"Drivel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! 5 What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—who? ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I'm the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it,—by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... like Winthrop and Mason, Treat and Leete, and others of the foremost rank in those days, could have served as judges in such trials, and in all earnestness and sincerity listened to and given credence to the drivel, the travesties of common sense, the mockeries of truth, which fell from the lips of the witnesses in their testimonies. Some of the absurd charges against Katherine Harrison invite particular attention and need no ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... evil come of it, they may not be found to have slept upon it, or consulted with an effeminate pillow in point of honour and courage. He strikes when he is hot himself, not when the iron is so which he designs to work upon. His tongue has no retentive faculty, but is always running like a fool's drivel. He cannot keep it within compass, but it will be always upon the ramble and playing of tricks upon a frolic, fancying of passes upon religion, State, and the persons of those that are in present authority, no matter how, to whom, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... faculties unimpaired. We have had many communications with your world, and have always been frustrated by this one gulf which may not be crossed. When real thought gets across the border, it is often indefinite, sometimes mere drivel. Such answers as come from the void are usually disappointing, no matter how expert our mediums may be in communicating with ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... words, Sedgwick," said Mr. Thompson approvingly. "The word I had on my tongue was—balderdash. But your thought was happier. Balderdash is a vague and shapeless term. It conjures up no definite vision. But drivel and drool—very ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... times" by the faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he himself is obliged to apologise for the horrors he describes, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... girl, haven't you got anything better to do this morning than to loll all over my sofa and talk drivel when I want to write a letter blowing up somebody? I felt a fool when you came in. Now you've made me feel a double-dyed idiot. Kindly go away and dig a hole in the ground ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... thought it over, the more nonsense it became, as all words turn to drivel on repetition; but chiefly he was amazed that even love could have wrought this change in him. In his distress he happened to think of Dean Swift. Had not that fierce satirist created a dialect of his own for ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... crowded with new interests that first-comer was not ousted. Only he had changed his plumage and she called him Friendship. She blushed sometimes and stamped her foot when she remembered those meetings in the summer mornings, her tremors, her heart-beats. And oh, the "drivel" she had ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... chalk. For the first time he had looked Truth in the eyes. Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... crusade after crusade had failed to dislodge from absolute power. The crowds upon the street snapped eagerly at that huge portrait and searched as eagerly through the paper for more about the Boss. They did not find it, except upon the editorial page, where, in the space usually devoted to drivel about "How Kind We Should Be to Dumb Animals," and "Why Fathers Should Confide More in Their Sons," appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: "Sam Stone Must Leave Town." Beneath was the additional information: "Further issues of the Bulletin ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Frenchmen, as we see them in the streets and in the fields, but men in general, as they ought to be on leaving the hands of Nature, or after the teachings of Reason. As to the former, there is no need of being scrupulous because they are infatuated with prejudices and their opinions are mere drivel; as for the latter, it is just the opposite: full of respect for the vainglorious images of his own theory, of ghosts produced by his own intellectual device, the Jacobin will always bow down to responses that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... know what you're talking about. How can you? It's impossible for you to conceive—it's almost impossible even for me to conceive—the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius. Four hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four hours a day is stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But you can't imagine that work like Adrian's is to be done in ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... air-jungle to- morrow—and if there's anything there I shall know it. If I return, I'll find myself a bit of a celebrity. If I don't, this note-book may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mr. Coulson; "you are a fool. I pay you to take care of this house. I am freezing to death in my own room, and you come in and drivel to me about ivy and hand-organs. Get me an overcoat at once. See that all doors and windows are closed below. An old, fat, irresponsible, one-sided object like you prating about springtime and flowers in the middle of winter! When Higgins ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... are many old legends that our forefathers came from a world beyond the sky, but I have always dismissed this as religious drivel, ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... in: 'highly nonoptimal', the worst possible way to do something; 'highly nontrivial', either impossible or requiring a major research project; 'highly nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; 'highly nontechnical', drivel written for {luser}s, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (compare {drool-proof paper}). In other computing cultures, postfixing of {in the extreme} might ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... "My good man, you drivel. The devil has nothing to do with this. Neither has the town, which you may call by what name you please. But Don Carlos Gould is neither a coward nor an empty talker. You will admit that?" He ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... unfrequently there is a spice of malignity in the blockhead's composition; but a creature of this calibre you can wither, for it is not worth crushing, by withholding the sunshine of your countenance from it, or by leaving it to drivel on, until the utter contempt of the whole company claps to change the figure—a wet night—cap as an extinguisher on it, and its small stinking flame flickers and goes out of itself. Then there is your sentimental water—fly, who blaws in the lugs of the women, and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... &c.—tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough—plays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance—such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... thunder? To be for ever young in desire and enjoyment, though old and haggard, and bent double with age and infirmities? To have our wish and our revenge—ay, and the bodies of our enemies wasting before our spells, like wax to the flame? But go, sneak and drivel, and mind thy meal and barley-cakes, and go ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the maudlin drivel of a man not responsible for what he was saying. But Derry had had enough. He took a step forward and stood at the foot of the bed. "I wouldn't go any farther if I were you, Dad. I've not been a slacker. I have never been a slacker. I am not a coward. I have never been a coward. I am going ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... that several lunchers spun round in their chairs, and a Rand magnate, who was eating peas at the next table, started and cut his mouth. "Go? It's the limit! This is just the sort of thing to get right at them. It'll hit them where they live. What made you think of that drivel at the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... for some hanging matter—"suspend your judgment," or you will deserve credit for very little. We promise you that there are giants on the earth in these days, ay, and famous giants of their cubits! But when a giant is made to drivel, his drivelings are very little better than those of a pigmy. And we swear to you, (under correction from the parish vestry, which is entitled to half-a-crown an oath,) that the circulating libraries would make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... a boy—mere drivel—but of such a kind that even his butts were fond of him. He would make M. Bonzig laugh in the middle of his severest penal sentences, and thus demoralize the whole school-room and set a shocking example, and be ordered a la porte of the salle d'etudes—an exile which was quite ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... audiences condescend to club tastes with the scarecrow old women of the heath and the mountain, and to play "look at the bugabow," with the nurselings of the lap, we should be sorry to be deficient in curtesy, or when so many good and wise people drivel not to drivel a little too; we bend therefore with stiff and painful obedience to our duty, and offer our readers a short ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... journalists fetch up their drivel? I aim only at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no higher degree of merit, not even at brevity—I am sure it could have been all done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Chemist. Give me—Fosco—chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute the conception—with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper. Under similar circumstances, revive me the illustrious Newton. I guarantee that when he sees the apple fall he shall EAT IT, instead of discovering the principle of gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform Nero into the mildest of men before ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... best perhaps being that English criticism at the time was at nearly as low an ebb as English poetry. A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility; and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who tells us ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury |
