"Flounder" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ellen," said Tom, "and that it is our duty to help in the entertainment of the company; but, for my part, I throw myself upon your mercy. I wouldn't, for the world, hint that we are more solid than the girls, but 'tis very certain that we are more lumbering. If I were to begin a tale, I'd flounder through it, like a whale with a harpoon in its body; while any of the girls, even down to little Anna, would glide along, like a graceful, snow-white swan upon a silver lake—happy in her element, and giving pleasure to all ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... meat now more than when he had only himself to think of. But it would not do to fire his rifle there. So he broke off a cedar branch and threw it. He crippled the rabbit, which started to flounder up the slope. Venters did not wish to lose the meat, and he never allowed crippled game to escape, to die lingeringly in some covert. So after a careful glance below, and back toward the canyon, he began to chase ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... He didn't want to flounder through an emotional morass, you see. A firm smooth-bearing surface, that was what, for every-day use, he wanted her to provide him with; lightly given, casual caresses that could be accepted with a smile, pleasantness, a confident security that she wouldn't be "tragic." And on ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... up his mind whether to follow or no. For 'twas near day now, an' his face plain at that distance. Fearin' he'd come on again, I pulled hot foot the few steps between me an' home. But when I came to the door, I went cold as a flounder. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lengths of the horse; then "turn square to the right" and go two lengths; and finally "strike for the shore, slanting a little down the stream." Luckily, I had some one with me more expert in fords than I was, and through his friendly guidance managed to flounder through. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... vessel to the ocean, And these words the hero utters: "Like a bubble swim these waters, Like a flower ride the billows; Loan me of thy magic feathers, Three, O eagle, four, O raven, For protection to my vessel, Lest it flounder in the ocean!" Now the sailor, Lemminkainen, Seats himself upon the bottom Of the vessel he has builded, Hastens on his journey homeward, Head depressed and evil-humored, Cap awry upon his forehead, Mind dejected, heavy-hearted, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... nor her stall were to be seen. I looked over the balustrade upon the river; the tide was now, as before, rolling beneath the arch with frightful impetuosity. As I gazed upon the eddies of the whirlpool, I thought within myself how soon human life would become extinct there; a plunge, a convulsive flounder, and all would be over. When I last stood over that abyss I had felt a kind of impulse—a fascination: I had resisted it—I did not plunge into it. At present I felt a kind of impulse to plunge; but the impulse was of a different kind; it proceeded from a loathing ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... some Mendelian experiments myself, not always with results in agreement with the strict Mendelian doctrine, so that I am not venturing to criticise without experience. I have not hesitated to reprint the figure, published many years ago, of a Flounder showing the production of pigment under the influence of light, because I thought it was desirable that the reader should have before him this figure and those of an example of mutation in the Turbot for comparison when following the ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... Violette had no cause to fear! Amedee received his degree on the same day with his friend Maurice, and both passed honorably. A little old man with a head like a baboon—the scientific examiner—tried to make Amedee flounder on the subject of nitrogen, but he passed all the same. One ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... that whatever is deeply thought is well written. And one might add that whatever is deeply observed is well said. The artist in design is by the very nature of his work compelled to observe deeply, precisely, beautifully. He is never able to revolve in a vacuum, or flounder in a morass, or run after a mirage. When there is nothing there he is still. He is held by his art to Nature. So, when he takes up his pen, by training, by acquired instinct, he still follows with the new instrument, deeply, precisely, beautifully, ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... back gently and signed him to a seat. "I trust not," she said, answering his citation; "but I think the flame through which Beatrice walked must have been less contaminating than this morass in which I flounder." ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... boys come around him, and eye his motions, and make pitying or impertinent remarks at his ill-luck—the old man answers not, but fishes on imperturbably. Anon, he gathers up his clams or worms, and his one sun-baked flounder—you think he is going home—but no, he is merely going to another corner of the wharf, where he throws his line under a vessel's counter, and fishes on with the same deathlike patience as before. He seems not quiet so much as torpid,—not ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... come down. More fool than he rose! To create Preternatural Suspicion, this was his function in the Revolutionary Epos. But now if he have lost his cornucopia of ready-money, what else had he to lose? In thick darkness, inward and outward, he must welter and flounder on, in that piteous death-element, the hapless man. Once, or even twice, we shall still behold him emerged; struggling out of the thick death-element: in vain. For one moment, it is the last moment, he starts aloft, or is flung aloft, even into clearness ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... perspective of which is so desolating to heart and eye; backwards or forwards, it is always the same, with a flat sameness of outlook to right and left, and every 450 seconds the chime would boom and flounder heavily by, with a dozen sharp railway whistles after it, like swordfish after a whale, piercing it ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... make it pass through the hands; but by using two silver plates fastened by small wires to the extremity of the principal wire used, and introducing the tongue between those plates, I succeeded in obtaining powerful shocks upon the tongue and gums, and could easily convulse a flounder, an eel, or a frog. None of these effects could be obtained directly from the electromotor, i.e. when the tongue, frog, or fish was in a similar, and therefore comparative manner, interposed in the course of the communication ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... upon which Michael's Place and Brompton Crescent are built was known by the name of "Flounder Field," from its usual moist and muddy state. This field contained fourteen acres, and is said to have been part of the estate of Alderman Henry Smith, which in this neighbourhood was upwards of eighty-four acres. He was a native of Wandsworth, where he is buried. It has been ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... the existing stock of fish for culinary purposes received, if we may trust the vocabularies, a few accessions; as, for instance, the bream, the skate, the flounder, and the bake. ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... they followed, The gasping cod swallow'd— 'Twas wonderful, really; And turbot and flounder, 'Mid fish that were rounder, ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... also needful to drag the canoe out, flounder amidst boulders or through tangled forest with her contents, and then, hewing a path here and there with the axe, painfully drag her round; but portage after portage was left behind, and they were still fighting their way yard by yard upstream while the rain came down. Seaforth also ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... instances. Many flat fish, as for example the flounder and the skate, are exactly the colour of the gravel or sand on which they habitually rest. Among the marine flower gardens of an Eastern coral reef the fishes present every variety of gorgeous colour, while the river ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... County's "back" is the first of their men to go into action. He brings the ball back deftly and prettily, slipping in and out among his own men, who get beside him as a sort of bodyguard, ready at any moment to carry on the ball. It is ludicrous to see Ricketts and Winter and Callonby flounder about after him. The fellow is like an eel. One moment you have him, the next he's away; now you're sure of him, now he's out of all reach. Ah! Stansfield's got him at last! No he hasn't; but Winter has—No, Winter has lost him; and—just look—he's past all the School ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... the two boys pitched in. There was no lack of ammunition aboard the Seamew, and there seemed to be no lack of porpoises anxious to serve as moving targets. And, indeed, Mart soon found that he need spend no worry over leaving wounded fish to flounder ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... he had a tuneful tongue, Such happy intonation, Wherever he sat down and sung He left a small plantation; Whenever in a lonely grove He set up his forlorn pipes, The gouty oak began to move And flounder into hornpipes." ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... undeveloped but a subject lost? If a relation stops, where's the story? If it doesn't stop, where's the innocence? It seems to me you must choose. It would be very pretty if it were otherwise, but that's how we flounder. Art is our ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... of a little fish, however, called a sand dab—he is a tiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eating purposes he is probably the best fish that swims—better even than the pompano of the Gulf—and when you say that you are saying about all there is to be said for a fish. And the big ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... the flounder, perhaps you may know, Has one side for use and another for show; One side for the public, a delicate brown, And one that is white, which he always keeps ...
— Stevenson Memorial Cook Book • Various
... whom I knew to possess an enviable flow of silver speech, and obtested him, by whatever he deemed holiest, to give me at least an available thought or two to start with, and, once afloat, I would trust to my guardian-angel for enabling me to flounder ashore again, He advised me to begin with some remarks complimentary to the Lord-Mayor, and expressive of the hereditary reverence in which his office was held—at least, my friend thought that there would be no harm ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and I may speak in perfect candour now. I swear to you that, given a man clear-eyed enough to see that a woman by ordinary is nourished much as he is nourished, and is subjected to every bodily infirmity which he endures and frets beneath, I do not often bungle matters. But when a fool begins to flounder about the world, dead-drunk with adoration of an immaculate woman—a monster which, as even the man's own judgment assures him, does not exist and never will exist—why, he becomes as unmanageable as any other maniac when a frenzy ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... to have a care against seeking to hurry myself right out of the flounder class and ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... sole or flounder into four filets. Roll each one up, stuffing with a mixture of sal piquant sauce. Roll around each a thin slice of pork and fasten with a skewer. Stand on end in a baking pan and put a small piece of butter and a slice of lemon on each ...
— Joe Tilden's Recipes for Epicures • Joe Tilden
... distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing, have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when, having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about his chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a halt again, ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... c'est charmant," he cried, going with an immense flounder into the midst of the amused trappers, and slapping those next to him on the back. "Give me veapon, do, mes amis—gun, pistol, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... mile or so too far, I reckon, for Father Slatter to trudge after me, and if he had come, I'd have serven him of the poker, or twain if need be. I guess he should have loved rather to flounder ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... cabin, and swept howling on. But she never in the world would have attended. Not in that emergency! She would not, for anything, have peeped out of the windows, in perfectly proper curiosity, to watch the Bottle River jacks flounder into town. Not she! Pattie Batch was busy. Pattie Batch was so desperately employed that her swift little fingers demanded all the attention that the most alert, the brightest, the very most bewitching gray eyes in the whole wide world could bestow upon anything whatsoever. Christmas ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... been struck with the curious adaptation of nearly all animals to their habitat, for example in the matter of color. The sandy hue of the sole and flounder, the white of the polar bear with its suggestion of Arctic snows, the stripes of the Bengal tiger—as if the actual reeds of its native jungle had nature-printed themselves on its hide;—these, and a hundred others which will occur to every one, are marked instances of adaptation to Environment, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... was committed. As when he wrote poetry the grappling-hooks of rhyme dragged him into statements he had not dreamed of at the start and was afraid of at the finish—so now he stumbled into a proposal he could not clamber out of. He must flounder through. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Salmon. [2] calwar. Salwar, No. 167. R. Holme says, "Calver is a term used to a Flounder when to be boiled in oil, vinegar, and spices and to be kept in it." But in Lancashire Salmon newly taken and immediately dressed is called Calver Salmon: and in Littleton Salar is a young salmon. [3] lewe water. warm. ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... pleasure of seeing how you look as you flounder through the rapids; and then, again, I may pick up a few points as to how not to ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... could not hope to obtain a loan of more than ten cents; a pair of gloves too small for use and a bit of paper that was not a cheque. A second look at this, however, inspired hope. It was about the size of a flounder, ruled in wide lines, and bore in conspicuous characters the words, "Western Union Telegraph Company." Immediately below this interesting legend was much other printed matter, the purport of which was that ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... a second for reflection. As Brooks rushed headlong forward, Charles hurriedly interposed his stick between his legs, and leaving him to flounder, started off ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... too. I saw him as plain as I see you; he ran out afore me, and couldn't stop or look back, as long as I said catekism. He was in his old shape of the sarpent; he was the matter of a yard long, and as thick round as my arm and travelled belly-flounder fashion; when I touched land, he dodged into an eddy, and out of sight in no time. Oh, there is no mistake, I'll take my oath of it; I see him, I did upon my soul. It was the old gentleman hisself; he come there to cool hisself. Oh, it was the ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... matters as the splitting of hard rock and the driving of massive piles into the river-bed, the higher intelligence of the man of intellect had its effect. Gordon smoked his pipe out as he watched Nasmyth flounder into the stream among the other men, pushing a little car loaded with broken rock that apparently ran along a submerged track. Then he strolled ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... me for letting this thing run!" he went on. "Of course it tickles me to death to see Eldridge flounder; but that isn't all. This is the best thing that could happen to them out there! I'm just patriotic enough to wish them more of it. It's good medicine! At last every man jack of them is up against something he's got to decide for himself. The police are useless; the fire department is useless; the ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... stout boy thought he could do the same. Two or three heavy jumps landed him, not among the bulrushes as he had hoped, but in a pool of muddy water where he sank up to his middle with alarming rapidity. Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass and cling there while he endeavored to kick his legs free. He got them out, but struggled in vain to coil them up or to hoist his heavy body upon the very small island in this sea of mud. Down they splashed again, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... Sallie wasn't meant. She really wasn't. She never surely knows the lesson herself, and it was such fun asking her all sorts of questions just to see her flounder round for answers that I used to pretend I wanted to know a lot of things I didn't. But I don't do that now. It was like punching a lame cat to see ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... of Flounder, Piedmont Guinea Hen, Marie Cranberry Jelly Candied Sweet Potatoes Cauliflower Coleslaw Pumpkin Tarts Coffee Cheese ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... an' suvved kettenescrus 'dree the panni. And yeck penned as yuv was a boro mush, an' the waver rakkered ajaw sa yuv was a borodiro mush, and sar pookered sigan ket'nus how lengis were borodirer mushis. Adoi the flounder shelled avree for his meriben "Mandy's the krallis of you sar!" an' he shelled so surrelo he kaired his mui bongo, all o' yeck rikkorus. So to akovo divvus acai he's penned the Krallis o' the Matchis, and rikkers his mui bongo sar o' ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... beach, plunged into the water to prevent delay, and struggled through the thick matted seaweed to the boat. The water was deeper than he expected, and when he came to the boat he needed the aid of the boatmen to climb over the gunwale. Instead of giving him this aid the rascals allowed him to flounder there, and kept looking to the shore, where the constable had by this time appeared with his musket. The moment he showed himself, the three boatmen cried out together, 'We surrender!' and invited him on board; where he instantly took up a hatchet—no doubt provided by the ship for ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... such As find our common nature—overmuch Despised because restricted and unfit To bear the burthen they impose on it— Cling when they would discard it; craving strength To leap from the allotted world, at length They do leap,—flounder on without a term, Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ In unexpanded ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of mind in allegorical pictures. The sense in which it was used by me is plain from the context; at least, it would be plain to any one but a fisher for faults, predisposed to carp at some things, to dab at others, and to flounder in all. But I am possibly in error. It is the female swine, perhaps, that is profaned in the eyes of the Oriental tourist. Men find strange ways of marking their intolerance; and the spirit is certainly strong enough, in Mr. W.'s works, to set up a creature as sacred, in sheer opposition ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... was rather like a narrow flounder—long, tapered, and oval in cross-section—but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth silver-pink ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Virginia coast teemed with many kinds of fish and shellfish which were both edible and palatable. Varieties which the colonists soon learned to eat included sheepshead, shad, sturgeon, herring, sole, white salmon, bass, flounder, pike, bream, perch, rock, and drum, as well as oysters, crabs, and mussels. Seafood was an important source of food for the colonists, and at times, especially during the early years of the settlement, it was the ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... sate, Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate; Then gnaw'd his pen, then dasht it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there, Yet wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair. Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode, and abdicated play; Nonsense precipitate, like running lead, That slipt through cracks and zigzags of the head; All that on Folly Frenzy could beget, Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... of his drawing out and draining dry the sensation he had begun to taste. He would do it, moreover—that would be the refinement of his art—not only without the betraying anxiety of a single question, but just even by seeing her flounder (since she must, in a vagueness deeply disconcerting to her) as to her real effect on him. She was distinctly floundering by the time he had brought her—it had taken ten minutes—down to a consciousness of absurd and twaddling topics, to the reported precarious state, for instance, of the ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... he must have had an ugly fall, but, picked up quickly by the delicate and steady finger of his rider, the good horse found some slight projection of the bank, whereby to make a second spring. After a heavy flounder, however, which must have dismounted any less perfect horseman, he recovered himself well, and before many minutes was ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... taken him up as short and as sharply as that, but he tried not to flounder in her grasp. "I don't think there's anything I've done in any such calculated way as you describe. Everything has come as a sort of indistinguishable part of everything else. Your coming out belonged closely to my having come before you, and ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest for truth. The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar divergences, not to be bridged by ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the paternal ire. "Stewart, I asked you to be candid with me. You're leaving me to flounder around ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... the onyx tub and walls Dazzle the air. I enter then her room And stand against the closed door, do not pry Upon her in the bath. Give her the chance To fly me, fight me standing face to face. I hear her flounder in the water, hear Hands slap and slip with water breast and arms; Hear little sighs and shudders and the roughness Of crash towels on her back, when in a minute She stands with back toward me in the ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... reader will look at the sketch of the brains of the codfish, flounder, and roach, as figured by Spurzheim, he will see in each a very small cerebrum, a larger cerebellum, and still larger middle brain or optic lobes. This is the model on which the human brain is first developed, when in the second month it becomes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... us into the bog and had done fairly well at first, but when he neared us he too sank to his belly and could only flounder about. We were in this predicament when Du-seen and his followers approached the edge of the horrible swamp. I saw that Al-tan was with him and many other Kro-lu warriors. The alliance against Jor the chief had, therefore, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... proved useless. Like a phantom she had slipped away amid the underbrush, leaving him to flounder blindly in the labyrinth. Once she laughed outright, a clear burst of girlish merriment ringing through the silence, and he leaped desperately forward, hoping to intercept her flight. His incautious ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... colony always sails under the lee of its mother. Talk does it all, friend Harris. Talk, talk, talk; a man can talk himself into a fever, or set a ship's company by the ears. He can talk a cherry into a peach, or a flounder into a whale. Now here is the whole of this long coast of America, and all her rivers, and lakes, and brooks, swarming with such treasures as any man might fatten on, and yet his Majesty's servants, who come among us, talk of their turbots, and their sole, and their carp, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... horse with his heel. It backed, and then, growing afraid of the blackness about it, plunged, while Winston for the first time saw that there was a gap in the loosely-laid planking close behind it. Another plunge or flounder, and horse and ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... opening of the era of modern scientific discovery, with all its fruitful new generalizations, the still more highly generalized laws of epistemology and of the spiritual constitution of man might well baffle the physicist and lead his intellect to "flounder.'' It is fundamentally necessary, in order to avoid such floundering, that the "knowledge'' of things sensible should be kept distinct from the "knowledge'' of things spiritual; yet in practice they are constantly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ceaseless search. And Avery Van Brunt, as he talked on and on, felt a nervousness under the dumb gaze. In the midst of his most graphic battle descriptions, he would become suddenly conscious of the black eyes burning into him, and would stumble and flounder till he could catch the gait and go again. Fairfax, hands clasped round knees, pipe out, absorbed, spurred him on when he lagged, and repictured the world he ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... give themselves to philosophy at the outset, like people who leave a land they know, and do not yet descry the land they are sailing to. For by abandoning the common and familiar, before they know and apprehend what is better, they frequently flounder about in the middle and are fain to return. As they say the Roman Sextius, giving up for philosophy all his honours and offices in Rome, being afterwards discontented with philosophy from the difficulties he met with in it at first, very nearly threw himself out of window. Similarly they relate ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Albert. "Because their masters, sometimes, daub on colors with their full palettes and strong brushes, this feeble herd tag after them and flounder around in color and passion in a way that ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... superstition. It is not true that boys can only learn to write their own language correctly by means of Latin prose. Nor is it true that Latin prose supplies the ideal mental discipline. That is only true for the minority of boys who reach the stage at which real Latin prose is written. Most flounder about all their time in the stage of artificial Latin prose, wherein is nothing more than the meticulous application of a set of laboriously acquired grammatical rules—a tolerable training in conscientious application, such as any subject can supply, but nothing more. Yet ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... probation has darkness in it. The all-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be condemn'd before commission. In these things we grope and flounder, and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatch'd from vice (no great compliment to it, by the bye), let us take it. And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... friends, the present Sir Bernard Mallet and his younger brother Stephen Mallet, had set up house. I remember to this day owning to my brother that though I had intended my review of Gulliver's Travels to be epoch-making, it had turned out a horrible fiasco. However, I somehow felt I should only flounder deeper into the quagmire of my own creation if I rewrote the two reviews. Accordingly, they were sent off in the usual way. Knowing my father's experience in such matters, I did not expect to get them back in type for many weeks. As a matter of fact, they ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... sounded as shrill as a dozen clarions, and it carried half-a-mile along the quay. He sprang ashore. "Hi-ya!" It was like the yell of a hundred cannibals, but the Pilot's crew only grinned. "You ze boys. I bringa you ze flounder for tea. Heh?" In one moment the fat fisher was back in the boat, and in another he had scrambled ashore with a number of fish, strung together through the gills. Above the noise of the traffic on the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... to the quantity of fat it contains, fish may be divided into two classes: (a) dry, or lean fish, and (b) oily fish. Cod, haddock, smelt, flounder, perch, bass, brook trout, and pike are dry, or lean fish. Salmon, shad, mackerel, herring, eel, halibut, lake trout, and white fish are oily fish. (This latter group contains from 5 to ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... fixed the pack on his back, then crawled through the snow into the shelter of the fir-woods. As soon as he was out of sight, he arose, recovered the thongs of his larrigans from the futile snare, and made his way back on the trail as fast as he could flounder. That one glance over the edge of his trench had told his trained eye all he needed ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... called for me after the lesson. I told him I could find the way back to the boarding-house alone, but he said he'd consider it a pleasure and privilege to call for me. He has the nicest manners! He never needs to flounder around for the right thing to say, it just slips from his tongue like butter. Aunt Maria always says, "look out for them smooth apple-sass talkers," but I'm sure Mr. Lee is a gentleman and just the right kind for a country girl ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... on the other side, a flounder of slipping hoofs, and the staccato pounding of the gallop broke out again. The chestnut had come down upon the fallen horse or helpless man, and was going on, uncontrollable. Crestwick rushed madly at the hedge, and scrambling ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... horse stumbled, the laden car ran on top of him like a landslip, and, with an abortive flounder, he collapsed beneath it. Once down, he lay, after the manner of his kind, like a dead thing, and the covered car, propped on its shafts, presented its open mouth to the heavens. Even as I sped headlong to the rescue in the wake of Robert and Croppy, I fore-knew ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... eyebrows the secretary knows that I depend upon him to find out who the person is, and the name, if possible. He, therefore, gets the card and shows it to me by some magical twist. Sometimes he manages to whisper the name. Often I fail to grasp either the whisper or the card; then I am lost, and flounder hopelessly about without bearings of any kind, asking leading-questions, cautiously feeling my way, not knowing whether I am talking to a person of great importance or the contrary. When at last my extreme wariness and diplomacy ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... reasoning. As he pins you down to statement of facts and forces you to draw valid conclusions, you feel in a most perplexed frame of mind. Either you find yourself unable to give reasons, or you entangle yourself in contradictions. In short, you flounder about helplessly and feel as though the bottom of your ship of knowledge has dropped out. And when the ordeal is over and you have made a miserable botch of a recitation which you thought you had been perfectly prepared ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... prayer in stock, and at least two purely automatic social speeches of this sort, no man needs to flounder altogether hopelessly for words in any ordinary emergency of life. Thus with no more mental interruption than the two-minute break in time, the Senior Surgeon then resumed ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... it out so funnily that it sounded just like some queer old flounder trying to talk, and we thought he was joking. But he wasn't at all. Sometimes he is very nice and tells us the longest yarns about when he shipped on a whaler, but this time he was busy and the rudder-gudgeons didn't behave right, I think, so he let us do all the talking. We told him a good deal ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... the remainder of the wall cases. These include perch; bream; the john-dory; carp; barbel; salmon; pike; trout; sturgeon; the shark; thornback; lamprey; turbot; plaice; sole; flounder; cod; ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... gun by hand to its waiting horses; also how, when threatened by a hostile patrol, Hilary, Mandeville, Maxime and Charlie had hurried back on foot into the wood and hotly checked the pursuit long enough for their fellows to mount the team, lay a shoulder to every miry wheel and flounder away with the prize. But beyond that keen moment when the four, after their one volley from ambush, had sprung this way and that shouting absurd orders to make-believe men, cheering and firing from behind trees, and (cut off from their horses) ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... on, and a pair of clean white cotton stockings, in this heavenly mood, under the green trees, and beside the still waters, out of which beautiful salmon trouts were sporting and leaping, methought in a moment I fell down in a trance, as flat as a flounder, and I heard a voice visibly saying to me, "Thou shalt have a son; let him be christened Benjamin!" The joy that this vision brought my spirit thrilled through my bones, like the sounds of a blind man grinding "Rule Britannia" out of an organ, and my senses vanished from ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... have been about two o'clock in the morning that I was suddenly conscious of a feeling of suffocation. I tried to call out, but there was something which prevented me from uttering a sound. I struggled to rise, but I could only flounder like a hamstrung horse. I was strapped at the ankles, strapped at the knees, and strapped again at the wrists. Only my eyes were free to move, and there at the foot of my couch, by the light of a Portuguese lamp, whom should I see but the Abbot and ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it," said Frank, "and very good-natured he was to take the monster off my hands; it had already hugged two soldiers and one groom into the shape of a flounder. I tell you what," resumed Frank, after a short pause, "I have a great mind even now to tell my father honestly all ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... twisted gut collar I am reasonably sure; the hook, of course, is what it may be. But I test the tackle all along, and fish down the pool with a large Butcher. It does not take long, with this express speed of water, and, I think rather to my relief, nothing happens. Then I flounder out, sit on a rock, fill a full pipe, and look through my flies. Here is a Wilkinson that brought me a big fish on bonny Tweed last autumn; for auld lang syne I meet the blue-eyed gaffsman's shake of the head with a confident smile, and put up the Kelso fly. I know the hang ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... miralets, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses, jewelfish, trumpetfish, blennies, gray mullet, wrasse, smelt, flying fish, anchovies, sea bream, porgies, garfish, or any of the chief representatives of the order Pleuronecta, such as sole, flounder, plaice, dab, and brill, simply because of the dizzying speed with which the Nautilus hustled through these ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... away into the ditch, collapsed there on his quarters, and recovered himself with the grunt and flounder of a hippopotamus emerging from ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... consists mainly of shell-fish, sea-eggs, for which the women dive with much dexterity, and fish, which they train their dogs to assist them in catching. These dogs are sent into the water at the entrance to a narrow creek or small bay, and they then bark and flounder about and drive the fish before them into shallow water, where ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... for ten. Beautiful, fresh sand-dabs, but an hour or two out of the water, were five cents a pound, while sea bass, fresh cod, mackerel, and similar fish went at the same price. Small fish, or white bait, went by quantity, ten cents securing about half a gallon. Smelt, herring, flounder, sole, all went at equally low prices, and as each buyer secured his allotment he went hurrying off through the mist, as silently as the floating gulls. When these were all supplied the rest of the fish and crabs were taken up to the wharf and put on the counters of the free market, ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... deftly into the Marechal's own Cabinet; sat there, an hour, talking to the Marechal [little admiring the Marechal's talk, as we shall find], still insisting on the incognito,"—to which Broglio, put out in his high paces by this sudden thing, and apt to flounder, as I have heard, was not polite enough to conform altogether. "What shall I do, in this sudden case?" poor Broglio is thinking to himself: "must write to Court; perhaps try to detain—?" Friedrioh's chief thought naturally is, One cannot be away out of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the same writer how both eyes of the flounder get, quite unintentionally, on the same side of the head. The writer makes much of this case (see p. 306), and we are not disposed to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... light fish—that is, cod, cusk, flounder, etc. Skin the fish by starting at the head and drawing down towards the tail; then take out the bones. Cut the fish into pieces about three inches square, and salt and pepper well. Butter such a dish, ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... up and queer him for life. He needs to think right, and we folks here can't teach him that way. Not even Father Jose. There's jest one thing to teach him, and that's Life itself—on his own. If I figger right he'll flounder around. He'll hit snags. He'll get bumped, and, maybe, have some nasty falls. But it's the only way for a boy of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the "dry season," I did not encounter many of the discomforts that beset the African wayfarer in periods of rain and tempest. I was not obliged to flounder through lagoons, or swim against the current of perilous rivers. We met their traces almost every day; and, in many places, the soil was worn into parched ravines or the tracks of dried-up torrents. Whatever affliction I experienced arose from the wasting depression of heat. We did ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... you turn some jagged peak and come on one of those snug coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle. Reefs white as lace fret line the coast. Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways. Gray finback whales flounder in schools. The lazy humpbacks lounge round and round the ships, eyeing the keels curiously. A polar bear is seen on an ice pan. Then the ships come to those lonely harbors north of Newfoundland—Griguet and Quirpon and Ha-Ha-Bay, rock girt, treeless, always windy, desolate, with an eternal ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... said Vavasor respectfully, "that any two persons in the concert-room can be as much unlike each other as that flounder shuddering along the sandy bottom, and that yard of eel sliding through the water like ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... genius or by his good fortune. But what is the chance of success or failure; of obtaining popularity, or of holding it, when achieved? One man goes over the ice, which bears him, and a score who follow flounder in. In fine, Mr. Pendennis's was an exceptional case, and applies to himself only: and I assert solemnly, and will to the last maintain, that it is one thing to write a novel, and another to ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray |
