"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... accurately. And as for Persian statistics, unwise is the man who attaches any importance to them. Much as I would like to quote statistics, I cannot refrain from thinking that no statistics are a hundredfold better than slip-shod, haphazard, inaccurate ones. And this rule I must certainly apply to the export of rice from Ghilan to Europe, principally Russia, during 1900, and will limit myself to ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... Nor are the lessons haphazard dashes at the nearest living thing; on the contrary, they are virtually fundamental, whether with respect to their relation to some of the classified sciences, or with reference to the development of thought and power of expression in the ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 15, February 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... off the unfit and leaving only those who are fairly well adapted to their positions. Something of this sort no doubt takes place to a limited extent; but, so far as it does take place, our methods are denounced as defective and, perhaps, as old-fashioned. 'Haphazard' is a wasteful principle, and should be superseded by intelligent initiative and deliberate preparation. And this indeed is the usual process. One adapts oneself carefully and of set purpose to the conditions of one's life, instead of simply waiting for natural ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... mixture that it is, of rambling narrative, disconnected incident, capricious disquisition, and coarse humour. That, no doubt, was the very manner in which his mind worked; and the essential element of his spirit resides precisely in this haphazard and various looseness. His exceeding coarseness is itself an expression of one of the most fundamental qualities of his mind—its jovial acceptance of the physical facts of life. Another side of the same characteristic ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... can spare you," answered Humphreys. "And I would advise you to go immediately after breakfast, for, as you know, 'it is the early bird that catches the worm.' But how do you propose to set about your quest? Not quite haphazard, I suppose?" ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... stones, or a layer of cut flints. The forearms and the hands were subjected to the same treatment as the head. In many cases no trace of them appears, in others they are deposited by the side of the skull or scattered about haphazard. Other mutilations are frequently met with; the ribs are divided and piled up behind the body, the limbs are disjointed or the body is entirely dismembered, and the fragments arranged upon the ground or enclosed together in ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... to form an accurate idea of William's loquacity and self-conceit should read a few passages, selected haphazard from "The Voice of the Lord upon the waters," a sermon by His Majesty, the Emperor-King, for use in polar voyages. There they will find a strange hotch-potch of all sorts of ideas, religious, political and heathen, all half digested. But the ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... not yet back, and the study was empty; a friendly-looking room, its simple haphazard furniture unified by the rich colour harmonies of Indian carpets and curtains; while a liberal supply of books, unusual for the country, proclaimed it the room of a soldier who found time for ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is nicer ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to give even an approximately complete inventory of the representative places of the Village. I have had to content myself with some dozen or so examples,—recorded almost haphazard, for the most part, but as I believe, more or less typical, take them all in all, of the Village eating place in its varied and ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... proper names tend to be phonetic and haphazard. Eg Pensanz, Pensans, Pensants, Pensance, and Penzance ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... arrive at the same conclusion," pursued my father,—"I with my theory, you with your experience,—that the physic we take must not be chosen haphazard, and that a mistake in the bottle may kill a horse. But when we come to the medicine for the mind, how little do we think of the golden rule which common-sense applies to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... death will not be the haphazard affair that it is under the present anarchic conditions. Men will not be stumbling out of the world at odd moments and for reasons over which they have no control. There will always, of course, be a percentage ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... developed a wise combination of investigation, persuasion, and public education to fight this problem, with the result that on the Potomac conditions have in some ways actually improved during a period of wars and booms and haphazard urban expansion when many other rivers were headed ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... arrange the minor incidents of my story in their proper sequence. I am writing by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which emerge haphazard the figures of boys—boys working, boys eating, boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs and along passages, the whole picture faintly scented with a composite aroma consisting of roast beef, ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... as well as for economy a thorough revision of the executive departments of the Government is necessary. There is no doubt that the present system has grown up at haphazard. It would be difficult for anyone to form a clear idea of the duties assigned to or powers conferred on the various departments, to say who in each department has authority to do certain acts, or is responsible for seeing that ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... other opportunities of playing the great game of war. If that be so, the reader shall decide whether the account shall prolong the tale I have told, or whether the task shall fall to another hand. [It is an excellent instance of the capricious and haphazard manner in which honours and rewards are bestowed in the army, that the operations in the Mamund Valley and throughout Bajaur are commemorated by no distinctive clasp. The losses sustained by the Brigade were indisputably most ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... may not be out of place here. The essential value of antiquities, apart from their purely artistic interest, lies in the circumstances in which they are found. The inexperienced traveller is apt to pick up a number of objects haphazard, without accurately noting their find-spots, and even, getting tired of them, as a child of flowers that he has picked, to discard them a mile or two away. If the first act is a blunder, the second is a crime; it is better to leave them lying in place. For the same reason, it is highly desirable ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... Carlo for choice. Anne's mother"—here the Princess paused, and then went on with an obvious effort—"I know nothing of Anne's mother, Mr. Ware. She died when Anne was a child. Mr. Denham brought up his daughter in a haphazard way." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... each other—as in the novel or the drama. We are like a company of chess-men, not sorted out in kinds, pawns together, kings and queens together, and knights and rooks together, but simply thrown at haphazard into a box, and jumbled side by side. In the stationary societies, where all individuals were permeated by the same political, religious, moral, and social ideas; and where each class had its own hereditary and fixed traditions of action and manners, this cause ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... bound, and bearing poor Jim-Jim with her vanished into the darkness beyond, in the direction of the bathing-place that I have already described. We jumped up perfectly mad with horror and fear, and rushed wildly after her, firing shots at haphazard on the chance that she would be frightened by them into dropping her prey, but nothing could we see, and nothing could we hear. The lioness had vanished into the darkness, taking Jim-Jim with her, and to attempt to follow her till daylight was madness. We should only expose ourselves ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard
... his very best work, and that then his interest and vigour rapidly decline I am disposed to believe that this is true of most occupations, of coal-mining or engineering, or brick-laying or cotton-spinning. The thing has never been properly thought about. Our civilisation has grown up in a haphazard kind of way, and it has been convenient to specialise workers and employ them piecemeal. But if it is true that in respect of any occupation a man has his period of maximum efficiency, then we open up a whole world of new social possibilities. What we really ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse. The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter. The spires of churches, numerous, scattered haphazard, uprose like beacons on a maze of shoals without a channel; the driving rain mingled with the falling dusk of a winter's evening; and the booming of a big clock on a tower, striking the hour, rolled past in voluminous, austere bursts of sound, with ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... you hear him? Was it not poetical of a wounded, fevered boy to beg to be laid by the window, and to say 'Let me drink the moonshine?' Take down your Homer, and read a thousand lines haphazard, and see whether you stumble over a thought more poetical than that. But criticism does not exist: whatever the dead said was good; whatever the living say is little; as if the dead were a race apart, and had never been ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... Modock—"Pickhandle" Modock—had been what is known in railroad-construction circles as a gypo man, or shanty man. A gypo man is an impecunious construction contractor whose light, haphazard outfit of teams and tools makes it necessary for him to subcontract in the lightest dirt work from a slightly better equipped subcontractor, who in turn has taken a subcontract from the main contractors in a big piece of railroad building. In the vernacular of the grade, ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... may seem haphazard. Nevertheless it has system and purpose. The usual method followed in books that aim to be musical guides would have been much easier. Mine I believe best adapted to the needs of the average pianolist, who, it may be assumed, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... English fireplace, about twenty people had arrived, and as many more were expected. A lively chatter had already begun; for each woman had been offered on her arrival a basket from which she had to choose a brightly coloured ribbon. These ribbons matched the rosettes presented in an equally haphazard way to every man. As Vincy observed, it gave one the rather ghastly impression that there was going to be a cotillion at once, on sight, before dinner; which was a little frightening. In reality it was merely so that the partners for the meal should ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... aching clearness of vision she saw what lay before her—the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—she saw it ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... application of the theory of probability renders possible mathematical statement and control of the results. The facts show that any character, size of leaf, length of stem, the number of members in a flower, etc. do not vary haphazard but in a very regular manner. In most cases it is found that there is a value which occurs most commonly, the average or medium value, from which the larger and smaller deviations, the so-called plus and minus variations fall away in a continuous series and ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... governmental bodies to get off the dime and get going—rescue those people, or, cynically, at least make a show of action to quell the flood of telegrams. E.H.Q. resisted the pressures in favor of doing a workmanlike job in preparation for a genuine rescue instead of a haphazard show, but was ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... islanders themselves. Having had little time, and scarcely any opportunity, to become acquainted with the customs he pretends to describe, he writes them down one after another in an off-hand, haphazard style; and were the book thus produced to be translated into the tongue of the people of whom it purports to give the history, it would appear quite as wonderful to them as it does to the American ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... are too everlastingly scientific. Buds and leaves are scattered at haphazard all ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... so, we are well assured that it is so, because all observation and experiment are found to bear out the truth of the principle we have assumed. All we have learned concerning nature excludes the notion that there is anything haphazard or arbitrary in her ways. We do not feel at all as though the action of natural forces might be suspended or modified for our particular benefit, and hence certain ideas of the efficacy of prayer—e.g., ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... created around her. But Doggie was not such a young man. Such passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by training. No tales of immortal love had ever fired his blood. Once, somewhere abroad, the unprincipled McPhail found him reading Manon Lescaut—he had bought a cheap copy haphazard—and taking the delectable volume out of his hands, asked him what he ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... knew the old city fairly well—enough to love it and to loathe it in one breath. He had seen its tragedies and passed them by, or had, in his haphazard way, thrown a greeting to them, or even a glass of native wine. And he knew the musical temperament; the all or nothing of its insistent demands; its heights that are higher than others, its wretchednesses that are hell. Once in the Hofstadt Theater, where ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gloves are bought. I select a pair haphazard, and he pretends to perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of my hand. I make him assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If they split or the fingers are too long—glovemakers have the most erratic ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... no haphazard in this world of ours: Cause and effect are grim, relentless powers. They rule the world. (A king was shot last night. Last night I held ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... preparing, as it is now, to steal another country by fraud and war; yet the stars on the flag always make me happy and confident. Do you see the constellations swinging above us, such unimaginable vastnesses, not roving or crashing through the illimitable at haphazard, but moving in more excellent measure, and to a finer rhythm, than the most delicate clockwork man ever made? The great ocean-lines mark our seas with their paths through the water; the fine brains of the earth are behind the ships that sail from port to port, ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... a little irritated that she should not perceive his mood and exorcise it. But she had not her mother's marvellous susceptibility. She drank her tea in serene silence. He made a few haphazard remarks, hoping to lose in conversation the cloud that threatened his evening; but she only assented tranquilly and watched the changing colors of the ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... people had "as good a right to their ways as city people to theirs." Therefore the threatened invasion did not in the least prevent him from making havoc in the substantial breakfast that Mrs. Atwood and her daughter Susan put on the table in a haphazard manner, taking it from the adjacent stove as fast as it was ready. A stolid-looking hired man sat opposite to Roger, and shovelled in his food with his knife, with a monotonous assiduity that suggested a laborer filling a coal-bin. He seemed oblivious to everything save the breakfast, and with the ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... who, refusing to be bound by the letter of the Thirty-nine Articles, extended his charity even to persons of the Popish faith. In short, he was one of the few to whom Mahony could speak of his own haphazard efforts at ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... marked upon his chart, every mile near shore will have been sounded, and he will know to a foot or two how much water is beneath his keel. But as soon as he ventures up some strange creek or river, paradoxically speaking, "he is at sea." In other words, he would be journeying haphazard, if the ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... there—just to see (in Whitman's words) what I could do to it. Imagine it upon a windy night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out, grumbling, underneath the stars,—coughing invalids, and kicking infants, and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and picking their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices, their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the mysterious gleam ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... at first seemed haphazard enough. Reports from the districts were being read with frequent interruptions, petty corrections and useless discussions that strayed from the point and made me impatient. And yet wide vistas opened here. Telegrams ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... displaying it for some few minutes hauled it down and hoisted another. We thought it would never do to display a total ignorance of the signals; Ryan therefore ordered the signal-bag to be produced, and we strung some flags together haphazard, and hoisted them. This signal the schooner acknowledged, tacking at the same time and standing toward us once more; but we were far too busy to wait for her, for although she had all the looks of a slaver, we knew, from the course she was steering, that she could have ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... send a member to Parliament; while, on the other hand, many places in the south of England which did send members had long ceased to be of any importance. Furthermore, the representation was of the most haphazard description. In one section no one could vote except substantial property holders, in another none but town officers, while in a third every man who had a tenement big enough to boil a pot in, and hence called a ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... nobody. He resembled a man who was secretly carrying a considerable parcel of high explosive. He wandered until he could wander no more, and then he entered a tea-shop that was nearly full of young girls. It was a new world to him. He saw "Mutton pie 8d" on the menu and ordered it haphazard. He discovered to his astonishment that he was hungry. Having eaten the mutton pie, he ordered a second one, and ate it. The second mutton pie seemed to endow the eater with the faculty of vision—a result which ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... was one of wild beauty. It wound up a desolate mountain pass along which great black boulders were scattered haphazard like the mighty toys of a giant. The glittering snow lay all around them, making their nakedness the more apparent. And far, far above, the white crags shone with a dazzling ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... with him, I began to see into the laboratory of life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the camp he paused to take in its disposition. From one detail to another his eye wandered, and in it dawned a growing approval. Your native, left to his own devices, pitches his little tents haphazard here, there, and everywhere, according as his fancy turns to this or that bush, thicket, or clump of grass. Such a camp straggles abominably. But here was no such confusion. Back from the water-hole a hundred yards, atop a slight ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... centrality, they were furnished in a very miscellaneous way. They were not bare, but close inspection revealed that everything was damaged, more or less, and there was absolutely nothing that seemed to have an interest taken in it. His goods were accidents, presents, or the haphazard acquisitions of a pressing need. Nothing, of course, was frowsy, but everything was somewhat dusty, as if belonging to a man who never rebuked a servant. Above all, there was nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to the north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others. The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by stoves. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... new Sir Patrick stretched herself on the ocean bed, she fell with a despairing wail; her gown spread like a pall over the earth, the Highland bonnet came off, and her hair floated over a haphazard ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... rock-strata, the animals and the plants but to the stars, to the chemical elements, and to the laws of nature. There must have been a far-off antiquity, one is then tempted to suppose, when things were really chaotic. Little by little, out of all the haphazard possibilities of that time, a few connected things and habits arose, and the rudiments of regular performance began. Every variation in the way of law and order added itself to this nucleus, which inevitably grew more considerable ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... was built of wood, a board outer-covering over a framework of logs. It was in reality not one house but a cluster of houses joined together in a rather haphazard manner. Inside, the place was full of surprises. One went up steps from the living room into the dining room and there were always steps to be ascended or descended in passing from one room to another. At meal times the place was like a beehive. At one moment all ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... corroborates the young man's story to the extent that the will was drawn up by Jonas Oldacre in his journey yesterday. It is curious—is it not?—that a man should draw up so important a document in so haphazard a fashion. It suggests that he did not think it was going to be of much practical importance. If a man drew up a will which he did not intend ever to be effective, he ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... bulk of the speculators bought lands at haphazard, certain parties who found favour at the government offices managed to secure the best lands which were for sale or location, before they were exposed to fair competition at the periodical public sales in the different districts. Thus a large portion of the wild lands in the colony were ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... philosophical, yet the teachings of Christ are full of philosophy. The language used and the manner of putting the truth were so simple that the ignorant man and the child were never left in doubt as to his meaning. Nevertheless his teaching was not haphazard; it was connected and logical. It contained so much of truth, so systematically put and so much to the point in view, that, while it appealed at once to the understanding of his hearers, it also furnished material for thought ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... character is built by long-continued habits of thought. If the mature edifice of character usually shows in an exaggerated form the peculiarities of the original predisposition, this merely indicates a probability that the slow erection of the edifice has proceeded at haphazard, and that reason has not presided over it. A child may be born with a tendency to bent shoulders. If nothing is done, if on the contrary he becomes a clerk and abhors gymnastics, his shoulders will develop an excessive roundness, entirely through ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... the critic. Without reference, express or implied, to other types of genius or to other ways of treatment it is impossible for criticism to take a single step in definition either of an author, or a movement, or a form of art. In a vague and haphazard fashion, even the Elizabethans were comparative. Meres was so in his endless stream of classical parallels; Sidney, after a loftier strain, in his defence of harmonious prose as a form of poetry. And it is the highest achievement of modern ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... humanity has made a fight for it, and the white, dusty roads struggle with an almost visible effort up the heavy grade of the hill until they attain the summit. The effect is of a terraced and piled-up city, straggling in haphazard fashion up to the point where the great Roman Catholic cathedral, square-hewn and twin-towered, crowns the mass of ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... and Mrs Rendell thrust the half-finished note under her desk, too agitated to complete it. She had shown no signs of surprise to the young man himself, but her heart was beating quickly, and she bundled away her writing materials in a haphazard fashion very unlike her usual methodical ways. Her first thought was for Maud, and most of the ten minutes of Ned's waiting were taken up in interviewing the girl, and deputing to her a dozen little shopping commissions which would keep her ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... little cottages stand behind their glowing flower gardens. Here a long low brick wall edges the road, mellow and lichened; here a double-gabled, weather-tiled building stands next to a patch of old brick painted the newest possible yellow. Somehow the effect is not hideous, and fits with the haphazard, sunlit tiles and whitewash. Chiddingfold is at its best and sleepiest in high summer—a village of weatherworn ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Conrad, that he knew such a man and that thus life passed him leaving those memories. They are the records of the events of his life, not in every instance striking or decisive events but rather those haphazard events which for no definite reason impress themselves upon the mind and recur in memory long afterward as symbols of one knows not what sacred ritual taking place behind ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... much-loved food. Every night our animals were tied up in various directions, but we found them on the following morning utterly disregarded. This neglect on the part of the tigers imposed the necessity of marching in line haphazard for many hours consecutively through all the most likely places to contain a tiger. Many of the islands were at this dry season separated from each other by sandy channels where the contracted stream ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... power; on a career which should at the same time dazzle the imagination and gratify her heart. Notwithstanding the gossip of Paris, founded on no authentic knowledge of her husband's character or information, based on the haphazard observations of the floating multitude, Lucretia herself had no reason to fear that her influence over Lord Monmouth, if exerted, was materially diminished. But satisfied that he had formed no other tie, with her ever the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... money has been subscribed for the benefit of the Armenians. Who knows how much this has cost the givers? yet the distribution of this large sum seems to be conducted on most haphazard lines. An open letter arrived the other day for the Mayor of Tiflis. There is no Mayor of Tiflis, so the letter was brought to Major ——. It said: "Have you received two cheques already sent? We have had no acknowledgment." There seems to be no check on the expenditure, and there is no ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... the fugitive hoped with confidence to have lost himself in a taciturn and apathetic wilderness of peak-broken land where his discovery would be as haphazard an undertaking as the accurate aiming of a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... affair, of colonial pattern, a large yard before it and a larger one behind, the tumble-down shed in which General Jackson had been tethered, a large barn, also rather tumble-down, with henhouses and corncribs beside it and attached to it in haphazard fashion. In the front yard were overgrown clusters of lilac and rose bushes and, behind the barn, was the stubble of a departed garden. Thankful looked at ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to resign all hope of "fineries", and content herself with plain blouses and navy-blue serge skirts that could be lengthened easily. Not that Gwen troubled much about dress at this period of her existence; indeed she was apt to throw on her garments in a haphazard fashion that greatly excited Beatrice's wrath, and would raise a remonstrance even from Winnie. Life was so full of different things, and so many fresh interests and new plans were crowding continually into her ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... hard here," he ventured, as, noticing the damage that the damp grass was doing to his trouser hems, he covered the remaining distance between them in a series of violent haphazard leaps. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Stinky, with a haphazard blow, had given Chook the dreaded knock-out, a jolt beside the chin that, in the expressive phrase, "sent ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by "striking oil," and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No speculation, no commerce; "nothing venture, nothing have," is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... in other respects he seemed a hardy, hardworking youth, of an intellectual type. His hair was thick, short, and flaxen. He possessed neither a sorb nor a third arm—so presumably he was not a native of Ifdawn. His forehead, however, was disfigured by what looked like a haphazard assortment of eyes, eight in number, of different sizes and shapes. They went in pairs, and whenever two were in use, it was indicated by a peculiar shining—the rest remained dull, until their turn came. In addition to the upper ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... and how I hate and almost fear those haphazard walks through unknown streets; and this was the reason why, as nothing would induce me to undertake a tour in Italy by myself, I made up my mind to accompany my ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... is busy for the moment," said a young staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked about the fields and said, "It's very unhealthy here." I agreed with him. The bodies of many young soldiers lay about. Five-point-nines (5.9's) were coming over in a haphazard way. It was no ground for cavalry. But some squadrons of the 10th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, and the Blues were ordered to take Monchy, and rode up the hill in a flurry of snow and were seen by German gunners and slashed by shrapnel. Most of their horses were killed in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... been in progress for some time, and various craters have been blown and sapped out to, and after trench mortars have "strafed" consistently for many months and torn the original surface of the ground to pieces, the actual position of the trenches themselves becomes haphazard. They cease in many cases to bear the slightest likeness to the ordinary trenches of commerce; they become deep gorges in mountains of sandbags. I have sometimes wished that those officers who apparently ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... with affairs through a rather haphazard and shifting assortment of stereotypes, if a comparatively few men in each generation were not constantly engaged in arranging, standardizing, and improving them into logical systems, known as the Laws of Political Economy, the Principles of Politics, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... what he does not see: the landscape that surrounds him, the house which he inhabits and also the dangers that threaten him and the secret passions by which he is stirred. We have surprised it wandering hither and thither, at haphazard, in the future, confounding it with the present and the past, not conscious of where it is but seeing far and wide, knowing perhaps everything but unaware of the importance of what it knows, or as yet incapable of turning it to account or of making ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... as haphazard, as apparently absent-minded and as shrewd in her own house as in the houses of others, greeted Dion with a vague cordiality. Her husband, a robust and very definite giant, with a fan-shaped beard, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... divined that Kria had fallen a victim to her charms, and, as he was younger than Ku-ish, richer, and, moreover, a Malay, a man of a superior race, she was both pleased and flattered. No one who knows what a Sakai's life is, nor of the purely haphazard manner in which they are allowed to grow up, would dream of looking for principle in a Sakai woman, or would expect her to resist a temptation. The idea of right and wrong, as we understand it, never probably occurred to Chep, and all she waited for ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... on with the interested crowd to see these haphazard weddings. It was plain that the marrying of a number of young couples was looked upon as part of the May Day sports. It was a pretty enough sight to see some of the flower-crowned blushing girls in their festal white, led along by their ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... had been written, and he dared not look again at the manuscript, because every time he did so he recognized in the phrases that he had thought to be his own, rags taken from other authors, painfully pieced together haphazard. It was a great sorrow to him. He had ideas sometimes which he thought admirable. He would run tremblingly to his table. Could he keep his inspiration this time? But hardly had he taken pen in hand than he found himself alone ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... use of our going to work in a haphazard fashion," were Mr. Rover's words. "We must first go over the ground carefully and plan out just what is best to do. Otherwise a good portion of our energies will ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... full-berried with tawny fruit, the brethren looked down across a slope dotted with junipers to the view outspread before them. None spoke, for it had been warm work in their habits to climb the burnished grass. It would have been hard to explain the significance of that group, unless it were due to some haphazard achievement of perfect form; yet somehow for Mark that moment was taken from time and placed in eternity, so that whenever afterward in his life he read about the Middle Ages he was able to be ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... all these is carefully designated. There must be frequent drills in manning the boats; the fire hose must be tested to see that it works and is in proper condition; and in thick weather the foghorns must be sounded at regular intervals. There is no such thing now as going to sea in haphazard fashion and trusting to luck. Everything that can be done for the safety of those who travel the ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... and luck, is the quality of troops, that is, the organization that best assures their esprit, their reliability, their confidence, their unity. Troops, in this sense, means soldiers. Soldiers, no matter how well drilled, who are assembled haphazard into companies and battalions will never have, have never had, that entire unity which ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... been generally rejected as unsatisfying. The book, despite its obscurities, is clearly a unity. It is no haphazard collection of love songs. There is a sustained dramatic action leading up to a noble climax. Some passages almost defy the attempt to fit them into a coherent plot, but most moderns detect the following story in Canticles: A beautiful maid of Shulem (perhaps another form ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... fur-trader was conducting was one of the first that ever penetrated these wild regions in search of furs. The ground over which they travelled was quite new to them, and having no guide they just moved about at haphazard, encamping on the margin of every stream or river on which signs of the presence of beaver were discovered, and ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... special natural shape, is this: In crystals the molecules and atoms are all arranged in some orderly manner. In other substances, substances without special form, amorphous substances, as we call them, the molecules are just grouped together in a haphazard way. ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... was not until he had left it behind and had settled in Orange, New Jersey, that he can be said to have given definite shape to his life. He was only forty in 1887, and all that he had done up to that time, tremendous as much of it was, had worn a haphazard, Bohemian air, with all the inconsequential freedom and crudeness somehow attaching to pioneer life. The development of the new laboratory in West Orange, just at the foot of Llewellyn Park, on the Orange Mountains, not only marked the happy beginning ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... anything, Artie. Bragg has some fine soldiers under him—not the least doubt of that. The more I see of this campaign, the more I am convinced that the war will not end until there has been an immense amount of blood shed. We began in a haphazard sort of way, but we are speedily getting ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... of his wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817." It is one of the ironies of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the "shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will. That which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... roused from his reverie, it was to discover that his haphazard course had taken him back toward the heart of Paris; and presently, weary with futile cruising and being in the neighbourhood of the Madeleine, he sought the cab-rank there, silenced his motor, and relapsed into morose reflections ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... fact, that the same word means both these, conveys a piece of practical wisdom, which it will do us all good to note clearly and take to heart. For it teaches us that whatever is 'ordered' is firm, and whatever is disorderly, haphazard, done without the exercise of one's mind on the act, being chaotic, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... throw at haphazard a bomb among the spectators in a theatre, or to kill an individual, is the act of barbarians or of ignorant people. The Socialist Party sees in such deeds the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... who framed his plans in complete disregard of what soil, climate, etc., permit. One of the evils of an abstract or remote external aim in education is that its very inapplicability in practice is likely to react into a haphazard snatching at immediate conditions. A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... mate, the skipper and I, with the Nisan natives, walked up the bank, and in a few minutes the guns were at work. Never before had I seen such thousands of pigeons in so small an area. It could hardly be called sport, for the birds were so thick on the trees that when a native fired at haphazard into the branches the heavy charge of shot would bring them down by the dozen—the remainder would simply fly off to the next tree. Owing to the dense foliage the skipper and I seldom got a shot at them on the wing, and had to slaughter like the natives, consoling ourselves with the ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... myself to alter the order of the different voyages. I have grouped together those voyages which relate to the same parts of the globe, instead of adopting the somewhat haphazard arrangement of the original edition. This, and the indices I have added to each volume, will, I hope, greatly assist the student. The maps, with the exception of the facsimile ones, are modern; on them I have traced the presumed course of the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... Correspondence.—Up to this time the resistance of the colonists had been carried on in a haphazard sort of way. Now Committees of Correspondence began to be appointed. These committees were of two kinds. First there were town Committees of Correspondence. These were invented by Samuel Adams and were first appointed ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... things perceived, a grouping of them to fit in with each other, and with what is already in the mind. And both imply the third—concentration, aided by emotion and will. For passive attention and haphazard associations assure the ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... fire which burned on a large, circular flagstone, the flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod, which was empty for the moment, some wormeaten tables were placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a geometrical turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or to see to it that they did not make too unusual angles. Upon these tables gleamed several dripping pots of wine and beer, and round ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... double-faced kind. Shades should also be kept drawn down to the same line, or else be rolled up out of sight, for there is nothing that gives a more ill-kept look to a house than having the shades and curtains at any haphazard height or angle. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... twenty-three years old. All that he had done so far was haphazard enough. He had trifled with his schooling, loitered over his law, read a great deal at random, seen many theatres, and made many friends. He had escaped from the valley of the shadow, and was now free to go on in the primrose way ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton |
