Clumsy meaning

Adjective: clumsy

Pronunciation:(klúm-zee)

Clumsy meaning:

• Lacking grace in movement or posture

Synonyms: gawky, clunky, ungainly, unwieldy, klutzy 

• Not elegant or graceful in expression

Synonyms: chosen, clunky 

• Difficult to handle or manage especially because of shape

Synonyms: awkward, bunglesome, ungainly 

• Showing lack of skill or aptitude

Synonyms: bungling, fumbling, incompetent

Derived forms: clumsier, clumsiest

Quotations:

1. Oscar Wilde – Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.
2. H.G. Wells – The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
3. E. E. Cummings –  Nothing proving or sick or partial. Nothing false, nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints children, innocent spontaneous, true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden, but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted; brain over heart, surface: nowhere hating or to fear; Shadow, mind without soul. Only how measureless cool flames of making;
4. Elizabeth Gilbert- So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.
5. Amos Oz- There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tyrant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.
6. Rick Riordan- 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!
7. Elizabeth Gilbert – The Bhagavad Gita that 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 with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.
8. Stephen King- Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm. Sorry, clumsy, she says. You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits. Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man. She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her I always did.  Who are you, George? Someone you knew in another life, honey.
9. Rick Bragg- But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

Sample sentences:

1. Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter. Do not take away the rose, the lance flower that you pluck, the water that suddenly bursts forth in joy, the sudden wave of silver born in you. My struggle is harsh and I come back with eyes tire that times from having seen the unchanging earth, but when your laughter enter sit rises to the sky seeking me and it opens for me all the doors of life. My love, in the darkest hour your laughter opens, and if suddenly you see my blood staining the stones of the street, laugh, because your laughter will be for my hands like a fresh sword. Next to the sea in the autumn, your laughter must raise its foamy cascade, and in the spring, love, I want your laughter like the flower I was waiting for, the blue flower, the rose of my echoing country. Laugh at the night, at the day, at the moon, laugh at the twisted streets of the island, laugh at this clumsy fool who loves you, but when I open my eyes and close them, when my steps go, when my steps return, deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter.
2. Instead of things I’m good at, it might be faster to list the things I can’t do. I can’t cook or clean the house. My room’s a mess, and I’m always losing things. I love music, but I can’t sing a note. I’m clumsy and can barely sew a stitch. My sense of direction is the pits, and I can’t tell left from right half the time. When I get angry, I tend to break things. Plates and pencils, alarm clocks. Later on I regret it, but at the time I can’t help myself. I have no money in the bank. I’m bashful for no reason, and I have hardly any friends to speak of.
3. Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way.
4. Thorne shuffled his feet. You know, if it was a bad kiss, you can just say so. She stiffened. That’s not at all what I Wait. Did you think it was a bad kiss? No, he said, with an abrupt, clumsy laugh. I thought it was um. He cleared his throat. But there were clearly a lot of expectations, and a lot of pressure, and. He squirmed in the chair. We were going to die, you know. I know. She squeezed her knees into her chest. And, no, it wasn’t. I didn’t think it was a bad kiss. Oh, thank the stars.
5. 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.
6. There’s nothing 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?
7. I am that clumsy human, always loving, loving, loving. And loving. And never leaving.
8. An ecstasy of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime. Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 
9. So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way. The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear until he was saying I love you and she was saying. Really, I mean it; you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met. What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you’d started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying I’m sorry, of course you’re right, and whatever you think is best, and You’re the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world, and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and we’ve got to be together on this thing, when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn’t even like Shep Campbell!
10. We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. 
11. A clumsy, awkward success is still a success.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. Two of them summoned disgusting camels. I’d met them before, so I was less than excited when a ton of dromedary flesh flew across my line of sight, plowed into the sphinx, and collapsed on top of it. The sphinx growled in outrage as it tried to free itself. The camel grunted and farted. Hindenburg, I said. Only one camel could possibly fart that badly. Walt, why in the world? Sorry! he yelled. Wrong amulet! The technique worked, at any rate. The camel wasn’t much of a fighter, but it was quite heavy and clumsy. The criosphinx snarled and clawed at the floor, trying unsuccessfully to push the camel off; but Hindenburg just splayed his legs, made alarmed honking sounds, and let loose gas. I moved to Walt’s side and tried to get my bearings.
15. It was Alec who brought their lips together. Seregil’s first reaction was disbelief. But Alec was insistent, clumsy but determined. It lasted an instant, an eternity, that one awkward kiss, and it spoke silent volumes of bewildered honesty. The moment that followed was too fragile for words.
16. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpet  of carpets, the woodless of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernail of fingernails, the nothingness of all, of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry Wow! all the time, which is LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side effects. Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy ‘music making’, all that grain of human performance…transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making. The nothingness of music can be molded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hell of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks. Nothing else comes close.
17. How many times have you said, This is it. I’ve finally found my one true love. And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture can make love shatter, stall or fade away.
18. You know you’re a clumsy person when you cause other people to fall down.
19. I’m betting Cinderella didn’t feel this foolish, but then again, Cinderella wasn’t as clumsy as an intoxicated walrus.
20. To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again