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More "Idiotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was by my side. Her clothes were saturated with last night's rain, but though she looked very cold, she did not shiver, a proof that she had not lain down on the hills, but had walked about during the whole night. There was no wildness of the maniac—there was no idiotic stare. But oh the witchery of ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... go-as-you-please of the private adventure family. "Socialism in fact is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it just as the old water-works of private enterprise or the old gas company."[11] To any one not idiotic nor blind with a passionate desire to lie about Socialism, the meaning of this passage is perfectly plain. Socialism seeks to broaden the basis of the family and to make the once irresponsible parent responsible to the State for its welfare. Socialism ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... I used to badger you! We were little fools to think such a thing ever went on when one came to years of discretion. Only I believe we were afraid the elder and idiotic Darcy might foist his son on some college. I must say Yerbury has become quite endurable now that party lines have been set up;" and Mrs. Eastman crumbed her cake, watching her ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away as well as when he is at home. And the man, who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off," nor has to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the faintest indecent allusion that the singers grew broader and broader, and the hateful music-hall songs grew more and more risky as the night grew onward. By the way, can anything be more loathsomely idiotic than the average music-hall ditty, with its refrain and its quaint stringing together of casual filthiness? If I had not wanted to fix a new picture on my mind I should have liked better to be in a tap-room among honestly brutal costers and scavengers than with ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a pirate-brig one day and an officer of a French man-o'-war the next. I might just as reasonably have suspected the Vestale herself of piracy; and that, I well knew, would be carrying my suspicions to the uttermost extremity of idiotic absurdity. I had, in short—so I finally decided—discovered a mare's nest, and upon the strength of it had been upon the very verge of proclaiming myself a hopeless idiot and making myself the perpetual laughing-stock of the whole ship. I congratulated myself most ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... to extinguish what they had deemed but an accidental fire, were now paralyzed into idiotic inaction, at the defiance of the incendiary, thinking him some sudden pirate or fiend dropped down from ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Tai-y remonstrated laughingly. "But wait and I'll ask him about it! so come along all of you, and I vouch I'll make him abandon that idiotic frame of mind ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... are indications of mental and moral efficiency by any means wanting as recognised elements in personal beauty. A good-humoured face is in itself almost pretty. A pleasant smile half redeems unattractive features. Low, receding foreheads strike us unfavourably. Heavy, stolid, half-idiotic countenances can never be beautiful, however regular their lines and contours. Intelligence and goodness are almost as necessary as health and vigour in order to make up our perfect ideal of a beautiful human face and figure. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... harmless sport in stealthy silence like conspirators, or sit together in a boat, dumb, glum, and penitential, like naughty schoolboys on the bench of disgrace? 'Tis an Omorcan superstition; a rule without a reason; a venerable, idiotic fashion invented to repress lively spirits and ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... I saw you talking to that idiotic fellow in a high collar, and I thought, 'Oh, everything be damned!' So I chummed up to the pock-marked chap. He was glad enough to have me! ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... an idiotic ambition had alone impelled Camille to leave Vernon. He wished to find a post in some important administration. He blushed with delight when he fancied he saw himself in the middle of a large office, with lustring elbow sleeves, and ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... that there was a wide distinction between hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the one they call 'The Envy of Sisyphus,' because it goes quite nicely up-hill if you ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... game, gentlemen," said the croupier monotonously. I thought he looked at me—indeed, everybody seemed to be looking at me—and my companion repeated his warning. But here I must again appeal to the boyish reader in defense of my idiotic obstinacy. To have taken advice would have shown my youth. I shook my head—I could not trust my voice. I smiled, but with a sinking heart, and let my stake remain. The ball again sped round the wheel, and stopped. There was a pause. The croupier indolently advanced his rake and swept my whole pile ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... Powell Seaton. "It was an idiotic question for me to ask, but I'm so excited, boys, that I don't pretend to know altogether what I'm ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... knowing with what kind of a male she had to do. She was a fair-haired woman, or rather a fair-haired girl, a fresh, quite fresh young creature, whom you guessed to be rosy and plump under her swelling bodice. I talked to her in that flattering and idiotic style which we always adopt with girls of this sort; and as she was truly charming, the idea suddenly occurred to me to take her with me—always with a view to celebrating my fortieth year. It was neither a long nor difficult ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... "You idiotic person, of course there isn't!" Anne replied. "Why on earth you should all talk about a man directly a girl breaks away for a time, I can't imagine. Now sit down there and listen. I brought Julien along because if you bully me too much I shall make him take me away. We are excellent friends, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... form; it is certain that in so doing they can find an extraordinary happiness. Those who have absolutely nothing to express and absolutely no power of expression are God's failures; they should be kindly treated along with the hopelessly idiotic and the hydrocephalous. Of the majority it is certainly true that they have some vague but profound emotions, also it is certain that only in formal expression can they realise them. To caper and shout is to express oneself, yet is it comfortless; but introduce the idea ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... honour to entertain the high-born Lady Ygerne Bellaire at dinner," he said in mock deference. "Her request is my command. Shall I voice my second idiotic thought?" ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... as long as his dignity would allow, and then turned off into a by-lane end dropped on a bench and looked gloomily at the Lohengrin swans with the paddle-wheel attachment that circle around the lake. They struck him as the most idiotic inventions he had ever seen, and he pitied, with the pity of a man who contemplates crossing the ocean to be measured for his fall clothes, the people who could find delight in having some one paddle them around ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... I," said the Duchesse drily, "but let me at the same time tell you this: I have always known that Englishmen were peculiarly idiotic in certain important matters of life, but I must say that I had no idea idiocy could reach the boundless proportions which it has done in your case. Well!" she added with sudden gentleness, "farewell for the present, mon preux chevalier: it is not too late, remember, to bear in ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... all the finesse which he could command if he hoped to win a place in her confidence. He could not afford to throw away a single card. As the mysterious lady of the fog she had called him a "fresh Aleck," thanks to his idiotic blundering; but even before that she had chosen for some reason to exert her woman's prerogative and had informed him quite plainly that she did not desire his acquaintance. That ought to have been enough! Then as Miss Margaret Williams she naturally would ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... too funny to be laughable, it was comic in a way to make one want to weep. So that Lanyard, who refused to weep in public, could merely gape in speechless and transfixed rapture. And perhaps this was fortunate; otherwise Monk must have seen that his idiotic secret was out, the sport of ribald mirth, and the situation must have been precipitated with a vengeance and an outcome impossible to predict. As it was, absorbed in his inner torment, Monk was ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... proprietor of the donkey-cart, for it had caused him to 'eat all his economies,' and he resigned himself to the wages of a road-mender, which were small but sure. It was getting dusk when we parted. My next companion on the road was a poor bent-backed, shambling, idiotic youth, who was driving home two long-tailed sheep and a lamb, and who had just enough intelligence for this work. He kept at my side for a mile or two, flourishing a long stick over the backs of the sheep and uttering melancholy cries. His presence was not cheering, but I had to put up with it, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... 1908, provides that "When any passenger arriving on board any ship is either lunatic, idiotic, deaf, dumb, blind, or infirm, and is likely to become a charge upon the public," the owner, master, or charterer of the ship shall be required to enter into a bond in the sum of L100 for every such passenger, the person entering into the bond and his sureties ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... again. I did that idiotic thing twice over before I thought what a fool I was towards myself, and teaching you two lads at the ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... idiotic a midshipman, if he but orders a sailor to perform even the most absurd action, that man is not only bound to render instant and unanswering obedience, but he would refuse at his peril. And if, having obeyed, he should then complain to the Captain, and the Captain, in his own ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... stood on pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that one of us would be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle with the inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead; while another, from some fancied artistic tendency which always failed to justify itself, might be told off without warning to hammer out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys with tears of weariness ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... left you for someone else I should have been afraid to tell you? That I should have written an idiotic note like that? . . . How dared you wire to Penelope? It was abominable ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... few peers but this was to her, unfamiliar country. She was moreover pitting her skill against one who was her equal if not her superior, and who knew every trail and by-way hereabouts. He was a youth with a vacuous, almost idiotic face, whom she had that same day encountered. He had left her sight, but had never been too remote to follow or gauge her course and what he learned he relayed to others. In due time he had known without going further just where she must bring up—for he knew the ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... manuscript of Aliris: A Romance of all Time, and read it through carefully from the beginning. To his surprise he found it very poor. Its language was felicitous in some spots, but stilted in most; the erudition was pedantic, and dragged in by the ears; the action was idiotic; and the proportions were padded until they no longer existed as proportions. He was astounded. He began to see that he had misconceived the whole treatment of it. It would have to be written all over again, with the love story as the ruling motif. He felt very capable of doing the love story. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... carefully placed, for subsequent discovery, between the pages of a put-away book, I still held an undaunted course. But, when Patrick, the disinherited spendthrift, took upon himself, for the thinnest reason, all the blame of his supplanter's evil doing and kept up this idiotic fraud till the girl of his heart, and indeed everyone who cared for him, turned their backs in disdain, then I confess to having felt that Miss SHARP was trying my forbearance too high. But even so the fact that I could not throw the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... But this is mere idiotic fooling. All of you that don't escape will be either in jail ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... what will happen then. It will rise there, some time; and perhaps that time may not be far off.—Oh if men could only look at these national questions with calm scientific vision, understanding the laws that govern national and racial life! There would be none of these idiotic jealousies then; no heart-burnings or contempt or hatred as between the nations; there would be none of this cock-a-doodling arrogance that sometimes makes nations in their heyday a laughing-stock for the Gods. Instead we should see one single race, Humanity; poured now ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... make that successful effort with such wonderful speed and accuracy? The slave looked at him in wonder. It was very evident that he had already forgotten the service which he had rendered, and the same listless, childlike, and almost idiotic expression was in his face. This event endeared the boy very much to the Circassian, and she never failed to show him every kindness in her power. She would arrange his straggling dress, and part his hair, smoothly away ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... the utmost self-complaisance. "I confess, indeed," with a sudden slight burst of vindictiveness, "that I never liked Dysart; idiotic sort of fool in my estimation, self-opinionated like all fools, and deucedly impertinent in that silent way of his. I believe," with a contemptuous laugh, "he has given it as his opinion that there is very little to ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... upon us in a couple of hours. I can continue my soliloquising as I canter through the bush; there will be no one to disturb me or ridicule me, unless, indeed, the bird named the laughing jackass should make the woods echo with his idiotic chuckle, or the parrots should scream their ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... the post-office, and was descending the slope from the public road to his dwelling. He found Lettice sitting on the edge of the porch, and, panting vigorously, the dog extended before her, an expression of idiotic satisfaction on his shaggy face. They were, together, an epitome of extreme youth; and Gordon's discontent, revived from the night before, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... "if you are not going to treat him as you would treat De Lacy and that idiotic Sims, I won't bring him!" And with that he flung ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... he addressed her in the most respectful language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side, and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch the by-play, thinking what a light touch Kerry had, and how he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour. They ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... friend the husband (who is, by the way, something of a pig) says: "I should be glad to stay with Nellie often in the evening, but she will always talk about her worries, and she worries about the family in a way that is idiotic. She is always sure that George will catch the measles because a boy in the next street has them, and she is always sure that our children do not have the advantages nor the good manners that other children have. If it is not one thing it is another; whenever we are alone there is something to ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... have upon the future of the arts, I cannot say, but one would surely think a very great effect; for it will enable people to see clearly many things which are now as completely hidden from them as if they were blind in body and idiotic in mind: and this, I say, will act not only upon those who most directly feel the evils of ignorance, but also upon those who feel them indirectly,—upon us, the educated: the great wave of rising intelligence, rife ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... we had Lawrence with us!" exclaimed Hadad excitedly at last. "A little, little man—hardly any larger than Mrs. Ticknor—but a David against Goliath! And would you believe it?—there is an idiotic rumour that Lawrence has returned and is hiding in Damascus! The French are really disturbed about it. They have cabled their Foreign Office and received an official denial of the rumour; but official denials carry no weight nowadays. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... well justified by the facts," she replied seriously. "But only the most idiotic and ignorant of gossips could possibly say that of you. Every one who is any one knows that the Kyneston ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... he meant. Her very white face showed that. The young man went on, pressing, masterful, confident, towering over her: "It's idiotic to speak of it now, out here—with all these people around—but it just got me to see you with that—I wasn't sure how I felt about you till I saw how I felt when you seemed so friendly with him, when you got off the car together. Then I knew. It ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... went on without taking any notice of you. When you tried to shoot us down, we took some slight action, but did not kill anyone and are now discussing the situation. Listen carefully now, and remember—it is very possible that the next craft you attack in such utterly idiotic fashion will, without any more warning than you gave, blow this whole planet into ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... whoops and feminine squeaks, is distinctly audible. Near the entrance is a painted house-front with two doors, which are being pitilessly battered with wooden balls; from time to time a well-directed missile touches a spring, one of the doors opens, and an idiotic effigy comes blandly goggling and sliding down an inclined plane, to be saluted with yells of laughter, and ignominiously pushed back into domestic privacy. Amidst surroundings thus happily suggesting the idyllic and pastoral associations of Arcady, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... "if it is not terrible because it is new to you, and because you do not know me very well. Not," he added hastily, "that I think your knowing me well would be an advantage! I am not so idiotic. But you do not know me at all, and for a good many years I must have stood in the light of an enemy. It is not easy to readjust such things—witness the ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... taken this particular direction of flying from his honors. No! it is as I have always suspected. He heard, in some way, of the girl's English lover, and he, with his besotted devotion to her, was just the man to be morbidly, madly jealous, and to do some such idiotic thing as he has done, and get himself murdered and burned to ashes for his pains! Yes; and it serves him ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... to guess the impression made on Meir by Schmul's humble and at the same time grave, warning. He continually kept his hand on little Lejbele's head, and looked into the beautiful fine-featured face of the pale, sick, idiotic and trembling child, where he saw the personification of that portion of Israel, which, devoured by misery and disease, nevertheless believed blindly and worshipped humbly, timidly, ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... she cried. "You've watched for two days and been provoked because that letter didn't come. Now you've got it, there you sit like a mummy and let your mind be so filled with this idiotic drivel that you're not ever reading John Jardine's letter that is to tell you what both of us are crazy ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... theatre—and afterwards, when the evening was over and he had gone off in a cloud of glory. He would think it all over and come solemnly to the conclusion that the reason for his mumbling stupidity, his toeing and heeling, and all that idiotic speechlessness that set Emmy on her hind legs, was sheer love of the truth. He couldn't tell a lie—to a woman. That would be it. He would pretend that Jenny had chivvied him into taking Em, that he was too noble to refuse to take Em, or to let Em really see point-blank that he didn't want to take ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... and secluded altars. From every one of these lurking-places, such crowds of phantom-looking men and women, leading other men and women with twisted limbs, or chattering jaws, or paralytic gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad infirmity, came hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the cathedral above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this lower church, they could hardly have made a greater ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... path a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker's assistant, who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by dragging down the corners of the mouth. She turned away ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... way, Brenda's way," he said. "She's scatter-brained; you can't get round that. Going off after the dance in that idiotic way. It's maddening." ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... fight him. And the fomenters of class hatred will not find much support from the "men in blue." Mr. Punch has had occasion to rebuke the levity of smart fashionables who visit the wounded and weary them by idiotic questions. He is glad to show the other side of the picture in the tribute paid to the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... Irish have Home Rule," said recently Mr. Winston Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the last word came from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said, in friendly, private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full savour of their own ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... by the torrent, Hilda had seen a well-dressed epileptic youth, in charge of an elderly woman, approaching the station. He had passed slowly close by her, as she modestly waited in her hasty mourning, and she had had a fearful vision of his idiotic greenish face supported somehow like a mask at the summit of that shaky structure of limbs. He had indeed stared at her with his apelike eyes. She had watched him, almost shuddering, till he was lost amid the heedless crowd within. Then, without waiting longer for her relative, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... implements of war but fear, down-right fear?" Then a little further on: "The men were provided with leather boarding-caps, fitted with bands of iron, * * * another strong symptom of fear!" Now, such a piece of writing as this is simply evidence of an unsound mind; it is not so much malicious as idiotic. I only reproduce it to help prove what I have all along insisted on, that any of James' unsupported statements about the Americans, whether respecting the tonnage of the ships or the courage of the crews, ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... and think of it ever being bullied and overawed by a long veranda-load of gaping, patronizing tourists, and the idiotic flirting females of their species. Think of a lot of over-dressed creatures flouting those severe outlines and deep-toned distances with frippery and garishness. You know how you have been lulled to sleep by that delicious, indefinite, ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... DETERIORATING, he who like us has recognized the extraordinary fortuitousness which has hitherto played its game in respect to the future of mankind—a game in which neither the hand, nor even a "finger of God" has participated!—he who divines the fate that is hidden under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence of "modern ideas," and still more under the whole of Christo-European morality—suffers from an anguish with which no other is to be compared. He sees at a glance all that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and I do," said he, "and I won't protest any more while you're in this mood. Bear with me if I seem idiotic to-night—I've been burning old letters, and that always makes me ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... great toleration of me, but I am sure this arose from his feeling that I saw there was an underlying idea in the minds of the people he loved well enough to lay down his life for in the hope of benefiting and ennobling them, and that I did not, as many do, set them down as idiotic brutes, glorying in an aimless cruelty that would be ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... liked me as much as ever, and didn't care about any one else, but didn't think she ought to marry me, and so on. I couldn't get her to say why for a long time, but at last it came out. Some one, that idiotic Englishwoman, I suppose, had put it into the dear girl's head that it was her duty not to ally herself with 'a reactionary' (I think that was the word) and in this case that meant poor harmless me. I argued till I must have been blue in the face, but I couldn't get her to give in: ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... be as silly as you like, providing it holds the attention of vulgar readers. Think of "The Hollow Statue", what could be more idiotic? Yet it sells ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... hands. I broke into elfish laughter, and ended with a sob. Sobs and laughter together shook my fasting body like a leaf; and I zigzagged across the fields, buffeted this side and that by a mirth as uncontrollable as it was idiotic. Once I pulled up in the middle of a spasm to marvel irresponsibly at the sound of my own voice. You may wonder that I had will and wit to be drifted towards Flora's trysting-place. But in truth there was no missing it—the low chine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rot!" He laughed rudely. "You've never lived yet, dear. Look here, Vi. My father's one of the three richest men in South Africa; and all he's got will come to me some day. As it is he gives me an allowance bigger than those of all the other men in the regiment put together. I hate the Service and its idiotic discipline. I want to be free—to go where money counts. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... wish I had. I only say that if I were twenty-one, as I now see life, I would do as I have here suggested. But perhaps I would not. I might go about barking my shins and burning my fingers, making idiotic experiments in the endeavour to prove that I was an exception to all the rules, and knew a little more than all the ancients. So let not the young man be discouraged if he has committed follies; for there seems ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... beads, cups and dishes carved out of cocoa-nut, dried gourds, horns of animals, fans, stuffed parakeets, and old coins—while a grotesque wooden idol peered hideously forth from between the stretched-out portions of a pair of old nankeen trousers, as though surveying the miscellaneous collection in idiotic amazement. An aged man sat smoking at the open door of this promising habitation—a true specimen of a Neapolitan grown old. The skin of his face was like a piece of brown parchment scored all over with deep furrows and wrinkles, as though Time, disapproving ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... man of Camber's genius, having decided upon murder, must have arranged for an unassailable alibi. Very well. Are we now to leap to the other end of the scale, and to credit him with such utter stupidity as to place hanging evidence where it could not fail to be discovered by the most idiotic policeman? Preserve your balance, Knox. Theories are wild horses. They run away with us. I know that of old, for which very reason I always avoid speculation until I have a solid foundation of fact ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... him. And he asks such odd questions, which I don't see the meaning of at first, like traps. He often tells me he never asks any questions, but he does, indirect ones, all the time. I'm getting afraid of being alone with him. Sometimes I think if I stay much longer at Barford I'm so idiotic he'll get it out of me. Has he asked ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... do you blame me? I looked down at her—I'm a good deal taller than she is—and for a minute I wanted to get down in front of her among the gear-shifts and put my head in her lap. But of course I didn't do anything so idiotic as that. I just laughed and said: "Not you,"—and put out my hand and squeezed hers—she'd left off her motoring gloves. And she squeezed back, and looked up at me with those black eyes of hers—and that was all there was of it, and we were off again on details, with no scene to ...
— The Whistling Mother • Grace S. Richmond
... silly saying having come into her mind. She could see them lying there, with their white faces to the night. Surely she might have thought of some remark less idiotic to make to ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... trouble of deciding," continued the Minor Poet. "On Thursday her place was occupied by a fat, red-headed girl, who replied to my look of inquiry with an idiotic laugh, and on Sunday I searched the Hypatia House pews for her in vain. I learnt subsequently that she had been sent home on the previous Wednesday, suddenly. It appeared that I was not the only one. I left the ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... this city there have been some "replies" to me. They have been almost idiotic. A Catholic priest asked me how I had the impudence to differ with Newton. Newton, he says, believed in a God; and I ask this Catholic priest how he has the impudence to differ with Newton. Newton was a Protestant. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... me. We're friends, aren't we? Good! Understand, I don't blame you in the least—it's that idiotic revolution that spoiled our business. I can't understand those people. Lord! You did splendidly, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... for all that I couldn't make myself greatly interested in the bold bad Marquis DE SARCEY in those anxious two years before "the Terror," with his insufferable pride, his incredible elegance, his fantastic ideas of love and his idiotic marriage, the negotiations for which, with the resulting complications, take up so large a space in a lengthy book. It gives one the impression of being written not "according to plan" but out of a random fancy, with so hurried a pen that not merely have irrelevant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... with the thin fingers of her idol boy, and laughed with an idiotic chuckle as she looked upon the white face, calling him her "gentleman," and wondering "how he came to have such a delicate skin, when his father ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... a great deal because I know how welcome a long letter will be, and yet I fear that I cannot make this one very long for the simple reason that I am feeling serious. Moods are like dresses. Some of them do not suit me at all. Seriousness not only spoils me, it makes me absolutely idiotic. Most people I know, however, prefer me like that because then I express my agreement with their opinions so very readily. But to be serious. I don't quite understand what you are going to do at Dover. Still, I am glad you've gone, ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... neighbourhood, occupation, sport and common interests, men are particularly apt to cultivate that intense patriotism of the small unit which is termed esprit de corps. The history of the War—like the history of all past wars—will illustrate its constant military value. It would be idiotic to reassert the old fallacy, belied by the experience of centuries, that one volunteer is worth ten pressed men. Nevertheless the morale of a unit can only be enriched when it is recruited wholly from willing applicants familiar with its traditions and with ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... upon the brushy part of the broom, disguised by the sheet, the house resounded with roars of laughter. The subject, however, was deaf to all of the noise. He was absorbed in his courtship, and he continued to hug the broom, and exhibit in his features that idiotic smile that one sees only upon the faces of lovers and bridegrooms. "All the world loves a lover," as the saying is, and all the world ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... ideala. identical : identa. idiom : idiomo, idiotismo. idiotic : idiota. idle : senokupa. idol : idolo. illegitimate : nelauxlegxa, bastarda, illuminate : ilumini. illusion : iluzio. illustrate : ilustri. image : figuro, bildo. imagine : imagi, revi. imbibe : ensorbi. imbue : penetri, ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... What an idiotic notion of mine to have a glass roof to my bedroom! I feel as though I were living under an umbrella through which the water might come dripping at any moment. During the night this will probably happen. The panes of glass, unless they are very closely joined together, will let the water through, ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... "illustrations") of the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what might have ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... early walk. He asked if I would dine with him some evening at the "Iridescent," and I said it was not a time for dining at restaurants. "No," he agreed, "it certainly isn't now all the French cooks are gone; and what an idiotic idea this is about reducing the number of courses at dinner! Silly rot, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... of the candles, I could see her staring eyes, framed by lids that looked as if they had been scalded, so red were they; her idiotic and contracted mouth, trembling with despair, and her whole pitiful face, which was drenched ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... precisely her situation as well as his. There ought to be less sentimental rubbish and more plain sense about all of it. Women would suffer less from shattered illusions, they would grow accustomed to reality, and be considerably less idiotic in ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... vehicles and all sorts of city delights at the door, you are forced to sit, not in a room with some human grace and comfort or furniture and decoration, but in a stalled pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... met him? Allow me——" Then turning to me, "Old man, when you have a moment I wish you to meet Miss ——." I don't know what she said to me or what I said to her. I can remember that I tried to be clever, and experienced a growing conviction that I was making myself appear more and more idiotic. I am certain, too, that, in spite of my Italian-like complexion, I was as red ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... have preferred something in a lower key; at least I thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this place is idiotic unless one is perfectly happy; and that then it's-as good as ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... breathing corpses, rather than living men." At the bottom of his heart, and in spite of the ill temper their resistance caused in him, the heroism of the Rochellese excited the cardinal's admiration. Buckingham had just been assassinated. "The king could not have lost a more bitter or a more idiotic enemy; his unreasoning enterprises ended unluckily, but they, nevertheless, did not fail to put us in great peril and cause us much mischief," says Richelieu "the idiotic madness of an enemy being more to be feared than his ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Larry! No immediate scandal. I haven't any one in view, and living as I do it isn't likely that I shall be tempted by some knightly or idiotic man, who wants to run away with a middle-aged woman and three children. I am anchored safely—at any rate as long as dad lives and your mother, and the children need my good name. Oh!" she broke off suddenly; "don't let us talk ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Mr.—in the arm, was doubtless of the party who attacked the flock; but it must have been some hours after that he was shot, for the shepherd had to come home with the flock to inform him of the occurrence, and then search and pursuit had to be made, during which he was overtaken. He is a stupid idiotic sort of man, so that the natives have not deemed him worthy of receiving the honours of their ceremonies, and still call him a boy, or youth, although ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don't set the office on fire," I said, "and go away ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... army, his movements, and his plans. And all this while the country, the people, is kept officially ignorant of its honor, of its fate. All publicity and communication is suppressed—not to inform thereby the enemy of our movements. How idiotic, how silly! As if the march and the movements of an army of one hundred thousand men could be kept secret from a vigilant and desperate enemy, and the enemy wanted to read the papers for it. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... while the rest of the idiotic world lay asleep within its cramped boundary of brick and stone, Hansie revelled in the beauties of Nature, abandoning herself to at least one hour of perfect bliss before the toil and trouble of another ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman; the tigress she had detected in her composition did not require to be called forth; half-a-dozen words, direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, with the eyes burning over them, sufficed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... swindling, and forgets, or is ill-tempered towards, the inestimable treasure he has at home. On such occasions the heroine of the feminine novel shines out in all her majesty. She is kind and patient to her husband's faults, except that when he is more than usually idiotic her eyes flash, and her nostrils dilate with a sort of grand scorn, while her knowledge of life and business is displayed at critical moments to save him from ruin. When every one else deserts him, she takes a cab into the city, and employs some clever friend, who has always ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... do want to," declared King, agreeably. "I'm not afraid of any grumpy girl. I'll smile on her so sweetly, she'll have to smile back." And King gave such an idiotic grin that they all smiled ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... have occurred to the author of this interesting expose, or to his interlocutor, that there was a very simple and well-known remedy for this idiotic and extravagant mode of living,—the dinner-pail. The contractor cited to his friend the case of the masons from the provinces, the Creusois and the Limousins, who are enabled to save money by leaving their families in the country, ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... whether it was Antoine who sat before the fire last night," Thede puzzled. "If I could just get my hands on that idiotic little plaything, I'd sneak back to old Finklebaum and get his hundred dollars so quick it would make his ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
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