"Gabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like "flies in the shambles." Such a soul has GAMBETTA. He is all language. If you were to cut him up in little bits and put each atom under a microscope, you would find in every molecule the text of some proclamation. The genii of syntax and prosody are his guardian angels, and the love of "gabble" is the be-all and the end-all of his political existence. He loves not GARIBALDI. He would have done violence to his grandmother rather than consent to the invitation of the Italian liberator. For short, he calls him "GARRY." ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... comprehension. One glance at his moveless eyes is enough to prove that. They are like pebbles in his head—without cognisance or expression. He mutters the words 'Great Secret' over and over again, and tacks it on to the other phrase of 'No more wars' in a semi-conscious sort of gabble,—this is, of course, the disordered action of the brain working to catch up and ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... whom shall men thyself compare, Since common models fail 'em, Save classic goose of ancient Rome, Or sacred ass of Balaam? The gabble of that wakeful goose Saved Rome from sack of Brennus; The braying of the prophet's ass Betrayed the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Democracy at housekeeping for herself,—we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... wind is not so cold As the bright smile he sees me win, Nor the host's oldest wine so old As our poor gabble, sour and thin. ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... and Totty throned between them. There was a little desultory talk and seeking of places, and then the four elder children, standing round the table, read a chapter, verse for verse. Then followed the recitation of the catechism in that queer, mechanical gabble that Bessie recollected so well. "If you stop to think you are sure to break down," was still the warning. After that Jack said the collect and epistle for the day, and Willie and Tom said the gospel, and the lesser ones said psalms and hymns ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and gabble is built neither house nor stable!" said the Pig. "What can you do to ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... the characters of the play from a French novel, based on an Italian plot, and wove around the story a lot of glittering talk to please the lords and ladies who listened to the silly gabble of their prototypes. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... stories as these are ript up; that would burthen the strongest memory to bear them: and so much the more, because it is impossible to distinguish one from the t'other, when the men and the women that gabble so one among another. And oft-times they spin such course threads of bawdery in their talk, that are enough to spoil a whole web of linnen. And who can tell but that their tattling would last a whole night, for there's hardly one of them ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... said the Cap'n, eagerly, forgetting for the moment the presence of Constable Nute, "those wimmen might gabble a little at you and make threats and things like that—but—but—there isn't anything they can do, you understand!" He winked at Mr. Parrott. "You ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... bravest Spartan Dogges in the world; if they do but once open and spend[151] there gabble, gabble, gabble it will make the Forest ecchoe as if a Ring of Bells were in it; admirably flewd[152], by their eares you would take 'em to be singing boyes; and for Dewlaps they are as bigge as Vintners bags in which they ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... certainly have himself bestowed on it, as it excels the most outrageous pranks of the alliterative age. It is called, "Green-Room Gossip; or, Gravity Gallinipt; A Gallimaufry got up to guile Gymnastical and Gyneocratic Governments; Gathered and Garnished by Gridiron Gabble, Gent., Godson ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... looks as if she'd been callin' on the dressmaker pretty often. Anyhow she looked worried and Olindy Cahoon's dressmakin' gabble is enough to worry anybody. She left a note ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in the Critique des Arts with a pretty compliment to Alice's executive energy, and added 'that it was one of the rare soirees of the season.' He must have been drunk when he wrote it. I played badly—I never can play when they gabble. It was as garrulous as a fish market in front. Enfin! It was over and we telegraphed his reverence the result; from a money standpoint it was ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... courtesy and frankness. Dignified, but reasonably familiar; tenacious when sure of his position, but not hard to persuade or to convince in a cause having merit, I have good reason to be incredulous when I hear persons gabble about the unwillingness of President Wilson to seek counsel or accept advice. For a really great man who must be measurably conscious of his own intellectual power, he has repeatedly done both things in an ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... here upon the floor of Congress in both Houses are the picked men of the nation. You may say what you please about John Morrissey, the gambler, &c.; he was head and shoulders above the rank and file of his constituency. The world may gabble ever so much about members of Congress being corrupt and being bought and sold; they are as a rule head and shoulders among the great majority who compose their State governments. There is no doubt about it. Therefore I ask of you, as representative ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... obstetrics. Even Dr. Sturgeon, pioneering bravely, is unable to get beyond a sentimental and trivial view of the thing he vivisects, and so his book is no more than a compendium of mush. His very description of the act of kissing is made up of sonorous gabble about heaving bosoms, red lips, electric sparks and such-like imaginings. What reason have we for believing, as he says, that the lungs are "strongly expanded" during the act? My own casual observation ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... to the theatres; the playbills, however, are not seductive. If you go in, you will find the house nearly empty; the actors gabble their parts with as little action as possible. You see they are bored, and they bore us. Sometimes when some actor, naturally comic, says or does something funny, the audience laughs, and then suddenly leaves off and looks more serious than before. Laughter ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... An hysterical gabble broke the contemplation. Waddling up from behind was a tame goose. The shocking thing was too fat and slow to keep itself clean—its head snubbed, its voice crazily pitched, its wings gone back to a rudiment, its huge food-apparatus sagging to the ground, straining to lay itself against ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... lily-shaped cups of silver, and flagons and tankards of solid gold. The music rises higher, and the revelry breaks out into wilder transport, and the wine has flushed the cheek and touched the brain, and louder than all other voices are the hiccough of the inebriates, the gabble of fools, and the song of ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... the boy thought he was too good to sit and listen to such gabble. "Now listen to me, you crows!" said he. "I think you ought to be ashamed of yourselves to talk about all your wickedness. I have lived amongst wild geese for three weeks, and of them I have never heard or seen anything but good. You must ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... cast the first stone! There was a tendency also among both monks and nuns to slip out before the end of the service on any good or bad excuse: they had to see after the dinner or the guest-house, their gardens needed weeding, or they did not feel well. But the most common fault of all was to gabble through the services as quickly as they could in order to get them over. They left out the syllables at the beginning and end of words, they omitted the dipsalma or pause between two verses, so that one side of the choir ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... the rattle and clash of the dice-box in the distant parlor, reached his ear amidst the laughter and gabble of the common room. The night was a hard one in the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and was for ever jabbering at me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an idea, I believe, that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the proper use of speech. He called it "Big Thinks" to distinguish it from "Little Thinks," the sane every-day interests of life. If ever I made a remark he did not understand, he would ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... decaitful bi th' hauf, an' when aw come to think on it, aw remember he didn't behave just as aw could ha' liked him if he'd just been wed to me, th' first day they wor wed, for he'd hardly a word to say to awr Emma at dinner time, but he could gabble fast enuff to that lass o' Amos's, an' if shoo wor a child o' mine aw'd awther tak' some o' that consait aght on her or else aw'd tak' ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... see you." Ann came suddenly down to earth, and tried to focus her attention on. Miss Caroline's hospitable gabble. "Such a lot of people here this afternoon, too.... I'm so pleased. And a beautiful day, isn't it? Even Mr. Coventry has been tempted out of his shell. He'll be quite a social acquisition to the neighbourhood ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... silence. He was eating up de Spain with his eyes, and de Spain not only ached to hear him speak but was resolved to make him. Sandusky had stood motionless from the instant he entered the room. He knew all about the preliminary gabble of a fight and took no interest in it. He did not know all about de Spain, and being about to face his bullets he had prudence enough to wonder whether the man could have brought a reputation to Sleepy Cat without having done something to earn it. What Sandusky was sensibly intent ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... ceased offering her advice and sympathy she felt it a distinct relief. She had not the remotest idea that she was become the centre of an awe-stricken sympathy, that her little world had fallen back and stood gaping at her and hers as they might at one abnormally stricken: if their gabble ceased very suddenly and no more idlers came in for a chat by the fireside she was not the one to fret; she had always plenty to do without idle women hindering her, and, now the girl had her sick fit on her, all the work fell to ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... hopes that Charles Edward may die; disconnected phrases, run into each other without so much as a comma or a full stop (since I have had to punctuate my translation, at least partially, to make it intelligible); the excited, unconsecutive, unceasing, discursive, reiterating gabble of hysteria, eager, vague, impotent, thoughts suddenly vanishing and as suddenly coming to a dead stop; everything rattled off as if between two sobs or two convulsions. Did Alfieri enjoy receiving letters ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... on the walls, while Vesuvius was brooding its fiery conspiracy under their feet, bring the scene nearer home to us than the letter of Pliny, and deepen the tragedy by their trifling contrast, like the grave-diggers' unseemly gabble in Hamlet. Perhaps our judgment of history is made sounder, and our view of it more lifelike, when we are so constantly reminded how the little things of life assert their place alongside the great ones, and how healthy the constitution ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... air for a quarter of an hour's spell and made their announcement, and then the copper helmets were clapped into place again, and once more like a pair of uncouth sea monsters they slowly and clumsily faded away into the depths. A gabble of excited Italian kept pace to the turning of the air-pumps, and of that language Kettle knew barely a score of words. Practically these people might have weaved any kind of plot noisily and under his very ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... "Listen to 'em gabble like a pack of old women," laughed Jack, as the friendly argument about the crackling ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... murmur. Evidently he knew what he was saying so well that he did not need even to think about it, for his eyes wandered over his folded hands as though in methodical search for somebody. They reached Form I, and Robert, who saw them coming, broke instinctively into a panic-stricken gabble. Of all the poems which Christine had read aloud to him, Casablanca was the only one he could remember, and he had got as far as "whence all but he had fled" before he saw that it was of no good. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... in Devon as the "Wisk," "Yesk," "Yeth," or "Heath Hounds"; in Wales as the "Cwn Annwn" or "Cyn y Wybr"; in Cornwall as the "Devil and his Dandy-Dogs"; and in the neighbourhood of Leeds as the "Gabble Retchets." They are common all over the Continent. In appearance they are usually described as monstrous, human-headed dogs, black, with fiery eyes and teeth, and sprinkled all over with blood. They make a great howling noise, which is very shrill and mournful, and appear ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... argent, Would undertake to do the work that Mr. Speaker does— With nobody to help him except the trembling Sergeant, While still begin and never end the shout and scream and buzz? Oh, never any where, save in desert groves Brazilian, Was ever heard such endless and aimless gabble yet. For there the tribes of monkeys to the number of a million, Screech and chatter without ceasing, from the sunrise to the set. Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! order! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... I remember with a strange feeling that there are people who, of their free choice, spend day and night in cities, who throng to the gabble of drawing-rooms, make festival in public eating- houses, sweat in the glare of the theatre. They call it life; they call it enjoyment. Why, so it is, for them; they are so made. The folly is mine, to wonder that they ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... that the so-called 'poetical' trick of confusedly heaping words together regardless of meaning, should so bewilder men and deprive them of all wise and sober judgment! By my faith! ... I would as soon listen to the gabble of geese in a farmyard as to the silly glibness of such inflated twaddle, such mawkish sentiment, such turgid ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... bodily into half a quarter of it—would be swallowed up like a mouthful, and never seen again! Castle Warlock was twice as old—that was something! but why had not Lady Joan told him hundreds of stories about Cairncarque, instead of letting him gabble on about their little place? But she could not love her castle as he did his, for she had no such father in it! That must be what made the difference! That was why she did not care to talk about it! Was he actually going to see her again? and would she be to him the same as before? For him, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... right. That's over. Now, then, I'm going to gabble for five minutes gaily. [Settling herself comfortably in an armchair.] What jolly flowers you've got there! What have you been doing with yourself? Amos took me to the Caffe Quadri yesterday to late breakfast, to cheer me up. Oh, I've something to ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... flambeau of bog-fir, all streaming down the mountain sides, along the roads, or across the fields, and settling at last into one broad sheet of fire. Many a loud laugh might then be heard ringing the night echo into reverberation; mirthful was the gabble in hard guttural Irish; and now and then a song from some one whose potations had been, rather copious, would rise on the night-breeze, to which a chorus was subjoined by a dozen voices ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... interview he was incessantly busy among his fellow-soldiers. At length we placed him on the ground before us, and told him that he might play the part of spokesman for the whole. Tete Rouge was delighted, and we soon had the satisfaction of seeing him talk and gabble at such a rate that the torrent of questions was in a great measure diverted from us. A little while after, to our amazement, we saw a large cannon with four horses come lumbering up behind the crowd; ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... two men and a nurse, who said they were the father, the uncle, and the aunt of it, carried about to get money by showing it, by reason it was so strange a creature. It was, as to all the rest, of a common form, and could stand upon its feet; could go and gabble much like other children of the same age; it had never as yet taken any other nourishment but from the nurse's breasts, and what, in my presence, they tried to put into the mouth of it, it only chewed a little and spat it out again without swallowing; the cry of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Babylonish dialect, Which learned pedants much affect; It was a parti-color'd dress Of patch'd and piebald languages: 'Twas English cut on Greek and Latin, Like fustian heretofore on satin. It had an odd promiscuous tone, As if h' had talk'd three parts in one; Which made some think, when he did gabble, Th' had heard three laborers of Babel; Or Cerberus himself pronounce A leash of languages at once. This he as volubly would vent As if his stock would ne'er be spent: And truly, to support that ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... unprofitable.' Hamlet, act i. sc. 2. See ante, iii. 350, where Boswell is reproached by Johnson with 'bringing in gabble,' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell |
