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More "Glib" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... full of "subtle" ideas; in the circle young lads of seventeen talk glibly and learnedly of women and of love, while in the presence of women they are dumb or talk to them like a book—and what do they talk about? The circle is the hot-bed of glib fluency; in the circle they spy on one another like so many police officials.... Oh, circle! thou'rt not a circle, but an enchanted ring, which has been the ruin of many a ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... thou swallow up my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public! 'Tis the manner of thy craft,—yet see!"—and with a dexterous movement of his arm he threw the fruit-peel through the window far out into ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... means,' he began, listening vaguely to the glib patter that seemed to come from another mouth. 'Your father, my dear young lady, I venture to think is now really on the road to recovery. Dr Simon makes excellent progress. But, of course—two heads, we know, are so much better than one when there's the least—the least difficulty. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... The words came glib to his lips. She stared at him in amazement. "You did—you say you wrote to me?" she asked him, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... to analyze and apply to his own government a moral law that has evolved from the painful travail of the generations, it does not follow that he was too stupid to feel irony. Reddening, he put forth the usual declaimer of honorable intention with the glib tongue of passion. He meant well by the girl! Would give her a good home, find her better than she had ever been found in her life! As for marrying? He was not of the marrying kind! Never would! and so on, finishing ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... says he, "with a man who was a poet; he could neither read nor write; but he was a poet by nature, having a muse wonderfully glib at making triplets and quartets. He was nicknamed Tum Tai of the Moor. He made an englyn for me to put in a book in which I was inserting all the verses ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... takes to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... the auctioneer, in his glib tones, "we are presenting to-day a most unusual opportunity. Prizes will be distributed to many enterprising people of Gridley, though these prizes are all so valuable that I trust none of them will go for the traditional ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... gone beyond them, we have not gone very far, we have not come to perfect knowledge. There is still something around us and within that baffles and surprises us. Events happen which are as mysterious after our glib explanations as they were before. Changes for good or ill take place in the heart of man for which his intellect gives no reason. There is the daily miracle of the human will, the power of free choice, for which no one can account, and which sometimes flashes out the strangest ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... consisted of four machines, each complete with pilot, observer, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. The job was an offensive patrol—that is to say, we were to hunt trouble around a given area behind the Boche lines. A great deal of the credit for our "mastery of the air"—that glib phrase of the question-asking politician—during the Somme Push of 1916, belongs to those who organised and those who led these fighting expeditions over enemy country. Thanks to them, our aircraft were able ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... part of a goatherd really a son of the man, or a serpent-tongued liar, a chosen master of craft whose seeming guilelessness had helped to delude us? It had been a crude first idea on his part to suggest the admission as refugees of a swarm of armed men, but, when this had failed, there had been glib readiness with the other and more subtle plan that had so nearly succeeded. And as I reflected on these things, I marked the young hypocrite for ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... tell more upon the hearts and consciences of slaveholders, than if I was attacking them in America; for almost every paper that I now receive from the United States, comes teeming with statements about this fugitive Negro, calling him a "glib-tongued scoundrel," and saying that he is running out against the institutions and people of America. I deny the charge that I am saying a word against the institutions of America,{327} or the people, as such. What I have to say is against slavery and slaveholders. I feel at liberty to speak on ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... the lie that comes glib to a man's tongue. None of that for me. I leave the sneaking off to them soft-spoken chaps you're thinking of. No! If you love me you take me. And if you take me—why, then, the capstan-song of deep-water ships is sure to settle it ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... call on God so glib, Sammy? 'Tis marvel He don't strike ye blind, lad. Or there's your innards, Sam, here's that may whip out your liver, lad—So!" I saw the glitter of the hook, heard Smiling Sam's gasping scream as the steel bit into him, and then Tressady ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... I," agreed Mr. Bingle enthusiastically. He had been dazed, yet vastly impressed by the unintelligible phraseology of the stage as it ran from the glib lips of the eager young man. He was flattered by Dick's assumption that he was perfectly familiar with the theatre from box ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... Forrester had accused her of that. And Tante had accused her of it, too. But no; it had been slowly to freeze to stillness to hear his clear cold utterance of shameful words, see the folly of his arrogance and his complacency, realise, in his glacial look and glib, ironic smile, that he was blind to what he was destroying in her. For he could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit, unversed in irony, drank in the bitter draught of disillusion. They had never loved each other; ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... upon the harp by Scrooge's niece by marriage, is described after all, as may be remembered by the readers of the Carol, to to have been intrinsically "a mere nothing; you might learn to whistle it in two minutes." Say that in twenty minutes, or, at the outside, in half-an-hour, any ordinarily glib talker might have rattled through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... took to wife a relative of his, a niece of Mr. Cheng's wife, a Miss Wang, and has now been married for the last two years. This Mr. Lien has lately obtained by purchase the rank of sub-prefect. He too takes little pleasure in books, but as far as worldly affairs go, he is so versatile and glib of tongue, that he has recently taken up his quarters with his uncle Mr. Cheng, to whom he gives a helping hand in the management of domestic matters. Who would have thought it, however, ever since his marriage with his worthy wife, not a single person, whether high or low, has there ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... here, where it was pretended that nuggets could be gathered like cabbages—I myself threw up a tidy little country practice.... I might mention that medicine was my profession. It would have given me intense satisfaction, Mr. Turnham, to see one of those glib journalists in my shoes, or the shoes of some of my messmates on the OCEAN QUEEN. There were men aboard that ship, sir, who were reduced to beggary before they could even set foot on the road to the north. Granted it is the duty of ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... little maiden whom I asked the name of that town, so that I might ask the way thither if I should come into a valley where I could not have pointed it out any longer. I pleased the young girl very much by presenting her with my card, and induced her to use her glib tongue volubly in telling me about their schools—what they studied, how long the terms last, &c. She would get along very well in our Pennsylvania German dialect. When we parted, she skipped away and proudly showed the card which she had received from an "American," to one of her schoolmates ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... embodied in Mr. Tulliver's interests and opinions. And as an extra touch of bitterness, the injured miller had recently, in borrowing the five hundred pounds, been obliged to carry a little business to Wakem's office on his own account. A hook-nosed glib fellow! as cool as a cucumber,—always looking so sure of his game! And it was vexatious that Lawyer Gore was not more like him, but was a bald, round-featured man, with bland manners and fat hands; a game-cock ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... side of Antinous sat Eurymachus, who was next to him in power and rank. This was a smooth and subtle villain, not less dangerous than Antinous, but glib and plausible of speech. And he too made answer after his kind: "Telemachus, thou sayest well, and none can dispute thy right. But with thy good leave I would ask thee concerning the stranger. He seemed a goodly man; but why did he start up and leave us so suddenly? Did he bring any ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... a pervert who, with a glib tongue, protests that his conscience drove him from the Church, that his enslaved intelligence needed deliverance, search him and you will find a skeleton in his closet; and if you do not find it, it is there just the same. A renegade priest some years ago, held ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... companion, and lightly assured her that I was as mad as a dingo dog. From the moment after the phrase's utterance to that of the slapping of my knee, it had been altogether absent from my mind. Now it haunts me. It reiterates itself after the manner of a glib phrase. I am glad I am not in a railway carriage; the cranks would amuse the wheels with it all night long. As it is, the surf tries to thunder it out on the shingle just a few yards away from my window. I keep asking myself: why a dingo dog? If I am mad ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... of excitement; my father expects her to accept the invitations which he is obliged to decline; so she gives up her own tastes and inclinations as usual, and goes into hot rooms among crowds of fine people, hearing the same glib compliments, and the same polite inquiries, night after night, until, patient as she is, she heartily wishes that her fashionable friends all lived in some opposite quarter of the globe, the farther away ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... not Jacques acting Penelope?' said Madame de Bourke, unable to help smiling at her little daughter's glib mythology, while going to the rescue of the embroidery silks, in which her youngest ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Sally and the dressmaker talked about pipings—not a bird—a new way to fold goods to make trimmings, and soon everything was going on the same as if the new teacher were not there. I noticed that she kept her head straight, and was not nearly so glib-tongued and birdlike before mother and Sally as she had been at the schoolhouse. Maybe that was why father told mother that night that the ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... spit-box over dere. By chance, have you got any 'bacco? Make me more glib if I can chew and spit; then I 'members more and better de ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... creatures of their age, less admirable expressions of the individualism of their time. And just as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict revision. We must not accept the glib statement of the historian, especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not exist. If a convention in one field of intellectual activity is said ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Helen fain would say Her word, but in his restless way Sir Barbour nipped that word; The other three were dumb perforce— Except Sir Barbour's glib discourse, No human sound ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... high-backed chairs on either side of the empty fireplace when we arrived, he smoking his evening pipe of Oronooko, and she working at her embroidery. The moment that I opened the door the man whom I had brought stepped briskly in, and bowing to the old people began to make glib excuses for the lateness of his visit, and to explain the manner in which we had picked him up. I could not help smiling at the utter amazement expressed upon my mother's face as she gazed at him, for the loss of his jack-boots exposed a pair ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Duchemin's doubts? To tell the sad truth, they were just as strong as ever. The man was somehow prejudiced: he found Monk's story entirely too glib, and knew a mean sense of gratification when the cure interposed ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... subject leading to another, for our monk is a glib talker, we come to the cheese-makers, the goatherds. "Even these honest rustics," says he, "are becoming sophisticated (mafsudin). Their cheese is no longer what it was, nor is their faith. For Civilisation, passing ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... year in France and we are told that "Addison spoke the language like a native "—a glib expression, still able-bodied, that means little or much. From France Addison followed down into Italy, and spent a year there, residing in various small towns with the same object in view that took him ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the blue eyes of the other smiled at the memory of the girl's glib repetition of his discourse. "What's the great idea? Aside from the fact that he belongs to the white dove, anti-military bunch of sisters, Singleton seems quite ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... glib and specious explanation Cynthia was convinced. True, she added a question touching the amazing condition of the grooms, in reply to which Joseph afforded her ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Koosje, hurriedly. "I live in this big house by myself, and I dare say you'll be more useful in the shop than Yanke—if your tongue is as glib as it used to be, that is. You know some English, too, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... laughing, "your English tongue can wag as glib as your outlandish one. A sweetheart in the case there, isn't there? What the devil's she going down to the river for at this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... given a piece of Greek Testament to translate, for mercy's sake do not be too glib. Dinna translate a thing until you are sure it is there. They have an unholy habit of leaving out a couple of verses some place in the middle, and you're just the one to tumble head-first into the lacuna. (I ken ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... besides a considerable amount of uncommon sense, and his mother listened with intelligent interest: commenting on what he said in her quiet way, as she found opportunity—we say this advisedly, for opportunities were not so frequent as one might suppose. March had always been possessed of a glib tongue, and he seemed, as Bounce remarked, to have oiled the hinges since his return to ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... have to stand the stare of a crowd of people at every new place for hours: all usually talk as quickly as their glib tongues can; these certainly do not belong to the tribes who are supposed to eke out their language by signs! A few indulge their curiosity in sight-seeing, but go on steadily weaving nets, or by beating bark-cloth, or in spinning cotton, others smoke their big tobacco pipes, or nurse a ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... suddenly rounding upon the man, "you are extraordinarily free and glib with your information. Now, are you a traitor to your own people, or is your information false and intended ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... a fight for independence, were heard throughout Norway. Meetings were held more or less secretly, and at each of them was some one with well-filled pockets and glib tongue, to enlarge on the country's wrongs, and promise assistance from an outside irresistible power as soon as they showed that they meant to strike for freedom. No one openly named the power. That was not necessary; it ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... fairly launched in a recital glib on his lips, regained the dominance of manner which the attitude of his subordinates had momentarily imperiled. Increased composure brought with it a certain hauteur, and he paused again—perhaps to gratify the actor's instinct in him rather than observe the effect of his words. But the ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... the story-teller is advised not to commit it to memory. Such a method is apt to produce a wooden or glib manner of presentation. It is better for her to read the story over and over again until its plot, imagery, style, and vocabulary become her own, and then to retell it, as Miss Bryant says, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... a young fellow who wanted more than evil weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were nearly ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... condensation of Gregory's glib sophistries on the lips of his wife, Wilbur had seemed to turn a deaf ear. It did not occur to him, at first, that Selma was seriously in earnest. He regarded her suggestions of neglected opportunities, which were often whimsically uttered, as more than half playful—a ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... the turning-out of stanch men in this nineteenth century. In the old, earnest times, war made men stanch and true to each other. We have learned up a good many glib phrases about the wickedness of war, and we thank God that we live in these peaceful, trading times, wherein we can—and do—devote the whole of our thoughts and energies to robbing and cheating and swindling one another—to "doing" our friends, ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... with biting scorn. "Tell the Duke and Lord Cheisford where I found them! Let us hear your glib young tongue telling the ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Bartholdi statue. It makes some whites uncomfortable. It converts into strange reading glib eulogies ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... was not so sure she was going to talk about the American child. She was not sure of anything, except that the household looked most irregular, and that Peter Byrne was trying to cover a difficult situation with much conversation. He was almost glib, was Peter. The tea was good; ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... handsome Pole, glib of tongue, the heir to a thousand minor graces, reckless in outpouring the wine of Life, had truly gone the downward way with all the abandon of his showy, insincere race. Hawke well knew the final level of misery awaiting the wandering, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... at right angles to these, a street of shops; the cheese-monger's very small, the chemist's very smart, the pastry-cook's very dowdy, and the green-grocer's very dark, I was still looking out at the view thus presented, when I was suddenly apostrophized by a glib, disputatious voice behind me. ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... these here hills fer ye, Samson. Down thar, ye'll see lots of things thet's new—an' civilized an' beautiful! Ye'll see lots of gals thet kin read an' write, gals dressed up in all kinds of fancy fixin's." Her glib words ran out and ended in ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... fortress named Gib, Whose manners were haughty and glib! If you tried to get in, She replied, with a grin, 'I'm ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... is not a more startling witness to the character of its surroundings than the "terrible infant," whose rude snatchings, pert contradictions, and glib slang phrases are sure to be most effectively "shown off" in the presence of visitors. It is of little use to affect grieved surprise, or stern reprobation, when one's children are merely exhibiting their daily discipline. Most parents feel keenly the embarrassment ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... sadness in her eyes. It touched him to the soul, and for a moment he wavered in his purpose. He stood beside her—she seated on the old lichened seat—and a silence fell between them, during which Mr. Wilding's conscience wrestled with his stronger passion. It was his habit to be glib, talking incessantly what time he was in her company, and seeing to it that his talk was shallow and touched at nothing belonging to the deeps of human life. Thus was it, perhaps, that this sudden and enduring silence affected her most oddly; ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... except for that one figure in sombre draperies, being men, suffered this violence as only men bear with a woman in a temper. With the letting in of the fresh air, fresh energy in the prosecution manifested itself. The witnesses were being subjected to inquisitorial torture; their answers were still glib, but the faces were studies of the passions held in the leash of self-control. Not twenty minutes had ticked their beat of time when once more the jury, to a man, showed signs of shivering. Half a dozen gravely took ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... majesty, (If, for I want that glib and oily heart, To speak and purpose not, since what I well intend I'll do't before I speak,) that you make known, It is no vicious blot, murder, or foulness, No unchaste action, or dishonored step That hath deprived me of your grace and favor; But even for want of that, for which I ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... it is rare, and absolute accuracy is still rarer. Beware of the person who is sure of every thing—who retails to you a conversation he has heard, affecting to give the exact words of a third person, or who quotes passages in verse or in prose, with glib assurance, as the production of some well-known writer. The chances are ten to one that the conversation is mainly manufactured in the brain of the narrator, and that the quotation is either not written by the author to whom it is attributed, or else is a travesty of his real language. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... King of Denmark, he met a West Indian negro slave, by name Antony Ulrich. And Antony was an interesting man. He had been baptized; he had been taught the rudiments of the Christian faith; he had met two other Brethren at the court; his tongue was glib and his imagination lively; and now he poured into Zinzendorf's ears a heartrending tale of the benighted condition of the slaves on the Danish island of St. Thomas. He spoke pathetically of his sister ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Fletcher hadn't really done a good deal to make Abrahama think he did want her," said Sylvia. "He was just that kind of man. I never did think much of him. He was handsome and glib, but he was all surface. I guess poor Abrahama had some reason to cut off Susy. I guess there was some double-dealing. I thought so at the time, and now this will makes ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Willett,' I said, 'they found your son's camera on the trail. Your butler exhibits it to the police and reporters and tells them a glib story. He told it to me, also. But what I want to know is, why nobody has thought of ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... that strikes us in connection with this glib project is the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle. ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... painter closed with him at once, ashamed and humbled at this miserable chaffering, glad also to get a little money now and then. But this time he was obstinate, and took to insulting the picture-dealer, who, giving tit for tat, all at once dropped the formal 'you' to assume the glib 'thou,' denied his talent, overwhelmed him with invective, and taxed him with ingratitude. Meanwhile, however, he had taken from his pocket three successive five-franc pieces, which, as if playing at chuck-farthing, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... It is curious. The whole world and all its marvelous distractions seem to have resolved themselves into the curt sentence, "It rains." And somehow the great financier's faculty for the glib manipulation of platitudes which has earned him a reputation as a powerful economist seems for the moment to have abandoned him. His eyes remind one of a boy standing on tiptoe and staring over a fence at a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... &c (converse) 588; din in the ears &c (repeat) 104; talk at random, talk nonsense &c 497; be hoarse with talking. Adj. loquacious, talkative, garrulous, linguacious^, multiloquous^; largiloquent^; chattering &c v.; chatty &c (sociable) 892; declamatory &c 582; open-mouthed. fluent, voluble, glib, flippant; long tongued, long winded &c (diffuse) 573. Adv. trippingly on the tongue; glibly &c adj.; off the reel. Phr. the tongue running fast, the tongue running loose, the tongue running on wheels; all talk and no cider; foul whisperings are abroad [Macbeth]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... not answer. What had this slim, glib young man to do with him? What had any white man to do with him after what he had suffered ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Fualdes was seated at the table, and was made to sign papers. The tall, powerful man, Bastide Grammont, of course—no doubt it was Grammont; Bach in this relied upon the information of the magistrate and upon glib Rumor—stuck the signed papers in his pocket-book. In the meanwhile Madame Bancal cooked a supper, chicken with vegetables, and veal with rice; an important detail, indicating the cold-bloodedness of the murderers. ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... instant, looking absently at the headstone of "Hephzibah," who was the later of Robert McCoy's two beloved wives, then she said, with an effort, for these staid descendants of Scottish ancestry were not given to glib talking ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... explain the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are 'terribly at ease in Zion.' They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the plays and the poems. That is enough.' But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... "Glib tongue," I laughed. "Born to flatter the male—every girl of your world." And I added seriously, "You don't answer my question? ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... almost disappeared. It was a common thing to hear the Second Army spoken of as a whole Army of cowards and "defeatists." Many foreign critics, with minds blankly ignorant of nearly all the facts, seemed to think that the whole business could be accounted for by a few glib phrases about German and Socialist propaganda, or the supposed lack of fighting qualities in the Italian race. Yet it was this same Second Army, which in those now distant days in August had conquered the Bainsizza ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... fake long ago. The old woman has the same sort of girls come to her with the same old stories, over and over again, and she has a hundred dodges and gets a hundred straight tips where nobody else would see anything; and of course she has the same replies all ready. There is nothing like being glib. And there's really a great deal of the same in the regular doctor business, as I know, coming close on to it and calling myself one. Why, I've been called into a regular consultation in Chicago, where I had an office,—'pon my honor I was, and no great honor neither. It was all patter, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Coombe regarding her with an expression of speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn little scraps of orthodoxy—as one who fished them out of a bag of long-discarded remnants of rubbish—was so true to type that it almost ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gambling. I always lost to the Major. He lost to others but I was careful never to win from him. He fell into the way of dropping around at my quarters. Like most of his set, the Major was a heavy drinker. When his face would become very hushed and his tongue very glib, I would try to draw things out of him, but I never could get anything worth while. The slightest suspicious question made him close up as tight as ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... I don't want to know. I don't want to be continually told. I wish these people would meet me on my own ground. I wish the Macleods would begin to talk after dinner about the Lord Chamberlain's interference with the politics of burlesque, and then perhaps they would not be so glib. I am tired of hearing about John Maclean's boat, and Donald Maclean's horse, and Sandy Maclean's refusal to pay the road-tax. And as for the drinking of whiskey that these sailors get through—well, it seems to me that the ordinary condition of things is reversed here altogether; and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... faithfulness toward his glorious music. I am a little sensitive, too, about admitting that I like Carlyle and Browning. I suppose this is because I have belonged to a Browning and Carlyle club, where I have heard some of the most idiotic women it was ever my privilege to encounter, express glib sentiments concerning these masters, which in me lay too deep for utterance. It is something like the occasional horror which overpowers me when I think that perhaps I am doomed to go to heaven. If certain people here on earth upon whom ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... to interpose a 'ye cannot.' Many a boy has been made a sailor by the stories of hardships which his parents have meant as dissuasives. Joshua here is doing exactly what Jesus Christ often did. He refused glib vows because He desired whole hearts. His very longing that men should follow Him made Him send them back to bethink themselves when they promised to do it. 'Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Glib as I was in the defence of others I found it difficult to argue in my own behalf. At any rate, it would have availed nothing. I had been tried, convicted, and sentenced in my absence, and it was vain to hope for pardon. ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... of the influence of sympathy. There are some natures that are gifted with a blessed power to bring consolation to men. It is not that they are glib of tongue or facile of speech, but somehow the very pressure of their hand is grateful to the saddened heart. The simple and kindly action, of which we think nothing, may tell powerfully on others, and unclose fountains of feeling deep ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... commercial relations with the Makololo. I then requested my companions to give a true account of what they had seen. The wonderful things lost nothing in the telling, the climax always being that they had finished the whole world, and had turned only when there was no more land. One glib old gentleman asked, "Then you reached Ma Robert (Mrs. L.)?" They were obliged to confess that she lived a little beyond the world. The presents were received with expressions of great satisfaction and delight; ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 3. Tsze-lu said, 'There are (there) common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, do not ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... this—while I'm away from thee, There stands my only representative; [Withdrawing curtains. She is my proxy, and I charge you, sir, Be faithful unto her as unto me! Into her quietly attentive ear Pour all thy treasures of hyperbole, And give thy nimble tongue full license, lest Disuse should rust its glib machinery; [Advancing. If thoughts of love should haply crowd on thee, There stands my other self, tell them to her, She'll listen well; nay, that's ungenerous, For she is I, yet lovelier than I, And hath no temper, sir, and ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... but it's true! You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for me, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... got my story pretty glib by this time; I had reeled it off with increasing particulars to the Westchester Park station-master, and the head man at the stables, and General Filbert, and I was so letter-perfect that I had a vision of the whole thing, especially of my talking with the ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... o' speech than you can make pretence to," said the woman abruptly. "I often wonder that of two twin-brothers one should be so glib and ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of the Talleyrand Club that the only qualifications required for admittance to its membership are a frock-coat and a glib tongue. To explain the whereabouts of the Talleyrand Club were only a work of supererogation. Many hansom cabmen know it. Hansom cabmen know more than ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... frequently and without warning is the burden of life for the Cause; and it is because of its exhausting strain and exacting demands that so many men have failed. We must get men to realise that to live is as daring as to die. But confusion has been made in our time by the glib phrase: "You are not asked now to die for Ireland, but to live for her," without insisting that the life shall aim at the ideal, the brave and the true. To slip apologetically through existence is ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... all these things," Phineas Cross interrupted, "because he speaks for us, our duly elected representative. Sit thee down, Fenn. If you wanted the job, well, you haven't got it, and that's all there is about it, and though you're as glib with your tongue as any here, and though you've as many at your back, perchance, as I have, I tell you I'd never have voted for you if there hadn't been another man here. So put that in your pipe ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in any favorable disposition to be amused. The Count's glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when Madame Fosco rose to set the example of ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... that," said Nancy in a glib voice. "I was at a first-rate school myself for years. Weren't we kept strict, just! My word! we couldn't call our noses our own. The only language was parlez-vous. But it was a select school—very; and now that I have left, ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... fashion, only too conscious of the grey-blueness of her fine eyes, and the modish cut of her clothes. She had a knack which seemed to Laura both desirable and unattainable: that of appearing to be engrossed in glib chat with her companion, while in reality she did not hear a word Laura said, and ogled everyone who passed, out of ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... proceedings at Des Moines. Resolutions were passed with two or three aye votes and no noes at all, while the rest of the members looked over the Record, read the morning papers, or wrote on busily. The speaker declared each motion carried with glib voice. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... plunged into plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick business, the kind of brick they had ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... mortal heart; but instead of the old visionary-man, I beheld a boatman dead and bleeding at my feet. A wild cry arose. The mob seized me, and I was carried to prison. Next day the case was investigated before the court of justice. I related the simple fact. A glib advocate doubted my asseverations; but the spectators, who were numerous, gave the fullest credit to the story, and I was spared the doom of a murderer, because the judges were of opinion that I could have no motive to commit the crime, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... How little, again, the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... damned poor apology for a man—not worth the powder to blow you up. You hadn't the sand to fight for the money entrusted to you, nor the nerve to face me after you had lost it. Get out of here. Vamos! Don't ever let me hear yore smooth, glib tongue again." ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... day passed. During dinner Aratoff chatted a great deal with Platosha, questioned her about old times, which, by the way, she recalled and transmitted badly, as she was not possessed of a very glib tongue, and had noticed hardly anything in the course of her life save her Yashka. She merely rejoiced that he was so good-natured and affectionate that day!—Toward evening Aratoff quieted down ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... tiny waists hers could have been spanned by Ben Westerveld's two hands. He discovered that later. Just now he thought he had never seen anything so fairylike and dainty, though he did not put it that way. Ben was not glib of ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... to come and dine with you in London, and see what a genial and charming person he can be—what a quick bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the warmth of your ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... motley company of the riff-raff and raggabash of the island,—young and elderly, silent and glib—rough as a pigskin, and smooth as their sleeves at the elbow; with just one feature common to the whole pack of pick-thanks, and that was a look of ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... denizens of the metropolis, so carefully, so artistically, groomed were their whiskers, so presentable their oval, clean-shaven faces, so easy the manner of their dancing attendance upon their womenfolk, so glib their French conversation as they quizzed their female companions. As for the other category, it comprised individuals who, stout, or of the same build as Chichikov (that is to say, neither very portly nor very lean), backed and sidled away from the ladies, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... about his commercial travelling were simply brazen and glib lying. All the samples of drapers' goods, suspenders gloire and buttons helios, the artificial teeth and insertible eyes, served only as a shield, screening his real activity—to wit, the traffic in ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... moment, the prince hesitated, but brief as the pause, scarcely the durance of an eye-flash, Lal Lu saw it, and gazed upon the prince with a disconcerting directness as he added, with the haste we note in the accused who attempt to distract suspicion by the utterance of glib generalities: ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... I had allowed myself to heed the glib tongue of a hotel-runner before I left the rice-steamer, and he had commandeered my bag and taken it to the Oriente Hotel, of which I knew nothing except that it was in the walled city and across the river from the cable office. To recapture ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... all degrees of power, and the least are interesting, but they must not be confounded. There is the glib tongue and cool self-possession of the salesman in a large shop, which, as is well known, overpower the prudence and resolution of housekeepers of both sexes. There is a petty lawyer's fluency, which is sufficiently impressive to him who is devoid of that talent, though it be, in so many ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... I am persuaded there was no malice. He talked but for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There was no particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal, to flatter himself and to ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... honor-flaw'd, I haue three daughters: the eldest is eleuen; The second, and the third, nine: and some fiue: If this proue true, they'l pay for't. By mine Honor Ile gell'd em all: fourteene they shall not see To bring false generations: they are co-heyres, And I had rather glib my selfe, then they Should not produce ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... terms which were used for a century or two past in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... wild folk, Profferest greeting in the faces of flowers, Blowest in the firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... boys before me begun to titter and snicker at anybody's havin' the power, and I sez, eyein' 'em sternly, "Do you know what you're laughin' at, young men? You talk about it real glib, but have you any idee of the greatness and overwhelmin' might of the Force you're speakin' of? That Power wuz at Pentecost in cloven tongues of flame, and strange voices and words that no man could utter. Saul laughed at the Power but it struck ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... I sat in my shop, with the ape at my side, he began to turn right and left, and I said in myself, "What ails the beast?" Then God made the ape speak with a glib tongue, and he said to me, "O Abou Mohammed!" When I heard him speak, I was sore afraid; but he said to me, "Fear not; I will tell thee my case. Know that I am a Marid of the Jinn and came to thee, because of thy poor estate; but to-day thou knowest not the ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... Robert Turold reverted to the Norman spelling when he settled in Suffolk. Turrald is the corrupted form, doubtless due to early Saxon difficulties with Norman names. The Saxons were never very glib at Norman-French, and there was no standardized spelling of ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... remarks are not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... pleased with my courtly speech, and perchance also with my moustachios, for a smile took the place of the frown wherewith she had at first confronted me. Now, if I had uttered glib pleasantries in answer to her frowns, how many more did not her smiles wring from me! I discoursed to her in the very courtliest fashion of cows and pullets and such other matters as interesting to her as they were mysterious to me. I questioned her in a breath touching ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O! these encounterers so glib of tongue That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every tickling reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity, And daughters of ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... he will find out things he seldom fails. Perhaps nobody but a green-turbaned Hadji could so speedily have screwed information out of secretive Arabs, paid to be silent. And he had to fit deductions into spaces of the puzzle left empty by fibs and glib self-excusings. What he did learn was this: a dragoman had come, in a small boat, from a steam dahabeah to the Enchantress Isis while we were away at Kasr Ibrim. He presented credentials written out for him in Cairo by Miss Rachel Guest, and ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Italian lady, and for the moment wished herself in Beacon Street. It was a great trouble to her that she could not pluck up courage to speak a word in Italian. "I know more about it than some that are glib enough," she would say to her niece Livy, "but these Tuscans are so particular ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to make use of it. Beware of that fatal facility of thoughtless speech and superficial action which has misled many a young man into the belief that he could make a glib tongue or a deft hand take the place of ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... but this is the nearest one," explained the glib-tongued Count, seemingly much relieved by the prospect of Fitzroy's early arrival. "You don't deserve to be pulled out of a difficulty so promptly, Smith," he went on, eying the ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... the lawful ruler of his obedient province of Virginia; and in The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck Rudolph Musgrave, that quaint figure whittled out of chivalry and dressed up in amiable heroics, is plainly contrasted with the glib rogue of genius John Charteris, who, elsewhere in Mr. Cabell's books generally the chorus, here enters the plot and exhibits a sorry gallantry in action. Poictesme, these novels indicate, is not the only country Mr. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... sentence which crossed his lips served to confirm the marvellous truth which had so dazzlingly burst upon the professor's eager brain, and with a glib tongue he named each weapon, each garment, as accurately as ever set down in ancient history, not a little to the wide-eyed amazement of ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... was given over in about equal parts to "universalism" and "predestinarianism." This troublesome female, that he candidly admitted he had a hard race to keep up with, he has left impaled for all time as a "thin-faced, Roman-nosed, loquacious, glib-tongued Yankee." ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... and rumours of strikes, and when he came to ask himself the reason why, he was appalled at his own ignorance. Something was wrong somewhere; something which would have to be put right. And the trouble was that it did not seem a matter of great ease to put it right. He felt that the glib phrases about Capital and Labour pulling together, about better relations between employers and men, about standing shoulder to shoulder, failed to hit the point. They were rather like offering a hungry lion a halfpenny bun. They could ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Slocum two hundred dollars. It is no more than just that the laborer should have a share—he only asks a beggarly share—of the prosperity which he has helped to build up." This was specious and taking. Then there came down from the great city a glib person disguised as The Workingman's Friend,—no workingman himself, mind you, but a ghoul that lives upon subscriptions and sucks the senses out of innocent human beings,—who managed to set the place by the ears. The result of all which was that one May morning every shop, mill, ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... have here, is perfectly hateful to the English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... interest for me, and when you're used to looking deep into human lives out of a complete knowledge of them as we do up here, it's very tantalizing and tormenting and after a while gets boring, the superficial, incoherent glimpses you get in such a smooth, glib-tongued circle as the people I happen to know in New York. It's like trying to read something in a language of which you know only a few words, and having the book shown to you by jerks ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to his manager's dictation, and was strengthened in the conviction that Penton had stolen that parcel of silver. Usually the manager composed hesitatingly, especially when addressing head office, but now he was glib, and seemed familiar with his subject. He even appeared to be in suppressed good humor ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... great business in the West, until he was welcomed as a promising client. He hung around and when she came in one day her father was forced to introduce them. The remainder is the same world-old story——a good looking, glib-tongued man, plying every art known to an ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... opera he transfers with bold self-reliance to my intentions and to the work itself. He, who apparently can see in opera nothing but kettledrums, trombones, and double-basses, naturally in my opera did not see the wood for the trees; but, being a clever and glib- penned litterateur, he produces a witty and many-coloured set of variorum notes which he could not have done better if it had been his intention to make fun of me, and this stuff he sends to the newspaper ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... God, that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My very heart and soul are quakin', To think how we stood sweatin', shakin', An' pish'd wi' dread, While he, wi' hingin' lips and snakin', [sneering] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... out from the city, and Lorelei's first glimpse of Fennellcourt was such that she forgot her vague dislike of Hayman himself. Bert, who had met her and Bob for luncheon, had turned out to be, instead of a polished man of the world, a glib youth with an artificial laugh and a pair of sober, heavy-lidded eyes. Lorelei's shyness at meeting him had quickly disappeared when she found that he knew more theatrical people than she and that he was quite unable to talk interestingly about anything except choruses and coryphees. ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... Street, who plays and sells flutes, trumpets, and fiddles, and grand pehanners. He was talking to Egloskerry, that very small bachelor-man with money in the funds. I was going by, I'm sure, without thinking or expecting a nod from men of that glib kidney when ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... glazed again when he understood that Monsieur wished only to make inquiries, not to engage a room. He was civil, however, and glib in French with a South-German accent. Madame Delatour had sold her interest in the hotel to him, Anton Schreiber. Unfortunately there had been a mortgage. The widow was left badly off, and broken-hearted at her husband's death. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line, along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse, yet glib cordage that I suppose he called his hair, and which with a 'bend' inward at the nape of the neck, (the only approach to flexure in his whole figure) slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... oddly diverse lives—the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him. He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who (at fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors through the great plant. How he juggles figures; how grandly they roll off his tongue. How glib he is with ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... earnest importunitie, after I had moistned my lips, to make my lie run glib to his journies end, forward I went as followeth ..." And the good apostle stops again; the cider and his own words have moved him; he is a little fuddled, so is mine host; they both fall to weeping. The innkeeper ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Yes, perhaps we do. I am not sure even of that. But in eighty-five cases out of a hundred none of us have any knowledge of the history of painting or any intelligent idea of why Velasquez is regarded as a master; yet we acquire a glib familiarity with the names of half a dozen cubists or futurists, and bandy them about much as my office boy does the names of his favorite ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... full many a clime in, Tolling sublime in cathedral shrine; While at a glib rate brass tongues would vibrate;— But all their music spoke naught like thine. For memory dwelling on each proud swelling Of thy belfry knelling its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon sound far more grand on The pleasant waters of ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... with the exception of Allison, were chuckling at this glib persuasiveness. Westby stood there, in a calmly respectful, even deferential attitude, as if animated only by a desire ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... he was discerned by Tito in the Piazza del Duomo, he had the fresh anguish of this consciousness in his mind, and Tito's ready speech fell upon him like the mockery of a glib, defying demon. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... What had this slim, glib young man to do with him? What had any white man to do with him after what he had suffered at ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... course, and there is jelly or gelatine, but these are not hard, they are not stones as glass seems to be. The child will be pleased too to see a crystal or a bit of mica, but the main thing is that we should not imagine we have disposed of the wonder by a mere name with a glib, "Oh, that's just because it's transparent," but that we realise, and reinforce and deepen the child's sense of wonderfulness. So teacher and child enter into ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... the glib and customary dishonesty that says "He died as he would have wished to." No man wishes to die—at least, no poet does. To part with the exhilarating bustle and tumult, the blueness of the sky, the sunlight that tingles ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... you had a long tongue, but you do not seem very glib this minute," Captain Swope went on. "You've taken a ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... swift deeds was performed with such a glib precipitancy that if was as though the action had been rehearsed a score of times. The garden was all drowsy peace now that Orestes spread his palms in a gesture of deprecation. A little distance from him, Ahasuerus with his forefinger drew upon the water's surface ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... had little children in his hand, and came on at a brisk pace, till he drew near us. When I saw him, O my sister, I fell down for excess of affright; but the young lion rose and went to meet the carpenter, who smiled in his face and said to him, with a glib tongue, "O illustrious king and lord of the long arm, may God prosper shine evening and shine endeavour and increase thy velour and strengthen thee! Protect me from that which hath betided me and smitten me with its mischief, for ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... sometimes occurred that believers in the Bible have been quite too eager to accommodate themselves to purely passing phases of objection to it. The matter mentioned a moment ago, the excision of the supernatural, is a case in point. The easy and glib way in which some have sought to get around difficulties, by talking in large terms about the progressiveness of the revelation, as though the progress were from error to truth, instead of from half light to full light, is ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... was glib, shallow, fussy, and never knew that her husband belonged to the world, and to her only incidentally. She took sole charge of him and his affairs; ordered people away who wanted to see him if she did not like their looks; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... twisted my question around and about, trying to strike that man's average, but failed. He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived, faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way: "Can ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Frank thought he could see Atwater shrug his shoulders and look to him for the required explanation. For Abram was a fellow of few words, and Frank was glib ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... TEUFELSKOPF was a High German doctor, of the first class. He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—swindling. He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the parlour waxed louder and wilder as the night wore on. There were unseen guests there, elate and inspiring, who sat with the revellers—phantoms who attend such wassail, and keep the ladle of the punch-bowl clinking, the tongue of the songster glib and tuneful, and the general mirth alive and furious. A few honest folk, with the gift of a second sight in such matters, discover their uncanny presence—leprous impurity, insane blasphemy, and the stony grin ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 'mazement at this young generation. They is happy all right. Times not hard for them glib and well as they seems. Times have changed a sight since I was born in this world and still changing. Sometimes it seems like they are all right. Ag'in times is tough on old folks like me. This is all in the Bible—about the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... court clearly showed its appreciation of its own fine sarcasm as it rapped for order and continued insolently: "See here, Adams, if you aren't crazy, what are you trying to do? What do you expect to get out of all this glib talk about the power of spiritual forces and the peaceful revolution and the power greater than bullets and your fanatical ranting about the Holy Ghost in the dupes you are inciting to murder? ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... enter into commercial relations with the Makololo. I then requested my companions to give a true account of what they had seen. The wonderful things lost nothing in the telling, the climax always being that they had finished the whole world, and had turned only when there was no more land. One glib old gentleman asked, "Then you reached Ma Robert (Mrs. L.)?" They were obliged to confess that she lived a little beyond the world. The presents were received with expressions of great satisfaction and delight; and on Sunday, when Sekeletu made his appearance at church in his ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... bearer of the shield, He that clave longest to the ship, In death lay stretched On the broad marge of Limfjord; On the sands at Hals Fell the bounteous chieftain; It was his glib-tongued kinsman ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... stories of Horizon about his commercial travelling were simply brazen and glib lying. All the samples of drapers' goods, suspenders gloire and buttons helios, the artificial teeth and insertible eyes, served only as a shield, screening his real activity—to wit, the traffic in the body of woman. True, at ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Tante had accused her of it, too. But no; it had been slowly to freeze to stillness to hear his clear cold utterance of shameful words, see the folly of his arrogance and his complacency, realise, in his glacial look and glib, ironic smile, that he was blind to what he was destroying in her. For he could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit, unversed ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... our agreeable cheer, a man about thirty years of age came in, he said, to make our acquaintance. He was quite a sharp-looking fellow, with small, keen black eyes, a "glib" tongue, and told us that he was an out-and-out rebel, proud to meet us and ready to oblige. Steve forthwith proposed, as evidence of his good-will, an exchange of headgear. He dilated eloquently on the historic value ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... will find out things he seldom fails. Perhaps nobody but a green-turbaned Hadji could so speedily have screwed information out of secretive Arabs, paid to be silent. And he had to fit deductions into spaces of the puzzle left empty by fibs and glib self-excusings. What he did learn was this: a dragoman had come, in a small boat, from a steam dahabeah to the Enchantress Isis while we were away at Kasr Ibrim. He presented credentials written out for him in Cairo by Miss ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... able to work out for themselves, it is only a superficial advantage, and one gained at the expense of the child's growth in power to think and act independently. It is an advantage closely akin to the parrotlike recitation of the pupil who catches a few glib phrases and gives them back without thought, as compared with the recitation of the pupil who thinks and expresses his thoughts in ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... delighted with their method. What could be better than to see sons growing up, good Catholics in all external observances, devoted to the order of society and Mother Church, and at the same time showy Latinists, furnished with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the construction of an epigram or compliment? If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow, and Jesuit morality of base alloy, the reply, like that of an Italian draper selling palpable shoddy for broadcloth, came easily ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... which crossed his lips served to confirm the marvellous truth which had so dazzlingly burst upon the professor's eager brain, and with a glib tongue he named each weapon, each garment, as accurately as ever set down in ancient history, not a little to the wide-eyed amazement ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... figure in sombre draperies, being men, suffered this violence as only men bear with a woman in a temper. With the letting in of the fresh air, fresh energy in the prosecution manifested itself. The witnesses were being subjected to inquisitorial torture; their answers were still glib, but the faces were studies of the passions held in the leash of self-control. Not twenty minutes had ticked their beat of time when once more the jury, to a man, showed signs of shivering. Half a dozen gravely took out their pocket-handkerchiefs, and as gravely covered their ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... I bear your reply to this gentle captain? For by my faith, Madame, you require a more careful go-between than this, one more discreet and less glib ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... provocative fashion, only too conscious of the grey-blueness of her fine eyes, and the modish cut of her clothes. She had a knack which seemed to Laura both desirable and unattainable: that of appearing to be engrossed in glib chat with her companion, while in reality she did not hear a word Laura said, and ogled everyone who passed, out of the ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... another, for our monk is a glib talker, we come to the cheese-makers, the goatherds. "Even these honest rustics," says he, "are becoming sophisticated (mafsudin). Their cheese is no longer what it was, nor is their faith. For Civilisation, passing by their huts in some shape or other, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... He is not glib of speech, though quick enough at sea. As he takes up the little teapot and shakes it roundwise, after the manner of the galley, his great brown ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... wheeled, discharging a little rivulet from the cave: and in it I saw three owl-eyed fish, a finger long, loiter, and spur themselves, and gaze. Leda, who cannot be still in tongue or limb, chattered in her glib baby manner as we ate, and then, after smoking a cigarette, said that she would go and 'lun,' and went, and left me darkling, for she is the sun and the moon and the host of the stars, I occupying myself that night in making ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... to her, but she never turned her head. He stood glowering, grinding his teeth together, his glib tongue finding for once no way to better his sorry case. He was the picture of trickery rewarded; I could not repress a grin at him. Marking which, he burst out at me, vehemently, yet in a low tone, for Mayenne ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... the silence and constraint that hung over the assembly must have stirred a fear that something terrible had happened, which would be increased by Peter's question. It was a merciful opportunity given her to separate herself from the sin and the punishment; but her lie was glib, and indicated determination to stick to the fraud. That moment was heavy with her fate, and she knew it not; but she knew that she had the opportunity of telling the truth, and she did not take it. She had to make the hard choice which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Apparently not so in China. There is so much craft, so much diplomacy, so much subtle legerdemain that, if he chooses, the Chinese may give you no end of trouble to inform yourself on the simplest subject. The Chinese, like so many cavillers and calumniators, all glib of tongue, who know better than any nation on earth how to turn voice and pen to account, have taken the utmost advantage of extended means of circulating thought, with the result that an Englishman such as myself, even were I a deep scholar of their language, would ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... philistine. It does not extend to those things on which the masses have not pronounced, and by its freedom and elasticity in regard to these it often produces erroneous judgments as to its general character. The popular opinions always contain broad fallacies, half-truths, and glib generalizations of fifty years before. If a teacher is to be displaced by a board of trustees because he is a free-trader, or a gold man, or a silver man, or disapproves of a war in which the ruling clique has involved the country, or because he thinks ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... to breakfast next day, and pervaded the kitchen like a daily paper. Horrible murders, barn-burnings, failures, deaths, births, marriages, separations, lawsuits, slanders, and petty larcenies outran each other in her glib speech, and her fingers flew as fast on Sam's blue jacket as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... suggestion, the need of companionship and advice from an older woman, Molly's intolerance of conventionalities, all went home; though it was some time before the trio entirely absorbed the meaning of the glossy phrases and glib vocabulary. The letter passed about in silence after Sandy had read it, Sam and Mormon plowing through the maze ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... the bottle to Swanson, who stood listening to his glib tongue in amused wonder, and invited him to test the medicine. Nothing loth, the ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... used for a century or two past in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and those ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... rather thoughtlessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much. Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as the others were—but the lines on the stones give no sign. One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them; one knows it would ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... bearing the name of Miss Laura Tinley, was sent up to Emilia. She had forgotten this person, and asked Lady Gosstre who it was. Arabella's rival presented herself most winningly. For some time, Emilia listened to her, with wonder that a tongue should be so glib on matters of no earthly interest. At last, Laura said in an undertone: "I am the bearer of a message from Mr. Pericles; do you walk ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... would have been quite sure that here were no masterpieces—here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than a faint interest in the whims of life—no deep interior laughs, no sense of futility ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... at them), even when they are fallen phantasmal, and to make persons of them again, we will give this Piece; sorry that it is the last we have of that fine hand. How welcome, in the murky puddle of Dryasdust, is any glimpse by a lively glib Wilhelmina, which we can discern to be human! Hear what Wilhelmina says (in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public! 'Tis the manner of thy craft,—yet see!"—and with a dexterous movement of his arm he threw the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... talk too glib about the judgments of Providence. The bad boys don't always git drownded when they go fishin' Sundays—they often git home with long strings of trout, and lick the good boys on their way home from Sunday-school. Such is ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... of it this morning," proceeded the money-lender, with a grim contempt for all our raillery, "when you played your pretty trick upon me, so glib and smooth, and up to every move, the pair of you! One borrowing the money, and the other paying me back in my very ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... we are honest men and true; and you will be spared this everlasting palaver. Then we will have some rules, or by-laws, or something, for the workmen. Talk to Mr. Winston about it. He would make a capital speaker, with his glib tongue." ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... be afraid of me. I'm not such a devil as I look. We mean no harm at all. Signor Prefetto, I'm your very humble servant. Gently, lieutenant! You're strangling me! We're here as witnesses! Now then, Padre, speak up! Your tongue's glib enough!" ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... phrenology sub Jove,—out in the cold,—as not one of the household of science. I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I love to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... turned to his sergeant with a triumphant expression. "Just what I thought. Anybody that can't give a better account of himself than that had better be locked up. Spies—aha! Another of you came ashore a while ago—a glib-tongued, story-telling gentleman who fooled us into letting him off, but we've got you safe and sound and here you'll stay! Sergeant, arrest ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... help, he was certain, to be shanghaied. But no matter how wistfully, no matter how late at night he timorously forced himself to loiter among unwashed English stokers on West Street, he couldn't get himself molested except by glib persons wishing ten cents "for ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... must bow. Far in the desert met their various races, All gathering from their hiding-places. Discuss'd was many a notion. At last, it was resolved, on motion, To pacify the conquering banner, By sending homage in, and tribute. With both the homage and its manner They charged the monkey, as a glib brute; And, lest the chap should too much chatter, In black on white they wrote the matter. Nought but the tribute served to fash, As that must needs be paid in cash. A prince, who chanced a mine to own, At last, obliged them with a loan. The mule and ass, to bear the treasure, Their ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... body!" exclaimed the bear, "but that was well turned. Now, sir, as you are getting a little glib, will you go still further and tell us how old ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... O'er fair free hills and valleys I can converse and carry on ad lib.; On active tennis-courts (between the rallies) I can be confident, and none more glib; But not in drawing-rooms my bright star dallies— I'm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... of William Cobbett, and though he did not run so far counter to the ideas of his patrons as to teach Cobbett's grammar at school, he always recommended it to me as the one by which alone I could learn to write good English. The learning of anything, especially of arithmetic and grammar, by the glib repetition of rules was a system that he held in contempt. With the public, ability to recite the rules of such subjects as those went farther than any actual demonstration of the power to cipher ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... stretching facts to the very limit. Even in this case, he said that he started out with the idea of shooting the rapids, and if we hadn't flustered him so, he would not have bumped into the bank and turned about so many times. Dutchy was a very glib talker. He nearly persuaded us that it was all done intentionally, and his thrilling account of the wild dash between the rocks and through the shower of spray stirred us up so that we all had to ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... regarded it as a masterpiece of policy, forgot or disavowed their eulogies, and the bulk of the public, who cannot be decided by anything but the event, looked upon it as the source of all our woes." The counsels of Abbe de Bernis had for some time past been pacific; from a court-abbe, elegant and glib, he had become, on the 25th of June, minister of foreign affairs. But Madame de Pompadour remained faithful to the empress. In the month of January, 1758, Count Clermont was appointed general-in-chief of the army of Germany. In disregard ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... necessary for a man to possess some education; and my master, although he had been at the best school in England, that is, the most expensive, and also at College, was almost totally illiterate, so we let the Church scheme follow that of the coach. At last, bethinking me that he was tolerably glib at the tongue, as most people are who are addicted to the turf, also a great master of slang, remembering also that he had a crabbed old uncle, who had some borough interest, I proposed that he should get into the House, promising in one fortnight to qualify ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... as plain as my name's Sam,' said he. A few days after, I said, 'By George! Sam, I've found Sol.' 'So you have,' said he. 'Now let me try. Blow, Joe, blow!' Sam, he found Re and La. And in the course of two months we got so we could play Old Hundred. I don't pretend to say we could do it as glib as you run over the ivory, ma'am; but it was Old Hundred, and no mistake. And we played Yankee Doodle, first rate. We called our instrument the Harmolinks; and we enjoyed it all the more because it was our own invention. ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... head of owl, Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, Feathered and ruffled in every part, Skipper Ireson stood in the cart. Scores of women, old and young, Strong of muscle, and glib of tongue, Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, Shouting and singing the shrill refrain "Here's Flud Oirson, for his horrd horrt, Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt By ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... "Madame Newcome pas ici—votre excellence nouvellement arrive—avez-vous fait ung bong voyage? Je recois chez moi Mercredi prochaing; lonnure de vous voir—Madamasel Miles ma fille;" and, Mira, now reinforcing her mamma, poured in a glib little oration in French, somewhat to the astonishment of the Colonel, who began to think, however, that perhaps French was the language of the polite world, into which he was now making ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... His answer was glib enough: "One of the governor's servants. He said as how there was no harm in the letter, and the gold ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... based upon the nature and capacity of the instruments, without taking into account the human element, always the most important factor. And what has really come about is this: that cavilers, calumniators, and crooks—all gentlemen glib of tongue, who know better than any one else how to turn voice and pen to account—have taken the utmost advantage of these extended means for circulating thought, with the result that the men of our times have the greatest difficulty in the world to know ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... talked about pipings—not a bird—a new way to fold goods to make trimmings, and soon everything was going on the same as if the new teacher were not there. I noticed that she kept her head straight, and was not nearly so glib-tongued and birdlike before mother and Sally as she had been at the schoolhouse. Maybe that was why father told mother that night that the new teacher would ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... overtook a little maiden whom I asked the name of that town, so that I might ask the way thither if I should come into a valley where I could not have pointed it out any longer. I pleased the young girl very much by presenting her with my card, and induced her to use her glib tongue volubly in telling me about their schools—what they studied, how long the terms last, &c. She would get along very well in our Pennsylvania German dialect. When we parted, she skipped away and ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... to have lost his tongue, which was certainly glib enough ordinarily. All he would say was that the engineering department was still at work, he believed; that the track was approaching Copah, ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... and five," he answered promptly. Evidently he had uttered the glib lie before, and as on another occasion he waited for his listener to reduce the words ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... come on, and receive the laconic answer, 'How should I know?' After half an hour the secretary arrives. I repeat my question, and receive the same answer. Another half hour passes, and one of the justices drives up in his tarantass. Perhaps he is a glib-tongued gentleman, and assures me that the proceedings will commence at once: 'Sei tchas! sei tchas!' Don't believe what the priest or the dictionary tells you about the meaning of that expression. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... bowed, never yet having spoken a word in Harry's hearing, and our friend Doodles with glib volubility told Harry how intimate he was with Archie, and how he knew Sir Hugh, and how he had met Lady Clavering, and how "doosed" glad he was to meet Harry himself on this ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace books,—if they had such painful aids to culture,—and were comforted and edified by the discovery that brilliant John Lyly had made. This glib command of the matter-of-course, with a ready use of the proverb and the 'old said saw,' is a marked characteristic of the work. It emphasizes the youth of its author. We learn what could not have been new even in 1579, that 'in misery it is a great comfort to have ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... thinking it may have been the Samaritans that vexed him. Peter lifted his heavy shoulders and muttered: the Samaritans? We give no heed to them: and he began to speak, at first with diffidence; Joseph had to woo him into speaking, which he did; but after the first few minutes Peter was glib enough, telling Joseph that last night there had been stirs and quarrels among the disciples regarding his boats, and John's and James' boats too, he said, and by the jealous and envious, he muttered, who would like to come between ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... go. 'Mr. Willett,' I said, 'they found your son's camera on the trail. Your butler exhibits it to the police and reporters and tells them a glib story. He told it to me, also. But what I want to know is, why nobody has thought of ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Was this story of the landlord a glib lie of Captain Barstow's to account, with a detail which should carry conviction, for the suspiciously new pack of cards? And if so, did her father believe in its truth? Had the packs been waiting in Captain Barstow's coat pocket in the hall until the fitting moment for their appearance? ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... money-making lot flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle. There is also a curious look of waxworks ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... trumpet, broke off suddenly. The angry fire died out of his blue eyes, and he bowed his head humbly. "I ask yer pardon, Minister!" he said, quietly, after a pause. "I humbly ask yer pardon. I had forgotten the Lord, ye see, for all I was talkin' about Him so glib. I was takin' my view, and forgettin' that the Lord had His. He takes things by and large, and nat'rally He takes 'em larger than mortal man kin do. Amen! so be it!" He took off his battered hat, and stood motionless for a few moments, with bent head: nor was his the only silent prayer that ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... war mighty diffrent. He war down in de lower kentry wen de war war ober. He war mighty smart, an' had a good head-piece, an' a orful glib tongue. He set up store an' sole whisky, an' made a lot ob money. Den he wanted ter go to de legislatur. Now what should he do but make out he'd got 'ligion, an' war called to preach. He had no more 'ligion dan my ole dorg. But he had money an' built a meetin' house, whar he ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... of them. They were just as strange to him as he to them. He saw the brother, too, a tall, glib, dapper youth. He saw the old house with its dilapidated stairs, its rooms filled with cumbersome, provincial furniture. He saw the alternating currents of life in this family: there was now rest, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... revolt, is not to play the schoolmaster to this event, but to study its peculiar character. For this a certain amount of scientific insight and some goodwill is necessary, whereas for the other operation a glib phraseology, saturated ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the theatre under such conditions shall be talkative, witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real intensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellous ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... distinguished from denizens of the metropolis, so carefully, so artistically, groomed were their whiskers, so presentable their oval, clean-shaven faces, so easy the manner of their dancing attendance upon their womenfolk, so glib their French conversation as they quizzed their female companions. As for the other category, it comprised individuals who, stout, or of the same build as Chichikov (that is to say, neither very portly nor very lean), backed and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... He lost to others but I was careful never to win from him. He fell into the way of dropping around at my quarters. Like most of his set, the Major was a heavy drinker. When his face would become very hushed and his tongue very glib, I would try to draw things out of him, but I never could get anything worth while. The slightest suspicious question made him close up as ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... continued she, "to hear me quote holy writ so glib. I have pored over it this four years, and why? Not because God wrote it, but because I saw it often in thy hands ere thou didst leave me. Heaven forgive me, I am but a woman. What thinkest thou of this sentence? 'Let your work so shine before men that ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... is curious. The whole world and all its marvelous distractions seem to have resolved themselves into the curt sentence, "It rains." And somehow the great financier's faculty for the glib manipulation of platitudes which has earned him a reputation as a powerful economist seems for the moment to have abandoned him. His eyes remind one of a boy standing on tiptoe and staring over a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... it was old liquor, sixty years at least. But I gad, it strikes me that you are pretty glib to-night. You must have ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with every circumstance ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... arduous road, but it leads to reality. All short and easy answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush. The confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient authority to back it. The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all, to a Balance of Probabilities. That is the best God that theoretic philosophy can give us. It may be better than nothing. But who can love a Balance of Probabilities? Who can feel the hand of such a deity as ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question, the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... that this was his true vocation. To renounce pleasure and discipline the mind; to live a life of self-denial, submitting himself humbly to the inspiration of the great masters. . . . To be serene, like this old man; to avoid that facile, glib, composite note—those monkey-tricks of cleverness. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... using strong expressions and superlatives in conversation; and, though the dissipated artificial life which they lead prevents their cherishing any strong legitimate passion, the language of passion in affected tones slips for ever from their glib tongues, and every trifle produces those phosphoric bursts which only mimick in the dark ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Zeke," anxiously, "it's my responsibility. I recommended you. I want you should say 'em off as glib as Fanshaw did. Now ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... the cheese-monger's very small, the chemist's very smart, the pastry-cook's very dowdy, and the green-grocer's very dark, I was still looking out at the view thus presented, when I was suddenly apostrophized by a glib, disputatious voice behind me. ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... just below the falls, where they are seventy-five feet high. There was a little projecting rock on which she could just sit,—a horrible place. Below it was a dreadful eddy, in which nothing could live. He helped her down to it, and she was in mortal terror, as such glib-tongued women generally are when there is the least danger. Then the man ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... that Ben Schenk's glib protestations, reinforced by Mrs. Beaver's own zealous approval, should have in time outclassed the humble Joe? The blow fell just when the second term of night school was over, and Joe was looking forward to long summer evenings ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... since I came here to New-York, I see so many things to make me sigh, that my hooks and eyes keep flying off like Peggotty's buttons. There—run along, now, and don't you come this way again, with that little glib tongue, and those bright eyes, or you'll empty ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... took me aside, and began saying so much in praise of you; and when she once got me on that subject, I was ready and glib enough, I warrant you. But somehow, though I then found it so much easier to speak, I find it more difficult to recollect exactly what I said. Is not that strange? And then she said that my happiness would excite so much envy in the great world; that you had been admired, courted, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... asked, with biting scorn. "Tell the Duke and Lord Cheisford where I found them! Let us hear your glib young tongue telling the ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of Canada" is a phrase which has been much in vogue with a section of the British press ever since the attempt to establish reciprocity between the United States and the Dominion. It is a question if the glib users of the phrase have the faintest idea what they mean by it. It is a catchword. It sounds ominously deep as the owl's wise but meaningless "too-whoo." English publicists who have never been nearer Canada than a Dominion postage stamp wisely ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... of this year I debated twelve days, at Burksville, with Presiding Elder Frogge. He was the great champion of Methodism in Southern Kentucky. He had had a great many debates, and, while he was very ready and glib in his line of debating, I soon discovered that his scholarship and reading were both very limited, exceedingly so; and I intentionally widened the range of controversy more than was my wont, to see what ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... about that," said Nancy in a glib voice. "I was at a first-rate school myself for years. Weren't we kept strict, just! My word! we couldn't call our noses our own. The only language was parlez-vous. But it was a select school—very; and now that I have left, I like to feel that I am accomplished. ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... had finished with the carefully framed, glib excuse that I was to make, he shouted to me over the wire, "What do you think, Jameson? Tell him to come down right away. The impossible has happened. I have got under Dopey Jack's guard—he has confessed. It's big. Tell ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... my courtly speech, and perchance also with my moustachios, for a smile took the place of the frown wherewith she had at first confronted me. Now, if I had uttered glib pleasantries in answer to her frowns, how many more did not her smiles wring from me! I discoursed to her in the very courtliest fashion of cows and pullets and such other matters as interesting to her as they were mysterious to me. I questioned ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... my God, that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My very heart and soul are quakin', To think how we stood sweatin', shakin', An' pish'd wi' dread, While he, wi' hingin' lips and snakin', [sneering] Held ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... nor I were in any favorable disposition to be amused. The Count's glib cynicism had revealed a new aspect of his nature from which we both recoiled. But it was impossible to resist the comical distress of so very large a man at the loss of so very small a mouse. We laughed in spite of ourselves; and when ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... The lecturer, was a glib, self-possessed youth, filled to the brim with statistics, with which he literally overwhelmed his auditors. His remarks were accompanied by a rapid-fire snapping of fingers to the time of which the operator changed his slides. A bewildering succession ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... Gladstonopolis as the hero of the occasion, and to hear him, as he made his speeches at the dinner which was given on the day, and at which he was called upon to take the chair. I was glad to see, however, that he was not quite so glib with his tongue as he had been when addressing the people. He hesitated a good deal, nay, almost broke down, when he gave the health of Sir Kennington Oval and the British sixteen; and I was quite pleased to hear Lord Marylebone declare to his mother that he was "a wonderfully ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... for it but to leave all, save what I actually felt, unsaid. Diplomacy I was trained in, and on most matters I had a glib enough tongue. But to palter with women was a lightness I had always neglected, and if I had invented would-be pretty speeches out of my clumsy inexperience, Phorenice would have seen through the fraud on the instant. She had been ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... This glib speech quite banished any lingering suspicion that Jerry or Hamp may have felt. They were highly elated by the news, and they helped to pack up with alacrity. In a short time the little party ...
— The Camp in the Snow - Besiedged by Danger • William Murray Graydon
... Mr. Balker," said Captain Sullendine when the party reached the quarter-deck; and he was so lively in his movements, and so glib in his speech, as to provoke the suspicion that he had imbibed again at the conclusion of his oration on shore. "Here, you, Sopsy!" he continued in ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... came to him, and with glib and easy profession said, "I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest." This seemed all that could have been asked. No man could do more. Yet Jesus discouraged this ardent scribe. He saw that he did not know ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... how all conditions, how all minds, (As well of glib and slippery creatures, as Of grave and austere quality,) tender down Their services to Lord Timon; his large fortune, Upon his good and gracious nature hanging, Subdues and properties to his love and tendance All sorts of hearts; yea, from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... outfit I have here, is perfectly hateful to the English mind.... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... not need their asseverations of veracity; the truth shone through their uncouth stories. They were widely different from the glib patter that runs out of a crook's mouth in the presence of an official. Some of these men were seasoned criminals; often they did not themselves understand how iniquitous was the "deal" that had been given ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... for that, anyway—so he did not understand me. I turned and twisted my question around and about, trying to strike that man's average, but failed. He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived, faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way: "Can man boat ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to the knowing ones it is not strange that they should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less knowing ones from their reservoir of words. Then it is the most natural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most easily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth becomes the ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... and satin, and a waving of ostrich feathers. The daughter is pale and interesting, and interprets Beethoven, and paints the old mill; while a skilled person, hired at a high price, rules in the dairy. The son rides a-hunting, and is glib on the odds. The 'offices'—such it is the fashion to call the places in which work was formerly done—are carefully kept in the background. The violets and snowdrops and crocuses are rooted up, all the sweet ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Muskingum River to Marietta. The first Methodist family I stopped with there, the lady was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but a thorough Universalist. She was a thin-faced, Roman-nosed, loquacious Yankee, glib on the tongue, and you may depend upon it I had a hard race to keep up with her, though I found it a good school, for it set me to reading my Bible. And here permit me to say, of all the isms I ever heard of, they were here. These descendants ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's accomplishments. But, a remarkable ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... of Bursley, this enlightened and beautiful town which I am now visiting for the first time,' he began in a hard, metallic voice, employing again with the glib accuracy of a machine the exact phrases which he had been using all day, 'look at me—look well at me. How old do you think I am? How old do I seem? Twenty, my dear, do you say?' and he turned with practised insolence to a pot-girl in a red shawl ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... women, a hundred years ago, were credulous, eager to admire and believe, and apt to imagine all sorts of excellences in the object of their admiration. For weeks, nay, months, Madam Esmond was never tired of hearing Mr. Ward's great glib voice and voluble commonplaces: and, according to her wont, she insisted that her neighbours should come and listen to him, and ordered them to be converted. Her young favourite, Mr. Washington, she was especially anxious to influence; and again and again pressed ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his son, Mick, were there. Donovan was the publican, butcher, and horse-dealer at the Overhaul. He was reputed to be well-in, though some said that if everybody had their own he would n't be worth much. He was a glib-tongued Irishman who knew everything—or fondly imagined he did—from the law to horse-surgery. There was money to be made out of selections, he reckoned, if selectors only knew how to make it—the majority, he proclaimed, did n't know enough to get ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... these remarks are not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy of the publican and something more, to enjoy ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... to return. O'er fair free hills and valleys I can converse and carry on ad lib.; On active tennis-courts (between the rallies) I can be confident, and none more glib; But not in drawing-rooms my bright star dallies— I'm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... having had experience of Vooda's persuasive tongue and knack of casuistry, did not wish to argue the point—knowing, as he did full well, the object of Vooda's visit—and at once made up his mind that he would not see the glib-tongued constable alone. ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... obliged to leave phrenology sub Jove,—out in the cold,—as not one of the household of science. I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done. I love to amuse myself in its plaster Golgothas, and listen to the glib professor, as he discovers by ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... minister's wife bowed very low to an Italian lady, and for the moment wished herself in Beacon Street. It was a great trouble to her that she could not pluck up courage to speak a word in Italian. "I know more about it than some that are glib enough," she would say to her niece Livy, "but these Tuscans are so particular with ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O! these encounterers so glib of tongue That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every tickling reader! Set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity, ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... suspecting him. He is too glib with his Princeton. Himmel! Did you ever hear a man talk so fast and so much and use such words? I can speak as good English as any man my age, but there were words, dozens of them, that I had never ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... true account of what they had seen. The wonderful things lost nothing in the telling, the climax always being that they had finished the whole world, and had turned only when there was no more land. One glib old gentleman asked, "Then you reached Ma Robert (Mrs. L.)?" They were obliged to confess that she lived a little beyond the world. The presents were received with expressions of great satisfaction and delight; and on Sunday, when Sekeletu made his appearance ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... never silent talks much folly; a glib tongue, unless it be bridled, will often talk a ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... citizen with a grievance, a theory, or even merely the gift of gab might air his views and be reasonably sure of an audience. In the evening there was always a crowd. Street fakirs plied their traffic under sputtering gas torches, dispensing, along with a ready flow of glib chatter, marvellous ointments, cure-alls, soap, suspenders, cheap safety razors, anything that would coax stray dimes and quarters ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... beheld a boatman dead and bleeding at my feet. A wild cry arose. The mob seized me, and I was carried to prison. Next day the case was investigated before the court of justice. I related the simple fact. A glib advocate doubted my asseverations; but the spectators, who were numerous, gave the fullest credit to the story, and I was spared the doom of a murderer, because the judges were of opinion that I could have no motive to commit the crime, and had perpetrated the deed under some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... had gone, Carton drank and slept till ten o'clock, and then walked to the chambers of Mr. Stryver. Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a bold, and was fast shouldering his way to a lucrative practice; but it had been noted that he had not the striking and necessary faculty of extracting evidence from a heap of statements. A remarkable ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... one sees and what the other sees are in the same place. Since the shape and colour are not quite the same for the two men, this raises a difficulty, hastily solved, or rather covered up, by declaring what each sees to be purely "subjective"—though it would puzzle those who use this glib word to say what they mean by it. The truth seems to be that space—and time also—is much more complicated than it would appear to be from the finished structure of physics, and that the one all-embracing three-dimensional space is a logical construction, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... conditions. But he was emphatically not of that sort, so continued to lead his disreputable, roving life for a period of ten years. At the end of which time he met a plaintive little Englishwoman, just out from Home, and she, knowing nothing whatever of Rivers, but being taken with his glib tongue and rather handsome person, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... caller is an old woman who wants the popular pastor to get her husband work in the Navy Yard. No sooner is she disposed of, with a word of comfort, than a spruce-looking young man steps forward. He is a book agent, and his glib tongue runs so fast that the preacher subscribes for his book without looking at it. As the agent retires a shy young girl comes forward and asks for the preacher's autograph. It is given cheerfully. Two old ladies of bustling activity have come to ask for advice about opening a soup kitchen ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... a result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass as if they had thrown it up rather than spoken it. It seemed to me that this was almost as much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious of public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator is glib, his countrymen distrust him. They dislike smartness. The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, provided there be an element of commonplace running through them; and any rough, yet never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... affair which took place in the State of Georgia in the year 1811. At the Superior Court at Milledgeville a Mrs. Palmer, who, the account states, "seems to have been rather glib of the tongue, was indicted, tried, convicted, and, in pursuance of the sentence of the Court, was punished by being publicly ducked in the Oconee River for—scolding." This, we are told, was the first instance of ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... father expects her to accept the invitations which he is obliged to decline; so she gives up her own tastes and inclinations as usual, and goes into hot rooms among crowds of fine people, hearing the same glib compliments, and the same polite inquiries, night after night, until, patient as she is, she heartily wishes that her fashionable friends all lived in some opposite quarter of the globe, the farther away ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... that instinctively sought the laxer neighborhoods of the frontier. An echo of Pigeon Creek informed the young storekeeper's first state paper, the announcement of his candidacy, in the year 1832. His first political speech was in a curious vein, glib, intimate and fantastic: "Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it becoming more and more marked all ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... he understood that Monsieur wished only to make inquiries, not to engage a room. He was civil, however, and glib in French with a South-German accent. Madame Delatour had sold her interest in the hotel to him, Anton Schreiber. Unfortunately there had been a mortgage. The widow was left badly off, and broken-hearted at her husband's death. With what little money she had, she had gone to Oran, ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... was usually at least one Rabbi. One of the sons of Anselm Moses must be a Rabbi. The parents of little Mayer Anselm set him apart for the synagogue—he was so clever at reciting prayers and so glib with responses. Then he had an eczema for management, and took charge of all the games when the children played Hebrew I-Spy through the hallways and dark corners of the big, rambling and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... about this time, which made much noise. He was a great, ugly, idle, mischievous fellow, son of the Duc de Rohan, who had given him the title I have just named. He had served in one campaign very indolently, and then quitted the army, under pretence of ill-health, to serve no more. Glib in speech, and with the manners of the great world, he was full of caprices and fancies; although a great gambler and spendthrift, he was miserly, and cared only for himself. He had been enamoured of Florence, an actress, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... night," replied Josephson, now glib enough as his first excitement subsided and his command of English returned. "He was a neighbor of Mr. Minturn's, I hear. Oh, what luck!" growled Josephson as the name recalled ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... be won for the plot, a proposal to compromise the whole matter amicably might serve to beguile him to the chateau of his friend at Ebernburg till his safe-conduct should expire, and then the liars could throw off the mask and dispose of him with credit in the eyes of Rome. The glib and wily Glapio led in the attempt. Von Sickingen and Bucer were entrapped by his bland hypocrisy, and lent themselves to the execution of the specious proposition. But when they came to Luther with it, he turned his back, saying, "If the emperor's ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... it's true! You preach to me no more, You, once so glib with holy words! I am Astonished!. . . (With burlesque fury): Stay, I will surprise you too! Hark! I permit you. . . (He pretends to be seeking for something to tease her with, and to have found it): . . .It is something new!— To—pray for me, ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... thumb-marked and dirtied with brick chips and the soil of the trenches, and showed stage by stage how the drama unrolled. It was no good. Poor me! nobody quite understood. Some thought possibly that I was a glib liar; others did not even trouble to think anything. How much they understood! They had not the background, the atmosphere, the long weeks which were necessary to teach even us ourselves. They had not ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... desired Lewis to tell the Governor of Virginia that "they had taken up the Hatchet against all Nations that were Enemies to the English"; but Lewis, an astute student of Indian Psychology, rightly surmised that all their glib professions of friendship and assistance were "only to put a gloss on their knavery." So it proved; for instead of the four hundred warriors promised under the treaty for service in Virginia, the Cherokees sent only seven warriors, accompanied by three women. Al though the Cherokees ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... of fashion, very fond of using strong expressions and superlatives in conversation; and, though the dissipated artificial life which they lead prevents their cherishing any strong legitimate passion, the language of passion in affected tones slips for ever from their glib tongues, and every trifle produces those phosphoric bursts which only mimick in the dark the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... of the three actual sword makers, and had been president of the guild until he gave place to Roland. He was the oldest of the company; an ambitious man, a glib talker, with great influence among his fellows, and a natural leader of them. What he said generally represented the opinion ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... not restrain a joyful exclamation. "So that was it!" he cried. "You were at the McIntyre house, and gave the poison to Turnbull there—and not in the court room—four hours before he died. You'll swing for that crime, my buck, in spite of your glib tongue and ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there is a great deal else—sin, and shame, and remorse, and heartbreak, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... is the burden of life for the Cause; and it is because of its exhausting strain and exacting demands that so many men have failed. We must get men to realise that to live is as daring as to die. But confusion has been made in our time by the glib phrase: "You are not asked now to die for Ireland, but to live for her," without insisting that the life shall aim at the ideal, the brave and the true. To slip apologetically through existence is not life. If such a mean philosophy went abroad, we would soon find the land a place ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... by Tito in the Piazza del Duomo, he had the fresh anguish of this consciousness in his mind, and Tito's ready speech fell upon him like the mockery of a glib, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... three daughters: the eldest is eleuen; The second, and the third, nine: and some fiue: If this proue true, they'l pay for't. By mine Honor Ile gell'd em all: fourteene they shall not see To bring false generations: they are co-heyres, And I had rather glib my selfe, then they Should not produce ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... through it all and the light grew so dim that Eric thought it time to make an end this way or that. Therefore, he took the head of the slain man, though he feared to touch it, and rolled it swiftly into the cave, saying, "Now, being so glib of speech, go tell thy mate that Eric Brighteyes ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... resplendar De [12], bold dame," cried the knight by the side of Edward, while a lurid flush passed over his cheek of bronze; "but thou art too glib of tongue for a subject, and pratest overmuch of Woden, the Paynim, for the lips of a ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the highly educated classes (so-called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... boys, with the exception of Allison, were chuckling at this glib persuasiveness. Westby stood there, in a calmly respectful, even deferential attitude, as if animated only by a desire ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... dere. By chance, have you got any 'bacco? Make me more glib if I can chew and spit; then I 'members more and better de things done past ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 1 • Various
... soul alive. Sometimes when alone with her, and with the "spooniness" which will attach to male courtship before twenty-five, fairly shaken off, he could be a gay, dashing and even a presuming lover. Just now he was unamiable—not to say wicked, and ready for any use of his glib tongue which could send the blue coat out of the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... truths. I know of no harder experience than this. It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do. We balance our spiritual accounts with care. We insert glib phrases about duty into all our reckonings. There is nothing, or next to nothing, which cannot, if adroitly catalogued, be considered a duty; and it is this delicate mental adjustment which is disturbed ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... brow deepened, and Yates was quick to see that he had lost ground again, if, indeed, he had ever gained any, which he began to doubt. She evidently did not relish his glib talk about the university. He was just about to say something deferentially about that institution, for he was not a man who would speak disrespectfully of the equator if he thought he might curry favor with his auditor ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... to know the thoughts in that little brown head, on its first look at life! Whatever the reason, he plainly concluded not to take the risk that day, for he disappeared again behind a door that no reporter, however glib or plausible, could pass. Sometimes he vanished with a suddenness that was not natural. Did his heart fail him, or, perchance, his footing give way? For whether he clung to the walls, or made stepping-stones of his brothers and sisters (as do many of ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... said I, "be dumb, Accursed traitor! to thy shame of thee True tidings will I bear."—" Off," he replied, "Tell what thou list; but as thou escape from hence To speak of him whose tongue hath been so glib, Forget not: here he wails the Frenchman's gold. 'Him of Duera,' thou canst say, 'I mark'd, Where the starv'd sinners pine.' If thou be ask'd What other shade was with them, at thy side Is Beccaria, whose red gorge distain'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... partly Scotch, by nature he was entirely Irish. He possessed a glib tongue of the latter order and his habit was to address every one he met, be he Indian, Highland Scot, or French Canadian, in the dialect which the person was supposed to favour. So he roared out in his magnificent baritone, as he picked ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... interrupted Brett, with the cynical smile which so often disconcerted glib liars like Petit. "It is hopeless to expect you to tell the truth. However, I think I know a way to clear your wits. You must be brought face to face with La Belle Chasseuse. Perhaps when you are confronted with that lady in the room ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... his eye. Feeling ran higher and higher, but there was no indication that Barouche's hopes were sure of fulfilment. His face became paler as the day wore on, and his hands freer with those of his late constituents. Yet he noticed that Carnac was still glib with his tongue and freer with his hands. Carnac seemed everywhere, on every corner, in every street, at every polling booth; he laid his trowel against every brick in the wall. Carnac was not as confident as he seemed, but he was nearing the end of the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... motionless as if dead, while the wonderful brain was busy with thoughts that stirred the profoundest depths of his nature. There are beliefs that come to us at which reason may laugh, but which it can not shake or disturb. There are questions that the glib unbeliever may ask that we can not answer. But away down in our hearts is a faith which the whole world can not remove, and which can be uprooted only by ourselves. Woe to him who dares ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... Rule he was speedily well rid of; for when his indiscreet frankness to customers was observed, the rod taught him the folly of untimely truth-telling, if not the propriety of smoothing the way to a bargain by a glib falsehood. With such training, he grew up an expert salesman; and before he was of age, after various changes in business, he became the confidential clerk in a large wholesale house. Owing to unexpected reverses, the house became embarrassed, and at length failed. The head of the firm went back ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... it was now didn't care whether its sons-in-law were Christian or Jewish;—whether they had the fair skin and bold eyes and uncertain words of an English gentleman, or the swarthy colour and false grimace and glib tongue of some inferior Latin race. But he cared for these things;—and it was dreadful to him to think that his daughter should not care for them. "I suppose I had better die and leave them to look after themselves," he said, as he returned ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... see our fellow-creatures (especially if bound to look at them), even when they are fallen phantasmal, and to make persons of them again, we will give this Piece; sorry that it is the last we have of that fine hand. How welcome, in the murky puddle of Dryasdust, is any glimpse by a lively glib Wilhelmina, which we can discern to be human! Hear what Wilhelmina says (in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... rational When they regurgitate the thing they hear! This fool is but an unit of the crowd, And crowds are senseless as the vasty deep That sinks or surges as the moon dictates. I know these crowds, and know that any man That hath a glib tongue and a rolling eye Can as he willeth with them. [Removes his mask and mounts steps of Loggia.] Citizens! [Prolonged yells and groans from the crowd.] Yes, I am he, I am that same Lorenzo Whom you have nicknamed the Magnificent. [Further terrific yells, shakings of fists, brandishings ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... plans. It was a gusty March day when the Falkners went out with the architect to consider the lot, and spent an afternoon trying to decide how to secure the most sun. Falkner, weary of the whole matter, listened to the glib young architect. Another windy day in April they returned to the lot to look at the excavation. The contracts were not yet signed. Lumber had gone soaring, and there was a strike in the brick business, the kind of brick they had chosen being unobtainable, while hardware seemed unaccountably ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... is so moral, or so immoral if it comes to that. I notice it's always the folks that ain't had much to do with morals one way or the other that's so almighty glib about them." ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... after I had moistned my lips, to make my lie run glib to his journies end, forward I went as followeth ..." And the good apostle stops again; the cider and his own words have moved him; he is a little fuddled, so is mine host; they both fall to weeping. The innkeeper is ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... Pierre almost shrank from the unknown sorrow of this man beside him, who was about to disclose the story of his life. The solitary places do not make men glib of tongue; rather, spare of words. They whose tragedy lies in the capacity to suffer greatly, being given the woe of imagination, bring forth inner history as a mother gasps life into ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of sympathy. There are some natures that are gifted with a blessed power to bring consolation to men. It is not that they are glib of tongue or facile of speech, but somehow the very pressure of their hand is grateful to the saddened heart. The simple and kindly action, of which we think nothing, may tell powerfully on others, and unclose fountains of feeling deep down in ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... gift o' speech than you can make pretence to," said the woman abruptly. "I often wonder that of two twin-brothers one should be so glib and t'other ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... midnight, I rode by a well-remembered porch, where all that was brightest and gayest of Richmond's youth had passed many happy hours. There was Styles Staple; his joyous face clouded now, his glib tongue mute—with two weeping girls clinging to his hands. Solemnly he bent down; pressed his lips to each pure forehead, in a kiss that was a sacrament—threw himself into their mother's arms, as ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... then wealthy and powerful family of Lavillotte, old-timers of Louisiana soil, was considered the opposite of an honor by them, with the exception of the young girl, educated in the north, who had been fascinated by his fine looks and glib tongue. Therefore, when Joyce was born, an edict was issued by its leading members—two patriarchal uncles who held control of the property—that she should be cut off from her maternal rights in ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... injuring a man's son.' 3. Tsze-lu said, 'There are (there) common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, do not think ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... give you some cause for mirth. Its members are of all sorts, ages and origins, and they have had between them some odd experiences since that first day when, parading hastily in Kensington Gardens, they wished they hadn't been quite so glib, in their anxiety to get to war, about professing full knowledge of the ways and wiles of the motor bicycle. One at least of them paid the price of inexactitude then and there; he still shudders to think how, put to the test, he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... up my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public! 'Tis the manner of thy craft,—yet see!"—and with a dexterous movement of his arm he threw the fruit-peel ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... carried out was certainly a genuine triumph. Steve openly congratulated the two efficient cooks on their "masterly skill"; though Max laughingly warned the others to "beware of the Greeks bearing gifts," for there might be a base motive hiding behind all that glib praise. Steve protested that he meant every word of it; but then it was well known that Steve hated to do any cooking himself, and hence was fain to laud the efforts of others in that line, doubtless in the hope of encouraging them to "keep ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... and Jack began to pump my memory mercilessly for what it might retain of his driving lessons. Luckily, I had forgotten nothing, and I was able to demonstrate my knowledge by pointing to the various parts of the machine with each glib reference I made. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... puzzling Birralong. The last man in the district whom they expected to be carried away by the glib tales of nuggets by the bucketful and gravel running two ounces to the dish, was Tony Taylor; still less did they expect that he would leave his selection home, to say nothing of the charms of Birralong and Marmot's verandah, for a wild-cat yarn of travelling fossickers. He was ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of mis-technicality—an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him to ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... us in connection with this glib project is the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to feminine ingenuity rather pleasant than otherwise, to devise sumptuary laws ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... the dinner on the train, which had been so poor; about London, about dances. She was really very nervous, and chattered from fear. Morel sat all the time smoking his thick twist tobacco, watching her, and listening to her glib London speech, as he puffed. Mrs. Morel, dressed up in her best black silk blouse, answered quietly and rather briefly. The three children sat round in silence and admiration. Miss Western was the princess. Everything of the best was got out for her: the best cups, the ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... should search elsewhere, you were not acquainted with the hiding-place? When I asked you in my office the other day whether you knew where the will was hidden, and you wouldn't answer me for very fear, though you were glib enough in swearing that you had not hidden it yourself, then you knew nothing about the book and its enclosure? When you told Mr Griffith down at Coed that you had something to divulge, were you not then almost driven to tell ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... brudder war mighty diffrent. He war down in de lower kentry wen de war war ober. He war mighty smart, an' had a good head-piece, an' a orful glib tongue. He set up store an' sole whisky, an' made a lot ob money. Den he wanted ter go to de legislatur. Now what should he do but make out he'd got 'ligion, an' war called to preach. He had no more 'ligion dan my ole dorg. But he had money an' built a meetin' ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... many misgivings and a rapid beating of the heart when Miss Ashurst called upon her. Edna was always such a conscientious child about her lessons that Miss Ashurst rather overlooked the fact that upon this occasion she was not quite as glib as usual, and she took her seat with a feeling of great relief, determining that she would not forget ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source and secret of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... and lance. With that he pulled it up easily, plucked off the boughs, and trimmed it at his pleasure. In the meantime his mare pissed to ease her belly, but it was in such abundance that it did overflow the country seven leagues, and all the piss of that urinal flood ran glib away towards the ford of Vede, wherewith the water was so swollen that all the forces the enemy had there were with great horror drowned, except some who had taken the way on the left hand towards ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... couldn't fall in love with him. I like him, very much. But he's too much of a recluse. Could I kiss him? No! No! Guy Pollock at twenty-six I could have kissed him then, maybe, even if I were married to some one else, and probably I'd have been glib in persuading myself ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... recovered sufficiently to address you as he fully hoped and intended to do to-day." At this all eyes sped to the Bishop, who stood certainly in a drooping attitude at the chaplain's side, his episcopal hands behind his back. "Something happened," the glib spokesman continued with stern eyes, "something that you do not often hear of in these days. His lordship was accosted, beset, and, like the poor man in the Scriptures, despitefully entreated, not many miles beyond your own boundary, by ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... of the conventional—provided it be glib. One reads such an assertion, and provided it be suave and brief and conventional, one seldom questions—or thinks "very strange" and then forgets. One has an impression from geography lessons: Mediterranean not more than three inches wide, on the map; Switzerland only a few more inches ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... suitor, with his glib Irish tongue, and his pretty, coaxing ways. There was about him also that glamour of experience and of mystery which attracts a woman's interest, and finally her love. He could talk of the sweet valleys of County Monaghan from which he came, of the lovely, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... desert met their various races, All gathering from their hiding-places. Discuss'd was many a notion. At last, it was resolved, on motion, To pacify the conquering banner, By sending homage in, and tribute. With both the homage and its manner They charged the monkey, as a glib brute; And, lest the chap should too much chatter, In black on white they wrote the matter. Nought but the tribute served to fash, As that must needs be paid in cash. A prince, who chanced a mine to own, At last, obliged ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... love that other man, that you are not to be his wife, can you love me, will you be my wife?" These were the words which were in his heart, but with all his sighs he could not draw them to his lips. He would have given anything, everything for power to ask this simple question, but glib as was his tongue in pulpits and on platforms, now he could not find a word wherewith to express the plain wish of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... lead us toward mutual understanding. They clear up the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of terms, they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity. The common way of speech and thought which the old system of logic has simply systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact. All propositions are approximations to an elusive truth, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... Tony, listening to her brother's glib excuses. "Thank goodness he can lie like that. Larry never could." And as her eyes met Ted's a moment later when they passed each other in the maze of dancers he murmured "All right" in her ear and she was well content. ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... a High German doctor, of the first class. He had taken his diploma of Beelzebub in the Black Forest, and was gifted with as fine a hand to force a card—with as glib a tongue to harangue a mob at wakes and fairs, as any professor since the birth of the fourth grace of life,—swindling. He would talk until his head smoked of his list of miraculous cures—of his balsams, his anodynes, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... fro with ignoble solemnity; another has fallen asleep and snores at intervals with a nauseous rattle; smart young men, dressed fashionably, fling chance witticisms at the busy barmaids, and the nymphs answer with glib readiness. This is the home of Jollity and Good-fellowship; this is the place from which Care is banished; this is the happy corner where the social glass is dispensed. Alas for the jollity and the sociability and all the rest of it! Force yourself to study the vile spectacle, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... ingenious faculty for putting everything on his client's side in the best light, and his adversary's in the worst. He could "tear a witness to pieces," and turn him inside out. His junior, Skimpin, was glib, ready-armed at all points, and singularly adroit in "making a hare" of any witness who fell into his hands, teste Winkle. He had all the professional devices for dealing with a witness's answers, and twisting them to his purpose, at his fingers' ends. He was the Wontner or Ballantyne ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... launched in a recital glib on his lips, regained the dominance of manner which the attitude of his subordinates had momentarily imperiled. Increased composure brought with it a certain hauteur, and he paused again—perhaps to gratify the actor's instinct in him rather than observe the effect ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... auctioneer, in his glib tones, "we are presenting to-day a most unusual opportunity. Prizes will be distributed to many enterprising people of Gridley, though these prizes are all so valuable that I trust none of them will go for the traditional 'song.' It is seldom, indeed, in ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... reprehensible in graphic as in musical art. There is often no literary meaning whatever in some of the best examples of both. Harmony, tone, color and technique pure and simple are the full compass of the intention. What this may suggest to the individual he is welcome to, but the glib dictum of certain preachers on art as to hidden intentions would indicate that they had effected an agreement, with the full confidence of the silent partner to exploit him. Beware of the gilt edged footnote, or the art that depends upon it. A writer of ordinary imagination ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... first Robert Turold reverted to the Norman spelling when he settled in Suffolk. Turrald is the corrupted form, doubtless due to early Saxon difficulties with Norman names. The Saxons were never very glib at Norman-French, and there was no standardized spelling of family names at ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... on ahead, knew nothing of the love scenes just behind them. They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual directness, went ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give accosting welcome ere it comes, And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts To every ticklish reader! set them down For sluttish spoils of opportunity ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... talked in the same large ways about policy, and the duties and responsibilities of the rich. They were swayed by the same ethic that dominated their husbands—the ethic of their class; and they uttered glib phrases that their ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... ugly, idle, mischievous fellow, son of the Duc de Rohan, who had given him the title I have just named. He had served in one campaign very indolently, and then quitted the army, under pretence of ill-health, to serve no more. Glib in speech, and with the manners of the great world, he was full of caprices and fancies; although a great gambler and spendthrift, he was miserly, and cared only for himself. He had been enamoured of Florence, an actress, whom M. d'Orleans had for a long time kept, and by ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... diffrent. He war down in de lower kentry wen de war war ober. He war mighty smart, an' had a good head-piece, an' a orful glib tongue. He set up store an' sole whisky, an' made a lot ob money. Den he wanted ter go to de legislatur. Now what should he do but make out he'd got 'ligion, an' war called to preach. He had no more 'ligion dan my ole dorg. But he had money an' built a meetin' house, whar he could hole meeting, ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are 'terribly at ease in Zion.' They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib ignorant way of saying, 'Why should we read what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? We can read the plays and the poems. That is enough.' But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... shall I vnderstand you? Poet. I will vnboult to you. You see how all Conditions, how all Mindes, As well of glib and slipp'ry Creatures, as Of Graue and austere qualitie, tender downe Their seruices to Lord Timon: his large Fortune, Vpon his good and gracious Nature hanging, Subdues and properties to his loue and tendance ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... greeting in the faces of flowers, Blowest in the firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source and secret ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... bells chiming full many a clime in, Tolling sublime in cathedral shrine; While at a glib rate brass tongues would vibrate;— But all their music spoke naught like thine. For memory dwelling on each proud swelling Of thy belfry knelling its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon sound far more grand on The pleasant waters of the ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... equivalents for terms which were used for a century or two past in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and those ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... we pointed silently to their feet of clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation's religion is its life, and as such white ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... by heart had a black horse, and he who knew all about the corporation laws received a milk-white steed. Then they rubbed the corners of their mouths with fish-oil, so that they might become very smooth and glib. All the servants stood below in the courtyard, and looked on while they mounted their horses; and just by chance the third son came up. For the proprietor had really three sons, though nobody counted the third with his brothers, because he was not so learned as they, and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens then—and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... he asked, with biting scorn. "Tell the Duke and Lord Cheisford where I found them! Let us hear your glib young tongue telling the truth ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I have said, tend to complicate the Herzegovinian-Montenegrin question, private machinations have recently been the most successful, and consequently the most injurious to order and the general weal. The energy of some of the foreign employes has been truly astounding, while their glib tongues and manoeuvring minds have worked metamorphoses worthy of Robin or the Wizard of the North. This distortion of facts was somewhat naively described by a French ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... us at every step; we are to follow Christ's example. Be humble, it is said, as Christ was humble. Theology indeed would prescribe annihilation rather than humiliation. Man in presence of the Infinite is absolutely nothing. Science, according to a glib commonplace of popular writers, agrees with theology in prescribing humility. But that very ambiguous word has a totally different meaning in the two cases. Science bids us recognize the inevitable limitation of our powers, and the feebleness of any individual as compared ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... to say for himself. Probably it would have struck his critics as little short of profane to make the comparison, otherwise there is a great example that might have stood him and all men not giants and glib of tongue in good stead. It is written of an apostle, and he not the least of the apostles, that he might have been termed in bodily presence mean, and in speech contemptible. But boys and girls are not wont to take up such examples and ponder their ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... kept a man's tongue oiled without any expense; and, as that useful member ought never to grow rusty or creak in turning on its hinges in the case of a practitioner of the law, in whom it should be always glib and easy, he lost few opportunities of improving himself by the utterance of handsome speeches and eulogistic expressions. And this had passed into such a habit with him, that, if he could not be correctly said to have his tongue at ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... have gone beyond them, we have not gone very far, we have not come to perfect knowledge. There is still something around us and within that baffles and surprises us. Events happen which are as mysterious after our glib explanations as they were before. Changes for good or ill take place in the heart of man for which his intellect gives no reason. There is the daily miracle of the human will, the power of free choice, ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... bound to look at them), even when they are fallen phantasmal, and to make persons of them again, we will give this Piece; sorry that it is the last we have of that fine hand. How welcome, in the murky puddle of Dryasdust, is any glimpse by a lively glib Wilhelmina, which we can discern to be human! Hear what Wilhelmina says (in a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... swallow up my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public! 'Tis the manner of thy craft,—yet see!"—and with a dexterous movement of his arm he threw ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... on this occasion. With his disappearance from the pulpit, and his subsequent retreat round by the back of the churchyard into the privacy of his own garden, the tongues of the gossips, restrained as long as their minister was likely to be within earshot, broke loose and began to wag with glib rapidity. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... The money-making lot flourish to some extent in Kimberley, but most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle. There is also a curious ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... higher and higher, but there was no indication that Barouche's hopes were sure of fulfilment. His face became paler as the day wore on, and his hands freer with those of his late constituents. Yet he noticed that Carnac was still glib with his tongue and freer with his hands. Carnac seemed everywhere, on every corner, in every street, at every polling booth; he laid his trowel against every brick in the wall. Carnac was not as confident as he seemed, but he was nearing the end of the trail; and his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... so glib as Lon. He looked nervous. He'd come expecting a little glass blowing and here was something strange. He didn't seem to be able to tell her all about himself. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... and most spotless integrity act when they wish to make themselves agreeable to their constituents, and have some end to gain of the country folks. How is it that we allow ourselves not to be deceived, but to be ingratiated so readily by a glib tongue, a ready laugh, and a frank manner? We know, for the most part, that it is false coin, and we take it: we know that it is flattery, which it costs nothing to distribute to every body, and ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sol.' 'So you have,' said he. 'Now let me try. Blow, Joe, blow!' Sam, he found Re and La. And in the course of two months we got so we could play Old Hundred. I don't pretend to say we could do it as glib as you run over the ivory, ma'am; but it was Old Hundred, and no mistake. And we played Yankee Doodle, first rate. We called our instrument the Harmolinks; and we enjoyed it all the more because it was our own invention. I tell you what, ma'am, there's music hid away in everything, only we don't ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... informs us that the Lord God wrought for Adam and his wife robes of honor from the cast-off skin of the serpent. We learn elsewhere that Nimrod came into possession of Adam's coat through Ham, who stole it from Noah while in the Ark. The glib tongue of tradition also tells how Esau slew Nimrod and appropriated the garment, and wore it for luck when hunting; but that on the day when he went to seek venison at the request of his dying parent, in his hurry he forgot the embroidered robe of Adam, and had bad ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... some confident an' cl'ar; 'somebody downs Burke; that's dead certain. Burke don't put that hole in the middle of his back himse'f; no matter how much he reckons it improves him. Then, when it's someone else who is it? Now,' goes on Texas, as glib as wolves, 'yere's how I argues: You-all don't do it; Peets don't do it; Boggs don't do it; thar's not one of us who does it. An' thar you be plumb down to Pinon Bill. In the very nacher of the deal, when no one else does it an' it's done, Pinon Bill's got to do it. I ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... well ask!" cried Jurgen. He unfolded the cantrap which had been given him by the Master Philologist, and which Jurgen had treasured against the time when more was needed than a glib tongue. "O most unrighteous judges," says Jurgen, sternly, "now hear and tremble! 'At the death of Adrian the Fifth, Pedro Juliani, who should be named John the Twentieth, was through an error in the reckoning elevated to the papal chair as John ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... lady of Furness," said the merry taunter, with many interruptions from laughter and want of breath; "thy heels are as glib as thy tongue: for which—oh, oh! I am breathed—blown—dispossessed of my birthright, free quaffing o' the air. Ha, ha! I cannot laugh. Oh! what a mouth didst thou make at old blacksleeves. Gaping so, I wonder he mistook not thy muzzle for one of the vents into his old quarters. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... in him, and drew very sound conclusions from them: but he could not put them into words. He knew that he was right, but he could not make a speech about it. Better that, than be—as too many are—ready to make glib speeches, which they only half believe themselves; ready to deceive themselves with subtle arguments and high-flown oratory, till they can give the most satisfactory reasons for doing the most unsatisfactory and unreasonable things. No, the good soldier was no orator: but he ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... and the third, nine: and some fiue: If this proue true, they'l pay for't. By mine Honor Ile gell'd em all: fourteene they shall not see To bring false generations: they are co-heyres, And I had rather glib my selfe, then they ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... propos; so much so that it frightens me a little. Valerie has, you see, made a mess of it. She has, you see, spoiled her life, in that aspect of it. To mend it now, so completely, to start fresh at—how old is she?—at forty-six, it's just a little glib. Somehow one doesn't get off so easily as that. One can't start so happily at forty-six. Perhaps one is wiser not ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a new thought. Just why had he chosen St. Martin's? Was it only a coincidence? Or had he, subconsciously at least, picked this particular world? He had always considered himself the unwilling subject of glib persuaders ... but mightn't some inner compulsion of his own have put the monkey on ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... understand me. I turned and twisted my question around and about, trying to strike that man's average, but failed. He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived, faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way: "Can man ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... vocation. To renounce pleasure and discipline the mind; to live a life of self-denial, submitting himself humbly to the inspiration of the great masters. . . . To be serene, like this old man; to avoid that facile, glib, composite note—those monkey-tricks of cleverness. . ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this you that I hear? Why you are warmer in your denunciation of this little wisp of a woman than you ever were of fat old Madame Gorgon, with her prodigious paste diamonds. Really, you take it too hard. And you, too, who used to skate so nimbly over the glib surface of society, and cut such coquettish figures of eight upon the characters of your friends. You must excuse me, but it seems to me odd that Miss Minerva Tattle, who used to treat serious things so lightly, should ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... of a fight for independence, were heard throughout Norway. Meetings were held more or less secretly, and at each of them was some one with well-filled pockets and glib tongue, to enlarge on the country's wrongs, and promise assistance from an outside irresistible power as soon as they showed that they meant to strike for freedom. No one openly named the power. ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... one reason for suspecting him. He is too glib with his Princeton. Himmel! Did you ever hear a man talk so fast and so much and use such words? I can speak as good English as any man my age, but there were words, dozens of them, that I had never ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... office stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery. He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue. W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of his friend, "He radiates talk. He will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, meta-physics, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... Smith will seize and hold the following named vessels, viz.: Schooners "Trifle," "Frances E. Burgess," "Despatch," "Washington," and "Glib," wherever he may find them, and will convey them to the nearest place ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it becoming more and ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... necessary to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring money and character: a glib tongue, a few high professions of public principle, and a few weeks' canvassing, were found to serve the turn more than ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Cheng's wife, a Miss Wang, and has now been married for the last two years. This Mr. Lien has lately obtained by purchase the rank of sub-prefect. He too takes little pleasure in books, but as far as worldly affairs go, he is so versatile and glib of tongue, that he has recently taken up his quarters with his uncle Mr. Cheng, to whom he gives a helping hand in the management of domestic matters. Who would have thought it, however, ever since his marriage with his worthy wife, not a single person, whether ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... early years of the republic they seem honestly to have dignified their submission as "respect for the popular verdict." They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that "the voice of the people is the voice of God." And this hideous blasphemy was as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated at the polls year after year as upon those of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... observer, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. The job was an offensive patrol—that is to say, we were to hunt trouble around a given area behind the Boche lines. A great deal of the credit for our "mastery of the air"—that glib phrase of the question-asking politician—during the Somme Push of 1916, belongs to those who organised and those who led these fighting expeditions over enemy country. Thanks to them, our aircraft were able to carry out reconnaissance, artillery ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... her, but she never turned her head. He stood glowering, grinding his teeth together, his glib tongue finding for once no way to better his sorry case. He was the picture of trickery rewarded; I could not repress a grin at him. Marking which, he burst out at me, vehemently, yet in a low tone, for Mayenne ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... interested in all its activities, and prepared to be proud of its achievements, but she possessed none of the instincts of a wire-puller. So long as the class offices were creditably filled she cared not who held them, and comparing her ignorance of parliamentary procedure with the glib self-confidence of Jean, Eleanor and their friends, she even felt grateful to them for rescuing the class from the pitfalls ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... I saw made an impression on me and I can't forget them. When I hear my glib young cousin who sits and surveys life from the shelter of his father's income—when I hear him ...
— The Pot Boiler • Upton Sinclair
... to him, and with glib and easy profession said, "I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest." This seemed all that could have been asked. No man could do more. Yet Jesus discouraged this ardent scribe. He saw that he did not know what he was saying, that ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... I replied, glib enough now. "It was Admiral Napier who gave me my nomination the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... train that would bring him to Chicago at about one o'clock. The other boys, in little groups, or in pairs, were smoking and talking. Tyler wanted to join them, but he did not. They seemed so sufficient unto themselves, with their plans, and their glib knowledge of places, and amusements, and girls. On the train they all bought sweets from the train butcher—chocolate maraschinos, and nut bars, and molasses kisses—and ate them as greedily as children, until their hunger for ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... separated their two oddly diverse lives—the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him. He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... strikes us in connection with this glib project is the enormous difficulty of carrying it into execution. It is easy, we all know, to call spirits from the vasty deep, but exceedingly difficult to induce them to obey the summons. It is easy, and to ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... a reply, but none came. Her easy assurance staggered him; he could hardly believe that this self-composed, glib-spoken young woman had been at one time his diffident, shy little love. The unhappy man found it very hard to reconcile the two. "Why don't you speak?" she asked impatiently, facing him in a defiant manner; and ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... never have believed. Mr. Temple, a prudent and experienced Minister, is absent, unfortunately, from his post, and his place is filled by Lord Napier, a worthy man, and an active, above all, an active penman, a glib writer if not a great; writing, not quite, but very nearly as well as the captains and admirals themselves. We find this gentleman, like them, ardently hoping that revolt may prosper, and doing his endeavour to realize his desire; dealing out every sort of suggestion and recommendation, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... on, "ought to bring great happiness, great position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... are given a piece of Greek Testament to translate, for mercy's sake do not be too glib. Dinna translate a thing until you are sure it is there. They have an unholy habit of leaving out a couple of verses some place in the middle, and you're just the one to tumble head-first into the lacuna. ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the worse for its travels into beggardom. And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he had drawn upon: at our first encounter, he was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical "Queen Mab," and "Keats—John Keats, sir." And I have often wondered how he came by these acquirements, just as I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of coins was her most favorable accompaniment; and her giving of self was a sort of disrobing formality. The men who pursued her were forward ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... degradation the sweetness of that delicacy descends. It haunts the drunkard's dreams, and breathes a breath of purity into the bosom of the abandoned. That is the power of a noble innocence, a respect for our fellow creatures—glib phrases, but how little understood and acted on! With my father it was quite natural.... He was a hot hater, though, I can tell you. He hated hypocrisy, he hated lying, and he hated presumption and pretentiousness. He loved sincerity, truth, and modesty. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... even of that. But in eighty-five cases out of a hundred none of us have any knowledge of the history of painting or any intelligent idea of why Velasquez is regarded as a master; yet we acquire a glib familiarity with the names of half a dozen cubists or futurists, and bandy them about much as my office boy does the names of his favorite pugilists ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... beating of the heart when Miss Ashurst called upon her. Edna was always such a conscientious child about her lessons that Miss Ashurst rather overlooked the fact that upon this occasion she was not quite as glib as usual, and she took her seat with a feeling of great relief, determining that she would not ...
— A Dear Little Girl at School • Amy E. Blanchard
... the ketch's native rig, and to the glib Tripolitanese of the Sicilian pilot, no suspicion was excited in the Philadelphia's watch by the answer to their hail that she had lost her anchors in a gale and would like to run a line to the war-ship and to ride by it through the night. So completely were the Tripolitans deceived ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by plunging ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... staring at the glib speaker with astounded eyes. "Do you suppose a woman killed your brother?" ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... the veil away from his private affairs. What would one give to know the thoughts in that little brown head, on its first look at life! Whatever the reason, he plainly concluded not to take the risk that day, for he disappeared again behind a door that no reporter, however glib or plausible, could pass. Sometimes he vanished with a suddenness that was not natural. Did his heart fail him, or, perchance, his footing give way? For whether he clung to the walls, or made stepping-stones of his brothers and sisters (as do many of his betters, or at least his biggers), who can ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... himself like a man of the world and a gentleman, and Coke was convinced that he was a superior man of the world and a superior gentleman, but that he simply had not had words to express his position at the proper time. Coleman was glib. Therefore, Coke had been the victim of an attitude as well as of a benefaction. And so ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... the bumble-bee; now, however, he went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in the light of ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... is not Jacques acting Penelope?' said Madame de Bourke, unable to help smiling at her little daughter's glib mythology, while going to the rescue of the embroidery silks, in which her youngest ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the pulpy bodies of the peaches they had on their plates. Luziano Salustri lay back at ease in his chair, his classic head reclining on the velvet cushions, and recited in low and measured tones one of his own poems, caring little or nothing whether his neighbors attended to him or not. The glib tongue of the Marchese Gualdro ran on smoothly and incessantly, though he frequently lost the thread of his anecdotes and became involved in a maze of contradictory assertions. The rather large nose of the Chevalier Mancini reddened visibly ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... bear, "but that was well turned. Now, sir, as you are getting a little glib, will you go still further and tell us ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... have raised such a row about the Guttenchild crowd putting over a big steal on the public that the party leaders are scared stiff. I couldn't pick up a newspaper anywhere without seeing your name in the headlines. It was fierce." Selfridge had found his glib ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... you do not love," impetuously returned the other with glib, persistent vehemence. "I would marry the Sheik, I would prize his flocks, his riches; but I love—I ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... agreeable cheer, a man about thirty years of age came in, he said, to make our acquaintance. He was quite a sharp-looking fellow, with small, keen black eyes, a "glib" tongue, and told us that he was an out-and-out rebel, proud to meet us and ready to oblige. Steve forthwith proposed, as evidence of his good-will, an exchange of headgear. He dilated eloquently on the historic value of his own cap, and, while it did not ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... attempted; "roughs," who had come in late, occasionally tried to bully those who looked "soft" out of their ground. Being quite a youngster, I was, naturally, the kind of game these gentry were seeking. However, I sought and obtained help among my Kaffrarian friends, so when two glib tongued scoundrels endeavored to claim my burrow on the score of prior occupation, they were soon hunted off. Messrs. Tom Barry and George Ward were entrusted by the Landdrost with the survey. Ward, who had been in the Austrian Army, was an exceedingly handsome man. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... he turned to Francesca, and told her at a great rate, for in Italian he was glib, to go back to the Signora in the top garden and tell her he had encountered his old friend the Signora Arbuthnot, and was going for a walk with her and would ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... hundred dollars. It is no more than just that the laborer should have a share—he only asks a beggarly share—of the prosperity which he has helped to build up." This was specious and taking. Then there came down from the great city a glib person disguised as The Workingman's Friend,—no workingman himself, mind you, but a ghoul that lives upon subscriptions and sucks the senses out of innocent human beings,—who managed to set the place by the ears. The result of all which was that one May ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... be talking to a Sea-changeling. They were glib and seductive and always searching for ways to twist your thoughts. But being Rastignac, he had to talk. Moreover, it was so difficult to find anybody who would listen to his ideas that he ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... to his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ignorance, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... superior information concerning these things, because I am at their mercy. If I want to know where I am I must find the definitive sign. This accounts for my glib use of the word mucilage, as well as the titles ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... have swallowed up Aunt Margaret's money; it might very well have left her defenceless. Her stepmother seemed familiar with its powers, and able to evoke them at will; and though she did not trust her, there was something in her glib utterance that struck fear into the girl's heart. She did not answer, and Mrs. Rainham ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... on my knees I am either stupid; feeling nothing at all, or else my head is full of what I was doing before I began to pray, or what I am going to do as soon as I get through. I do not believe anybody else in the world is like me in this respect. Then when I feel differently, and can make a nice, glib prayer, with floods of tears running down my cheeks, I get all puffed up, and think how much pleased God must be to see me so fervent in spirit. I go down-stairs in this frame, and begin to scold Susan for misplacing my music, ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... I then requested my companions to give a true account of what they had seen. The wonderful things lost nothing in the telling, the climax always being that they had finished the whole world, and had turned only when there was no more land. One glib old gentleman asked, "Then you reached Ma Robert (Mrs. L.)?" They were obliged to confess that she lived a little beyond the world. The presents were received with expressions of great satisfaction and delight; and on Sunday, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... to think lecturing a very simple occupation, requiring only a glib tongue, and a good pair of lungs. Several years ago, I received a letter from a young man in which he wrote: "I heard you lecture last week. I would like to become a lecturer myself. I have no experience ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... 'Times' that morning on the subject of the Pontresina accident. It contained only a few of the stock newspaper platitudes of regret at the loss of a distinguished and rising young light of science—the ordinary glib commonplaces of obituary notices which a practised journalist knows so well how to adapt almost mechanically to the passing event of the moment; but they seemed to afford the shattered old country grocer an amount of consolation and solemn relief ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... 497; be hoarse with talking. Adj. loquacious, talkative, garrulous, linguacious^, multiloquous^; largiloquent^; chattering &c v.; chatty &c (sociable) 892; declamatory &c 582; open-mouthed. fluent, voluble, glib, flippant; long tongued, long winded &c (diffuse) 573. Adv. trippingly on the tongue; glibly &c adj.; off the reel. Phr. the tongue running fast, the tongue running loose, the tongue running on wheels; all talk and no cider; foul whisperings are abroad [Macbeth]; what a spendthrift ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... this year I debated twelve days, at Burksville, with Presiding Elder Frogge. He was the great champion of Methodism in Southern Kentucky. He had had a great many debates, and, while he was very ready and glib in his line of debating, I soon discovered that his scholarship and reading were both very limited, exceedingly so; and I intentionally widened the range of controversy more than was my wont, to see what he would ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... Carton drank and slept till ten o'clock, and then walked to the chambers of Mr. Stryver. Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous, and a bold, and was fast shouldering his way to a lucrative practice; but it had been noted that he had not the striking and necessary faculty of extracting evidence from a heap ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... are not more than the glib commonplaces of a man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the philosophy ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... farther, then. I have told them that I will be their backer at need; I made the deal wi' them direct and ye have nowt to do with it. You are ill to please, young man! You come here with a very singular story, and nowt to back it but a glib tongue and your smooth, innocent-like young face—and you go back hame with a heaped gowpen of gold, and mair in the kist ahint of that. I think ye do ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... interest among the villagers. They came about us, asking who we were and whither we were going. They were greatly excited when they learned that we were escorting deserters and recaptured English prisoners. The real deserters told a glib story of the furious fight they had had with the villains (pointing to the unhappy officer and his men). The villagers threw up their hands with shrill exclamations at this moving recital, and, going up to the cart, gazen open-mouthed and not without a secret ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... the boys before me begun to titter and snicker at anybody's havin' the power, and I sez, eyein' 'em sternly, "Do you know what you're laughin' at, young men? You talk about it real glib, but have you any idee of the greatness and overwhelmin' might of the Force you're speakin' of? That Power wuz at Pentecost in cloven tongues of flame, and strange voices and words that no man could utter. Saul laughed at the Power but it struck him blind in the street, and ketched ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... in Guardis, of any country, but France in one respect is better off, in possessing no less than eleven fine paintings of public ceremonials. Guardi may be considered the originator of small sketches, and perhaps the precursor of those glib little views which are handed about the Piazza at the present day. His drawings are fairly numerous, and are remarkably delicate and incisive in touch. A large collection which he left to his son is now in the Museo Correr. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... story pretty glib by this time; I had reeled it off with increasing particulars to the Westchester Park station-master, and the head man at the stables, and General Filbert, and I was so letter-perfect that I had a vision of the whole thing, especially of my talking with the general ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... admirable expressions of the individualism of their time. And just as historical facts require readjustment by posterity, so our critical estimate of intellectual and aesthetic evolution requires strict revision. We must not accept the glib statement of the historian, especially of the contemporary historian, that at certain periods intellectual activity and artistic expression were decaying or did not exist. If a convention in one field of intellectual activity ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... mutual understanding. They clear up the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of terms, they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity. The common way of speech and thought which the old system of logic has simply systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact. All propositions are approximations to an elusive truth, and we employ them as the mathematician studies the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... language you please, at will. Do you see? You at once have the same old play in a new tongue. And you can keep changing it from language to language, until your private theatrical pupils have become glib and at home in the speech of all nations. Zum Beispiel, suppose we wish to adjust the play to the French tongue. First, we give Mrs. Blumenthal and Gretchen French names. Next, we knock the German Meisterschaft sentences out of the first scene, and replace them with sentences ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I was careful never to win from him. He fell into the way of dropping around at my quarters. Like most of his set, the Major was a heavy drinker. When his face would become very hushed and his tongue very glib, I would try to draw things out of him, but I never could get anything worth while. The slightest suspicious question made him close up as ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... which Mr. Bonteen used to prove that a man who has gained credit as a legislator should in process of time become a member of the executive, is trite and common, and was not used by Mr. Bonteen with any special force. Mr. Bonteen was glib of tongue and possessed that familiarity with the place which poor Phineas had lacked so sorely. There was one moment, however, which was terrible to Phineas. As soon as Mr. Bonteen had shown the purpose for ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... in longhand to his manager's dictation, and was strengthened in the conviction that Penton had stolen that parcel of silver. Usually the manager composed hesitatingly, especially when addressing head office, but now he was glib, and seemed familiar with his subject. He even appeared to be in suppressed good humor ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... a familiar story, although the depth of its significance is beyond the compass of any living human intelligence. It is easy to say in a glib sentence that the amount of wealth produced every few years nowadays is equal to all the accumulated wealth of all the centuries down to the early part of the nineteenth; but the social meaning of so great a change baffles all ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... all about that," said Nancy in a glib voice. "I was at a first-rate school myself for years. Weren't we kept strict, just! My word! we couldn't call our noses our own. The only language was parlez-vous. But it was a select school—very; and now that I have left, I like to feel that ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... marriage of the scheming Yankee, James Early, into the then wealthy and powerful family of Lavillotte, old-timers of Louisiana soil, was considered the opposite of an honor by them, with the exception of the young girl, educated in the north, who had been fascinated by his fine looks and glib tongue. Therefore, when Joyce was born, an edict was issued by its leading members—two patriarchal uncles who held control of the property—that she should be cut off from her maternal rights in the family estate unless allowed to take the family name. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... his feet and towered over her, his Jotun-frame appearing to swell with irritation. "Do you not know how provoking your words are, that you are so glib of tongue?" he thundered. "Tell shortly what you think of their case; can they last ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... of this Executive Council," Cross intervened. "You're a bit too glib with your tongue ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that they, too, may have a share in that abundance which is the common birthright of all. Do the political bully, the grafter, the tout, know the meaning of love? No; but they can be taught. Oh, not by the hypocritical millionaire pietists who prate their glib platitudes to their Sunday Bible classes, and return to their luxurious homes to order the slaughter of starving women and babes! They, like their poor victims, are deep under the spell of that mesmerism which tells them that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... ideas of his patrons as to teach Cobbett's grammar at school, he always recommended it to me as the one by which alone I could learn to write good English. The learning of anything, especially of arithmetic and grammar, by the glib repetition of rules was a system that he held in contempt. With the public, ability to recite the rules of such subjects as those went farther than any actual demonstration of the power to cipher ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... the street a very red-faced, bulbous-nosed and ancient ruin with a patriarchal white beard was preparing to give phrenological readings. I had seen him earlier in the day, and had been amused at his impressive glib patter. Now, however, he had become foolishly drunk. He mounted the same boxes that had served as the executive desk, and invited custom. After a moment's hesitation a burly, red-faced miner shouldered his way through the group and sat down on the edge ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... groping shuffle of cautious feet, broken by the hollow echo of the guide's voice reciting his sing-song jargon of what he supposed to be English. He held a lantern that revealed a long alleyway of crumbling, mud-colored stone. Nina tried to make out something of his glib discourse, but ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... its own history Comfortable reassurance that one was still his client Dumb grief which has never learned to moan Gilt-edged orthodoxy Glib assurances that naive souls make so easily to others He have all the pleasure, I have all the work He was asleep, for he knew not remorse In work alone man rests from grief Kind of sporting energy, a defiant ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... infinite possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... movies, where Amory was fascinated by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... under such conditions shall be talkative, witty, full of neat swift caricaturing, improvised, unselfconscious; at its worst, glib. Boisterous action often, passionate strain almost never. In Echegaray there are hecatombs, half the characters habitually go insane in the last act; tremendous barking but no bite of real intensity. Benavente has recaptured some of Lope de Vega's marvellous quality ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... call for cold-blooded murder in reprisal. Yet the man was acting very curiously. Much of the time he scarcely appeared to hear what Miss Brewster was saying to him. Moreover, he had lied. Lidgerwood recalled his glib explanation at the meeting beside the displaced rail. Flemister claimed to have had the news of the disaster by 'phone: where had he been when the 'phone message found him? Not at his mine, Lidgerwood decided, since he could not have walked from the Wire-Silver ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery. He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue. W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of his friend, "He radiates talk. He will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, meta-physics, medicine, mangold-wurzel, with ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... which we hear so much is certainly not accounted for when you have called it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such glib explanation. When you see how business controls politics, it certainly is not very illuminating to call the successful business men of a nation criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate the law. May not this constant dodging or hurdling of statutes ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... tale the story-teller is advised not to commit it to memory. Such a method is apt to produce a wooden or glib manner of presentation. It is better for her to read the story over and over again until its plot, imagery, style, and vocabulary become her own, and then to retell it, as Miss Bryant says, "simply, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... truly when she said that she was "different." Her cavalier dealings with the situation, the glib way she spoke of divorce, the insult she flung at the respectable form of Huxtable, Vidler and Huxtable by suggesting that Arthur should consult "a really good lawyer in London," all showed how far she had travelled from the ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... satisfy them," returned Robert Turold. "The first Robert Turold reverted to the Norman spelling when he settled in Suffolk. Turrald is the corrupted form, doubtless due to early Saxon difficulties with Norman names. The Saxons were never very glib at Norman-French, and there was no standardized spelling of family names at ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... that glib-tongu'd Aiken, My very heart and soul are quakin', To think how we stood sweatin', shakin', An' pish'd wi' dread, While he, wi' hingin' lips and snakin', [sneering] ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... after reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecticism—and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... greater gift o' speech than you can make pretence to," said the woman abruptly. "I often wonder that of two twin-brothers one should be so glib and t'other so mum-chance." ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... these, a street of shops; the cheese-monger's very small, the chemist's very smart, the pastry-cook's very dowdy, and the green-grocer's very dark, I was still looking out at the view thus presented, when I was suddenly apostrophized by a glib, ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... all his expense. Alongside the street a very red-faced, bulbous-nosed and ancient ruin with a patriarchal white beard was preparing to give phrenological readings. I had seen him earlier in the day, and had been amused at his impressive glib patter. Now, however, he had become foolishly drunk. He mounted the same boxes that had served as the executive desk, and invited custom. After a moment's hesitation a burly, red-faced miner shouldered his way through ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... conversation with him," continued the earl, "in the book-room, and I think I have convinced him that it is for your mutual happiness"—he paused, for he couldn't condescend to tell a lie; but in his glib, speechifying manner, he was nearly falling into one—"mutual happiness" was such an appropriate prudential phrase that he could not resist the temptation; but he corrected himself—"at least, I think I have convinced him that it is impossible that he should any longer ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... and I've had reason to repent of my opinion ever since. Oh, she showed the cloven foot to-night! 'Sit down,' she says; 'I've nothing to read, and I hate work; let's have a little chat.' She's got a glib tongue of her own. All I could do was to say a word now and then to keep her going. She talked and talked till it was time to light the lamp. She was particular in telling me to put the shade over it. We were half in the dark, and half in ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... since those days," Rochester declared. "You have acquired the knack of glib speech. You have become a past master in the arts which go to the ensnaring of over-imaginative women. You have mixed with quack spiritualists and self-styled professors of what they term occultism. Go and practise your arts where you will, but remember what I have told you. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... less excusable form of the credit system is buying household goods on the instalment plan. The poor are often teased into this by glib agents. An old woman, whose income was not sufficient to keep her alive, contracted to buy a clock on the instalment plan for $8.00 because she needed one when she {114} occasionally had a day's job of cleaning. ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... half-educated, characteristic and peril of our time. They, indeed, purchase and purchase largely. Heaven forbid that I should not recognize the few among them whose bent of brain and of conscience justifies their fervour; to such—the ten in ten thousand—be all aid and brotherly solace! But the glib many, the perky mispronouncers of titles and of authors' names, the twanging murderers of rhythm, the maulers of the uncut edge at sixpence extra, the ready-reckoners of bibliopolic discount—am I to see in these a witness of my hope for the century ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... constructions which children are able to work out for themselves, it is only a superficial advantage, and one gained at the expense of the child's growth in power to think and act independently. It is an advantage closely akin to the parrotlike recitation of the pupil who catches a few glib phrases and gives them back without thought, as compared with the recitation of the pupil who thinks and expresses his thoughts in ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... that anything she said would be taken down by myself and used in evidence against her," was the glib response. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... quality. There is water of course, and there is jelly or gelatine, but these are not hard, they are not stones as glass seems to be. The child will be pleased too to see a crystal or a bit of mica, but the main thing is that we should not imagine we have disposed of the wonder by a mere name with a glib, "Oh, that's just because it's transparent," but that we realise, and reinforce and deepen the child's sense of wonderfulness. So teacher and child enter ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... getting glib again," said Boylan. Peter's reserve had interposed. His absence had something to do with her, but he could not remember. "Where is she?" had got away from him as he crossed the border back into the racking physical domain. ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... their method. What could be better than to see sons growing up, good Catholics in all external observances, devoted to the order of society and Mother Church, and at the same time showy Latinists, furnished with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the construction of an epigram or compliment? If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow, and Jesuit morality of base alloy, the reply, like that of an Italian draper selling palpable shoddy for broadcloth, came easily and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... man," said Marcus, as the shepherd concluded his glib recital. "Couldst thou identify these knaves, if once they ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... art of poetry; according to which he judged, approved, and blamed, without flattery or detraction. If he did not always commend the compositions of others, it was not ill-nature, (which was not in his temper,) but strict justice, that would not let him call a few flowers set in ranks, a glib measure, and so many couplets, by the name of poetry: he was of Ben Jonson's ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... lady took me aside, and began saying so much in praise of you; and when she once got me on that subject, I was ready and glib enough, I warrant you. But somehow, though I then found it so much easier to speak, I find it more difficult to recollect exactly what I said. Is not that strange? And then she said that my happiness would excite so much ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... his habits no worse than a whole lot of others he knows, An' he don't seem to care what his neighbors may say, as heedlessly forward he goes. He don't stop to think if it's wrong or it's right; with his speech he is careless or glib, Till the minute the nurse lets him into the room to see what's asleep ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... his craft nowadays, not because he has taste for literature, but because he has an incurable faculty for scribbling. He has no culture, and he soon loses the power of taking pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... siller, to seek more for you. Weel, they need seek no farther, then. I have told them that I will be their backer at need; I made the deal wi' them direct and ye have nowt to do with it. You are ill to please, young man! You come here with a very singular story, and nowt to back it but a glib tongue and your smooth, innocent-like young face—and you go back hame with a heaped gowpen of gold, and mair in the kist ahint of that. I think ye do ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... It isn't that we are simply backward in these things, we are antagonistic. The British mind has never really tolerated electricity; at least, not that sort of electricity that runs through wires. Too slippery and glib for it. Associates it with Italians and fluency generally, with Volta, Galvani, Marconi and so on. The proper British electricity is that high-grade useless long-sparking stuff you get by turning round ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Therefore he went to his wounded rival, tended and encouraged him, and in the end brought him to the contest in a litter, thereby gravely jeopardising his own chance of success. Richard, never at any time a glib jingler of rhymes, was in sorry case, for now that he had most need of his wits, his passion instead of sharpening them seemed to have removed them utterly. If he had but known it, he had a good friend in Queen Eleanor, who was determined that he should win, and she fancied that she had ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... officer turned to his sergeant with a triumphant expression. "Just what I thought. Anybody that can't give a better account of himself than that had better be locked up. Spies—aha! Another of you came ashore a while ago—a glib-tongued, story-telling gentleman who fooled us into letting him off, but we've got you safe and sound and here you'll stay! Sergeant, arrest ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... easily, plucked off the boughs, and trimmed it at his pleasure. In the meantime his mare pissed to ease her belly, but it was in such abundance that it did overflow the country seven leagues, and all the piss of that urinal flood ran glib away towards the ford of Vede, wherewith the water was so swollen that all the forces the enemy had there were with great horror drowned, except some who had taken the way on the left hand towards the hills. Gargantua, being come to the place of the wood of Vede, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... name, and all the things that a crowd says when they've got hold of a feller that they see they can plague. Well, some things they said WAS funny,—yes, and mighty witty too, I ain't denying that,—but all the same it warn't fair nor brave, all them people pitching on one, and they so glib and sharp, and him without any gift of talk to answer back with. But, good land! what did he want to sass back for? You see, it couldn't do him no good, and it was just nuts for them. They HAD him, you know. But that was his way. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to howl, but he certainly could not talk, and it was hard for him to follow such a glib speaker as the president. However, the fact remained that he had distinguished himself, and brought honour to the Fifth Form in general by taking seven wickets; and for this reason his comrades would have ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... disreputable, roving life for a period of ten years. At the end of which time he met a plaintive little Englishwoman, just out from Home, and she, knowing nothing whatever of Rivers, but being taken with his glib tongue and ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... must be suppressed at all hazards," declared the monk. "It is the wish of the Emperor," he added, a glib lie always ready upon his tongue. "Further, I need not add that if this affair be conducted in secrecy and scandal in the Imperial House avoided, His Majesty will certainly see that you are adequately rewarded. I can promise ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... believed. The state is justified in insisting that children shall be educated, but it is not justified in forcing their education to proceed on a uniform plan and to be directed to the production of a dead level of glib uniformity. Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... in a recital glib on his lips, regained the dominance of manner which the attitude of his subordinates had momentarily imperiled. Increased composure brought with it a certain hauteur, and he paused again—perhaps to gratify the actor's instinct in him rather than observe the effect of his words. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... should do in connection with a first outbreak, such as the Silesian workers' revolt, is not to play the schoolmaster to this event, but to study its peculiar character. For this a certain amount of scientific insight and some goodwill is necessary, whereas for the other operation a glib phraseology, saturated in ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... rattled on she grew more and more glib; she was what they call whopper-jawed, and spoke a language almost purely consonantal, cutting and clipping her words with a rapid play of her whopper-jaw till there was nothing but the bare bones left of them. Statira was ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... honest men and true; and you will be spared this everlasting palaver. Then we will have some rules, or by-laws, or something, for the workmen. Talk to Mr. Winston about it. He would make a capital speaker, with his glib tongue." ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... over the Muskingum River to Marietta. The first Methodist family I stopped with there, the lady was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but a thorough Universalist. She was a thin-faced, Roman-nosed, loquacious Yankee, glib on the tongue, and you may depend upon it I had a hard race to keep up with her, though I found it a good school, for it set me to reading my Bible. And here permit me to say, of all the isms I ever heard of, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... ties in the past, and his presentiments were not agreeable. It seemed like the fluctuations of a dream—as if the action begun by that loud bloated stranger were being carried on by this pale-eyed sickly looking piece of respectability, whose subdued tone and glib formality of speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him as their remembered contrast. He answered, with a marked ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... is, old chap," he confided, "you'll be making yourself unpopular before long. Another criminal at large, thanks to that glib tongue and subtle brain of yours. The crooks of London will present you with a testimonial ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... compromise the whole matter amicably might serve to beguile him to the chateau of his friend at Ebernburg till his safe-conduct should expire, and then the liars could throw off the mask and dispose of him with credit in the eyes of Rome. The glib and wily Glapio led in the attempt. Von Sickingen and Bucer were entrapped by his bland hypocrisy, and lent themselves to the execution of the specious proposition. But when they came to Luther with it, he turned his back, saying, "If the emperor's confessor has anything ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... discerned by Tito in the Piazza del Duomo, he had the fresh anguish of this consciousness in his mind, and Tito's ready speech fell upon him like the mockery of a glib, defying demon. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... dwelt pleasantly on Manuela, but pity mixed with his thought; and he added some prudence on his own account. "That child—she's no more—I must do something for her. Not a bad 'un, I'll swear, not fundamentally bad. I don't doubt her as I doubt the male: he's too glib by half... She's distractingly pretty—what nectarine colour! The mouth of a child—that droop at the corners—and as soft as a child's too." He shook his head. "No more kissing or I ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... time, nothing more sweeter,'—and countless Elizabethan gentlemen and ladies underscored that sentence, or transferred it to their commonplace books,—if they had such painful aids to culture,—and were comforted and edified by the discovery that brilliant John Lyly had made. This glib command of the matter-of-course, with a ready use of the proverb and the 'old said saw,' is a marked characteristic of the work. It emphasizes the youth of its author. We learn what could not have been new even ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... name," said the glib Tam; "we were brought up in the same village, the village of Glascae, and tramped off to the same college at six every morning when the bummer went. There'd ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... unimaginative minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who (at fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors through the great plant. How he juggles figures; how grandly they roll off his tongue. How glib he ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Wang, and has now been married for the last two years. This Mr. Lien has lately obtained by purchase the rank of sub-prefect. He too takes little pleasure in books, but as far as worldly affairs go, he is so versatile and glib of tongue, that he has recently taken up his quarters with his uncle Mr. Cheng, to whom he gives a helping hand in the management of domestic matters. Who would have thought it, however, ever since his marriage with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... about to explain to Sir John that the American was there through no connivance of mine, when my chief asked me to be silent, and, turning to his visitor, gruffly requested him to proceed with his interesting narration. The inventor needed no second invitation, but went on with his glib talk, while Sir John's frown grew deeper, and his face became redder under his fringe of white hair. When the American had finished, Sir John roughly bade him begone, and take his accursed machine with him. He said it was an insult for a person with one ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... house had retired to rest, with what a sinister delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, The source and secret of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... century or two past in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... the whole day passed. During dinner Aratoff chatted a great deal with Platosha, questioned her about old times, which, by the way, she recalled and transmitted badly, as she was not possessed of a very glib tongue, and had noticed hardly anything in the course of her life save her Yashka. She merely rejoiced that he was so good-natured and affectionate that day!—Toward evening Aratoff quieted down to such a degree that he played several games of ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... right embodied in Mr. Tulliver's interests and opinions. And as an extra touch of bitterness, the injured miller had recently, in borrowing the five hundred pounds, been obliged to carry a little business to Wakem's office on his own account. A hook-nosed glib fellow! as cool as a cucumber,—always looking so sure of his game! And it was vexatious that Lawyer Gore was not more like him, but was a bald, round-featured man, with bland manners and fat hands; a game-cock that you ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... complicate the Herzegovinian-Montenegrin question, private machinations have recently been the most successful, and consequently the most injurious to order and the general weal. The energy of some of the foreign employes has been truly astounding, while their glib tongues and manoeuvring minds have worked metamorphoses worthy of Robin or the Wizard of the North. This distortion of facts was somewhat naively described by a French colleague of ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... George! Sam, I've found Sol.' 'So you have,' said he. 'Now let me try. Blow, Joe, blow!' Sam, he found Re and La. And in the course of two months we got so we could play Old Hundred. I don't pretend to say we could do it as glib as you run over the ivory, ma'am; but it was Old Hundred, and no mistake. And we played Yankee Doodle, first rate. We called our instrument the Harmolinks; and we enjoyed it all the more because it ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... God has made so bright that nor mirror nor emerald nor topaz would make any show beside it. But of all this, he who gazes at the brightness of the eyes has not a word to say; for to all those who behold them they seem two glowing candles. And who has so glib a tongue that he could describe the fashion of the well-shaped nose, and of the bright countenance where the rose overlays the lily so that it eclipses something of the lily in order the better to illuminate ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... couldn't say but you might; I niver had any call to be buyin' such a thing before. But a bit that one shillin' 'ud be the price of is what I'm wishful to be gettin', if it was yella—and beggin' your pardon, ma'am," Hugh answered with a glib meekness, which mollified the old woman as much as his not undesigned mention ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... true that there were some glib-tongued fellows who spoke the language without foreign accent, all of them of the lowest order of Democratic ward-politicians, of creatures skulking from the outstretched arm of avenging law; while the most degraded of the German population were represented; while it is also true that ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... my head's a mop; I'm vet as any think; Oh! shan't ve cotch a cold!" "Your tongue is glib enough!" his rib exclaim'd, and made him shrink, —For ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... at this miserable chaffering, glad also to get a little money now and then. But this time he was obstinate, and took to insulting the picture-dealer, who, giving tit for tat, all at once dropped the formal 'you' to assume the glib 'thou,' denied his talent, overwhelmed him with invective, and taxed him with ingratitude. Meanwhile, however, he had taken from his pocket three successive five-franc pieces, which, as if playing at chuck-farthing, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... been, one would suppose, the easiest thing in the world for the glib-tongued Hiram to reply to such an interrogatory; but there was something awful in that gaze—not severe, nor stern, nor condemnatory, but awful in its earnest, truthful, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Jewish boy's sudden prosperity, there were deeply-marked dark circles about his eyes. The Bowery's delights were telling upon the frightened lad, who had sealed his glib tongue now behind lying lips. Flattered by the "cop's" familiar manner, Emil greedily swallowed the ground bait artfully scattered ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... native rig, and to the glib Tripolitanese of the Sicilian pilot, no suspicion was excited in the Philadelphia's watch by the answer to their hail that she had lost her anchors in a gale and would like to run a line to the war-ship and to ride by it through the night. So completely ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... turned and twisted my question around and about, trying to strike that man's average, but failed. He could not make out what I wanted. Now Mr. X arrived, faced this same man, looked him in the eye, and emptied this sentence on him, in the most glib and confident way: "Can man boat ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ever lived on earth, and now occupied a foremost place among the gods; while the Athenian insisted that Theseus was far superior, for his fortune had been in every way supremely blessed, whereas Hercules had at one time been forced to act as a servant. And he gained his point, for he was a very glib fellow, like all Athenians; so that the Theban, who was no match for him in talking, cried at last in some disgust, "All right, have your way; I only hope that, when our heroes are angry with us, Athens may suffer from the anger of ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... has slid down the channels Of history's annals Disguised as the child of a king, But that is a glib And iniquitous fib, For she never was any such thing: They called her the Fair One with Golden Locks, And it's true she had lovers who swarmed in flocks, But the rest is ironic; Her business chronic Was selling hair-tonic ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... attempt to describe his ready utterance; his glib use of the most sacred expressions; his familiar handling ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... similitude of the bumble-bee; now, however, he went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass as if they had thrown it up rather than spoken it. It seemed to me that this was almost as much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, ambitious of public favor, should not be too smooth. If an orator is glib, his countrymen distrust him. They dislike smartness. The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, provided there be an element of commonplace running through them; and any rough, yet never vulgar force of expression, such as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that what the one sees and what the other sees are in the same place. Since the shape and colour are not quite the same for the two men, this raises a difficulty, hastily solved, or rather covered up, by declaring what each sees to be purely "subjective"—though it would puzzle those who use this glib word to say what they mean by it. The truth seems to be that space—and time also—is much more complicated than it would appear to be from the finished structure of physics, and that the one all-embracing ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... misadventure from which he has not yet recovered sufficiently to address you as he fully hoped and intended to do to-day." At this all eyes sped to the Bishop, who stood certainly in a drooping attitude at the chaplain's side, his episcopal hands behind his back. "Something happened," the glib spokesman continued with stern eyes, "something that you do not often hear of in these days. His lordship was accosted, beset, and, like the poor man in the Scriptures, despitefully entreated, not many miles beyond your own boundary, by a pair ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... But no glib flow of figures fell from him. His eyebrows suddenly contracted, his body stiffened itself. Then for the next quarter of an hour nothing sounded in the quiet room but his turning of the creakling pages. Once or twice he glanced round swiftly over his shoulder, as though ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... play; but instead of marbles or leap-frog or ball, he found little boys in ragged knickerbockers huddled together on the ground, "shooting craps" with precocious avidity and quarreling over the pennies that made the pitiful wagers. He heard glib profanity rolling from the lips of children who should have been stumbling through baby catechisms; and his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... asked the name of that town, so that I might ask the way thither if I should come into a valley where I could not have pointed it out any longer. I pleased the young girl very much by presenting her with my card, and induced her to use her glib tongue volubly in telling me about their schools—what they studied, how long the terms last, &c. She would get along very well in our Pennsylvania German dialect. When we parted, she skipped away and proudly showed the card ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... his companion. "I'm sorry, very sorry, that I asked you; sorry most of all that—" He halted diffidently, his great hands hanging loose at his side, his broad shoulders drooping wearily. He was not glib of speech, at best, and this second blow was hard to bear. A full half minute he stood so, hesitant, searching for words; then heavily, clumsily, he turned, started for the door. "I really must be ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... be distinguished from denizens of the metropolis, so carefully, so artistically, groomed were their whiskers, so presentable their oval, clean-shaven faces, so easy the manner of their dancing attendance upon their womenfolk, so glib their French conversation as they quizzed their female companions. As for the other category, it comprised individuals who, stout, or of the same build as Chichikov (that is to say, neither very portly nor very lean), ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... over the assembly must have stirred a fear that something terrible had happened, which would be increased by Peter's question. It was a merciful opportunity given her to separate herself from the sin and the punishment; but her lie was glib, and indicated determination to stick to the fraud. That moment was heavy with her fate, and she knew it not; but she knew that she had the opportunity of telling the truth, and she did not take it. She had to make the hard choice which we have sometimes to make, to be true to some ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Penitent" and the translator of Lucan's "Pharsalia," was at one time an Under-Secretary of State. Rowe's dramatic work is not yet absolutely forgotten by the world. We still hear of the "gallant gay Lothario," although many of those who are glib with the words do not know that they come from the "Fair Penitent," and would not care even if they ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... we arrived, he smoking his evening pipe of Oronooko, and she working at her embroidery. The moment that I opened the door the man whom I had brought stepped briskly in, and bowing to the old people began to make glib excuses for the lateness of his visit, and to explain the manner in which we had picked him up. I could not help smiling at the utter amazement expressed upon my mother's face as she gazed at him, for the loss of his jack-boots exposed a pair of interminable spindle-shanks which were in ludicrous ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... who, with a glib tongue, protests that his conscience drove him from the Church, that his enslaved intelligence needed deliverance, search him and you will find a skeleton in his closet; and if you do not find it, it is there just the same. A renegade priest some years ago, held forth before a ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... understands no English language," says the native, as glib as before. "He be glad to know how you come in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been quite sure that here were no masterpieces—here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than a faint interest in the whims of life—no deep interior laughs, no sense of futility or hint ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... said, 'There are (there) common people and officers; there are the altars of the spirits of the land and grain. Why must one read books before he can be considered to have learned?' 4. The Master said, 'It is on this account that I hate your glib-tongued people.' CHAP. XXV. 1. Tsze-lu, Tsang Hsi, Zan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hwa were sitting by the Master. 2. He said to them, 'Though I am a day or so older than you, ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... school for the turning-out of stanch men in this nineteenth century. In the old, earnest times, war made men stanch and true to each other. We have learned up a good many glib phrases about the wickedness of war, and we thank God that we live in these peaceful, trading times, wherein we can—and do—devote the whole of our thoughts and energies to robbing and cheating and swindling one another—to ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... of nineteen is not so glib in speaking of marriage as a girl of fourteen, but I finally told her that I should not fancy the destiny of marrying a rich girl: then my imagination warmed, and I let her hear what my dream would be. She, the girl I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... appeal to me. I remember some of the best words, not perhaps as they are, but as I caught them from an almost over-glib expert. Did you know you had a strabismal vertebra? or, given a strabismal vertebra, that it could be developed to almost any extent by simply 'eaving from the 'ips? Take my tip and try it ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... blue eyes of the other smiled at the memory of the girl's glib repetition of his discourse. "What's the great idea? Aside from the fact that he belongs to the white dove, anti-military bunch of sisters, Singleton seems ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... "Believing that my wife is entitled to all the rights that I enjoy, I vote aye." The last name had been called, and all knew that only fifty votes had been cast for the amendment, lacking one of the required three-fifths of all members elect. The chief clerk of the House, B. D. Slaughter, usually so glib, slowly repeated the names of those who had voted and more slowly footed up the result. Two favorable members were outside; if only one could be reached! The speaker, who had just voted against the amendment, but was kindly disposed towards those interested in it, held the announcement ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... chiming full many a clime in, Tolling sublime in cathedral shrine; While at a glib rate brass tongues would vibrate, But all their music spoke nought to thine; For memory dwelling on each proud swelling Of thy belfry knelling its bold notes free, Made the bells of Shandon Sound far more grand on The pleasant ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... securely based upon impartial intelligence than before; it owed less to her weakness for seeing the best in people. As for Edwin, he was saying to himself: "I wish to the devil I could talk to her without spluttering! Why can't I be natural? Why can't I be glib? Some chaps could." And Edwin could ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... 16.—At length we tread the shore of France—of sunny Provence—the last unvisited realm we have to roam through before returning home. It is with a feeling of more than common relief that we see around us the lively faces and hear the glib tongues of the French. It is like an earnest that the "roughing" we have undergone among Bohemian boors and Italian savages is well nigh finished, and that, henceforth, we shall find civilized sympathy ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... out-and-out "defective delinquents" who can be supervised, controlled and prevented from procreating their kind. The advent of the Binet-Simon and similar psychological tests indicates that the mental defective who is glib and plausible, bright looking and attractive, but with a mental vision of seven, eight or nine years, may not merely lower the whole level of intelligence in a school or in a society, but may be encouraged by church and state to increase and multiply until he dominates and gives the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... on the look-out for dramatic and instructive contrast in the House of Commons, one could not do better than study Mr. Morley and Mr. Chamberlain for a week. Mr. Chamberlain—glib, shallow, self-possessed, well-trained by years of public life—debates admirably. Nobody can deny that—not even those who, like myself, find his speaking exasperatingly empty and superficial and foolish. He is master of all his ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... impertinent type that instinctively sought the laxer neighborhoods of the frontier. An echo of Pigeon Creek informed the young storekeeper's first state paper, the announcement of his candidacy, in the year 1832. His first political speech was in a curious vein, glib, intimate and fantastic: "Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... be seen that you have gone forth in a manner that is worthy of Athens, and are already in action. Words without the reality must always appear a vain and empty thing, and above all when they come from Athens; for the more we seem to excel in the glib use of such language, the more it is distrusted by every one. {13} The change, then, which is pointed out to them must be great, the conversion striking. They must see you paying your contributions, marching to war, doing everything with a will, if any of them is to listen to you. And if ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... before, or even to say that in the last few days he had crossed the desert from Tucson and found water on the trail as usual where he expected. He rode on, leading the way slowly up the canon, suffering the glib Mexican to talk unanswered. His own suppressed feelings still smouldered in his eye, still now and then knotted the muscles in his cheeks; but of Luis's chatter he said his whole opinion in one word, a single English syllable, which he uttered quietly for his own benefit. It also ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Shield" there was usually at least one Rabbi. One of the sons of Anselm Moses must be a Rabbi. The parents of little Mayer Anselm set him apart for the synagogue—he was so clever at reciting prayers and so glib with responses. Then he had an eczema for management, and took charge of all the games when the children played Hebrew I-Spy through the hallways and dark corners of the big, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... war, of a fight for independence, were heard throughout Norway. Meetings were held more or less secretly, and at each of them was some one with well-filled pockets and glib tongue, to enlarge on the country's wrongs, and promise assistance from an outside irresistible power as soon as they showed that they meant to strike for freedom. No one openly named the power. That was not necessary; it was everywhere felt and understood. Men ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... unchaste and the idle, the unjust and the unmerciful, and the covetous man, who is an idolater, says the scripture, though he may call himself seven times a Protestant, and rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies greediness and tyranny by glib words about the necessities of business and the laws of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called, which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. Such a man loves and makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send him ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... that I had allowed myself to heed the glib tongue of a hotel-runner before I left the rice-steamer, and he had commandeered my bag and taken it to the Oriente Hotel, of which I knew nothing except that it was in the walled city and across the river from the cable office. ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... preceding one, I am filled with a perverse envy of all the confused and stammering heroes of history. Is Washington faltering out a few broken and ungrammatical sentences, in reply to the vote of thanks of the Virginia legislature, less manly than the glib tongue in the court-room or in the club that can hit the mark every time? The test of a wit or of a scholar is one thing; the test of a man, I take it, is quite another. In this and some other respects Emerson is well antidoted ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... his florid paraphrase took it gravely, yet held by their "Moll Lovel." They wished that Gregory Drax might have a fair wind home; they wondered what Master Lovel was about; trusted that the black-eyed rascal (whose speech was too glib, surely, to be honest) would not make a fool of the girl. He very soon showed them that, whatever else he did, he intended to make a woman of her. Let them hold, said he (for once expressing his contempt), to their "Molly Lovel"—the name was the ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... admitting that I like Carlyle and Browning. I suppose this is because I have belonged to a Browning and Carlyle club, where I have heard some of the most idiotic women it was ever my privilege to encounter, express glib sentiments concerning these masters, which in me lay too deep for utterance. It is something like the occasional horror which overpowers me when I think that perhaps I am doomed to go to heaven. If ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... disappearance from the pulpit, and his subsequent retreat round by the back of the churchyard into the privacy of his own garden, the tongues of the gossips, restrained as long as their minister was likely to be within earshot, broke loose and began to wag with glib rapidity. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... ringing out like a trumpet, broke off suddenly. The angry fire died out of his blue eyes, and he bowed his head humbly. "I ask yer pardon, Minister!" he said, quietly, after a pause. "I humbly ask yer pardon. I had forgotten the Lord, ye see, for all I was talkin' about Him so glib. I was takin' my view, and forgettin' that the Lord had His. He takes things by and large, and nat'rally He takes 'em larger than mortal man kin do. Amen! so be it!" He took off his battered hat, and stood motionless ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... prompted a new thought. Just why had he chosen St. Martin's? Was it only a coincidence? Or had he, subconsciously at least, picked this particular world? He had always considered himself the unwilling subject of glib persuaders ... but mightn't some inner compulsion of his own have put the monkey on ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... mould, Sally and the dressmaker talked about pipings—not a bird—a new way to fold goods to make trimmings, and soon everything was going on the same as if the new teacher were not there. I noticed that she kept her head straight, and was not nearly so glib-tongued and birdlike before mother and Sally as she had been at the schoolhouse. Maybe that was why father told mother that night that the new ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... these things," Phineas Cross interrupted, "because he speaks for us, our duly elected representative. Sit thee down, Fenn. If you wanted the job, well, you haven't got it, and that's all there is about it, and though you're as glib with your tongue as any here, and though you've as many at your back, perchance, as I have, I tell you I'd never have voted for you if there hadn't been another man here. So put that in your ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... character, did not refute the charge,—if I was to be dragged to death on suspicion, gibbeted as a murderer, because some felon had stolen my pocket-knife, and committed a crime with it,—then I would go to my death unmoved. I would disdain to frame explanations; let the law murder me if it would; no glib counsel should save my life by technicalities; I would be vindicated by God and my past ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... walking on ahead, knew nothing of the love scenes just behind them. They talked of many things, of the moonlight and the river and the scent of the flowers, but all the time Hugh felt diffident and tongue-tied. He had not the glib tongue of Gavan Blake, and he felt little at ease talking common-places. Mary Grant thought he must be worried over something, and, with her usual ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... returned to business. Lucy showed off her attainments with her usual self-satisfaction. They were what might be expected from a second-rate old-fashioned young ladies' school, where nothing was good but the French pronunciation. She was evidently considered a great proficient, and her glib mediocrity was even more disheartening than the ungracious carelessness or dulness— there was no knowing which—that made her sister figure wretchedly in the examination. However, there was little time—the door-bell rang at a quarter to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... focus, in these days, by reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as the terrier shakes ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,—the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,—slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... louder and wilder as the night wore on. There were unseen guests there, elate and inspiring, who sat with the revellers—phantoms who attend such wassail, and keep the ladle of the punch-bowl clinking, the tongue of the songster glib and tuneful, and the general mirth alive and furious. A few honest folk, with the gift of a second sight in such matters, discover their uncanny presence—leprous impurity, insane blasphemy, and the stony grin of ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... John Fletcher hadn't really done a good deal to make Abrahama think he did want her," said Sylvia. "He was just that kind of man. I never did think much of him. He was handsome and glib, but he was all surface. I guess poor Abrahama had some reason to cut off Susy. I guess there was some double-dealing. I thought so at the time, and now this will makes me think so ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... boys cheered the Bartholdi statue. It makes some whites uncomfortable. It converts into strange reading glib eulogies of democratic principles. ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... curtain did happen nevertheless to be drawn aside: the Pit recognised Jean Jacques, but took no great notice of him! He expressed the bitterest indignation; gloomed all evening, spake no other than surly words. The glib Countess remained entirely convinced that his anger was not at being seen, but at not being applauded when seen. How the whole nature of the man is poisoned; nothing but suspicion, self-isolation, fierce moody ways! He could not live with anybody. A man of some rank from ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the man who belonged with the machine had met with an accident; indeed, this was true, for the genuine chauffeur had used Gibelin's bribe money in unwise libations and appeared the next morning with a battered head and a glib story that was never ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... of seventeen talk glibly and learnedly of women and of love, while in the presence of women they are dumb or talk to them like a book—and what do they talk about? The circle is the hot-bed of glib fluency; in the circle they spy on one another like so many police officials.... Oh, circle! thou'rt not a circle, but an enchanted ring, which has been the ruin of many a ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... herself up unasked to be the conqueror's spoil and bride. Thus all vows of woman are loosed by change of fortune and melted by the shifting of time; the faith of their soul rests on a slippery foothold, and is weakened by casual chances; glib in promises, and as sluggish in performance, all manner of lustful promptings enslave it, and it bounds away with panting and precipitate desire, forgetful of old things in the ever hot pursuit after something ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... possibilities of moral harm, the more so because of the rather mawkish sentimentality with which it is decked out; for if any scoundrel is really the instrument of God's will, why should he be blamed for his scoundrelism? And we observe how yet once more, by a glib and vapid phrase—"I believe in the {62} infinitude of wisdom and love; there is nothing else"—the fact of evil has been triumphantly got rid of. In words, that is to say, but not in reality; for in reality there ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... border land, mostly of the Lower Saxon strain, with a slight tinge of Slavic blood, were a tough, sturdy race, not specially graceful in social manners, but with unusual keenness of understanding and clearness of judgment. Those who lived in the capital had been glib of tongue and ready to scoff from time immemorial: all were capable of great exertions; industrious, persistent, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to be proud of its achievements, but she possessed none of the instincts of a wire-puller. So long as the class offices were creditably filled she cared not who held them, and comparing her ignorance of parliamentary procedure with the glib self-confidence of Jean, Eleanor and their friends, she even felt grateful to them for rescuing the class from the pitfalls ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... very intimate," says he, "with a man who was a poet; he could neither read nor write; but he was a poet by nature, having a muse wonderfully glib at making triplets and quartets. He was nicknamed Tum Tai of the Moor. He made an englyn for me to put in a book in which I was inserting all the verses I ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Camelot to fight for his Princess. He was the Mysterious Knight, parented in fairy-far Avilion, the Fortunate Youth, the Awakener of England. Now he was but a base-born young man who had attained a high position by false pretences; an ordinary adventurer with a glib tongue; a self-educated, self-seeking, commonplace fellow. At least, so he saw himself in his Princess's eyes. And he had meant that she should thus behold him. No longer was he entering lists to fight for her. For what hopeless purpose was he entering them? To awaken England? ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... for the cause, or against it—caught its quick rebuke, at the hands of some glib funmaker. Once an enthusiastic admirer of the hero of Charleston indited a glowing ode, of which ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
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