"Clutter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a little unusual clutter in the big, hot, clean kitchen; Lydia was making sandwiches for the Girls' Sodality Christmas Tree at the large table. Two or three empty cardboard boxes stood waiting the neatly trimmed and pressed bread: Lydia did this sort of thing perfectly. At ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... a restful pause in the bustle of Bishopsgate Street, still stands—the worse, to be sure, for the clutter of little shops that has been built in front of it, and for incongruous interior renovation—and I am very grateful to Purchas for having preserved the scrap of information that links Hudson's living ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... held fast the clutter of sheds and old stables roofed with dirt and rotting hay. The melancholy of emptiness hung like an invisible curtain before the sprawling house with warped, weather-blackened shingles, and sagging window-frames. You felt the silence when first you sighted the ranch buildings ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... he asked as I sat down and began to wonder how he ever conducted his work in the choatic clutter of stuff on the top ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... text, except for two instances (probably typographical errors) on page 186 (3-1/2d. per pound) and page 206 (12s. per ton). In the plaintext version of this transcription, italic markup has not been added to Sterling currency units in order to reduce clutter and enhance readability. ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... a fair. I immediately called our people out, and showed them the object of terror which I had seen, and, without any further consultation, fired a full volley among them, most of our pieces being loaded with two or three slugs or bullets apiece. It made a horrible clutter among them, and in general they all took to their heels, only that we could observe that some walked off with more gravity and majesty than others, being not so much frighted at the noise and fire; and we could perceive that some were left upon the ground struggling as for life, but we durst ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... fam'ly the sort o' stuff that's nourishin'. Not just somethin' to eat, but food. I don't believe their stummicks realize they belong to poor folks. I'm not envyin' the rich, mind you. Dear no! I wouldn't be hired to clutter up my insides with the messes I see goin' up to the tables of some I work for. Cocktails, an' entrys, an' foody-de-gra-gra, an' suchlike. No! I believe in reel, straight nourishment. The things that builds up your bones, an' gives you red ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... It clutter'd here, it chuckled there; It stirr'd the old wife's mettle: She shifted in her elbow-chair, And hurl'd ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... She had almost forgotten the Russian baroness. Now with a start of fresh interest she thought of the portrait and wondered where it was,—the masterful picture of the one who had ruined her happiness. She looked through the clutter again, thinking that it was probably with the Russian wherever she was. But the portrait was there with the rest, wrapped carefully in ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... then she stuck her head through the kitchen door and announced that she was leaving. "Don't burn the whole place up, Maida," she cautioned with a laugh as she caught sight of her sitting, humped forward in a kitchen chair, fat elbows resting on a table, placidly viewing a vast clutter of dishes that had not ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... father kept bachelor's hall, with a veteran woods cook to tend and do for them. The male cook was Ward's idea. The young man had lived much in the woods, and the ways of women about the house annoyed him; a bit of clutter was ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... buy articles of attire far in advance even of their high wages. Shops festooned with furs of every description, where coats costing ten, twenty, and even thirty and more guineas, were frequently bought; shops whose windows were a clutter of tissue-like crepe-de-chine underclothes and blouses; boot-clubs and jewelry-clubs, these last, garish establishments, secure in the glamour of irresistible imitations—all have urged to extravagance and a ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... talked of water-lilies And lotus pink and white— We didn't dare to say a word But we wished with all our might, For how could we manoeuvre The submarine we've got, If they go and clutter up the place With all that ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... not a person," she replied; adding with a whimsical twinkle, "they're all like the dishes, Aunt Ellen,—bound to accumulate crumbs and scraps, and do nothing but clutter up." ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... side to side with a vaguely worried feeling that it must take a power of dusting and wiping to keep such a clutter of things clean; and this feeling gradually rose into her consciousness above the dull stupefaction of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... Miss Sally, "so it's no use wasting talk on it. One's all I want. Another one wouldn't be no good but to clutter ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... behind the hearth, while I lit a pipe and lay down on the bench for a while, listening to the dead soughing of the trees. There was a slight breeze bearing down towards the hut, and I could hear quite clearly the clutter of a grouse far away on the ridge behind. Save ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... dust four or five small volumes of M. Guy de Maupassant's stories, "Robinson Crusoe," "Sappho," "Mr. Barnes of New York," a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, "The Arabian Nights' Entertainment," "Studies of the Human Form Divine," "The Little Minister," and a clutter of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that crispness one finds in such articles upon a doctor's ante-room table. Upon the wall, above the sideboard, was an old framed lithograph of Miss Della Fox in "Wang"; over the bookshelves there ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... a kind of adhesion or tenacity, as in cleave, clay, cling, climb, clamber, clammy, clasp, to clasp, to clip, to clinch, cloak, clog, close, to close, a clod, a clot, as a clot of blood, clouted cream, a clutter, a cluster. ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... at the noise of a bagpipe?" "What's that to you?" quoth Peg. "Everybody's to choose their own music." Then Peg had taken a fancy not to say her Paternoster, which made people imagine strange things of her. Of the three brothers that have made such a clutter in the world—Lord Peter, Martin, and Jack—Jack had of late been her inclinations. Lord Peter she detested, nor did Martin stand much better in her good graces; but Jack had found the way to her heart. I have often admired what charms she discovered in that awkward ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... Recklow got up and went to the door in the wall as they dismounted. After a short, whispered consultation they guided their machines into the garden, through a paved alley to a tiled shed. Then they went on duty, one taking the telephone in Recklow's private office, the other busying himself with the clutter of maps and papers. And Recklow went back to the door in the wall. About eleven an American motor ambulance drove up. A nurse carrying her luggage got out, and Recklow ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... dead King Helgi, Ere thou castest Thy blood-clutter'd mail-shirt. Bloody the dew On thy dauntless body, Heavy the rime On thy raven love-locks; Cold are thy hands, Helgi, my king's son, How shall I loose ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... if to listen, but to do the contrary was his fixed purpose, even though the pianist, at last appreciated, put into his playing so much feeling and force. Gerald's eyes went wandering among the clutter of bric-a-brac, from a green bronze lizard to a mosaic picture of Roman peasants, from a leaning tower of Pisa to a Sorrento box. Then they rose to the paintings. He ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... a rickshaw to the river. He picked out the Hankow among the clutter of shipping, anchored not far from shore, and out of reach of the swift current which rushed dangerously down midchannel. Black smoke issued from her single chubby funnel. Blue-coated coolies sped to and fro on her single narrow deck. Bobbie MacLaurin leaned far out across the rail ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... system of all evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of the absolute shows itself. For we do not like qualifying adverbs. [Footnote: Cf. Freud's discussion of absolutism in dreams, Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VI, especially pp. 288, et seq.] They clutter up sentences, and interfere with irresistible feeling. We prefer most to more, least to less, we dislike the words rather, perhaps, if, or, but, toward, not quite, almost, temporarily, partly. Yet nearly every opinion about public affairs needs to be ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... presents are all gathered. Its pop-corn gets stale. The cranberries smell. It looks scragglier and scragglier. It gets brittle. Its needles begin to fall. Pretty soon it's nothing but a clutter. It must be dreadful to start as a Christmas tree and end by being nothing but a clutter. ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... scooped out of depressions in the rock, and started on. Knowing the trail at this point, he rode straight out along the platform, and came in half a minute to the spot where the wall of rock was broken down into a clutter of debris, in width some forty feet. Up through this litter of disintegrated granite the trail lurched with many twists and turns, and emerged at last upon one of the lower levels ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... defense. A monstrous defense. Since there are always two sides to everything. Yes, what is the other side? His honor would like to know. Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... to pick my way through the clutter of men lying, some still as death, some writhing and gurgling horrid sounds. I had got about eight feet when across the hideous noises broke a laugh like a pleased kid. I whirled. He'd lifted his big shoulders up from the straw and was laughing after me from under those thick black lashes; ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... because it faced north, and warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there. The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray walls, and the six or seven photographs ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... heard them say, though, They found a way to put a stop to it. He was before my time—I never saw him; But the pen stayed exactly as it was There in the upper chamber in the ell, A sort of catch-all full of attic clutter. I often think of the smooth hickory bars. It got so I would say—you know, half fooling— "It's time I took my turn upstairs in jail"— Just as you will till it becomes a habit. No wonder I was glad to get away. Mind you, I waited till Len said the word. I didn't ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... sport. To most of them, short pilgrimages are as tame as rabbits would be to the hunter of lions. They will walk from Bombay to Benares, from Madras to Llassa, begging and bragging all the way. Eventually they become semi-holy, distinguished citizens in a clutter of mud huts. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... It's one of those things you can't get out of without getting out of town too. Here we've been and gone and skimped our own children to buy something that would show up good in Mrs. Budlong's back parlor, and when I laid eyes on it in all that clutter—why, if it didn't look like something the cat ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... look. The strangeness continued to bother her and she realized that there were no ash trays; there was none of the usual clutter of things that a family drops in their tracks. It was a room fashioned for a small person to live in but it ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... through the "kitchen" first, and there the clutter of empty pots and pans told their own story. From the dining-room the others caught sight of the tardy pair and a wild hubbub ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... hurt you to come in," she said; "but it won't do you much good; the place is all in a clutter, and it always is. Come along in, if you want to! and shut the door; 'tain't so warm here you'll need the wind in to help you. Want the children, did you say? what do you ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... fits, and snatch'd away in Rage; And sure that Livery which I give my Slaves I may take from 'em when my Portsmouth raves. Thou art a Creature of my own Creation; Then swallow this without Capitulation. If you with feigned Wrongs still keep a Clutter, And make the People for your Sake to mutter, For my own Comfort, but your Trouble, know, G———fish, I'll send ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... the house of God! And too often the church is planned so that it has no privacies or recesses, but a hideous publicity pervades its every part. We adorn it with stenciled frescoes of the same patterns which we see in hotel lobbies and clubs; we hang up maps behind the reading desk; we clutter up its ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Is down, and all opposed things flow together Into a vast monotony, where night And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life, Are synonyms. What now—what now to me Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers That clutter up the world? You were my song! Now, let discord scream! You were my flower! Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not Plant things above your grave—(the common balm Of the conventional woe for its own wound!) ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... gray lockers, past the confusion of chairs and easels that clustered around the big screen of the composition room, straight into the farthest nook of the great bare work rooms beyond, where an array of heroic-sized white casts loomed conspicuous in the cold north light above the clutter of easels, stools and drawing-boards that encompassed ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... being something disturbed with the clutter of bringing the poor gentleman into the house, as above, were first angry and very high with the master of the house for suffering such a fellow, as they called him, to be brought out of the grave into their house; but being answered that the man was a neighbor, and that he was sound, but ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... magazines, congregated themselves as if by magic. To work in such confusion seemed hopeless, but Page eluded the congestion by the simple expedient of moving on. He would light a fresh cigar, give the editorial chair a hitch, and begin his work in front of a fresh expanse of table, with no clutter of the past to disturb the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... fer a body to keep yer yungins to hum even ef it does clutter up the house to hev their fun. Alfurd's mos' crazy 'bout bein' a circus clown an' ye'd die laffin' to see the little cuss cuttin' didoes. I'd rather see him doin' it than hev him trapesin' ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Miki gave up his idea of exploration and joined him. They reached the shelf of the dip twenty yards from the carcass of the bull, and from a clutter of big stones looked forth upon their meat. In that moment they stood dumb and paralyzed. Two gigantic owls were tearing at the carcass. To Miki and Neewa these were the monsters of the black forest ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Pictures. It may be admitted at once that these lists, however inadequate they must be, and however unsatisfactory in themselves, may have a humble utility of their own as a first aid to the ignorant. At least, they may serve to remind a man lost in a maze amid the clatter and the clutter of our own time, that after all this century of ours is the heir of the ages, and that it is for us to profit by the best that the past has bequeathed to us. Even the most expertly selected list could do little more ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... original text, the entire Table of Contents was printed in italic typeface. For the plaintext version of this ebook, in order to reduce clutter, the standard markup for italics has not been used for text in ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... going on just the same. Her eyes were bright, and wide, and hot. Suddenly she became conscious of the musical antics of her finger. She folded it in with its mates, so that her hand became a fist. She stood up and stared down at the clutter of the breakfast table. The egg—that fateful second egg—had congealed to a mottled mess of yellow and white. The spoon lay on the cloth. His coffee, only half consumed, showed tan with a cold grey film over it. A slice ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... day. They turned to their heavy, hard-smiting swords. Each of them fell to strike and to hew, to lay low and cut down, to slay and undo [3]his fellow,[3] till as large as the head of a month-old child was each lump and each cut, [4]each clutter and each clot of gore[4] that each of them took from the shoulders and thighs and shoulder-blades of ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... Cabell and the popular romancers who in all ages clutter the scene and for whom he has nothing but amused contempt is that they are unconscious dupes of the demiurge whereas he, aware of its ways and its devices, employs it almost as if it were some hippogriff bridled by him in Elysian pastures and respectfully entertained in a snug Virginian stable. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren |
