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Flabby   Listen
adjective
flabby  adj.  Yielding to the touch, and easily moved or shaken; hanging loose by its own weight; wanting firmness; flaccid; as, flabby flesh.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Flabby" Quotes from Famous Books



... at the door of his little room and was pointing him out to a short man who looked like an artisan, wearing a long coat and a waistcoat, and looking at a distance remarkably like a woman. He stooped, and his head in a greasy cap hung forward. From his wrinkled flabby face he looked over fifty; his little eyes were lost in fat and they looked out grimly, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... flowers. It was little fatigue, now, except to the spirits, to nurse poor George. He was shrunk to skin and bone, and so light as to startle those who had been accustomed to lift him. It was grievous, however, to look at the ghastly stretched features, the flabby tremulous little arms, and the suffering expression of countenance. To hear his feeble cry was worse still. Oliver was really glad to take Mildred away from seeing and hearing him, as long as the child would be quiet with Roger: so he asked her to ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... feet tall, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, and weighed about two hundred pounds of flabby flesh, mostly covered by filthy garments. His head was pyramidal in shape, and covered by a mass of unkempt red hair. He had practically no forehead. His eyes were dull and bloodshot. His nose was ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson

... master's side, cocked his ears, and wagged his tail—so far his education was perfect. We say he bounded clumsily, for it must be remembered that he was still a very young pup, with soft, flabby muscles. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne

... this sympathy she patted Mrs. Agar's somewhat flabby hands, and looked softly at her. She could hardly have failed to see a glitter in the bereaved one's eyes, which was certainly not that of grief. It was the gleam of pure, heartless excitement ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman

... heavy eyes and rouged lips. Ragged lips that had been chewed by every mad dog in the world. What lips there were everywhere! Bright scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead of kisses. Bulbous, flabby lips that would wobble and shiver if attention failed them. Lips of a horrid fascination that one looked at and hated and ran to. . . . Looking at him slyly or boldly, they passed along, and turned after a while and repassed him, ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... Every night of his life was crowded with curious, sad and ridiculous incidents; had he let them linger long in his mind his hand and temperament would have suffered a loss of accumulative skill. That would have spelled ruin, and this particular waiter, like so many of his flabby-faced brothers, was a shrewd tradesman—in the commodities of his discreetly elastic memory—and the even more valuable asset, a talent ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... so that you won't grumble about the toughness, they send you something soft and flabby that passes for meat, something with the look and the taste of a sponge—or a poultice. When you chew that, it's the same as a cup of water, ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... did not finish his sentence, for Billy, with a blaze in his eyes like the lamps of a tiger, and a fierce young cat-like leap flew at the flabby creature, wrenched the gun out of his astonished hand, and before he could make any outcry held it tantalizingly in his face. Billy had never had any experience before with bullies and bandits except in his dreams; but he had ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... natural woman's heart, none the less does an ideal of male purity, of the masculine subdued to gentle virtues, make strong appeal to the imagination in her sex. To the everyday man, Kite seemed a mere pale grotesque, a creature of flabby foolishness. But Olga Hannaford was not the only girl who had dreamed of devoting her life to him. If she could believe his assurance (and she all but did believe it), for her alone had he felt anything worthy to be called love, to her alone had he spoken ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... throughout history have been enemies to slavery or its likeness: reason and sympathy suggest that time and place be given for the operative man and woman to rest, to benefit by physical culture, that the bowed figures might uplift the flabby muscles. Time is securely past when the manufacturers' greed may sweat the labourers' souls through the bodies' pores in order that more stuff may be turned ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... spend much on myself—precious little chance in a bally place like this. It mostly goes in tips. You see, the peasants about here think anything under a purse of gold stingy. But it certainly struck me the last time I went to the Counting-house that what sacks there were looked a bit flabby. When do you expect ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey

... drunk at dirty tables by the grimiest of tipplers. Hard by is the "Stannaro," or hardware tinker, who is always re-bottoming dilapidated pans, and drives a brisk trade in those clumsy, murderous-looking knives. Further on is the greengrocer, with the long strings of greens, and sausages, and flabby balls of cheese, and straw-covered oil-flasks dangling in festoons before his door. Over the way is the Government depot, where the coarsest of salt and the rankest of tobacco are sold at monopoly prices. ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey

... like him and obey him, than to dislike him and fight with him. His curates troubled him as little as possible with the grace of godliness, and threw off as far as they could that zeal which is so dear to the youthful mind but which so often seems to be weak and flabby to their elders. His ushers or assistants in the school fell in with his views implicitly, and were content to accept compensation in the shape of personal civilities. It was much better to go shares with the Doctor in a joke than to have to ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope

... [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... Mrs. Phillips had turned away. The shopman was altering the order. Joan moved towards the door, and accidentally caught sight of Mrs. Phillips's face. The flabby mouth was trembling. A tear was running down the ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome

... so far satisfactory. Our three travellers were quite charmed with their proficiency in the new mode of progression, when a sudden thaw set in and damped not only their spirits but their shoes. The netting and lines became flabby. The moccasins, with which Hendrick had supplied them from the bundle he carried for his own use, were reduced to something of the nature of tripe. The damp snow, which when rendered powdery by frost had fallen through the net-work of the shoes, now fell upon it in soft heaps and remained there, ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne

... and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no colour now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss something which neither of us had ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... our long table d'hote was held by a Frenchman, a Normand, a giant, but a pallid and rather flabby giant, whose name, if he had another than Monsieur, I never heard. He professed to be a painter, used to sketch birds and profiles on the back of his menu-card between the courses, wore shamelessly ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... contrast with a priest-like face having a vague resemblance to a calf's head, meek to unmeaningness, and but little brightened by divergent bloodless eyes, divided by a straight flat nose, surmounted by a flat forehead, flanked by enormous ears, flabby and graceless. His thin, weak hair showed the baldness through various ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac

... than a single one, one of which is the will-power or faculty of doing, and the other the consciousness or perception of being. If we realise only one of these two centres we shall lose both mental and moral balance. If we lose sight of that centre which is our personal will, we shall become flabby visionaries without any backbone; and if, in our anxiety to develop backbone, we lost sight of the other centre, we shall find that we have lost that which corresponds to the lungs and heart in the physical body, and that our backbone, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... yer yaller hair all a-blowsin' at loose eends, stiddier bein' plaited up stiff an' tight an' personable, an' yer face burned pink in the sun, stiddier like yer skin ginerally looks, fine an' white ez a pan o' fraish milk, an' the flabby, slinksy skirt o' that yaller calico dress 'thout no starch in it, a-flappin' an' whirlin' in the wind—shucks! I dun'no' whut the man could hev thought o' you-uns, dressed ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... with the 'airship,' as you call it," went on the bathing-pavilion cashier. "She was in a basket when I found her. And tied to the basket were some toy balloons. A few of them had burst, and the gas had come out of the others, so that they were all flabby and wouldn't keep the airship up any more. Then it came down, and it happened to land right in the back yard of the place where I board, ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope

... in the evening from a sale in the neighborhood, he was aware of a peculiar change in his father's manner. His first impression was that the old man, contrary to Dr. Deane's orders, had resumed his rations of brandy, and exceeded the usual allowance. There was a vivid color on his flabby cheeks; he was alert, talkative, and frequently chuckled to himself, shifting the hickory staff from hand to hand, or rubbing his gums backward and forward ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor

... her hand; through its flabby sides she could feel with her fingers the single five-franc piece which it yet contained. Somehow, that had to be disposed of or provided for; five francs was a serious matter to Annette. She looked round; the man in the seat was ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... said Judy brightly. "Shall I make you some toast, Hilda? This in the toast-rack is so soft and flabby—do let ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... hintroduced the word 'he,' young un; hotherwise, from the looks of yer both, you seems to liken me to a monster. Yer want to know who's he? He's a boy—a full-grown human boy—something like yerself, only not so flabby by a long chalk." ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade

... imperious "must" calling him, the prod of necessity spurring him on, whence would have come the motive which led him to struggle for self-development, self-unfoldment? If he had been born and educated in luxury, his character would probably have been soft and flabby in comparison ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... hung up for the admiration of his friends and his own ecstatic contemplation—this twisted, shapeless, sightless lump of hide and hair, with a great jaw of discolored teeth gleaming from under its flabby folds? It is true that here were the identical horns, for had he not gone lovingly over every tine of them?—but was this rag of a thing all that was left of the splendid stag he had beheld lying on the heather? However, Mr. Macleay speedily reassured him. He was ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... "It's taken us four hours to come twenty miles, thanks to a flabby tire. That's only ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... Anaesthesia (lack of sensation) in certain areas of the skin and in certain of the special senses; second, Lethargy, in which consciousness seems to disappear entirely; the subject not being sensitive to any stimulations by eye, ear, skin, etc., and the body being flabby and pliable as in natural sleep; third, Somnambulism, so called from its analogies to the ordinary sleep-walking condition to which many persons are subject. This last covers the phenomena of ordinary mesmeric ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... air of distrustful inscrutability. The hand which took my letter was very large, very white, and looked as if it would feel horribly flabby. With the other he put on his nose a pair of enormous mother-of-pearl-framed spectacles—things exactly like those of a cobra's—and began to read. He had said precisely nothing at all. It was for him and what he represented ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... woman, who was obliged to submit to their discourtesy. Of all the guests Mdlle. Selpdorf alone stood erect, forgetting, in her indignation, to join in the general obeisance. The Grand Duke, looking up, found her flushed and flashing, and superlatively handsome. His flabby cheeks twitched, ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard

... who having seated himself on a chair with some projecting nail on it, and therefrom rising, to pay his devoir on the entrance of Majesty, instantaneously emitted several pecks of dry wheat-dust: and stood there diminished to a spindle, his galloons and slashes dangling sorrowful and flabby round him. Whereupon ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... personal traits that exasperated their mates unreasonably. Mulcher had a way of breathing aloud through his coarse lips that chafed Hogan's temper. For hours at a time the Irishman would stare at those flabby spewing lips, filled with a desire to maul them. Yet before this isolation, he had never observed that Mulcher ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... out of his chair. He stood before the candidate to whom the Elder had introduced him and forgot to look at the ceiling. He had been caught off his guard, and through the momentary look of recognition there flitted across his flabby features an expression that was far from ecclesiastical. But it was gone as quickly as it had come, and the Reverend Mr. Means was once more his complacent ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper

... sixth day a splintered, battered poling- boat with its seams open swung in to the bank where O'Neil's men were encamped, and its three occupants staggered out. They were gaunt and stiff and heavy-eyed. Even Tom Slater's full cheeks hung loose and flabby. But the leader was alert and buoyant; his face was calm, ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... very human in its virtues and weakness. Plants like animals become exalted, grow tired or despond. An easy green-house life makes them less than themselves, overgrown and flabby, capable of response, till they have become hardened by adversity to a fuller existence. A time comes when after an answer to a supreme shock, there is a sudden end of the plant's power to give any further response. This supreme shock ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... Thanks, Nichols," said McGuire, following him to the door and offering a flabby hand. "Don't mind what I've said to-night. I think we understand each other. Stryker will see that the house is locked when the young people come up. Keep your men to the mark and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... sheets and tackles, but the dirtiest and most arduous tasks were appointed him. Swung aloft in a bosun's chair, he scraped the masts and slushed down. Holystoning the deck or scrubbing it with fresh limes made his back ache and developed the wasted, flabby muscles. When the Kittiwake lay at anchor and her copper bottom was scrubbed with cocoa-nut husks by the native crew, who dived and did it under water, Pankburn was sent down on his shift and as many times ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... hurry these ere fish through!" The major expected a different return for his generosity, and reminded his friend that he had not yet showed him a sample of his wares. At the word, the other mounted his little box of a wagon, and in a trice laid three cod and two flabby haddock upon the lid, declaring they were as fresh and bright as a new-coined quarter. And though at the most rapid pace his horse could travel, he was more than six hours from the nearest sea-shore, he was ready to swear by the hair of his head, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... British subject.... The lover never asks his fair one if she admires Donizetti's compositions, but tenderly inquires if she loves beef-steak pies. This sordid vice of greediness is rapidly brutalizing natures not originally spiritual; every other passion is sinking, oppressed by flabby folds of fat, into helplessness. All the mental energies are crushed beneath the oily mass. Sensibility is smothered in, the feculent steams of roast beef, and delicacy stained by the waste drippings of porter. The brain is slowly softening into blubber, and the liver ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... was never lighted. There was no season o' social converse. Every merchant but Eph Hill grew fat an' round, an' complained of indigestion an' sick-headache. Sam looked like a moored balloon. Seemed so their morals grew fat an' flabby an' shif'less an' in need of exercise. Their morals travelled too, but they travelled from mouth to mouth, as ye might say, an' very fast. More'n half of 'em give up church an' went off on the ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller

... a good deal of time in the spring-house trying to fool his stomach by keeping it filled up all the time with water. He had got past the cranky stage, being too weak for it; his face was folded up in wrinkles like an accordion and his double chin was so flabby you could have tucked ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... over the land agent's flabby body, poking the folds of fat here and there over Major Stover's ribs. At each thump ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens

... flabby thing which sent a shudder of loathing through her frame, and raised her face to ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... a clear dark red, the fat firm and white, and not too much of it; when touched the meat should feel crisp yet tender. If the fat is yellow and the lean flabby and damp, it is bad. A freshly scraped wooden skewer run into the meat along the bone will speedily enable anyone to detect staleness. For roasting mutton scarcely can be hung too long, as long as it is not tainted; but for boiling ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil

... the box appeared an elderly man in a roomy coat, and with a high cravat. His small eyes had an expression of stupid conceit, modified by a kind of cringing suspicion; his mustache and whiskers were dyed, he had an immense meaningless forehead, and flabby cheeks: his whole appearance was ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... perchance some approach of Mr. Bayne, to afford assistance if this were needed. Hours went by, and still there was no news, no return of the messenger. Now and again Mrs. Briscoe sought to exchange a word with Mrs. Marable to relieve the tension of the situation; but the elder lady was flabby with fatigue; her altruistic capabilities had been tried to the utmost in this long vigil and painful excitement, which were indeed unmeet for her age and failing strength. She did not enter into ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... that exists between the health of the body and the health of the spirit. A strong will, showing itself in ability to concentrate its efforts on a chosen purpose, is not to be expected in a child whose muscles are flabby and whose nerves quickly tire. Since the will expresses itself in action, it can be best cultivated in a body capable of ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... a matter of great anxiety with many women; and it is proper that it should be, for a flabby, pendulous abdomen is not only destructive to grace of movement and harmony of outline, but is a ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... Jane, and when Aunt Jane dared him to produce the birch rod, there was nothing whatever for it but to comply. He rose and walked slowly and very unwillingly across the room. He unlocked the door of a big cupboard in the wall, and, poking in his large, soft, flabby hand, presently produced what looked in Diana's eyes a very terrible instrument. It was a rod, clean, slender, and with, as she afterwards expressed it, temper all over it. It flashed through her ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade

... brow with wrinkles: and your back sinks between your staring hip-bones, like that of an unhealthy cow. But, forsooth! your breast and your fallen chest, full well resembling a broken-backed horse, provoke me; and a body flabby, and feeble knees supported by swollen legs. May you be happy: and may triumphal statues adorn your funeral procession; and may no matron appear in public abounding with richer pearls. What follows, because the Stoic treatises ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... which the trailing tendrils of the luminous slugs were sunk. It was the naked body of Carter. As those sucking tendrils drew out the substance of his skeleton, Carter's body was changing slowly, horribly, sinking into a flabby ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells

... foreman demanded my name, registered me, told me where to find a shovel and assigned me to a gang under another foreman. At seven o'clock I took my place with a dozen Italians and began to shovel. My muscles were decidedly flabby, and by noon I began to find it hard work. I was glad to stop and eat my lunch. I couldn't remember a meal in five years that tasted as good as that did. My companions watched me curiously—perhaps a bit suspiciously—but they chattered in a foreign tongue ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton

... not crying. She had redd up her house for the last time and put on her black merino. Her mouth was wide open while she listened. If yon had, addressed her you would have thought her polite and stupid. Look at her. A flabby-faced woman she is now, with a swollen body, and no one has heeded her much these thirty years. I can tell you something; it is almost droll. Nanny Webster was once a gay flirt, and in Airlie Square there is a weaver with an unsteady head who thought all the ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... penetrating gaze; and found that he no longer saw the man Baudru. To be sure, he saw Baudru; but, at the same time, he saw the other, the real man, Lupin. He discovered the intense life in the eyes, he filled up the shrunken features, he perceived the real flesh beneath the flabby skin, the real mouth through the grimaces that deformed it. Those were the eyes and mouth of the other, and especially his keen, alert, mocking expression, so ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc

... and flabby from disuse that it was almost physically impossible for me to run and exercise as other children do. I was weaker than I really looked to be. I gained the reputation of being a good boy, but the truth was I was too lazy to do anything mean ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... which hedged in this most exclusive of youngsters had increased his importance in my thoughts. What I saw was a boy of ten, well grown for his years, who ambled forward rather sheepishly and gave me a moist and rather flabby hand to shake. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... enlarging and strengthening his heterogeneous empire. Now he was on one side of the sea, now on the other. He promised succour, and the brethren brought back—promises. The work stopped, and the Prior endured in grim silence. Another embassage is sent, and again the lean wallets return still flabby. Then the brethren began to turn their anger against the Prior. He was slothful and neglectful for not approaching the king in person (although the man was abroad and busy). Brother Gerard, a white-haired gentleman, "very successful ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... We did not amalgamate properly at Harrow; it was somehow rainy, and then a wife makes such a damp; but in a seat of celibacy I will have revenge. Don't you hate helping first, and losing the wings of chicken? And then, conversation is always flabby. Oh! in the East women are in their proper sphere, and one has—no conversation at all. My house here is a delightful matrimonial mansion. When I wed, my spouse and I will be so ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... unduly fond of exercising it. But she was a very nice girl into the bargain, and so thought one and all of the young men who frequented Mrs. Hill's drawing-room and counted it richly worth while merely to look at Miss Thayer after having seen nothing for weeks except flabby ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... might have been still in the sixties; but with his remnant of white hair, watery eyes, and ashy cheeks he looks like a reg'lar antique. Must have been one of these heavy-set sports in his day, a good feeder, and a consistent drinker; but by the flabby dewlaps and the meal-bag way his clothes hang on him I judge he's slumped quite a lot. Still, he's kind of a dignified, impressive old ruin, which makes the contrast with the other half of the ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... Genesis represents all fishes, amphibia, reptiles, birds, etc., as travelling along their respective lines of developmental progress and differentiation, from points far back in geologic time, and constantly working their way up from cold and flabby creatures into those of higher cerebral activity, and brighter and more varied life, until gigantic winged reptiles mounted into the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... species—seem futile. Who knows which of us is right ?—or if our difference of opinion may not be a difference in our years? If all who love one another were of the same opinion, living would be monotonous, and conversation flabby. So cheer up. You are ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich

... with one's refuge in God there is nothing left to struggle with. My point is that whatever there may be to struggle with there is nothing to be afraid of. Freedom from struggle would profit us not at all. On the contrary, it would render us nerveless, flabby, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... about her, her hands and wrists were shrunken, her flesh was soft and flabby, and she had dark shadows in her face. Nursing her child seemed to draw all strength from her, and her nervous depression increased; she was too weary and ill to think of the future, and for a whole week her physical condition held her, to the exclusion of every other thought. Mrs. Jones was very ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore

... He caught the flabby body by the collar, spinning the dignity of the law round face down prone upon the log. "A'll not take my fist t' y' as A wud t' a Man! Ye dastard, drunken, poltroon, coward, whiskey sodden lout an' scum o' filth, an'," each word was emphasized ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... Rudolph Musgrave admonished his victim, when he had ended. "You are entirely too flabby now, you know. That path yonder will take you to the hotel, where, I imagine, you are staying. There is a train leaving Lichfield at six-fifteen, and if I were you, I would be very careful not to miss that train. Good-evening. I am sorry to have been compelled ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... suggested Henry Carson and the Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease of disordered side-street kitchens. To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed over the bunny-book. She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood with him in the same depth of human grief. And she cried a little, secretly, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... practical and almost rudely healthy young man, with an unreflecting belief in the existence of things he had seen, and considerable doubt concerning those which he had not seen. In his heart he regarded sentiment as the expression of a flabby nature in a feeble body. Once or twice he had casually redressing-case, with its array of silver toilet articles, the solid front of his chiffonnier, the carved arms of his favorite lounging-chair, even the etchings and prints on the walls. Suddenly, as he looked ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... worms, are not all of one family, nor is each family equally inviting to fish. The red, fat fellows never come amiss, but the light, flabby kind afford no great lure for even the hungriest sort of a fish. The worm that keeps its tail a-wiggling after he is on the hook, is just the thing. The manure worm, the marsh worm, and a worm found at the root of the sweet flag, all make good bait; but the best of all is the ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort

... short (five feet five inches), but well built, with strong chest and a powerful voice. His arms are weak and flabby (feminine, he thinks), but the legs muscular. As a boy of 14 he could walk forty miles with ease, and he played football till near the age of 45. He is considered manly in character and tastes, but is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... visitor—a well-dressed man with a diamond pin in his scarf—walked up and down Fitz's office awaiting his arrival—a short, thick-set, large-paunched man with a heavy jaw, a straight line of a mouth, two little restless eyes wobbling about in a pulp of wrinkles, flabby cheeks, a nose that was too small for the area it failed to ornament, and a gray stubbly beard shaven so closely at its edges that it looked as if its owner might either wear it on his chin or put it in his pocket at ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith

... that Caroline's first impression was that it was a perilous place for one so lately recovered. However, Ellen believed in no danger till she came on two monstrous stains of damp on the walls, with a whole crop of curious fungi in one corner, and discovered that all the holland was flabby, and all the damask clammy! Then she enforced the instant lighting of fires, and shivered so decidedly, that Caroline and Jessie begged her to return to the fire in the library, while Jessie went in search of Rob ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... not able to enter No. 139 Pershore-road, Birmingham; if he were, he would descend in swift wrath upon his silly traducers, who have put their own inanity into his mouth, making the great, virile Atheist talk like a little, flabby Spiritualist after an orgie ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... will not even permit the poor young girl to have the usual female attendance, for fear of intrigues and amours, which the maid might be induced to engage in. Instead, a hideous little apparition with hollow eyes and pale flabby cheeks appears every morning and evening to perform for sweet Marianna the services of a tiring-maid. And this little apparition is nobody else but that tiny Tomb Thumb of a Pitichinaccio, who has to don female attire. ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... newspapers were pasted over. He was a stout man in a dirty white shirt stained to a brownish color round the armpits and caught in very tightly at the waist by the broad elastic belt that held up his yellow corduroy trousers. His face was flabby, of a greenish color; black eyes looked at Andrews fixedly through barely open lids, so that they seemed long ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... at all as it ought," said Hester, shaking her head sadly. "The buds are very few, and they are all shrunken. See how limp and flabby the stems of ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... Fishing fisxkaptado. Fishing-line hokfadeno. Fish-market fisxvendejo. Fishmonger fisxvendisto. Fissure fendeto. Fist pugno. Fit (illness) atako. Fit for, to be tauxgi. Fitly alkonvena. Five kvin. Fix fiksi. Fixed fiksa. Fixity fikseco. Flabby mola. Flag standardo. Flag (navy) flago. Flagon botelego. Flagstone sxtonplato. Flagrant flagranta. Flail drasxilo. Flake negxero, floko. Flambeau torcxo. Flame flami. Flame flamo. Flank flanko. Flannel flanelo. Flap klapo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... the Lizzie might like a turn at frogging, and Josef, with Indian wordlessness, handed the net to him. Whereupon, with his flabby mouth wide and his large gray eyes gleaming, he proceeded to miss four easy ones in succession. And with that Josef, in a gibberish which is French-Canadian patois of the inner circles, addressed the Tin Lizzie and took away the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... them that's fat and flabby do be wrinkled young, and that whitish yellowy hair she has does be soon turning the like of a handful of thin grass you'd see rotting, where the wet lies, at the north of a sty. (Turning to go out on right.) Ah, it's a better thing to have a simple, seemly face, the like ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge

... resemblance to the handsome Russian Emperor and the terrible Domitian, Isidore Baudoyer was nothing more than a political office-holder, of little ability as head of his department, a cut-and-dried routine man, who concealed the fact that he was a flabby cipher by so ponderous a personality that no scalpel could cut deep enough to let the operator see into him. His severe studies, in which he had shown the patience and sagacity of an ox, and his square head, deceived ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac

... happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list - I've got a little list Of social offenders who might well be underground, And who never would be missed - who never would be missed! There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs - All people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs - All children who are up in dates, and floor you with 'em flat - All persons who in shaking hands, shake hands with you like THAT - And all third persons who on spoiling TETE-E-TETES insist - They'd none ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... on his hat and turned away. Northrup got an unpleasant impression of the man's head in the back. It was flat and his neck met it in flabby folds that wrinkled under certain emotions as other men's foreheads did. The expressive neck was ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... force, and whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced—but replaced dead, flabby, useless. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... artistic earnestness, at least with grammatical purity, and often with beauty, while in their every feature he will recognise the echo of a corresponding social culture. In Germany, on the other hand, they will strike him as unoriginal, flabby, filled with dressing-gown thoughts and expressions, unpleasantly spread out, and therewithal possessing no background of social form. At the most, owing to their scholarly mannerisms and display of knowledge, he will be reminded of the fact that in Latin countries it is ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... prehensile lizard claws in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... seventy-eight hogsheads of nectar were swilled down at that sitting. At last you took my advice, and transmogrified them into stones; and immediately got rid of your perplexity, and a truce with thirst was proclaimed through this vast Olympus. This was the year of flabby cods, near Teumessus, between ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... in the flabby stuffed glove that served the Scarecrow for a hand, and the Scarecrow pressed it so cordially that the straw in his ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... had the reputation of being a good fencer, but in point of physique there was no comparison between the combatants. Sackville was a tall and powerfully-built man, but dissipation and good living had rendered his muscles flabby and sapped his strength, although he was still in what should have been his prime. Fergus, on the other hand, had not a superfluous ounce of flesh. Constant exercise had hardened every muscle. He was a picture ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty

... sure of that?" asked Longford, sharply scanning Julian's flabby face, green-grey eyes and ruddy locks with sudden suspicion— "Or is ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... since at no time in my life have I studied the arts of the Stone-Cutter, or been a master in the Science of Quarrying. Nor is it easy at my advanced age, with a back no longer sinewy, and muscles grown flabby from lack of active exercise, for me to lift a virgin sheet of stone from the ground to the surface of my writing-desk without a derrick, but these are, after all, minor difficulties, and I shall let no such insignificant obstacles stand between me and the great purpose ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... hulking, flabby fat man in work coveralls. He had black hair that spilled all over his forehead, and tiny button eyes. He was the only man in the room who was sitting down, and that was meant to make him feel even more inferior and insecure. His hands were clasped ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett

... minds the Cruchots. All three took snuff, and had long ceased to repress the habit of snivelling or to remove the brown blotches which strewed the frills of their dingy shirts and the yellowing creases of their crumpled collars. Their flabby cravats were twisted into ropes as soon as they wound them about their throats. The enormous quantity of linen which allowed these people to have their clothing washed only once in six months, and to keep it during that time in the depths of ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... statement is big with meaning for all who have a true conception of pedagogy and of life. In this sentence we see the finger-board that points toward high achievements in teaching. If the hurdles are too low, the boy becomes flaccid, flabby, sluggish, and lethargic. The hurdles should be just high enough to engage his full strength, physical, mental, and moral. They should ever be a challenge to his best efforts. But they should never be so high that they will invite discouragement, disaster, ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... in the garden in such weather; and, if she had been like the other aunt, might almost have been convinced that such determination must be for an object. However, Gillian encountered the fog in vain, though she walked up and down the path till her clothes were quite limp and flabby with damp. All the view that rewarded her was the outline of the shrubs looming through the mist like distant forests as mountains. Moreover, she got a scolding from Aunt Ada, who met her coming in, and was horrified at the misty atmosphere which she was said to have brought in, and insisted ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... a perversity which should be forgiven to those who suffer night and day and are as if drunk with an exalted unhappiness, I went on: "For the sake of an old cast-off glove; for I suppose a disdained love is not much more than a soiled, flabby thing that finds itself on a private rubbish heap because ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... in my side," said the Blue-gum. "I do hope and trust it isn't white-ants. It would be simply horrible, if it were. Fancy getting white-ants at my time of life! Here I have lived on this mountain, tree and sapling, for over a hundred years; and to think those nasty, white, flabby little things should get me at ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis

... really be. All such conduct is inconsistent with Christianity; but we are not to say, therefore, that it is incompatible with Christianity. Thank God! that is a very different matter. But as long as you and I have two things—viz. strong and hot desires, and weak and flabby wills—so long shall we, in this world full of combustibles, not be beyond the possibility of a dreadful conflagration being kindled by some devil-blown sparks. There are plenty of dry sticks lying about to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... ashore; the thin, flabby fellow was a poor compensation for vigorous Bourbaki. He was set to work on the plantation, and as the Government was never informed of the affair, he is probably there to this day, and will ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... He's in love with her, too. Seems to be glad she shot him. Says he's ashamed of himself for ever suspecting her of anything but being a genuine angel. Why, he's got as flabby as a rabbit and mumbles like ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... or less appreciable, in all blackguardism: here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke; the flabby, fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard perseveringly, to register how often black won, and how often red, never spoke; the dirty, wrinkled old man, with the vulture eyes and the darned ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... I were you. They will make you less elastic. The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there's a fortune in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather

... on. You perceive that the style is actually worse than in the sample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at any rate nervous? But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidate was able to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... de Loyarte—and why should Senor de Loyarte not be associated with literature—presents the figure of a fat, pale, flabby boy in a priests' school, skulking under the skirts of ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... very thorough examination, and the next day I went around to see him." Her voice got a little harder and cooler. "Mother'll never be well, Rose. She's got an incurable disease. There's a long name for it that I can't remember. What it means is that her heart is getting flabby—degenerating, he called it. He says we can't do anything except to retard the progress of the disease. It may go fast, or it may go slowly. That attack she had was just a symptom, he said. She'll have others. And by and by, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... bamboo chairs, the tables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish for hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark, he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium; but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue that one could be admitted to the pier. Once ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... the summer night, which came in at the open window. Maria felt irritated by it, and she wondered why Mrs. Cone felt so badly about the loss of her baby. It had always seemed to Maria a most unattractive child, large-headed, flabby, and mottled, with ever an open mouth of resistance, and a loud wail of opposition to existence in general. Maria felt sure that she could never have loved such a baby. Even the unfrequent smiles of that baby had not been winning; they had seemed reminiscent of the commonest and coarsest ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... O Thou that giv'st the flabby Strength, and stingo'st up the weak:- Restful as a grand old Abbey— Bracing as a ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)

... a phenomenal memory; he could recite in his classroom pages of Scott's novels, which he had not read since early youth. He had no intention of allowing my memory to grow flabby from lack of use. I often repeat a verse he asked me ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... in his shirt-sleeves, with an apron on. Thick-set, muscular man,—frizzled head, low forehead, sharp, black eyes, flabby face, with a false, greasy smile on it now, oiling over a curious, stealthy expression of mingled surprise and inquiry, as he sees his landlord here at ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various

... another attack; only, unlike scarlet fever, measles, smallpox, etc., this immunity, instead of for life, is only for six months or a year. This immunity is due to the formation in the blood of protective substances known as anti-bodies, which destroy or render harmless the invading germs. Flabby, under-ventilated individuals, who are always "catching cold," have such weak resisting powers that they form hardly enough anti-bodies to terminate the first attack, without having enough left to protect them from another for more than a few weeks or months. Dr. Leonard Williams ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... the child it is easy to feel through the mother's abdominal wall, which has now become lax and flabby, the organs which lie beneath it. The top of the womb, once just below the edge of the ribs, may now be found about the level of the uppermost part of the hip bones, a position which it keeps until detachment of the after- birth begins. ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... me, anyhow? I began a series of cautious experiments, designed to discover the trouble. My arms were weak and of a strange, flabby limpness, but they moved. So did my left leg; but when I came to the right one I was baffled. It wouldn't stir; it was heavily encased in something. Good heavens! now I knew! It was in a ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... of that flabby but fidgety kind which throws off ideas as a crab its shells, one after another—useless, imperfect moulds of itself. He came home to the mountain-hut in the first flush and triumph of authorship, bringing every newspaper-clipping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... bearded Huns obeyed promptly and meekly. Of the others one held up his arms with sullen reluctance, his flabby face distorted with rage. The fifth, dropping on one knee, picked up a rifle and levelled it at the ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman

... Mrs. Turpin and her lodger were becoming less strained. For the first time in her life the flabby, foolish woman had to do with a person of firm will and bright intelligence; not being vicious of temper, she necessarily felt herself submitting to domination, and darkly surmised that the rule might in some way be for her good. All the sluggard and the slattern ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lherueux, the draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been formerly; a pedlar said some, a banker at Routot according to others. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... as of good morals. They have no business to fill the library with wretched models of writing, when there are thousand of good models ready, in numbers far greater than they have money to purchase. Weak and flabby and silly books tend to make weak and flabby and silly brains. Why should library guides put in circulation such stuff as the dime novels, or "Old Sleuth" stories, or the slip-slop novels of "The Duchess," when the great ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... an original person—I stopped midway: nature ought to have given me far more conceit or none at all. But at first I felt the change a very hard one; moreover, my stay abroad too had utterly drained my resources, while I was not disposed to marry a merchant's daughter, young, but flabby as a jelly, so I retired to my country place. I fancy,' added my neighbour, with another glance sideways at me, 'I may pass over in silence the first impressions of country life, references to the beauty of nature, the gentle ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... any chance, you have allowed your mind to get into the sort of condition which the old-fashioned German scholar used to allow his body to get into, it develops that the Auto-Comrade hates a flabby brain almost as much as he hates a flabby body. He soon makes it clear that he will not have much to do with any one who has not yet mastered the vigorous and highly complex art of not worrying. Also, he ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... that permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this, he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy" Burgundy was no more than a flabby, vin ordinaire beside it. Not that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in his veins, he summed it up ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... happen," continues he. "The balloon, which was quite flabby and soft when I ascended, was now taut, and fully distended. Soon the hydrogen gas began to escape in considerable quantities by the neck of the balloon, and then, from time to time, I pulled open the valve to give it two issues at once; ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion

... last ten years Madame Descoings had taken on the ripe tints of a russet apple at Easter. Wrinkles had formed in her superabundant flesh, now grown pallid and flabby. Her eyes, full of life, were bright with thoughts that were still young and vivacious, and might be considered grasping; for there is always something of that spirit in a gambler. Her fat face bore traces of dissimulation and of the mental reservations hidden in the depths of her ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... imagination. And see! here is my own favourite story The Blue Bird. I know him by his outspread tail. 'Tis he right enough. It is as much as I can do to prevent myself flinging my arms round the old shop-woman's neck and kissing her flabby cheeks. The Blue Bird, ah me, what a debt I owe him! If I have ever wrought any good in my life, it is all due to him. Whenever we were drafting a Bill with our Chief, the memory of the Blue Bird would steal into my mind amid the heaps of legal and parliamentary documents by which I was hemmed ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France

... and their senses reeled before the blaze and the glory of this, the most magnificent of the dwellings of man. Finally, a pair of curtains, crusted with gold, were parted, and their guide handed them over to a negro mute who stood within. A heavy, fat, brown-skinned man, with a large, flabby, hairless face was pacing up and down the small apartment, and he turned upon them as they entered with an abominable and threatening smile. His loose lips and pendulous cheeks were those of a gross old woman, but above them there shone a pair of ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... out of window! And, I vow, would have gone on to—but Lord! this is frightful! What a shocking howling! My dear sir, my very dear Sir George,' Mr. Thomasson continued, his voice tremulous and his fat cheeks grown on a sudden loose and flabby, 'do you think that ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... nothing dangerous about my theory. Instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer—far safer and saner than the usual order. Men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives." ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... on juries, are never seen without a little brown bag, and the appearance of having been interrupted in a drink. Pale and shiny, with large loose eyes shifting from side to side, he had an underdone voice and uneasy flabby hands. Mr. Bosengate disliked sitting next to him. Beyond this commercial traveller sat a dark pale young man with spectacles; beyond him again, a short old man with grey moustache, mutton chops, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... made with currants, and was rather a special pudding, but was dear: two penn'orth not being larger than a penn'orth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere near where the Lowther Arcade is now. It was a stout, hale pudding, heavy and flabby; with great raisins in it, stuck in whole, at great distances apart. It came up hot, at about noon every day; and many and many a day did I dine ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... distrust of his own abilities to Lavater, when that self-sufficient man wrote his famous work on Physiognomy. Whatever betrayal of her inner self her face might have presented, in the distant time when she was young, was now completely overlaid by a surface of a flabby fat which, assisted by green spectacles, kept the virtues (or vices) of this woman's nature a profound secret until she opened her lips. When she used her voice, she let out the truth. Nobody could hear ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... flabby, relaxed; loose, vague, equivocal, doubtful; slack, remiss, negligent; unrestrained, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... long, ragged band was moving amid the oscillation of the waves. It did not float, but darted about at its own will. It had an object; was advancing somewhere rapidly. The thing had something of the form of a jester's bauble with points, which hung flabby and undulating. It seemed covered with a dust incapable of being washed away by the water. It was more than horrible; it was foul. It seemed to be seeking the darker portion of the cavern, where at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... seated in an easy chair in his familiar attitude, with one leg crossed high above the other. His cheeks, which were so flabby that they looked heavier below, were twitching violently; but he wore the air of a man little concerned in what the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... shape The face one stone, like those Assyrian kings! One sees in carvings, watching men flayed red Horribly laughable in leaps and writhes; That face — utterly evil, clouded round With evil like a smoke — it turns smiles sour! ... And Nero there, the flabby cheeks astrain And sweating agony... long agony... Imperishable, unappeasable For ever... well... it droops the mouth. Till I Look up. There's one blue patch no smoke dares touch. Sky, clear, ineffable, alive with light, Always the same... Before, I never knew Rest and green ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... Lowlands are now almost barren of trout. The spawning fish, flabby and useless, are killed in winter. All through the rest of the year, in the remotest places, tourists are hard at them with worm. In a small burn a skilled wormer may almost depopulate the pools, and, on the Border, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... but that old life seems to me now to be—used up, colourless and flabby. The people seem small and—all alike. This life—is big, free and—in the making. There are souls here that are only touched by sins that have drifted to them—they are possible of great things. They are new and keen, and they ring true when you strike them. The ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... Malinowsky, as he pushed his way in. His face was purple, he had fat, flabby cheeks and a moustache like two wisps of straw. "How are ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... alacrity he always displayed in the consumption of succulent eatables. He was a largely made man, very much on the wrong side of fifty, with accumulations of unwholesome fat on every available portion of his body. His round face was cleanly shaven and shiny, as though its flabby surface were frequently polished with some sort of luminous grease instead of the customary soap. His mouth was absurdly small and pursy for so broad a countenance,—his nose seemed endeavoring to retreat behind his puffy cheeks as though painfully aware of its own insignificance,—and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... me with exaggerated attention, got angry because they did not bring me a chair quickly enough, stretched out his fat, flabby hand to draw this chair quite close to his own, and made a sign to a tall, bearded satyr, whom he called the Brother Treasurer, to go out; then, after overwhelming me with questions about my journey, and my return, and my health, and my family, while his keen restless little ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... still stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no color now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false sheen I had seen so much of evil, were glazed now, and his big and burly frame shook the door it pressed against. He was staring at a small slip of paper he held, and, from his anxious looks, appeared to miss ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... not expecting to fall in love with any of them. I merely discovered some time since that I had a brain, and they happen to be the impulse that possesses it. You always have prided yourself that I am intellectual, and so I am in the flabby 'well-read' fashion. I feel as if my brain had been a mausoleum for skeletons and mummies; it felt alive for the first time when I began to read the newspapers in England. I want no more memoirs and letters and biographies, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... which was Vance Cornish crumbled and fell away. A new man looked down at her. The firm flesh of his face became loose. His whole body was flabby. She had the feeling that if she pushed against his chest with the weight of her arm, he would topple to the floor. That weakness gradually passed. A peculiar strength of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand

... of the body should be sponged with cold, lukewarm or hot water, depending on the temperature, especially of the skin. The cold water will reduce the temperature and tone the peripheral blood vessels; the hot water, if the temperature is low and the skin moist and flabby, will cleanse it and also tone the peripheral blood vessels. If the blood vessels are dilated and the perspiration profuse, atropin is indicated, both as a cardiac stimulant and contractor of the blood vessels and as a preventer of too profuse sweating. The dose ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... something secret and horribly unfamiliar in his manner frightened her. He came a step further into the hall and picking up a dark muffler from a chair, wound it round his neck. She saw that his face was livid, and looked suddenly flabby, and ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... so full, that great quantities are obliged to inhabit the neighbouring brooks, all which empty themselves in the rivers. At the latter end of the year, that is, the spawning season, the large trouts (which are become very loose and flabby) take to the small brooks to deposit their spawn; after which they return to the rivers. At this time there are, in consequence, many young trouts, which remain, I should imagine, till next year, when I believe they go to the rivers; for during that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various

... has been frequently made that the elephants most vicious and troublesome to tame, and the most worthless when tamed, are those distinguished by a thin trunk and flabby pendulous ears. The period of tuition does not appear to be influenced by the size or strength of the animals: some of the smallest give the greatest amount of trouble; whereas, in the instance of the two largest that have been taken in Ceylon within the last thirty ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... hands with Martin. Such varieties of hands, the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean, the coarse, the fine; such differences of temperature, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, the flabby; such diversities of grasp, the tight, the loose, the short-lived, and the lingering! Still up, up, up, more, more, more; and ever and anon the Captain's voice was heard above the crowd—'There's more below! there's more below. Now, gentlemen you that have been introduced to ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens



Words linked to "Flabby" :   flab, flabbiness, flaccid, soft, unfit



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