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More "Drivel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those who came in the prosperous days of the 70's or 80's, never could understand the partiality of the old settlers for the "Hymen's Altar" chapter. Lycurgus Mason also always took the view that the "Hymen" chapter was drivel. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... 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 a sot. But, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... my dear 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... as it exhibits Byron the poet, Byron the scoffer, Byron the roue, in his true colors and real dimensions; and if, after reading it, a person should adopt the old cant about his brilliant rascalities, and the old drivel about his sentimental misanthropy, the fault is in the reader rather than the volume. For our own part we are acquainted with no edition of any celebrated author, equaling this in the remorselessness with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... empty sound is conversation; and not 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... of the name of Judah, who, in 1822, had published a dramatic poem styled "Odofried the Outcast." The title was ominous of the fate which the production met. The author naturally felt that the age was unappreciative. To relieve his mind he wrote eleven or twelve hundred lines of fresh drivel, in which he assailed everything and everybody. The satire was of that dreadful kind which requires notes and commentaries to point out who is hit and what is meant; and the annotation, as is usual in such cases, took up much more space than the text. This work—for which the author was sent to ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... an impatient twist. She thought it positively indecent to speak of sacred things so early in the morning in cold blood. "What has this drivel to do with your ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... country people in a bally little school-house, and the girl gets up and harangues. She's been to the city, and knows a few catch phrases. There's nothing to it. We wouldn't have known of it—only for the enthusiastic friend who pours his drivel into this paper." ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... retired, probably dispirited by the loss of their leader. It is evident that the fever when untreated is as fatal now as it proved in the case of Commodore Owen's officers in this river, or in the great Niger Expedition. And yet what poor drivel was poured forth when I adopted energetic measures for speedily removing any Europeans out of the Delta. We were not then aware that the remedy which was first found efficacious in our own little Thomas on Lake 'Ngami, in 1850, and that cured myself and attendants during my solitary journeyings, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... October, Lady Tatham returned to Duddon. Tatham would have been with her, but that he was detained, grumbling, by a political demonstration at Newcastle. Never had he felt political speech-making so tedious. But for a foolish promise to talk drivel to a crowd of people who knew even less about the subject than he, he might have been spending the evening with Lydia. For the strangers in Green Cottage had departed, and Lydia was again ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the suggestion. She meant to marry when she should find the right man, but the difficulty of choice disturbed her. She had still much of the spirit which made her at twelve see nothing but nonsense in the "Turn, Gentle Hermit of the Dale" drivel, and she was quite prepared to decide with her mind. She never took her heart into consideration, or the possibility of being overcome by a feeling which ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... object seen in the morning—a crow, a cripple, &c.—determines the fortunes of the day, had his respect. "At an hour," he comments, "when the senses are most impressionable the aspect of unpleasant spectacles has a double effect." [508] He was disturbed by the "drivel of dreams," and if he did not himself search for the philosopher's stone he knew many men who were so engaged (he tells us there were a hundred in London alone) and he evidently ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... be so loved, yet so mistaken! 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? ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... so insufferably crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it openly as "Drivel." Never was such Collapse. In brief, The ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all right. Yellow ivory also. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to write ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... editors to know details of this kind; but it surely is their duty to investigate before starting on a crusade. In the case of people who knew the facts, this particular blunder merely made the newspapers that committed it look ridiculous; but the majority of those who read the drivel in all probability had no idea of the facts, and were led to imagine that promotions to the various ranks of general officer had hitherto all been a matter of seniority. It is an example of the way in which the public have been misled about the War ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... more confidence he acquired in his own powers. This severe mental labor took away much of the pain of his "despised love." Ishmael was one to love strongly, ardently, constantly. But he was not one to drivel over a hopeless passion. He loved Claudia: how deeply, how purely, how faithfully, all his future life was destined to prove. And he knew that Claudia loved him; but that all the prejudices of her rank, her character, and her education were ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... writing for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, I myself — you mayn't ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... Delphic Hag of old, by Fiend possest, He swells, wild Frenzy heaves his panting breast, His bristling hairs stick up, his eyeballs glow, And from his mouth long strakes of drivel flow.'] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... 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
... Steve wearily. "I'm willing to be decent about it, Tom, but I don't want to listen to drivel ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... silly, doesn't it? And there are many things quite as silly as this in the book. You can scarcely imagine how wise people like the Egyptians could ever have believed in such drivel. But, then, side by side with this miserable stuff, you find really wonderful and noble thoughts, that surely came to these men of ancient days from God Himself, telling them how every man must be judged at ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... oppose our popish deceivers who, without the authority of God's Word, boast themselves heads of the Church and of the people of God, at the same time neither teaching nor understanding the Scriptures, but offering their own drivel as ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... of orbs of sight, Their sockets two small bones like berries fill. Towards us, as I say, he speeds outright Along the shore, and seems a moving hill. Tusks jutting out like savage swine he shows, A breast with drivel foul, and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of ...
— Options • O. Henry
... have no sort of patience with the theological snivel and drivel about the sacredness of the Sabbath. I do not understand why they do not accept the words of their own Christ, namely, that "the Sabbath was made for man, and ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... my look out. It can't be worse than going about with you and listening while you crow and drivel about her, that's one comfort! [The Pale-haired Lady coughs in ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... smiling at me like a Cheshire cat, Mr Lubin; and I am not going to sit here mumchance like an old-fashioned goody goody wife while you men monopolize the conversation and pay out the very ghastliest exploded drivel as the latest thing in politics. I am not giving you my own ideas, Mr Lubin, but just the regular orthodox science of today. Only the most awful old fossils think that Socialism is bad economics and that Darwin invented Evolution. Ask Papa. Ask Uncle. Ask ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... a strange curiosity touching the mind they issued from; the perhaps unparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, and emitted it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdroeckh also a father and mother; did he, at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his; looks he also wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the Past, where only winds, and their low harsh moan, give inarticulate ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... week of October, Lady Tatham returned to Duddon. Tatham would have been with her, but that he was detained, grumbling, by a political demonstration at Newcastle. Never had he felt political speech-making so tedious. But for a foolish promise to talk drivel to a crowd of people who knew even less about the subject than he, he might have been spending the evening with Lydia. For the strangers in Green Cottage had departed, and Lydia was again within ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... drawer, after a year of ceaseless adventures, and Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie discreetly forbore to mention it. During that year Henry's opinion on his work had fluctuated. There had been moments, days perhaps, of discouragement, when he regarded it as drivel, and himself as a fool—in so far, that is, as he had trafficked with literature. On the other hand, his original view of it reasserted itself with frequency. And in the end he gloomily and proudly decided, once and for all, that the Stream of Trashy Novels Constantly ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... could have contained so much fiery energy. Moreover, he found a field for his journalistic talents in a passionate correspondence in the local papers. Tyson could speak, Tyson could write, where other men maunder and drivel. His tongue was tipped with fire and his pen with vitriol. Looking about him for a worthy antagonist, he singled out Smedley, M.D., a local practitioner given over to two ideals—sanitation and reform. Needless to say, for sanitation and reform Tyson cared ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... to 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
... Dryden, Warburton and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... of the sea never saw I such. They had no feathers, but their fashion was of a bat; and he was flapping them so that three winds went forth from him, whereby Cocytus was all congealed. With six eyes he was weeping, and over three chins trickled the tears and bloody drivel. With each mouth he was crushing a sinner with his teeth, in manner of a brake, so that he thus was making three of them woeful. To the one in front the biting was nothing to the clawing, so that sometimes his spine remained all stripped ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... is an amazing amount of drivel written over here, most of which, I think, would never get past the office-boy of an American publication. The English short story and the English music-hall ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... good society in England, Charles, men drivel at all ages by repeating silly formulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys make their own formulas out of slang, like you. When they reach your age, and get political private secretaryships and things of that sort, they drop slang and get their formulas ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... 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: ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... Lord Henry concluded, "that according to this view of poetry, which I believe is the right view, and the view unconsciously taken by the masses, more than three quarters of Victorian Verse is simply so much superior drivel." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... fools with their endless drivel about the Church of the Spirit of Mankind Incarnate. It's enough to make a man wish for a ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting to ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... head!' replied Davis. 'You can do that, I fancy, and by God, I'll show you how! I'll stand no more of your drivel.' ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... if it be my vice, My pleasure to displease—to love men hate me! Ah, friend of mine, believe me, I march better 'Neath the cross-fire of glances inimical! How droll the stains one sees on fine-laced doublets, From gall of envy, or the poltroon's drivel! —The enervating friendship which enfolds you Is like an open-laced Italian collar, Floating around your neck in woman's fashion; One is at ease thus,—but less proud the carriage! The forehead, free from mainstay or coercion, Bends here, there, everywhere. But ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... 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
... here, miserable remnant, snatched from under Death's teeth, thou inspirest weariness and disgust with life; like a caterpillar in the fields, thou gloatest on the rich ear of joy and belchest out the drivel of despair and sorrow. Thy truth is like a rusty sword in the hands of a nightly murderer,—and as a murderer thou shalt be executed. But before that, let me look into thine eyes. Perchance, only cowards are afraid of them, but in the brave they awake the thirst for strife and victory; then ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance. Yet ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... police-offices 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 a driveler of Seneca! Under the circulating library tyranny, Johnson himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... you're writing for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, I myself — you ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers of Sand City—upon which town may God ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Certain natures feel the lust of battle now and then. But unfortunately life in a country town does not offer much in that way, and it isn't given to every one to (turns the leaves of the book RORLUND has been reading). "Woman as the Handmaid of Society." What sort of drivel is this? ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... good to marry, and her own inclinations seconded the suggestion. She meant to marry when she should find the right man, but the difficulty of choice disturbed her. She had still much of the spirit which made her at twelve see nothing but nonsense in the "Turn, Gentle Hermit of the Dale" drivel, and she was quite prepared to decide with her mind. She never took her heart into consideration, or the possibility of being overcome by a feeling which is stronger ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They would request me to resign in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feller that chatters all the time is bound to talk a certain amount of drivel.—The Sayings of ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to be of any service, for the younger missionaries had retired, probably dispirited by the loss of their leader. It is evident that the fever when untreated is as fatal now as it proved in the case of Commodore Owen's officers in this river, or in the great Niger Expedition. And yet what poor drivel was poured forth when I adopted energetic measures for speedily removing any Europeans out of the Delta. We were not then aware that the remedy which was first found efficacious in our own little Thomas on Lake 'Ngami, in 1850, and that cured myself and attendants during ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... is evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... I'm half afraid you've lived in your musty old books so long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of the furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly, sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very often ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... 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 end of ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... expects editors to know details of this kind; but it surely is their duty to investigate before starting on a crusade. In the case of people who knew the facts, this particular blunder merely made the newspapers that committed it look ridiculous; but the majority of those who read the drivel in all probability had no idea of the facts, and were led to imagine that promotions to the various ranks of general officer had hitherto all been a matter of seniority. It is an example of the way in which the public have been misled about the War Office ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... doesn't it? And there are many things quite as silly as this in the book. You can scarcely imagine how wise people like the Egyptians could ever have believed in such drivel. But, then, side by side with this miserable stuff, you find really wonderful and noble thoughts, that surely came to these men of ancient days from God Himself, telling them how every man must be judged at last for all that ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... people in a bally little school-house, and the girl gets up and harangues. She's been to the city, and knows a few catch phrases. There's nothing to it. We wouldn't have known of it—only for the enthusiastic friend who pours his drivel into ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... plunges into that vortex of Hades. Reckon up the good he gets there. Does he gain health? Alas, think of the crowd, the rank odours, the straining heart-beats! Does he hear any wisdom? Listen to the hideous badinage, the wild bursts of foul language from the betting-men, the mean, cunning drivel of the gamblers, the shrill laughter of the horsey and unsexed women? Does the youth make friends? Ah, yes! He makes friends who will cheat him at betting, cheat him at horse-dealing, cheat him at gambling when the orgies of the course are over, borrow ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... with pleasure from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe collection, the editor has selected upwards of fifty, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... concluded, "that according to this view of poetry, which I believe is the right view, and the view unconsciously taken by the masses, more than three quarters of Victorian Verse is simply so much superior drivel." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... are many old legends that our forefathers came from a world beyond the sky, but I have always dismissed this as religious drivel, fit only for women." ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... sentimental drivel short," cut in Hume unpleasantly. "Have you gone over to his side of the deal? Are you throwing me down and tying ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... sometimes find your elders laying their heads together and saying what a bad thing it is for young men to come into a little money—that those always do best who have no expectancy, and the like. They will then quote some drivel from one of the Kingsleys about the deadening effect an income of 300 pounds a year will have upon a man. Avoid any one whom you may hear talk in this way. The fault lies not with the legacy (which would certainly be ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... myself. And when I see a whole silent, solemn drawing-room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads "communing" I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation. In our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and "rot," mostly, but better that, a thousand times, than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a paper? Well, it's nothing very new To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, I myself — you mayn't believe it — helped to ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... girl companion, and while there was in great fear and grief, expecting a death-sentence from the Emperor the next day. When brought before his judge, his face was wan and pale and his hair and beard gray, the change having taken place in the night. His beard was filthy with drivel, and the Emperor, moved by his pitiful condition, pardoned him. There was a clergyman of Nottingham whose daughter at the age of thirteen experienced a change from jet-blackness of the hair to white in a single night, but this was confined to a spot on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Old Ebenezer proves that it is all a joke." And this from another one: "'What do you think of young Parson Bostic?' was asked of Banker McElwin. 'I didn't think he was loaded,' the financier replied." It was said that a great batch of this drivel was cut out, credited and sent to McElwin, and Lyman accused Warren, but he denied it, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... God, quod a? nay let a whoreson drivel Prate here all day, with a foul evil, And all thy sermon goeth on covetise, And biddest men beware of avarice; And yet in thy sermon dost thou none other thing, But for alms ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... He didn't mind the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam—only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"—is an admirable example of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... who squeak boldly forth in print that Nature is the mother of altruism, that self-sacrifice is her first law! One genius observes that 'tis their cruelty and selfishness have arrested the progress of the tiger and the ape! Poor Nature! Never a word of shotguns in all this drivel, of course. Cruelty and selfishness! Qualities purely and solely human—qualities resulting from conscious intelligence alone. You and I are selfish, not the ape; you and I are cruel, not the tiger. He at ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... another man to rob his fellow-creatures; aunt there gave lessons,—she can't teach a bit; she was only putting nonsense into the heads of future men and women, and, such as it was, putting it there wrong. I was doing likewise, and I teach worse than she does. Of an evening I wrote drivel for the papers. We were, every one of us, useless and miserable. At last ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... short—you can put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... room tualetejo, vestejo. Drill bori. Drill (tool) borilo. Drill (military) ekzerco. Drink trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... 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 ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... 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
... verses, in and out of the volume, that the mysterious poet might have written under a hundred aliases. But the Dutch Flat "Clarion," following, with no uncertain sound, left me small time for consideration. "We doubt," said that journal, "if a more feeble collection of drivel could have been made, even if taken exclusively from the editor's own verses, which we note he has, by an equal editorial incompetency, left out of the volume. When we add that, by a felicity of idiotic selection, this person ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... that isn't Emerson," he answered. "It's just common sense, only it sounds to you like drivel. I'm going now,—unless you want to hear some more about the plots I've been getting into. But I want to say this. I ask you to remember that you're my father, and that—I'm fond of you. And that, if you and I happen to be on opposite sides, it won't make any difference as far ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... dearest friends; Unarmed run upon thy foemen's swords; Never fear any plague, before it fall: Dropsies and watery tympanies haunt thee; Thy lungs with surfeiting be putrified, To cause thee have an odious stinking breath; Slaver and drivel like a child at mouth; Be poor and beggarly in thy old age; Let thine own kinsmen laugh when thou complain'st, And many tears gain nothing but blind scoffs. This is the guerdon due to drunkenness: Shame, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... senseless drivel you write on the least provocation! Whether you grew up with the Surbury relics or not, you have certainly decayed with them. Every stone that's left of that confounded ruin (probably only a simple market-cross) proclaims ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... times,[67] and now I will say only this: First, they must prove that the rock means authority. They will not do this, nor can they do it, so they just have voice to their own inventions, and all their drivel must be divine command. Secondly, the rock can mean neither St. Peter nor his authority, on account of the words of Christ which follow, "And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." Now it is clear as day that no one is edified in the Church, nor withstands the gates ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... is abominably diffuse, filled with extraneous and superfluous matter, and totally lacking in the principles of good construction. There are scenes of positively breathless excitement, preceded and followed by dreary drivel; but the success of the book does not depend on its action, but rather on the characters of Sonia, her maudlin father, the student Raskolnikov, and his sister. It is impossible to read "Crime and Punishment" without ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... preserve his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... thing is no work of mine," cried Tricotrin; "and if we are to avoid a quarrel, I will ask you not to accuse me of it! A joy, indeed? In that block of drivel you view the cause of ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... have contained so much fiery energy. Moreover, he found a field for his journalistic talents in a passionate correspondence in the local papers. Tyson could speak, Tyson could write, where other men maunder and drivel. His tongue was tipped with fire and his pen with vitriol. Looking about him for a worthy antagonist, he singled out Smedley, M.D., a local practitioner given over to two ideals—sanitation and reform. Needless to say, for sanitation and reform Tyson cared not a hang. ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... "that you are talking drivel? Nobody ought to drivel before breakfast. It isn't decent. What does Dahlia ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... have got to do is to put a lot of stupid, conventional ideas out of your mind, and not worry about other people, and the drivel they talk, or the idiotic things they say. We weren't conventional last year, so why the dickens should we be this? I'm awfully keen about you, Sabina, and awfully keen about the child too; but let us be sane and be lovers and not ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... to die?" sharply interrupted the general. "Why do you drivel? You know I detest beds and blankets. Drop it! Here, take this," and he gave him a sheet of crested paper folded in four, which was lying beside him. "Read it, please. Aloud! so that ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... dear 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... style till the defendant began to drivel at the mouth a little. At last, after a struggle, he said, with a piteous whine, that he could not help it: he hated signing his name; some mischief always came of it; but this time ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... not to be turned aside by drivel of that sort; so, with a scornful laugh, I hurried on and was soon in the courtyard, surrounded by at least a score of persons who madly inquired where the fire was, and wanted to help me to put it out. At last we managed to get them back at their work, and I instructed old Conrad to have the ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... there is an amazing amount of drivel written over here, most of which, I think, would never get past the office-boy of an American publication. The English short story and the English music-hall ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Arbitration is the soothing lullaby which Anglomaniacs are to sing to his unsuspecting "cousin" until he gets his "iron hand" in order—weaves about him an anaconda-coil of cannon. Despite all the milk-sick drivel anent "ties of blood, language and literature," "community of interest of the ger-ate and gal-orious Anglo-Saxon race, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, the cold facts of history prove that for more than ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... so, be so loved, yet so mistaken 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? ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... 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
... a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience." A fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there,—the storm at night, the haunted chamber, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... 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 to his taste; for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... mistakes, this bears The palm, "That all men are about to live," For ever on the brink of being born. All pay themselves the compliment to think They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride On this reversion takes up ready praise; At least, their own; their future selves applauds; How excellent that life they ne'er will lead! Time lodg'd in their own hands is Folly's vails: That lodg'd in Fate's, to Wisdom they consign; The thing they can't ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... very old fir-tree, killed by the assiduous ivy. Just a short time ago I saw it struck down, lying on the grass, its foliage looking like a beautiful head of reddish hair. I saw the axe that felled it, too. Its trunk weeps tears of resin, which trail along in drivel, then change to heavy, creeping flame. But the dry red locks break into lines of living fire, whistle and shoot innumerable jets of many colors underneath a broad ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... snapping shut in a peculiar fashion, as though he were squirting venom all over the floor. He was as sensual as Maximum Max, only his voluptuous talks of women were far more offensive in form. But then his lewd drivel was apt to glitter with flashes of imagination. I do not remember ever seeing him ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... look out. It can't be worse than going about with you and listening while you crow and drivel about her, that's one comfort! [The Pale-haired Lady coughs in a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... afraid you've lived in your musty old books so long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of the furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly, sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very often ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... earth, Emblem of all to whom the Land gives birth; Each genial influence nurtured to resist; A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist. [xv] Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain, 140 Till, burst at length, each wat'ry head o'erflows, Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows: Then thousand schemes of petulance and pride Despatch her scheming children far and wide; Some East, some West, some—everywhere but North! In quest of lawless gain, they issue ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... pretending, and let you lie and pretend, and let your parents and Sam lie and pretend, you would find me—almost tolerable. Well, I'm not that kind. When there's no especial reason one way or the other, I'm willing to smirk and grimace and dodder and drivel, like the rest of your friends, those ladies and gentlemen. But when there's business to be transacted, I am business-like. Let's not begin with your thinking you are deceiving me, and so hating me and despising me and trying to keep up the ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... 'im 'ome a 'owlin' to 'is mammy or 'is nuss. But I'd rather take the chuck For a show of British pluck, And do my month in chockee, and eat my skilly free; And I'll leave the curs to snivel With their 'Ouse o' Commons drivel, Which may suit a pack of jaw-pots, but, by gosh, it don't ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so loved, yet so mistaken! 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? 10 ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... particulars were communicated by a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience." A fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there,—the storm at night, the haunted chamber, the white ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... proceeded to sea. It was Sunday, so we were idle, the four of us lounging on the lower bridge deck—the Captain, Briggs, myself, and this human phonograph. It was a pleasant day, and we would have enjoyed the loaf in the warm afternoon sunshine, had it not been for the unending drivel of the passenger. I enjoyed it anyway, for even though the ears be filled with a buzzing, the eyes are free, and San Francisco ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... of old, by Fiend possest, He swells, wild Frenzy heaves his panting breast, His bristling hairs stick up, his eyeballs glow, And from his mouth long strakes of drivel flow.'] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... collections of humpies, called towns—also for the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European slaves in the towns, and like dingoes in the bush—who drivel about 'democracy,' and yet haven't any more spunk than to graft for a few Cockney dudes that razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris. Why, the Australians haven't even got the grit to claim enough of their own money to throw ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... office, helping another man to rob his fellow-creatures; aunt there gave lessons,—she can't teach a bit; she was only putting nonsense into the heads of future men and women, and, such as it was, putting it there wrong. I was doing likewise, and I teach worse than she does. Of an evening I wrote drivel for the papers. We were, every one of us, useless and miserable. At last one ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... in a bally little school-house, and the girl gets up and harangues. She's been to the city, and knows a few catch phrases. There's nothing to it. We wouldn't have known of it—only for the enthusiastic friend who pours his drivel into ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... don't in the least want to know what passed between you and Eleanor. But what I would give my ears to understand is how you can go through a two hours' conversation with the girl you were engaged to—a conversation which must have affected the lives of both of you—and then come up to me and talk drivel about ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... proceeded in this style till the defendant began to drivel at the mouth a little. At last, after a struggle, he said, with a piteous whine, that he could not help it: he hated signing his name; some mischief always came of it; but this ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... no good your smiling at me like a Cheshire cat, Mr Lubin; and I am not going to sit here mumchance like an old-fashioned goody goody wife while you men monopolize the conversation and pay out the very ghastliest exploded drivel as the latest thing in politics. I am not giving you my own ideas, Mr Lubin, but just the regular orthodox science of today. Only the most awful old fossils think that Socialism is bad economics and that Darwin invented Evolution. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... their fashion was of a bat; and he was flapping them so that three winds went forth from him, whereby Cocytus was all congealed. With six eyes he was weeping, and over three chins trickled the tears and bloody drivel. With each mouth he was crushing a sinner with his teeth, in manner of a brake, so that he thus was making three of them woeful. To the one in front the biting was nothing to the clawing, so that sometimes his spine remained all ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... what she told you, Aunt Emily," he said, taking up the check beside his plate, "but it was rather cleverly concealed rot, as far as I am concerned. Drivel; faddy drivel, but the girl's a lady, or whatever that word stands for. I half believe the child takes herself seriously—she has wonderful eyes. She should wear blinders—it isn't fair to leave them outside the veil. Comical ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to write ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Archie, "that you are talking drivel? Nobody ought to drivel before breakfast. It isn't decent. What does Dahlia want ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... 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 that ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... to thy dearest friends; Unarmed run upon thy foemen's swords; Never fear any plague, before it fall: Dropsies and watery tympanies haunt thee; Thy lungs with surfeiting be putrified, To cause thee have an odious stinking breath; Slaver and drivel like a child at mouth; Be poor and beggarly in thy old age; Let thine own kinsmen laugh when thou complain'st, And many tears gain nothing but blind scoffs. This is the guerdon due to drunkenness: Shame, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... of lath, In his rage and his wrath, Cries ah, ha! to the devil: Like a mad lad, Pare thy nails, dad. Adieu, goodman drivel. ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during this period ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... This profligate drivel is uttered by the Nestor of the commonwealth, an infirm old man, with one foot in the grave. In order, however, to make the course pursued by this gentleman and the next speaker intelligible to the English reader, we may explain that, by the annexation of Texas, the Southern States have a majority ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... whole 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 ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... evolutionary and mechanical theories of the much slandered Wilhelm Roux. And yet I am bound to say you display considerable independence in your method. Indeed you do. And more than that, you throw much needed light on the mysteries of God himself. There is a good deal of incoherent drivel these days about the freedom of science. Well, you'll have to show me where it is. Scientists? They are a lot of conceited pin-heads, each working for himself, and incurably jealous of what his colleagues are doing. Up and at 'em, Doctor, that's my advice, and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... do you want?" Cappy shrilled impatiently. "Cut out this infernal drivel and get down to business. Unfold your proposition; and if it looks to me like a winner I'll take a flyer with you if it's the last act of ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all right. Yellow ivory also. And what ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... adventures, and Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie discreetly forbore to mention it. During that year Henry's opinion on his work had fluctuated. There had been moments, days perhaps, of discouragement, when he regarded it as drivel, and himself as a fool—in so far, that is, as he had trafficked with literature. On the other hand, his original view of it reasserted itself with frequency. And in the end he gloomily and proudly decided, once and for all, that the Stream of Trashy Novels ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... he stroke his beard, and now againe He wipes the drivel from his filthy chin; Now offers he a kisse, but high Disdaine Will not permit her hart to pity him: Her hart more hard than adamant or steele, Her hart more changeable ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... 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 ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting to ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy composers before his time he would have invented it, not because he was lazy, but because he wanted to go on and could not afford infinite music-paper. Hence his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy; and therefore, when ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... 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 his ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... regurgitate, spew, puke, keck[obs3], retch, heave, upchuck, chuck up, barf; belch out; cast up, bring up, be sick, get sick, worship the porcelain god. disgorge; expectorate, clear the throat, hawk, spit, sputter, splutter, slobber, drivel, slaver, slabber[obs3]; eructate; drool. unpack, unlade, unload, unship, offload; break bulk; dump. be let out. spew forth, erupt, ooze &c. (emerge) 295. Adj. emitting, emitted, &c. v. Int. begone! get you gone! get away, go away, get along, go along, get along ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 excellent words." ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Senesin, his voice oddly tight under the strain of suppressed emotion, "a person should learn to know what he's talking about before he makes any attempt to talk. If you must talk drivel about my father, I'll thank you not to do it in my presence." And before Heywood could formulate an answer, Senesin turned to the colonel. "If you'll pardon me, my lord, I have another errand to perform. I'll see you at eleven." Then ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Sir," murmured the 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
... and worse rime, without any resemblance to poetry. The remaining stanzas are mere drivel, unworthy of the poet's talent or of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... a kind of stupefaction. Was it of Farrington the man was talking such drivel? Farrington, who only the week before had told him in high gratification that within the last month he had added a cool million to his ward's marriage portion. Farrington, who had, but two days ago, hinted mysteriously of a gigantic financial coup in the near ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... 'I've got to 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 he ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... tualetejo, vestejo. Drill bori. Drill (tool) borilo. Drill (military) ekzerco. Drink trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... awaken a strange curiosity touching the mind they issued from; the perhaps unparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, and emitted it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdrockh also a father and mother; did he, at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his; looks he also wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the Past, where only winds, and their low harsh moan, give inarticulate answer? ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... dear Mac,' he said, 'you would pay me the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad with whom I have the misfortune to be connected. You would greatly oblige me if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar drivel you would ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... he protested. "It's your money. Don't tell me you're going to give it to suffering humanity. That sort of drivel makes me sick. Take it, give it away if you like, but for God's ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the man by whom France is governed! Governed, do I say?— possessed in supreme and sovereign sway! And every day, and every morning, by his decrees, by his messages, by all the incredible drivel which he parades in the "Moniteur," this emigrant, who knows not France, teaches France her lesson! and this ruffian tells France he has saved her! And from whom? From herself! Before him, Providence committed only follies; God was waiting ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... "Don't drivel," said Peter. "I shouldn't have stopped if you HAD said it. Not likely. And besides, us rowing hadn't anything to do with it. I might have caught my foot in the hoe, or taken off my fingers in the chaff-cutting machine or blown my nose off with fireworks. It would ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... enough, I fear too long, tormented you with my drivel. It must be your consolation, that, in spirit, you have been with me to-night, as I have thought of the old days, pausing for a moment over these mute but eloquent companions, to dream or to sigh, and then once more turning the old familiar pages as I try ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... cousin—to talk much, unless some other pain hinder me, is to me little grief. A foolish old man is often as full of words as a woman. It is, you know, as some poets paint us, all the joy of an old fool's life to sit well and warm with a cup and a roasted crabapple, and drivel ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... shut your head!' replied Davis. 'You can do that, I fancy, and by God, I'll show you how! I'll stand no more of your drivel.' ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... shuttled to and fro in search of what he knew she wanted—a love story. Presently he began to weave a tale, sorry enough, with all the ancient claptraps and rusted platitudes. How long he sat there, reeling off this drivel, he never knew. When he reached the happy ending, he waited. But there was no sign from her. By and by he gathered enough courage to lean toward her. She had fallen asleep. The hand that had been clenched lay open, relaxed; ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... with such energy 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
... on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—Who? One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake. No, at noonday in the bustle of man's worktime ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Turner, Sergeant Ballantyne, W. T. Stead, Judge Edmunds, Admiral Usborne Moore, the late Archdeacon Wilberforce, and such a cloud of other witnesses, can be dismissed with the empty "All rot" or "Nauseating drivel" formulae. As Mr. Arthur Hill has well said, we have reached a point where further proof is superfluous, and where the weight of disproof lies upon those who deny. The very people who clamour for proofs have as a rule never taken the trouble to examine the copious proofs which already exist. ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "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 comes back, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... thro dark cadaverous with the sound of gabbling dead. Where we heard them hoot palaverous Drivel learned beneath unsavorous Moulds, and saw a glutton's head Grin to a hissing bat, That scraped him as ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... 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 he has done digesting ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... really lies," said his stern critic, "even if he does drivel about his little flower with bones and a voice! Probably by now he's wishing the voice had been left out of his little flower." Impressively she planted a rigid forefinger on the print of the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... hate me! Ah, friend of mine, believe me, I march better 'Neath the cross-fire of glances inimical! How droll the stains one sees on fine-laced doublets, From gall of envy, or the poltroon's drivel! —The enervating friendship which enfolds you Is like an open-laced Italian collar, Floating around your neck in woman's fashion; One is at ease thus,—but less proud the carriage! The forehead, free from mainstay or coercion, Bends here, there, everywhere. But I, embracing Hatred, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... 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 ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... scoundrel and a knave of the deepest dye. I have been cruelly deceived, and it serves me right for trusting a Scotchman. Yes, I do understand figures, and I can count. I have counted the words in MacAlister's drivel (I certainly cannot call it a speech), and there were exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. I also carefully counted the lies—there were exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. Therefore, I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Petherton),—What senseless drivel you write on the least provocation! Whether you grew up with the Surbury relics or not, you have certainly decayed with them. Every stone that's left of that confounded ruin (probably only a simple market-cross) proclaims the date of its birth. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... either case it would be an impertinence, Mr Keegan, as your approval is not of the slightest consequence to us. What use do you suppose all this drivel is to men with serious practical ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... of scurrilous rondeau, consisting of nine lines, so loathsome in its brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression, that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe. The total point of this idiot's drivel consists in calling Sir Thomas "an asse;" and well it justifies the poet's own remark, "Let there be gall enough in thy ink, no matter though thou write with a goose pen." Our own belief is, that these lines were a production ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... else in the world worth talking about. I told her all about myself,—my past, with its good and bad points, and my present hopes and purposes. It all popped out as naturally as possible. I suppose it would sound like drivel if I were to repeat it. Finally she began ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... represents the anguish of a very old fir-tree, killed by the assiduous ivy. Just a short time ago I saw it struck down, lying on the grass, its foliage looking like a beautiful head of reddish hair. I saw the axe that felled it, too. Its trunk weeps tears of resin, which trail along in drivel, then change to heavy, creeping flame. But the dry red locks break into lines of living fire, whistle and shoot innumerable jets of many colors underneath a broad gold wave that ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... actions. Whence it results that Father Cruchard is wrathful with you for not having advised him of your presence in the "new Athens." It seems to me that people are sillier and flatter there than usual. The state of politics has become drivel! They have tickled my ears with the return of the Empire. I don't believe in it! However...We should have to expatriate ourselves ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... 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} ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... I'm dashed if she didn't give me another letter to translate, this time signed 'Your loving Herbert.' Herbert, I discovered, was a sapper who'd been transferred to Boulogne and, judging by his hand, was better with a shovel than a pen. As an amateur in style I couldn't translate his drivel word for word. Like Cyrano, the artist in me rose supreme, and I manicured and curled his letter, painted and embroidered it, and nearly finished by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... fungus-hue, in place of orbs of sight, Their sockets two small bones like berries fill. Towards us, as I say, he speeds outright Along the shore, and seems a moving hill. Tusks jutting out like savage swine he shows, A breast with drivel foul, and pointed nose. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... the name of Judah, who, in 1822, had published a dramatic poem styled "Odofried the Outcast." The title was ominous of the fate which the production met. The author naturally felt that the age was unappreciative. To relieve his mind he wrote eleven or twelve hundred lines of fresh drivel, in which he assailed everything and everybody. The satire was of that dreadful kind which requires notes and commentaries to point out who is hit and what is meant; and the annotation, as is usual in ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
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