"Puling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one bitterly cold day in February at the end of a long row of prisoners, waiting their turn to appear before the magistrate, stood the woman wretched and ill, with a puling bit of mortality in ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... she may be mistaken. But remaining to tend him, before long the ringing cough, a single cough, is repeated again and again; the patient is roused, and then a new symptom is remarked; the sound of his voice is changed; puling, and as if the throat were swelled, it corresponds ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... misled into discovering in Whitman "the poet of democracy." Others maintain that he is the greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is "cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse elements which ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... befallen me! To sail the seas in hot pursuit of one's enemies, or in search of further conquest,—to feel the very wind and sun beating up the blood in one's veins,—to live the life of a man—a true man! . . . in all the pride and worth of strength, and invincible vigor!—how much better than the puling, feeble, sickly existence, led by the majority of men to-day! I dwell apart from them as much as I can,—I steep my mind and body in the joys of Nature, and the free fresh air,—but often I feel that the old days of the heroes must have been best,—when Gorm the Bold ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... think of that, Sir Captain? How would you like to be saddled with a young wolf- hound cub like that—Sorley Boy's son he is, no other, on my life—that I was fool enough to take wardship of when he was a puling puppy and his father an honest man? What do you think of that? Curse the whole ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... for instance, and yet more notably in The Last Ride Together) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental. There is no talk, among his lovers, of "blighted hearts," no whining and puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, and no pretence of despair. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... reckon that would come first. Course it wouldn't make a hit with a man to have a woman puling around all ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... was in the kitchen some half hour agone, conveying her mistress a warm draught, or some such puling diet," said the page. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still to make The morning precious: ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... I think it is probable she cried for a plaything, and they have given her a husband. Well, well, well, the puling chit shall not be deprived of her plaything: 'tis only exchanging London dolls for American babies.—Apropos, of babies, have you heard what Mrs. Affable's high-flying notions of delicacy ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... when to tell the truth, which, with him, was always. He could not stand anything like affectation, or what people were calling aestheticism and decadence. To him, literature was literature and art was art, and not puling sentiment, affected posturing, lilies and sunflowers. The National Observer was the housetop from which he shouted for all who passed to hear that it did not matter twopence what the dabbler wanted to express if he could not express it, ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the Chief for the audience. Take him for a frivolous public. Ah, my Pippo!" (Agostino laughed aside to him). "Let us lead off with a lighter piece; a trifle-tra-la-la! and then let the frisky piccolo be drowned in deep organ notes, as on some occasions in history the people overrun certain puling characters. But that, I confess, is an illustration altogether out of place, and I'll simply jot it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... course, be the big thrill in it—Osborn. It would be wonderful to have him coming home to her successful little dinners every evening. People didn't want a great deal, after all; all the discontented, puling, peevish, wanting people one met must be great fools; they had made their beds and made them wrong; the great thing, the simple secret, was to make them right. A husband and wife must pull together, in everything. Pulling together ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... how now, I say? What, you puling, peevish thing, you untoward baggage, will you not be ruled by your father? Have I taken care to bring you up to this, and will you do as you list? Away, I say; hang, starve, beg; begone, pack, I say; out of my sight! Thou never gettest pennyworth of my goods for this. Think ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... offenders were only admonished. In Wareham, in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe" to protect his foot—for doing this piece of heavy work on the Lord's Day, was ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... very skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, a thing ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Douglas, coldly, indicating with his finger the trampled cloth, "is not the banner of Scotland, but only that of the Seneschal Stewarts. The King of Scots is but a puling brat, and they who usurp his name are murderous hounds whose necks I shall presently stretch with the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young 20 wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the lions; when you fasted, it was presently after 25 dinner; when you looked sadly, it was for want of money: and now you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that, when ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle. As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:—"I had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... to his own instincts in Africa, develops the Southern sociology to a degree which casts entirely into pitiable pettiness the puling despotism of the calaboose and slave market. Witness Dahomey, where all lives, all fortunes, all persons, are cooerdinated in one perfect 'system' of subjugation to one sable Jefferson Davis Gezo, who is de jure divino husband by a sublime ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... desert air, 160 Or to my trembling side unnerved sink down, Palsied, forsooth, by Candour's half-made frown? When Justice bids me on, shall I delay Because insipid Candour bars my way? When she, of all alike the puling friend, Would disappoint my satire's noblest end; When she to villains would a sanction give, And shelter those who are not fit to live; When she would screen the guilty from a blush, And bids me spare whom Reason bids me crush, 170 All leagues with Candour proudly ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... R) If the bonds gall you so much, break them. Don't spend your breath in this puling talk. If you are tired of me, go! As far as I am concerned, I set you free. Find some other woman, if you can, who will be ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... merged in the Grecian Empire. The Roman Empire came last. [How Law can be considered to be the characteristic of all or any part of this period, I am at a loss to discover. Neither do I see any indication of puling Infancy here.] These four great Empires of the world had run their course when our SAVIOUR CHRIST was born. GOD sent His own Eternal SON into the world; and lo, a change passed over the whole fabric of the world's polity. The old forms of social life became, as it were, dissolved; or rather, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... laughed, and Garrison felt repulsion fingering his heart. Then the former trainer shot out a clawing, ravenous hand. "I want that money—want it quick!" he spat, taking a step forward. "You want hatred, eh? Well, hatred you'll have, boy. Hatred that I've always given you, you miserable, puling, lily-livered ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... editorial rooms of the Daily News. He would say that the imperishable crowns won by the heroes of Fox's "Book of Martyrs" were nothing to what he, a stanch Republican partisan, earned by enduring and associating daily with the piping, puling independents who infested that "ranch." He said that he expected a place high up in the dictionary of latter-day saints and in the encyclopedia of nineteenth-century tribulations, because of the Christian ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... What friends have you got anywhere to take your side? If you'd made friends with me, my fine lady, you'd have found it good for yourself; but you've chosen to make me your enemy, and I'll make him your enemy. You know, as well as I do, he can't hear the sight of your long, puling face." ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... mother, on her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained much of his solemn song, could not only read currently, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... extreme humor was this same Dick, whom he studied with the greatest care for points worthy his humorous appreciation. Dick, in addition to his genuinely lively mental interests, was a most romantic person on one side, a most puling and complaining soul on the other. As a newspaper artist I believe he was only a fairly respectable craftsman, if so much, whereas Peter was much better, although he deferred to Dick in the most persuasive manner and seemed to believe at times, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Bull style of music. I delight in Handel's Allegro and Penseroso. Do you know the fine pompous joyous chorus of 'These pleasures, Mirth, if thou canst give, etc.'? Handel certainly does in music what old Bacon desires in his Essay on Masques, 'Let the songs be loud and cheerful, not puling, etc.' One might think the Water music ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... It differs from that of Measure for Measure in the fact that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought about as ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... divert even from her beautiful face the glance of her enraptured beholders. If we are to gain an approximate idea of a figure so perfect, we must try to conceive what might be the result of a supreme effort of nature to show by comparison to the most artistic of her people just what puling infants they were in their attempts to create forms of true ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a useful or rational man. It cannot claim the slightest share in any one of the comforts ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... may devour my limbs; That I may die, like the late puling Francis[5], Under the barber's hands, imposthumes choak me,— If while alive, I cease to chew their ruin; Alphonso Corso, Grillon, priest, together: To hang them in effigy,—nay, to tread, Drag, stamp, and grind them, after they are ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... thousand crimes and debaucheries—and old Colonel Rumbald; whose fate, I must allow, caused me a little sorrow (even though he had flung a sharp cleaver at my head), for he was very much more of a man than that puling treacherous hound my Lord Howard, who was taken hiding in his shirt, up his own chimney, and turned traitor to his friends. Holloway too—a merchant of Bristol, and a friend of Mr. Ferguson—was executed, and several ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... from the dim recesses of a sanctuary at her son, her Jean, clad in sacerdotal vestments, lifting the monstrance in the vaulted choir censed by the beating wings of half-seen Cherubim. And she would tremble awestruck as if she were the mother of a god, this poor sick work-woman whose puling child lay beside her drooping in the poisoned air of ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... whose multitude darkens the light of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forming a vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men and their supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since we heard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voice drowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yet they alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by the deranged of former generations appear ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... againe. No shrewish teares shall fill our eye When the sword-hilt's in our hand; Heart-whole we'll part and no whit sighe For the fayrest of the land; Let piping swaine, and craven wight, Thus weepe and puling crye, Our business is like men to fight, And hero-like ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... broken down. And the reason of it all? That's the puzzle. She has her meals, her liberty, a good house to live in, and good clothes to wear, as usual. A while since that sufficed to keep her handsome and cheery, and there she sits now a poor, little, pale, puling chit enough. Provoking! Then comes the question, What is to be done? I suppose I must send for advice. Will ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Berber muleteers of El Arbi bel Hadj ben Haidah looked with great scorn upon these Bedouins, and their contempt was reciprocated. In the eyes of the Berbers these men were outcasts and "eaters of sand," and in the eyes of the Bedouins the muleteers were puling, town-bred slaves, who dared not say their right hands were ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... temptation to gratify your desire and shock you—a far greater temptation than to be repentant and reactionary. Only, it occurs to me that this place and time are supposed to be devoted to a lecture by Henry Frazer on his opinions about contemporary drama. It is in no sense to be given to the puling defense of a martyr, nor to the sensational self-advertisement of either myself or any of you. I have no intention of devoting any part of my lecture, aside from these introductory adumbrations, to the astonishing number of new friends whose ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... that old Liz suddenly ceased her gesticulations, lifted her black brows in unutterable surprise, opened her mouth, and became a listening statue? Did she too recognise tones which recalled other days—and the puling cries of infancy? It might have been so. Certain it is that when the shout was repeated she broke down in an effort to reply, and burst into mingled laughter and tears, at the same time waving her free ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... miserably will they whine through squeaking organs; their big voices turned into puling pity-begging lamentations! their now-offensive paws, how helpless then!—their now-erect necks then denying support to their aching heads; those globes of mischief dropping upon their quaking shoulders. Then what wry faces ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... not fourty yeares agoe I lay A puling Infant in my Nurse's arms: Not fourty daies agoe two Daughters gay Did blesse my ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... go. You are too young—to be fettered—I should have thought of it! Do not communicate with me for at least a year: it is imperative. Do not tell me your plans. If we part, we do part. I have vowed a vow not to further obstruct the course you had decided on before you knew me and my puling ways; and by Heaven's help I'll keep that vow. . . . Now go. These are the parting ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... that maiden better than Cerberus does Hades. But may Hades swallow him, for all that! I will have nothing to do with him. He is too bony. But where shall I begin in this case? A dreadful thing has happened. If he has broken the bones of such a man as Croton, beyond a doubt the soul of Vinicius is puling above that cursed house now, awaiting his burial. By Castor! but he is a patrician, a friend of Caesar, a relative of Petronius, a man known in all Rome, a military tribune. His death cannot pass without punishment. Suppose I were to go to the pretorian camp, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a puling, miserable failure!" ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, expressed a warm wish that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amelie was ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... disembodied spirits can take an interest in things earthly, it will be no small addition to his present state of bliss to discover almost the realization of suggestions made sixty years ago, before the Browns of this period were conceived, and while the Rolphs were puling infants. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy overcoat buttoned ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... comprehend nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... corrected this point of view. The father and mother who were able to send six sturdy, native-born sons to the conflict were regarded as benefactors of the nation. But these six sturdy sons had been, some twenty years before, six "puling infants," viewed with gloomy disapproval by the Malthusian bachelor. If the strength of the nation lies in its men and women there is only one way to increase it. Before the war it was thought that a simpler and easier method of increase could ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... behind him on the bank of the brook. Sam, for his part, turned upon Dick with a ferocious oath, and a fresh demand for the money. Of the whining, puling, weeping Raven they took no notice whatever. No notice! Ah, ha, Messrs. Long Legs and Fiery Nose, you are making the mistake of ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... such apprehensions of its dying that it had been baptized in a great hurry, "Henry Leaf Ascott," according to the mother's desire, which in her critical position nobody dared to thwart. Even at the end of fourteen days the "son and heir" was still a puling, sickly, yellow-faced baby. But to the mother ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... nowadays to a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's complaint ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... done? Speak up, speak up!—for this is no place, I trow, For the puling people on virtue fed. So speak, or prepare to go." But the Flea flew free from the pincers' grip, and uttered a single phrase— "I have lived on blood, as a gentleman should, and that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... possible that the "paralytic puling" may have been suggested by the "placid purring" of previous satirists. In March, 1814, his sister Augusta was trying hard to persuade Byron, as he ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... strokes of the lone woodcutter, or by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heavens. Here shall you see no enemies but winter and rough weather. And if a pang comes to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger. All the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of these woods, fall away from you like a garment. And if perchance you come forth upon an eminence, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... knocked, she heard two or three windows thrown up in neighbouring houses, from which the bodies of unkempt women projected, to cast interested glances in Mavis's direction. As she waited, she could hear the faint puling of a baby within the house. Next, she was conscious that a lath of a Venetian blind was pulled aside and that someone was spying upon her from the aperture. She waited further, the while two of the curious women who leaned from the windows were loudly ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... know I can never be anything to you but a sort of puling weakling, who must be nursed, and petted, and cared for. I know," he went on, his words coming with a rush in the height of his protesting passion, "if your thoughts, your secret thoughts and feelings, were put into words, I know what they would ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... and the one[13] on the death of his mother have, perhaps, never been surpassed. Here is no affectation of sentimentality, no morbid and puling complaints, but the dignified and chastened expression of sorrow, which a mind, constituted as Johnson's, must have experienced on the departure of a mother. A heart, tender and susceptible of pathetic emotion, as his was, must have deeply felt, how dreary it is to walk downward to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... the shade of lingering disgust that had possessed him when he had taken the child to church disappeared and a feeling of natural affection took its place. However much the daughter had sinned, the infant was not to blame. It was a helpless, puling, tender thing, demanding his sympathy and his love. Gerhardt felt his heart go out to the little child, and yet he could not yield his ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... no puling prayer, Fedalma—ask No balm of pardon that may soothe my soul For others' bleeding wounds: I am not come To say, "Forgive me:" you must not forgive, For you must see me ever as I am— ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... would be great festivities in the Glen . . . perhaps he would be asked to propose the bride's health . . . It really seemed a providence that Saunderson should come along the road when he was playing the fool like a puling boy, for if any man could give a douche to love-sickness it was the minister ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... tributes, and your courts, and your body-guards! Bah! You'd have a gibbet if you could, wouldn't you? You with your rebellion and your tinpot honours! A puling baby could conspire as well as you. And all the world laughing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... laid at your feet my hand, my heart and my flourishing business, and thus—thus I am supplanted by that puling saint, George Jeffreys. A-ha! [Gnaws ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... moisture of the Prophet did him credit at that painful period of his life, it must be allowed that his behaviour on being formally introduced into London Society showed no puling regret, no backward longings after echoing colleges, lost dons and the scouts that are no more. He was quite at his ease, and displayed none of the high-pitched contempt of Piccadilly that is often so amusingly ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... open unto my love, Doe more then loving lynes or words can doe. My letters have bin answerd with disdayne: Her father I have mov'd to gayne my love, But he is frosty in my fervent suite; And now perforce I will obtayne her love Or ease her puling hatred by revenge. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... puling whimper. Sometimes his terror rose to the throat and his entreaties became shrieks. He died a dozen deaths while his foe watched him with a chill stillness more menacing than ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor, and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, "What next?" Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten, the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and drinking which in spite of the ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... about in a way which made it seem wonderful that wood and iron could hold together. It wasn't exactly under such circumstances that the wife even of a boatswain's mate would have chosen to bring a puling infant into the world. The doctor thought that mother would have died, and, as there was no cow on board, that I should have shared her fate, but she got through it and nursed me, and I throve amazingly, so that in six months I was as big as most children ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... and the evil are come to by those animals which are not yet depraved. You, too, have laid down the same position, and these are your own words. How many errors are there in them! For by reference to which kind of pleasure will a puling infant judge of the chief good; pleasure in stability or pleasure in motion?—since, if the gods so will, we are learning how to speak from Epicurus. If it is from pleasure as a state, then certainly nature desires to be ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... arose at the words. The Wangoni did not entirely believe the explanation; and to further their doubts there now arose from the inside of the huts the puling wail of infants which the mothers had not been entirely ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... had gone back thirty generations in as many seconds. Thus might one of the daughters of Boadicea have looked whilst guiding her mother's chariot against the Roman phalanx. Resting on one knee, with a revolver in each hand, she seemed no puling mate for the gallant man who ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... hunted buck along the corridor. He whipped his arms around the lady and kissed her passionately, and then flung on his knees and held out his arms. She put the something in white into them and there was a little puling cry. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... out of the shop, scarcely heeding the voice of Mr. Mossrose, who said, "I'll take forty per shent" (and went back to his duty cursing himself for a soft-hearted fool for giving up so much of his rights to a puling woman). Morgiana, I say, tottered out of the shop, and went up Conduit Street, weeping, weeping with all her eyes. She was quite faint, for she had taken nothing that morning but the glass of water which the pastry-cook in the Strand had given her, and was forced to ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... principle; but if he were a Christian—nay, a man—his heart and head too would tell him that the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever—and that Leigh Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture Christopher North in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods. Mr. Hunt's London Journal, may dear James, is not only beyond all comparison, but out of all sight, the most entertaining and instructive of all the cheap ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... tyranny on republican cards. So his head settled it: as for his heart,—his neighbors' houses were in ashes, burned by the Yankees; his son lay dead at Manassas. He died to keep them back, didn't he? "Geordy boy," he used to call him,—worth a dozen puling girls: since he died, the old man had never named his name. Scofield was a Rebel in every bitter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of literary tasks and the utmost test, where it is successfully encountered, of nobility,—the practice, namely, of self- revelation and self-delineation. To talk much about oneself with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of indecent familiarity, no puling and no posing,—the shores of the sea of literature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those who have adventured on this dangerous attempt. But a criticism of Stevenson is happy in this, that from the writer ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... sure it was a part of Schiller's design to represent in Carlos a process of evolution. Under the influence of manly friendship the puling sentimentalist was to have his fiber toughened into the stuff that great men are made of; and so it was quite in order that he should appear at first as a weakling. But he is too much of a weakling, and the reason ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... fond mother," said D'Aulney, resuming his walk; "but, there are few husbands who choose to be neglected for a puling infant." ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... one other left of whom I must say something here, and more immediately. The poor, puling little babe, born in misery and ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... fruits, the flowers, the trees, Arise in due succession; all things speak Peace, harmony and love.... Is Mother Earth A step-dame to her numerous sons, who earn Her unshared gifts with unremitting toil; A mother only to those puling babes Who, nursed in ease and luxury, make men The playthings of their babyhood, and mar, In self-important childishness, that peace Which men ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Whose son he was she never knew, and what his name was she had never heard. But she had fixed and done for him since he was a baby, and no mother could have loved a son more than she had loved her Paul. What a poor, puling little one he was, and how the neighbors used to shake their heads ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... humour, and will meet your jest. She should be one about my Katherine's age; But not so old, by some ten years, in gravity. One that would meet my mirth, sometimes outrun it; No puling, pining moppet, as you said, Nor moping maid, that I must still be teaching The freedoms of a wife all her life after: But one, that, having worn the chain before, (And worn it lightly, as report gave out,) Enfranchised from it by her poor fool's death, Took it not so to heart that ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Behaver in the meeting hous. Such as Smiling and Larfing and Intiseing others to the Same Evil. Such as Larfing or Smiling or puling the hair of his nayber Benoni Simkins in the time of Publick Worship. Such as throwing Sister Penticost Perkins on the Ice, it being Saboth day, between the meeting hous and his plaes ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... carter is judged worthy to beget; a male child to uprear in the traditions of his house, to add, an he might, his share to the glory of it. A son to serve Rome as his fathers served. And what was born to me? A puling fool, not worthy even to breed her kind into the world. Were she blessed with wit, she might mate with one worthy of her blood and keep her name thus from complete extinction. As it is—what man would have her ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... exclaimed Catiline, "this puling love-sick girl, this timorous, repentant—I had nearly called thee—maiden! Why, thou fool, what would'st thou with the man farther? Dost ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... is black, In puling prose and rhyme, Talk hatefully of love, and tack Hypocrisy to crime; Who smile and smite, engross the gorge Or impotently frown; And call us "rebels" with King George, As if they wore ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... you yourself once did dreadful execution among driven grouse in a gale of wind with No. 8 shot, which you had brought out by mistake. You may object that you never, as a matter of fact, did this execution, never having even shot at all with No. 8. Tush! you are puling. If you are going to let a conscientious accuracy stand in your way like this, you had better become dumb when sporting talk is flying about. Of course you must not exaggerate too much. Only bumptious fools do that, and they are called liars for their pains. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... Lancaster, WERE HANGED FOR BEING EGYPTIANS.' They were, in fact, gypsies, or had been consorting with gypsies, and they suffered under 5 Eliz. c. 20. In 1783 this statute was abolished, and was even considered "a law of excessive severity." For even a hundred years ago "the puling cant of sickly humanitarianism" was making itself heard to the injury of our sturdy old English legislation. To be killed by a poet is now an unusual fate, but the St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, register (1598) mentions how "Gabriel Spencer, ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... my thoughts. There are no gods! There is no rational guidance of the universe. It has arisen self-evolved, by chance; and if a god created it, he laid down eternal laws and has left them to govern its course without mercy or grace, and without troubling himself about the puling of men who creep about on the face of the earth like the ants on that of a pumpkin. And well for us that it should be so! Better a thousand times is it to be the servant of an iron law, than the slave of a capricious master who takes a malignant and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... two Sonnets on * * *. I never wrote but one sonnet before, and that was not in earnest, and many years ago, as an exercise—and I will never write another. They are the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions. I detest the Petrarch so much[104], that I would not be the man even to have obtained his Laura, which the metaphysical, whining ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... preacher's keep it's only fair that I should get some of the good that comes to him hereafter; that's how it looks to me; so I don't trouble my head much about the ins and the outs of getting saved or damned. I've never puled in this world, thank God, and let come what will, I ain't going to begin puling in the next. But to go back to whar I started from, it all makes in the end for that pretty little chap over yonder in the dining-room. Rather puny for his years now, but as sound as a nut, and he'll grow, he'll ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... I suppe vpon my selfe, And so shall sterue with Feeding: come, let's go, Leaue this faint-puling, and lament as I do, In Anger, Iuno-like: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the fault of a woman, I might have been wearing it now? You start with incredulity. I say, why not? Had there been a gallant chief to lead my countrymen, instead or puling knaves who bent the knee to King Richard II., they might have been freemen; had there been a resolute leader to meet the murderous ruffian Oliver Cromwell, we should have shaken off the English for ever. But there was no Barry ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... just made the rounds of the tents outside, and he was marvelling. There were men who had fought bravely, who had stood wounds and the surgeon's knife without a murmur; who, weakened and demoralized by fever now, were weak and puling of spirit, and sly and thievish; who would steal the food of the very comrades for whom a little while before they had risked their lives—men who in a fortnight had fallen from a high plane of life to ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... say!" and Antoine brought his fist heavily down on the table. "Next thing you will be begging that we take her. Since the good Lord in His mercy has refrained from giving us any mouths to feed, we will not fly in His face for those who do not concern us. And the puling thing would die on the journey and have to be left behind to feed the wolves. Come! ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... beastly flesh, and the other, as it seemed to me, the iron lamp in which a sacred spirit burned unceasingly, purifying with its glowing flame the human tabernacle. Then Messer Simone gave a short laugh, and said, mockingly, that such stay-at-home tactics were well enough for puling fellows that liked to lie snug behind city walls and write puling sonnets, and would rather be busy with such petty business than risk their fine skins in ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... weep and pluck their beards in pretended sorrow when in the throes of their commercial emotion. If paid enough money they do not hesitate to use the onion freely to produce the real thing in tears. Next followed a dozen of mere puling mutes, of no caste or distinction whatever but that lent by a big brass badge on the breast of each. Then came four rickety carriages of the Columbus era; they hadn't a soul in them, but their cloth upholstered seats had been whitewashed with white lead and ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... with her arms stretched out and, as she did so, his heart was strangely stirred within him by a little puling cry. ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... won! I've solved the problem that gives man immortality! All the epochs that have existed since God first formed the world are mine to play with! I have seen myself as a puling infant, and as a greybeard. I have made myself immortal, because, with this machine, I can set back the clock of time. I have found a land where I am ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... shrieked once, wildly, beseeching someone to stop them, but no man paid any attention to her cry. They sat on their horses, silent, tense, grim, and she settled into a coma of terror, an icy paralysis gripping her. She heard her father muttering incoherently at her side, droning and puling something over and over in a wailing monotone—she caught it after a while; he was calling upon his God—in an hour that could not have been were it not for his own ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... one to the other, and putting her hand on Robbie's fair curls, almost as if she were doing him an injustice to say it. "Yes, I think every one would say Elsie was the bonnier baby. Robbie was but a puling, pasty-faced little thing, thin and miserable, not a crowing, bright little thing like the others. He wanted a deal o' care, did Robbie, an' I will say ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... paradise, See aldermanic banquets rise— And though the duns around you troop, Still float in seas of turtle soup. I here forsake the tuneful trade, Where none but lordlings now are paid, Or where some northern rogue sits puling, (The curse of universal schooling)— A ploughman to his country lost, An author to his printer's cost— A slave to every man who'll buy him, A knave to every man who'll try him— Yet let him take the pen, at once The laurel gathers round ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... Wacousta, chafing with the recollection, "wherefore do I, like a vain and puling schoolboy, enter into this abasing contrast of personal advantages? The proud eagle soars not more above the craven kite, than did my soul, in all that was manly and generous, above that of yon false governor; ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... been so long?" It was as if she implied that these minutes without him were an eternity of ennui. He grew more and more conceited. He was already despising Don Juan as a puling boy. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... 'But I would fain be puny and puling, to have the clear heart that once I had. Oh, hear me! hear ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by way of amending his errors, and bringing back this daring innovator to sober history, that it has been thought fit to alter the play of Lear for the stage, as they have altered Romeo and Juliet: they have converted the seraph-like Cordelia into a puling love heroine, and sent her off victorious at the end of the play—exit with drums and colors flying—to be married to Edgar. Now any thing more absurd, more discordant with all our previous impressions, and with the characters as unfolded to us, can hardly be imagined. "I cannot conceive," ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... said firmly, as he seemed to shake himself together, "I see it now. It's all right, Miss Linton; and it's better to be a brick of a boy than a weak, puling noodle of a ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... their caps and many-colored finery. There are smartly-arrayed young girls, chatting merrily with the swains at their side. Unruly children scamper, barefooted and bareheaded, around and under the tables. Puling infants and barking dogs add their discord to the din and confusion. It is a scene one is not apt ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... seaman died, and was reported to them, they exclaimed: "Poor fellow! bring me his bag, and mind everything belonging to him is put into it." This they considered their perquisite. Surely this is wrong and robbery! Ah, Mr. Hume! why were you a puling, helpless babe at that time? Had you been a man and known it, you would have called for reformation ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... times took refuge from his thoughts in sudden action, shaking this folly off with fierce impatience, heaping abusive epithets upon his own head, arraigning himself as a drivelling sentimentalist; and what shame could equal that of a puling sentimentality? ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson |
