Ungainly Quotes & Sayings

James M. McPherson spoke for a later generation of scholars when he asserted in 1988 that Lincoln's entire, public inaugural journey might have been a "mistake," because in his effort to avoid "a careless remark or slip of the tongue" that might "inflame the crisis further," the president-elect "indulged in platitudes and trivia," producing "an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer. — Harold Holzer

I think that places, like people, ought to have boundaries. Who ever said that gardening was a public activity, anyway? Gardening, like making love, feels a lot better than it looks. Nobody buys tickets to gardening competitions. There's no such thing as the Gardening Olympics. There is no gold medal in Speed Weeding or Double Digging. Maybe there should be, but I wouldn't compete in a gardening Olympiad for all the compost in China. I go through ungainly contortions when I garden. I squat. I crawl around on my hands and knees. Most of the time I bend over, upended. That angle may be flattering to a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, but it is not flattering to me. — Cassandra Danz

Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son, he said bitterly.
Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used to it, she could not be hurt further. But he saw her neck grow stiffer and stiffer. — Mette Ivie Harrison

She entered with ungainly struggle like some huge awkward chicken, torn, squawking, out of its coop. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins. — Edmund Crispin

Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,
And one arm bent across your sullen cold
Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,
Deep-shadow'd from the candle's guttering gold;
And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;
Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head ...
You are too young to fall asleep for ever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead. — Siegfried Sassoon

The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. 'Faking it' in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail. — Parker J. Palmer

It's a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god's handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There's not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one? — Marcel Theroux

Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something
some new skeleton
was emerging from beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous. — Laini Taylor

In cross examination, as in fishing, nothing is more ungainly than a fisherman pulled into the water by his catch. — Louis Nizer

I was never afraid of my monsters. I controlled them. I slept with them in the dark, and they never stepped beyond their boundaries. My monsters had never asked to be bora with bolts in their necks, scaly wings, blood hunger in their veins, or deformed faces from which beautiful girls shrank back in horror. My monsters were not evil; they were simply trying to survive in a tough old world. They reminded me of myself and my friends: ungainly, unlovely, beaten but not conquered. They were the outsiders searching for a place to belong in a cataclysm of villagers' torches, amulets, crucifixes, silver bullets, radiation bombs, air force jets, and flamethrowers. They were imperfect, and heroic in their suffering. — Robert McCammon

The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy - large, ungainly potato like things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days - cut into my feet and draw blood as if the were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in. — David Rakoff

Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the language. — John Backus

The shoes of leadership have many ways to pinch and blister the feet of those who walk in them. But here's the thing, when we do walk in them despite the difficulties and challenges, our gait gradually changes from an ungainly, self-conscious toddle to a poised, purposeful stride that inspires trust in those who follow. — Jodi Detrick

Her head is two sizes too large, ungainly, swarming with thoughts. Why? — Joe Hart

The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirties and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise. — Simon Schama

The early settlers amazed her
they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch. — Jennifer Vanderbes

What age is she now, twenty something. I'm not sure. She is very bright, quite the bluestocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stand out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially ... Yet she is brave and makes the best of herself and of the world. She has the rueful, grimly humorous, clomping way to her that is common to so many ungainly girls. ... Dear Claire, my sweet girl. — John Banville

I must learn the dregs of my thought, my dreams, are the speech of my soul. I must carry them in my heart, and go back and forth over them in my mind, like the words of the person dearest to me. Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration? You think that the dream is foolish and ungainly. What is beautiful? What is ungainly? What is clever? What is foolish? The spirit of this time is your measure, but the spirit of the depths surpasses it at both ends. — C. G. Jung

Those who are compelled to paint by force, without being in the necessary mood, can produce only ungainly works, because this profession requires an unruffled temper. — Titian

When Little Richard used to stand up and play it was just fabulous, and Liberace had the candlesticks and the rings and the gift of the gab. The piano's is the most ungainly rock' n' roll instrument of all time but those two people transcended it, as did Jerry Lee Lewis. — Elton John

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday. — Catherynne M Valente

And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she'd worn, the insecurity she'd felt, all the innocent mistakes she made. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Percy, you are dismissed from my service."
"Me? Why, my lord?"
"Why? Because, Percy, far from being a fit consort for a prince of the realm, you would bore the leggings off a village idiot. You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly, and the part of you that can't be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the court, wouldn't be worth mentioning even if it could be. If you put on a floppy hat and a funny codpiece, you might just get by as a fool, but since you wouldn't know a joke if it got up and gave you a haircut, I doubt it. That's why you're dismissed."
"Oh, I see."
"And as for you, Baldrick ... "
"Yes."
"You're out, too. — Richard Curtis

(Bonhoeffer's) change was not an ungainly, embarrassing leap from which he would have to retreat slightly when he gained more maturity and perspective. It was by all accounts a deepening consistent with what had gone before. — Eric Metaxas

LEIA [to Han:] Hast thou come here in that ungainly heap? Thou art, perhaps, then braver than I thought. — Ian Doescher

It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. — Donna Tartt

One time, I noticed that the little waxy strips you peel off the maxi pad adhesive were printed, over and over, with a slogan: 'Kotex Understands.' In the worst moments, when my period felt like a death - the death of innocence, the death of safety, the harbinger of a world where I was too fat, too weird, too childish, too ungainly - I'd sit hunched over on the toilet and stare at that slogan, and I'd cry. Kotex understands. Somebody, somewhere, understands. — Lindy West

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. — Djuna Barnes

When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod-or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly-thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

ON his way out of the museum Atwater passed Nosworth, arguing in the evening sunshine with a party of negroes, who stood about him in ungainly positions, near in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of First Messenger. — Anthony Powell

The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop. — Megan Whalen Turner

Julia was a tall, ungainly girl, much taller than Gordon, with a thin face and a neck just a little too long - one of those girls who even at their most youthful remind one irresistibly of a goose. — George Orwell

I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect. — Debra Dean

But the Seeker, who is of unsure gait, also has unsure traits. The way that he moves is unstable and ungainly. It is also unnatural. No other life form adopted this precarious locomotion method of walking on two legs. Intrinsically off balance at all times, it takes just a small stone or a banana peel to topple him over. It is a mysterious wobbly motion much like that of a bicycle. How easy it is, to throw a cyclist off balance, need not be elaborated. But try throwing a truck off balance? Unsettling the Seeker's balance is also equally easy. But try throwing a horse or a tiger off balance? Even a child knows that four wheels or, at least, three wheels are more stable than two wheels. — Biju Vasudevan

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be ... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He was fiercely beautiful in the way some young males are, as if their whole being were being lived through their eyes, and their large noses, and their ungainly limbs. — Eloisa James

Do you remember what Crux said?" Scorn asked China. "I bet you do. He said that you handed Skulduggery Pleasant's wife and child over to Nefarian Serpine. He said that you led them to their deaths ... Blackmail is just an ugly, ungainly word, but these are ugly and ungainly times in which we live. You will do as I say, exactly as I say, or I will tell the Skeleton Detective your terrible, terrible secret. Do you agree to my terms? — Derek Landy

The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If — Douglas Adams

Why do fathers look ungainly in their daughter's bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world? — Mira Jacob

For years I believed they loved me for my voice, my stage presence, my courageous life. 'Incomparable,' they said. 'Divine.' I am the goddesses on the ceilings of the antechambers at Versailles, the statues in the gardens. That's what they see in me. The huntress. The peacemaker. The Amazon. The Muse. Victory. Glory. War. I am divine. But now I wonder if I was anything more than some exotic creature in the King's pleasure gardens - not a lion, and surely not a baboon, but perhaps - yes - a giraffe. Unlikely. Ungainly. Unique. Beautiful in parts but not particularly attractive as a concept. Alien. But compelling, nevertheless. — Kelly Gardiner

Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates. Social meetings are periods of penance to them, and any appearance in public will unnerve them. They go much about alone, and blush when women speak to them. In truth, they are not as yet men, whatever the number may be of their years; and, as they are no longer boys, the world has found for them the ungraceful name of hobbledehoy. — Anthony Trollope

In a Kenya game park once I saw a family of wart-hogs waddling ungainly and in a tremendous hurry across the grass. Contemptuous though I am of those who find animals comic ... still I could not help laughing at this quaint spectacle. My African companion rightly rebuked me. "You should not laugh at them," he said. "They are beautiful to each other. — Jan Morris

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and those below cowered and, if they were not quick enough, were spattered in blood. Then came the jolt, as of a fall, and I saw the leg was caught in an ungainly way in the smaller branches of a mutamba tree, the foot hooked, long like that infamous fruit. — Tsitsi Dangarembga

She also watched Miss Upchurch as she danced with Mr. Hudson. They bounded through the steps in lively abandon. Mr. Hudson's form was a bit ungainly, but he had never seemed so young and handsome as he did while dancing with Miss Upchurch. — Julie Klassen