Clumsy Quotes

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. [...] The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities. ~ H.G. Wells

Today's television sitcoms ... the father is typically depicted as a clumsy buffoon, an inane and even unnecessary appendage. In creating that caricature, producers and directors have done irreparable damage to the God-ordained image of what may be one of the most significant roles and offices in eternity - that of a father, that of a real man. ~ Robert L. Millet

Beyond the clumsy, brute force tools of will, determination and hard work - and free from the heavy attachment of want, and the illusions of burden and blocks, is the true technology of creation through beingness. ~ Bryant McGill

Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits. ~ Michael Connelly

I'm not a purist - I like films that are narrated and films that aren't, films that are beautiful and films that are clumsy but heartfelt. Mostly, I just like a good story and good characters. ~ Marshall Curry

What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals. ~ Temple Grandin

I have these big feelings for you and they make me clumsy. When I couldn't do anything with them, it made me sad. Everything about what I feel for you is new to me. ~ Penny Reid

Because sometimes it's better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound.
Until you are lying in the middle of the sidewalk, with a throbbing ankle and bloody chin, wishing you hadn't even tried. ~ John David Anderson

My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness - what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! ~ D.H. Lawrence

He was a big, rather clumsy man, with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest. I should guess that he was less muscular than at first sight he looked. He had large staring blue eyes and a damp and pendulous lower lip. He didn't look in the least like an intellectual. Creative people of his abundant kind never do, of course, but all the talk of Rutherford looking like a farmer was unperceptive nonsense. His was really the kind of face and physique that often goes with great weight of character and gifts. It could easily have been the soma of a great writer. As he talked to his companions in the streets, his voice was three times as loud as any of theirs, and his accent was bizarre…. It was part of his nature that, stupendous as his work was, he should consider it 10 per cent more so. It was also part of his nature that, quite without acting, he should behave constantly as though he were 10 per cent larger than life. Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world...But there was that mysterious diffidence behind it all. He hated the faintest suspicion of being patronized, even when he was a world figure.

Archbishop Lang was once tactless enough to suggest that he supposed a famous scientist had no time for reading. Rutherford immediately felt that he was being regarded as an ignorant roughneck. He produced a formidable list of his last month's reading. Then, half innocently, half malevol ~ C.P. Snow

In other circumstances, if Jamie hadn't been so miserable, Ryan would have laughed. Jamie rarely got so pissed that he lost the thread of the conversation. "Yes, you are." Cradling Jamie's face, he brushed his lips against Jamie's forehead. "Everything will be fine, you'll see." He kissed Jamie's temple.

Jamie shuddered. "Don't. Not now. I can't - not now."

Frowning, Ryan pulled back to look at his friend.

Jamie was staring at him oddly, his lips parted and curled in half a grimace, his eyes gleaming with desperation. "I - " he said before suddenly lunging forward and closing the distance between their mouths.

For a moment, Ryan's alcohol-fogged brain couldn't understand what was going on.

Jamie was kissing him.

Jamie was kissing him. Or at least trying to, his lips clumsy and awkward but desperate and needy - so needy it was weirding Ryan out. ~ Alessandra Hazard

Are you ready to put the 'fun' in Fall Fun Fest?" he says as I slap his palm.
"I can at least put the 'trip' in 'Triple F.'" A pause. "By being clumsy, I mean. Not by, like, sharing drugs with the group." Three sets of eyes are on me, and I can't stop myself from talking. "I don't have any drugs. In case you were worried. Or, in case you were … expecting me to have drugs.…"
Gideon grins. ~ Emma Mills

Words define us,' Mom continued, as I struggled to make my clumsy marks look like her elegant script. 'We must protect our knowledge and pass it on whenever we can. If we are ever to become a society again, we must teach others how to remain human. ~ Julie Kagawa

Have you been so busy?
that to connect you feel lousy..
Beware before it gets clumsy
and appears to be mumsy
Dont forget to keep in touch
A mere "Hi" doesnt retouch
Please try to maintain
for the bonding to sustain
Missing you badly....... ~ N.N. Hakkapakki

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye. ~ Robert Smithson

He saw her as the passionate spirit of innocent youth, now beleaguered by the trick which is played on youth - the trick of treachery in the body, which turns flesh into green bones. Her stupid finery was not vulgar to him, but touching. The girl was still there, still appealing from behind the breaking barricade of rouge. She had made the brave protest: I will not be vanquished. Under the clumsy coquetry, the undignified clothes, there was the human cry for help. The young eyes were puzzled, saying: It is I, inside here - what have they done to me? I will not submit. Some part of her spirit knew that the powder was making a guy of her, and hated it, and tried to hold her lover with the eyes alone. They said: Don't look at all this. Look at me. I am still here, in the eyes. Look at me, here in the prison, and help me out. Another part said: I am not old, it is illusion. I am beautifully made-up. See, I will perform the movements of youth. I will defy the enormous army of age. ~ T.H. White

I'm, like, super-clumsy and weird and funny and dorky. ~ Shantel VanSanten

Jonathan's arm jerked to the side in clumsy reaction, tipping over the bottle of ink that sat on the desk beside his papers. He watched the dark liquid obliterate in a moment what had cost him an afternoon of painful effort to complete. It was a fitting metaphor for his life, he thought, like the despair that spread inexorably through his being, a creeping blackness that threatened to blot out what small hope or purpose was yet left to him. ~ Sondra Allan Carr

Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed in great variety among Germans. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Old Milgrom pauses to console the girl and tells her she's not the only one who's clumsy, that she herself couldn't do anything when she was young - boil an egg or hem a diaper - and then she learned. Life taught her. ~ Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

When a little child is learning to walk or talk, we encourage him and praise him for every tiny improvement he makes. The child beams and eagerly tries to do better. Is this the way you encourage yourself when you are learning something new? Or do you make it harder to learn because you tell yourself that you are stupid or clumsy or a "failure"? ~ Louise L. Hay

I'm not clumsy; just accident prone. ~ Daniel Radcliffe

The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life. ~ Jean Lucey Pratt

If we were to construct a similar map for society, it would have to include each person's professional and personal interests and chart everyone she or he knew. It would make Milgram's experiment seem clumsy and obsolete by allowing us to find, in seconds, the shortest path to any person in the world. It would be a must-use tool for everyone from politicians to salespeople and epidemiologists. Of course, such a social search engine is impossible to build, since it would take at least a lifetime to interrogate all 6 billion people on the earth to learn about their friends and acquaintances. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It's a clumsy try for the comfort of normality. ~ Adib Khan

When someone leaves your life, those exits are not made equal. Some are beautiful and poetic and satisfying. Others are abrupt and unfair. But most are just unremarkable, unintentional, clumsy. ~ Griffin McElroy

This was my introduction to mountaineering, and clumsy indeed were my movements as we moved off. ~ Jan Morris

Then Anomander turned to Gripp Galas. 'Old friend, long have you served me, with valour and with honour. As my most trusted servant I have set my weight upon you, and not once heard from you a word of complaint. You have dressed my wounds on the field of battle. You have mended the damage of my clumsy youth. Did you truly believe that now, on this fraught day, I would once more draw tight this leash? We are all weakened by distress, and indeed it seems every tender emotion lies exposed and trembling to a forest of knives. Gripp Galas, old friend, your service to me ends here and it ends now. You have won the heart of a woman who in all things is nothing less than breathtaking. If love needs permission, I give it. If your future with Lady Hish can be served by any sacrifice within my ability, I give it.' He set his gaze upon Hish Tulla. 'Nothing need be asked and nothing need be surrendered by you, my lady. On this, of all days, I will see love made right.' He swung into the saddle. 'Go well, my friends. We are done here. ~ Steven Erikson

Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons. ~ Donald Hall

Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays. ~ Sun Tzu

Will you go on a date with me Friday night? A real date, not a pretend one? I'll probably be so clumsy that you won't go out with me a second time, but please say yes. ~ Carolyn Brown

Our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. ~ H.G.Wells

He touched me. He… he whispered things in my ear, things I never would've expected to affect me the way they did. I feel like I lose control when I'm near him. I'm like a leaf fluttering in the wind - when he zigs, I zag. He talks and I jump. He walks and I turn into a blithering idiot. I admit it, I'm clumsy, but when I find myself near him…" He didn't have the courage to finish the sentence. With a sudden lump in his throat, he added: "I don't want to hope, and I certainly don't want to delude myself. Damn it, the thought of deluding myself terrifies me!"
"I think I know what your problem is."
"And what would that be?"
He sat up, offering a sly smile. "You're hopelessly in love with him. ~ Valentina C. Brin

Everybody else possessed the key to popularity and happiness, and his clumsy attempts to find his own key always ended with other children looking at him funny, or calling him names. ~ Belinda Bauer

Your physicality is this great thing, but it is also the thing that makes you clumsy and limits you in the world, so to speak. ~ Amy Ray

Ava said her hand accidentally slipped and made contact with her guy's nose. I said Repeatedly? And she said, 'Uh, yeah. I'm really clumsy. ~ Gena Showalter

It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the practical work done in computing, both in software and in hardware design, is unsound and clumsy because the people who do it have not any clear understanding of the fundamental design principles of their work. Most of the abstract mathematical and theoretical work is sterile because it has no point of contact with real computing. ~ Christopher Strachey

Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teen aged clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.

She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.

I now make my living being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.

I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.

Now her sort of impoliteness is in fashion. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm fucking done with sadness, and I don't know what's up the ass of the universe lately, but I'VE HAD IT. I AM GOING TO BE FURIOUSLY HAPPY, OUT OF SHEER SPITE.

Can you hear that? That's me smiling, y'all. I'm smiling so loud you can fucking hear it. I'm going to destroy the goddamn universe with my irrational joy and I will spew forth pictures of clumsy kittens and baby puppies adopted by raccoons and MOTHERFUCKING NEWBORN LLAMAS DIPPED IN GLITTER AND THE BLOOD OF SEXY VAMPIRES AND IT'S GOING TO BE AWESOME. In fact, I'm starting a whole movement right now. The FURIOUSLY HAPPY movement. And it's going to be awesome because first of all, we're all going to be VEHEMENTLY happy, and secondly because it will freak the shit out of everyone that hates you because those assholes don't want to see you even vaguely amused, much less furiously happy, and it will make their world turn a little sideways and will probably scare the shit out of them. Which will make you even more happy. Legitimately. ~ Jenny Lawson

The human route to sympathy or empathy is a clumsy one but it's all we've got. To understand the consequences of our actions we must exercise our imaginations. ~ Robert McLiam-Wilson

Angel is right,"said Dr. G-H quickly. "This is my clumsy way of demonstrating."
"Demonstrating what?" I was barely able to keep a snarl out of my voice. "How to get yourself beat up in one easy step? ~ James Patterson

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul? ~ Anne Sexton

She shrugged. "I fell. I'm a clumsy fool." "I know how you feel. I'm such a fool I knocked half my teeth out and hacked my leg to useless pulp. Look at me now, a cripple. It's amazing where a little foolishness can take you, if it goes unchecked. ~ Joe Abercrombie

I had an affinity for pandas. Something about clumsy vegetarians struck a chord with me. ~ Lish McBride

I love you, Jeremy."

He still felt it, that wince of doubt. The urge to push her away. She said it so simply. As though there was nothing easier, more natural in the world. The words themselves hung in the air, so tiny, so bare.

Jeremy felt as though she'd thrust a frail, delicate, birdlike thing into his big, clumsy hands, charging him to keep it safe. And God forgive him, his first impulse was to shove it away. He would destroy it, surely. In his desperation, he would grasp it so tightly it would break into a thousand pieces - and his own heart would break along with it. ~ Tessa Dare

Lucian's voice rang inside my head, loud and clear, "Move your ass, Elena, and no matter what, trust your reflexes." Relying on my clumsy butt was more like it. I'd made a joke, That was a good sign. ~ Adrienne Woods

Our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks. ~ Jon Ronson

Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn't even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht's, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow. ~ Anne Tyler

Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges - for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. ~ Nell Zink

Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work. ~ William Klein

For a moment nothing happens. The figure stands still and I stand cold and alive and-
He starts to run. I make my way down the rocks, slipping, sliding, trying to get to the plain. I wish, I think, my feet clumsy, moving too fast, not fast enough, I wish i could run, I wish I'd written a whole poem, I wish I kept the compass-
And then I reach the plain and wish for nothing but what I have. Ky. Running toward me. I have never seen him run like this, fast, free, strong, wild. He looks so beautiful, his body moves so right. He stops just close enough for me to see the blue of his eyes and forget the red on my hands and the green I wish I wore. "You're here," he says, breathing hard and hungry. sweat and dirt cover his face, and he looks at me as though I'm the only thing he ever needed to see. I open my mouth to say yes. But I only have time to breathe in before he closes the last of the distance. All I know is the kiss. ~ Ally Condie

People expect it to be easy because there you are, out there, doing the thing that you want and making lots of money out of it. But, you know, I'm not that smooth. I can get clumsy around certain people. Like if I were to sit down and think, 'OK, I'm really famous, how am I going to conduct myself in public?' I wouldn't know who that person would be! It would be a lot easier if I could, but I can't. ~ Kristen Stewart

Would that my hands were meant to build. I would know what to say. What to do. Maybe in another life I would have been that man. In this one, my words, like my hands, are clumsy. All they can do is cut. All they can do is break. ~ Pierce Brown

I'm really clumsy, so I trip and fall a lot. And every time I perform in New York my pants split onstage. That's happened four or five times. Every time, I pull on my mom's jeans as fast as I can, so there we are, standing backstage without our pants on. It's like a curse. ~ Jessica Simpson

What - in other words - would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler's Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents - whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species - all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the bored ~ Saul Bellow

She was at least seventy, tall, withered, and angular, with white hair arranged in old-fashioned sausage curls on her temples. She was dressed in the quaint and clumsy style of the wandering Englishwoman, like a person to whom clothes were a matter of complete indifference; she was eating an omelette and drinking water. ~ Guy De Maupassant

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. ~ Umberto Eco

The children who are appreciated for what they are, even if they are homely, or clumsy, or slow, will grow up with confidences in themselves - happy. They will have a spirit that will make the best of all the capacities that they have, and of all the opportunities that come their way. They will make light of any handicaps. ~ Benjamin Spock

Right," Thatcher said, "let's have a look at her."
Katherine hesitated. The kitten was fast asleep in her arms and she was afraid to wake her.
"Something amiss?" Thatcher asked.
Katherine giggled at her capricious emotions and shoved the kitten into the surgeon's arms. The animal woke up as Thatcher examined it. He set the kitten on the deck and watched as she wobbled around on clumsy paws. "Yes," Thatcher nodded conclusively. "This is indeed a cat. ~ Matt Tomerlin

The day the roles reverse is foreign. It's a clumsy dance of love and responsibility, not wanting to cross any lines of respect. It's honoring this person who gave their life to you - not to mention literally gave you life - and taking their fragile body in your hands like a newborn, tending to their every need. ~ Lisa Goich

He'd only been gone two seconds, but the room got brighter when they were together, as if they were two elements that became brilliant in proximity. At Sam's clumsy efforts to carry the vacuum, Grace smiled a new smile that I thought only he ever got, and he shot her a withering look full of the sort of subtext you could only get from a lot of conversations whispered after dark.
It made me think of Isabel, back at her house. We didn't have what Sam and Grace had. We weren't even close to having it. I didn't think what we had could get to this, even if you gave it a thousand years. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

When she opened her eyes they were confronted by a musical box against the opposite wall - one of those early Bavarian toys where mechanical figures perform to the tune.

'How odd,' she thought. The little stage showed a group of fiddlers, two couples in costumes like those of the ball she had just quitted, and in a doorway at the side, a gypsy or beggar man.

Very faintly the distant waltz came to her ears, but no footsteps ringing in the abandoned halls.

With her hand pressed to her unsteady heart, acting under a sudden compulsion, she pushed down the lever. Delicate plucked music started up; the fiddlers sawed with their clumsy arms in time to an ethereal waltz. The couples moved jerkily out and each raised an arm to clasp its partner. To various clicks and rumbles from under the floor they began to revolve with each other and to orbit round the room. Their movements were sinister because of being both reluctant and predestined. Here they were and this is was what they must do. ("Many Coloured Glass") ~ Lucy M. Boston

The beauty of the collage technique is that you're using sounds that have never met and were never supposed to meet. You introduce them to each other, at first they're a bit shy, clumsy, staring at their shoes. But you can sense there's something there. So you cut and paste a little bit and by the end of the song you can spot them in the corner, holding hands. ~ Jens Lekman

I do like Christmas on the whole ... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year. ~ E. M. Forster

Evil Hall had been transformed into a magnificent ballroom, glittering with green tinsel, black balloons, thousands of green-flamed candles, and a spinning chandelier streaking wall murals with emerald bursts of light. Around a towering ice sculpture of two entwined snakes, Hort and Dot stumbled through a waltz, Anadil wrapped her arms around Vex, Brone tried not to step on Mona's green feet, and Hester and Ravan swayed and whispered as more villainous couples waltzed around them. Ravan's bunk mates picked up the music on reed violins as more pairs flooded onto the floor, clumsy, bashful, but aglow with happiness, dancing beneath a spangled banner:
THE 1ST ANNUAL VILLAINS NO BALL ~ Soman Chainani

My mother complained about the Parisians' habit of bumping into tourists on the narrow sidewalks. 'Am I bumping into them?' she asked, perplexed. 'I feel like such a clumsy American.' 'No, no,' I corrected. 'That's their way of saying hello. ~ Kate Betts

Frank didn't drop you on purpose," she said. "He's not like that. He's just a little clumsy sometimes."
"Oops," Leo said, in his best Frank Zhang voice. "Dropped Leo into a squad of enemy soldiers. Dang it! ~ Rick Riordan

this was business. ~ Eoin Colfer

Her eyes are beautiful, eloquent, and frightened, and seem to be telling the man: "You're a clumsy lover . . . You don't begin to understand me . . . I don't really know you, and you scare me . . . You sneer at everything I like . . . You lie so well! . . . You possess me completely, yet I can't trust you . . . If you knew what limpid springs you wall up within me because I fear you! 'What am I doing here at your side? Would that this music could free me of you forever! Or else that this violin would stop before I find out any more about you! You yearn for my undoing, not my happiness, and what is worst in me assures you of your victory. ~ Colette

Anger will make you weak and clumsy. It will divert your focus. ~ Tahereh Mafi

After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited; because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. ~ H.G. Wells

You do not want to marry me, my lord. I would be the worst wife imaginable. I'm forgetful and stubborn, and I can never sit still for more than five minutes. I'm always doing things I shouldn't. I eavesdrop on other people, I shout and run in public, and I'm a clumsy dancer. And I've lowered my character with a great deal of unwholesome reading material." Pausing to draw breath, she noticed that Lord St. Vincent didn't appear properly impressed by her list of faults. "Also, my legs are skinny. Like a stork's."
At the indecent mention of body parts, Lord Chaworth gasped audibly, while Lord Westcliff developed a sudden keen interest in the nearby cabbage roses.
Lord St. Vincent's mouth worked against a brief tremor, as if he were amused despite himself. "I appreciate your candor," he said after a moment. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Mr Pett, receiving her cold glance squarely between the eyes, felt as if he were being disembowelled by a clumsy amateur. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'
'Pain?' Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. 'Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.'
'And who created the dangers?' Yossarian demanded ... 'Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us? ~ Joseph Heller

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century. ~ William McKinley

Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

And you are? (Elfa)
One of the reviewers who wrote that you were a piss-poor substitute for Kiara and that the entire system is saddened by the loss of her from the show. I was just telling her that if she doesn't return soon and they leave your clumsy ass in, the show'll be closing prematurely for sure. (Syn)
You're a pig! (Elfa)
Oink, oink. (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The men, who a moment before had been cursing and cumbersome creatures clambering down the clay bank into the clumsy boats, were mysteriously transformed into warrior silhouettes, spiky with weapons, who glided silent and noble through the vaporous night toward the misted shadows of the enemy shore. ~ Bernard Cornwell

I am clumsy, a late and nervous driver, and despise all sports except a little gentle dancing or yoga. ~ Emma Donoghue

He dragged me back - just in time. A tree had crashed down on to the side walk, just missing us. Poirot stared at it, pale and upset.
"It was a near thing that! But clumsy, all the same - for I had no suspicion - at least hardly any suspicion. Yes, but for my quick eyes, the eyes of a cat, Hercule Poirot might now be crushed out of existence - a terrible calamity for the world. And you, too, mon ami - though that would not be such a national catastrophe."
"Thank you," I said coldly. ~ Agatha Christie

Sanctification is like a clumsy, slow walk rather than a light switch that we turn from off to on. ~ Edward T. Welch

We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother's funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn't work. ~ Donna Tartt

We write or we are written upon. The whole of our lives is the clumsy attempt to wield the pen with grace. ~ Vincent Louis Carrella

FORTRAN, the infantile disorder, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore
written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen,
and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. ~ W.B.Yeats

What am I? A scholar? No, hardly that; a lover of woodlands, a solitary, in the habit of uttering disjointed words in the shadow of beech trees, and used to scribbling presumptuously under an immature laurel tree; fervent in toil, but not happy with the results; a lover of letters, but not fully versed in them; an adherent of no sect, but very eager for truth; and because that is hard to find, and because I am a clumsy searcher, often, out of self-distrust, I flee error and fall into doubt, which I hold in lieu of truth. Thus I have finally joined that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, doubts everything - outside of the things that it is sacrilege to doubt. ~ Francesco Petrarca

The driver bumped his way through the door and plopped down Caitlyn's "luggage." Caitlyn watched Madame Snowe's eyes go to it, widening as
she took it in. Caitlyn's cheeks heated.
Her "luggage" was a Vietnam War-era army green duffel bag, bought for a dollar at a garage sale. Cloud-shaped moisture stains mottled its
faded surface, and jagged stitches of black carpet thread sealed a rip on one end, Caitlyn's clumsy needlework giving the mended hole the look of
one of Frankenstein's scars.
"Is that all you brought?" Greta asked.
Caitlyn nodded, wishing the floor would swallow her.
"Very good. You will have no trouble unpacking, and then you can burn your bag, heh?"
"Reduce, reuse, recycle!" Caitlyn said with false cheer. "We're very big on living green in Oregon. Why buy a new suitcase when someone else's
old duffel bag will do?"
"We'll see that it gets … disposed of properly, ~ Lisa Cach

Cheaters never prosper, we tell ourselves. But the ape in us knows it's not true. Clumsy, untutored, cheats never prosper. They are discovered and suffer the consequences [ ... ]But what we apes despise is the clumsiness of their effort, the ineptness, the gaucherie. The ape in us does not despise the cheating itself; [ ... ] ~ Mark Rowlands

Children, you must understand, are monsters. They are ravenous, ravening, they lope over the countryside with slavering mouths, seeking love to devour. Even when they find it, even if they roll about in it and gorge themselves, still it will never be enough. Their hunger for it is greater than any heart to satisfy. You mustn't think poorly of them - we are all monsters that way, it is only that when we are grown, we learn more subtle ways to snatch it up, and secretly slurp our fingers clean in dark corners, relishing even the last dregs. All children know is a sort of clumsy pouncing after love. They often miss, but that is how they learn. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Happiness is an elusive state of mind not to be gained by clumsy pursuit.It is given to those who do not sue for it:to be unconcerned about a desired good is probably the only way to possess it. ~ Ruskin Bond

I became an actor because it was my clumsy attempt to become myself. ~ Martin Sheen

Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-dispairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated - a feat improperly recognized - boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start; the circumspect endeavours to obtain one's bearings in a world now frankly hostile, the apparent but deceptive encouragement of one's judges, half of whom were asleep, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster because of that same negligible obstacle one had surely taken before at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never quite certain weren't friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration. ~ Malcolm Lowry

This idea that clumsy, stumbling people are real bright is ridiculous, because intelligence is related to neurologic function, and really intelligent people are very well-coordinated. ~ Robert Jarvik

Have you ever wondered
What happens to all the
poems people write?
The poems they never
let anyone else read?
Perhaps they are
Too private and personal

Perhaps they are just not good enough.

Perhaps the prospect
of such a heartfelt
expression being seen as
clumsy
shallow silly
pretentious saccharine
unoriginal sentimental
trite boring
overwrought obscure stupid
pointless
or
simply embarrassing

is enough to give any aspiring
poet good reason to
hide their work from
public view.

forever.

Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED.
Burnt shredded flushed away
Occasionally they are folded
Into little squares
And wedged under the corner of
An unstable piece of furniture
(So actually quite useful)

Others are
hidden behind
a loose brick
or drainpipe
or
sealed into
the back of an
old alarm clock
or
put between the pages of
AN OBSCURE BOOK
that is unlikely
to ever be opened.

someone might find them one day,
BUT PROBABLY NOT
The truth is that unread poetry
Will almost always be just that.
DOOMED
to join a vast invisible river
of waste that flows out of suburbia.

well
Almost always.

On rare occasions,
Some especially insistent
piec ~ Shaun Tan

A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me. ~ Bill Nighy

If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day - doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents - it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of "independents" and "moderates" may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort i ~ William E. Connolly

Water's never clumsy. ~ Matthew McConaughey

The direction of research . . .should be:
- toward non-violence rather than violence,
- towards a harmonious cooperation with nature rather than with warfare against nature;
- towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than [our often] noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions. ~ E.F. Schumacher

I have an incredible talent for tripping everywhere. And I find that rather boring. Tripping and walking out of my shoes; I do it all the time when I am out at work. I'm a bit clumsy. ~ Mette-Marit, Crown Princess Of Norway

Harriet groaned as Adam turned around and revealed what he had just bought at the bar. "I said one more drink, not one more pitcher," she called across to him. "We're expected home already!"

"Listen to yourself, woman!" Adam said incredulously, reaching the table and putting the jug of Snakebite down. "They're not our parents!"

"Yeah, but – its board game night, 'The Game of Life'…" Harriet said, stupid with her share of the two jugs of Snakebite they'd imbibed already.

"Fuck 'The Game of Life'," Adam replied, with great delight, refilling their pint glasses with a clumsy slosh from the pitcher. "I always get the shit jobs anyway. ~ Erin Lawless