"Knock-kneed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great one to talk?" queried Lucy, severely. "Didn't you get around Dad and trade him an old, blind, knock-kneed bag of bones for a perfectly good pony—one I liked ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Ben Weatherstaff, getting close to her. "Look at th' lad's legs, wilt tha'? They was like drumsticks i' stockin' two month' ago—an' I heard folk tell as they was bandy an' knock-kneed both at th' same time. Look ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... about them. Thus he remarks in passing that the modern novel is 'devoted to the bewilderment of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry or which new religion he believes in; we still give this knock-kneed cad ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... behind an enormous cab-horse. He had white kid gloves and white reins, and nature had by this time decorated him with a considerable tuft on the chin. A very small cab-boy, vice Stoopid retired, swung on behind Foker's vehicle; knock-kneed and in the tightest leather breeches. Foker looked at the dusty coach, and the smoking horses of the 'Alacrity' by which he had made journeys in former times. "What, Foker!" cried out Pendennis—"Hullo! Pen, my boy!" said the other, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but in Countess Lidia Ivanovna's little drawing room the blinds were drawn and the lamps lighted. At a round table under a lamp sat the countess and Alexey Alexandrovitch, talking softly. A short, thinnish man, very pale and handsome, with feminine hips and knock-kneed legs, with fine brilliant eyes and long hair lying on the collar of his coat, was standing at the end of the room gazing at the portraits on the wall. After greeting the lady of the house and Alexey Alexandrovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch could not resist glancing ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... better term let us call pants—a pair of bags sewed together at the top, and designed for no other purpose than to conceal from the world the character and quality of the wearer's legs. When that beatific invention arrives your spindle-legged, knock-kneed imitation of a man will, as far as the public eye is concerned, find himself on as sure a footing as your very Adonis, and a person with a comparatively under-developed understanding will be able to make as good a showing ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... up and down the pavement, with an unlighted cigar stuck in his mouth. I took a match, and said, 'Have a light, my noble swell?' and hanged if he didn't give me ten centimes! My! ain't he ugly!—short, shrivelled up, and knock-kneed, with a glass in his eye, and ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... thin man whose clothes hung loosely on the angles of his round-shouldered, bony form. His long, thin legs, about which the baggy trousers draped in ungraceful folds, were slightly knock-kneed and terminated in large, flat feet. His arms were very long even for such a tall man, and the huge, bony hands were gnarled and knotted. When he removed his bowler hat, as he frequently did to wipe away with a red handkerchief the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the lap of green hills with a real river running through it. Here boy and baby—and Rags too—find New England friends, whom it is a privilege for nous autres to know. Samanthy Ann is a real live person, and so is Jabe Slocum—a long, loose, knock-kneed, slack-twisted person, of whom Aunt Hitty Tarbox (whom GEORGE ELIOT might have sketched) remarked he would have been "longer yit if he hedn't hed so much turned up fur feet." Timothy's Quest is the best thing of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... dilatory and sluggish; of a swarthy complexion; had a cast in one eye, a blemish, however, which was not visible at a distance; his limbs were well set; his figure was neither tall nor short; he was knock-kneed, and rather pot-bellied. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... each other. They are a more or less close company, and they have to consider each other: not one of them is independent. To be so, they would have to renounce their social life, and even their friendships. Who is there that would have the courage, in such a knock-kneed time, when even the best critics doubt whether a just notice is worth the annoyance it may cause to the writer and the object of it? Who is there so devoted to duty that he would condemn himself to such a hell on earth: dare to stand out against opinion, fight ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... had ceased to impress the Boers. They had had too many of them, and they began to think the British Government a somewhat knock-kneed institution whose joints had ceased to hold together. Sir Garnet Wolseley, however, with characteristic energy and determination, dealt with the malcontents one by one, converting them, and causing them to sensibly consider ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... makeshifts of every description; and where their pride had rebelled against such ingratitude, they were smothered beneath the limbs of fallen trees, which had been felled on the spot to serve as substitutes. His flumes were knock-kneed and bow-legged, and in places they had no legs at all. Their sides were warped and bulged with the alternate damp and drouth, heat and cold. The lumber was bleached white, and porous with decay. It was with difficulty they could be persuaded to remain at their water-carrying capacity. ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... first resolve, which, in its mere animal estate, we may name courage. Booth found that a tragedy in real life could no more be enacted without greasy-faced and knock-kneed supernumeraries than upon the mimic stage. Your "First Citizen," who swings a stave for Marc Antony, and drinks hard porter behind the flies is very like the bravo of real life, who murders between his cocktails at the nearest bar. Wilkes Booth had passed the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... when she once walked with him all the way from Broxton to Hayslope, had only broken silence to remark that the grey goose had begun to lay. And as for Mr. Craig, the gardener, he was a sensible man enough, to be sure, but he was knock-kneed, and had a queer sort of sing-song in his talk; moreover, on the most charitable supposition, he must be far on the way ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... and John, the sole factotum of the establishment—the man who cleaned the boots and knives, and swept up the avenue, removed the weeds from the flower-beds, cleaned the steps whenever they were cleaned, and the windows whenever they were cleaned—appeared on the scene, leading a tumble-down, knock-kneed pony harnessed to a ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... corn was in the milk—that season which the Indians celebrate with their famous corn dance—we saw Wilomene White streaking across the plains on old Buckskin, her knock-kneed pony. Wilomene was a familiar sight on the prairie, and the sight of her short, plump figure, jolting up and down in a stiff gallop, as though she were on a wooden horse, water keg hanging from her saddlehorn—just in case she should come across any water—was welcome wherever ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... the thumb of each hand into the armhole of his waistcoat, and moves along stiffly, with a knock-kneed gait. His talk was chiefly of hotels, and such matters as a man, always travelling, without any purpose of observation for mental improvement, would be interested in. He spoke of his life as a ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... he went on, 'with every old screw in the country. I got broken-winded mares from the ploughs. I collected a regular hospital of spavined, knock-kneed beasts, and he took them from me without a word at thirty pounds apiece. It would have been all right if I had gone no further. But, hang it all! I got to the end of my tether. I declare to you I don't believe there was another screw left in the whole county of Mayo, and unless ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... help the wrong feller. I've no doubt that ef me an' Jim Hart was a-hittin' an' a-wrastlin', an' hevin' the terriblest fight you ever heard on, ef any woman wuz to come along she'd pull me off the ornery, long-legged, knock-kneed, ugly Jim Hart—an' ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... generally cognizant of the power of overgrown and unbalanced hoofs to divert the lower bones of young legs from their proper direction, and, therefore, to cause them to be moved improperly, with loss of speed and often with injury to the limbs, we might hope to see fewer knock-kneed, bow-legged, "splay-footed," "pigeon-toed," cow-hocked, interfering, and ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... understand," bellowed the Honorable Bickford, using the megaphone, "you are talking about my dog—a dog that is worth more dollars than that old knock-kneed plug of yours has got hairs in her mane. Put your hand on that dog, and you'll ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day |
