"Sevens" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if he's a lazy good-for-nought, everything'll be at sixes and sevens. If he has a conscience, he'll work, and if not, there's ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... their fame went on, And they went on — from bad to worse; Till, goaded hot with nothing done, And each accoutred with a curse, The friends of Old King Cole, by twos, And fours, and sevens, and elevens, Pronounced unalterable views Of doings that were ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... then her horror and her dread When "Vox Stellarum" shook his head; Then darkly spake in phrase forlorn Of Taurus and of Capricorn; Of stars averse, and stars ascendant, And stars entirely independent; In fact, it seemed that all the Heavens Were set at sixes and at sevens, Portending, in her case, some ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... themselves with ordinary flirtations. Now the rule is that not a word shall be spoken that does not refer to business. "Miss O'Brien, where is the salmon-coloured sarsenet? or, Mr. Green, I'll trouble you for the ladies' sevens." Nothing is ever spoken beyond that. "Morals, morals, above everything!" Mr. Brown was once heard to shout from his little room, when a whisper had been going round the shop as to a concerted visit to the Crystal Palace. Why a visit to ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... linen robes, 387-l. Initiates of Bakchic Mysteries followed rules of Pythagoras, 420-m. Initiates of Bakchic Mysteries practiced contemplation and peace, 420-l. Initiates of Christian Mysteries received three degrees, 541-l. Initiates of Druidical Mysteries arranged in threes, fives, sevens, 429-l. Initiates of Druidical Mysteries placed in a boat, referring to Osiris, 430-l. Initiates of Eleusis believed the Sun blazed with splendor for them, 386-m. Initiates of Mysteries invested with cord ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... had seen him at the asylum in full possession of his good sense! Another joyful hour had flown, the last one no doubt! Oh! now, as nothing could reclaim him, not even the fear of his near death, she swore she would no longer put herself out; the home might be all at sixes and sevens, she did not care any longer; and she talked ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... "Oh, dear, if you were a different kind of girl how much easier would it be! I wish your father would come home and look after his own affairs, instead of my having to leave things at sixes and sevens and go running round the country hunting up his ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... back, Job," said his brother. "Things have been going at sixes and sevens here since you went to get some new kind of blasting powder. By the way, I hope you got it, for we are ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... your sweet looks, have a Billingsgate tongue, That is fifty times worse than a fishwoman's hung. If these be the plagues of a beautiful wife, O ease me, Great Jove, of so cursed a life; If La Pies divine, who inhabit the Heavens, Will Whore on like mortals, at sixes and sevens; Rave, rattle, and taunt at their horrify'd spouses, And ramble abitching thro' all the twelve houses; For all your fine features I'll e'en give you over, The charms of a Whore are but plagues to a lover. Get you gone and be pox'd, to your old bully Mars, Let a God be a slave ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... Nevil, and that was enough, considering that the young dog of 'humanity' had clearly been running out of his way to catch a jaundice, and was bereaving his houses of the matronly government, deprived of which they were all of them likely soon to be at sixes and sevens with disorderly lacqueys, peccant maids, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... proportionate to the strictness of her discipline; that her present fright at being caught praying by a chemist or an electrician, results mainly from her having allowed her twos and threes gathered in the name of Christ to become sixes and sevens gathered in the name of Belial; and that therefore her now needfulest duty is to explain to her stammering votaries, extremely doubtful as they are of the effect of their supplications either on politics or the weather, that although Elijah was a man subject ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pure loveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the hall in courtly talk. Meanwhile the lance ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... thought of the riddles of that tower, far less of the early Christianity of the isle of saints, of which these ruins and their wild legend were the only vestiges, nor of the mysticism that planted clusters of churches in sevens as analogous to the seven stars of the Apocalypse. Even the rugged glories of the landscape chiefly addressed themselves to her as good to sketch, her highest flight in admiration of the picturesque. In ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... we can leave. It remains To state that my present appearance Is something too awful, my brains Are tending to wild incoherence; My mental condition's absurd; My thoughts are at sixes and sevens, Inextrica—lord! ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... concealed sets having been made up by the player without the assistance of a pung or chow score twice as much as the same set would if it were on the table. This together with the fact that sets of ones, nines, winds or dragons score twice as much as sets of twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, sevens and eights should be helpful in memorizing the score which is essential to the careful playing ...
— Pung Chow - The Game of a Hundred Intelligences. Also known as Mah-Diao, Mah-Jong, Mah-Cheuk, Mah-Juck and Pe-Ling • Lew Lysle Harr
... all foreign troops were to be withdrawn, and a pledge was to be given that no fortress should be placed in the hands of any power. But Spain at the last moment had refused to sanction the treaty, and everything was remitted to what might be exactly described as a state of sixes and sevens. Subsequently it was hoped that the States' troops might be induced to withdraw simultaneously with the Catholic forces on an undertaking by Spinola that there should be no re-occupation of the disputed territory either by the Republic or by Spain. But Barneveld ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 'for one ought to wake up natural-like,' he explained. The white carter 'couldn't bear with niggers,' and though he did his work well and faithfully, he helped to demoralize the place and loosen discipline. Everything was at sixes and sevens, when, on the occasion of Mrs. Stevenson's going to Fiji for a few months' rest, my sister and I took charge of affairs. The expensive German was bidden to depart; Mr. Stevenson discharged the carter; the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... hall?" Susan asked in quick concern. "Excuse me, but I could not think of renting the house to a bachelor or bachelors. It is a rare man who is a house-keeper. Things would soon be at sixes and sevens with a set ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... this subjective inquietude it would have been an unpleasant summer. All the world was at sixes and sevens, the social unrest stirred up by the war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed, quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very air—ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Miss Betsey. 'Don't cry any more.' —'And I am sure we never had a word of difference respecting it, except when Mr. Copperfield objected to my threes and fives being too much like each other, or to my putting curly tails to my sevens and nines,' resumed my mother in another ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... say it's the hand of God! He won't own up that it is, but I'm letting him alone, for I've done quarreling, though I don't like to see a man get religion and deny it, for all the world like Peter in the New Testament. If you have n't used up the last one of your seventy-times-sevens, I think you'd better come back and forgive your husband. If you don't, you'd better send for your son. I'm willing to bear the burdens the Lord intends specially for me, but Jack belongs to you, and a good-sized heavy burden he is, too, for his age. I can't ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... I, with a highly-dissuasive inflection of voice. "Please not to-night; we are all higgledy-piggledy—at sixes and sevens! To tell you the truth, we have been cooking. I wonder you did not smell it ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... the dice and began rolling sevens absently. "How come you're walking beat, anyhow? With what you pulled here, you should ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... day excessively rainy, or, as we call it, soft. I e'en unpacked my books and did a great deal to put them in order, but I was sick of the labour by two o'clock and left several of my books and all of my papers at sixes and sevens. Sir Adam and the Colonel dined with us. A Spanish gentleman with his wife, whom I had seen at the French Consul's, also dropped in. He was a handsome, intelligent, and sensible man; his name I have forgot. We had a ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... impatiently: "Indeed, and that's why you have run away and left things at sixes and sevens at Rodeck, despite all my solemn charges? I had not thought you would be so neglectful ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... they would resist, and finally resist effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... Kingston in the Townshend packet. The day auspicious was, and calm the heavens; Not so the scene on board—oh, what a racket! And everything on deck apparently at sixes and sevens. Mail-bags and passengers mixed up in every direction, The latter engaged with their relatives in fond farewells; On the one hand the faltering accents of affection, On the other the unpolisht seamen emitting yells, With criticisms of a Custom ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... not be said that he was putting West in this position. West had put himself there. It was he who had written the article, and it was he who had kept silent about it. Every man must accept the responsibility for his own acts, or the world would soon be at sixes and sevens. In telling Miss Weyland the truth about the matter, as far as that went, he would be putting himself in an unpleasant position. Nobody liked to see one man "telling on" another. He did not like it himself, as he remembered, for instance, in the case of young ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... have made known to my fraternity that we also have a saint, all they have to do is to call upon him six or seven times, when their brains are at sixes and sevens. I opine that holy Saint Brandon made a very hazard-ous voyage, for it is quite clear that, in the whole arrangement, it was—seven's ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... hill, bank, and brae, are spread the flying School! Squads of us, at sore sixes and sevens, are making for the frozen woods. Alas! poor covert now in their naked leaflessness for the stricken deer! Twos and threes in miserable plight floundering in drift-wreaths! And here and there—woefullest ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson |
