The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?
It's like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.
Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
A scientist sounds like a scientist because the things that come out of their mouth don't stumble, that's all. If they [said], "And the, um, a microwave, uh," you know, then you don't sound right, but if you can just get it out without stumbling then you're going to sound fine.
Failure can either be a stepping stone to success or a stumbling to defeat.
Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.
Its authors meant it to be. . . a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.
The largest fear in the world is to speak in public. We fear of stumbling, or public humiliation, and so we're fearing a face-to-face rejection. So, we'll say things in a text or e-mail that we would never say face-to-face. So, relationships are coming together faster and breaking apart faster, and they're a little bit more disposable.
What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.
Turn your stumbling blocks into steppingstones to success.
Stumbling is not falling.
Sometimes we are given exactly what we need. The precise people that you need the most come stumbling into your life. Sometimes you don't notice, and this is very sad. Sometimes you lose them again. This is sad too, but not as sad. Because what you have once had together you have forever.
President Bush demanded that Kerry apologize. Can you imagine that -- Bush demanding an apology for someone stumbling over his words?. . . Kerry should have tried the Bush strategy: say so many stupid things, no one cares anymore.
She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.
We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, the mode and manner of Spirit's creation, and thus is always going beyond what went before-that leaps, not crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, often stumbling and bruising its metaphyscical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.
A stepping-stone can be a stumbling block if we can't see it until after we have tripped over it.