What is "fitfully"

Usage examples of "fitfully".

In a few pages, the man crystallizes everything Cyfer and Ressler have struggled so fitfully to consolidate.

We passed herds of dozing zebras, fitfully dreaming dinotheres, asleep-on-their-feet gazelles.

Beckwith sat with his back to the rough lumber of one wall, dozing fitfully with Espe cradled in his arms.

Flaps were open- ing and closing fitfully behind the base of the feeder arms, behind the jaws, and he wondered if it was breathing through those instead of its mouth.

The screaming and cursing continued fitfully, but their morale seemed to be broken, and Hayward watched with relief as the mob scrabbled back in disorder.

He looked now at Kes, who seemed to sleep somewhat fitfully under the effects of the sedative.

It was only a small stream, such as is born in the High Sierra of melting snows, but its dizzy fall, its mad leaping, the echoes that were never still, caused a murmurous sound that swelled and lessened fitfully but was never still.

Longarm slept fitfully, and when he stood up as the train was pulling into El Paso not long after dawn, his muscles were stiff and sore and he was almost as tired as when he had first dozed off.

Meanwhile -- for when a missile has reached that infinitesimal point after which descent begins, it hesitates for a moment, and pretends to stand still -- while then the pocket-knife stands still at its zenith, Amsel tears his gaze away from the object that has reached this infinitesimal point and once more -- the object is already falling quickly fitfully, because now more exposed to the head wind, riverward -- has his eye on his friend Matern who is still teetering on the ball of his foot and his toes sockless in high shoe, holding his right hand high and far from his body, while his left arm steers and tries to keep him in balance.

On the piles supporting the pier and the people on the pier beards of seaweed wave fitfully: back and forth sticklebacks busy silvery commonplace.

Rose yawned, talked fitfully about the gayeties of the coming week, worked half a leaf on an antimacassar, and sang three or four silly little coquettish songs which somehow jarred on every one.

The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like sparrows, he once said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly among the leaves, and they looked round and found the infants and dotards gone and the benches filled with lovers.

Clovis, as he sat in the smoking-room after lunch, talking fitfully to Jane Martlet in the intervals of putting together the materials of a cocktail, which he had irreverently patented under the name of an Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

His bright blue eye, which at all times shone with uncommon keenness and splendour, had its vivacity augmented by fever and mental impatience, and glanced from among his curled and unshorn locks of yellow hair as fitfully and as vividly as the last gleams of the sun shoot through the clouds of an approaching thunderstorm, which still, however, are gilded by its beams.

Nostrilamus, the once autocratic Malefica of Caledon, wheezed like an old woman as he peered into the muddy pit in which his men stood, knee-deep in icy sludge, picking fitfully at the walls of mud that rose above their heads, their rusty shovels hardly equal to the task.