"Muddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... devastation of a plague in one! Who shall say how, or where, the seed is sown that springs so swiftly to such thick harvest! Who can trace its beginnings—and who can predict its end! Tragic and terrible as its work has always seemed to the miserable and muddle-headed human units, whose faults and follies, whose dissoluteness and neglect of the highest interests of the people, are chiefly to blame for the birth of this Monster, it is nevertheless Divine Law, that, when any part of God's Universe-House ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... able to manage successfully the finances of a nation, but his own were left in a sorry muddle: at his death it took forty thousand pounds to cause him to be worth nothing. His debts were paid by the nation. And this indifference to his own affairs was put forth at the time as proof of his probity and excellence. We think now that it marked his limitations. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... pervert the gospel of Christ. To paraphrase this sentence: "These false apostles do not merely trouble you, they abolish Christ's Gospel. They act as if they were the only true Gospel-preachers. For all that they muddle Law and Gospel. As a result they pervert the Gospel. Either Christ must live and the Law perish, or the Law remains and Christ must perish; Christ and the Law cannot dwell side by side in the conscience. It is either grace or law. ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... to see the rough way in which some people allow themselves to be served, and the muddle in which they prefer to live rather than do anything themselves that they consider menial; as if an untidy house, slovenly servants, badly cooked and coarsely served food, are not likely to do much more to lower ...
— The Skilful Cook - A Practical Manual of Modern Experience • Mary Harrison
... shuffled his feet uneasily—"seems to me I said somethin' 'bout it—not jest that, you know, but somethin'. Fact is, I was so muddle-headed and upset that I don't know exactly what I did say. Anyhow, he said 'twas all right, so there ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... revolutions,—let us glance for a moment, and with the faintest light of Clothes-Philosophy, on what may be called the Habilatory Class of our fellow-men. Here too overlooking, where so much were to be looked on, the million spinners, weavers, fullers, dyers, washers, and wringers, that puddle and muddle in their dark recesses, to make us Clothes, and die that we may live,—let us but turn the reader's attention upon two small divisions of mankind, who, like moths, may be regarded as Cloth-animals, creatures that live, move and have their being ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... girl and while offending her he had failed to serve the rancher. For Red Jim Perris, driven by force from the ranch, would surely return again to exact payment in full for the treatment he had received. The whole affair was a hopeless muddle. He had staked everything on his ability to trap Perris and destroy him, thereby piling upon the shoulders of Oliver Jordan a burden of gratitude which the rancher could never repay. But now that Perris was footloose he became a danger imperilling not only Jordan but Hervey himself. ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... marriages, for the same reason that it produces so many unhappy men. But all the reforms were directed to rescuing the industrialism rather than the happiness. Poor couples were to be divorced because they were already divided. Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses. When the tares are found in the wheat, the greatest promptitude and practicality is always ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... this may reach you. I fear we must go and that it leaves the Expedition in a bad muddle. But we have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen. I regret only for ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... these women, their work, which, no other hands were ready to take, jarred against his abstract theory, and irritated him, as an obstinate fact always does run into the hand of a man who is determined to clutch the very heart of a matter. Truth will not underlie all facts, in this muddle of a world, in spite of the positive philosophers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... And the day goes on and on, getting worse and worse you mislay your exercise-book, you drop your arithmetic in the mud, your pencil breaks, and when you open your knife to sharpen the pencil you split your nail. On such a day you jam your thumb in doors, and muddle the messages you are sent on by grown-ups. You upset your tea, and your bread-and-butter won't hold together for a moment. And when at last you get to bed usually in disgrace it is no comfort at all to you to know that not a single bit of it is ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... be mystical. Mr. Waverton comes here to do his poor possible to make mischief between us. I suppose you saw that. He tells us that he went blundering with my father into a muddle of a plot." ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet "Dutch interior" effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... is," endorsed Ingred, "and a most uncomfortable one, I should say. I went to his house once for a music lesson, and it looked in a fearful muddle. Good old Bantam! We must give her congrats! She'll soon get things into order there! I believe she adores little Kenneth. I've often seen her taking him about the town. She shall have my blessing, by ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the needless muddle was apparent. Evasions were of no use; therefore Dunois admitted that there was no way to correct the blunder but to send the army all the way back to Blois, and let it begin over again and come up on the other side this time, according ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... us we weren't to ask anybody else to do shopping for us," said Wendy demurely. "When you've not been told not to do anything, you're not disobedient if you don't do it—oh! I'm getting rather in a muddle, but ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... can do. When Bob makes up his mind to do anything, he generally does it." Jack, believing he had demolished the subject, opened his Morning Post and fell to studying the latest phases of the Venezuelan muddle. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... for some one on whom to cast the blame for the Cretan muddle. The present idea is that England is the guilty party. This last report may not have any more truth in it than that about Russia, but it is now, said that England is bent upon conquering the Transvaal, and securing ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Since I got your phone I've been in a regular muddle, believe ME. Cornelia Bryant was never so ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... intellectual solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for my Tristram—are we so run out of stock that there is no one lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst our doctors...but I must disable my judgment by choosing a Warburton?" Later on, in a letter to his friend, Mr. Croft, at Stillington, whom the scandal ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... difficulty. Since I saw you last, Mr. Polwarth, a strange and very uncomfortable doubt has rushed in upon me, and I find myself altogether unfit to tackle it. I have no weapons—not a single argument of the least weight. I wonder if it be a law of nature that no sooner shall a man get into a muddle with one thing, than a thousand other muddles shall come pouring in upon him, as if Muddle itself were going to swallow him up! Here am I just beginning to get a little start in honester ways, when up comes the ugly head of the said doubt, swelling ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... then set off sharply, so that now and again she had to run a few paces to keep up with him. He took her round by the back of the theatre and into a muddle of streets that led thence. The quiet of the night closed about them; Truda was embarked upon ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... as poet and scholar. Above all, he was fortunate in a seclusion that prompted study and deepened meditation, while it enabled him to converse with his genius disengaged from those worldly influences which would have disenchanted it of its mystic enthusiasm, if they did not muddle it ingloriously away. Surely this sequestered nest was more congenial to the brooding of those ethereal visions of the "Faery Queen" and to giving his "soul a ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... far as it goes; but then it is equally true that M. M. —— actually obtained his wife, and that Mynheer Van Holland paid for her. I dare say all this can be reconciled with the eternal fitness of things; but I protest I don't see how it is to be done. It is "all a muddle," in my mind. I cannot even affirm that the banditti were ever hanged; and I am quite sure that the unlucky Dutch merchant, whose goods were so comically mixed up with this whole history, never had any poetical or material justice for his loss of them. But it is as much the reader's business as mine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Grenville, as go-between he offered the Whig leader his alliance for the overthrow of Addington and the formation of a Ministry of the talented men of all parties. Here, then, is the origin of the broad-bottomed or All the Talents Administrations which produced so singular a muddle after the death of Pitt. The Fox-Grenville bargain cannot be styled immoral like that of Fox and North in 1782; for it expressly excluded all compromise on matters of conviction. Nevertheless it was a tactical mistake, for which Pitt's exasperating aloofness was ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... a hanky cry, unless you make it worse. Lydia, I wish you and Anne would go away and let father and me muddle along alone." ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... mutiny. Prickett, therefore—in part borne out by the "Note" of poor Widowes—is our authority for the several mutinous outbreaks which occurred during the voyage; and Prickett wrote with a vagueness—using such phrases as "this day" and "this time," without adding a date—that helped him to muddle his narrative in the parts which we want to have, but which he did not want ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... divorce there is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions. It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers have become ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Chinese troops near Tientsin. Suddenly all these points were declared to be in doubt. Round the question of the length of time the Indemnities might be postponed, and the actual amount of the increase in the Customs Tariff, there appeared to be an inexplicable muddle largely owing to the intervention of so many agents and to the fact that the exchange of views had been almost entirely verbal, unofficial, and secret. It would be wearisome to analyse a dispute which belongs to the peculiar atmosphere ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the prudent dramatist strict economy in suicide. The third case, Zoe Blundell's leap to nothingness, in that harsh and ruthless masterpiece, Mid-Channel, is as inevitable as anything can well be in human destiny. Zoe has made a miserable and hopeless muddle of her life. In spite of her goodness of heart, she has no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has intervened disastrously in the destinies of others. She is ill; her nerves ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... reply, he went on: "'Well,' says I to myself, 'here are two young folks that have fallen in love, and have every right to do so, and yet they are kept apart by unreasonable and cruel-minded parents. They are young and know nothing of the law, and without help they would most certainly get into a muddle. Now, suppose I take their matter in hand, knowing the law thoroughly as I do, and being up to its weak as well as ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... Samantha, to muddle up your head and hurt your feelin's by tellin' you what it's fur." And he went out quick and shet the door. But I got a splendid dinner and afterwards he told me of ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... but unfortunately for the good of the house, Faith was not troubled by appearances. Her eyes did not notice details, the details which mean so much, for her home had always been in more or less of a muddle. There were so many of them, Audrey, Faith, Tom, Deborah and baby Joan. Five of them ransacking and romping all over the house, until granny had come and taken Audrey away to live ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... occurred to me, something about the discrepancy between the spiritual quality of the sunset and the after-supper satisfaction of the onlookers. I essayed to express it, but was so embarrassed that I made a muddle of my English. Miss Tevkin took no notice ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... is extraordinarily clear-headed," he would say. "If you want to see your way through a muddle, just you talk it over with her. It's ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... plan, to continue the expedition and strengthen it as fast as possible. To the American soldier at this distance it looks as though the French and British, perhaps in all good faith, planned to muddle along till the American authorities could be shown the fitness or the necessity of supporting the expedition with proper forces. But this was playing with a handful of Americans and other Allied troops a great game of hazard. Only those ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... mutual muddle ("When I go over the chapter I will see what I can do, but I hardly know how I am obscure, and I think we are somehow in a mutual muddle with respect to each other, from starting from some fundamentally different notions."—Letter of May 6, 1859.), I never for a moment ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and boyhood as he had had, were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of life, in all honour and rectitude, so as to win. From the muddle of his father's affairs he had taken away a lesson of method, order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well," was not only one of his favourite maxims—it was ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Chippenfield in a tolerant tone, "but you'll have to shed this habit of jumping impulsively to conclusions—and generally wrong conclusions—if you want to succeed in Scotland Yard. This letter of Hill's only strengthens my previous opinion that a damned muddle-headed jury let a cold-blooded murderer loose on the world when they acquitted Fred Birchill of the charge of shooting Sir Horace Fewbanks. Why, man alive, Holymead no more believes Hill is guilty than I do. He set himself to bamboozle ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... generalities: "Marshal Hal Dozier, when interviewed, said—" and a great many innocuous things which he was sure that grim hunter could not have spoken. He passed over the rest of the column in careless contempt. On the second page, in a muddle of short notices, one headline caught his eye and held it: "Charles Merchant to Wed ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... who drink water, think water. The Elizabethans—Sidney and Shakspeare, Burleigh and Queen Bess, worked on beef and ale,—and you would not class them among the muddle-headed of the earth: Believe me, to write well, you must live well. If you take it out of your brain, you must put it in again. It's a question of fact. Try it for yourself." And off Tom went; while Lucia rushed back to her husband, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... understand is how he came to know she was in Ballymoy. I'll find that out later on. In the meanwhile I think I'd better go into Ballymoy after all. It's a nuisance, for I was extremely comfortable on the yacht, but I can't leave things in the muddle they're in now, and there's nobody else about the place I could ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... eyes riveted themselves on Aratoff with a boldness and directness to match. She went on with the same enthusiasm, and only toward the close did her voice again fall, and in it and in her face her previous dejection was again depicted. She made a complete muddle, as the saying is, of the last four lines,—the little volume of Pushkin suddenly slipped from her hands, and she beat ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... put to the trouble and expense of a general election, valuable time had been wasted, legislative preparations had been thrown away, and everything was now back again in just the same condition as when the King made up his mind to dismiss the Melbourne Administration. The whole blame for the muddle rested on the King, who now found himself compelled to take up again with Lord Melbourne just as if nothing had happened. The King, indeed, made an attempt to induce Lord Grey to come out of his retirement and form another Ministry; but Lord Grey was not to be prevailed upon ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Foreigners largely man the merchant ships, though Englishmen still continue to officer them and to prefer foreigners for'ard. In South Africa the colonial teaches the islander how to shoot, and the officers muddle and blunder; while at home the street people play hysterically at mafficking, and the War Office ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... singular muddle, he pointed out, seemed to be whether or not the poor fellow had known that the boat was upset. Well, who could say what he knew, an intoxicated man in a blind passion? Not Carlisle, certainly, plunged suddenly into the sea and intensely occupied with saving her life. How, for instance, could ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... helping me in the search, it entered my head to mix up with this murder the spectre, or ghost, that had frightened the Dane at the wheel into a fit, along with the memory of a sort of quarrel which I guessed had happened between Captain Griffiths and Miss Le Grand. It was a mere muddle of fancies at best, and yet they took a hold of my imagination. I think it was about a week before this murder that I had observed the coolness of what you might call a lovers' quarrel betwixt the captain and his young lady, and without taking any further notice of it ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... companion, and perhaps at his gayest on these occasions. "A man's holiday," he would say, "is his garden," and he set out to enjoy himself and to make everyone about him enjoy themselves too. I told him the old schoolboy muddle about Sir Walter Raleigh introducing tobacco and saying: "We shall this day light up such a fire in England as I trust shall never be put out." He had not heard it before and, though amused, appeared preoccupied, ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... go against it! Things are arranged in a certain way, and it's no use going against them! You mustn't even discuss them. But what did you do? You got some maggot into your head. A convent, indeed! Silly fool! What did the girl want? Did she want your convent? What a set of muddle-headed fools there seems to be now! Just think what's happened! You, you're neither fish nor fowl, nor good red-herring. And the girl's done for! She's living with an old man! And you drove the old man into sin! How many laws have you broken? ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... admirable, because she doesn't trouble her head about churches and creeds any longer. She used to do so once, but now she thinks only of what is morally right or wrong, and leaves the ecclesiastical muddle for the divines to get out of as best they can. Mamma used to dread bringing us to Morne when we were younger; we were always so outrageous here; and we told her it was Aunt Fulda who made us so, because ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... do no good," said I, "and it may just muddle you for to-morrow. Take an easy evening now, and go to bed early. You'll be all ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... between the British and the French soldiers. They don't understand very much of each other's speech, but they "muddle through," as Atkins puts it, with "any old lingo." The French call out, "Bravo, Tommee!" and share cigarettes with him: and Atkins, not very sure of his new comrades' military Christian name, replies with a cheery "Right, Oh!" Then turning to his own fellows he shouts, ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... Protr Ilyitch intervened, listening and watching him uneasily, "you'd better go yourself and tell them. He'll muddle it." ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Frances, 'I suppose not. It's only really the Harpers I care about,' she added to herself. 'And now,' she went on thinking, 'with this muddle about the old lady at Robin Redbreast—if their mother doesn't want her to know about them, perhaps it's best for Jacinth not to see them much. And I'll have to forget what Margaret told me, after I've written to mamma. I want to remember it ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... Out of all this muddle and confusion and slipshod thinking there arose one man with a purpose, one man who fixed his eyes on a single inevitable goal and walked straight at it, not minding what or whom he trod upon on the way. His purpose was the mass-production ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... in his. "I am trusting you," she said, "with all my life. Don't make a muddle of it, dear, ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... tarry cord and did not give a fraction of an inch. Tears of bitter rage filled his eyes and made furrows on his encrusted cheek. Idiot that he had been, he had wrecked everything! What would Saskia and Dougal and Sir Archie do without a business man by their side? There would be a muddle, and the little party would walk into a trap. He saw it all very clearly. The men from the sea would overpower them, there would be murder done, and an easy capture of the Princess; and the police would turn up at long last ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... counter-revolution. These movements are generally innocuous; they sometimes add to the gaiety of nations by the sheer imbecility of their inception and attempted execution, and they appear to be welcome rather than otherwise, as a means of distracting public attention from the universal muddle and general misguidance of European affairs, to those who consider themselves called upon and qualified to ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... use will they be to me if I don't remember one of them? To be sure that about not letting my nails grow, and marrying again if I have the chance, will not slip out of my head; but all that other hash, muddle, and jumble—I don't and can't recollect any more of it than of last year's clouds; so it must be given me in writing; for though I can't either read or write, I'll give it to my confessor, to drive it into me and remind me of it whenever ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "absurd" two or three times, but he became more thoughtful a moment later, and sat smoking and pondering. That would be a nice muddle if she, the niece of a Frenchman—an American, too—should fix her affections on a captain of Uhlans whose regiment he, Jack Marche, would avoid as he would hope to avoid ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... the automobile explained to him until he knew every part like a brother and then, when asked if he understood it, he replied that he understood all but one thing and that was what made it go without horses. So if the reader, who knows a car from A to Z, will kindly forbear to smile when I muddle things up, I will be her ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... 'is wife, and she'll myke every penny in every one o' them shillins tell. She gets more fur 'im out of 'is wyges than wot 'e can. Some o' you know wot the 'omes is like w'ere the men don't let the women manage. Well, the Poor Laws and the 'ole Government is just in the syme muddle because the men 'ave tried to do the national 'ousekeepin' without ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... his antagonist backward, seeking to muddle his defence and to clear an opening for his own deadly stroke; but the other man also was a master, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "What a muddle and mockery the whole thing is!" he cried. "What a fumbling old fool old Mother Nature has been! She drives us into indignity and dishonour: and she doesn't even get the children which are her only excuse for her mischief. See what a fantastic thing I am when you take the machine to pieces! ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... largely anarchic: parents and schoolmasters are good-natured or weak or lazy; and children are docile and affectionate and very shortwinded in their fits of naughtiness; and so most families slummock along and muddle through until the children cease to be children. In the few cases when the parties are energetic and determined, the child is crushed or the parent is reduced to a cipher, as the case may be. When the opposed forces are neither of them strong enough to annihilate the other, there ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... agreed. "Only, you see, we like the muddle to be made by the other side. But, in this case, the muddle is on our side. The change, as you say, seems to leave our friend Stephen's interests unaffected. That is, of course, what poor Jeffrey Blackmore thought. But he was mistaken. The effect of the change ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... and dried the ice in the sun. His was a case of Handy- Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr. Lover's hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe the white gentleman with half a dozen of bottled beer; a case of muddle-headed craft and elaborate silliness, which keeps no proportion between the means and the end; so common in insane persons; frequent, too, among the lower Irish, such as Handy Andy; and very frequent, I am afraid, among the Negroes. But—as might have been expected—the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... lieutenant would fire back, and he was cool enough to fire with effect. Well, he wouldn't miss; what should he miss for? As for the greasers, they would run at the first shot. Nevertheless, he did occasionally muddle over the idea of going off to California with his gold, and without doing this particular job. What kept him to his agreement was the hope of stealing the spare mules, and the fear that the draft might not be paid ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... not, their aversion to the authorship of women is very much like the conviction of a weak pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long walks; or the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his wife is constitutionally unfitted to ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... orderly kind of tempest, with first some thunder, and then some rain, and then a gust of wind or two, such as Thor was wont to arrange, but a mixture of hail and wind and thunder and lightning and rain and snow, all raging together in a tremendous muddle, so that the earth folk thought the end of ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... his master. To Bowring we also owe the Deontology, which professes to represent Bentham's dictation. The Mills repudiated this version, certainly a very poor one, of their teacher's morality, and held that it represented less Bentham than such an impression of Bentham as could be stamped upon a muddle-headed disciple.[335] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... to Afghanistan. Generally speaking, the story of our dealings with that country has been a record of stupid, arrogant muddle. From the days of the first Afghan war, when an ill-fated army was despatched on its crazy mission to place a puppet king, Shah Shuja, on the throne of Afghanistan, our statesmen have, with some notable exceptions, mishandled ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... it into his head that I went below because I thought he was making a muddle of the speed. As a matter of fact, he knows every blessed thing I do about our motors, and Williamson is loyal to ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... caused much alarm to the inhabitants of Esher proper. We do not use the expression "Esher proper" from any prudish reason, but merely because Little Esher, a mile down the road, might in the reader's mind become a factor to promote muddle if we did not take care to indicate clearly its ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... cosmic philosopher must contract his vision to the little island we inhabit, must adjust his interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure our lives. The muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr. Dreiser's work comes from the conflict within him of huge, expansive moods and a conscience working hard to be accurate in its representation of the most honest facts ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... old as the world, treasured up out of respect for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India by saintly Chinese missionaries at the epoch of our Middle Ages. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain of a ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... which stands out incontrovertibly from the whole weary muddle. It is quite clear that the inability to act in common arises from the fact that in the international sphere the European is still dominated by illusions which he has dropped when he deals with home politics. The political faith of the Turk, which he would never think of applying at ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... him). What a muddle! What a muddle! (Turns on stairs.) Shall I put on my emerald green ...
— I'll Leave It To You - A Light Comedy In Three Acts • Noel Coward
... to telegraph to London," he said, "till I see what comes of our examination of the Indians. My own conviction is, that this muddle-headed local police-officer is as much in the dark as ever, and is simply trying to gain time. The idea of any of the servants being in league with the Indians is a preposterous absurdity, in my opinion. Keep about the house, Betteredge, till ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... letters she learned much that was not in the papers, especially in those tense days when the C.I.V.'S did at last get to the front—and remained there: tales of horses mercifully shot, and sheep mercilessly poisoned, and oxen dropping dead as they dragged the convoys; tales of muddle and accident, tales of British soldiers slain by their own protective cannon as they lay behind ant-heaps facing the enemy, and British officers culled under the very eyes of the polo-match; tales of hospital and camp, of shirts turned sable and putties ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... have never even seen an annuity distributed to aggravate the muddle with their suggestions would be most presumptuous. It is as little as we can do to abstain. We may venture here only to say a word in mitigation of the deep stain left upon the fair fame of the United States by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... streets, which alone carry the atmosphere of unprivileged humanity. The mood of the evening was doubtless foolish, boyish, but it was none the less keen and convincing. He had never before had the inner, unknown elements of his nature so stirred; had never felt this blind, raging protest. It was a muddle of impressions: the picture of the poor soul with his clamor for a job; the satisfied, brutal egotism of Brome Porter, who lived as if life were a huge poker game; the overfed, red-cheeked Caspar, whom he remembered ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... much, but I wanted the confirmation of your own lips, my dear child. The knowledge emboldens me to offer you an asylum under my own roof for the next few months—or longer. Ulick, as you say, is but a boy, half hot, half muddle-head. He, perhaps, could ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... bring-to first and at once. It is evident, however, that even the Sailing Instructions, cast-iron as they were, contemplated a fleet in order, not one in process of forming order; and that to bring-to helter-skelter, regardless of order, was to obey the letter rather than the spirit. Muddle-headed as Mathews seems to have been, what he was trying to do was clear enough; and the duty of a subordinate was to carry out his evident aim. An order does not necessarily supersede its predecessor, unless the two are incompatible. The whole ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... footing up on the margin of his manuscript the amount of his indebtedness, the expenses of his household, and the possibilities of his income. It was weary, hard, nerve-racking employment. About the muddle of June they closed Viviani. Susy Clemens went to Paris to cultivate her voice, a rare soprano, with a view to preparing for the operatic stage. Clemens took Mrs. Clemens, with little Jean, to Germany for the baths. Clara, who had graduated from Mrs. Willard's school in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... her maid's clothes. Oh, you'll have to hear worse things than that before we're out of this muddle. If you won't mind a bit of advice from a man of experience, I would suggest that you take things easy. It's the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... which have been thus far published, there is a vagueness in the arguments on this branch of the subject, which betrays a want of definite conviction in the minds of the writers; and which tends quite as much to muddle as to enlighten the ideas of the reader. In so far as the directions are given, whether fortified by argument or not, they are clearly empirical, and are usually very much qualified by considerations which weigh with unequal force in ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... jostling and confused relatives are as a rule grammatically wrong, like the common blunder of putting an "and which" where there is no previous "which" expressed or implied. They, simply, put as they are, bewilder and muddle the reader because the writer has not taken the trouble to break up his sentence into two or three. This is, of course, a very gross abuse, and except when the talents above noticed either fuse his style into something ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons—although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as humming-birds—yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me back to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... duty; the division car repairer and the roadmaster curled up in the caboose, for they had been routed out at an unseemly hour; the station agent amused himself reading the messages that rattled through to the South and back, telling of a muddle at headquarters. When a wrecking train is held for orders, it is safe to assume that something ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... belly?" "I shan't say," said she with a modest fit, no sham. "Was it?—was it just as my prick now is?" Her story was exciting me, I pulled her belly up to mine, and my prick, a right good stiff one was between us. "I suppose it were," said she, "I don't recollect, all seems in a muddle, he hurt me dreadful, I screamed, he put something over my mouth, and I don't know no more; but he was doing it right up, and I were ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... said he. "I saw the exact tree in my dream, but now there's so many of them, they muddle ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... But beyond the tenderness there was also an energy that made every move seem like an attack. In spite of her reserve there was impatience, and Olva's first judgment of her was that the last thing in the world that she could endure was muddle; she shone with the ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... suffering," which of all sentiments was the most likely to appeal to Dick Dudley, for he is one of those who look upon sorrow and suffering as bad management on the part of some one, since the world is really such an awfully jolly place, if only people didn't make a muddle of their lives. He says it is all very well to talk of high ideals, you can't live up to them, the best you can do is to live up to the highest practical ideal. But then his standard of ideal is very much higher since he saw Pauline for the first time. Pauline ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... I want to understand. The thing seems such a muddle to me. You've given up your practice—how ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... generally lay her hand in a moment upon anything she wanted. This afternoon, however, she rummaged for her atlas in vain. She turned books and papers over and over in her futile search, till the desk was in a chaotic muddle. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... charlatanism of his beloved author. I know an author who burnt his manuscript because his friend and critic had misunderstood him. I see a thousand reviews (and have written several of them) where book and reviewer muddle along together like the partners of everyday marriages. But next time, one always ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to be busy all the morning over my accounts; they've got into the most disgraceful muddle, and I want to put them straight. I shall be in the drawing room, for I keep all my household books in the davenport there. I mean to give you a holiday, Judy, but perhaps you won't mind reading some of your history to yourself, and doing ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... the men. They huddled no more like sheep. They seemed suddenly to bethink them of their weapons, and at once commenced firing. Belabored by their officers, they began to move forward. The regiment, involved like a cart involved in mud and muddle, started unevenly with many jolts and jerks. The men stopped now every few paces to fire and load, and in this manner moved slowly on ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... of fact I went to see my beloved on that evening filled with a new faith in the outcome of our life together. I am afraid I muddle this matter in trying to tell it. A moment ago I said the other woman, the tobacconist's wife, went with me. I do not mean she went in fact. What I am trying to say is that something of her faith in her own desires and her ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... am on the way to the front, gets excited again; for, you see, illness and weakness make these strong men as children, not least in the patient unmurmuring resignation with which they suffer. I think my Irish friend had an indistinct idea of a "muddle" somewhere, which had kept him for weeks on salt meat and biscuit, until it gave him the "scurvy," for he is very anxious that I should take over plenty of vegetables, of every sort. "And, oh! mother!"—and it is strange to hear his almost plaintive tone as he urges this—"take them plenty ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... up a new sub-section, which he admitted was so obscure that he only 'more or less' understood it himself, and which, indeed, is of 'plusquam-Thucydidean' dimness and involution.... There is no excuse, we must say, for the muddle into which the Government has got over the Bill.... The House of Commons has adjourned for a short holiday, but the Irish Land Purchase Bill is not yet through Committee.... There still remained all the new clauses, for which no time had ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... me now as if you're all in a muddle. You've got two of them under arrest—why don't you lock up Ward and Collins and have them all in jail? Then you'd be sure to have the ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... no stimulants of any kind, and should be very sorry to do so. I thought it was now generally admitted that the more work a man has to do, the less he can afford to muddle himself in any way. But as I have never tried the experiment in using either alcohol or tobacco, and cannot afford to do it, I have no comparative experience to offer. It might be beneficial; I do not believe it would, and prefer not to risk the chance. ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... it, Farquhar, the blunder lies with Benson himself. He is just the man to muddle away his money in indiscriminate charity, and then to wonder what has become ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "What muddle are you talking?" cried Norman, angrily; "the brute will get away. Look here, Shan, ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... and we'd have missed this. It takes only about one season to muddle up their riding with the white man's booze—or the white man's treaty money. Why don't we leave well enough alone—that is, if they'd let us ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... things over herself, don't you think so, ma'am? No one went in there to murder her. But how came she to have those clothes on. She was dressed quite different when I let her in. I say it's all a muddle, ma'am, and it will be a smart ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... The Fall.—The theological muddle is largely caused by the inability of many people to free themselves from archaic notions which have really nothing to do with Christianity, although they have been imported into it. The principal of these, in relation to the question of sin, is the doctrine ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... It was a muddle which was hard to penetrate. What a beautiful line of talk Blatch Ferguson had handed him the other day! According to Blatch the Honorable Milton Waring was one of the hardest-working, most conscientious ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of the scientists ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... rather want of system, and the bitter scorn poured on German fussiness by travelling Britons. The ways of one nation are certainly not the ways of another in this respect. Directly I cross the German frontier I know that I am safe from muddle and mistakes, that I need not look after myself or my luggage, that I cannot get into a wrong train or alight at a wrong station, or suffer any injury through carelessness or mismanagement. Everything is ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... always shining, and the game plentiful. Then the men of the settlement seem to have but a hazy notion about its bein' a place of happiness, but they can't tell why or wherefore in a very comprehensible sort o' way, and, as far as I can see, they're in no hurry to get there. It seems in a muddle somehow, an' that's a thing that surprises me, for the works o' the Almighty—hereaway in the mountains—are plain and onderstandable, so as a child might read 'em; but man's brains don't seem to be such perfect work, for, when he comes to talk o' God and heaven, they appear to me to work as if they ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... be a strange muddle," said the captain, who was not disposed to listen any longer to the sparring between the cousins. "At the suggestion of the lieutenant who came on board this forenoon, I have taken the earliest opportunity to settle the question as to which ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... the word will pardon,) Like a long-legg'd grasshopper in the garden, Forever on the wing, and hops and sings The same old song, as in the grass he springs; Would he but stay there! no; he needs must muddle His ...
— Faust • Goethe
... the horses! Off to Canterbury! Tramp, tramp o'er pebble, and splash, splash through puddle; Hurrah! how swiftly speeds the post so merry! Not like slow Germany, wherein they muddle Along the road, as if they went to bury Their fare; and also pause besides, to fuddle With 'schnapps'—sad dogs! whom 'Hundsfot,' or 'Verflucter,' Affect no more than ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... simpler than the Rule of Three Are the laws of earth and sky; Yet fools will muddle all true thought, And pride will have its cry; The banners with their deadly words Go reeling on unfurled, And sin and sadness march along To the heartbreak ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... said so," he returned, dryly; "in some cases it is best to reserve one's opinion; but of course at Mr. Williams's age it is a grave matter;" then he drew his chair closer to the fire. "Life's an awful muddle, Livy, as that man said in Hard Times; fancy the loneliness of a young creature like that; why, she cannot be more than two- or three-and-twenty, and her lawful protector drinking himself ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... he said. "I have made you rich; you shall be happy in your old age; but I will not let you muddle away my life any longer. Miserable wretch! I am hungry—where is my ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... not all. No work will be carried out thoroughly without order and system. You see people who work all day and work hard, but never make any way, because they work in a muddle, and with no regular plan. At school the child is given the habit ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... learned afterwards, he was believed to have been murdered with the missionary, and a report to that effect was sent to England, which, in the general muddle that prevailed at the beginning of the war, had never been corrected. For be it remembered it was not until he was carried to Mombasa, nearly two months after he was hurt, that he reached any place where there was a telegraph. By this time also, those at Mombasa had plenty of fresh ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... dig through a whole library of horse practice, and muddle and mull over the Mendelian Law until I'm dizzy, like the clod that I am; but she is the genius. She doesn't have to study law. She just knows it in some witch-like, intuitional way. All she has to do is size up a bunch ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... she is," said Mrs. Fisher, scrunching heavily over the pebbles towards the hidden corner. "Well, that accounts for it. The muddle that man Droitwich made in his department in the war was a national scandal. It amounted to ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... relatively bad when, spreading over a number of books, it pursues no order, and thus results in a muddle of faint impressions each blurring the rest. Books must be allowed to help one another; they must be skilfully called in to each other's aid. And that this may be accomplished some guiding principle is necessary. "And what," you demand, "should that guiding principle be?" ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... "Go to sleep, you muddle-headed thing," he muttered. "Don't make that noise in the middle of the night.—They always do that at home when the ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... But the muddle continued. In order to compel competition, according to the academic theories of the day, licenses were given to thir-teen private companies. As might have been expected, the ablest company quickly swallowed the other twelve. If it had been let alone, this company ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... their meaning; the duties our ancestors performed have lost their usefulness; the old bottles will not hold the new wine which our generation serves to us. And this is one reason why so many people rate and gibe at what they call the "muddle-headed British public; "because it cannot change its ideas so quickly as it is forced to change its conditions ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... ripening climate, and Dorothy Sambrooke had been exposed to it under exceptionally ripening circumstances. Slender, pale, with blue eyes a trifle tired from poring over the pages of books and trying to muddle into an understanding of life—such she had been the month before. But now the eyes were warm instead of tired, the cheeks were touched with the sun, and the body gave the first hint and promise of swelling lines. During that month she had left ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... long way ahead. . . . Ryabovitch was with the first cannon of the fifth battery. He could see all the four batteries moving in front of him. For any one not a military man this long tedious procession of a moving brigade seems an intricate and unintelligible muddle; one cannot understand why there are so many people round one cannon, and why it is drawn by so many horses in such a strange network of harness, as though it really were so terrible and heavy. To Ryabovitch it was all perfectly comprehensible and therefore uninteresting. He had ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... perhaps sufficient attention has not. been paid to the lofty position of the character, as distinguished from the prowess, that this version gives to Cuchulain. The first verse, put in Cuchulain's mouth, strikes a new note, contrasting alike with the muddle-headed bargaining of Ferdia and Maev, and the somewhat fussy anxiety of Fergus. The contrast between the way in which Cuchulain receives Fergus's report of the valour of Ferdia, and that in which Ferdia receives the praises of Cuchulain from his charioteer, is well worked out; ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... the traction muddle was sufficient to afford a background of plausibility for this highminded renunciation. There was something likable in Charles Holton. His volubility, which had prejudiced her against him in the beginning, ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... depends on how you look at it,' responded the old man indifferently. 'Well, I'm tired, and there's no more to talk about. Everything is right and tight, is it? No possibility of a muddle at the end?' ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... Monsieur Bongrand is right, you could never bear the sight. Everything is ticketed. All the town is coming and going just as in the street; the handsome furniture is being ruined, they even stand upon it; the whole place is such a muddle that a hen couldn't find her chicks. You'd think there had been a fire. Lots of things are in the courtyard; the closets are all open, and nothing in them. Oh! the poor dear man, it's well he died, the ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... drift is the same. "There's no great odds betwixt my noble and learned brother and myself," says the grotesque proprietor of the rag and bottle shop under the wall of Lincoln's-inn, "they call me Lord Chancellor and my shop Chancery, and we both of us grub on in a muddle." Edax rerum the motto of both, but with a difference. Out of the lumber of the shop emerge slowly some fragments of evidence by which the chief actors in the story are sensibly affected, and to which ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... you won't believe it, but they have really gone, and if 'Gentleman Jim' knew anything about this, he would surely say, 'I 'spose their time hadn't come yet, little missie.' That's it, Carlo. Their time had not come yet. But they have left things in a fearful muddle, and we will have to work as we never worked before. The first thing to be done to-morrow ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... occasion he had thought, with a queer, detached interest, of the relief which morphia might bring to his tormented nerves; but with the thought came another—the picture of Iris Wayne who had bidden him remember that this was not the way out of the tragic muddle into which his life had been ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... you mean the new folk at the Friary," she continued, carelessly. "Oh, they are only moving in to-day, and they will be in a muddle for a week, I should think. I don't think we can intrude ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... these things if you really thought you were in a hopeless muddle. I have gone through it all this term, and I know. I have tried to laugh, and I have drunk until I didn't care what happened, but it is all no use. I have made a mess of everything, and there is no one to blame except ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... I have made another muddle of it, I admit! My lord Faruskiar, of whom I had made a hero—by telegraph—for the readers of the Twentieth. Century. Decidedly my good intentions ought certainly to qualify me as one of the best paviers of a road to a certain place you have ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... use of a green-colored tablecloth we sometimes use to drape our hills. Of course, a large part of the fun of this game lies in the witty incorporation of all sorts of extraneous objects. But the incorporation must be witty, or you may soon convert the whole thing into an incoherent muddle of half-good ideas. ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... might be some excuse for his folly. No; all this dirt and confusion, which once a week drives me nearly beside myself, is what K—— calls clearing up the ship; when he and his man Friday, as he calls Kelly, turn everything topsy-turvy, and, to make the muddle more complete, they always choose my washing-day for their frolic. Pantries and cellars are rummaged over, and everything is dragged out of its place, for the mere pleasure of making a litter, and dragging it ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... 'your high-mindedness is admirable, quite admirable, but it won't work; it doesn't fit into modern conditions. Theoretically, Marriage is a Holy Mystery no doubt—in practice it's apt to be an Unholy Muddle, sometimes a Mess. Personally I believe ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... shook our heads together, and declared that the masterpieces would console them. As for the rest of it, there's only one thing more to be said. What I might be in other places I don't know: I'm the wrong man in the wrong place here. Let me muddle on for the future in my own way, with my own few friends; and ask me anything else in the world, as long as you don't ask me to make any more ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... of cleansing the Treasury has commenced, and brooms and scrubbing-brushes are at a premium—a little anticipative, it is true, of the approaching turn-out; but the dilatory idleness and muddle-headed confusion of those who will soon be termed its late occupiers, rendered this a work of absolute time and labour. That the change in office had long been expected, is evident from the number of hoards discovered, which the unfortunate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... pogroms, plebiscites, Ireland, steel strikes, red armies, Fourteen Points, The Truth About This, The Real Story of That, the League of Nations, the riots in Berlin, in Dublin, Milan, Paris, London, Chicago; secret treaties, pacts, betrayals, Kolchak—an incomprehensible muddle of newspaper headlines shrieked from morning to morning and said nothing. The distracted mob become privy for the moment to the vast biological disorder eternally existent under its nose, snorted, yelped, and shook indignant sawdust out ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the work. Yet the house was always in confusion. Mrs. Gourlay had asked for another servant, but Gourlay would not allow that; "one's enough," said he, and what he once laid down he never went back on. Mrs. Gourlay had to muddle along as best she could, and having no strength either of mind or body, she let things drift, and took refuge in reading ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... me if she imagines I'm such a sneak, but how could she suppose I would? And yet I thought her guilty. Oh dear, it's a horrible muddle! How shall ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath all its varied aspects must needs be order and discipline. "Muddle," said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... go into rights, Mr. Clark," the judge retorted, "the whole thing is a hopeless muddle. None of us in a very real sense has any rights—extremely few rights, at ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... forgotten it in the face of new revelations far more unbelievable." He sighed. "If these men about us realized the terrible ordeal that lies ahead! Misgoverned; unprepared—I shudder at the thought of the sacrifices we must make, many of them in vain. But I suppose that somehow, some day, we shall muddle through." ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... leave for town that very day. On the other hand, Sir Tancred was averse to going to the police; he knew what the provincial police were. What was excellent evidence to him would seem no evidence at all to them; and they would move too late, or, if they moved in time, would muddle the whole business, and let the Biggleswades know they were suspected. Besides, it hurt his self-love to seek aid from anyone. No, the proper game was to rob the robbers, and he had seven ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... don't know what to say," she cried. "It is all such a frightful muddle. I don't even know whether I love you or not. I do; you know that, Jim. But I don't know whether I love you in the right way. I thought before that I didn't. And how can I when I did a thing like that? I'm a girl who goes to any ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... it not be?" she rejoined, in a not very convincing tone. "Now I shall rely on you—and I am sure it will not be in vain—to respect my wishes. Things seem to be in a horrible muddle," she added with a rather dreary laugh, "but let's hope they will ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... all right, Miss Falconer." I was switching on the lamps. Then I extinguished them; their clear acetylene glare seemed almost weirdly out of place. "We can muddle along without any lights. Not much traffic here," I muttered. I had a feeling, anyhow, that unostentatiousness of approach might not ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... warden question. It was supposed and reported that the warden would be removed; then we learned that the political muddle prevented, some contending for a straight, out-and-out Democrat, others, for a Labor Reformer, the party with whom they had bargained and thus gained the power. Then there was another element which seemed largely to prevail, and ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... sneering at himself for having it, after all his fine talk about "backbone"; and finding reasons for despair thicken, the harder he tried to make elbow-room for hope, till altogether confounded at the muddle, he flung up thought, with "Brain's full and stomach's empty, and it's ill talking between a full man and a fasting," and set about cooking his rations. "But first catch your hare," cries Mrs. Glass. Drake had his hare, such as it was, but found something ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various |
