"Puling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the germ of an angel,—but a beast still. A week-old baby gives no more sign of intelligence, of love, or ambition, or hope, or fear, or passion, or purpose, than a week-old monkey, and is not half so frisky and funny. In fact, it is a puling, scowling, wretched, dismal, desperate-looking animal. It is only as it grows old that the beast gives way and the angel-wings bud, and all along through infancy and childhood the beast gives way and gives way and the angel-wings bud and bud; and yet we entertain our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all? That's the puzzle. She has her meals, her liberty, a good house to live in, and good clothes to wear, as usual. A while since that sufficed to keep her handsome and cheery, and there she sits now a poor, little, pale, puling chit enough. Provoking! Then comes the question, What is to be done? I suppose I must send for advice. Will you ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... dim white wall, a thin curtain swaying before it. At first he took it for the white-washed wall of his attic at home, the lace-curtains at the head of the bed blowing in the wind. Then a slow-winged shadow, passing between him and the ceiling with puling cry, ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... the old man, "Rebecca, I say, speak to her," and his voice faltered, the accents becoming puling. ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply can't kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature and mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and shipwrecks, volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents, and such like sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but it is no good your ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... puling whimper. Sometimes his terror rose to the throat and his entreaties became shrieks. He died a dozen deaths while his foe watched him with a chill stillness more menacing than ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... arose at the words. The Wangoni did not entirely believe the explanation; and to further their doubts there now arose from the inside of the huts the puling wail of infants which the mothers had not been entirely ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... last the poor thing is toiled and hammered into fit shape, it is in general racked and tortured prose rather than anything resembling poetry." Though Lord Byron wrote a few himself he defined the sonnet as "The most puling, petrifying, stupidly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... in mine absence, even to the following of me in another ship, in a shipboy's disguise, and how I rescued her from a scheming Pagan villain; but, as a plain, blunt man, I am no hand at the weaving of puling love tales and such trifling diversions for lovesick mayds and their puny gallants—having only consideration for men and their deeds, which I have here set down bluntly and even at mine advanced years am ready to maintain with the ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... was in those long-departed days. They said that I was beautiful. The mirror now reflects a haggard old woman, with ashen lips and face of deadly pallor. But do not fancy that you are listening to a mere puling lament. It is not the flight of years that has brought me to be this wreck of my former self: had it been so I could have borne the loss cheerfully, patiently, as the common lot of all; but it was no natural progress of decay which has robbed ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Why, how now, I say? What, you puling, peevish thing, you untoward baggage, will you not be ruled by your father? Have I taken care to bring you up to this, and will you do as you list? Away, I say; hang, starve, beg; begone, pack, I say; out of my sight! Thou never gettest pennyworth of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... But I should like him first to be a manly boy, and then a boyish man. The Yordases always have been manly boys; instead of puling, and puking, and picking this, that, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... is to observe that you are willing to let us have a little of your culture at your own price, but we shall not want it; we shall have our own culture, and it will be a much bigger and finer thing than the puling reveries of hedonists; it will be like the sea, not like ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sunne, and how to despise all hazards. Remove from him all nicenesse and quaintnesse in clothing, in lying, in eating, and in drinking: fashion him to all things, that he prove not a faire and wanton-puling boy, but a lustie and vigorous boy: When I was a child, being a man, and now am old, I have ever judged and believed the same. But amongst other things, I could never away with this kind of discipline used in most of our Colleges. It had peradventure been lesse hurtfull, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... eloquence:—"The work is essentially American. It is the type, the representative, THE AGGREGATE OUTBURST OF THE GREAT AMERICAN HEART, so well expressed, so admirably revealing the sentiment of our whole people—with the exception of some puling lovers he speaks of-—that it will find sympathy in the mind of every true son of the soil." The work thus heralded over the Republic with such perfect e pluribus unum concord is entitled English Items; and the embodiment ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... other left of whom I must say something here, and more immediately. The poor, puling little babe, born in misery and ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... in laughing whispers upon every discard, upon every bet. Now and then, in their whisperings, Cooley's hair touched hers; sometimes she laid her hand on his the more conveniently to look at his cards. Mellin began to be enraged. Did she think that puling milksop had as much as a shadow of the daring, the devilry, the carelessness of consequences which lay within Robert Russ Mellin? "Consequences?" What were they? There were no such things! She would not ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... her Jean, clad in sacerdotal vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she would tremble awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this poor sick work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping in the poisoned air of ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... me," he cried arrogantly. "Henry, I want the advantage of my strength in this world and I'm not going to go puling around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless a ride. Let 'em walk. Let 'em fall. Let 'em rot for all I care. I'm not afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place where man puts on trousers it's ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... a part of Schiller's design to represent in Carlos a process of evolution. Under the influence of manly friendship the puling sentimentalist was to have his fiber toughened into the stuff that great men are made of; and so it was quite in order that he should appear at first as a weakling. But he is too much of a weakling, and the reason is that Schiller did not foresee the end from the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... when she got a dreadful shock; instead of hiding, her hero had run out at the gate! At this bitter sight Maimie stopped blankly, as if all her lapful of darling treasures were suddenly spilled, and then for very disdain she could not sob; in a swell of protest against all puling cowards she ran to St. Govor's Well and hid ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in the good old English fashion ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... because he was a nobleman, and secondly, because he was a gentleman; but, to say nothing of the composition of his incomparable letters, and of the Castle of Otranto[1765], he is the "Ultimus Romanorum," the author of the Mysterious Mother[1768], a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. He is the father of the first romance and of the last tragedy in our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, be he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... sea-change that takes place at the Stroke Of Midnight on the date of the person's 21st birthday; no magic wand is waved over his scalp to convert him in a moment of time from a puling infant to a mature adult. The growth of child to adult is as gradual as the increase of his stature, which varies from one child to ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... "Some puling theoretician!" he muttered to himself, as he walked to the works one winter morning. "Some dandy who can draw cubes and triangles and cannot do anything else except come here—late probably—in an overcoat and comforter. One of those sickly office-desk beggars who are ill half ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... she would not have braved so much to save me from danger. I had difficulty in keeping from shouting aloud, so great was my joy. I felt that my strength had come back to me, and I cared no more for the threats of Cap'n Jack than for the anger of a puling child. I knew that Israel Barnicoat was somewhere lying in wait to do me harm, but I was not afraid. I saw this, too: Richard Tresidder would desire to have as little as possible said about my visit to Pennington, ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... description, when the statue moved its head toward him, a shudder went through the crowd, and a number of forefingers were levelled at it, and the head moved toward me, marked of them all. Its voice was answered by a dull puling scream from women, and the men gaped. When it descended from the saddle, the act was not performed with one bound, as I fancied, but difficultly; and it walked up to me like a figure dragging logs at its heels. Half-a-dozen workmen ran to arrest it; some townswomen fainted. There was a heavy altercation ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... well said; what's the news from London, Sirrah? My young mistress keeps such a puling ...
— A Yorkshire Tragedy • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... call Us to the field againe. No shrewish teares shall fill your eye When the sword-hilt's in our hand,— Heart-whole we'll part, and no whit sighe For the fayrest of the land; Let piping swaine, and craven wight, Thus weepe and puling crye, Our business is like men to ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... retorted, eyeing him shrewdly, "if it is so easy to do why were you undone a minute ago? And puling like a child ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... had become paramount. He could sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle. As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:—"I had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of England, Scotland, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... thousand crimes and debaucheries—and old Colonel Rumbald; whose fate, I must allow, caused me a little sorrow (even though he had flung a sharp cleaver at my head), for he was very much more of a man than that puling treacherous hound my Lord Howard, who was taken hiding in his shirt, up his own chimney, and turned traitor to his friends. Holloway too—a merchant of Bristol, and a friend of Mr. Ferguson—was executed, and several in Edinburgh, of the Scottish plotters under Argyle, among ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... can take an interest in things earthly, it will be no small addition to his present state of bliss to discover almost the realization of suggestions made sixty years ago, before the Browns of this period were conceived, and while the Rolphs were puling infants. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... of the Prophet did him credit at that painful period of his life, it must be allowed that his behaviour on being formally introduced into London Society showed no puling regret, no backward longings after echoing colleges, lost dons and the scouts that are no more. He was quite at his ease, and displayed none of the high-pitched contempt of Piccadilly that is often so amusingly characteristic of the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... moustaches—probably the only men on earth whom money causes to weep and pluck their beards in pretended sorrow when in the throes of their commercial emotion. If paid enough money they do not hesitate to use the onion freely to produce the real thing in tears. Next followed a dozen of mere puling mutes, of no caste or distinction whatever but that lent by a big brass badge on the breast of each. Then came four rickety carriages of the Columbus era; they hadn't a soul in them, but their cloth upholstered seats had been whitewashed with white ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas, are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse of each other's doctor. There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians. The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms, set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with invalids describing their own complaints. Or the sufferers turn their batteries ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... situation, on the largest possible scale, is that presented in Monna Vanna. It differs from that of Measure for Measure in the fact that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought about as little as possible. Every word that is uttered ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... gray, flat- backed, flat-breasted, sat beside the rude bed, silent, motionless, awaiting an end that she had so often watched in the sullen ferocity that is of beast rather than of man. And on her lap lay a little, pink, puling thing that whimpered and twisted weakly—a little, naked, thing ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... El Arbi bel Hadj ben Haidah looked with great scorn upon these Bedouins, and their contempt was reciprocated. In the eyes of the Berbers these men were outcasts and "eaters of sand," and in the eyes of the Bedouins the muleteers were puling, town-bred slaves, who dared not say their right hands were ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... her arms stretched out and, as she did so, his heart was strangely stirred within him by a little puling cry. ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... than Jackanapes, and that, consequently, Jackanapes was to blame for leading Tony into scrapes which resulted in his being chilled, frightened, or (most frequently) sick. But when Miss Jessamine said that Tony Johnson was delicate, she meant that he was more puling, less manly, and less healthily brought up than Jackanapes, who, when they got into mischief together, was certainly not to blame because his friend could not get wet, sit a kicking donkey, ride in the giddy-go-round, bear the noise of a cracker, or smoke brown ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... my hand against him. He fell at my feet and blubbered; he has kissed these very boots, literally, beseeching me 'not to frighten him.' Do you hear? 'Not to frighten him.' What a thing to say! Why, I offered him money. He's a puling chicken—sickly, epileptic, weak-minded—a child of eight could thrash him. He has no character worth talking about. It's not Smerdyakov, gentlemen. He doesn't care for money; he wouldn't take my presents. Besides, what motive had he for murdering the old man? Why, he's very likely his son, you ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... exaggerated satire of your neighbours. That's a spirit I'm sorry to notice in ye, and I regret to see that ye're already looking sulky at rebuke. The vairse,' pursued Armstrong, 'is mainly sickly, whining, puling stuff, as far away from Nature and experience as it's easily possible to be. Now, I invite ye. Listen ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... subject. But Browning, who has employed the motive so often (here, for instance, and yet more notably in The Last Ride Together) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental. There is no talk, among his lovers, of "blighted hearts," no whining and puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, and no pretence of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... is black, In puling prose and rhyme, Talk hatefully of love, and tack Hypocrisy to crime; Who smile and smite, engross the gorge Or impotently frown; And call us "rebels" with King George, As if they wore ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, expressed a warm wish that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amelie ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Switzerland. In the latter country he met with the celebrated Father Gassner, who, like Valentine Greatraks, amused himself by casting out devils, and healing the sick by merely laying hands upon them. At his approach puling girls fell into convulsions, and the hypochondriac fancied themselves cured. His house was daily besieged by the lame, the blind, and the hysteric. Mesmer at once acknowledged the efficacy of his cures, and declared that they were the obvious ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... wound the mind; But in thy fall what adds the brackish sum More than a blot unto thy martyrdom? Which scorns such wretched suffrages, and stands More by thy single worth than our whole bands. Yet could the puling tribute rescue ought In this sad loss, or wert thou to be brought Back here by tears, I would in any wise Pay down the sum, or quite consume my eyes. Thou fell'st our double ruin; and this rent Forc'd in thy life shak'd both the Church and tent. Learning in others steals ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... flowers, the trees, Arise in due succession; all things speak Peace, harmony and love.... Is Mother Earth A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil; A mother only to those puling babes Who, nursed in ease and luxury, make men The playthings of their babyhood, and mar, In self-important childishness, that peace Which men ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... me. Do you think you can put me off with defences and puling arguments of necessity, or policy, or the sacredness of property? No. You and I are here looking at naked truth. I will go down into your very soul and have it out by the roots, the naked truth. But I will have my answer. Are you ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... fanatics who may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don't be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory. Why don't you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don't you read it, and learn out of the mouth of the founder of Christianity, that there is one sin for which there is no forgiveness—blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, hey?—and that sin I ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... guidance of the universe. It has arisen self-evolved, by chance; and if a god created it, he laid down eternal laws and has left them to govern its course without mercy or grace, and without troubling himself about the puling of men who creep about on the face of the earth like the ants on that of a pumpkin. And well for us that it should be so! Better a thousand times is it to be the servant of an iron law, than the slave of a capricious master ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... amounted to a failure to comprehend nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... not suit the puling sentimentalism of the boudoir and the boarding-school. The Quixotism of the modern time will be angry with the rough writer who thus rudely lays his hand upon the helm of the mailed knight, and would deflower it of its glory and glossy plumes. It is hard to yield ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... me—which was little, for his time seemed to be much occupied, and his weakness for tobacco nearly cured—he once or twice attempted some drivel about disinterested friendship and undying gratitude; but I stopped that. If there be one thing for which I profess no sympathy, it is puling sentiment. He apparently did not care to discuss the progress of his affair, which was a relief; it is a dreadful nuisance to have to listen to lovers' talk, and I had enough of that at Wayback, when I could not help myself. At our time of life a man ought to ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... Alf. "You're just doing this whole thing to be cussed. You know you've got me where I can't stir hand or foot. I was a fool ever to have got mixed up with such a white-livered, puling baby. I might have known you hadn't an ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... and Sir James flew like a hunted buck along the corridor. He whipped his arms around the lady and kissed her passionately, and then flung on his knees and held out his arms. She put the something in white into them and there was a little puling cry. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... for I found the red-nosed old gentleman was a veteran fox-hunter of the neighborhood, for whose opinion my father had vast deference. Indeed, I believe he would have pardoned anything in me more readily than poetry; which he called a cursed, sneaking, puling, housekeeping employment, the bane of all true manhood. He swore it was unworthy of a youngster of my expectations, who was one day to have so great an estate, and would he able to keep horses and hounds and hire poets to write songs ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... so long?" It was as if she implied that these minutes without him were an eternity of ennui. He grew more and more conceited. He was already despising Don Juan as a puling boy. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... longer green but an opaline reverberation. We know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell by cell, the entire mask. The simple gestures of daily life have been recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a vitality that shames the anaemic imaginings and puling pessimisms of his younger contemporaries. What versatility, what undaunted desire to conquer new problems! He has in turn painted landscapes as full of distinction as Monet's. The nervous vivacity of his ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the open air is always well; it is because men now-a-days shut themselves up so much in rooms and pen themselves in stifling styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... and your courts, and your body-guards! Bah! You'd have a gibbet if you could, wouldn't you? You with your rebellion and your tinpot honours! A puling baby could conspire as well as you. And all the world ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I've solved the problem that gives man immortality! All the epochs that have existed since God first formed the world are mine to play with! I have seen myself as a puling infant, and as a greybeard. I have made myself immortal, because, with this machine, I can set back the clock of time. I have found a land where I am worshipped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... caitiff son of a brave father, who gave him to my care to train in knightly ways. But 'tis a puling fool, more fitting for the bowers ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... Romanoffs would become the dream of yesterday? All the long line of Royal sons no longer counts. Czardom with all it meant has gone for ever. The man, whose word a few weeks ago meant glory or shame, life or death, is to-day an exile, a prisoner. His word no more than the cry of a puling child! And to-morrow? God may speak again, and then Kaiserism will fall with ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... on her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... old Ike had been setting ferst in one chair and then in another chair and puling his wiskers and when father sed this he gave a grone and sed aint there no pertection under the law? and father sed the matter is being vestigated and persecution will folow enny falce step that the villins make. the trubble is they are verry hard ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... drew into a snarl. "Are ye men or puling babes? Hack yer way through them, if they be trolls, ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... passage, "it bristles with striking idiosyncrasies and bizarre contrasts. Its history, population, climate, location, architecture, soil, water, customs, costumes, horses, cattle, all attract the stranger's attention, either by force of intrinsic singularity or of odd juxtapositions. It was a puling infant for a century and a quarter, yet has grown to a pretty vigorous youth in a quarter of a century; its inhabitants are so varied that the 'go slow' directions over its bridges are printed in three languages, and the religious services in its churches ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... corrected this point of view. The father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants," viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier method of increase could be found in the wholesale import of Austrians, ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... the lamp, pulls the chain. Puling, the gasjet lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.) Only the chimney's broken. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only, it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose bright ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... sacred spirit burned unceasingly, purifying with its glowing flame the human tabernacle. Then Messer Simone gave a short laugh, and said, mockingly, that such stay-at-home tactics were well enough for puling fellows that liked to lie snug behind city walls and write puling sonnets, and would rather be busy with such petty business than risk their fine skins ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... on the origin of the 'Giaour' Smart, Christopher Smith, Sir Henry ——, Horace, esq., his 'Horace in London' ——, Mrs. Spencer. See 'Florence.' ——, Miss (afterwards Mrs. Oscar Byrne), dancer Smyrna, Lord Byron's stay at Smythe, Professor Socrates Sonnets, 'the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions,' Sorelli, his translation of Grillparzer's 'Sappho' Sotheby, William, esq., his tragedies his 'Ivan' accepted for Drury Lane Theatre similarity of a passage in 'Ivan' to one in the 'Corsair' a 'row' about 'Ivan' the AEschylus of the age his ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the poor to claim? What boots to me your corn and wine, Your busy toil, your vaunted fame, The senate where your speakers shine? Once, when your homes, by war o'erswept, Saw strangers battening on your land, Like any puling fool, I wept! The aged wretch ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... will come when that dread power—the Poor— Whom, in their greed and pride of wealth, they spurn— Will rise on them, and tear them from their seats; Drag all their vulgar splendours down, and pluck Their shallow women from their lawless beds, Yea, seize their puling and unhealthy babes, And fling them as foul pavement to the streets. In all the dreaming of the Universe There is no darker ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... 'though I am near fifteen years of age, and half through Homer? but you must allow that Bernard Low is an abominably disagreeable fellow, and one that one should like to duck in a horse-pond—a whining, puling, mother-spoiled brat; however, I will see that he shan't be quizzed to his face, and I suppose that's all you require, ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... I would fain be puny and puling, to have the clear heart that once I had. Oh, hear me! hear me! and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... noble on the highest step, is not bestowed, like the rewards in a child's school, to the most deserving. I love you, Hugo Gottfried, it is true. But I wish a thousand times that I did not. Nevertheless—I do! Therefore make your reckoning with that, and put aside puling shams and whimpering subterfuges." ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... that old Liz suddenly ceased her gesticulations, lifted her black brows in unutterable surprise, opened her mouth, and became a listening statue? Did she too recognise tones which recalled other days—and the puling cries of infancy? It might have been so. Certain it is that when the shout was repeated she broke down in an effort to reply, and burst into mingled laughter and tears, at the same time waving her free arm more violently ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... enables one man to produce such sublime and agreeable impressions on his fellows. To step from the busy pave of New Bond-street and its busy whirl of fashion to this placid meer of reflection is a contrast almost too severe for some of the puling votaries of London gaiety: yet the scene teems with deep-souled poetry. Some such feelings as those so touchingly expressed in Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon, on his first exile, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... ugh! You whining, puling fool! Hussey, you have not a drop of my blood in you. What, you are ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... With more of truth in them than she expected; and yet what business have I sentimentalizing. My socius thinks "what a puling fool this ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... aeroplanes whose multitude darkens the light of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forming a vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men and their supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since we heard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voice drowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yet they alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by the deranged of former generations appear at last to all people as comical ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... see a coyote run without thinking of a night I spent on the Cheyenne, when that puling little English lord spent the whole night shivering up a tree, to hear me and Little Breeches snoring on the ground and he thought it was wolves eating us up, because a little while before a coyote yelled in the bushes——" and again ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... be Lucia Orestilla?" exclaimed Catiline, "this puling love-sick girl, this timorous, repentant—I had nearly called thee—maiden! Why, thou fool, what would'st thou with the man farther? Dost think to be ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... recall that one of the butts of his extreme humor was this same Dick, whom he studied with the greatest care for points worthy his humorous appreciation. Dick, in addition to his genuinely lively mental interests, was a most romantic person on one side, a most puling and complaining soul on the other. As a newspaper artist I believe he was only a fairly respectable craftsman, if so much, whereas Peter was much better, although he deferred to Dick in the most persuasive manner and seemed to believe at times, though I knew he did not, that Dick represented ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... in a trice They make a feast less great than nice. But all this while his eye is served, We must not think his ear was sterved; But that there was in place to stir His spleen, the chirring grasshopper, The merry cricket, puling fly, The piping gnat for minstrelsy. And now, we must imagine first, The elves present, to quench his thirst, A pure seed-pearl of infant dew, Brought and besweeten'd in a blue And pregnant violet; which done, His kitling eyes begin ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... army—a commission, purchased with my money, and his sister's misery! This was the man who had been foremost in the plot to ensnare me, and grasp my wealth. This was the man who had been the main instrument in forcing his sister to wed me; well knowing that her heart was given to that puling boy. Due to his uniform! The livery of his degradation! I turned my eyes upon him—I could not help it—but I ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... gossiping women, decked in their caps and many-colored finery. There are smartly-arrayed young girls, chatting merrily with the swains at their side. Unruly children scamper, barefooted and bareheaded, around and under the tables. Puling infants and barking dogs add their discord to the din and confusion. It is a scene one is ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... suppose it is by way of amending his errors, and bringing back this daring innovator to sober history, that it has been thought fit to alter the play of Lear for the stage, as they have altered Romeo and Juliet: they have converted the seraph-like Cordelia into a puling love heroine, and sent her off victorious at the end of the play—exit with drums and colors flying—to be married to Edgar. Now any thing more absurd, more discordant with all our previous impressions, and with the characters ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... went at it like a puling babe. Why didn't you put some fire into it—kiss her feet or bite her neck? Then you would have made us sit up and take notice. You college people are a lot ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... a puling, yelping whelp in her place.... A tall, severe-looking elderly woman entered the verandah by a distant door and approached the savage, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... myself now with observing that the vigorous and laborious class of life has lately got, from the bon-ton of the humanity of this day, the name of the "laboring poor." We have heard many plans for the relief of the "laboring poor." This puling jargon is not as innocent as it is foolish. In meddling with great affairs, weakness is never innoxious. Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is used to excite compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for those who cannot labor,—for the sick and infirm, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... energy, happy in their wooden home, with a kind captain and smart officers to teach them, life and stir around, fair prospects ahead, and a British seaman's honest livelihood to be earned instead of the miserable puling beggardom of the streets, or the horrid company of the prison cell; which, that they should lie in the path of any child of our land, adrift on the rough tide of time at ten years old, is a glaring shame to the millions of sovereigns in bankers' ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... the object of burglary is to provide the burglar with money to spend, and as in many instances it has achieved this object, therefore the burglar is a public benefactor and the police are ignorant sentimentalists. No highway robber has yet harrowed us with denunciations of the puling moralist who allows his child to suffer all the evils of poverty because certain faddists think it dishonest to garotte an alderman. Thieves and assassins understand quite well that there are paths of acquisition, even of the best things, that are barred to all men of honor. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... humour, and will meet your jest. She should be one about my Katherine's age; But not so old, by some ten years, in gravity. One that would meet my mirth, sometimes outrun it; No puling, pining moppet, as you said, Nor moping maid, that I must still be teaching The freedoms of a wife all her life after: But one, that, having worn the chain before, (And worn it lightly, as report gave out,) Enfranchised from it by her poor fool's death, Took it not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Walpole firstly, because he was a nobleman, and secondly, because he was a gentleman: but, to say nothing of the composition of his incomparable letters, and of "The Castle of Otranto," he is the Ultimus Romanorum, the author of the 'Mysterious Mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play: he is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy in our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a robin-redbreast; to walk alone, like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young 20 wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the lions; when you fasted, it was presently after 25 dinner; when you looked sadly, it was for want of money: and now you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that, when I look ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... so. I can't help it if people will take possession of me and pull me about. Fifthly, and lastly, I had an interview with the Countess, had I? Well, is it wrong for a man to bid good-bye to a friend? I ask you, what upon earth do you mean by such a charge as that? Do you take me for a puling infant?" ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... accustomed nowadays to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint produces ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... forward) You thought no doubt to spite me! That to this Royal Christening you did not invite me! BUT—(Mrs. Kean: "You must plaster that 'but' on the white wall at the back of the gallery.")— But on this puling brat revenged I'll be! My fiery dragon there shall have her ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... retribution shall be taken for our conduct. This has been the cry all through the war. "We should have conquered the South," says an American paper which I read this very day, "but for England." Was there ever such puling heard from men who have an army of a million, and who turn and revile a people who have stood as aloof from their contest as we have from the war of Troy? Or is it an outcry made with malice prepense? And is the song of the New York Times a variation of the Herald tune?—"The ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... why deny it?" went on Larry. "With them and the Keth and gentle invisible soldiers walking around assassinating at will—well, the worst Bolsheviki are only puling babes, eh, Doc? ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... my life in making a gentleman of? What do you think of that, Sir Captain? How would you like to be saddled with a young wolf- hound cub like that—Sorley Boy's son he is, no other, on my life—that I was fool enough to take wardship of when he was a puling puppy and his father an honest man? What do you think of that? Curse the whole ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... combined hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor, and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, "What next?" Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten, the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and drinking which in spite ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... Now I have found you, we part not till I know what I desire. The vision that sees through the Past, and cleaves through the veil of the Future, is in you at this hour; never before, never to come again. The vision of no puling fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule, but of a strong man, with a vigorous brain. Soar and ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... can do without them; And what if you should never know them more!— He is a puny soul who, feeling pain, Finds ease because another feels it too. If e'er I open out this heart of mine It shall be for a nobler end—to teach And not to purchase puling sympathy. —Nay, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... dimpled. She had gone back thirty generations in as many seconds. Thus might one of the daughters of Boadicea have looked whilst guiding her mother's chariot against the Roman phalanx. Resting on one knee, with a revolver in each hand, she seemed no puling mate for the gallant man who fought ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... your lofty paradise, See aldermanic banquets rise— And though the duns around you troop, Still float in seas of turtle soup. I here forsake the tuneful trade, Where none but lordlings now are paid, Or where some northern rogue sits puling, (The curse of universal schooling)— A ploughman to his country lost, An author to his printer's cost— A slave to every man who'll buy him, A knave to every man who'll try him— Yet let him take the pen, at once The ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ignoble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty, and cowardice its greatest crime—above all, that ultimate, puling cowardice of accepting life empty ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... stretching out a hand and dragging him roughly between his knees, and then holding up his head by the chin. 'None of that nonsense! We're not going to hurt thee, Linton—isn't that thy name? Thou art thy mother's child, entirely! Where is my share in thee, puling chicken?' ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... civilised community . . . The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can, therefore, serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth." In another part of this essay he says: "While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in and accelerating the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... mendicant, with an expression of withering and baneful scorn; "a silly hankering for a puling girl." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... long, turn you both out of door? How say you, pretty soul, is't come to pass, yea or no? I think I have pull'd your peacock's plumes somewhat low. And yet you be so stout as though you felt no grief; But I know, ere it be long, you will come puling to me for relief. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... MacDougall answered, looking from one to the other, and putting her hand on Robbie's fair curls, almost as if she were doing him an injustice to say it. "Yes, I think every one would say Elsie was the bonnier baby. Robbie was but a puling, pasty-faced little thing, thin and miserable, not a crowing, bright little thing like the others. He wanted a deal o' care, did Robbie, an' I will ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... only admonished. In Wareham, in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe" to protect his foot—for doing this piece of heavy work on the Lord's Day, was ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... rounds of the tents outside, and he was marvelling. There were men who had fought bravely, who had stood wounds and the surgeon's knife without a murmur; who, weakened and demoralized by fever now, were weak and puling of spirit, and sly and thievish; who would steal the food of the very comrades for whom a little while before they had risked their lives—men who in a fortnight had fallen from a high plane of life to the pitiful level of brutes. ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... or not, he married in his youth a woman of the half-blood, and begot of her a troop of devils. Five sons he had, all great men, knowing not God and fearing none of God's works. And after them came a daughter, a puling slip of a thing, never meant to live, whom they did to death among them with their drinking and blaspheming ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... from her beautiful face the glance of her enraptured beholders. If we are to gain an approximate idea of a figure so perfect, we must try to conceive what might be the result of a supreme effort of nature to show by comparison to the most artistic of her people just what puling infants they were in their attempts to create forms ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... course, be the big thrill in it—Osborn. It would be wonderful to have him coming home to her successful little dinners every evening. People didn't want a great deal, after all; all the discontented, puling, peevish, wanting people one met must be great fools; they had made their beds and made them wrong; the great thing, the simple secret, was to make them right. A husband and wife must pull together, in everything. Pulling ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... from being horrified at the courage of her favourite, always used to pay his debts after his duels; and would not listen to a word that was whispered against his morality. "He will sow his wild oats," she would say, "and is worth far more than that puling hypocrite ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... strifes are bred by day, Our puling wives do open lay; None friends, none foes we must esteem But whom they so vouchsafe to deem: O 'tis of all our follies chief, Our woe to woo, to ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... baptized in a great hurry, "Henry Leaf Ascott," according to the mother's desire, which in her critical position nobody dared to thwart. Even at the end of fourteen days the "son and heir" was still a puling, sickly, yellow-faced baby. But to the ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... to Strides Cottage again! Nearer and nearer now, that moment that must come, and put an end to all this puling hesitation. She could not help the thought that rose in her mind:—"This that I do—this reuniting of two souls long parted by a living death—may it not be what Death does every day for many a world-worn ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... (which just now are dangling by our kitchen blaze) discourse most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my palate. For, with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship hath taken physic for his body to-day, and being low and puling, requireth to be pampered. Foh! how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose! For you must know we extract a divine spirit of gravy from those materials which, duly compounded with a consistence of bread and cream (y'clept bread-sauce), each to each giving ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Germania's Austrian bridegroom, and everywhere illuminate the heavens with the torches of our triumphs. If the torches now and then come too near some piece of humanity and set it on fire, what is that to us? Germany is our enemy, and if we have a puling compassion on our enemy, we become traitors to our own cause. That's all. But what is the use of this strife and these recriminations?" asked he, suddenly breaking into a smile. "I have only come to ask your excellency ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... wide Atlantic, worthless London's puling child, Better that its waves should bear thee, than the land thou hast reviled; Better in the stifling cabin, on the sofa thou shouldst lie, Sickening as the fetid nigger bears the greens and bacon by; Better, when the midnight horrors haunt the strained ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... shop, scarcely heeding the voice of Mr. Mossrose, who said, "I'll take forty per shent" (and went back to his duty cursing himself for a soft-hearted fool for giving up so much of his rights to a puling woman). Morgiana, I say, tottered out of the shop, and went up Conduit Street, weeping, weeping with all her eyes. She was quite faint, for she had taken nothing that morning but the glass of water which the pastry-cook in the Strand ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the solemn, and even the stern depository of justice, could scarcely imagine, in that searching glance and compressed lip, the softness of heart which those fragments indicate. Death may be a great subduer of the fierce spirit of man as it approaches; but their language is not the phrase of puling softness, or pusillanimous alarm; it is at once calm and fond, collected and fervid. The writer's natural and honourable feelings are all alive at the moment when the last pang might seem to be at hand; and though nothing is said ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Wacousta, chafing with the recollection, "wherefore do I, like a vain and puling schoolboy, enter into this abasing contrast of personal advantages? The proud eagle soars not more above the craven kite, than did my soul, in all that was manly and generous, above that of yon false governor; and who should have prized those qualities, if it were not the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... utmost test, where it is successfully encountered, of nobility,—the practice, namely, of self- revelation and self-delineation. To talk much about oneself with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of indecent familiarity, no puling and no posing,—the shores of the sea of literature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those who have adventured on this dangerous attempt. But a criticism of Stevenson is happy in this, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... left to his own instincts in Africa, develops the Southern sociology to a degree which casts entirely into pitiable pettiness the puling despotism of the calaboose and slave market. Witness Dahomey, where all lives, all fortunes, all persons, are cooerdinated in one perfect 'system' of subjugation to one sable Jefferson Davis Gezo, who is de ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Antoine brought his fist heavily down on the table. "Next thing you will be begging that we take her. Since the good Lord in His mercy has refrained from giving us any mouths to feed, we will not fly in His face for those who do not concern us. And the puling thing would die on the journey and have to be left behind to feed the wolves. Come! come! Attend to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas |
