"Flabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an insult to return a cordial grasp of the hand, and hearty greeting, by a cold bow or a flabby extension of a portion of the hand. Even if you do not approve of the familiar greeting you should return it with some show ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... literally riddled with them. In spite of this it may for a time seem well. The typical syphilitic child, however, is thin, weak, and wasted. Syphilis hastens old age even in the strong. It turns the young child into an old man or woman at birth. The skin is wrinkled, the flesh flabby. The face is that of an old man—weazened, pinched, pathetic, with watery, bleary eyes, and snuffling nose. The mother often says that all the baby's trouble started with a bad cold. The disease attacks the throat, and turns the normal robust cry of a healthy infant ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... even hard brain-workers are generally exercised a good deal; for the constitutional exercise of such is usually walking. But in large town such men give fair play to no other thews and sinews. More especially the arms of such men are very flabby. The muscle is soft, and slender. If the fore legs of a horse were like that, you could not ride him but at ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... former state, teats are very apt to become corded, or spindled; and in the latter, too much milk will constantly be pressing on the lower tubes, or receptacle. They should drop naturally from the lower parts of the bag, being neither too short, small, or dumpy, or long, flabby, and thick, but, perhaps, about three inches in length, and so thick as just to fill the hand. They should hang as if all the quarters of the udder were equal in size, the front quarters projecting a little forward, and the hind ones a little more dependent. Each quarter should contain ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... life, when you seemed already dead. Then you admired me. Then I was the man—not that kind of athlete you had just left, but the man of will-power, the mesmerist who instilled new nervous energy into your flabby muscles and charged your empty brain with a new store of electricity. And then I gave you back your reputation. I brought you new friends, furnished you with a little court of people who, for the sake of friendship ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... room. Jim, looking sidewise, recognized Jake Hibbard, and began covertly to study his face. He knew that this flabby-faced, dirty man, with the little screwed-up eyes, and the big screwed-up mouth, stained brown at the corners with tobacco, was Pete Lamoury's lawyer. Familiar for many years to his contemptuous young eyes, Jake now looked sinister ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... shapes and sizes, and most of them are astonishingly badly tied. It is quite heartrending to behold a kilted exile endeavouring to gather up a heterogeneous mess of socks, cigarettes, chocolate, soap, shortbread, and Edinburgh rock, from the ruins of what was once a flabby and unstable parcel, but is now a few skimpy rags of brown paper, which have long escaped the control of a most inadequate piece of string—a monument of ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... out its prehensile lizard claws in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing did not so much die as disintegrate under the ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... He was five-foot two; his chest measurement was less than proportionate to his height. His muscles, so far as they existed, were flabby. He moved his arms to exercise their powers; then, realising his weariness, went slowly to bed. Bates was a little tiny man, but his ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... which was not thicker than a man's body, and he threw his arms about it, back of the head. The fish struggled weakly, but the professor did not let go, and in a few seconds Colin had brought up the boat. He then took the rope, which had been passed around the soft and flabby body. Then, jumping overboard also, the boy helped the professor lift the fish from below, for the flesh was so soft that a rope would cut right through it. With great exertion, for the creature ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... 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 ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... of these peccaries (cochinos or puercos del monte) pass close by him. The herd marched in a close body, the males proceeding first; and each sow was accompanied by her young. The flesh of the chacharo is flabby, and not very agreeable; it affords, however, a plentiful nourishment to the natives, who kill these animals with small lances tied to cords. We were assured at Atures, that the tiger dreads being surrounded in the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish for hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark, he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium; but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... that 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 ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... her mop. Her varicose legs trotted across the wet lobby of the Jordon Building, and her flabby fat arms reached for the tall man with bright eyes who stood near the elevators. "It's me, ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... know the signs. And if the Pilgrim don't show up to-night with the grub and tobacco—But I reckon the dawg smelt him coming, all right." He fingered uncertainly a very flabby tobacco sack, grew suddenly reckless and made himself an exceedingly thin cigarette with the remaining crumbs of tobacco and what little he could glean from the pockets of the coat he was mending. Surely, the Pilgrim would remember his tobacco! Incapable ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... of Harry. It is a flippant name. It calls up merriness, youth, bravado, color, song. Barnes was forty-nine, streaked with grey, heart-sick, pallid, shuffling, timorous, sorry, and forlorn. Three decades of grease paint had made his skin flabby; and three decades of what the grease paint stood for had done likewise by his soul. It was thus that he drifted from doorway to doorway in Fourteenth Street, down by the Elevated, where dry little agents told him in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... no matter what ordinary antique, would greatly fall short of what we call sculpturesque beauty; and many of the others, old humanists and priests and lawyers, are emphatically ugly: snub or absurdly hooked noses, retreating or deformedly overhanging foreheads, fleshy noses, and flabby cheeks, blear eyes and sunk-in mouths; and a perfect network of wrinkles and creases, which, hard as it is to say, have been scooped out not merely by age, but by low mind, fretting and triumphant animalism. Now, by what means did ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... soft and flabby to avail much, and I dragged him back helplessly with tightened grip, only too delighted ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... seen and chosen two very respectable young women in Christchurch, one as a cook, and the other as a housemaid. The cook, Euphemia by name, was a tall, fat, flabby woman, with a pasty complexion, but a nice expression of face, and better manners than usual. She turned out to be very good natured, perfectly ignorant though willing to learn, and was much admired by the neighbouring cockatoos, or small farmers. Lois the housemaid, was the smallest ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... day off 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
... to which we have devoted so many words, because, though signally defeated, much of its power and influence survives. The fact that it proved to be as large as it was is by no means discouraging: that there should have been so much flabby and diseased flesh on the body-politic was to have been expected; and that it would show itself chiefly in the large cities, where foul humors and leprosy are sure to break out, if anywhere, upon slight irritation, (contrast the corrupt vote of New York City with Missouri and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Argentina and countries as far off as Finland, we get a flood of imported and domestic Swisses of all sad sorts, with all possible faults—from too many holes, that make a flabby, wobbly cheese, to too few—cracked, dried-up, collapsed or utterly ruined by molding inside. So it will pay you to buy only the kind already marked genuine in Switzerland. For there cheese such as Saanen ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... same evening she had made up her mind to go, and now he seemed not so shiftless and worthless, but run down and beaten upon by chance. His eyes were not keen, his face marked, his hands flabby. She thought his hair had a touch of grey. All unconscious of his doom, he rocked and read his paper, while she ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... had suited the action to the word. Out from under him his feet shot. But Mr. Schimmelpodt, being short and flabby of leg, with a bulky body above, came down as slowly as big bodies are supposed to move. It was rather a gradual tumble. Having so much fat on all portions of his body Mr. Schimmelpodt came down ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... What he wanted was to emancipate the female mind from the yoke of superstition and of priestcraft. Time enough to talk about giving women votes when they were no longer the slaves of an obstructive religion. There were good things in the lecture, but, on the whole, it was flabby—flabby. A man who would discourse on this topic must be courageous; he must dare to shock and give offence. Now, if he ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... nestes is gone, I can't see no woodcock, nor snipe; My dog he looks dogged and dull, My leggins is flabby as tripe! ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... had, he deemed it wiser not to name them, since the least sibilant of the sound of the voice incites to treachery; and in conclusion, that of all men he was acquainted with, one at least never failed to right his humour; and that one was yonder flabby, pallid fellow with the velvet collar to his coat, and the rings on his fingers, and the gold hair, named Pliable, who sat beside Mr. Stubborn on the settle ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... the fancies of the evening—they often look flat and flabby and gray the next morning. Quite impossible! But if I'd acted on half the good and grand schemes I've had o' nights I might now be quite a ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... 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 ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... 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 ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... are busy." But SMITH's a slug, 'ARCOURT's a hum, and LABBY makes a chap go squirmish. Dull as ditchwater the whole thing. One longs e'en for a Hirish skirmish; But PARNELL's fo par, and his spite, 'ave knocked the sparkle out of PADDY. No; Parlyment's a played-out fraud, flabby and footy, flat and faddy. The Season's similar. Season? Bah? By sech a name it ain't worth calling. Shoulders like these and carves like those was not quite made for pantry-sprawling; But wot's the use? Trot myself hout for 'Ebrews, or some tuppenny kernel? No, not for JEAMES, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... opening the door. At this the young fellow, who was a strapping six-footer, but soft and flabby, drew back and refused to go. He was too late. Bill's grip was on his collar and out they went into the snow, and behind them Hi closed the door. In vain the young fellow struggled to wrench himself free from ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... bark but felt too lazy. Out of the kitchen came the cook, barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket; he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... for the lazy," he smiled. "It lets us all out of resisting temptation. Why resist anything, if everything happens for the best? If it were true, it would give us the license to be as flabby as we liked—which rather falls in line with what we were saying about Adair. But who is she—this woman? You say you've ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... on flesh. That makes one look old and flabby. Gaveck Tablets are harmless, a reducing tonic to the system. Give them a ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... nothing dangerous about my theory. Instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer—far safer and saner than the usual order. Men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives." ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... mentioned was of middle height, well-proportioned, and rather stout; the tone of his skin had no brilliancy; it was neither livid nor dead-white, nor colored, but gelatinous,—that word can alone give a true idea of the flabby, hueless envelope, beneath which were concealed nerves that were less vigorous than capable of enormous resistance at certain given moments. His eyes, of a pale cold blue, expressed in their ordinary condition a species of deceptive sadness, which ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... quote unfairly mere scraps of sentences without context,—or to fly off into a whirlwind of personal and scurrilous calumnies against an author whom they don't know, and perhaps never will know,—that sort of thing is quite useless to me. It neither encourages nor angers me. It is a mere flabby exhibition of incompetency—much as if a jelly-fish should try to fight a sea-gull! Now you,—if you criticise me,—your criticism will be valuable, because it will be quite honest—there will be no 'personal' ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... nice girl into the bargain, and so thought one and all of the young men who frequented Mrs. Hill's drawing-room and counted it richly worth while merely to look at Miss Thayer after having seen nothing for weeks except flabby half-breed girls ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Boswells genius—we mustn't forget that—as the other wretched stuff written about Johnson. There's a passage in Boswell, when he didn't see Johnson for a long time, and stuck in a few stories collected from other friends. They are awfully flat and flabby—they have all been rolled about in some one's mind, till they are as smooth as pebbles—some bits of the crudest rudeness, not worked up to—some knock-down schoolboy retorts which most civilised men would have had the decency ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... all round the trade. I've had it before. The man will never come to the front. He'll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off." That's what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some one was knocking at the door of the room—tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately. The man might have been knocking for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea's employer, the publisher of my first book. He opened the door at last, and came in rather peremptorily. ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... in the rear of the hall announced the coming of somebody, who proved to be a rather fat woman in a soiled wrapper, with tousled light hair, flabby face, pale eyes, and a worried but kindly look. Larcher had seen her ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Greenwich, for Scotland. I remember a double line of soldiers along the road, several very fussy horsemen riding to and fro, a troop of Cavalry, and a carriage, in which sat a very fat elderly man, with a pale flabby face, without beard or whisker, but fringed with the curls of a large brown wig. That is all I remember, or care to ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... in love with her, too. Seems to be glad she shot him. Says he's ashamed of himself for ever suspecting her of anything but being a genuine angel. Why, he's got as flabby as a rabbit and ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... thought I saw that Calyste's love was 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 ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... his master's side, cocked his ears, and wagged his tail,—so far his education was perfect. We say he bounded clumsily, for it must be remembered that he was still a very young pup, with soft, flabby muscles. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... teaching them to be ready to move in squads or masses, like the fist of a pugilist. Skepsey left it to his look to speak his thought. He saw an enemy in tobacco. The drowsiness of beer had stretched various hulks under trees. Ponderous cricket lumbered half-alive. Flabby fun knocked-up a yell. And it was rather vexatious to see girls dancing in good time to the band-music. One had a male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque of the thing he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man. There was 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
... instance) very hot in a frying-pan, and into this drop your prepared potatoes, only a good handful at a time; as, if you attempt to fry too many at once, instead of being crisp, as they should be, the potatoes will fry flabby, and consequently will be unappetising. As soon as the first lot is fried in a satisfactory manner, drain them from the fat with a skimmer, or spoon, and then fry the remainder; and when all are fried, shake ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... is gradually becoming a parasite,—an animal which finally loses all its organs from lack of use, so that only its stomach remains,—and has, of course, no intelligence at all. The examples of such men as James are much more numerous than might be supposed. We seldom see them in such flabby dependence upon the will of an individual as would make them conspicuous; but they are about us every day, and in large numbers, in their weak dependence upon public opinion,—their bondage to the desire that other men should think well of them. The human parasites that are daily feeding on social ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no color now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... together in a deadly embrace. Looking like one insect, they spin rapidly round for a few moments, then up springs the wasp—victorious. The wretched victim is not dead; its legs move a little, but its soft body is paralyzed, and lies collapsed, flabby, and powerless as a stranded jellyfish. And this is the invariable result of every such conflict. In other classes of beings, even the weakest hunted thing occasionally succeeds in inflicting pain on its ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... cleared away when a visitor came out of the woods. He had a red, flabby face, framed in a thick whisker turning grey. The chief feature of his dress was a long surtout, that had been part of a gentleman's dress-suit in its day and a shabby tile hat. Addressing the master with deliberate ceremony, he told how he had heard of new-comers and felt it ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... would probably grow tired of expository lectures, however excellent and instructive. A criticism of Garrick's is more curious. After listening to Smith one evening, the great player turned to a friend and whispered, "What say you to this? eh, flabby, eh?" but whatever may have been the case that particular evening, flabbiness at least was not a characteristic of Smith's talk. It erred rather in excess of substance. He had Johnson's solidity and weight, without ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... braggart," interrupted the priest. "Gillespie is as flabby as dough from an illness. 'Tis here you sit quiet, and help with Miriam as ye'd save y'r soul! Howld down with y'r bouncing nonsense, lad, and the saints be with ye; for it's a fight there'll be, and there is the fightin' stuff of a soldier in ye! Never turn to me—mind ye never turn ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Lord Byron's fine old ranting verse. "The mountains look on Marathon—and Marathon looks on the sea." But "standing on the Persians' grave" Greece seems in the same humour that made Lord Byron give her up as a hopelessly flabby country. ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... found his 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 ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... dry, hard feed. Similar changes may be found on the mucous membrane of the nasal cavity, larynx, trachea, the uterus, vagina, and rectum. The lungs may be injected, edematous, or pneumonic. The heart muscle is pale and flabby, and frequently hemorrhages are observed in its internal membrane. The liver may be pale or injected with blood, and at times shows hemorrhages beneath its capsule. The bile is thin and watery in consistence. The kidneys may be inflamed or contain small hemorrhages within their substance ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black hair, skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple blotches, yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a muscular frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating forehead, and a hanging lip,—Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his real character under an external stupidity, lightened at times by a show of experience, which seemed all the more intelligent because he had acquired in the company of his ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... Zangwill 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 ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... of the Cooneys' fatal shiftlessness. And they were popular, too, in their way, and Chas might easily have married some socially prominent girl with money, instead of bringing a nameless saleslady into the family. It was impossible for Carlisle not to contrast her aunt's flabby sentimentalism with her own and her mother's sane, brilliant ambitiousness. If nothing succeeds like success, how doubly true it was that nothing fails ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... I've got a little list Of social offenders who might well be underground, And who never would be missed - who never would be missed! There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs - All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs - All children who are up in dates, and floor you with 'em flat - All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like THAT - And all third persons who on spoiling TETE-E-TETES insist - They'd none of 'em be missed - they'd ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... O Thou that giv'st the flabby Strength, and stingo'st up the weak:- Restful as a grand old Abbey— Bracing as a ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... brittle, like cast iron." If so, it would be even less trustworthy for a sword than bronze. [Footnote: Iliad (1900), Book VI, line 48, Note.] Perhaps the Celts of 225 B.C. did not smelt iron by primitive methods, but discovered some process for making it not hard and brittle, but flabby. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... unprecedented, an utterly amazing thing. She got up and gathered Billy Louise into her arms so unexpectedly that Billy Louise inadvertently buried her nose in the honey she had not yet licked off the bread. Marthy held her close pressed to her big, flabby bosom and wept into her hair in a queer, whimpering way that somehow made Billy Louise think of a hurt dog. It was only for a minute that Marthy did this; she stopped almost as suddenly as she began and went outside, wiping her eyes and her nose ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... 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 flabby stuffed glove that served the Scarecrow for a hand, and the Scarecrow pressed it so cordially that the straw in his ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... short, flabby, sandy-haired youth, not particularly beloved of his comrades, and his first remark was, "I say, you chaps, have you done your holiday task? Pa says he shall keep everyone in who hasn't. I've done mine;" which, as a contribution ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... wish you had said your say. I believe you could get ahead of the fabulous monster in open combat. She is, after all, a very flabby, fabulous monster and one ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... to change into the adult fly, the pupa climbs up some plant near the surface of the water. Again its back yawns wide open, and from the rent our Dragon fly slowly emerges. For an hour or more, it remains torpid and listless, with its flabby, soft wings remaining motionless. The fluids leave the surface, the crust hardens and dries, rich and varied tints appear, and our Dragon fly rises into its new world of light and sunshine a gorgeous, but repulsive being. Tennyson thus describes ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... are made clever simpletons; their brains are worked with useless knowledge, which totally unfits them for every-day duties. Their muscles are allowed to be idle, which makes them limp and flabby. The want of proper exercise ruins the complexion, and their faces become of the colour of a tallow candle! And precious wives and mothers they make when they do grow up! Grow up, did I say? They grow all manner of ways, and are as ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... Not exactly ill but, you know.... It's awful with these ladies! Sits up at cards till three every morning, and pulls her waist into the shape of a wine-glass. And the lady is flabby and fat, and carries the weight of a good many years ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... Bull," as he was called, take a game; he rushed up and down the field cursing and swearing. His voice thundered over the ground. It was the first game after the summer holidays, and everyone felt rather flabby. At half-time the great man burst out: "I have played football for twenty-five years, I coached Oxford teams and Gloucestershire teams, led an English scrum, and for fifteen years I have taught footer here, but never saw I ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... 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 Pointview to Jerusalem ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... preamble—flavouring it with plenty of 'distressings' and 'painfuls' and 'father of the deceased well known to and respected by many of us-es.' Great big pudding of a chap, the coroner. Sat there impassive like a flabby old Buddha. Face like a three-parts deflated football. Looked as if he'd been poured on to his seat out of a jug and jellified there. There was old Bright, the girl's father, smouldering like inside the door of a banked-up furnace; smouldering like ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... even so much as keep. Unemployed strength steadily diminishes. The sluggard's arm grows soft and flabby. So, even in this lowest sphere, the law is inexorable. Having is using. Not using is losing. Idleness is paralysis. New triumphs must only dictate new struggles. If it be Alexander of Macedon, the Orontes must suggest ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... muscle—cold, flabby, and red; And N was a Nerve, like a bit of white thread. O was some Opium, a fool chose to take; And P were the Pins used to keep him awake. Fol de ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... see you, I tell you!" almost shouted the man, rising from his desk and revealing himself a short, pudgy figure, with flabby face and shining bald head. "Can't you understand ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... outdoor exercises for girls, swimming is one of the most perfect. It not only calls into vigorous action most of the muscles of the body, but spares many of those muscles that are so commonly overworked, the most of the work being performed by muscles that are so little used as to have become flabby ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... and flabby-cheeked Writer to the Signet who laid down his pen after reading and signing this lucid document. He stalked solemnly to the door, and then with a chastened air ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... entirely nondescript, with noisy throats cut out of the same copper plate, a soft billowy shadow of a woman under a floppy hat and exuding a ghastly sweet, cloying perfume. Her bare arm was as soft and flabby as jelly as she stretched it out to Myrtle. After her came another man, rather hesitantly, and keeping in the shadow. His voice was good, rather deep, rather strong. As he passed, he called Joe by name. Twisting around in the light, Joe ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... coarsely so—a merciless caricature of the shrivelled old 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 ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... because my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering omnivorous mouth, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... it could not but have split the man's skull open; but he swerved aside a little as the rifle came down, and the weight of the stroke, glancing from his head, fell upon his shoulder. In an instant, dropping the rifle, Young was kneeling on his breast with a hand buried in the flabby flesh of his old throat, holding tight-gripped his windpipe. Excepting only Rayburn, Young was the strongest man I ever knew (though, to be sure, at that time he was weakened by his then recent wound and by the privations of his imprisonment), yet it was ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... nights at a stretch a Russian orgy would go on—nightmarish, tedious, savage, with screams and tears, with revilement over the body of woman; paradisaical nights were gotten up, during which naked, drunken, bow-legged, hairy, pot-bellied men, and women with flabby, yellow, pendulous thin bodies hideously grimaced to the music; they drank and guzzled like swine, on the beds and on the floor, amidst the stifling atmosphere, permeated with spirits, befouled with human respiration and the exhalations ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... and the portraits made me feel sad. This dull, sodden man was once a handsome fellow, alert, well poised, brave and cheerful. The profile which I saw in the photographs somehow made me think of an arrow-head on the upward flight; that, lower jaw, which is now so flabby and slobbery was once well rounded, and the weakness was not unpleasantly evident. I often wonder that human vanity has not done away with alcoholism. Men are vain animals, yet a good-looking fellow, who ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... gentlemen at work on the problems, who were very feverish; then with the young gentleman at work against time, who was very inky; and lastly with the young gentleman in a state of stupefaction, who was flabby and quite cold. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... him an appraising look, glanced at the car, then smiled and held out her hand. It was damp and flabby. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... toward the ladder, in spite of his fat and flabby muscles quivering in terrible spasms, he ran up the long steel structure with a supreme and ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... always carefully calculated when directed against any one or anything capable of retaliation in kind, and very probably he had already concluded that two well-grown boys like ourselves, used to all kinds of hard work, might prove an awkward handful for one whose muscles had been rendered flabby by ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... places, but it is not at all disagreeable in the clover-scented air; and his shrill whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant summer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck is not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby. Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass I have never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a skin filled with water. The legs of the woodchuck ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... comely than Janet, and having the smirk of a perfunctory greeting upon her flabby face, stood within the room assigned to Mistress Katherine. As her eyes fell upon the maid, she stepped back surprised, and with a confusion she essayed to hide in her coarse voiced ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... He was a heavy-set, flabby man of sixty-odd, this Lowland President. White hair; and an old-fashioned, rolling white mustache of the sort lately come into South American fashion. He sat with a glass of iced drink at his side. His uniform was stiffly white, and ornate ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... be white, the eleventh will presently be brought into their opinion. Besides, the Mayor had a currish side. He looked piteously from one to another of us, his cheeks seemed to grow in a moment pale and flabby, and he was on the point of whimpering, when at the last moment he bethought him of his servant, and turned to him in a spurt of sudden thankfulness. "Why, Jehan, man, I had forgotten you," he said. "Are these ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... already smashed her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space, but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties from just a few days of the ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... the looking-glass to see the portrait of one guilty of this loathsome sin. The effects are plainly discernible in the boy's appearance. The face and hands become pale and bloodless. The eye is destitute of its natural fire and lustre. The flesh is soft and flabby, the muscles limp and lacking healthy firmness. In cases where the habit has become confirmed, and where the system has been drained of this vital force, it is seen in positive ugliness, in a pale and cadaverous appearance, slovenly gait, slouching ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... be of a clear dark red, the fat firm and white, and not too much of it; when touched the meat should feel crisp yet tender. If the fat is yellow and the lean flabby and damp, it is bad. A freshly scraped wooden skewer run into the meat along the bone will speedily enable anyone to detect staleness. For roasting mutton scarcely can be hung too long, as long as it is not tainted; but for boiling ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... 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 Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mattress of "excelsior" (calculated to induce early rising), a dingy white spread, a gray blanket of coarse wool, a pair of cotton sheets which had too obviously done duty since passing through the hands of the laundress, and a pair of flabby little pillows in the same state, in respect to their cases, as the sheets. On the floor was a much used and faded ingrain carpet, in one place worn through by the edge of a loose board. A narrow strip of unpainted pine nailed to the wall carried six or seven wooden pegs to serve as ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... take this flabby creature seriously, even as a criminal. Lady Georgina's lips relaxed. 'Doosid clever,' she admitted, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... times during that stormy spell when it seemed as if we had grown wholly and hopelessly flabby as a people. All the outcry against the programme of order did not come from the lawless and the disorderly, by any means. Ordinarily decent, conservative citizens joined in counselling moderation and virtual compromise with the lawbreakers—it ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... men in the dingy ends of that low-ceilinged room who gesticulated and muttered softly in twos as men who make a bargain, and now and then more came in, and the eyes of the flabby owner of the house leaped up at them as they entered, seemed to know their errands at once and each one's peculiar need, and fell back again into somnolence, receiving his twenty francs in an almost lifeless hand and biting the coin as though in ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... womenfolk. It was King's hope that they were going down toward the lake; thus he would avoid meeting them. He'd come in at the back, have his talk with Ben, and be on his way without the bore of shaking a lot of flabby hands and listening to ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... 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 them there ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his story, and the class of it was patent from the guffawed comments it excited. Another of the group capped it with another, grosser yet, and the party burst into an uproarious hilarity. Then a flabby-jowled, paunchy fellow urged in ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... a few of the members the next day. It was evident that nobody cared very much whether he had been elected or not. Each man had his own affairs to look after, and greeted him with a flabby hand-shake and looked at him with cold and wandering eyes. It was ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... the sharpness of the controversies of the early Church, but it could scarcely be otherwise in an age like that. It was a period of transitions and of rude convulsions. The foundations of the great deep of human error were being broken up. It was no time for flabby, jelly-fish convictions. The training which the great leaders had received in philosophy and rhetoric had made them keen dialectics. They had something of Paul's abhorrence of heathen abominations, for they saw them on every hand. They saw ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them." This convenient generalization covers the multitude of Belgian crimes. This interesting manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions, and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare warns that exceptions are always permissible where the officer deems exceptional severities are "indispensable." ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... these 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
... had turned ashen now, and Bobby looked at him with quick compunction. Applerod, always so chubbily youthful for a man of his years, was grown suddenly old. He seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes, his face to have turned flabby, his eyes to have dimmed. After all, he was an old man, and the little that he had scraped together represented all that he could hope to amass in a none too provident lifetime. This day made him a pauper and there was no chance ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... of the damp floor infected his house with the rank atmosphere of poverty. A hopeless fecundity aggravated this poverty; his sad, placid wife with her big yellow eyes appeared every year with a new baby tugging at her flabby breast, and several children crept along the cloister walls, dull and inert with hunger, with enormous heads and thin necks, always sickly, though none of them managed to die; afflicted by all the pains of anaemia, by boils that arose and vanished on their faces, and watery eruptions covering ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... bitterly, sometimes he tore his hair and in frenzy called for help; but more often it came to pass that apathetically and quietly he began to die, and so he languished many years, before everybody's very eyes, wasted away, colorless, flabby, dull, like a tree, silently drying up in a stony soil. And of those who gazed at him, the ones who wept madly, sometimes felt again the stir of life; the ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... Ivan Nikiforovitch glanced up also—No, I can do no more—Give me a fresh pen with a fine point for this picture! mine is flabby. Their faces seemed to turn to stone whilst still retaining their defiant expression. Each beheld a long familiar face, to which it should have seemed the most natural of things to step up, involuntarily, as to an unexpected friend, and offer a snuff-box, with the words, "Do me the favour," ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... a matter of great surprise to me—and some relief—when, instead, I beheld advancing toward us a spare little figure with snow-white hair and a pallid face. His small blue eyes blinked upon us with a watery stare; his flabby cheeks were seamed with wrinkles, and his tremulous lips twitched and writhed in the shadowy semblance of a smile: there was naught about him to suggest either the soldier or ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... it seemed, the giants were. Though big in size they were flabby and had nothing like the muscle they should have had in proportion to their build. They went down like meal sacks and were ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... 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
... Is trailing to land, So flabby, so grimy, So sickly, so slimy,— The spots of his prime he Has rusted with sand; Crook-snouted his crest ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... channelled and short, his fingers 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 ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... to some giants of history, whose only claim to notoriety lay in their height, these giants were very powerful. Many giants have flabby muscles, but these of South America were like athletes. Tom realized this when there suddenly entered the audience chamber a youth of about our hero's age, but fully seven feet tall, and very big. He was evidently the king's son, for ...
— Tom Swift in Captivity • Victor Appleton
... partially or totally wrong impression. Let me say at once, therefore, that delicate as he often was, and sweet as he was more often, although he could write melodies which are mere iridescent filaments of tone, he never became flabby or other than crisp, and could, and did, write themes as flexible, sinewy, unbreakable as perfectly tempered steel bands. And these themes he could lay together and weld into choruses of gigantic strength. The subject and counter-subject of "Thou art the King of ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... 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 ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... de Loyarte—and why should Senor de Loyarte not be associated with literature—presents the figure of a fat, pale, flabby boy in a priests' school, skulking under the skirts ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... gills are red, the eyes full, and the whole fish firm and stiff, they are fresh and good; if on the contrary, the gills are pale, the eyes sunken, the flesh flabby, they ...
— My Pet Recipes, Tried and True - Contributed by the Ladies and Friends of St. Andrew's Church, Quebec • Various
... failed to express the utmost wonder and admiration as each fresh one appeared. Even when Susan suddenly placed a star-fish on her lap as she sat gazing over the sea, and requested her to feel how flabby it was, she came bravely through the trial, though she inwardly regarded it with disgust and fear. Then with garments held tightly round her, and feverishly grasping her parasol, she was persuaded to venture ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... flabby fellow, and lymphatically yellow, that will matter not a mite. If you take yourself in hand, in a way you'll understand, to become a Son of Light. On your crassness superimposing the peculiar art of glosing in sleek phrases about Sin. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... fortress wall is extensive but poor. Its tired main street stretches out a long way with flabby houses on each side of its cobbled wildness. There are as yet no buildings corresponding to the dignity of a great capital. The old Parliament House is a little place like a town-school, the temporary one is a converted ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Charles Bradlaugh is not able to enter No. 139 Pershore-road, Birmingham; if he were, he would descend in swift wrath upon his silly traducers, who have put their own inanity into his mouth, making the great, virile Atheist talk like a little, flabby Spiritualist after ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... in his unsteady fingers—the expensive-looking, gold-tipped cigarette of the old days. Peter was Peter. Ten years had made little difference. There were queer little hollow places in his cheeks, and under the jaw-bone, and at the base of the head, and a flabby, parchment-like appearance about the skin. That was all that made him different from the Peter ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the thin, flabby fellow was a poor compensation for vigorous Bourbaki. He was set to work on the plantation, and as the Government was never informed of the affair, he is probably there to this day, and will stay until ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... seemed to absorb the liquor like a dry sponge; his fatigue fell away, he became suddenly strong and vigorous again. But before he had gone a hundred yards the reaction followed. First his mind grew thick, then his limbs became unmanageable and his muscles flabby. He was drunk. Yet it was a strange and dangerous intoxication, against which he struggled desperately. He fought it for perhaps a quarter of a mile before it mastered him; then ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... of asking what books you are reading. It 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 world ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... approach of Mr. Bayne, to afford assistance if this were needed. Hours went by, and still there was no news, no return of the messenger. Now and again Mrs. Briscoe sought to exchange a word with Mrs. Marable to relieve the tension of the situation; but the elder lady was flabby with fatigue; her altruistic capabilities had been tried to the utmost in this long vigil and painful excitement, which were indeed unmeet for her age and failing strength. She did not enter into the troubled prevision of Gladys, who had been furtively watching a strange ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... his apartment late that night that he was being followed, he would have laughed and told them it was an impossibility. When he came out to the street the next morning and swung himself into a car that would land him at his office, he did not see the lank flabby figure of the toothless Bi standing just across the block, and keeping tab on him from the back platform, nor notice that he slid into the office building behind him and took the same elevator up, crowding in behind two fat men and effacing ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... the patronage of the young soda-clerks. They were as damply friendly as Miss Sonntag was dryly hostile. They called him "Old Georgie" and shouted, "Come on now, sport; shake a leg" . . . boys in belted coats, pimply boys, as young as Ted and as flabby as chorus-men, but powerful to dance and to mind the phonograph and smoke cigarettes and patronize Tanis. He tried to be one of them; he cried "Good work, Pete!" but his ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... if I were you. They will make you less elastic. The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there's a fortune in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... do not select handsome wood for its beauty," etc., and the loveliness of this piece must not tempt me to sacrifice what I hold of more consequence—tone. But I should do so did I now choose it; for it is weak where it should be strong, and poor, flabby and wretched from the ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... shaved, his blue suit was shabby and soiled. He was fatter, and his whole body was flabby and uncared for. Maggie saw at once that he had been drinking, not very much, but enough to make him a little uncertain on his feet and unsteady in his gaze. Maggie, when she saw him, felt nothing but a rush ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... inconsistent with Christianity; but we are not to say, therefore, that it is incompatible with Christianity. Thank God! that is a very different matter. But as long as you and I have two things—viz. strong and hot desires, and weak and flabby wills—so long shall we, in this world full of combustibles, not be beyond the possibility of a dreadful conflagration being kindled by some devil-blown sparks. There are plenty of dry sticks lying ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... heart was too good—or possibly because his 'cottonwool' education (so he expressed it), had made him too soft. Himself he was quite ready to murder in any way at any moment.... But others—no. 'There's no making him out,' his comrades said of him; 'he's a flabby creature, a poor stick—and yet such a desperate fellow—a perfect madman!' I chanced in later days to ask Misha what evil spirit drove him, forced him, to drink to excess, risk his life, and so on. He always had ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... along been too small for the bony hand of the once famous Court physician. Even now it appeared embedded in the flabby skin and refused to slide over ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... 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; I ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... evening he was sitting yonder, on the chair by the window-bench, and his crutch was standing in the corner by the door; and he had offered them all his hand in his odd, ingenuous way—that unpleasantly flabby hand, at whose touch they all felt a certain aversion, so importunate was it, and almost skinless in its warmth, so that one felt as if one had involuntarily touched some one on a naked part. Pelle was always reminded of Father Lasse; he too had never learned to put on armor, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... hideously bulbous in form, and which were flabby and elastic instead of armored with thick horn as were the heads of the usual soldiers. Like living syringes, these heads were; perambulating bulbs filled with some defensive or offensive liquid to be squirted out at the ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... Hiram glanced his way and noted that he had a noose of clothes-line tied so tightly about his neck that his flabby dewlap was pinched. He carried the rest of the line in a coil ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... in all this splendour?" I asked, laughing. The wise man does not carry sentiment too far. He keeps it like a little precious nugget of pure gold; the less wise beats it out into a flabby film. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... now legislate. The swoln cheek, choking his words in the birth, totally disqualifies him as orator; but his pencil, his head, his gross hot heart, with genius in a state of convulsion, will be there. A man bodily and mentally swoln-cheeked, disproportionate; flabby-large, instead of great; weak withal as in a state of convulsion, not strong in a state of composure: so let him play his part. Nor are naturalised Benefactors of the Species forgotten: Priestley, elected by the Orne Department, but declining: Paine the rebellious Needleman, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle |
