"Washy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... married O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care he has plenty of money and hes not a marrying man so somebody better get it out of him if I could find out whether he likes me I looked a bit washy of course when I looked close in the handglass powdering a mirror never gives you the expression besides scrooching down on me like that all the time with his big hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat always having to lie down for them better for him put it into ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... know it's all right," he blundered ahead tactlessly—the gleam in her eye should have warned him that he might have omitted that reassurance—"but just the looks of the thing. And he's such a weak and wishy-washy little nonentity!" ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... food, unwholesome food, stagnant water, or drinking large quantities of water at one time, purgative medicines, or it may be associated with blood diseases, lung and intestinal affections, or produced by micro-organisms. Many horses, particularly slack loined, slight, "washy" animals, purge if worked or excited, as may be observed among race horses when taken to a race course. Diarrhoea may also be due to worms, or it may be merely an effort on the part of nature to expel some irritant matter from the bowels or from the ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... hour, every second, or break down. There are others too—many others. No wonder that that idiot of a man in Harley Street talked to me gravely about my heart. No excitement. A quiet life! Bah! Such wishy-washy coffee and ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is a pump like viscount Castlereigh? A. Because it is a slender thing of wood, That up and down its awkward arm doth sway, And coolly spout, and spout, and spout away, In one weak, washy, everlasting flood. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the happy Royal Pair (Whose counterfeit presentments front me there, Inspiring, in young manhood and frank beauty) Will think their Laureate hath fulfilled his duty, His labour of most loyal love, discreetly. Compliments delicate, piled not sickly-sweetly, Like washy WARTON's, nor so loud thrasonical— Like Glorious JOHN's—that they sound half ironical! 'Tis hard indeed for loyal love to hit The medium just 'twixt ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... speeches, Madame's partner would lay down his cards for the sake of pouchong and brandy peaches; Being French and polite, of course, she only said 'Eh bien!' but no doubt thought him a lubber, For a cup of washy tea to break in upon her rubber. At four bells (ten P. M.,) up from the cards and down again at the table, To drink champaigne and eat cold chicken as long as we were able: With very slight variations this was ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... to vanquish his good resolutions. But a good-tempered, generous-hearted young man who farms his own land, has three or four good horses in his stable, a decent cellar of honest port and sherry—"none of your wishy-washy sour stuff in the way of hock or claret," cried Tom Halliday—and a very comfortable balance at his banker's, finds it no easy matter to shake off friends of the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Syd, sir. Of course I'd forgotten it. Got so wishy-washy with so much water, that I can't think quite clear ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... seen too many frauds to be taken in. She isn't a fraud. Neither does she belong to that miserable, wishy-washy, downhill class that sooner or later fetches up in a poorhouse. They say we're all made of dust, but some seem made of mud. You could see she was out of the common; and she's here on account of the wrong she received ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... And yet the boy did love his mother. She was not at all a wise woman, or a clever one; rather silly, indeed, in many things; but she was fond of him. At this period he was young-looking for his age, slight, and rather undersized, with an exceedingly light complexion, a wishy-washy sort of face with no colour in it, unmeaning light eyes, white eyebrows, and ragged-looking light hair with a tawny shade ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... WHY will people inundate their unfortunate victims with such "weak, washy, everlasting floods"? Why will they haul everything out into the open day? Why will they make the Holy of Holies common and unclean? Why will they be so ineffably stupid as not to see that there is that which speech profanes? Why will they lower their drag-nets into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... I perceived through conversation, through examples, and through my own reflections, that the first step in delivering ourselves from the wishy-washy, long-winded, empty epoch, could be taken only by definiteness, precision, and brevity. In the style which had hitherto prevailed, one could not distinguish the commonplace from what was better; since all were brought down to a level with each other. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and shoulders. When she is in "Scorpio" your bowels and belly are in danger, and so on all through your body; so that we might well enough wish the moon were wholly abolished; for the little wishy-washy light she gives to lovers and thieves is not at all a balance for such ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... from the remarks I have previously made it will not be supposed that I think all criticism should be of a flat, neutral tint, or what may be called the washy order. On the contrary, if criticism is not strong it cannot lift a young genius out of the struggling crowd, and it cannot beat down some bumptious impostor. If the critic really believes that ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... of the most nourishing dishes in common use; and there is no doubt but it owes its extraordinary nutritive quality to the Scotch (or Pearl) Barley, which is always used in preparing it.—If the Barley be omitted, the broth will be found to be poor and washy, and will afford little nourishment;—but any of the other ingredients may be retrenched;— even the meat;— without impairing very sensibly the nutritive quality of the Food.—Its flavour and palatableness ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... he must go, and he was cast in due form and replaced by a washy, bay beast as ugly as a mule, with a ewe-neck, rat-tail, and cow- hocks. The Drummer detested that animal, and the best of the Band-horses put back their ears and showed the whites of their eyes at the very sight of him. They knew him for an upstart and no gentleman. I fancy ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... with sheep's eyes. They are a washy blue, with the family white eyelashes (how different to Lord Robert's!). He has the most precise, regulated manner, and never says a word of slang; he ought to have been a young curate, and I can't imagine his spending ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... a strange notion for a grown-up man to get into his head, doesn't it? And yet, boys and girls, I run across some young people even here in America that think if they let Christ into their hearts it will make them sort of "wishy-washy" and "goody-goody," and ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... the ko-ko-nut, eh? Well, now, that is queer. If you'd 'a called it the milk o' the cow-cow-nut, I could have believed it. Hows'ever, it ain't bad, tho' raither wishy-washy. Got no ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... articles in The Morning Post. Their patriotism, their knowledge of human nature, their idealism, and their imagination were restricted to the traditional views of English country gentlemen of the Tory school. Anything outside that range of thought was to them heresy, treason, or wishy-washy sentiment. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... so, if you knew the work it is to set those leaves round," said the mantua-maker. "It takes hours and hours; and the cording and all. And the silk you know, Mrs. Sandford, that costs nowadays. It takes a full yard of the silk, and no washy lining silk, but good stiff dress silk. Some has 'em made of velvet, but to be sure, that would not be suitable for a common stuff like this. It will be very common, Mrs. Sandford, without you have ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... animal, with a blaze on the forehead, high spirited, with a shining coat, and having been a pet, was up to all kind of tricks, but was a general favourite, and a nice horse;—the other was Traveller, a light chesnut, what the hunter would call a washy brute, always eating and never fat;—the Colt, so called from his being young, certainly unequal to such a journey as that on which he was taken;—and Slommy, another aged horse. During the summer, Traveller had had a great discharge from the nose, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... they were not coming to supper they called on their mother, and if she could coax them to stay drank their afternoon coffee with her. Sometimes one or two strangers were asked to coffee, for this household was an old-fashioned one, and gave you good coffee rather than wishy-washy tea. It made a point of honour of a Meringuetorte when strangers came, and of the little chocolate cream cakes Germans call Othellos. But it must not be supposed that one or two strangers constitute a Kaffee-Klatsch, that celebrated form ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Roper only says this to convince himself that he might have forgotten the name—a sort of washy palliation of his Harrisson invention. It brings him within a measurable distance of a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... curious experiments it has appeared that such a mode of life is the healthiest. But at the same time, we have ascertained that the quantity of porter or substantial ale drunk in these regiments does virtually allow many meals, by comparison with the washy tea breakfasts ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... subject and give us the best education they can. They don't try to suit everybody. They try to furnish the best. Library trustees and librarian are in a like case. The silly, the weak, the sloppy, the wishy-washy novel, the sickly love story, the belated tract, the crude hodge-podge of stilted conversation, impossible incident, and moral platitude or moral bosh for children—these are not needed. It is as bad to buy them and circulate them, knowingly, as it would be for our school authorities to install ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts one sadly in mind of what is too truly called ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... appeared, languid and faded as before. Perhaps she had been even prettier than Nettie in her bright days, if any days had ever been bright for Fred Rider's wife. She was fairer, larger, smoother than her sister; but these advantages had lapsed in a general fade, which transformed her colour into washy pinkness, made her figure stoop, and her footsteps drag. She came remonstrating all the way in feeble accents. It was not for her, certainly, that the doctor had taken the trouble to come to the ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... taste; so he naturally had all the gals after him. I was afraid he was going to cut me out, and I was fool enough to—well, I used to hope, when I'd see him so popular in company, that he'd make another choice. And he might—he might have done it—for he was the most wishy-washy chap that ever cocked his eye at a woman; he might, I say, if me an' him hadn't had a regular knock-down-and-drag-out row. He was drinking once, and said more than I could stand about a hoss trade ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... money-maker, the inglorious driver of sweated labourers. If only these two could meet—and agree—there might possibly be some hope for the Dawn of that New World which the War surely came to found and the washy kind of Peace which followed seems to have thrust back again into darkness. True, there are some business men who perceive behind their business a goal, an ideal, in which there is something more than their own personal ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... least, that, like the ordinary in Jonathan Wild, "he preferred punch, the rather as there was nothing against it in Scripture." I should be sorry to believe that Mr. Bowles was fond of negus; it is such a "candid" liquor, so like a wishy-washy compromise between the passion for wine and the propriety of water. But different writers have divers tastes. Judge Blackstone composed his "Commentaries" (he was a poet too in his youth) with a bottle of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... back in a fright when they bang against a great ship; but when they get hold of a little boat like this, how they leap and topple in, as if they made sure of us [here a wave dashed into the boat]. Yes, that's your sort. Come along, swamp a little boat you washy cowards, it's only a woman and a boy. Poor Jim, he'll miss me something, but he'll miss the liquor more; who cares? Let's have ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat |
