"Muddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hill found herself alone with her lacerated feelings. After soothing them with a good cry, she set to work thinking seriously. There was no doubt she had muddled things badly, but there was no use leaving them in a muddle when a word or two fitly spoken ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... passengers who were 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 I quietly set the cause ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... 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 be kept ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... 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 ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... But what's back of all this muddle? Why was she masquerading as an opera singer, when fortune and place ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real, living things, things he must accept. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... late Mr. Wakley), cast a look of strong encouragement in my direction. Then, we had the doctor who had made the examination, and the usual tests as to whether the child was born alive; but he was a timid, muddle-headed doctor, and got confused and contradictory, and wouldn't say this, and couldn't answer for that, and the immaculate broker was too much for him, and our side slid back again. However, I tried again, and the Coroner backed me again, for which I ever ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... think that first come would be first served, and sent their husbands over before he was fairly squatted. Various and contradictory were the accounts they brought home. Men are so stupid at seeing and remembering things. Old Mr. Muddle came back bemused with sherry, declaring that he thought Mr. Puffington was as old as he was (sixty-two), while Mrs. Mousetrap thought he wasn't more than thirty at the outside. She described him as 'painfully handsome.' Mr. Slowan couldn't tell whether the drawing-room furniture ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... advertise in papers which he thought might by their publication of opinion ultimately hurt Capitalism as a whole; still less in those whose opinions might affect his own private fortune adversely. Stupid (like all people given up to gain), he was muddle-headed about the distinction between a large circulation and a circulation small, but appealing to the rich. He would refuse advertisements of luxuries to a paper read by half the wealthier class if he had heard in the National Liberal Club, ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... once—years ago, and I chanced to head off Piggie at a critical moment for young Akbar. On the strength of that, he wants me to go and be his political adviser for a few months. It seems the State is in rather a muddle. His father was a shocking old shuffler, and there are plenty of budmashes about, if report says true. But this young Rajah is anxious to get things straightened out, and the Commissioner wants a report made and so on. Altogether," Nick paused ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... incompetence of females who could not teach their menials to "cook a dinner which was not a disgrace to any decent household." When not virulently aspersing the mutton, he was expressing his opinion of muddle-headed weakness which would permit household bills to mount in a manner which could only bring ruin and disaster upon a minister of the gospel who throughout a protracted career of usefulness had sapped his intellectual manhood in the useless effort ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 incident, from Lestock's act to ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... the German lines the other night they played havoc with certain cantonments. If so why will not ten or twenty times as many planes accomplish ten or twenty times as much? It is simply a problem in mathematics. But will Englishmen see that? Not much. 'Muddle through' is their national motto and they are proud of it. Thank God the Germans are just as stupid. If it was the United States they wouldn't play the fool in regard to ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... now, stay and let me get all I can of you, in this frightful muddle," entreated Caroline. "Chaos is come again, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thinking of something else. The chief thing seems to me to be to work a way out of the muddle. Anybody may be Governor or even President if he tries hard enough—but it is a different matter to bring some kind of order out of this confusion. I've got an idea that I've been hammering at for the last twenty years. Not a great one, perhaps, though I think it is; and I'd like to get a chance ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... was shamefaced, and I knew she had offended his pride and never mine, and likewise I felt timid that that Rairyganoo girl might make things awkward. So I says "My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs." And we had the tea and the affairs too and after all it was but forty pound, and—There! she's as industrious and straight a creeter as ever lived and has paid back ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... said Nora, almost passionately. "I don't want to see him down in our shabby, untidy little drawing-room, to hear mamma talk about her expenses and papa's difficulties—to see all that tribe of children in their old frocks—to see the muddle in which we live! I don't want ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the Athenians— See our ambassadors are always drunk. For when we visit Sparta sober, then We're on the alert for trickery all the while So that we miss half of the things they say, And misinterpret things that were never said, And then report the muddle back to Athens. But now we're charmed with each other. They might cap With the Telamon-catch instead of the Cleitagora, And we'd applaud and praise them just the same; We're not too scrupulous ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... said Blondet, turning to the Pole, "will have proved to you that the 'perfect lady' represents the intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it by something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She certainly ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... adhere, except the general one of winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... question, if only because it seems to be impossible to find out the answer: and the same may be said of the not impossible (indeed almost more than probable) Portuguese maps and documents at the back of Captain Singleton. To disembroil the chronological muddle of Roxana, and follow out the tangles of the hide-and-seek of that most unpleasant "lady of pleasure" and her daughter, may suit some. But, apart from all these things, there abides the fact that you can read the books—read them again and again—enjoy them most keenly at ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... that there is more of Christ in us now than there was in the days of old," he said, speaking dispassionately, and with the confident deliberation of one who takes time to think. "I believe those old tales were founded on muddle-headed confusion of mind in the days when dreams were as real to mankind as the events of life. There are obscure tribes still on earth who cannot distinguish between what they have done and what they have only dreamt ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... fact 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 ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... All was a muddle together, and as my temples throbbed with the intensity of my thoughts, I was half disposed to believe myself in a troubled dream from which I should presently awake. Meanwhile, on ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... Victoria's nomination in the morning papers, Susan breathed a prayer of gratitude for a narrow escape, recording in her diary, "There never was such a foolish muddle—all come of Mrs. S. [Stanton] consulting and conceding to Woodhull & calling a People's Con[vention].... All came near being lost.... I never was so hurt with the folly of Stanton.... Our movement as such is so demoralized by letting ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... drugs necessary, all right and true, composed according to receipts made by physicians and apothecaries of her own creating, which they extracted out of Peter's, Martin's, and Jack's receipt books; and of this muddle and hodge-podge made up a dispensary of their own—strictly forbidding any other to be used, and particularly Peter's, from whom the greater part of this new dispensatory ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 the rule of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... can tell how a d——d muddle-headed country jury will decide a highly technical case like this," said the K.C. peevishly. "I've lost stronger cases than this before a Norfolk jury. Norfolk men are clannish, and Horbury's evidence carried weight. He is a Norfolk man, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... accompany you. (Aside) Everything is in such a muddle here, that I must go and look for Vernon. The advice and clear-sightedness of my old friend, the doctor, will be of service in ferreting out what it is that disturbs this household, for there is something or other. Ferdinand, I will follow you. Ladies, we will be soon be ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... will be while Miss Hetty is at the helm. She's a born manager, bless her, with her gentle ways and her firm words and her pretty little dignity. Miss Nan's business in life, it seems to me, is to set places all in a muddle, and Miss Hetty's to smooth them out again. Of course it's due to Miss Hetty to be mistress of the Grange, but sometimes I fear the life is too much for her, and she'll fret and fade like her mother before her; if I really thought that, I'd set ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... 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 ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... refinement of speech, though a strong Somersetshire accent, Israel Veal would show nothing of himself to a stranger. Probably he would speak so little, though quite politely, that he would be put down as "one of those muddle-headed, stupid yokels with little or no mind," who, according to the townsman, "moulder" in country ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the Israelites gave up: "How do you make bricks without straw?" They made a patent brick, built the Howard Museum in Washington, (was it a museum or a college?) the thing tumbled down, and a Congressional committee sat among its ruins. Poor Gen. HOWARD is in a muddle, and wishes, from the bottom of his heart, that we had free trade ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... by a candle only, but even so Jessie could see the untidy muddle of everything. The sink by the tap was crowded with pots and pans and dirty dishes, and so was the table and the dirty floor. Where was she to wash, and where was the dipper? She looked around her ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... all in his power to conciliate the different parties, but has now concluded that Paris must be conquered by the troops of Versailles. Every day there comes more disturbing news. How will it all end? When shall we get out of this muddle? En attendant, we live in a ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... cajoled by one of their own ilk into this unspeakable muddle, were, after all, he reflected, of the sort he had scorned with all his sailor repugnance to airs and pretensions. Cap'n Sproul possessed a peculiarly grim sense of humor. This indignant assemblage appealed ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... often more intelligent to them than to many merchants. If men understood domestic economy half as well as women do, then their political economy and their entire consequent statecraft would not be the futile muddle ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... said to himself as he went home, not caring to stay and talk to Helen when Lois had gone to church,—"well, it is all a muddle. I don't understand about there being no engagement, but I cannot help remembering that she cared, though I have no business to. And she cares yet. Oh, what a confounded ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... was never quite sober at that time; he had begun to use drugs, and was often in a half- stupefied condition. As a matter of fact, the woman did what she pleased with him. There's no doubt about the validity of the marriage. And what makes it so desperate a muddle is that since the marriage she's taken good care to give no grounds upon which a divorce could be obtained for Harman. ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... 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 ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... there was a freckled underbred young man who handed in what was evidently a carefully prepared memorandum upon what he called "my positions." Apparently he had a muddle of doubts about the early fathers and the dates of the earlier authentic copies of the gospels, things ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... absurdam. The entire history of the growth of the Christian doctrine in those disordered early centuries is a history of theology by committee; a history of furious wrangling, of hasty compromises, and still more hasty attempts to clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle was at its very worst, the church was confronted by enormous political opportunities. In order that it should seize these one chief thing appeared imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, albeit unbaptised and very ignorant of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... Ruknuddin Mahmud above-named, who is represented as reigning from 1246 to 1277. In Wassaf we find, as in Teixeira, Mahmud's son Masa'ud killing his brother Nazrat, and Bahauddin expelling Masa'ud. It is true that Hammer's surprising muddle makes Nazrat kill Masa'ud; however, as a few lines lower we find Masa'ud alive and Nazrat dead, we may safely venture on this correction. But we find also that Masa'ud appears as Ruknuddin Masa'ud, and that Bahauddin does not assume the princely authority himself, but proclaims ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... no one. Their message to you was true; but their messengers were women, and you were a warrior. That is why the mischance came, for it is ever the way with a woman to become foolish over a warrior, and then there is always a muddle. And when Emer comes—," he checked his indiscreet utterance by pretending to have a difficulty in restraining the horses, and then added confusedly: "Besides, I'd rather be in ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... I suppose I was right; I suppose things did turn out all the better in the end for having been left to settle themselves—at any rate whether they did or did not, the whole thing was in too great a muddle for me to venture to tackle it so long as Ellen was upon the scene; now, however, that she was removed, all my interest in my godson revived, and I turned over many times in my mind, what I had ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... 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 itself ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... monopolistic competition would give place to the orderliness of associated effort, and under Socialism society would for the first time in history behave like an organism."[257] Private capitalism and consequent competition are responsible not only for waste and muddle, but also for the adulteration of food and other necessaries of life. "Every man who knows anything of trade knows how general is the knavish practice of adulteration. Now all adulteration is directly due to competition. Did not Mr. John Bright ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... country the people used to say of any very expert thief: "Why, he'd steal the fire out of your grate." Under the Union arrangements Great Britain stole the fire out of the grate of Ireland. And having so dealt with capital and coal the predominant partner next proceeded by a logical development to muddle transportation. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... 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 of ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... the democratic aims of the civilized world. England and France have groped their way through centuries towards a vague ideal. America proudly began her existence by a proclamation of the equal rights of man. She proudly proclaims them now; but the world is involved in such a complicated muddle, that the utterances of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (to say nothing of their intellectual and political ancestor Jean Jacques Rousseau) require amplification. The political thought of the older ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... Darius Clayhanger had been nervous as to the manner in which the boy would acquit himself in the bit of business which had been confided to him. It was the boy's first bit of business. Straightforward as it was, the boy might muddle it, might omit a portion of it, might say the wrong thing, might forget. Darius hoped for the best, but he was afraid. He saw in his son an amiable irresponsible fool. He compared Edwin at sixteen with himself at the same age. Edwin ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of water." But a ship also "draws water." Therefore, logically, a Hydrographer is a ship. But a ship is never put into a witness-box, where it would be quite at sea, but in the dock, where it could be quite at home. "Truly," writes our Puzzled Correspondent, "there is a muddle somewhere." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... that the Comptroller ought to have allowed Tompkins a premium of twelve and a half per cent. on $1,000,000, leaving a balance due the Vice President of $11,870.50. It was a strange mix-up, and the more committees examined it the worse appeared the muddle. After Van Buren had reported, the question arose, should the Comptroller be sustained, or should the report of Van Buren's committee be accepted? It was a long drop from $130,000 claimed by Tompkins to $11,780.50 awarded him by Van Buren, yet it was better to take that than accept a settlement ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... it meant that something grave was afoot. She was afraid that her unsteady English might muddle what she intended to say. Lady Everington knew that it must be another proposal; she had already ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... 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 the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... he asked, thoughtfully. "There is hope yet. Why did not that muddle-headed banker tell us where this ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... 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 ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... start. You felt it the first moment we met, and I did the same. We kinder hated each other, and wanted to scratch! That was instinct! You don't get behind instinct in a hurry. Later on other things come in and muddle one up, but just in the first moment one sees clearly. You thought Elma Ramsden the sweetest thing, and were all fired up to help her, but when you looked at me you were bursting with pride and prejudice. Why was that, I ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Joan, as she came in-doors from bidding good-bye to the last departure: "come bear a hand and let's set the place all straight: I can't abide the men's coming home to find us all in a muddle." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... in the world. I had been reading, reading, reading; my brain was one dark and misty muddle of Kant, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and a few others. I read them one after another, as quickly as possible; the mixture had the same effect upon my mind as the indiscriminate contents of taffy-shop would have upon Sigmund's stomach—it made it sick. In my crude, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... misdirecting it, partly because the sexual impulse normally develops at the same time as the intellectual impulse, not in the early years of life, when wholesome instinctive habits might be formed. And there is always some ignorant and foolish friend who is prepared still further to muddle things: Eat a meal every other day! Eat twelve meals a day! Never eat fruit! Always eat grass! The advice emphatically given in sexual matters is usually not less absurd than this. When, however, the matter is fully open, the problems of food ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... world, a bright, light handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides the confusion, the unreality due to precipitation of events and change of scene, the sense that she had (how long ago—days, weeks, or years? in such a state time becomes a great muddle and mystery) been actually married by proxy, that she had come the whole way from Paris, through Venice and across the sea, besides being in this dream-like, phantasmagoric condition, which must have made all things seem light—it ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... day, and all day long, to help her with 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 ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Froissart and Boswell, he excels in proportion to his unconsciousness of the fact; his colors run truer. For lesser gobblers, who have not genius, the best way to lose consciousness is just to IT themselves go; if they endeavor to paint artistically the muddle will be worse. To such the proverb of the cobbler and his last is of perennial warning. As a barber once sagely remarked to me, "You can't trim a beard well, unless you're born to it." It is possible in some degree to imitate Froissart and ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... desire to take refuge in my "ignorance" from the burthen of thinking about African problems, I find myself obliged, like most other people, to do so. In the interests of our country, our children, and the world, we common persons have to have opinions about these matters. A muddle-up in Africa this year may kill your son and mine in the course of the next decade. I know this is not a claim to be interested in things African, such as the promoter of a tropical railway or an oil speculator has; ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... bit their pencils and tore their hair, Down, a-down, a-down—hey down! But those blessed bills, they wouldn't come square, With a down; 'Midst muddle and smudge it is hard to fix If a six is a nine or a nine is a six, With a down derry, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... theatres have got up a plot," continued the manager; "they will even hiss the piece, but I have made arrangements to defeat their kind intentions. I have squared the men in their pay; they will make a muddle of it. A couple of city men yonder have taken a hundred tickets apiece to secure a triumph for Florine and Coralie, and given them to acquaintances able and ready to act as chuckers out. The fellows, having been paid twice, will go ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... of mental torture, for it is little else! What trains of lucid thought, what word-pictures have been destroyed by thoughtless breakings of the chain of sequence! 'I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last,' wrote Miss Florence Nightingale. Hamerton, quoting her, is equally ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... but Helen, who will muddle things, says no, it's like music. The course of the Oder is to be like music. It's obliged to remind her of a symphonic poem. The part by the landing-stage is in B minor, if I remember rightly, but lower down things get extremely ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... 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, seemed now to speak for a frankness that appealed ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... and keeps out of the way for fear of having to open his mouth, he'll be doing serious damage. If respect to the future baronetcy makes him get into the background, tell him, with my compliments, the whole thing will be a muddle, and I'll never speak a good ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the opinion that the doubtful and contradictory construction of the Act as amended left the whole matter (as described by Mr. Niblack of Indiana when the Committee report was under consideration) "in a muddle;" with the inevitable result that certain parties would be deceived and misled by the peculiarly tortuous language which the Senate insisted upon introducing in the amendment. The House had acted throughout in a straightforward manner, but the most lenient ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... thanks. But you know" He paused. "It's all been a muddle, and I've no objection to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... "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 dinner? ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of crises, and he created crises as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... scheme after scheme to improve the army. What one had done, the next had undone, and the permanent War Office Officials had given more attention to buttons and braids and caps than to business-like organisations of fighting efficiency. The administration was, as it always had been, a chaos of muddle. The higher ranks were rotten with inefficiency, and the lower, aggravated and bewildered by change after change, had come to look upon soldiering as a sort of game, the rules of which were ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... She lay in bed all day, and sat up all night, talking unceasingly for hour upon hour to Dr. Meryon, who alone of her English attendants remained with her, Mrs. Fry having withdrawn to more congenial scenes long since. The doctor was a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man, but he was a good listener; and there he sat while that extraordinary talk flowed on—talk that scaled the heavens and ransacked the earth, talk in which memories of an abolished past—stories of Mr. Pitt and of ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... schemings to make the ends meet. I would cut off all those wretched cares which jar miserably on the shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness and joy that would come, if some dismal load, never to be cast off, were taken away. And I would take it off. I would clear up the horrible muddle. I would make them happy: and in doing that, I know that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... my boy, muddling! And a truly artistic muddle have we made. It's been a game of 'General Post' with the books. The dictionaries have taken the atlases' place, the Greek grammars have ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe
... inspectors are expensive luxuries, and by no means always efficient. A fat Government appointment is a nice thing—for the appointee, as Mr. Sanders is aware, but it is not profitable to the tax-payers of the country to multiply them too extensively. In my opinion the easiest way out of the muddle is to strike back and to hit where it will ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... going 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
... to much good, Jenny Spinner," she cried. "What with a muck of dirty dishes in one corner and a muddle of ragged clouts in another, you're the very model of a wife for a farm hand! Can't sew a gown for yerself neither, but bound to send it into town to be made for ye, and couldn't put a button on a pair of breeches for fear ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... at a spring on a hillside, when, looking up, what should he see but a Lamb just beginning to drink a little lower down. "There's my supper," thought he, "if only I can find some excuse to seize it." Then he called out to the Lamb, "How dare you muddle the water from ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... pleasure by a pneumatic operation upon the entral air tube pervading its shell. Its tentacula, sent abroad over the summit of the shell, searched the sea for prey. The creature had an ink-bag, with which it could muddle the water around it, to protect itself from more powerful animals, and, strange to say, this has been found so well preserved that an artist has used it in one instance as a paint, wherewith to delineate the ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... little band who had worked so hard for their object had been badly used. Mrs. Lynde told them to keep on and show the Pyes that there really were people in the world who could do things without making a muddle of them. Mr. Major Spencer sent them word that he would clean out all the stumps along the road front of his farm and seed it down with grass at his own expense; and Mrs. Hiram Sloane called at the school one day and beckoned Anne mysteriously out into the porch to tell her that if the "Sassiety" ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... chaos of theogonies as 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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 ladder and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... ended and the Prussian war with Denmark was renewed. There was a general feeling of shame over Palmerston's bluster followed by a meek British inaction. The debate came on a vote of censure, July 8, in the course of which Derby characterized governmental policy as one of "meddle and muddle." The censure was carried in the Lords by nine votes, but was defeated in the Commons by a ministerial majority of eighteen. It was the sharpest political crisis of Palmerston's Ministry during the Civil War. ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... let us mend the muddle. I'll go away for a few days and get another licence, and you ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was, in this very book, half-way out of this muddle. There are poems in it, just as strong as The Inn Album, but with the ineffable spirit of imaginative emotion and thought clasped together in them, so that the strong is stronger, and the humanity deeper than in the pieces he thought, being deceived ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... sweet lovers will be singing their songs in the praise of their sweethearts that are walking in the rose-gardens, and sour parents will be scowling from the windows. For my own part, I am always on the side of any lover, young or old, straight or crooked, gentle or simple, for to my mind, in this muddle of a world, the state of being in love is at least a definite state, and, whenever and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 'Ascobaruch, I think it's time that definite steps were taken,' I should reply frankly, 'My dear old High Priest, I absolutely agree with you, and I'm with you all the way.' You might even go so far as to suggest that the only way out of the muddle was to assassinate Merolchazzar and start ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... traversed by all nations from isolation to individualism through gregariousness. They opened the new era of amalgamation by co-ordinating, on a vast scale, individual achievements, resources and labour, and directing them to a common end. The allied peoples were meanwhile content to muddle through in the old way. This difference explains much that seems puzzling in the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... comfort, 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 ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... consider more conscientiously those who recruit their ranks, who, if started right without danger of debt, will have freedom to advance. The present muddle has come about in part because no one has taken the trouble to investigate the reasons. The young family with $3000 a year has ideals for the manners and morals of the children which are not satisfied ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... reads the leaders of certain papers, leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... 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 ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... had thoroughly exposed the corporation during the Bulletin's campaign against Sam Stone. Bond-floating companies from other cities were brought in, and after an examination of the books threw up their hands in horror at the crudest muddle they had ever found in ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... few facts. It announced a number of 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 ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... which was worse—a Cresswell or an Alwyn? It was no sin that Alwyn had done; it was simply ignorant presumption, and she must correct him firmly, but gently, like a child. What a crazy muddle the world was! She thought of Harry Cresswell and the tale he told her in the swamp. She thought of the flitting ghosts that awful night in Washington. She thought of Miss Wynn who had jilted Alwyn and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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 shown in burning the wheat and gathering ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... government will involve a certain amount of disorder; that one system will scarcely be working before it is superseded by another; that the rapid alterations in the personnel of the judicature, civil service and police will be inconvenient; that everything, in fact, will be in a muddle. But by how much is not well-organised muddle to be preferred to unsystematic anarchy? And as each type of government recurs in due course will it not be found to work ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... he calculating on the arrival of a Japanese patrol? Had he already tipped off to his consul in San Francisco the purpose of the expedition, sure of a reward equal to what his share would have been? If so, Rainey had made a muddle of his attempt to sound Tamada. He felt guilty, glad that Lund could not see his face, and ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... none to say her nay. The Germans have behaved pretty badly here, but not in all ways so ill as you may have gathered: they were doubtless much provoked; and if the insane Knappe had not appeared upon the scene, might have got out of the muddle with dignity. I write along without rhyme or reason, as things occur ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in my brain Are strange; sometimes I muddle 'em, Confounding Pleck with Plodder Lane, Titley with Tillietudlem; In short, it's not a game of skill, Else I should scarce essay at; But it is harmless, costs me nil; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... fine muddle. I'm as sweet as honey on the lasses, but when a fellow's sinned with 'em ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... you 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 ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... had come to him. It is hard, it is impossible, to give in print the effect of her radiant sweetness shining through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale's rough and broken sentences. To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the muddle of his story like a glow-worm in a tangle ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... I could have seen Eagle just once again," I heard myself thinking, as one hears the ticking of a watch under a pillow. But I felt a strange, throbbing eagerness to know quickly the great secret of what comes next after this world, with its seeming muddle of injustice and disappointment, its joys and broken aspirations. "Why! it was like this with me when we had our accident in the Golden Eagle!" I thought. And even as the remembrance flitted ghostlike through my brain, ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... say "for Christ's sake,"' she continued, and, with his weak brain all in a muddle, Arthur began what he meant to be a brief thanksgiving, but which stretched itself into a lengthy prayer, fall of the past and of Gretchen, whom he seemed to be ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... 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 to Joan's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... with elegantly severe authority, "I will not have this talking over the work. Miss Toppings, this whole skirt is an unmitigated muddle. Head-tucks half an inch too near the bottom! No room for your flounce. If you can't keep to your measures, you'd better not undertake piece-work. Take that last welt out, and put it in over the top. And make no more blunders, ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... scrumptious little house, whence I can get to it by underground rail. Oh, you may shake your head, Mr. Hailes, but if you will not help me, I shall set my unassisted genius to work, and you'll only suffer agonies in thinking of the muddle ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Once in a hundred years a six months' carnival is allowable to so ponderous a body. Civilization here aims to see itself not simply as in a glass, but in a multitude of glasses. To steer its optics through the architectural muddle in the basin before us it will need the retina that lies behind the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... unbridled moment Bas realized that he was acting the muddle-headed fool in revealing his fear to a subordinate, his hold over whom depended on an unbroken pose of mastery ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... last things over," said Madeline with a regretful little sigh. "I'm glad we had it before the alums, and the families begin to arrive and muddle ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... revenge. The man she married was a crack-brained weakling who got into the army the fag end of the war, fell in love with her pretty face, married her, then they quarrelled, and he drank himself into a muddle-head. She ran him into debt; then he gambled away government funds, bolted, was caught, and would have been tried and sent to jail, but some powerful relative saved him that, and simply had him dropped;—never heard of him again. She was about a month grass-widowed when Waring came ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King |
