the hills, which sounds the most ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... prepared, the mixing of the cake may be begun at once. The method of mixing depends entirely on the kind of cake that is being made, sponge cake involving a different procedure from butter cake. These methods should be thoroughly mastered, so that there will be no danger of confusing them and so that the recipe will not need to be referred to constantly during the mixing of the cake. When an ingredient that is not usually included in the ordinary butter or sponge cake is found in the recipe, the way in which this ingredient is added ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 4 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... adequate, gradually, and in spite of all effort to the contrary, I found that my teaching rested more and more on my own personal experience as a housekeeper, both at the South and at the North. The mass of material in many books was found confusing and paralyzing, choice seeming impossible when a dozen methods were given. And for the large proportion of receipts, directions were so vague that only a trained housekeeper could be certain of the order of combination, ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... where is a narrow channel for a boat drawing only a few feet of water. Unless he made this, he must run south and skirt the Ecriviere Rock and bank, where the streams setting over the sandy ridges make a confusing perilous sea to mariners in bad weather. Else, he must sail north between the Ecrehos and the Dirouilles, in the channel called Etoc, a tortuous and dangerous passage save in good weather, and then safe only to the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mistake is that of confusing art with archaeology. The veneration born of antiquity is one of the best traits in the human character, and fain would we have it cultivated to a greater extent. The old masters are rightly to be honoured for opening the path to future enlightenment. The mere fact that they have ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... now, and my heart steady, and I listened with an intensity that postponed fear, though my predicament was not a pleasant one, and the rippling water below me was confusing. ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... no such thing as a pure language. Their ideas and language, like their blood, is badly mixed up, confusing, and unsatisfactory, so far as the real meaning of the words are concerned. For this very reason we find so many different meanings for the same word; and also for this reason, we cannot formulate a legal enactment in the Anglo-Saxon tongue that, a learned lawyer, versed in this senseless jugglery ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... between the aesthetic and the sensuous clearly marked. Beneath a straighter sun the line is blurred and sometimes vanishes: no orchid-musk, no azure and distant hill, no tinted bay but accosts the senses, confusing one with another, mingling all the emotions in a single cup, persuading man that he knows good from evil as little as though he lived still in Eden. From such stealthy influences the man of rigid convictions is often in more danger than the man of no convictions at all, for rigid convictions ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of the opening of the opera. There was the usual crush, the glitter and confusing radiance of the brilliant audience. Annette, with papa, Aunt Nina, and Philip, was late reaching her box. The curtain was up, and "La Juive" was pouring forth defiance at her angry persecutors. Annette listened breathlessly. In fancy, she too was ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... case should the address be ambiguous. However many branch offices the firm may have, the use of more than one address on the envelope is apt to be confusing and may result in a communication's being returned to an office other than that from which it comes. To avoid this, only one address should be printed on the envelope, and that should be the address to which the correspondence is to be returned by the postal authorities in case of ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... That would have been dreadful, to have to go behind the screens to take off her hat and gloves. Then instead of sending word for her to come up, he himself had come down. As he led the way past the confusing halls and studios, he had looked back over his shoulder just a little, to let her know that not for a moment did he lose thought of her. To have walked in front of her, looking straight ahead, might ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... that she was pretty, too. And presently I thought her delightful. William had met me in a 'governess cart,' and we went to see him unharness the pony. He did this in a fumbling, experimental way, confusing the reins with the traces, and profiting so little by his wife's directions that she began to laugh. And her laugh was a lovely thing; quite a small sound, but exquisitely clear and gay, coming in a sequence of notes that neither rose nor fell, that ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the colour must be in the mind, seems to depend for its plausibility upon confusing the thing apprehended with the act of apprehension. Either of these might be called an 'idea'; probably either would have been called an idea by Berkeley. The act is undoubtedly in the mind; hence, when we are thinking of the act, we readily ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... drawn by a pair of lean grey horses with long manes and tails. The coachman was an Arab much pitted with smallpox, who wore the tarbush with European clothes. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, and the streets of the enticing and confusing city were crowded. Isaacson sat up very straight and looked about him with eager eyes. He felt keenly excited. This was his very first taste of Eastern life. Never before had he set foot in his "own place." Already, despite the zest shed through him by novelty, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... attitude—that is, in his treatment of her—was in the direction of bolder passion. of complete casting aside of all the restraint a conventional respecter of conventional womanhood feels toward a woman whom he respects. So, naturally, Susan, eager to love and to be loved, and easily confusing the not easily distinguished spiritual and physical, was reassured. Once in a while a look or a phrase from him gave her vague uneasiness; but on the whole she felt that, in addition to clear conscience from straightforwardness, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... while professing to explain God's Word, the scribes and teachers were confusing the simple people who wanted ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... the manner of measuring them, their pitch and like terms, are most confusing to the novice. As an aid to the understanding on this subject, the wheels are illustrated, showing the application ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... education-and-property-acquiring people. In a word, the difficulty of the problem is not so much due to the facts presented as to the hypothesis assumed for its solution. In this it is similar to the problem of the solar system. By a complex, confusing, and almost contradictory mathematical process, by the use of zigzags instead of straight lines, the earth can be proved to be the center of things celestial; but by an operation so simple that it can be comprehended by ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... make no impression in the picture; the thin and sere sward may appear rather like a closely shaven lawn or a new-mown meadow. And again, the picture sets a limit to the scene; it frames it, and thereby cuts off all extraneous and confusing ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... top brought me out upon a high hill of snow that sloped steeply down into the woods. The snow was soft, and I sat down in it and slid "a blue streak"—my blue overalls recording the streak—for a quarter of a mile, and then came to a sudden and confusing stop; one of my webs had caught on a spine of one of the dwarfed and almost ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... reaction for habitual situations and leaves consciousness free for new decisions. Since an automatic action, traveling along well-worn brain paths, consumes little energy and causes the minimum of fatigue, the plan not only frees consciousness from a confusing number of details, but also works for the conservation of energy. While consciousness is busy lighting up the special problems of the moment, the vast mass of life's demands are taken care of by the subconscious, which constitutes the bulk of the mind. "Properly speaking, the unconscious ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... it suitable myself to such an audience as this," replied Edna, who was possibly confusing it with Othello. "No, Miss Heritage, I really think something less—less objectionable would be—There's As you like it, now, quite a pleasant play. I think I can remember the outline of that. Let me see. Yes, it's about a girl called "Rosalind," ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... indifferent, suspicious, or even hostile, regarding the advances into the realm of secular knowledge, so decidedly do we like to see the workers in the realm of the knowledge of nature cautioned against confusing points of view, in thinking that they can through their scientific knowledge purify and reform the religious and ethical realms. They may purify and reform as much as they please, but only in their own realm. The only thing they are able to reform is our knowledge ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... the credit of Fundi: in the first place, he had not bolted; in the second place, instead of running up to the left side of my mount and perhaps colliding with and certainly confusing me, he had come up on the right side and passed the rifle to me ACROSS the horse. I do not know whether or not he had figured this out beforehand, but it ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... a loss which is to be more admired, the ignorance or the impudence of such opinion-confusing and opinion-poisoning sheets as the New York Times, the World, the Herald, etc. They sing hosanna for McClellan's victories. In advance they praise the to-be-fought battles on selected fields of battle, and after the plans have been matured for ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... retching violently, too sick to budge from the bunk room. It took over two weeks, with stops at half a dozen contract planets, before Jack and Tiger began to adjust themselves to the frightening and confusing sensations of conversion to star-drive. During this time Dal carried the load of the ship's work alone, while the others lay gasping and exhausted in their bunks, trying to rally strength for the ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... after a short discussion, it was decided that John and Betty should proceed to the roof of the house with two pailsful of water, whilst Agamemnon remained below to watch the effects of the measure. When John and Betty arrived at the chimney-pots, the pother was so confusing, that they were undecided which was the rebellious flue! but, in order to render assurance doubly sure, they each selected the one they conceived to be the delinquent, and discharged the contents of their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... regretted for a moment having burned it, but I shall regret all my life having made it known publicly, though I could hardly have done otherwise. I did not know my public, I did not know England." Here I think she was wrong in confusing England with a few anonymous letter- writers and scurrilous persons; for however opinions may differ upon the act itself, its wisdom or unwisdom, all right-thinking people honoured her for the sacrifice which she had ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... I replied, and raising my eyes to meet Mr. Benton's gaze, I shot the truth at him with a dark glance; his own eyes fell, and he looked as if overwhelmed with confusing thoughts; and the consciousness of being foiled roused the demon within him. This, however, was not the time or place to unbottle his wrath, and it must swell ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... moonlight were very confusing," remarked Josephine; "and then O'Shea made the two sailors stand in the same way, and they were real. I never knew a man like O'Shea for thinking of things that are half serious and half funny. I never knew him yet fail to find a way to do the thing he wanted to do; and it's ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the green hills, the dark rocks, and the sands were lit up with a brilliancy as of noonday, while the rolling clouds of smoke, laden as thickly with sparks as the sky in a snowstorm, were carried far away southwards and seaward. But the light was dazzling, confusing; and before the bold sailors knew which way to steer, they ran aground. The tide, in ten minutes' time, ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... though this kind of romancing is common enough among intelligent children, it distinguishes itself in this case by the strong impression which the incident had left on his own mind. It seems to have been a first real flight of dramatic fancy, confusing his identity for ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... However, because the current in the electrolyte flows from the consumed plate to the unconsumed plate, the consumed plate is called the positive plate and the unconsumed, the negative. This is likely to become confusing, but if one remembers that the active plate is the positive plate, because it sends forth positive ions in the electrolyte, and, therefore, itself becomes negatively charged, one will have the proper basis always to ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... again comes to the weary Commander-in-chief of finding a leader who could lead, in whom the troops and the country would have confidence, and who could be trusted to do his simple duty as a general in the field without confusing his military responsibilities with political scheming. The choice first fell upon Burnside. Burnside was neither ambitious nor self-confident. He was a good division general, but he doubted his ability for the general command. Burnside loyally accepts the task, does the best that was ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... in safety first of all. Then he explained the advantages they were gaining by every mile they made the enemy follow them—how the low Brazos land, the unfordable streams, the morasses, and the pathless woods were weakening, separating, and confusing the three great bodies of Mexicans behind. He declared the freedom of Texas to be sure and certain, and bid them prepare to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... education in its present stage of development, which is characteristic of our own generation, and which is in some ways so confusing and disconcerting, and so unfavourable to the smooth working of our educational machinery, has the merit of being a healthy ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... ascending metamorphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means of thought, recovers in inward profundity what it has lost in extension, and makes up for the rich accumulations of receptive passivity by the enormous privilege of that empire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by confusing and suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the severity of the conditions attached to the higher existence; but conscious and voluntary thought alone brings knowledge and allows us to act—that is to say, is alone capable ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it is with parcels distribution: private enterprise supplies in a partial manner a public need, and with the organization of a public parcels and goods delivery on cheap and sane lines in the place of our present complex, stupid, confusing, untrustworthy, and fantastically costly chaos of post-office, railways, and carriers, it is quite conceivable that Messrs. Omnium will give place again to ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the frailest, in the loftiest as well as in the lowest. And till such purpose is understood, the life of the man is to beholders what the flower is to the eye when looked at through a microscope,—an expanse of mere tissue, rough, formless, confusing; but such purpose once understood, the soul is transformed to the beholder as if made of glass, transparent, ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... had taken M. de Bois aback, chiefly because he was confounded by a new proof of his own awkwardness (stupidity, he plainly termed it) in leaving his handkerchief behind him, as a witness of his presence at the chalet. But there was no such confusing testimony to destroy his composure when he received Maurice. Besides, he had ample time to collect himself; for he was walking in the park when his valet announced that the young viscount was awaiting him in the library. He had looked forward ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... out he meant to reach the car and go back to town at once. Yet when he came to the road over which he had loitered the day before, he turned off upon it with slower steps. There was a confusing whirl of ideas in his brain, a chaos that required all his energy to feed it, so that the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... (it was in his pocket). This prevented the Captain from bringing a light and coming to the rescue. But Captain Hisgins broke down the door with the heavy fender curb and it was his smashing the door that sounded so confusing and frightening in the ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... moments when the whole traffic seemed to become chaotic and the roads were choked, and then as suddenly as the congestion was created, it was relieved. He felt enthralled by this wonder of traffic, of great crowds moving with ease through a criss-cross of confusing streets. ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... John MacDonald planned to maintain against all comers, and the on-rush of business, he practiced the art of relaxation; he had formed a habit of returning to the simple from confusing contact with the complex, and he practiced it largely in his home, with his wife and children. Lincoln is the best-known master of this art, necessary to maintain the equilibrium of a busy man, and keep him fresh, sane, sociable ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... highest and most ennobling ideas. Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind. He is the enemy of 'songs without words,' which he supposes to have some confusing or enervating effect on the mind of the hearer; and he is also opposed to the modern degeneracy of the drama, which he would probably have illustrated, like Aristophanes, from Euripides and Agathon. From this passage may be gathered a more perfect conception of art than ...
— Laws • Plato
... travellers over this great work now see all we saw on that long morning, and a great deal more besides, while the carriage windows are soused by the all-pervading spray, thus carrying out one of Mr. Rhodes's cherished sentiments. Finally—musing at the marvellous and confusing twists and turns of the river, changing in character and appearance so as to be wellnigh unrecognizable—we walked on a hundred yards, and came upon a deep, deep gorge, rocky, barren, and repelling, at the bottom of which, sluggish and dirty in colour, ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... period of my acceding to the administration of the General Government. For this purpose I wish to receive in writing such a clear account of the Department at the head of which you have been for some years past as may be sufficient (without overburthening or confusing the mind, which has very many objects to claim its attention at the same instant) to impress me with a full, precise, and distinct general idea of the affairs of the United States so far as they are comprehended in or connected with ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 10. • James D. Richardson
... characteristically great in purpose. He avoided carrying forward his arguments beyond the basis of his facts. Whether in treating the tangled intricacies of necessity, or the theological quagmires of prophecy, he invariably explained without confusing, and refuted without involving other subjects than those legitimately belonging to the controversy. His style of writing was serious, plain, and without an undue levity, yet withal perfectly readable. Men studied Collins who ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... deserved the name of "physical basis of life", which was soon given to it by Huxley. With this conception of protoplasm as the physical basis of life the problems connected with the study of life became more simplified. In order to study the nature of life it was no longer necessary to study the confusing mass of complex organs disclosed to us by animals and plants, or even the somewhat less confusing structures shown by individual cells. Even the simple cell has several separate parts capable of undergoing great modifications ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... the principal representatives, protectors, elaborators and explorers of Christianity. When the Greeks visited the Slav country with their divine message, the Slavs were heathens. Their heathenism was like a confusing dream. Nature stood before them with its contradictory forces. The primitive Slavs regarded all the forces of Nature encircling a human creature as being alive and stronger than this creature. All the forces, whether friendly or unfriendly to man, are man ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... fingers strike smartly, and then begin to remove, cautiously and slowly, because the mosquito was possibly not dead after all. What was the matter with the young man? His blood and senses seemed to quiver and tingle with a sensation at once delicious and confusing. In the same instant, he had seized the soft, warm fingers in both his hands, and pressed them convulsively and almost fiercely. Cornelia very naturally cried out, and sprang to her feet. Bressant, it would seem not so naturally, did the same thing, and with the air of being to the full as ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... the Jews and spoilt this beautiful old custom, by lighting false fires on other mountains, on wrong days, and at wrong hours, and thus confusing those who were watching by the beacon-fires. After a time, so many mistakes were made by means of these false signals, that the Jews were compelled to give up the system of beacon-fires altogether, and to depend on the slower course ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... garb; and then begins the induction into office, a trying experience to you both, and one which should be sufficiently prolonged to enable her to get a good grip of each new duty as it presents itself. Avoid confusing her at the start with a jumble of instructions, but make haste slowly, giving directions in a way which she can understand. Introduce her into her workroom, explain the range and show her how to operate it, point out the different utensils and their uses and ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism which has left none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced a mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing and even hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more important and profound agreements which have been growing all the time beneath. There are now abundant signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of a broad and solid kind. In ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the confusing noises that were about me, but the voice of my faery was not among them. My hand groped after alien hands, but the faery hand was not among them. Nor would I have ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... instinct, the everlasting human impulse. The boys, hobbledehoys, both of them, grew shy and turned red at unexpected moments. The girls developed a certain condescension of manner, which was very confusing and irritating to the boys. Elizabeth, as unaware of herself as the bud that has not opened to the bee, sighed a good deal, and repeated poetry to any one who would listen to her. She said boys were awfully rough, and their boots had a disagreeable smell, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... to wait for that knowledge! An hour would be a year and a year would be a century. He helped in all things as he was told to do; but his fingers were like thumbs and his feet like clubs. He felt a singular and confusing sense of identity with his father, as though ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... hard, rough, barren, and unfossiliferous strata. Wherever it is found, it lies on the top of the "mountain," or carboniferous limestone. Almost everywhere, where coal is found in England, it lies on the millstone grit. I speak roughly, for fear of confusing my readers with details. The three deposits pass more or less, in many places, into each other: but always in the order of mountain limestone below, millstone grit on it, and coal on ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... the Queen," I said. "It's rather confusing, because I had thought you were Alice; but it can't be helped. Besides, you came on just before you did, really, and you've spoken twice before you opened ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... is placed before the public as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of irrelevant reformation created chiefly within the last decade. Certainly in comparison with the first report of Mr. Wright's Massachusetts incumbency, the present one indicates a retrogression as ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... was to conduct business as business—not as sentiment. His aim was honorable profit, and he had no purpose of confusing it ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... brogue. Mrs. O'Brien had only a little of it—just the bit of a soft brogue that comes from Dublin, where she had lived for a long time. The most of the others had a good deal more. But as I go on with the story from here, I see no use in trying to write the brogue. It is hard to spell and confusing to read. If you do not know what a good Irish brogue is, you would never learn from any attempt of mine to spell it out for you; and if you do know what it is, you can put it in for yourself. I may ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... with an effort and looked. Even as he did so there came a trampling of horses' hoofs; and then, in the light that streamed from the windows, there appeared a company on horseback. They were too far away from where he sat, and the lights were too confusing, for him to see more than the general crowd that went by—perhaps from a dozen to twenty all told. But by them ran the heads of men who had waited at the bridge to see them go by; and a murmuring of voices came even through the closed windows. It was plain that others besides ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... distant, Captain Williams,' says the lady, smiling sweetly, and pretty nigh confusing my brains by the beautiful look she gave me, 'would a ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... For the second time a suspicion crossed the Vicar's mind that his hearers were confusing the Millennium with ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lieutenants are called "Mister" always, but all other officers must be addressed by their rank. At least that is what they tell me. But in Faye's company, the captain is called general, and the first lieutenant is called major, and as this is most confusing, I get things mixed sometimes. Most girls would. A soldier in uniform waited upon us at dinner, and that seemed so funny. I wanted to watch him all the time, which distracted me, I suppose, for once I called General ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... persisted. He dropped behind again, this time on purpose, after they had passed a clearing. He stayed hidden behind a tree-trunk and watched. The cluster-light was bright now but very confusing to the eye. He heard a rustling that he did not think was wind, and he thought that something started to cross the clearing and then stopped, as though it had ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... of "the ocean," too, another place where the tall ships went. But what was the ocean? "It's like a lake, but mightier," Belle had said. But what was a lake? It was all so vague and confusing. Always it came back to this, that I had no more seen the "ocean" than I had seen a "heathen land," and so ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... and so wills may be educated, and so that which makes us capable of faith, hope, and desire, may be drawn forth, strengthened, and refined. Emerson, whose thought is predominantly spiritual, takes a low and material view of the moral faculties, confusing strength of will with health. "Courage," he says, "is the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.... When one has a plus of health, all difficulties vanish before it." But will is a moral rather than a constitutional power; and in so far as it is moral, it may be cultivated and ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... was a little confusing to me, but I could guess at what he meant. Gorman appeared to him to be an unappreciated Oscar Wilde, one of those geniuses—I am bound to admit that they are mostly Irish—who delude the world into thinking they are uttering ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... best a confusing world! She seemed to be like a ship without a chart or a port of destination. But at least she could accept things as they were—even the fact that she herself was not "in commission," and was, ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... obtainable information given concerning the varieties which they represent. The testimony given is sometimes contradictory, either from want of proper observation on the part of the writers quoted, or from differences in the seeds sold under the same name. This is necessarily somewhat confusing to one who is looking up the merits of a variety, but it will form a better basis for judgment than would a mere descriptive list, without reference to dates or authorities. It is practically impossible to make a satisfactory classification which ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... carry on a long conversation with me at the Foreign Office about the proceedings of two Ambassadors who were engaged on the opposite sides in a great negotiation, and call A "B," and B "A," through the whole of it, which was, to say the least, confusing. He also sometimes entirely forgot the principal name in connection with the subject, as, for example, that of Mr. Gladstone when Prime Minister, and had to resort to the most extraordinary forms of language in order to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... to an abrupt stop, smelled first one arrow at one side of the trail, and the other on the opposite side, deliberated a moment, bolted sidewise and disappeared. What he got in his olfactory investigation must have been confusing. He smelled man; he smelled turkey feathers; and he smelled paint. What sort of animals do you think he imagined the ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... within ten days of the signing of the armistice, assuming the shape of an official inquiry from Division, a five-barred document wherein somebody with a talent for confusing himself (and a great contempt for the Paper Controller) managed to ask every officer the same question in five different ways. They cancelled each other out after a little examination and left behind merely a desire to discover whether or not each officer had a job waiting for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... cleared out temporarily for repairs, she never smiled, her husband told me, for more than three weeks—not till the workmen were out of the house, and that cupboard in working order again. She said it was so confusing, having nowhere to put ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... men enjoyed, in the Middle Ages, silly, teazing or puzzling answers; the questioner remaining at the end rolled up in the repartees, gasping as a fly caught in a spider's web. The Court fool or buffoon had for his principal merit his clever knack of returning witty or confusing answers; the best of them were preserved; itinerant minstrels remembered and repeated them; clerks turned them into Latin, and gave them place in their collections of exempla. They afforded amusement for a king, an amusement of a mixed ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... which I can't quite understand,' Charlie replied, for the cookery-book was an extraordinary work. The writing was bad, the spelling was worse, and the abbreviations were confusing. But the cook went right through the book with him then ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... thousand different dins; the bustle of the street; the clatter of a factory; the voice of the workshop; the cries of the pedlers intermingled with the chimes of the bells of a near-by convent-a confusing buzzing noise, which the author, however, seems to enjoy; for Coppee is Parisian by birth, Parisian by education, a ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... found themselves confronted with a task which is always confusing to criticism, in the necessity of valuing a work of art so novel in material that it seems to refuse the application of criterions. As he followed their struggles in the endeavor to judge his work ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... together, while the flower of Bursley's chivalry gazed in enchantment. The Countess's fan, depending from her arm, dangled against Denry's suit in a rather confusing fashion, which withdrew his attention from his feet. He laid hold of it gingerly between two unemployed fingers. After that he managed fairly well. Once they came perilously near the Earl and his partner; nothing else. And then the dance ended, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... words—in the tone. The chairman let fall the hand which had been raised to his face, holding on his eye-glasses; and a sort of self-condemning fear arose, confusing his brain. His son, proved innocent of one part, might be proved innocent of the other; and then—how would his own harsh conduct show out! West Lynne, in its charity, the justice in his, had cast more odium to Richard, with regard to his ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... wisdom, the new points of view, and the new interests must, of course, be from time to time bewildering and confusing. Today those who have a voice in the body politic have expressed their wishes and sufferings. The result has been a smaller or greater balancing of their conflicting interests. The appearance of new interests and complaints means disarrangement and confusion ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... correctly done, but the particulars concerning the musicians were rather startling. Thus Purcell was said to have written, among other things, an opera called Ebdon and Eneas; one stated that he was born 1543 and died 1595, probably confusing him with Tallis, that he wrote masses and reformed the church music; another that he was the organist of King's College Chapel, and wrote madrigals. One stated that he was born 1568 and died 1695; another, not knowing that he had so long ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... of romance, of great things all about them transcending the ordinary things of life—this in the Jews has survived centuries of torment, shame, cruelty, and oppression. This inherited sense of romance in the pawnbroker now leaped to answer Dickie's appeal. (And I do hope I am not confusing you; stick to it; read it again if you don't understand. What I mean is that the Jews always see the big beautiful things; they don't just see that gray is made of black and white; they see how incredibly black black can be, and that there may be a whiteness ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... If bankers, confusing distinctions of wealth, Have your gold to their own pockets whirled, And then gone to Europe for pleasure and health— It is only the way of ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... studious enough to hope for the honors she bestows on her worthier sons. You are already entered at Trinity,—and in fancy I see my youth return to me in your image. I see you wandering where the Cam steals its way through those noble gardens; and, confusing you with myself, I recall the old dreams that haunted me when the chiming bells swung over the placid waters. Verum secretumque Mouseion, quam multa dictatis, quam multa invenitis! There at that illustrious college, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... remained; she remembered the roses' perfume, and a very fat woman with a confusing similarity of contour fore and aft who blocked the lines and rattled on like a machine-gun saying dreadfully frank things about herself, her family, and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... enough but Dr. Harper seemed to find them most confusing. He wagged his venerable beard like an angry goat and said nothing at first, but like a goat he looked as though he might be gathering his forces for ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... confusing image of the Russian. Before she could reply the other said: "There's to be an inspection of the cars this morning. You'll have to get ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Why, Will..." I murmured. I seemed to feel myself on the edge of something very big and cloudy and confusing, but very necessary, somehow, to be understood. The trap he had led me into so neatly had fastened softly, but with almost an actual ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]—and putting itself at the disposition of the Press Bureau. That was the hour in which to fight for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... the dead vapors rising from a stagnant pool, and the same vapors touched by a torch. But we would brace the weakness which Lord Lindsay has admitted in his own assertion of this great inflaming instant by confusing its fire with the mere phosphorescence of the marsh, and explaining as a successive development of the several human faculties, what was indeed the bearing of them all at once, over a threshold strewed with the fragments of their idols, into the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he gives such an Account of his asking her Consent to marry him, and at the same Time artfully confusing her, so as to prevent her Consent, as perfectly paints his cunning vile Heart. How is her Behaviour altered to him from the Time she can write Miss Howe word that her Prospects are mended, till his returning Shufling convinces her there is no Confidence to be placed in him! But if, Sir, you cannot ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... could be turned on or off. Turned on, they linked together the senses of those who wore them, not the minds, but the senses. Each saw what the others saw, and heard what the others heard, and felt with the rest. But thoughts were not shared. Such a device would not be confusing if one were used to it, and two men working together could co-operate with a thousand times the effectiveness of men without them. Children playing together could have a degree of companionship otherwise impossible. ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... dispossess ourselves of the shackles of psychology, forget its confusing nomenclature, and view the human brain, as Sherrington has said, "as the organ of, and for the adaptation of nervous reaction," many clinical phenomena would appear ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... assembled at Marlowe Grange. The old house provided ample accommodation, and had been easily adapted to meet the wants of a school. Built originally in Elizabethan days, it had been added to at various times, and its medley of architecture, while hopelessly confusing styles, had resulted in a very picturesque and charming whole. Perhaps the most ancient part was the fortified gateway, ruinous and covered with ivy, but still preserving its winding stair leading to an upper story that spanned the entrance. With its ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... that I hate you!" I exclaimed (feeling very much as if I did hate her, though, for all that). "I only presume to think that you are confusing a delicate-minded man with a weak-minded man. Our ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... slow, Jervis," he replied. "We must carefully separate the legal tissues from the medical, and avoid confusing what we know with what we suspect. Now, with reference to the medical aspects of the case. The first question that confronts us is that of sleeping sickness, or negro-lethargy as it is sometimes called; and here we are in a difficulty. We have not enough ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... deep-rooted memories cling like his about some stable home! Whose notion of the world around them has expanded from some prospect of happy tranquillity, instead of being drawn at random from the confusing city's roar! Happier still if that early picture be of one of those rare scenes which have inspired poets and prophets with the retrospective day-dream of a patriarchal, or a golden, age; of some plot of ground like the Ithaca of Odysseus, [Greek: traechsi all agathae koyrotrophos], ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... that he saw a swordfish, but just as he was about to shout, there flashed across his mind a sentence that he had read somewhere of the likelihood of confusing a shark's fin with that of a swordfish, and soon he was able to make out that it was a shark. As it grew toward noon and the sun's rays beat directly on him, Colin began to realize that sitting on a scantling two inches by four ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Ba'albak, the Governor and the chief people rode out to receive us. Our horses' hoofs soon rang under a ruined battlement, and we entered in state through the dark tunnels. Horses were neighing, sabres were clanking; it was a noisy, confusing, picturesque scene. We tented for the night in the midst of the grand court of the ruins. In the morning the ladies of the Governor's harim paid me a visit in my tent. With their blue satin and diamonds, they were the most elaborately dressed women I had seen for a long time. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... the skipper made a gesture. The Plumie regarded Baird with interested eyes. And Baird led the way for a tour of the Niccola. It was confusing even to him, with right hand converted to up and left hand to down, and sidewise now almost vertical. On the way the Plumie made more clear, flutelike sounds, ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... of his ordination to the apostleship; and but once elsewhere in the New Testament by the appellation "son of Alpheus."[498] In writings other than scriptural he is sometimes designated as James II to avoid confusing him with James the son of Zebedee. There is acknowledged uncertainty concerning the identity of James the son of Alpheus as the James or one of the James's referred to in the Acts and the Epistles;[499] and a plenitude of controversial literature on ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... knowledge that the tide was on the rise, and half-ebb would not be till well on into next day. And he thought of Nance, and of Bernel, and of all the whole matter again; white thoughts and black thoughts, but chiefly white because of Nance, and Nance was a fact, while the black thoughts were shadows confusing as the mist. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... views of fifteen years ago are too familiar to you to need any exposition at my hands at this time. Suffice it to say that the religion of the Bible, as taught by the churches, to my mind appeared to be self-contradictory and confusing, and their explanations failed to explain. During the next eleven years my convictions underwent little change. I read everything that came in my way that had any bearing upon, or pretended in any degree to explain, the problem of life; and while I gained some ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... twenty-six-foot logs were placed side by side, slanting from a point two feet below the rim of the fall to the ledge below. They were bolted together top and bottom through the four holes bored for that purpose. This was a confusing and wet business. Sufficient water still flowed in the natural channel of the river to dash in spray over the entire work. Men toiled, wet to the skin, their garments clinging to them, their eyes full of water, barely able to breathe, yet groping doggedly at ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... invention of great utility, and grounded on optical principles; nor is at all difficult of execution; but it must be so divulged as not to be understood by the vulgar, and yet be clear to the sharp-sighted.' After this, he proceeds to describe a mechanism the details of which are confusing and unintelligible, nor did it appear to bear any resemblance to ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... talks about is the nearest approximation to the universal form of life, but this is constantly marred by a stray thought of permanence and the confusing hint of the passive mind that we suppose the balance to be the law, and are glad to accept night with day, and cold with heat, because there is a blindness in the spiritual eye which will not let us see the riper spirits who are not sated but satisfied with permanency. For there, too, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... not particularly remarkable. There is no confusing maze of hallways leading to the Personnel Department from the outside. Applicants would be unable to find us if there were. If he had got his bearings out on the street, he could have managed to ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... it sounds confusing— But as Mr. Lammle said, The anger of a gentleman Is boiling in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Weeks, Junior, did, I oughtn't to have fought him on the street like that. Oh, dear!" mused the girl, "I don't know whether I am sorry I hit Arlo Junior or am sorry that I'm not sorry. It's awfully confusing." ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... had returned again there was the gentle rustle of a dress on the stairs, and the lady herself was saying: "Dear Mr. Storm, come up. My servants are real tiresome, they are always confusing names." ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... continually from one fete to another it was almost confusing. The rejoicings over the baptism were followed by a fete given by the Emperor in the private park of Saint-Cloud, and from early in the morning the road from Paris to Saint-Cloud was covered with carriages ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... ablest, and richest financier of them all, with a marvellous head for figures and invaluable and commanding at the council-board, by virtue of his clear brain and his power to co-ordinate all the elements of the most confusing financial problems. Others had by luck and persistence made money—the basis of their fortunes; but Wallstein had showed them how to save those fortunes and make them grow; had enabled them to compete successfully with the games of other great financiers in the world's stock-markets. Wallstein ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... weakly down on the sand again, his head in his hands, and Mr. Milford, deeply interested, turned to the children. His questions called out a confusing and involved account, told piecemeal by Georgina and Richard ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Baglionis of Perugia, passionately admired and loved by their countrymen. The bodily portraits of these men, painted by the sternly realistic art of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, are even more confusing to our ideas than their moral portraits drawn by historians and chroniclers. Caesar Borgia, with his long fine features and noble head, is a gracious and refined prince; there is, perhaps, a certain duplicity in the well-cut lips; the beard, worn full and peaked ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Motor and Gas Gazette was of an overwhelming mass of desks and files and books, and a confusing, spying crowd of strange people, among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss Moynihan, the good-natured solid block of girl whom she had known at the commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising-manager, who had hired her. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis |
