"Muddled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hard fact if one really wants to work and prosper. And the hard fact is, that Adam's sons are not yet cherubs, nor their homestead, among the stars, just yet an outlying field of paradise. It is a planet whose private affairs are badly muddled. Its tenants for life are a quarrelsome, ill-tempered, unruly set of creatures altogether. As things go, they will break each others' heads sometimes. It is very unreasonable. I can see that. But men are not always reasonable. It is not for their own interest. I can see that too. But ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in its train—minutes flew by apace, the wine grew low in the decanters, and it became apparent to me that if I would not lose the whole evening, and go home with my brains muddled beyond all possibility of reading, I must take my departure. Accordingly, pulling out my watch, I reminded Mr. Frampton of my previous stipulation to be allowed to run away as soon as dinner was concluded, adding that I had ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... from different parts of the Union arose to extricate the convention from this welter, but generally, when they resumed their seats, left the matter more muddled than when ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... he said, fumbling nervously all over his clothes, "I've given it to the cabman. Of all the infernal idiocy! I knew I should. I had a presentiment that I should get it muddled up with my other money and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... same motive, Thad. On the contrary, while he went out to try and find a reason for believing Nick guilty, in spite of his alibi, I mean only to ask a few questions that will clear up a little point that is a bit muddled." ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... an extraordinary business, isn't it? I have just come from the Demonstration in Hyde Park. It was practically squashed by the arrival of the special editions. The people seemed pretty considerably muddled about it, so I suppose those who arranged it all may be said to have scored ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... in mind—and to thy best belief in act, how drags on now the burden of thy life? For a day or two, spirits and segars muddled his brain, and so kept thoughts away: but within a while they came on him too piercingly, and Julian writhed beneath those scorpion stings of hot and keen remorse: and when the coast-guards dragged the Mullet, how that caitiff trembled! and when ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in unstinted measures and some of the women so forgot themselves as to attempt to rival the men in drinking. The barrier being thrown down Charles drank freely, till his tones began to thicken, and his eye to grow muddled, and he sat down near Jeanette and tried to converse; but he was too much under the influence of liquor to hold a sensible ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... in the warm but somewhat unsavory skin of the dead monarch of the forest. I gloried in his calm repose; for the day was yet young, and I flattered myself that a three-hours' snooze would restore his muddled intellects to their normal mediocrity of useful instinct, and that I might still achieve my triumphal entry into the city,—a procession I had been so much in the habit of picturing to myself over the nocturnal camp-fire, that it had become a sort of nightmare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... in the wide world that he could paint; flowers and landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge; with people he was helpless and hopeless; also with animals. Skies he could sometimes manage, or effects of wind in foliage, but as a rule he left these all severely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that was guided by love. It was quite arresting, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... people that talk over their victuals are like to say anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with strong drink before they ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... became sensible of the misgivings that not infrequently had troubled him. His comrade, he believed, really had been a famous mineralogist, but now he was a frail and broken man with a half-muddled brain who could not be trusted to keep the fire going beneath the pots while he cooked a meal. He was also a prey to maudlin fancies, and it seemed quite possible that the mine was no more than a creation of his disordered imagination. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... no gold with this dross, and in that matter of blood, as to which Sir Harry's ideas were so strong, and indeed so noble, he entertained but a muddled theory. Noblesse oblige. High position will demand, and will often exact, high work. But that rule holds as good with a Buonaparte as with a Bourbon, with a Cromwell as with a Stewart; and succeeds ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... towards the close of the nineteenth century, was becoming more and more the illegitimate offspring of immaturity in thought and feeling. We were the slaves of our newspapers; each morning a library was thrown on our doorstep. But what a jumbled, inconsequent, muddled-up library! It was the best that could be made in such a hurry, and it satisfied most of us, though I believe there were conservative people who opened it only to read the marriage and the death notices. The latter came along ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... upon his shoulders so that ripples of delight, at all the voluptuous images of his desire, went through his whole body, making it quiver like a flame with yearning for unimaginable things. It all muddled into fantastic gibberish—into sounds of horns and trombones and double basses blown off key while a piccolo shrilled the first bars of ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... shouted Sloane. "You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf," and they sailed off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a change! Tall, well-set-up and bronzed, he is a model of health and strength. His eyes meet all our eyes frankly; he has done nothing to be ashamed of: there is no unposted letter in his pocket, no consciousness of a muddled telephone message in his head. To be on the dreaded carpet of the manager's room was once an ordeal; to-day he can drop cigarette-ash on it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... spontaneously, the tincture of Daisies should be taken in doses of five drops three times a day in water. Likewise this medicine should be given curatively on the principle of affinity between it and the symptoms induced in provers who have taken the same in material toxic doses, "when the brain is muddled, the sight dim, the spirits soon depressed, the temper irritable, the skin pimply, the heart apt to flutter, and the whole aspect careworn; as if from early excesses." Then the infusion of the plant in tablespoonful doses, or ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Dolokhov after he had dealt for some time. "Please place your money on the cards or I may get muddled in ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Johnson, with a half-sarcastic laugh, "w'y, now, you an' the doctor 'ave tried to worrit that electricity into my brain for many months, off an' on, and I do believe as I'm more muddled about it to-night than I was at ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... of that day has never been wholly clear. Sodden with weariness, dazzled and muddled by the savage sun-glare, he followed, with eyes fixed, the rhythmically, monotonously moving feet of his leader, through an interminable desert of soft, clogging sand; a desert which dropped away into parched arroyos, and rose to scorched mesas whereon fierce cacti thrust at him with thorns ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... protest was no longer muddled, but defined. "You mustn't do that," he said, with authority. "Suppose a man is riding a runaway horse and he loses his nerve and throws himself off and is killed—is that as good a way as if he sat tight and fought hard until the horse ran into a wall and killed him? I think not. And besides, any ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... man, who was getting muddled by his wife's eloquence,' how am I to feed her? they won't sell me ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... do wish I could see papa. It would make me quite sure he's alive, you know, for it all seems so muddled in my head since the day I was so naughty. And if he'd forgive me, and if he'd get better, I think, perhaps, I'd ask God to make me better too, so that I might make papa's tea and read aloud to him like ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... conscience. Let us suppose that you are the commissary of police and that you are proceeding to make an inquiry concerning this affair——Yes, but in order to do that, I require a clearer brain. Mine is muddled like a ragout." ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... muddled fury the man began once again trying to hold her on the animal. It was backing slowly towards a stone seat in the balustrade, and man and woman swayed and ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... "No. You're still muddled after floundering in the mud of South America. What possessed you to let that cheerful idiot, Wally Hart, ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... else, he had shrunk, of course-like road and station-master and water-works. He had almost said, 'You, too, have shrunk'—but otherwise was the same old fluffy personality that no doubt still got sadly muddled in his sermons, gave out wrong hymns, and spent his entire worldly substance on his scattered parish. His voice was softer too. It rang in his ears still, as though there had been no break of over two decades. The hum of bees and scythes ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... we have to work upon, we are overwhelmed by mental suggestions, and rapidly-dissolving views, of the various classes from Guy's to the London University, from St. George's to the London Hospital, perpetually crowding upon our brains (if we have any), and rendering our ideas as completely muddled as those of a "new man" who has, for the first week of October, attended every single lecture in the day, from the commencement of chemistry, at nine in the morning, to the close of surgery, at eight in the evening. Lecture! auspicious word! we have a beginning prompted by the mere sound. We ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... apron. There was a white blouse with a wide, turned-back collar, and a scarlet bodice, laced with black cords over a green tongue. I was soon in such a desperate tangle over these divers garments, so utterly muddled as to which to put on first, and which side forward, and which end up, and where and how by the grace of God to fasten them, that M. Etienne, with roars of laughter, came unsteadily to my aid. He insisted ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... around her bare shoulders. Judging by the noises and yells, we'd gotten out just in time. No one came out the exit behind us. Either the Spaceforce had plugged it or, more likely, everyone else in the cellar had been too muddled by drugs to know what ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... always the depth into which this talker delights to go. Were it this, with transparency, there would not be so much objection. He too frequently plunges into muddled waters, or makes them so by his movements therein. He persuades himself that he has acquired profound knowledge of philosophy from the dark and mystical writings of the Germans translated into English. With this persuasion he courts your attention, while he discourses ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... over this offer in his muddled mind—for he had persuaded himself that the offer was a genuine one—the clown fidgeted on his high stool, and hummed an air from Faust in a falsetto ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... the days of man." Soon, very soon, our brief lives will be lived. Soon, very soon, we and our affairs will have passed away. Uncounted generations will trample heedlessly upon our tombs. What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal? And I avow my faith that we are marching towards better days. ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... silly, muddled-brained, flat-headed idiot!" yelled Dyke, as he raced along over the plain, his steed sending the red sand flying at every spurn of its hoofs as it stretched itself out. "I'll be there first, and cut him off. You can't do it—you can't do ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... heart; and the contrast between Carker the manager and his brother, who for some early dishonest act, long since repented of, remains always Carker the junior; and about Captain Cuttle, and that poor, muddled nautical philosopher, Captain Bunsby, and the Game Chicken, and Mrs. Pipchin, and Miss Tox; and Cousin Feenix with wilful legs so little under control, and yet to the core of him a gentleman; and the apoplectic Major Bagstock, the Joey B. who claimed to be ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... other members of his family, and they often took short largely silent walks, usually down to the Salem Marine Railway where the Nautilus was undergoing repairs. His protracted silences were broken by the sudden vehement protests against the generally muddled aspect of affairs or longer monologues of inner questioning and search. He almost never referred to her or made her part of a conversation; she was free to dwell on her own emotions while he, with a corrugated brow, went on in his tortuous and ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Even brain-muddled Mullan felt a maudlin impulse to cheer at Feeny's enthusiastic answer. Even poor old Plummer gave a half-stifled cry. Possibly he dreamed that rescue was at hand; but there was little time for rejoicing. Springing back whence he ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... tell you how it came to be made, and then I'll relate the story in my own fashion, as the way in which the confession is written is too muddled for you to understand clearly. Still, it shows plainly enough that Clyne, for all ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... stories. He is full of kind intentions. Had you known him before the War, and had he liked you, and had you wished to take a ride upon a battleship, he would be disposed to order up a battleship and send you for a ride, even if, by doing so, he muddled up the fleet a little. That would be in line with his fixing it for moving picture people to act scenes on a battleship's deck—which he permitted. He saw no reason why that was not proper, and the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... turn, don't know what you mean," he answered. "I have learned nothing new about him. And it is too fair a morning," he concluded abruptly, "to bother over puzzles. Things have happened so rapidly that we are probably both muddled, and if we could spend the time in explanations we should doubtless find that neither ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Muddled indeed I was. Again in my eventful career I felt myself tremble; I knew not what I should say, any savoir faire being quite gone. I had received a crumpler of ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... best he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to save his present contracts. He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib's muddled preachments to ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... flopped about his bare legs as he awkwardly clambered into the rear seat beside the sex-muddled creature in a boy's suit and a girl's hat. Miss Juliana and the godly Merle in the front seat had very definitely drawn aloof from the outcasts. They chatted on matters at large in the most polite and social manner. They quite appeared to have forgotten that their equipage might ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... course of construction. One might well say that she is using the length of her body as a measure, in order to fix the next ceiling at the proper distance. Then she resumes her work. Perhaps the measure was not correctly taken; perhaps her memory, a few seconds old, has already become muddled. The Bee once more ceases laying her plaster and again goes and touches the front wall with her forehead and the back wall with the tip of her abdomen. Looking at that body trembling with eagerness, extended to its full length to touch the two ends of the room, how can we fail to grasp the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves in order, he began to understand. "Oh—ho!" he said again, and nodded his ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Ingra, found a seat for him, and Edmund, going down to the brook, filled a pocket flask with water and flung it in the fellow's face. This was repeated several times with the effect of finally straightening out his muddled senses sufficiently to warrant us in embarking for the return trip. All the way home Ingra was in a sulky mood, like any terrestrial drunkard after a debauch, but he kept his eyes on all Edmund's ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... Benoit, do not let us mix matters, this is no longer to do with the landlord but the bootmaker. I want a separate account. Accounts are a serious thing, we must not get muddled." ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... tumble had muddled his brains, or for some other reason best known to himself, Conrad straightway cast all his stepfather's cautions to the winds, and told neighbour Prieme the whole story of the safe-conduct ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... experience had shown her that the most crowded households often contain the loneliest nurseries, and that the rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered infancy; but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found herself feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to her charged with a ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... from one angle, looked different. It was suddenly a mixture of muddled colors, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades he had selected. The lines of wall, floor and ceiling were strangely ...
— Warm • Robert Sheckley
... steeped him in it, when quite a child, to his very lips, and he was always asking himself why common language, so easy for every other purpose, becomes obscure and unintelligible in a contract or will, which made him fancy that the men of law had muddled everything in order to render themselves necessary." He had lost the only man he had ever really loved, Stephen de la Boetie, an amiable and noble philosopher, counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux. "If I am pressed to declare why I loved him," Montaigne used to say, "I feel that it can only ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... no good nowheres. Awful poor lot o' Pugs, that gang. Not in it with the ''Atfield Combination Troupe,' as can fight a bit, and 'as some smart scrappers in it. No, Gemmen, the 'Old 'Un' allus were a fraud. Couldn't stand up to a Froggy, 'e couldn't. His Company muddled the 'ole bag o' tricks, and made a hawful mess of it. Ah, and would agen, mark yer, if they got the chance. Should a'most like to see 'em 'ave another shy, if only for the bloomin' fun o' the thing; but ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 7, 1891 • Various
... remains, shall not confine me long. I am impatient to see the curiosities of this famous city, and more impatient to continue my journey to Paris, from whence I hope to write you a more diverting letter than 'tis possible for me to do now, with a mind weakened by sickness, a head muddled with spleen, from a sorry inn, and a chamber crammed with mortifying objects of apothecaries vials and ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... always very judicious in their appointments. Some of our young men are sorely tempted to show off their acquirements, and preach themselves instead of the gospel, and there are one or two whom I could mention whose hearts are all right, but whose brains are so muddled and empty that they are utterly unfit to teach their fellows. We must not, however, look for perfection in this world, Mr Clearemout. A little chaff will always remain among the wheat. There is no system without some imperfection, ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... somebody else in nearly the same predicament. My chosen friend and ally, Bob M'Corkindale, was equally hard up with myself, and, if possible, more averse to exertion. Bob was essentially a speculative man—that is, in a philosophical sense. He had once got hold of a stray volume of Adam Smith, and muddled his brains for a whole week over the intricacies of the Wealth of Nations. The result was a crude farrago of notions regarding the true nature of money, the soundness of currency, and relative value of capital, with which he nightly favoured an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... of the liquor, doubtless adulterated, mounted to my head. As I had gulped it down at a breath, drunkenness seized me promptly; I felt that I was becoming muddled, then I experienced a lucid moment, then confusion followed. Then consciousness left me, I leaned my elbows on the table ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... it. 'You have given it to the Church,' he declared. I said to him: 'You're a scoundrel,' I said. 'No,' said he, 'I'm not a scoundrel, but I'm broad-minded.' But that wasn't he, that was some one else. I've muddled him with some one else ... without noticing it. Come, another glass and that's enough. Take away the bottle, Ivan. I've been telling lies. Why didn't you stop me, Ivan, and tell ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... more I thought over it the more muddled I grew. There was something maddening in the memory that I was unable to act as my instincts prompted me to act, that I couldn't, like the outraged wife of screen and story, walk promptly out of the door and slam it epochally shut after me. But modern life never quite lives up to its ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... brambles, and that worried him, for his whole head seemed one aching bruise and he dreaded anything touching it. But all the time he did not open his mouth, for silence was the one duty that his muddled wits enforced. He felt that he was not the master of his mind, and he dreaded what he might disclose ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... done, on nearing the fort, and would have been in sooner, had not Big Waller been obliged to take charge of poor Bertram, who, owing to the suddenness and violence of all these recent events in savage life, had got into a muddled condition of mind that rendered him peculiarly helpless. But they knew nothing of March Marston—they had expected to find him there ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... often inexcusable, but she "kept" her servants, and they would "do anything" for her. Further, except that she could not shine in conversation, she was a good hostess. She never made mistakes, never became muddled, never forgot. Of course she had friends to whom he was indifferent or perhaps slightly hostile, but she was entitled to her friends, as he to his. And she was a good mother. Stranger still, though she understood none of the arts and had no logical taste, she ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... banished; this is the happy corner where the social glass is dispensed. Alas for the jollity and the sociability and all the rest of it! Force yourself to study the vile spectacle, and you will soon harbour a brood of aching reflections. The whole of that chattering, swilling mob are employing their muddled minds on frivolity or obscenity, or worse things still. You will hear hardly an intelligent word; you will not catch a sound of sensible discussion; the scraps of conversation that reach you alternate between low banter, low squabbling, objectionable narrative, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Jack," he went on to say, "I wouldn't want to have anybody hear what I'm going to tell you now. It certainly is a shame how I've muddled this thing up, and I guess I deserve all I'm getting in the shape of worry. It's going to be a lesson to me, I give you my word on ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... front of him. His head was throbbing with the knock-down blow he had received, and he had not yet had time to gather the exact meaning of his sensations. The words Palmer Billy used suggested journeying, and somewhere in the muddled confusion of his mind there was a decided impulse ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... lunatic. Wilkes Booth I knew. He was drunk, had been drunk all that winter, completely muddled and perverted by brandy, the inheritant of mad blood. Czolgosz, the slayer of McKinley, and the assassin of the Empress Elizabeth ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... her a cordial letter of recommendation to Herr Bock, Counsellor of Archives, who was just then engaged in writing a voluminous work on the history of Nuremberg. It would be her task to arrange Herr Bock's muddled manuscript. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... place the resemblance, however, and finally, with a little sigh of fatigue, she gave up the attempt. Her brain still felt muddled and confused from the blow she had received. Perhaps later she would be able to think things ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... really mattered—not superficially, but as if they were the things that interested them most, as she knew they were. It was that kind of life she really longed for; she had only got her thoughts a little muddled in London because she had been rather humiliated in feeling herself a stranger where her brothers were so much at home. When she saw Muriel again she must put herself right there. Muriel would understand her. Muriel had ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... country. The woods blocked all sense of direction above and around. The ground was at any angle you please, and all sounds were split up and muddled by the tree-trunks, which acted as silencers. High above us the respectable, all-concealing forest had turned into sparse, ghastly blue sticks of timber—an assembly of leper-trees round a bald mountain top. ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... out. Long afterwards I knew that Deepley Walls had been built in the reign of the Third William by a certain Squire Chillington of that date, "out of my own head," as he himself put it in a quaint document still preserved among the family archives; and rather a muddled head it must have been in ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... Smart was not above assisting nature to take her course. Thus, some years before the opening of the story, he had deliberately buried one poor lady alive in a cave containing sulphide of mercury. Never ask me why. I am as muddled by this as I am over his further conduct in leaving with the corpse every possible clue in the way of letters and ciphers that could bring his guilt home to him. In any ordinary novel he would have been convicted in a few chapters; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... here and there a policeman, stamping To keep himself warm or sedately tramping Hither and thither, paced his beat; Or peered where out of the blizzard's welter Some wretched being had crept to shelter, And now, drenched through by the sleet, a muddled Blur of a man and ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... infinite pleasures, which is the true, eternal and primary character of an indulgence. The poor lady was so pleased with this relic, the virtue of which she tried in various ways, that her brain became muddled, and she had so much faith in it that she indulged as devoutly in indulgences as the Lady of Cande had indulged in vengeances. This business of confession woke up the younger Demoiselle de Cande, who came to watch the proceedings. You may ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... death for those she loved; but she was old for work, and the 'ache,' as she called it, had got into her bones. She had slept on the floor for two nights, and her poor old back was tired, and her head muddled with the confusion and her mistress's fretful fussiness. Biddy could have worked well if any one had told her exactly what to do, but between one order and another—between Mr. Cyril's impatience and Miss Mollie's incapable, youthful zeal—she was ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... give over that reaching wife's estate hath made of me a sordid fool, as hath it oft made woman heretofore. My senses up until I met one of two at the foot of the stair, I could make affidavit on. The mould of either could well trick the other, providing their heads were as muddled as mine, and in this matter I am also clear. 'Twas meet to speak lowly and the voice was not betrayed. But—there was some restraint at first; for his words came slow and with much flaunting of French—indeed 'twas overdone.—And the duel—ah! ah!—'twas Cedric's 'Nay, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... nine, but his comrades pull him down. "Make it eleven o'clock," they say. He drinks fast in the last hour, and is then so exhilarated that he probably conveys a supply of beer home. On Sunday morning he feels muddled, heavy, a little troubled with nausea; his mates hail him joyously, and then the company wait with anxiety until the public-houses are open; then the dry throats are eased and the low spirits raised, and the game goes on till ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Turkey is muddled and murky, But the course she's resolved to pursue Is true to her mind, which we constantly find A l'Enver(s) et ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... the Bar, and a man must have drunk himself mad drunk indeed if he thought he could contest a point with her. Being known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson, some water-side heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest, harboured muddled notions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she was named after, or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster. But, Abbey was only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had been ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... aristocrat, who, while he was less than their equal in many things, had risen above them in fortune. He had reached that period of drunkenness, and it took a vast quantity of stout liquor to bring him up to it, where his voice began to grow hoarse, his ready tongue to trip, his brain to be most completely muddled, and his legs to be most unreliable instruments of locomotion. The men about the table nodded and winked to each other, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... little mixed; understood that Session summoned to decide whether, in view of certain proceedings before Mr. Justice BUTT, PARNELL should be permitted to retain Leadership. Everything been discussed but that. Things got so muddled up, that O'KEEFE, walking about, bowed with anxious thought, not quite certain whether it is TIM HEALY, SEXTON, or JUSTIN McCARTHY, who was involved in recent Divorce suit. Certainly, it couldn't have been PARNELL, who to-day suggests that the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... invited her confidence by a few perfectly chosen expressions of comprehension and sympathy. The acuteness and activity of his mental processes delighted her while he questioned her. After the slovenly methods of Madame, after the loose reasoning and the muddled thinking of all the women she met in the course of her work, there was a positive pleasure in following the exactness and inflexibility of his logic. His reasoning was orderly, neat, elastic, without loose ends or tangled skeins to unravel, and she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... loophole for lots of our lessons," remarked Raymonde hopefully, as she personally conducted a party of new arrivals over the establishment. "For instance, if I get muddled over circulating decimals, I'll explain that my brains fall naturally into a mediaeval groove in these surroundings, and decimals weren't invented then, so that of course it's impossible for me to grasp them; and the same with geography—the map of ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... that now they had slipped out of a corps where they had seemed indispensable, it would be better for them to remain undiscovered. She had, in fact, decided to withdraw from the fight. When visiting, the Adjutant stumbled upon them, muddled and tired, as they sat amongst their packing cases. Her radiant face and gracious spirit soon drew out of the little woman the confession she had meant to hide. 'When I came in,' says the husband, 'there ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... day; the frozen ground was slippery as an icepond. She had not been out of the house for weeks past, and the day had so flurried her that she felt muddled and stupid—felt that Rosa had pushed her out of the house and her man was running ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... and then the Stoics, who tried to reconcile it with popular theological ideas, just as was done by the Christian Fathers. In the Middle Ages it was entirely lost under the theological theories of the time; but reappeared with Spinoza, who, however, muddled it up with a lot of metaphysics ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... now," she added, sitting up. "I thought it all out while I was sleeping. Isn't it funny that one can think a thing out in one's sleep? And it's so very clear now—as clear as crystal—and it was so dark and muddled before. Will they give me ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... gone," said Caron, "it is to be hoped that the King's head will no longer be so muddled about these things. I wish it with ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... works at the end of the month, for on the previous day he had spoken to Seguin, and had found him quite willing to sell the little pavilion and some fifty acres around it on very easy terms. As Mathieu had imagined, Seguin's affairs were in a very muddled state, for he had lost large sums at the gaming table and spent money recklessly on women, leading indeed a most disastrous life since trouble had arisen in his home. And so he welcomed the transaction which Mathieu proposed to him, in the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... somehow a muddled world in which one of her conceivable joys, at this time of day, would be to marry Mr. Pitman—to say nothing of a state of things in which this gentleman's own fancy could invest such a union with rapture. ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... warns me to leave off.—With a muddled sense of gratefulness, which I shall apprehend more clearly to-morrow, I remain, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Helles to put shape and form into the 53rd Division. Peyton's men are to be attached to the Irish Division. There is a new spirit of energy and hope in the higher ranks but the men have meanwhile been aimlessly marched and counter-marched, muddled, and knocked about so that their spirit ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... would seem to require that Lady Wardrop should have been hopelessly muddled by the Wilsthorpe maze. Nothing of that kind happened: yet it is to be doubted whether she got all the enjoyment from her new specimen that she expected. She was interested—keenly interested—to be sure, ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... to prevent us from recognizing that irresistible tendency to expansion. The "will to power" is the essence of the State. "The State is power" (Der Staat ist Macht) must ever be the first axiom of political science. Muddled political thinkers, who confuse the spiritual with the temporal activities of man, may hold that the end of the State is social justice, or the diffusion of light, or the propagation of religion, or the advancement of humanity. But the cause of justice, the spread of education, will ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... boisterously drunk or sullen and scowling-faced. In the latter case, he would come into the office where Denison worked (he had left the schooner of which he was supercargo, and was now "overseering" Solo-Solo) and try to grasp the muddled condition of his financial affairs. Then, with much variegated language, he would stride away, cursing the servants and the place and everything in general, mount his horse, and ride off again to the society of the loafers, gamblers, and flaunting ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... up, old man, it's twelve o'clock. You can't sleep here, you know. Say! ain't you got no sentiment? Lift up your muddled head; Have a drink to the glad New Year, a drop before you go— You darned old dirty hobo ... My God! Here, ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... false and therefore dangerous thought; but I admit it is magnificently expressed. A much more sensible and profound view of childhood is given by Browning at the end of A Soul's Tragedy; but unfortunately it is expressed in Browning's usual turbid and muddled way, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... how dim to make the lights, and how to efface himself, and let you wait on your 'lady' with your own hands. And she'll go home wearing a ring of yours—two, if you have them; and you'll wake up at noon next day, and think what a jolly time you had, but with your head so muddled that you can't remember where it was you were to meet her the next night, or whether it was the next night that her husband was to be home, and she couldn't see you at all." Overton rolled over on his face and grunted disdainfully, saying: "That's about the style of thing you call ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... St. Ange swore with a guileless eloquence quite outside the sphere of wickedness. The matter was in them. It must, of course, come out. So Billy swore now with only an occasional hitch where his indignation muddled pronunciation. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Agreed! We have to make another system or perish amidst the wreckage. I see that clearly. Science and plan have to replace custom and tradition in human affairs. Soon. Very soon. Granted. Granted. We used to say all that. Even before the war. Now we mean it. We've muddled about in the old ways overlong. Some new sort of world, planned and scientific, has to be got going. Civilization renewed. Rebuilding civilization—while the premises are still occupied and busy. It's an immense enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some ways it's an enormously attractive ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... for the way in which the doctor was treating the girls, so he trotted backwards and forwards for another hour, bringing in wood, stoking the stove, making kettles boil, fetching water from a crazy old pump in the next garden, falling over the tangled vegetation en route, and getting hopelessly muddled in the darkness. Then he suddenly became so sleepy that it seemed to him he would snore as he walked about; his feet became heavier and heavier, until the effort to lift them grew beyond his power. He could ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... wuz Flannigan; Boss of the siction wuz Finnigin; Whiniver the kyars got offen the thrack An' muddled up things t' th' divil an' back, Finnigin writ it to Flannigan, Afther the wrick wuz all on agin. That is, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... travelling about here and there in search of pleasure." "But," objected Giton, "they are the very ones we are most anxious to avoid," whereupon he explained to the astonished Eumolpus the reasons for their enmity and for the danger which threatened us. So muddled did he become, at what had been told him, that he lost the power of thinking, and requested each of us to offer his own opinion. "Just imagine," said he, "that we are trapped in the Cyclops' cave: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Rarely had I enjoyed such a sight since my arrival in the Old World. In Germany I had seen a few cases of stupefaction arising from overdoses of beer; in France the red nose of the bon vivant is not uncommon; in England some muddled heads are to be found; and in Scotland there are temperance societies enough to give rise to the suspicion that there is a cause for them; but, generally speaking, the sight of an intoxicated man is somewhat rare in the principal cities of the Continent. It will, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... particular part of the line the situation was, to say the least of it, a little muddled. The cavalry did not seem to be altogether at home in their new role. Their trenches seemed too small and detached. The front was covered with copses, which were continually changing hands. The whole line seemed to be dangerously weak, and the facilities for communication ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... shocked to find how easily I am muddled, for I had before thought over the subject much, and concluded my way was fair. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the peerage with the title of Earl of Yarmouth. But they were busy people in the troublesome times of the Roses, and they obtained a good deal of property, partly by the death of Sir John Fastolf, noted in the French wars and muddled by posterity (there seems to have been no real resemblance between them except an accusation of cowardice, probably false in both cases, and an imperfectly anagrammatised relation of names) with Shakespeare's "Falstaff." But they produced, received, and kept a great ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... worked this out already from the muddled and blotted entries! Do you think you've ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... by long practice in very various politics a way of making existing arrangements "do" with some slight patching. They are instinctively seized of the truth of Edmund Burke's maxim, "Innovation is not improvement." They have "muddled along" into precisely the institutions that suit any exigency, their sanest political philosophers recognizing that the exigency must always be most amenable to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "it's up to you now. I'm awfully sorry I muddled it, but you'll make it good. I know you will—you must. I shall weep ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... if she had not spoken, "Van Kuyp is your typical countryman. He has studied in Germany. He has muddled his brain with the music of a dozen different nations; if he had had any individuality it would have been submerged. His memory has killed his imagination. He borrows his inspiration from the poets, from Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, Richard Strauss. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... more truly infect) religion in this free land? I have had many of these attacking me by word or letter on the excuse of my books. Who, if he once weakly gives way to their urgent advice to "search and see for himself," will not soon be addled and muddled by all sorts of sophistical and controversial botherations, if even he is not tempted to accept—for lucre if not godliness—the office of bishop, or apostle, or prophet, or anything else too freely offered by zealots to new converts, if of notoriety enough to exalt or enrich ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... landmark in their curious wedded life, passed tranquil though muddled days in his room at the Hotel Godet. A gleam of sunlight on the glazed hat of an omnibus driver, the stick of the whip and the horse's ear, as he was coming home one day on the imperiale, put him on the track of a new sighting apparatus for a field gun which he ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing. We believed it, yet could not believe it.... I came out of a muddled stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt were torn open, and Sanderson's hand lay on ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... the saddle. Battles whose red desperation have made the world's historic combats look small, have within a year taught all men that the art of war requires as much original thinking as it did when the Corsican overwhelmed the muddled military minds of Europe, weakened and palsied by the belief that nothing more was to be learned ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... returned at night, with my brain somewhat muddled by the effects of a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of oriental perfume tickled delicately my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the natron, the bitumen, and the myrrh in which the paraschites who embalmed the dead had bathed the body of the Princess; it was a delicate, ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... you have muddled everything until you can't see your way out; so that you are ready ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... much in the books. Indeed, I am acquainted with scarcely any writer on ornithology whose head is not muddled on the subject of our three prevailing song-thrushes, confounding either their figures or their songs. A writer in the "Atlantic" [Footnote: For December, 1853] gravely tells us the wood thrush is sometimes called the hermit, and then, after describing the song of the hermit with great beauty ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... known him to jest, or his father before him, went out in a muddled frame of mind, leaving Doggie to struggle into his dress trousers as ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... that this seemed indeed "the life." Set apart from mirk and worry and the inci- dence of strife; And we trimmed our Kitchen Eden, swapping vegetable lore, Whi1e the whole demented world beside was muddled up ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... muddled state the fellow appeared to possess a sense of direction, for the boy soon found that he had come upon a narrow path leading along the cliff at a ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... she would perhaps be muddled and not take it all in exactly, but I knew, too, that she would grasp the gist of it, very well indeed. And so, indeed, she did. She turned white as a handkerchief, tried to say something, and her lips worked painfully; but she sank on a chair as though ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky |
