All 26 Uses of

baffle
in
The Sunlight Dialogues

It was that, the bafflement that came of talking with a man without visible emotions, that urged Clumly on.†
Chpt 5 *

And join the conspiracy, from bafflement: yes: we're the world, there's no denying it: we're old: and whatever it is that the world has done to them, it was us, we did it, whatever it was.†
Chpt 5

Thus began the remarkable dialogue Batavia Chief of Police Fred Clumly would play over and over later, with confused feelings of bafflement and rage and sorrow.†
Chpt 7

He knew very well how absurd he must look, oh yes, yes, he understood their bafflement—the Chief of Police standing there weeping, crying his heart out, for a man he'd been hunting Like a wild animal for days and days and days.†
Chpt 24

It was the sea that did it, old and bottomless with mystery, as people say, capable at times of unbelievable rage, and capable, too, of a peace that baffled you.†
Chpt 1

Nevertheless, the man was a comfort, his very existence satisfying in a world that incessantly demanded fine distinctions between things not worth a man's thinking about: a world of jokes to be puzzled out and laughed at in the right places (how many times, in how many grim rooms had Millie thrown back her head and white throat, and laughed while Hodge sat chuckling fierce and baffled, heavy as iron in his chair!)†
Chpt 3

More and more he repeated himself, struggling for the old clearheadedness in a stifling attic of increasingly baffling, antiquated opinions.†
Chpt 3

Hodge waited, and later it would seem to him that Clumly had taken a good deal longer than necessary to come out with it: he would remember that absolute stillness of Miller, standing by the door looking fixedly into his hat, and Clumly himself, touching his nose with two fingers like a man baffled by a sudden and inexplicable change in a familiar landscape, studying Hodge's jaw.†
Chpt 3

The expression on the face—the thin, wide lips, the far-apart eyes, the nostrils flared like the nostrils of a horse—was a baffling mixture of joy and terror.†
Chpt 3

And then—Hodge's father a blind old man now, baffled and lost—then came machines.†
Chpt 3

She gave them a smile she knew to be brilliant, baffling them, she hoped, smashing their outlaw defenses.†
Chpt 4

He scolded jaywalkers with a severity he secretly found comic, and now and then, with an unexpected, momentarily baffling smile, he let them know it.†
Chpt 5

Full of mysterious trust that fills the best of their parents and teachers with alarm, with grief for them because the world will change them, and with baffled shame because parents and teachers can't hope to prevent it, and even the best must contribute to it in ways they will not recognize themselves.†
Chpt 5

As for gods reflecting aspects of the human condition, some were perfectly clear and reasonable in meaning—some were representative of the grace and majesty of femininity, for instance—but others were baffling, for example the bull-shaped son of Samas, with idiot's eyes and a crown of unbelievable splendor.†
Chpt 7

In the same way, once when he was a child of ten, he had agreed to ride to school on his wooden-wheeled bicycle with a group of friends from neighboring farms, and he'd gotten up and gone to their houses one after another and had waited and waited and finally had left without them, baffled and wounded by their cruel betrayal; he had found when he got to the school that he was hours ahead of his time.†
Chpt 13

Still the old eyes searched him, cunning and baffled and something else too; after an instant Hodge caught what it was: wounded.†
Chpt 13

Ben shook his head, baffled by the linear simplicity of his younger brother's world.†
Chpt 15

Definitions:

(1) (baffle as in: baffled her)
to perplex or confuse someone
(2) (baffle as in: acoustic baffle)
something constructed to control the flow of sound or fluid
(3) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

Less commonly:
- baffle can refer to the hindering of efforts, plans, or desires.
- baffles can describe the area directly behind a moving vessel where water is disturbed
- baffle has other technical uses relating to medicine, heat transfer, and mechanics