"Dawdle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... government; a real government; a government not to be whistled down the wind by any jack (or Jeff) who chooses to secede: a government that will not dawdle with hands in pockets while this continent is converted into a maggot-swarm of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... answering with vehemence: "I should say not, you romantic infant! When I work I want to work with workers, not with drones! A person who can only dawdle over his task is of no use at all. How Uncle Calvin gets on with a mere imitation of a secretary, I can't possibly see. Why, Ted himself could cover ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... suppose, that, in our callow days, it is proper that we should be birched and wear fetters upon our little, bandy, sausage-like legs. But let me, now that I have come to man's estate, flout my old pedagogues, and, playing truant at my will, dawdle or labor, walk, skip, or run, go to my middle in quagmires, or climb to the hill-tops, take liberties with the venerable, snub the respectable, and keep the company of the disreputable,—dismiss the Archbishop without reading his homily,—pass by a folio in twenty grenadier volumes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... prematurely gray hair, his fresh youthful skin and his dark eyes. He reminded one somehow of a husky widow, he was so feminine in spite of his size. He looked leisurely enough for a busy man. You wondered how he had time to manage so many player folk, write so many plays and yet dawdle over his luncheon as he did. He leaned forward to ask Edwina's husband something. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... vice-royalty deserves better treatment than this. In Ireland he was an able governor. The man had something to do, and he did it. The lounger of the London clubs could not dawdle through the day in the midst of a fiery people full of faction, bleeding with the wounds of civil war, and indignant at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... of the humbler sort loves to dawdle along the bank on a bright afternoon, watching the play of the river and drawing a kind of philosophic contentment out of its cool aquatic humours. Presently he reaches that bridge—the jewellers' bridge. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... best of this kind; but should be firmly restricted to a few prints and to a few books. If a child has many toys, it will get tired of them and break them; if a boy has many prints he will merely dawdle and scrawl over them; it is by the limitation of the number of his possessions that his pleasure in them is perfected, and his attention concentrated. The parents need give themselves no trouble in instructing him, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... the next morning until the men who were bound for Fretly had all ridden off and were well out of sight of the house. What he had stayed for he would have been somewhat puzzled to explain. He was not the kind of man who, as a rule, cared to dawdle about all day with women when there was any kind of sport to be had from hunting down to ratting; more especially was he disinclined for any such dawdling when Helen Romer was amongst the number of the ladies so left to be danced attendance upon. And yet he distinctly ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... all is at my use and service. He is a very honest good creature. I wish that I had room for him here in this house instead of in Chesterfield Street. Bob grows every day more and more attached to him, but I cannot dawdle him as Horry Walpole does Tonton, for Me du Deffand's sake, nor does he seem to expect it. He has the accueil of a respectable old suisse in my hall, where I meet him on coming home in a posture couchante. Adieu; till I have letters, remember ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... say? Can you take a party of one rubbernecking this A.M.? I like you, Hobbs. You are the best interpreter of English I've ever seen. I can't help understanding you, no matter how hard I try not to. I want you to get me into the Castle grounds to-day and show me where the duchesses dawdle and the countesses cavort. I'm ashamed to say it, Hobbs, but since yesterday I've quite lost interest in the middle classes and the component parts thereof. I have suddenly acquired a thirst for champagne—in ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... learner who is slow from lack of such alertness. The wider awake the learner, the quicker will be his learning and the slower his subsequent forgetting; so that one is often tempted to admonish a certain type of studious but easy-going person, "for goodness' sake not to dawdle over his lessons", with any idea that the more time he spends with them the longer he will remember them. More gas! High pressure gives the biggest results, provided only it is directed into high-level observation, and does not simply generate fear and worry and a rattle-brained ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Besides, at the risk of being tedious, I reiterate that you and I are totally unlike. I'm only partially urban; you are completely so—to your very finger-tips. I'm half savage, more than half. I like to be out in the country, among the mountains, upon the lakes. I like to hunt and fish, and dawdle away time; you care for none of these things. I can make money because I inherited capital, and it almost makes itself; but it's not with me a definite ambition. I have no positive object in life, unless it is to make the little woman happy. ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... did Mr. Wolfe do at Louisbourg? Ill as he was, and in love as we knew him to be, he didn't stop to be nursed by his mother, Harry, or to dawdle with his sweetheart. He went on the King's service, and hath come back covered with honour. If there is to be another great campaign in America, papa says he is ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... man. "Give it fair play, give it fair play!" And he came after his own hat quickly but cautiously, with burning eyes. The hat had seemed at first to droop and dawdle as in ostentatious langour on the sunny lawn; but the wind again freshening and rising, it went dancing down the garden with the devilry of a pas de quatre. The eccentric went bounding after it with kangaroo leaps and bursts of breathless speech, of which it was ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... consulting S. Messre; for while I was with him Dawn would remain outside, and what more certain than that Mr R. Ernest Breslaw, walking up the street and quite unexpectedly espying her, and being such a friend of mine, should dawdle with her awaiting my reappearance, while growing inwardly wishful that it might be ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... said to her, 'Oh, sweet Beansie! tidy up my hearth a bit, for I am half choked by my ashes,' the unkind girl replied, 'The more fool you for having ashes! You don't suppose I am going to dawdle about helping people who won't help themselves? ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... to be a country gentleman's wife," Rebecca thought. "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year. I could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on the wall. I could water plants in a green-house and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor. I shouldn't miss it much, out of five thousand a year. I ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... women dawdle through the day, superintending their domestic work, look after their children's and their own toilette, tend the fire, attend to the cooking, and smoke consumedly. The idle sit with the men at the doors of their huts; those industriously disposed weave mats, and, whether ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... drudgery necessary to become a great artist. The mere writing of little essays and compositions is quite a different thing from the long, hard training necessary to become a writer of any acceptability. Merely because a child finds it easier to dawdle away the hours with a pencil or a brush than to go into the harvest field or into the kitchen is not a good reason for supposing that this preference is an indication of either talent ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... my love for my baby. I feared lest it should make me—nay, was making me—neglect my husband. The fear first arose in me one morning as I sat with her half dressed on my knees. I was dawdling over her in my fondness, as I used to dawdle over the dressing of my doll, when suddenly I became aware that never once since her arrival had I sat with my husband in his study. A pang of dismay shot through me. "Is this to be a wife?" I said to myself,—"to ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Hoek came out twenty-three years ago, he told me, without a 'heller', and is now the owner of cattle and land and horses to a large amount. But then the Germans work, while the Dutch dawdle and the English drink. 'New wine' is a penny a glass (half a pint), enough to blow your head off, and 'Cape smoke' (brandy, like vitriol) ninepence a bottle—that is the real calamity. If the Cape had the grape disease as badly as Madeira, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... luxurious vacation that he remembered was his last college vacation. What a boyish, good-for-nothing, aimless fellow he was in those days! How his brother used to snap him up and ask if he had nothing better to do than to dawdle around into Maple Street and swing Prudence under the maples in that old garden, or to write rhymes with her and correct her German exercises! How he used to tease her about having by and by to color ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... antidote in what the teacher denominates disorder. This so-called disorder betokens good health on their part and is a revelation of the fact that they have a keen appreciation of the fitness of things. They cannot brook monotony and it irks them to dawdle about in the anteroom of action. They are eager to do their work if only the teacher will get right at it. But they are impatient of meaningless preliminaries. They see no sense in calling the roll when everybody is present and discredit the teacher ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... betimes in the season of autumn; at early dawn if possible, and not to stop at all for dinner, seeing that once the day has passed its prime, the hour of sunset approaches with giant strides, and there is little or no twilight to help you if you have been foolish enough to dawdle your time in the hours of sunset proper. "'S fas a chuil as nach goirear" is another pregnant adage. (Desert, indeed, is the corner whence no voice of bird is heard.) Some people are very quiet, almost dumb indeed, but on the occurrence of some event, or on the back ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... anything to do, Molly!" And to Vickers she complained: "Children nowadays seem perfectly helpless. Unless they are provided with amusement every minute, they dawdle about, waiting for you to do something for them. Miss Betterton should make Molly ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... though of anything but an intellectual character, kept our minds sufficiently employed to prevent our brooding over our ill fortune; we were allowed to take matters pretty easily so long as we did not dawdle too much, and thus entail upon our lounging guard the unwelcome necessity of scrambling to their feet and hunting up our whereabouts; our daily labours brought with them just that amount of fatigue which ensured sound sleep and a happy oblivion of the dirt and manifold discomforts of our night quarters; ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... that she could whisk through her dressing in ten minutes, and that it was quite unnecessary to get up so soon: even when the others mercilessly pulled the bed-clothes from her, and pointed to their watches, she would dawdle instead of "whisking," and spend much superfluous time over manicure or dabbing on cucumber cream to improve her complexion. She was so innocent about her little vanities, and conducted them with such child-like complacency, that the girls tolerated them quite good humoredly, ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... she was called an incorrigible dawdle, and made humble confession of the same, offering to do all in her power to make up for the morning's laziness. But what would Midas ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... passed up the pathway, with a stride and a swing so different from his ordinary listless dawdle. They heard the sound of his heavy tread on the boards of the cottage verandah. Then there was a silence, and the heavy wits of each of the waiting men strove to grasp sufficient of the spectacle to put his thoughts ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... fashion. "Thanks. But let's not dawdle too much. I've got a lot of wreckage to put back together... Maybe I've still got it figured wrong, Tiflin. But lately I began to think the other way. You were always around when trouble was cooking—like part of it, or like a good cop. The first ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... man. When I ask you a question, or give an order, take it deliberately, and dawdle off ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... not have to wait long for Ali Baba, Mujrim, and the camels, for they had not been fools enough to dawdle, with a hundred and fifty balked freebooters within rifle-shot, whose resilient pride was likely to breed anger. You can't lead camels any more than horses as fast as you can ride them; unless stampeded they tow loggily; but the fact that two or three dozen mounted Arabs had elected ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... matter very much" ("Merci," Paklin thought to himself). "What is the time?" Solomin asked. "Five o'clock. We mustn't dawdle. You shall have the horses ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... never written anything good before, and a humorous essay on kittens by another junior that nobody had suspected of being literary. There was also a verse, or rather two verses; and it was these that caused the usually prompt and decisive Helen to hesitate and even to dawdle, wasting a precious afternoon in a futile attempt to square her conscience and still do as she pleased about those verses. One of them was Helen's own. It was good; Miss Raymond had said so with emphasis, and Helen wanted it to go into the "Argus." She had rather ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... me to do nothing whatever except go to market and drink himself into a disaffected, discontented condition. He is rarely visible before ten or eleven o'clock in the morning, except on market days, and he appears to smoke and dawdle most of his time away. Just now he broods over his wrongs, and declares he "will have his own again," whatever that may signify. He says he is enormously over-rented. Perhaps he is; but I cannot forget that it is not many years since he and his neighbours in the ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... Frank, "that's the best way. None of us want to dawdle our lives out in this place all day, and you don't want to leave any of us behind, Uncle Moses; so if we all go ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... would have been spared this shameful exposure, which, he knew well enough, Davis would never forget, but would tell all his life with an ever-increasing garniture of fiction. He cursed his weakness in allowing himself to dawdle about those arsenals and that parade-ground, and to be so far misguided by a hardened bachelor as to admire certain yellow-haired German and black-haired Hungarian women on the promenade; when he came ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... only "she" would take it into her pretty, capricious head to pay a call. In this latter line the Scholar had a decided pull. Education had taught him taste; necessity, handiness; and by aid of the two he transformed his rude dwelling into something approaching the rooms in which he used to dawdle away the happy hours, time ago. It was partly drawing-room, partly curiosity-shop. Cups, saucers, and spoons appeared as if by magicians' call, and one blazing afternoon the news flashed round the diamond-pits that Miss Musgrave was "taking afternoon tea ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... your 'right' for the present; the 'right' for us, your teachers, is to see that you learn as much as you can, without spoiling your dinner, your sleep, or your play; and that what you do learn, you learn well. You all know when you learn with a will, and when you dawdle. There's no doubt of conscience about that, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... in school is prohibited. When it is, the good boys and quick boys have to learn how to waste their extra time, which seems to be a pity. But with a sensible master, it is a thing understood, that it is better for boys or girls to study hard while they study, and never to learn to dawdle. Taking it for granted that you are in the hands of such masters or mistresses, I will take it for granted that, when you have learned the school lesson, there will be no objection to your next learning the other lesson, which lazier boys ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... and ME, dear, had nothing else to do. That was love as I know it; not Seth's sneaking rages, and Uncle Ben's sneaking fooleries, and Masters's sneaking conceit, but only love. And knowing that, I let Seth rage, and Uncle Ben dawdle, and Masters trifle—and for what? To keep them from me and my boy. They were satisfied, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... was very still. A train thundered by, and Potter's windmill creaked and splashed,—creaked and splashed. A cow-bell clanked in the lane, and Mary Bell looked up to see the Dickeys' cow dawdle by, her nose sniffing idly at the clover, her downy great bag leaving a trail of foam on the fresh grass. From up the road came the faint approaching rattle ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... of times long passed, but certainly we found nothing of the kind; nothing indeed different from all the folk of the South who dawdle at their work and spend most of their ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... Grimm—the Mr. Grimm of the bureau. Mr. Grimm was an utterly different type from his chief. He was younger, perhaps thirty-one or two, physically well proportioned, a little above the average height, with regular features and listless, purposeless eyes—a replica of a hundred other young men who dawdle idly in the windows of their clubs and watch the world hurry by. His manner was languid; his ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... "How you dawdle!" he says, fretfully. "Do you forget there are other people in the world besides yourself? ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... ladies may spend their days on deck, for just as much time as they spend below I shall consider that I am wasting. Indeed, I regret the attractiveness of the cabins, for I fear there may be a temptation to dawdle there, or lie among cushions on the comfortable seat-bunks on a gray or chilly day. "I hope she's as much interested in scenery as she apparently is in history," I said to myself as Starr and I wandered over the boat, "for the skipper-job ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... evenings—he belonged to a literary club, a musical society, and so on—it was scant consolation to be told that he objected to some of her own activities and associations. He did not much care, for example, to have her "run" with the McComases and others of that type or to have her dawdle over glasses, tall, broad, or short, in places of general democratic assemblage; and he told her so. I believe it was about here that she began to find him something of a prig and a doctrinaire; and she was not incapable, under ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... privacy, and then, getting out of the train, which had drawn up in the station, we hailed a taxi and climbed quickly into it. Charing Cross is the last place to dawdle in if you have any objection ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... suggestion needs explaining, perhaps. It does not mean license[A] to dawdle. Nothing is much more annoying in a speaker than too great deliberateness[A] or than hesitation of speech. But it means a quiet[A] realisation of the fact that the floor is yours, everybody wants to hear you, there is time[A] enough ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... Richard was a little doubtful as to her power over the wild girls. There could not be any doubt that John Taylor was in earnest, and had been worked upon just at the right moment; but there was danger that the impression would not last. "And his wife in such a horrible whining dawdle!" said Ethel—"there will be no good to be done if ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... your men shan't violate the early-closing ordinance, you must observe one yourself. A man who works only half a day Saturday can usually do a day and half's work Monday. I'd rather have my men hump themselves for nine hours than dawdle ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... always following fast upon your heels. There is no time to dawdle or linger on the road, no "stop and go on again:" if you but step aside to fasten your shoe-tie, your place is occupied—you are edged off, pushed out of the main current, and condemned to circle slowly in the lazy eddy of some complimenting clique. Thousands are to be found, anxious and able to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... said I to myself, "nice boys these to be going in for an exam.! How can they expect to do anything if they dawdle away their time in this way! I declare I quite feel as if I were taking an unfair advantage of them to be grinding away ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... you dawdle, the life blood is being sucked out of our great nation. It is a man's job to fight; it is a woman's to save.... I think you've made your choice, though you don't realize it. I'm praying to God ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... that young person gaily, "as the reward of virtue, let's go up on the roof. It is after four, but we'll have time if we don't dawdle. We can get from here to the theater ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... to step inside. There was something inexplainable about this maid who veiled her eagerness to admit him with such transparencies. Even a fool would scarcely have left so forbidding a character to dawdle about the living room while she went ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... behaviour to women. If I had been a woman, I should have spurned him for his perpetual insult of inane compliments. He was always dawdling after "the sex," which was one of his sweet phrases, and yet he was not passionate. Passion does not dawdle and compliment, nor is it nasty, as this fellow was. Passion may burn like a devouring flame; and in a few moments, like flame, may bring down a temple to dust and ashes, but it is earnest as flame, ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... being mentioned, he said, 'I took to Dr. Gibbons.' And addressing himself to Mr. Charles Dilly, added, 'I shall be glad to see him. Tell him, if he'll call on me, and dawdle over a dish of tea in an afternoon, I shall ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... me will you be blamed; I like to see you not ashamed To dawdle for awhile; You furnish, by example sage, A moral for our busy age; And so, though others fume and rage, I watch ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... to go through life reading the signs on the ten-story buildings and acquiring knowledge, than to dawdle and "Ah!" adown our pathway to the tomb and leave no record for posterity except that we had a good neck to pin a necktie upon. It is not pleasant to be called green, but I would rather be green and aspiring than blase ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... stood ready to let go of the ball he seemed inclined to dawdle over it. It wasn't going to be one of his snappiest—-any onlooker could judge that, ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... passed through Sylvie's mind as she sat there. This handsome and stalwart lily of the valley, with no desire for toiling, and no ability for spinning, would be content to drift and dawdle through life on his father's money. At that moment he was more contemptible to her than Irene, winning lovers by the score, and casting them aside with no more compunction than if they were the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... all, from what point of time or space we go home; how we shall smile, after we get there, that we ever gave it one moment's thought! You ask what I am doing; well, I am taking a vacation and not writing anything to speak of, yet just as busy as ever; not one moment in which to dawdle, though I dare say I seem to the folks here at home to be sitting round doing nothing. I must give you a picture of one day and you must photograph one of yours, as we have done before. Got up at seven ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... hard conditions of his happiness, and the Warren was in the hands of a set of leisurely country tradespeople, who if Theo had meant to carry his bride there must have postponed that happiness for a year or two—not much wonder, perhaps, since they were left by the young master to dawdle on their ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... married her, and when she looked back on her hard life in her father's house, she beheld it through that rosy veil of idealism in which the imaginative temperament envelops the past or the future at the cost of the present. Then she had had time, at least, to dream and to dawdle! During the seven months of her marriage, she had learned that for the brooding soul there is no anodyne so soothing as neglect, no comfort so grateful as ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... are rich find it desirable to go away for three or four months a year and dawdle in idleness around some fancy winter or summer resort. The rank and file of the American people would not waste their time that way even if they could. But they would provide the team-work necessary ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... Fanny could not but be sensible of. She might scruple to make use of the words, but she must and did feel that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end, and who had no talent, no conversation, no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... never more needed than now: I am near Ujiji, but the slaves who paddle are tired, and no wonder; they keep up a roaring song all through their work, night and day. I expect to get medicine, food, and milk at Ujiji, but dawdle and do nothing. I have a good appetite, and sleep well; these are the favourable symptoms; but am dreadfully thin, bowels irregular, and I have no medicine. Sputa increases; hope to hold out to Ujiji. Cough worse. Hope to ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... is one thing which the Cherub loves, it is to dawdle, but now he rose without a sigh and remarked that there was no time to waste. He ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... confession—'not yet.' Possibly, when he got Home, he might discover it was Tara, after all. It would need some courage to propose again. For the memory of that juvenile fiasco still pricked his sensitive pride. A touch of the Rajput came out there. Letters from Serbia seemed to dawdle unconscionably by the way. But, in leisurely course, he had received an answer to his screed about Dyan and the quest; a letter alive with all he loved best in her—enthusiasm, humour, vivid sympathy, deepened and enlarged ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... restlessness, the noise, the quarrels, the mooning ways, the healthy pessimism which was the motive power of the Euler family, as it is that of all respectable persons, and made their life a foretaste of purgatory. That a woman who did nothing but dawdle about all the blessed day should take upon herself to defy them with her calm insolence, while they bore their suffering in silence like galley-slaves,—and that people should approve of her into ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... straightened up and walked! Mr. Durant talked to us some about our lessons. He seemed pleased when we told him we liked geometry. When we got back to the college we told the girls about meeting Mr. Durant. I guess nobody will want to dawdle along after this; I'm ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... wouldn't be so mean as to fool you about such a thing. But mamma says you mustn't dawdle to-day. So hurry up and get those towels done. Sylvy is going to be awfully busy, so you'll have to help her, but we're going to clean the knives for you, and shell the peas. Bring them down to the little house; we're going down there. We might set ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... discriminating visitor will decidedly prefer to receive his sandwich and glass of bitter at the hands of a pretty barmaid rather than from an oleaginous pot-man in his shirt-sleeves; and the sherry-cobbler acquires a racier flavour from the arch looks of the Hebe who dispenses it. If silly young men do dawdle at the bar for the sake of the sirens inside, and occasionally, as we have known to be the case, take unto themselves these same sirens "for better or for worse," we can only cite the opinion of well-informed authorities, that ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... label from Forresters in the hem. Her bra was a Graceform, size thirty two, medium cup, but the girl on the bed did not have much need for molding, shaping, uplifting, padding or pretense. She was all her and she filled it right to the brim. I let my perception dawdle on the slender ankles, the lissome ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... fog the fulgid sun looks down Upon a stagnant earth where listless men Laboriously dawdle, curse, and sweat, Disqualified, unsatisfied, inert, — It seems to me somehow that God himself Scans with a close reproach what I have done, Counts with an unphrased patience my arrears, And ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... he was in some measure infected, and he dropped an insinuation, that he could eclipse his rival, even in his own lunatic sphere. This hint was not lost upon his companion, counsellor, and buffoon, the facetious Davy Dawdle, who had some humour, and a great deal of mischief, in his composition. He looked upon his patron as a fool, and his patron knew him to be both knave and fool; yet, the two characters suited each other so well, that they could ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... "Here comes your millionaire, Nancy," they would call to her whenever any man who looked the role approached her counter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy's imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionaires; ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... very truth was a young country, offering a wide field to all who sought work, adventure, achievement. Her thoughts ran on exultantly. She was rich, she was free, she was young, she was strong; why dawdle and dream among the fiords of Norway? Why scale Swiss mountains? Let that come later, when she had earned a playtime. In the first vigorous years of her youth, let her go out to the sunny land that was her home and give it ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... task-master over them, and being hid from the tobacco-fields by a convenient coppice of pine and cedar, they had set to work in a fury of diligence, had cut and stacked the grass in a race with time, and now found themselves possessed of a precious hour in which to dawdle, and swap opinions and tobacco before the sunset horn should call ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... with your work, Patsy, go on, and don't dawdle. Don't I tell you Mr. Durham is both tired and hungry? Never mind looking at ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... helplessness and fear of work was tempted to enter on that forlorn experiment which so many energetic women of decided character have made—that of marrying a man who can't stand alone, or do anything but dawdle, in the hope that they may be able to infuse in him some of their own ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... vernacular wretchedly. But I do emphasize the fact that proficiency here is of prime importance and I would also add that it should be the first work of a missionary after entering his field. To dawdle with the language the first year, is, generally speaking, to fail ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... they try. But what about the purple citizens? Will they work, or will they lie round in their purple garments and loaf? Work? Why should they work, their pay is there "fresh and fresh"? Why should they turn up on time for their task? Why should they not dawdle at their labor sitting upon the fence in endless colloquy while the harvest rots upon the stalk? If among them is one who cares to work with a fever of industry that even socialism cannot calm, let him do it. We, his fellows, ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... future. The so-called unemployed are mostly utter loafers, who will not give a good day's work for a fair day's wage. They refuse to work for less than eight shillings a day, and many of them if offered work at that price only dawdle about for a few hours and do ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... her pretty piece of work! 'Why should you? If you speak my Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext. And pray, don't loiter. We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you know they never got their shutters down till it was time ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... able: and the little girl who, in order to finish her dinner more quickly, shirks the use of her teeth, and sends food, half chewed, into her stomach, is like a man who, having two servants, the one strong and vigorous, the other feeble and delicate, allows the first to dawdle at his ease, and puts all the hard work on the other. He would be very unjust in so doing, would he not? And as injustice always meets with its reward, his work is ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... not being near the office door, or facing that way. But before his thoughts were really formed Paul had put them into action. He was too much alarmed and too full of the responsibility of his position to dawdle. Suppose any harm should come to his mother or the children! He grew sick with terror at the thought, ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... bread tray," suggested Sister practically. She never forgot the task in hand for other interests. "Mother says we mustn't dawdle, Roddy, you know she did. It's my turn to feed the birds, so I'll crumb the table. Could I use your saw if ...
— Brother and Sister • Josephine Lawrence
... they are in the north and south and east and west, as diversified indeed as any nation in the world, and that is the word patient. They can stand longer, sit longer, eat longer, drink longer, work longer hours, and dream longer, and dawdle longer than any people except the Orientals. This custom may date back to far distant times. Sitting, in the Greek view, was a posture of supplication (Odyssey, XIV, 29—31). The Emperor himself sets the example. He is an indefatigable stander, if I may coin the word, and on horseback ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... single letter referring to his own affairs had been forwarded to him for over two months. He had thrown his entire time and care into his work in the North. And now that these arrears had to be cleared off, he attacked the business with an obvious impatience. Formerly he had been used to dawdle over his letters, getting through a good portion of the forenoon with them and conversations with Waters about Buckinghamshire news. Now, even with that omniscient factotum by his side, his progress was slow, simply because ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... we will let you go on Friday, but we shall have to dawdle about the lakes for some time. We can't rush through them as we have been rushing through all these grand old Italian towns. We must have a long rest ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... though they may commit no serious offenses, such as making a mess of their food or themselves, or talking with their mouths full, all children love to crumb bread, flop this way and that in their chairs, knock spoons and forks together, dawdle over their food, feed animals—if any are allowed in the ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... intolerable, and if I cannot get rid of them we shall all starve before we accomplish what we wish. They dawdle behind picking up wild fruits, and over our last march (which we accomplished on the morning of the eighth day) they took from fourteen to twenty-two days. Retaining their brutal feelings to the last they killed the donkey ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... over, she was to see the world under Lady Anne's auspices. They were to go abroad soon after Christmas, to be in Rome for Easter, to dawdle about the Continent where they would and for as long as they would. Everything was planned and mapped out. Mary had her neat travelling-dress of grey cloth, tailor-made, her close-fitting toque, her veil and gloves, all her equipment, lying ready to ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... "Well, yes, if you'll hurry. But not if you dawdle. Mother has a lot to do this morning. Remember, I won't help you with a single thing you ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... kitchen, where I dawdle over my breakfast, the widowed bantam-hen has perched on the back of my drowsy cat. It is needless to go through the form of opening the school to-day; for, with the exception of Waster Lunny's girl, ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... more years than he could remember since this young American had taken a real holiday except for an occasional fishing trip on the Gunnison or into Wyoming. He had lived a life of activity. Now for the first time he learned how to be lazy. To dawdle indolently on one of the broad porches, while Miss Yuste sat beside him and busied herself over some needlework, was a sensuous delight that filled him with content. He felt that he would like to bask there in the warm sunshine forever. After ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... wander—Englishmen and dogs alone are seen abroad between nine and one. But in the soothing cool of the soft tropical evening, gay-lit boulevards, a magnificent State-subsidized opera-house, alfresco cafes where dawdle the domino-playing absinthe drinkers, the fierce-moustached gendarmes, and innumerable features typically and picturesquely French, induced me easily to believe myself back in the bewildering whirl of the Boulevard des Capucines ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Min Allah, for the end is with Him!' There is not a pin to choose in fatalism here between Muslim and Christian, the lazy, like Mohammed and Suleyman (one Arab the other Copt), say Min Allah or any form of dawdle you please; but the true Muslim doctrine is just what Yussuf laid down—'do all you can and be resigned to whatever be the result.' Fais ce que dois advienne qui pourra is good doctrine. In fact, I am very much puzzled to discover ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Pound told her that I was coming? Since then I have seen her more daintily shod than when her bare brown legs hurried from view into broken shoes of twice her size. Since then the hard little hand has turned white and thin and tapering, to such a hand as women are wont to let dawdle over the arms of chairs. Then I was a boy, with a boy's haughty way of regarding girlish softness. I was haughtier that day because I sought in my pride to cover up my debt to her. Now I am a man, but the boy's picture of Penelope Blight, the little girl in the patched blue frock and broken shoes, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... my mind. Can I go to my piano? No; I'm not fit for it. Work? No; I shall get thinking again if I take to my needle. A man, in my place, would find refuge in drink. I'm not a man, and I can't drink. I'll dawdle over my dresses, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... If the lazy student would only bring clearly before his mind the examination-room, and the unanswerable paper, and the bitter mortification when the pass-list comes out and his name is not there, he would not trifle and dawdle and seek all manner of diversions as he does, but he would bind himself to his desk and his task. If the young man who begins to tamper with purity, and in the midst of the temptations of a great city to gratify the lust of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... fields in the neighborhood; and of drovers and teamsters who travel that road. Here would they gather in the endless summer twilight, or by the light of the harvest moon, and sit round a table at the door; and tipple, and laugh, and quarrel, and fight, and sing drowsy songs, and dawdle away the hours until the deep solemn notes of St. Paul's clock would ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... so intently about the matter that he began to dawdle. And if there was one thing that the Muley Cow didn't like it was to have to stand still while a slow milker puttered at his work. So she suddenly gave her tail a switch and brought the end of it ...
— The Tale of Snowball Lamb • Arthur Bailey
... satisfaction was too much for General Feraud's stoicism. "Don't dawdle, then, damn you for a cold-blooded staff-coxcomb!" he roared out, suddenly, out of an impassive face held erect on ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... "I mustn't dawdle any more. It's no good going beyond the next hedge, it gets all open. Let's get on to it and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... princess, opening upon him all the tenderness of her large and beaming eyes, "how weary am I of sitting on my cushion, and seeing fop after fop, fool after fool, dawdle down upon their faces before me; and, moreover, I am suffocated with perfumes. Strike your mandolin again louder, beloved of my soul—still louder, that I may be further relieved of ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... wonderful than a thousand other happenings in '57. All laws of probability and general average were upset that year, when sixty thousand men held down an armed continent. Even stranger things were happening than that two bullock-carts should dawdle through a rebel-seething district in the direction of a plundered, blood-soaked rebel stronghold; stranger even than that on the foremost bullock-cart a lean and louse-infested fakir should be squatting, guarded ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... personality made any impression on my boyish imagination. I might sum up my impression of him in two words—simplicity and resolution. Now, after nearly forty years, I remember his step, the characteristic forward tread, firm, simple, resolute, neither fast nor slow, no hurry and no dawdle, but ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... grasp. Also the Malle Poste, with only a couple of passengers, tearing along at a real good dare-devil pace, and out of sight in no time. Steady old Cures come jolting past, now and then, in such ramshackle, rusty, musty, clattering coaches as no Englishman would believe in; and bony women dawdle about in solitary places, holding cows by ropes while they feed, or digging and hoeing or doing field-work of a more laborious kind, or representing real shepherdesses with their flocks—to obtain an adequate idea of which pursuit and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... last," said the boy, eating muffins; "she's a regular dawdle, she is. When you're not here, she lays ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Constance smiling. "Well, we will dawdle over our fish. I never thought of his coming," she went on, watching Yvonne as she deftly laid another place beside Frances. "This must be one of the week-ends he promised. I wonder why ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... in-doors and in my big chair nearly all the time. We have had a sharp, dreary winter too, and it has pinch'd me. I am alone most of the time; every week, indeed almost every day, write some—reminiscences, essays, sketches, for the magazines; and read, or rather I should say dawdle over books and papers a good deal—spend half the day ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... mistress of the Ottoman Empire. At a time when our interests required that we should be well represented, and powerfully supported, we had neither an Ambassador nor a fleet in the Mediterranean; and because Lord Ponsonby is Lord Grey's brother-in-law he has been able with impunity to dawdle on months after months at Naples for his pleasure, and leave affairs at Constantinople to be managed or mismanaged by a Charge d'Affaires ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... his time. But between them there was the difference of the nervous temperament and the lymphatic. Travers, with less brain than Sir Peter, had kept his brain constantly active; Sir Peter had allowed his brain to dawdle over old books and lazily delight in letting the hours slip by. Therefore Travers still looked young, alert,—up to his day, up to anything; while Sir Peter, entering that drawing-room, seemed a sort of Rip van Winkle who had slept through the past generation, and looked on the present with eyes ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the cuckoo-clock. Where did it come from? How long had they had it? What a jolly little customer the wee bird was, darting out and darting in with his hurry-call to anyone who would listen! It made a fellow feel ashamed to dawdle at his work. It wouldn't do to let any mere bird get ahead of him—a wooden ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... attractive to these children than they are to ordinary children in ordinary schools in all parts of the country. But they overcame all internal obstacles, went through with all of the monotony and drudgery, and to that extent triumphed over any disposition to shirk or to loaf or to dawdle or to flit ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... snowy peak her smile . . . Strange I Should dawdle near her grace admiringly, When love alarmed and challenged sympathy, Announced in chills of creeping fear ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... miserable pretence to say that the weather keeps the majority at home from church. It is only an excuse. I should have a great deal more respect for them if they would say frankly, 'We would rather sleep, read a novel, dawdle around en deshabille, and gossip.' Half the time when they say it's too stormy to venture out (oh, the heroism of our Christian age!), they should go and thank God for the rain that is providing food for them ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... should be beginning to realize them, Lemuel," declared his sister. "Life is not fun. There is no time to dawdle around with plays, and athletics, and such foolishness. Where are they this minute, ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... the time fixed in advance for her departure this young lady received from Mrs. Touchett a telegram running as follows: "Leave Florence 4th June for Bellaggio, and take you if you have not other views. But can't wait if you dawdle in Rome." The dawdling in Rome was very pleasant, but Isabel had different views, and she let her aunt know she would immediately join her. She told Gilbert Osmond that she had done so, and he replied that, spending many of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... wretch for not having written to you sooner. It seems strange there should remain any pressure of business or hurry of life in this place, where workmen look out of the windows of the house (our house and a fact!); they are repairing nine at a time, and boys swing their buckets and dawdle to the well for water, as if Time couldn't be lounged and coaxed off one's hands!! And yet busy I have been, and every mail has been a scramble. Getting into our house was no joke, attending sales and shops, buying furniture—ditto, ditto—as to paying and receiving ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... Governor of the district everything had been arranged for a drive of a couple hundred miles through some of the prettiest parts of the country from Kuopio to Iisalmi. We were to have a carriage with a hood (a rare honour) and two horses, to dawdle as we liked by the way, and just order our vehicle when and as we wanted it, so that we might really peep into the homes of the people, as well as avail ourselves of the Baron's many kind introductions. But late on the afternoon before that named for leaving, our cicerone ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... on Monday, and returned here yesterday; go away to- morrow. It has been a dreadfully idle life all day long, facendo niente, incessant gossip and dawdle, poor, unprofitable talk, and no rational employment. Brougham was here a little while ago for a week. He, Lord Wellesley, and Lord Anglesey form a discontented triumvirate, and are knit together by the common bond of ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... day. But, even if I never have the luck to do that, in a way it'll make no real difference. I've written her name in my private calendar, and shall always remember it."—She paused a moment. "We got rather near each other somehow, I think. We didn't dawdle or beat about the bush, but went straight along, passed the initial stages of acquaintance in a few hours, and reached that point of friendship where ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... by the immortals. For Scylla is not mortal; moreover she is savage, extreme, rude, cruel and invincible. There is no help for it; your best chance will be to get by her as fast as ever you can, for if you dawdle about her rock while you are putting on your armour, she may catch you with a second cast of her six heads, and snap up another half dozen of your men; so drive your ship past her at full speed, and roar out lustily to Crataiis ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... what he was doing was a thing grandiose, unique, epical; a history-making thing; a thing that would outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes. Yet he kept his head. He did not hurry, nor did he dawdle. Scrut by scrut, he ground slowly but he ground exceeding small. And while he did so he talked wisely and well. He passed from the power-station to a first edition of Leconte de Lisle's "Parnasse Contemporain" that he had picked up for sixpence in Liverpool, and thence ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... precaution a man may take against his friend, that we took in full. We certainly gave him no pretext for refusing to pay us what he promised. We were perfectly upright in our dealings with him. We did not dawdle over his affairs, nor did we shrink from any work to ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... out of a mixture[98] of these and other influences, he has made the first volume almost as little of a story as it could possibly be, while remaining a story at all. Seventy mortal pages, pretty well packed in the standard two-volume edition, which in all contains less than six hundred, dawdle over the not particularly well-told business of Gringoire's interrupted mystery, the arrival of the Flemish ambassadors, and the election of the Pope of Unreason. The vision of Esmeralda lightens the darkness and quickens ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury |
