"Flabby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... purple with rage, but underneath his rage was a clammy layer of unpleasant surprise that this mound of flabby fat should have had such uncanny vision ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... solemnly. I cannot, in the face of facts, ascribe all these phenomena to human agency. Something that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither, is at work there in the dark. I am driven to grant to it an extra-human power. Yet when that flabby Miss Fellows, in the trance state, undertakes to bring me messages from my dead wife, and when she attempts to recall the most tender memories of our life together, I cannot,"—he paused and turned ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... instance) very hot in a frying-pan, and into this drop your prepared potatoes, only a good handful at a time; as, if you attempt to fry too many at once, instead of being crisp, as they should be, the potatoes will fry flabby, and consequently will be unappetising. As soon as the first lot is fried in a satisfactory manner, drain them from the fat with a skimmer, or spoon, and then fry the remainder; and when all are fried, shake ...
— A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes • Charles Elme Francatelli
... poor dinner it was. There was a morsel of flabby white fish, as to the nature of which Phineas was altogether in doubt, a beef steak as to the nature of which he was not at all in doubt, and a little crumpled-up tart which he thought the driver of the fly must have brought with him from the pastry-cook's at Callender. There was some very hot ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... (Jennings, Jorian DeWitt, Alton, Wedderburn, were among the few I was acquainted with who were present) awaiting the arrival of a person for whom he professed extraordinary respect. The Dauphin of France was announced. A mild, flabby, amiable-looking old person, with shelving forehead and grey locks—excellently built for the object, Jorian said—entered. The Capet head and embonpoint were there. As far as a personal resemblance might ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... flabby man of sixty-odd, this Lowland President. White hair; and an old-fashioned, rolling white mustache of the sort lately come into South American fashion. He sat with a glass of iced drink at his side. His uniform was stiffly white, and ornate with heavy gold ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... was a rotund, flabby man, whom long indulgence in rubber-tired broughams and double-springed private cars had softened until he reminded one of a ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... return to Rome, and his departure appears to have been a matter of relief to Federigo, for so impoverished did the King of Naples find himself that the entertainment of the legate and his numerous escort had proved a heavy tax upon his flabby purse. ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... homeless ghost, with his cheeks sunken in and his long black hair straggling into his eyes; he was too discouraged to cut it, or to think about his appearance. His muscles were wasting away, and what were left were soft and flabby. He had no appetite, and they could not afford to tempt him with delicacies. It was better, he said, that he should not eat, it was a saving. About the end of March he had got hold of Ona's ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... various neighborly "unpleasantnesses," and he had more than once argued that no great fighter ever died of a sluggish liver or of any one of the other ills that beset sedentary, peace-loving people. Nations were like men—too much ease made them flabby. And Blaze had his own ideas of strategy, too. So during the perusal of his paper he bemoaned the mistakes his government was making. Why waste time with ultimatums? he argued to himself. He had never done so. Experience had taught him that the ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... you nothing, Joan, dear," Doris said; "I've been a coward. See, my hands are flabby inside—the hands of a woman who has had much too easy a time. 'Who has reached forth—but ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... close before it settled on the sandy floor. Its blinding whiteness made the more loathsome the sickening yellow of the flabby flowing thing that writhed frantically in the glare. It was formless, shapeless, a heaving mound of nauseous matter. Yet even in its agonized writhing distortions they sensed the beating pulsations that marked it a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... stood upright, 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 ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... 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 ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... in silence. Seagulls dipped about them. Off shore the sea-lions bobbed their thick, flabby black heads inquiringly in the water and climbed clumsily over the ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... because my impressions were corrected by subsequent observation. First of all impressions was its enormous size; the girth of its body was some fourscore feet, its length perhaps two hundred. Its sides rose and fell with its laboured breathing. I perceived that its gigantic, flabby body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering omnivorous ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... barefooted, and also as fat as a pig, and said that the master was having his afternoon rest. I went in to my brother and found him sitting on his bed with his knees covered with a blanket; he looked old, stout, flabby; his cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... bellowed. "By the powers, I'll learn you to play horse with Bully Evans! Pipe up your complaint or foot it, you flabby seacocks what call yourselves gentlemen of fortune! Stow my quid, but I'll send some of you to feed the fishes if you try to make the f'c'sle rule the ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... hand in the flabby stuffed glove that served the Scarecrow for a hand, and the Scarecrow pressed it so cordially that the ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... might take Tabora and save their women from Belgian hands. For the English, those soft-hearted fools, who had already so well treated the women at Wilhelmstal, could be as easily persuaded to exercise their flabby sentimentalism on the women and children in Tabora. So ran ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... 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 ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... the inventor, practised unrelentingly, with hatred of his rival in his heart. This hatred seemed to increase his powers of work. He practised, practised. He had a lively intelligence, if his heart was a trifle flabby. And he was very skilful, besides, when he condescended to take the trouble. He was a quick worker: in less than twenty days everything was ready, and "Arching the Gulf" sprawled over the hoardings of Berlin, side by side with "Bridging the Abyss." One saw nothing else; and the Kaiserin opened ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... hollowed out like a Roman mask. It set all the laws of anatomy at defiance. Close inspection failed to detect the substructure. Where you expected to find a bone, you discovered a layer of cartilaginous tissue, and the hollows of an ordinary human face were here filled out with flabby bosses. A pair of gray eyes, red-rimmed and lashless, looked forlornly out of a countenance which was flattened something after the fashion of a pumpkin, and surmounted by a Don Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain. It was the kind of nose, as Cervantes must ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... knotted, his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and his forehead a murderer's, broad and low. The littleness of his eye was hidden under his bushy eyebrows. His nose, long, sharp, and flabby, nearly met his mouth. Barkilphedro, properly attired, as an emperor, would have somewhat resembled Domitian. His face of muddy yellow might have been modelled in slimy paste—his immovable cheeks were like ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... through the crowd and pushed through the court-room door. The Judge was just taking his seat—a dull, heavy-looking man with a bald head, a pair of flabby, clean-shaven cheeks, and two small eyes that looked from under white eyebrows. Half-way up his forehead rested a pair of gold spectacles. The jury had evidently been out for luncheon, for they were picking their teeth and settling ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... they looked at me, Sitting bent by the fallen fire, And they laughed to think that I couldn't see; But I felt the flame of their hot desire. He's helping Marie to work the farm, A dashing, upstanding chap, they say; And look at me with my flabby arm, And the fat of sloth, and my face of clay— Look at me as I sit and sit, By the side of a fire that's seldom lit, Sagging and weary the livelong day, When every one else is out on the field, Sowing the seed ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... matters sexual, in matters political, in matters social, and matters financial you will find that the flabby, narrow-chested, under- trained mind that hides in the excellent-looking body of the typical young Englishman is encumbered with an elaborate duplicity. Under the cloak of a fine tradition of good form and fair appearances you ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... but, you know.... It's awful with these ladies! Sits up at cards till three every morning, and pulls her waist into the shape of a wine-glass. And the lady is flabby and fat, and carries the weight of a good many ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... convulsion; and will now legislate. The swoln cheek, choking his words in the birth, totally disqualifies him as orator; but his pencil, his head, his gross hot heart, with genius in a state of convulsion, will be there. A man bodily and mentally swoln-cheeked, disproportionate; flabby-large, instead of great; weak withal as in a state of convulsion, not strong in a state of composure: so let him play his part. Nor are naturalised Benefactors of the Species forgotten: Priestley, elected by the Orne Department, but declining: Paine the rebellious ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... are generally exercised a good deal; for the constitutional exercise of such is usually walking. But in large town such men give fair play to no other thews and sinews. More especially the arms of such men are very flabby. The muscle is soft, and slender. If the fore legs of a horse were like that, you could not ride him but at the risk of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... the road as Fanning, an evil smile on his flabby, pale face, hastened down into the depression in which Roy, with Peggy bending above him, still lay. The girl looked swiftly up. A big, red aeroplane was hovering on high. Presently one of its occupants, a girl peered over the edge. The next minute she turned and said ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... gold-tipped cigarette of the old days. Peter was Peter. Ten years had made little difference. There were queer little hollow places in his cheeks, and under the jaw-bone, and at the base of the head, and a flabby, parchment-like appearance about the skin. That was all that made him different from the Peter ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... 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 stay ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... repeated infection, ossification may be so interfered with as to cause softening and bending, with the evolution of a state of rickets. Between bone and muscle, too, we find a close relationship. We do not find powerful muscles with softened bone, nor flabby muscle with rigid and ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... 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 dark ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... devils. One can laugh... but that hunched 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, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... now. The son, ultra-English in his costume, from his sun-hat to his riding-breeches and gaiters, and the old Bengali, ridiculously like him in features, despite his shaven crown with one oiled scalp-lock, his bulbous nose and flabby cheeks, and teeth stained red by betel-chewing. On his forehead were painted three white horizontal strokes, the mark of the worshippers of Siva the Destroyer. His only garment was a dirty old dhoti tied round his fat, ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... a sense of the firmness or tautness of the abdominal muscles and not of flabby relaxation. When one changes a slouching posture into an erect posture, there is a sense of having reversed the way the body hangs, as it were, ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... as he pushed his way in. His face was purple, he had fat, flabby cheeks and a moustache like two wisps of straw. "How ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... he had a flabby nose and soft cheeks, that looked as if they had been boiled, dishevelled greasy locks, and a fat squat person. Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... saying what a fool he was when out of hearing. The tanner partly suspected this; and it put his nature upon edge; for he always drove his opinions in as if they were so many tenpenny nails, which the other man must either clinch or strike back into his teeth outright. He would rather have that than flabby silence, as if he ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... for girls, swimming is one of the most perfect. It not only calls into vigorous action most of the muscles of the body, but spares many of those muscles that are so commonly overworked, the most of the work being performed by muscles that are so little used as to have become flabby and weak. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... 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 ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... after nine o'clock when I entered the long shop with its rows of marble-topped tables and greasy lounges of red plush. An unhealthy-looking lad was sweeping out the place with wet saw-dust, and a big, dark-bearded, flabby-faced man in shirt-sleeves stood behind the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... that suffice us. In his Dance of Will-o'-wisps, which in this point happily is dated,—26th-27th April, 1776,—he had come to Ferney, with proper introduction to Voltaire; and here (after severe excision of the flabby parts, but without other change) is credible account of what he saw and heard. In Three Scenes; with this Prologue,—as to Costume, which is ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... A flabby, red-faced man in fine broadcloth and jaunty beaver came down the path, fumbling his seals, and met the Captain with a puffing snort of salutation. To Blecker, whose fancy was made sultry to-night by some passion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the face and felt a sudden pang of sympathy. Mr. Weatherley was certainly not looking as hale and prosperous as a few months ago. His cheeks were flabby, and there was a worried look about him which the head of the firm of Weatherley & Co. should certainly ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... will never come to the front. He'll take to inn-keeping, and that will finish him off." That's what he said, and he seemed to be speaking of me. Some one was knocking at the door of the room—tentative knocks of rather flabby knuckles. It was one of those sounds that one does not notice immediately. The man might have been knocking for ten minutes. It happened to be Lea's employer, the publisher of my first book. He opened the door ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... country by him, leaving his father unavenged? What opinion is he to form of the perfectly idiotic, complex conspiracy between the King and Laertes to get rid of Hamlet? Why should Hamlet appeal to him, except as a melodrama with a flabby hero, a feeble heroine, a very small amount of comic relief, and far too much dialogue, much of which is almost unintelligible? What can he make of the great soliloquies, of the purple patches, written in involved sentences, embellished by curious archaic terms ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... the spot, and picked it up where it lay, half-concealed among the brittle, dry scrub of milk-bushes. I examined the bearings carefully; though there were hoof-marks close by, it had received no hurt. I blew up the tire, which was somewhat flabby, and went on to untie my sturdy pony. The moment I looked at her I saw the poor little brute was wearied out with her two long rides in the sweltering sun. Her flanks quivered. "It is no use," I cried, patting her, as ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... taking on flesh. That makes one look old and flabby. Gaveck Tablets are harmless, a reducing tonic to the system. Give them a fair trial. Beware ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... a tumultuous feeling of affection as she had never before experienced. But when she saw her mother she was shocked and almost fainted. The baroness, in six months, had aged ten years. Her heavy cheeks had grown flabby and purple, as though the blood were congested; her eyes were dim and she could no longer move about unless supported under each arm. Her breathing was difficult and wheezing and affected those near her with a ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... see who could be trusted. Then, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders and impatient exclamation, turned back to the table. Fred, shivering and helpless, stood by the fire, uttering confused directions, and rubbing miserably his own flabby hands; his wife, crying, scolding, and incapable, stood at the end of the table, offering no assistance, but wondering when ever Nettie would come back. Dr Rider took the patient in his arms, and, beckoning Mrs Smith to go before him, carried the child up-stairs. There ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... an unruly digestion, all sorts of complications begin. The eyes get dull, the face thin and sallow, the complexion bad, and the flesh flabby. At that stage the wrinkles, with their aforesaid relatives, sail in upon the scene. And there you are! And—ten chances to one—it's a cheerful time you'll have ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... 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 and love of change. But Sister Cecilia probably misread ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... it seemed, the giants were. Though big in size they were flabby and had nothing like the muscle they should have had in proportion to their build. They went down like meal sacks and were ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... means pleased the major, "I must 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 Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... boy 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 sketch all the ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... 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 ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... flesh of the second quality is soft, and rather red compared with the pinkish-white meat of choice kinds; the fat is more scanty, and the general appearance coarser. The poorest lamb has yellow fat, and lean, flabby red meat, which keeps but a short time. Test the freshness of lamb by touching the kidney-fat; if it is soft and moist the meat is on the verge of spoiling; a bad smell indicates that it is already tainted; it ...
— Twenty-Five Cent Dinners for Families of Six • Juliet Corson
... before her. She was a very flabby and masculine woman, of great brains and keen penetration, and invariably had an oleaginous Jesuit priest at her elbow on important occasions to strengthen her religious standing and to give her decisions the force and effect ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... across the ocean. He was sure that some were made by whales, as they rose to breathe at the surface. Now and then a splash was heard as some huge monster leaped out of the water. Suddenly a large flabby mass was dashed against his face, and at the same time several other dark ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 without ritual expressions ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... was full of these little vortices of whirring, rotating 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
... Mr. Neal. Sometimes he looked into faces loosened by liquor and saw such an empty foulness looking out at him that he was heartsick. Then he would look at all the faces about him and see sin in manifold guise marking all of them. The sodden eyes of disillusion, the protruding underlip of lust, the flabby wrinkles of dissipation, the vacuous faces of women: it ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... side of consciousness, and 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 exhibitions ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... sat musing thus foolishly and pessimistically, who should loom upon his horizon but—of all people in the world—the Haddock, the fishy, flabby, stale, unprofitable Haddock! Most certainly Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like this. A beautiful confection of pearly-grey, pearl-buttoned flannel draped his droopy form, a pearly-grey silk tie, pearl-pinned, encircled his lofty collar, pearly-grey silk socks ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... heads that were hideously bulbous in form, and which were flabby and elastic instead of armored with thick horn as were the heads of the usual soldiers. Like living syringes, these heads were; perambulating bulbs filled with some defensive or offensive liquid to be squirted ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... was 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 in his pocket-book wherein a mention of his name had appeared. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... honest inquiry rather than querulous criticism in the question, often asked, Why does not religion produce a higher and stronger type of moral character? Enthusiasm for the teachings of Christ often is cooled by contact with some flabby-willed, narrow-minded professed follower ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... would melt away even in the hot solstice of June? In the fencing scene, (Act IV.,) his flabby muscles are soon ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said, rubbing his flabby hands together. "I like your independence. Now, let me see." He scratched his head. "Do you ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... Dropping the weapon, I grappled with him, catching him about the wrists, which shrank under my grasp. He seemed to have scarcely the strength of a child; and everywhere I touched him, his flesh yielded like the flabby muscles of a fat baby. I bent him over backwards, then swung him around and caught him by the shoulders, and whirled him around my head. Finally, I tossed him over the edge of the cliff, where he landed among some bushes, and scrambled down as ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... dropped her mop. Her varicose legs trotted across the wet lobby of the Jordon Building, and her flabby fat arms reached for the tall man with bright eyes who stood near the elevators. "It's me, Mom," the ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... 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 ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... well. Of late Mrs. Macnamara had lost all her pluck, and half her colour, and some even of her fat. She was like one of those portly dowagers in Numbernip's select society of metamorphosed turnips, who suddenly exhibited sympathetic symptoms of failure, grew yellow, flabby, and wrinkled, as the parent bulb withered and went out of season. You would not have known her for the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... German ballad. I thought I saw that Calyste's love was increasing through his reminiscences; that he was expending on me the stormy emotions I revived by reminding him of the coquetries of that hateful Beatrix,—just think of it! that cold, unhealthy nature, so persistent yet so flabby, something between a mollusk and a bit of coral, dares to ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... and green-lit spaces. They came out in a clearing, before dusk. Beside the clearing was a brook, with a crude cradle—sign of a not very successful gold miner. Before a log cabin, in a sway-sided rocker, creaked a tall, white, flabby woman, once nearly beautiful, now rubbed at the edges. She rose, huddling her wrapper about her bosom, as they drove into the clearing and picked their ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... taking of salmon from the "redds" as they spawned, of all methods of capture the least allied to "sport," for the fish then were soft and flabby, and almost useless as food. Nevertheless, there was in that, too, a strong element of excitement, for the weapon used, the clodding or throwing leister, required no mean skill in the using. This throwing leister was a heavy spear, or ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... and the well, those knowing woman for the first time, and old libertines frayed by all species of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and monsters maliciously distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men without noses, with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath, bald, trembling, covered with parasites—pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes. They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they sit, smoke, drink, convulsively ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... you 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 ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... at the Earth calendar dial that was automatically correlated with the Saarkkadic calendar just above it. Fifty-nine next week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to show for it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face, ...
— In Case of Fire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mother's milk will be no longer competent to afford it due nourishment; it will be inadequate in quantity and quality. Its countenance, therefore, will become pale; its look sickly and aged; the flesh soft and flabby; the limbs emaciated; the belly, in some cases, large, in others, shrunk; and the evacuations fetid and unnatural; and in a very few weeks, the blooming healthy child will be changed into the pale, sickly, peevish, wasted creature, ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... like these veg'table people," said the little girl. "They're cold and flabby, like cabbages, in spite ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... overfed and flabby and unable to hold his own against a determined man, settled himself in his chair and looked as obstinate ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... day off for a rest at Atlantic City, because their old Easter dinner might go down the wrong side. Honest, mama, to—to think how you're letting a crowd of old, flabby women that aren't fit even to wipe your shoes make a regular servant out ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... theater, far away into the noise and life on the boulevards, I persisted in looking at the other, at the old one, in scanning her over, in judging her, in dissecting her with my eyes; I got excited over her flabby cheeks, over those ridiculous dimples, that were half-filled up, over that treble chin, that hair which must have been dyed, those eyes which had no more brightness in them, and that nose which was a caricature of Lucy's beautiful, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... 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. What was certain ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... home? Well now I call that shabby: I should have loved to kiss her so— (A flabby, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Hornblower was physically evident. Flabby and shaken, she sat looking with unfeigned terror at her metamorphosed lord and master. And Mr. Hornblower, puffing out his chest, looked very much like the oldest son of the individual he had ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... had imagined Jacqueline capable of leaving him for a creature like Channing, flabby, wordy, feebly vicious! Somewhere at home she was waiting for him; lonely, perhaps, wondering why her husband did not come to her, but safe and unashamed. Possibly her mother and Jemima ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the universe is that non-joining habit! You would think that anybody, however dull, might consider his hands, and guess by the look of them that they must be made to work, and help, and take hold of somebody else's hands! Miserable, useless, flabby paws, those of the non-joiner; that he feeds and dresses himself with, and then hangs to his selfish sides, or puts behind his ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... inquired Bob, who had just taken up in his hands a soft, jelly-like, flabby thing that appeared as if it were a little white owl, some ten or twelve inches high, without any particular head or wings to speak of, although it had a short black beak, resembling a parrot's, projecting from out of its livid-hued ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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
... thing is to have the dripping boiling to begin with, you know," he continued—"(I'll only give you two eggs at a time)—then plunge them in, and as they brown take them off one by one and put them on a hot dish—I'm speaking of the potatoes now; but don't cover them up, it makes them flabby, and the great thing ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 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 as ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... the bartender, 'you know me. I got a real bad case of alkali throat. Roll up, boys!—Say, wait a minute. Moraga, meet my friend Longstreet.' Moraga showed many large white teeth in a friendly smile and gave into Longstreet's keeping a small, moist and very flabby hand. The other men, silently accepting the invitation, came forward; Barbee introduced them all. Longstreet's was the emotion of one being initiated into ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... He had had the worst of the bout. But he had discovered one or two things. If he could get Olson to talk, and could separate the fat, flabby man from his flinty wife, it would not be hard to frighten a confession from Hull of all he knew. Moreover, in his fear Hull had let slip one admission. Shibo, the little janitor, had some evidence against him. Hull knew it. Why was Shibo holding it back? The fat ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... warned by his Indian guide to hide himself behind the trunk of a tree, saw a number of these peccaries (cochinos or puercos del monte) pass close by him. The herd marched in a close body, the males proceeding first; and each sow was accompanied by her young. The flesh of the chacharo is flabby, and not very agreeable; it affords, however, a plentiful nourishment to the natives, who kill these animals with small lances tied to cords. We were assured at Atures, that the tiger dreads being surrounded in the forests by these herds of wild pigs; and that, to avoid being stifled, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... public also approved, but the critics were annoyed and continued so to browbeat the directors of the society that the latter actually requested me to permit the second movement of Mozart's Symphony in E flat to be played in the flabby and colourless way (ruschlich herunter spielen) they had been accustomed to—and which, they said, even Mendelssohn ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... thin girl in the chair, then two boys who were entirely nondescript, with noisy throats cut out of the same copper plate, a soft billowy shadow of a woman under a floppy hat and exuding a ghastly sweet, cloying perfume. Her bare arm was as soft and flabby as jelly as she stretched it out to Myrtle. After her came another man, rather hesitantly, and keeping in the shadow. His voice was good, rather deep, rather strong. As he passed, he called Joe by name. Twisting around in the light, Joe saw that it was Hawkins, one of the owners of the "Kum-quik ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Compton relates that while working in Barnes's shop in Forest Grove, Oregon, during the last illness of that noted bowyer, he came across a laminated bow made entirely of sap wood. Barnes stated that he had constructed it at the instigation of Will Thompson. The cast of this bow was slow, flabby, and weak. As a shooting implement it was ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... with pity, and glanced for a moment at his neighbor's red face, his short, thick neck, his "corporation," as Chenet called it to himself, his two fat, flabby legs, and the apoplectic rotundity of the old official; and raising the white Panama hat from his head, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... made me feel sad. This dull, sodden man was once a handsome fellow, alert, well poised, brave and cheerful. The profile which I saw in the photographs somehow made me think of an arrow-head on the upward flight; that, lower jaw, which is now so flabby and slobbery was once well rounded, and the weakness was not unpleasantly evident. I often wonder that human vanity has not done away with alcoholism. Men are vain animals, yet a good-looking fellow, who could never ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... follows:—"In the summer of 1839 I had an opportunity of watching the process of destruction among the plums, and it was as follows—Before or soon after the segments of the corolla had fallen off, the ovarium had become greenish yellow, soft, and flabby. As the fruit continued to increase in magnitude, its colour grew darker and of a more ruddy yellow, and at the end of a fortnight or three weeks the size of the abortive fruit rather exceeded that of a ripe walnut. In fact, an observer might imagine himself to be walking amongst ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... rather the friends of Gaynor's womenfolk. It was King's hope that they were going down toward the lake; thus he would avoid meeting them. He'd come in at the back, have his talk with Ben, and be on his way without the bore of shaking a lot of flabby hands and listening to a ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... stand upon the lids. The florid countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. His clear voice, well fuelled by a full, though rather flabby frame, rolls into all the galleries and corners of the vast building without effort; his gestures are even and well balanced; and you are, in fact, surprised to see how good a natural orator he is. You went to hear him, expecting to find some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... The flabby faces of the aristos betrayed not the slightest interest, not the least surprise. Only Atuna spoke: "Interesting, if true. Can ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... when later he came to tell me of it, "was incontinently to order his departure. But upon considering the matter and remembering how high in power and in the King's favour stands that monstrous libertine Bardelys, I deemed it wiser to afford shelter to this outrageous retinue. His steward—a flabby, insolent creature—says that Bardelys left them last night near Mirepoix, to ride hither, bidding them follow to-day. Curious that we should have no news of him! That he should have fallen into the Garonne and drowned himself were too great a ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... peasants. The people of Cherrapunji village are specially fair. The Syntengs of the Jaintia Hills are darker than the Khasi uplanders. The Wars who live in the low valleys are frequently more swarthy than the Khasis. The Bhois have the flabby-looking yellow skin of the Mikirs, and the Lynngams are darker than the Khakis. The Lynngams are probably the darkest complexioned people in the hills, and if one met them in the plains one would not be able to distinguish them ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... time to time advance suddenly, only to drop back to desolating driblets the following night. These gains were due to the work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain, swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new advertising devices. His ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... said, "My boy won't obey me. His father is dead. When I slap him he only jumps away. I lock him in and he steals the key, he keeps it in his pocket. He steals the money that I earn. He says I'm from the country." And a flabby anxious woman said, "My girl runs out to dance halls. Sometimes she comes back at two in the morning. She is fifteen and she ought to get married. But what can I do? A nice steady man who never dances comes sometimes ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... 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 net from him, asking no orders from me. The Lizzie, pipe in mouth ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... colossal mental power and nameless evil glowing in the dark depths of the two abnormally large eyes that stared fixedly out from under the heavy forehead. The thing had no nose. The mouth opening, surrounded by a rosette of flabby gray skin, was a mere slit. The entire skull and face were covered with small, closely overlapping scales of ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... six 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 flat and bent to one side, and ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... that even 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
... was the explanation conveyed to us in loud tones, with no reserve of whispered delicacy, when we expressed regret at monsieur's detention below stairs; a partially paralyzed leg, dragged painfully after the latter's flabby figure, being the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... paler than usual; her eyes were dark, the colour seemed to have faded from round about them, and her swiftest glance was as intent as a stare. The appearance of the Admiral, on the other hand, was rosy, and flabby, and moist; his jowl hung over his shirt-collar, his smile was loose and wandering, and he had so far relaxed the natural control of his eyes, that one of them was aimed inward, as if to catch the growth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Chef in one instant of half-comprehension. Then, as he saw the chalk-white bodies, the dead and flabby whiteness of their faces from which red eyes stared, he revised his estimate; here ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... think of it, they are very, very sad. I didn't do one right thing to-day 'cept to make myself pretty. Miss Winstead was so angry, and so was nurse, but when I am with them I don't mind a bit being naughty. I wouldn't be a flabby good girl ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... he, with a look askance at them—for it was the clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight forth at any object, whether human or inanimate, "where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?" ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Prince Jan rose stiffly, for he had not been hardened to the trail work from puppy days as Rollo and the other dogs had been. Five years of warm sunshine in the Land of No Snow had made Jan's muscles soft and flabby and he felt the cold weather more than any of the other St. Bernards. Then, too, his long hair made the work of the trails harder for him because the snow clung to his fur and when it melted and ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker
... the spirit of competition. Healthy progress demands unusual exertion. All psychological conditions for that maximum strain are unfavourable in a socialistic state with its acknowledged need of rigid regulation and bureaucracy. We see all around us the flabby routine work, stale and uninspiring, wherever sharp rivalry has no chance. It is the great opportunity for mediocrity, while the unusual talent is made ineffective and wasted. Our present civilization shows that in every country really decisive achievement is found only in ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Camusot, who had granted the warrant of arrest on Sauvager's application, with no idea that it was to be executed so promptly. Camusot was short, fair, and fat already, though he was only thirty years old or thereabouts; he had the flabby, livid look peculiar to officials who live shut up in their private study or in a court of justice; and his little, pale, yellow eyes were full of the suspicion which is often mistaken ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... Marsh., var. nigrum, Britton.—Occasional in alluvium of the Cold river (Cheshire county, N. H.). The large, dark green, "flabby" leaves, with closed sinuses and with densely pubescent petioles and lower surfaces, quickly distinguish this tree from the ordinary forms of the sugar maple. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... else she will need a doctor." Habits affect looks. If one is energetic and happy in doing her work, her face will reflect the contentment. If one hates work, the face will reflect discontent, the vital organs will grow flabby and affect the health, and looks will suffer. Enthusiasm in work stimulates the vital organs, causes circulation of the blood and makes the eye bright and the skin to take on a more ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... themselves on the side of the majority in regard to any question of the day. They range themselves there not because of any principle involved, but simply and solely because they consider this mode of action expedient. And they feel far safer, far happier, taking the flabby, muscleless arm of Expediency than in venturing into unknown difficulties behind the uncompromisingly stiff figure of Principle. But there are others-thank God for them!—who hate the shifty, cunning eye of Expediency far too much to have anything to do with ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking |
