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More "Drivel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to write a ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... you want?" Cappy shrilled impatiently. "Cut out this infernal drivel and get down to business. Unfold your proposition; and if it looks to me like a winner I'll take a flyer with you if it's the last act of my ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... represents the anguish of a very old fir-tree, killed by the assiduous ivy. Just a short time ago I saw it struck down, lying on the grass, its foliage looking like a beautiful head of reddish hair. I saw the axe that felled it, too. Its trunk weeps tears of resin, which trail along in drivel, then change to heavy, creeping flame. But the dry red locks break into lines of living fire, whistle and shoot innumerable jets of many colors underneath a broad gold ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... sentiment and worse rime, without any resemblance to poetry. The remaining stanzas are mere drivel, unworthy of the poet's talent or ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... slightly, pondered a moment upon this sententious drivel, then very properly ignored it, reverting ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... made of himself reveals him to be a scoundrel and a knave of the deepest dye. I have been cruelly deceived, and it serves me right for trusting a Scotchman. Yes, I do understand figures, and I can count. I have counted the words in MacAlister's drivel (I certainly cannot call it a speech), and there were exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. I also carefully counted the lies—there were exactly three thousand four hundred and thirty-nine. Therefore, I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sir, if they had retained the lines I had written for him. But they've only let him speak the first four words—'Passengers in Railway Carriages'—and then drivel on thus: 'which are provided with blinds must keep the blinds covered so as to cover the windows'—a clumsy tautology, Sir, for which I am sure no Home Secretary would care to be held responsible, and from which I had been at some pains to save him, as you may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... chatters all the time is bound to talk a certain amount of drivel.—The Sayings of ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... consisting of nine lines, so loathsome in its brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression, that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe. The total point of this idiot's drivel consists in calling Sir Thomas "an asse;" and well it justifies the poet's own remark, "Let there be gall enough in thy ink, no matter though thou write with a goose pen." Our own belief is, that these lines were a production of Charles II.'s reign, and applied ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... you and I've won you," Mackenzie broke in. "He's had his chance and he's missed it. You don't want to be worried with his drivel." ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... wanted here, miserable remnant, snatched from under Death's teeth, thou inspirest weariness and disgust with life; like a caterpillar in the fields, thou gloatest on the rich ear of joy and belchest out the drivel of despair and sorrow. Thy truth is like a rusty sword in the hands of a nightly murderer,—and as a murderer thou shalt be executed. But before that, let me look into thine eyes. Perchance, only cowards are afraid of them, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... much slandered Wilhelm Roux. And yet I am bound to say you display considerable independence in your method. Indeed you do. And more than that, you throw much needed light on the mysteries of God himself. There is a good deal of incoherent drivel these days about the freedom of science. Well, you'll have to show me where it is. Scientists? They are a lot of conceited pin-heads, each working for himself, and incurably jealous of what his colleagues are doing. Up and at 'em, Doctor, that's my ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... bori. Drill (tool) borilo. Drill (military) ekzerco. Drink trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... do wish, however that you had devoted a few pages to one who, a few years ago, loomed large in the literary horizon. I mean Robert Buchanan. I know that during these last few years he has poured out a great deal of drivel, but I cannot forget books like The New Abelard, and especially, God and the Man. It is a matter of surprise and regret that one of Buchanan's undoubted powers should have thrown himself away as he has done. All the same, the man who wrote God ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Hamlet, and sits down to execute the conception—with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper. Under similar circumstances, revive me the illustrious Newton. I guarantee that when he sees the apple fall he shall EAT IT, instead of discovering the principle of gravitation. Nero's dinner shall transform Nero into the mildest ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... could not but awaken a strange curiosity touching the mind they issued from; the perhaps unparalleled psychical mechanism, which manufactured such matter, and emitted it to the light of day. Had Teufelsdroeckh also a father and mother; did he, at one time, wear drivel-bibs, and live on spoon-meat? Did he ever, in rapture and tears, clasp a friend's bosom to his; looks he also wistfully into the long burial-aisle of the Past, where only winds, and their low harsh moan, give inarticulate answer? Has he fought duels;—good Heaven! how did he comport himself ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... fulfilment of God's command. How much more would Paul oppose our popish deceivers who, without the authority of God's Word, boast themselves heads of the Church and of the people of God, at the same time neither teaching nor understanding the Scriptures, but offering their own drivel as God's commands! ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... said, 'you would pay me the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad with whom I have the misfortune to be connected. You would greatly oblige me if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar drivel you ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers of Sand City—upon which town ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... run upon thy foemen's swords; Never fear any plague, before it fall: Dropsies and watery tympanies haunt thee; Thy lungs with surfeiting be putrified, To cause thee have an odious stinking breath; Slaver and drivel like a child at mouth; Be poor and beggarly in thy old age; Let thine own kinsmen laugh when thou complain'st, And many tears gain nothing but blind scoffs. This is the guerdon due to drunkenness: Shame, sickness, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... insensate cur should be slain on the spot! A pretty state of things, indeed! Why, he might have picked thee up from the gutter! Now foul fall him! but thou shalt no more be vexed with the tedious drivel of a petty dealer in ass's dung, some blackguard, belike, that came hither from the country because he was dismissed the service of some petty squire, clad in romagnole, with belfry-breeches, and a pen in his arse, and for that he has ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... know, I'm half afraid you've lived in your musty old books so long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of the furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly, sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very often ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... sort of nerves, what sort of blood, have we inherited? For nearly three years you've been arguing like an ignorant deacon, and talking all sorts of nonsense, and now you've written—this slavish drivel here! While I, while I! Look at me. . . . No elasticity, no boldness, no strength of will; I tremble over every step I take as though I should be flogged for it. I am timid before nonentities, idiots, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They would request me to resign in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... man by whom France is governed! Governed, do I say?— possessed in supreme and sovereign sway! And every day, and every morning, by his decrees, by his messages, by all the incredible drivel which he parades in the "Moniteur," this emigrant, who knows not France, teaches France her lesson! and this ruffian tells France he has saved her! And from whom? From herself! Before him, Providence committed only follies; God was waiting for ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe collection, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... know what she told you, Aunt Emily," he said, taking up the check beside his plate, "but it was rather cleverly concealed rot, as far as I am concerned. Drivel; faddy drivel, but the girl's a lady, or whatever that word stands for. I half believe the child takes herself seriously—she has wonderful eyes. She should wear blinders—it isn't fair to leave them outside the veil. Comical ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... battle now and then. But unfortunately life in a country town does not offer much in that way, and it isn't given to every one to (turns the leaves of the book RORLUND has been reading). "Woman as the Handmaid of Society." What sort of drivel is this? ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... understand Sir Marcus," said Pasquale, cheerfully. "We just let him drivel on until he is aware no ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... occult could come among us with his faculties unimpaired. We have had many communications with your world, and have always been frustrated by this one gulf which may not be crossed. When real thought gets across the border, it is often indefinite, sometimes mere drivel. Such answers as come from the void are usually disappointing, no matter how expert our mediums may be in communicating with ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... to measure himself with other men, the more confidence he acquired in his own powers. This severe mental labor took away much of the pain of his "despised love." Ishmael was one to love strongly, ardently, constantly. But he was not one to drivel over a hopeless passion. He loved Claudia: how deeply, how purely, how faithfully, all his future life was destined to prove. And he knew that Claudia loved him; but that all the prejudices of her rank, her character, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... was not prepared to stop in Africa just then, I did not close with the offer. It may be a shocking admission to make, but if I were to settle down in Morocco, I confess, I should most certainly keep slaves. There is a deal of sentimental drivel spouted about the condition of slaves. Those I have seen seemed very happy. In Morocco they are well treated; and if desirous to change masters the law empowers them to make a demand to that effect. It is true that a slave's oath is not deemed valid, but Cuffy bears the slight with praiseworthy ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... up, regurgitate, spew, puke, keck[obs3], retch, heave, upchuck, chuck up, barf; belch out; cast up, bring up, be sick, get sick, worship the porcelain god. disgorge; expectorate, clear the throat, hawk, spit, sputter, splutter, slobber, drivel, slaver, slabber[obs3]; eructate; drool. unpack, unlade, unload, unship, offload; break bulk; dump. be let out. spew forth, erupt, ooze &c. (emerge) 295. Adj. emitting, emitted, &c. v. Int. begone! get you gone! get away, go away, get along, go along, get along with ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... published a dramatic poem styled "Odofried the Outcast." The title was ominous of the fate which the production met. The author naturally felt that the age was unappreciative. To relieve his mind he wrote eleven or twelve hundred lines of fresh drivel, in which he assailed everything and everybody. The satire was of that dreadful kind which requires notes and commentaries to point out who is hit and what is meant; and the annotation, as is usual in such cases, took up much more space than the text. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... snapping shut in a peculiar fashion, as though he were squirting venom all over the floor. He was as sensual as Maximum Max, only his voluptuous talks of women were far more offensive in form. But then his lewd drivel was apt to glitter with flashes of imagination. I do not remember ever ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... so was drawn thro dark cadaverous with the sound of gabbling dead. Where we heard them hoot palaverous Drivel learned beneath unsavorous Moulds, and saw a glutton's head Grin to a hissing bat, That scraped him as ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal teachings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... said Archie, "that you are talking drivel? Nobody ought to drivel before breakfast. It isn't decent. What does Dahlia want to do ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... drawer, after a year of ceaseless adventures, and Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie discreetly forbore to mention it. During that year Henry's opinion on his work had fluctuated. There had been moments, days perhaps, of discouragement, when he regarded it as drivel, and himself as a fool—in so far, that is, as he had trafficked with literature. On the other hand, his original view of it reasserted itself with frequency. And in the end he gloomily and proudly decided, once and for all, that the Stream of Trashy Novels Constantly Poured Forth by the ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... as a boy—mere drivel—but of such a kind that even his butts were fond of him. He would make M. Bonzig laugh in the middle of his severest penal sentences, and thus demoralize the whole school-room and set a shocking ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... at him in a kind of stupefaction. Was it of Farrington the man was talking such drivel? Farrington, who only the week before had told him in high gratification that within the last month he had added a cool million to his ward's marriage portion. Farrington, who had, but two days ago, hinted mysteriously of a gigantic financial coup in the near future. And now all ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... would be an impertinence, Mr Keegan, as your approval is not of the slightest consequence to us. What use do you suppose all this drivel is to men with serious practical business ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... too often content to toy with verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... "Cease such drivel," cried Bright-Wits, interrupting him, "I have come to announce the completion of a task so simple that it should not have ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... possess his soul in patience till twelve o'clock, the hour being yet barely 11:30 a. m., Theydon tackled a page of reviews, since there is always consolation for a writer in learning at second hand what sheer drivel ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... "My good man, you drivel. The devil has nothing to do with this. Neither has the town, which you may call by what name you please. But Don Carlos Gould is neither a coward nor an empty talker. You will admit ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... thoughts shuttled to and fro in search of what he knew she wanted—a love story. Presently he began to weave a tale, sorry enough, with all the ancient claptraps and rusted platitudes. How long he sat there, reeling off this drivel, he never knew. When he reached the happy ending, he waited. But there was no sign from her. By and by he gathered enough courage to lean toward her. She had fallen asleep. The hand that had ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... slamming the money on the table. "Poor drivel to fit the circumstances. If I stood in your boots, sir, I would rise up in the mighty strength of my pride and pull out foundation stones until I shook the nation! I never envied mortal man ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... will be startling to one who has never heard the lips of a hoary old sinner drivel out religion. To me they are not so startling as the words of Christian women and bishops of the Church of England, when they say that the doctrine of the everlasting happiness of the righteous stands or falls with the doctrine of the hopeless damnation ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... "Drivel!" angrily exclaimed old Aaron Rockharrt. "I am tired of your idiotic, imbecile hypocrisies! Here are two men driven away by your unprincipled vacillation—to call your conduct by the lightest name. One driven to his death; one driven, it may be, to his ruin. It is quite time you were sent ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... old times" by the faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he himself is obliged to apologize for the horrors he describes, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... of the name of Judah, who, in 1822, had published a dramatic poem styled "Odofried the Outcast." The title was ominous of the fate which the production met. The author naturally felt that the age was unappreciative. To relieve his mind he wrote eleven or twelve hundred lines of fresh drivel, in which he assailed everything and everybody. The satire was of that dreadful kind which requires notes and commentaries to point out who is hit and what is meant; and the annotation, as is usual in such cases, took up much more space than the text. This ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... Summit—of the whole. But now the oddest Thing ensued; 'Twas so insufferably crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it openly as "Drivel." Never was such Collapse. In brief, The poor Professor died ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... of a subject is evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Word of God, quod a? nay let a whoreson drivel Prate here all day, with a foul evil, And all thy sermon goeth on covetise, And biddest men beware of avarice; And yet in thy sermon dost thou none other thing, But for alms stand ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... there, talking on, most of it a pretty dull kind of drivel. Mrs. Brindley listened patiently, because she liked him and because she had nothing else to do until bedtime. At last he rose with a ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... doth he stroke his beard, and now againe He wipes the drivel from his filthy chin; Now offers he a kisse, but high Disdaine Will not permit her hart to pity him: Her hart more hard than adamant or steele, Her hart ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... orbs of sight, Their sockets two small bones like berries fill. Towards us, as I say, he speeds outright Along the shore, and seems a moving hill. Tusks jutting out like savage swine he shows, A breast with drivel ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... been here," he announces. "She has said something to you, the spiteful little cat! See here, I can guess what unmitigated drivel it is. She has accused you of flirting with me, and said I stayed at home to keep you company when I should have ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... three months." A pessimistic garrison gunner from Malta, who was playing patience, cheated savagely. "I tell you no European country could stand it." Undoubtedly the fatuous drivel of certain writers had influenced even the Army itself. "Peace will be declared before Christmas. An' I'll have sat on that cursed island, and whenever I see a ship I'd like to poop at, the searchlight will go out, ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... characteristic in its faults; it is abominably diffuse, filled with extraneous and superfluous matter, and totally lacking in the principles of good construction. There are scenes of positively breathless excitement, preceded and followed by dreary drivel; but the success of the book does not depend on its action, but rather on the characters of Sonia, her maudlin father, the student Raskolnikov, and his sister. It is impossible to read "Crime and Punishment" without reverently saluting the author's power. As is ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... a new note of gladness in his voice which Reginald was quick to notice. "I haven't begun to drivel yet, Rege; and life counts for a good deal more when a man has an object than when he is living just to ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Drill bori. Drill (tool) borilo. Drill (military) ekzerco. Drink trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove (cattle) bestaro, brutaro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... style till the defendant began to drivel at the mouth a little. At last, after a struggle, he said, with a piteous whine, that he could not help it: he hated signing his name; some mischief always came of it; but this time he had ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... look out. It can't be worse than going about with you and listening while you crow and drivel about her, that's one comfort! [The Pale-haired Lady coughs in a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments—just to freshen the account—and a surety that he who debits is on the spot, to be a right royal king of credit. Only the account must never drivel. 'Stare aut crescere' appears to be his feeling on that point, and the departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have happened if she hadn't let her hand linger in mine. Oh, I wish to heaven girls were not so senselessly innocent and sisterly! Great Caesar! I'd give five hundred dollars not to have drooled that drivel about being her brother! George! She ought to know that only a fool or a scamp could make such an absurd proposal. I wonder if she still wants to lend me her money! I'd rather face a whole bank directorate with an overdrawn account ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... account for certain differences in them. Some of them, namely, seem to include elements of super-normal knowledge; others to show a curious subconscious mania for personation and deception; others again to be mere drivel. But Myers' conception of various strata or levels in the Subliminal sets us to analyzing them all from a new point of view. The word Subliminal for him denotes only a region, with possibly the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... ago by Randolph Churchill, when he denounced "a bondholder's war"; it is in the whole business of collecting debts due to cosmopolitan finance. But a stranger in Egypt hears little denunciation of cosmopolitan finance, and a great deal of drivel in the way of cosmopolitan idealism. When the Palestinians say that usurers menace their land they mean the land they dig; an old actuality and not a new abstraction. Their revolt may be right or wrong, but ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... those who came in the prosperous days of the 70's or 80's, never could understand the partiality of the old settlers for the "Hymen's Altar" chapter. Lycurgus Mason also always took the view that the "Hymen" chapter was drivel. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... had had the effrontery to pretend that he was printing a volume of verse. The court had heard extracts from that precious volume, which had evidently been written by Mr. Seepidge's office-boy. He had never read such appalling drivel in his life. He ordered the confiscated lottery prospectuses to be destroyed, and he thought he would be rendering a service to humanity if he added an order for the destruction of this ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... piece of work—to write a book, in short—you can put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to write a ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... played again. If the repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy composers before his time he would have invented it, not because he was lazy, but because he wanted to go on and could not afford infinite music-paper. Hence his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy; and therefore, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... of patience with the theological snivel and drivel about the sacredness of the Sabbath. I do not understand why they do not accept the words of their own Christ, namely, that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... thee; Thy wrath be fatal to thy dearest friends; Unarmed run upon thy foemen's swords; Never fear any plague, before it fall: Dropsies and watery tympanies haunt thee; Thy lungs with surfeiting be putrified, To cause thee have an odious stinking breath; Slaver and drivel like a child at mouth; Be poor and beggarly in thy old age; Let thine own kinsmen laugh when thou complain'st, And many tears gain nothing but blind scoffs. This is the guerdon due to drunkenness: Shame, sickness, misery ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... to understand Sir Marcus," said Pasquale, cheerfully. "We just let him drivel on until he is ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... I'm half afraid you've lived in your musty old books so long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of the furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly, sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... said Hummil calmly. 'I've got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I'm the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it,—by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... Lord Henry concluded, "that according to this view of poetry, which I believe is the right view, and the view unconsciously taken by the masses, more than three quarters of Victorian Verse is simply so much superior drivel." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... "slabbering-bib," a blue doublet, red hose, and black shoes. He represents an overgrown baby, but was a tumbler, and mimicked the barking of a dog. The word Bavian is derived from bavon, a "bib for a slabbering child" (see Cotgrave, French Dictionary). In modern French bave means "drivel," "slabbering," and the verb baver "to slabber," but the bib is now called ...
— 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.
... against it something that imposed silence on Sir Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will enchain mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this he displayed secure in its being his licence to drivel his abominable pathos. Sir Willoughby recognized Clara's purse. He understood at once how the must have come by it: he was not so quick in devising a means of stopping the tale. Flitch foiled him. "Intact," he replied ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... didn't mind the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam—only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"—is an admirable example of the mechanical fooling ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... testimony, in a drunken condition. Indeed, the character of his speech cannot be explained in any other way. He descended to the lowest tone of partizan stump speaking. He bandied epithets with some of his hearers who interrupted him. The whole speech was a mixture of inane drivel and reckless aspersion. His visit at Chicago passed without any particular scandal. But the speech he made at St. Louis fairly capped the climax. He accused the Republicans in Congress of substantially having planned the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... lives and moves with as contented and self-satisfied an ignorance of the laws, the history, the character of the country or its people, as if Switzerland were Timbuctoo. Still, even sublime ignorance such as this is better than to listen to the young thing of thirty-five summers, with her drivel about William Tell; and one has always the resource of conceiving a Swiss party tramping about England with no other notion of Englishmen than that they are extortionate hotel-keepers, or of the English Constitution ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... bargain, warranted free from vice or blemish; but as I was not prepared to stop in Africa just then, I did not close with the offer. It may be a shocking admission to make, but if I were to settle down in Morocco, I confess, I should most certainly keep slaves. There is a deal of sentimental drivel spouted about the condition of slaves. Those I have seen seemed very happy. In Morocco they are well treated; and if desirous to change masters the law empowers them to make a demand to that effect. It is true that a slave's oath is not deemed valid, but Cuffy bears the slight with praiseworthy ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... "Cut the sentimental drivel short," cut in Hume unpleasantly. "Have you gone over to his side of the deal? Are you throwing me down ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... soulless, like a beast of the field - a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life." And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh - drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... accented on some other syllable than the last, in whose derivatives the l is doubled by many writers; but it accords more with the analogy of the language not to double the l. Such words are the following: apparel, cancel, channel, cudgel, dishevel, drivel, duel, enamel, equal, gambol, grovel, jewel, libel, marshal, marvel, ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers of Sand City—upon which town may ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... long enough, I fear too long, tormented you with my drivel. It must be your consolation, that, in spirit, you have been with me to-night, as I have thought of the old days, pausing for a moment over these mute but eloquent companions, to dream or to sigh, and then once more turning the old familiar pages as I try to forget, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... lessons,—she can't teach a bit; she was only putting nonsense into the heads of future men and women, and, such as it was, putting it there wrong. I was doing likewise, and I teach worse than she does. Of an evening I wrote drivel for the papers. We were, every one of us, useless and miserable. At last one ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... companion, and while there was in great fear and grief, expecting a death-sentence from the Emperor the next day. When brought before his judge, his face was wan and pale and his hair and beard gray, the change having taken place in the night. His beard was filthy with drivel, and the Emperor, moved by his pitiful condition, pardoned him. There was a clergyman of Nottingham whose daughter at the age of thirteen experienced a change from jet-blackness of the hair to white in a single night, but this was confined to a spot on the back of the head 1 1/2 ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... was put in a drawer, after a year of ceaseless adventures, and Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie discreetly forbore to mention it. During that year Henry's opinion on his work had fluctuated. There had been moments, days perhaps, of discouragement, when he regarded it as drivel, and himself as a fool—in so far, that is, as he had trafficked with literature. On the other hand, his original view of it reasserted itself with frequency. And in the end he gloomily and proudly decided, ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... freedom of the Press, one is not master of one's own actions. Whence it results that Father Cruchard is wrathful with you for not having advised him of your presence in the "new Athens." It seems to me that people are sillier and flatter there than usual. The state of politics has become drivel! They have tickled my ears with the return of the Empire. I don't believe in it! However...We should have to expatriate ourselves ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... one than she would dare be to any man who was not out of it, each time people are manifestly interested—politely, of course—and form a circle, make room for one as they did at that particularly disagreeable Grimshott garden party yesterday, each time—I don't want to drivel, but so it is—one sees a pair of lovers—oh! well, it's not easy to retain one's philosophy, not to obey the primitive instincts of any animal when it's ill-used and hurt, and to revenge oneself—to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... whom France is governed! Governed, do I say?— possessed in supreme and sovereign sway! And every day, and every morning, by his decrees, by his messages, by all the incredible drivel which he parades in the "Moniteur," this emigrant, who knows not France, teaches France her lesson! and this ruffian tells France he has saved her! And from whom? From herself! Before him, Providence committed only follies; God was waiting for him to reduce everything to order; ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... pretending, and let you lie and pretend, and let your parents and Sam lie and pretend, you would find me—almost tolerable. Well, I'm not that kind. When there's no especial reason one way or the other, I'm willing to smirk and grimace and dodder and drivel, like the rest of your friends, those ladies and gentlemen. But when there's business to be transacted, I am business-like. Let's not begin with your thinking you are deceiving me, and so hating me and despising me and trying to keep up ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Ebenezer proves that it is all a joke." And this from another one: "'What do you think of young Parson Bostic?' was asked of Banker McElwin. 'I didn't think he was loaded,' the financier replied." It was said that a great batch of this drivel was cut out, credited and sent to McElwin, and Lyman accused Warren, but he denied it, though ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... anguish of a very old fir-tree, killed by the assiduous ivy. Just a short time ago I saw it struck down, lying on the grass, its foliage looking like a beautiful head of reddish hair. I saw the axe that felled it, too. Its trunk weeps tears of resin, which trail along in drivel, then change to heavy, creeping flame. But the dry red locks break into lines of living fire, whistle and shoot innumerable jets of many colors underneath a broad gold wave that ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... Associated Words: salivate, salivation, insalivate, insalivation, salivant, salivary, ptyalism, salival, salivous, expectorant, drool, drivel, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... murmured the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... were communicated by a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience." A fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there,—the storm at night, the ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... blue doublet, red hose, and black shoes. He represents an overgrown baby, but was a tumbler, and mimicked the barking of a dog. The word Bavian is derived from bavon, a "bib for a slabbering child" (see Cotgrave, French Dictionary). In modern French bave means "drivel," "slabbering," and the verb baver "to slabber," but the bib is now ...
— 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.
... a book, in short—you can put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... up their drivel? I aim only at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no higher degree of merit, not even at brevity—I am sure it could have been all done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... good society in England, Charles, men drivel at all ages by repeating silly formulas with an air of wisdom. Schoolboys make their own formulas out of slang, like you. When they reach your age, and get political private secretaryships and things of that sort, they drop slang and get their formulas ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... first time he had looked Truth in the eyes. Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... senseless drivel you write on the least provocation! Whether you grew up with the Surbury relics or not, you have certainly decayed with them. Every stone that's left of that confounded ruin (probably only a simple market-cross) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... and in the fields, but men in general, as they ought to be on leaving the hands of Nature, or after the teachings of Reason. As to the former, there is no need of being scrupulous because they are infatuated with prejudices and their opinions are mere drivel; as for the latter, it is just the opposite: full of respect for the vainglorious images of his own theory, of ghosts produced by his own intellectual device, the Jacobin will always bow down to responses that he himself has provided, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... it exhibits Byron the poet, Byron the scoffer, Byron the roue, in his true colors and real dimensions; and if, after reading it, a person should adopt the old cant about his brilliant rascalities, and the old drivel about his sentimental misanthropy, the fault is in the reader rather than the volume. For our own part we are acquainted with no edition of any celebrated author, equaling this in the remorselessness with which the man is stripped ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... is so fortunate as to possess in a high degree what Bayard Taylor calls "secondary inspiration," without which the work of a translator becomes a soulless mass and frequently degenerates into the veriest drivel. Erik Eggen's Alveliv deserves a place in the same high ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, I myself — you mayn't ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... they would assuredly rejoice at my calamity. However, when they pressed me close I told them every whit; and some thought that I had spoken falsely and derided me and others that I was daft and hare-brained and my words were the wild pratings of an idiot or the drivel of dreams. The youngsters made abundant fun of me and laughed to think that I, who never in my born days had sighted a golden coin, should tell how I had gotten so many Ashrafis, and how a kite had flown away with them. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... concluded, "that according to this view of poetry, which I believe is the right view, and the view unconsciously taken by the masses, more than three quarters of Victorian Verse is simply so much superior drivel." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... exenterate[obs3]. vomit, throw up, regurgitate, spew, puke, keck[obs3], retch, heave, upchuck, chuck up, barf; belch out; cast up, bring up, be sick, get sick, worship the porcelain god. disgorge; expectorate, clear the throat, hawk, spit, sputter, splutter, slobber, drivel, slaver, slabber[obs3]; eructate; drool. unpack, unlade, unload, unship, offload; break bulk; dump. be let out. spew forth, erupt, ooze &c. (emerge) 295. Adj. emitting, emitted, &c. v. Int. begone! ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... editors to know details of this kind; but it surely is their duty to investigate before starting on a crusade. In the case of people who knew the facts, this particular blunder merely made the newspapers that committed it look ridiculous; but the majority of those who read the drivel in all probability had no idea of the facts, and were led to imagine that promotions to the various ranks of general officer had hitherto all been a matter of seniority. It is an example of the way ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... and worse rime, without any resemblance to poetry. The remaining stanzas are mere drivel, unworthy of the poet's talent or of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... die?" sharply interrupted the general. "Why do you drivel? You know I detest beds and blankets. Drop it! Here, take this," and he gave him a sheet of crested paper folded in four, which was lying beside him. "Read it, please. Aloud! so ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... much-despised British tradesman is not a harsh, he is really a well-disposed, easy soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments—just to freshen the account—and a surety that he who debits is on the spot, to be a right royal king of credit. Only the account must never drivel. 'Stare aut crescere' appears to be his feeling on that point, and the departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of us lounging on the lower bridge deck—the Captain, Briggs, myself, and this human phonograph. It was a pleasant day, and we would have enjoyed the loaf in the warm afternoon sunshine, had it not been for the unending drivel of the passenger. I enjoyed it anyway, for even though the ears be filled with a buzzing, the eyes are free, and San Francisco ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... well entrenched and fortified, it is well to remember that it is the man with vision who finally prevails. The time has passed when the freethinker could be held up to the community as an example of a base and degraded individual. No manner of pulpit drivel can delude even the unthinking masses to this misconception. The freethinker is today the one who beholds the vision, and this vision does not transcend the natural. It is a vision that is earth-bound; a vision it may ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression, that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe. The total point of this idiot's drivel consists in calling Sir Thomas "an asse;" and well it justifies the poet's own remark, "Let there be gall enough in thy ink, no matter though thou write with a goose pen." Our own belief is, that these lines were a production of Charles II.'s reign, and applied to a Sir Thomas Lucy, not very ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... words ending in l, and accented on some other syllable than the last, in whose derivatives the l is doubled by many writers; but it accords more with the analogy of the language not to double the l. Such words are the following: apparel, cancel, channel, cudgel, dishevel, drivel, duel, enamel, equal, gambol, grovel, jewel, libel, marshal, marvel, metal, model, ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... it matter?' said Hummil calmly. 'I've got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I'm the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it,—by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when he gets ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... displease—to love men hate me! Ah, friend of mine, believe me, I march better 'Neath the cross-fire of glances inimical! How droll the stains one sees on fine-laced doublets, From gall of envy, or the poltroon's drivel! —The enervating friendship which enfolds you Is like an open-laced Italian collar, Floating around your neck in woman's fashion; One is at ease thus,—but less proud the carriage! The forehead, free from mainstay ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... you think I am uncivil To plague you with this draunting drivel, Abjuring a' intentions evil, I quat my pen, The Lord preserve us frae ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam—only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"—is an admirable example of the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... humor, as a boy—mere drivel—but of such a kind that even his butts were fond of him. He would make M. Bonzig laugh in the middle of his severest penal sentences, and thus demoralize the whole school-room and set a shocking example, and be ordered a la porte of the salle ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... unfrequently there is a spice of malignity in the blockhead's composition; but a creature of this calibre you can wither, for it is not worth crushing, by withholding the sunshine of your countenance from it, or by leaving it to drivel on, until the utter contempt of the whole company claps to change the figure—a wet night—cap as an extinguisher on it, and its small stinking flame flickers and goes out of itself. Then there is your sentimental water—fly, who blaws in the lugs of the women, and clips the King's ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Gordon at tea. "Bradford was bowling the most utter drivel half the time, I would have given anything to have been batting. And you were not bowling at your ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... he stroke his beard, and now againe He wipes the drivel from his filthy chin; Now offers he a kisse, but high Disdaine Will not permit her hart to pity him: Her hart more hard than adamant or steele, Her hart more ...
— The Affectionate Shepherd • Richard Barnfield
... of God, quod a? nay let a whoreson drivel Prate here all day, with a foul evil, And all thy sermon goeth on covetise, And biddest men beware of avarice; And yet in thy sermon dost thou none other thing, But for alms stand ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... friends; Unarmed run upon thy foemen's swords; Never fear any plague, before it fall: Dropsies and watery tympanies haunt thee; Thy lungs with surfeiting be putrified, To cause thee have an odious stinking breath; Slaver and drivel like a child at mouth; Be poor and beggarly in thy old age; Let thine own kinsmen laugh when thou complain'st, And many tears gain nothing but blind scoffs. This is the guerdon due to drunkenness: Shame, sickness, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... on the job, And send 'im 'ome a 'owlin' to 'is mammy or 'is nuss. But I'd rather take the chuck For a show of British pluck, And do my month in chockee, and eat my skilly free; And I'll leave the curs to snivel With their 'Ouse o' Commons drivel, Which may suit a pack of jaw-pots, but, by gosh, ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... a Parasol out of the Jar, and illustrated the famous Long Drive with Moving Pictures, Tableaux, Delsarte, and some newly acquired technical Drivel, which he mouthed with ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... solemn, carol, very, spirit, coral, borough, manor, tenant, minute, honor, punish, clamor, blemish, limit, comet, pumice, chapel, leper, triple, copy, habit, rebel, tribute, probate, heifer, profit, cavil, revel, drivel, novel, hovel, city, pity, british, critic, madam, credit, idiom, body, study, tacit, licit, hazard, ezad, lizard, closet, bosom, vicar, ...
— A Minniature ov Inglish Orthoggraphy • James Elphinston
... firm opening and snapping shut in a peculiar fashion, as though he were squirting venom all over the floor. He was as sensual as Maximum Max, only his voluptuous talks of women were far more offensive in form. But then his lewd drivel was apt to glitter with flashes of imagination. I do not remember ever seeing him in ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... neither of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for half an hour and let them go. Did you ever see ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pleasure from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... "this is all drivel, infantile drivel. What you are is of no importance. How to get out is the problem, how to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... majority of the other verses, in and out of the volume, that the mysterious poet might have written under a hundred aliases. But the Dutch Flat "Clarion," following, with no uncertain sound, left me small time for consideration. "We doubt," said that journal, "if a more feeble collection of drivel could have been made, even if taken exclusively from the editor's own verses, which we note he has, by an equal editorial incompetency, left out of the volume. When we add that, by a felicity of idiotic selection, this person has chosen only one, and the least ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 'highly nonoptimal', the worst possible way to do something; 'highly nontrivial', either impossible or requiring a major research project; 'highly nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; 'highly nontechnical', drivel written for {luser}s, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (compare {drool-proof paper}). In other computing cultures, postfixing of {in the extreme} ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... you boys are game for this melodrama, I'd like to use you, all right. You'll get experience in the business, anyway, so maybe it won't do you any harm. And if the weather holds good, we'll just make a long hard drive of this bunch of drivel; we'll rush 'em through—sabe? And I'll make it my business to see that Mart doesn't unload any more of the same. You may even get some fun out of it, seeing you're not fed up on this said Western drama, the way I am. Anyway, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... can't teach a bit; she was only putting nonsense into the heads of future men and women, and, such as it was, putting it there wrong. I was doing likewise, and I teach worse than she does. Of an evening I wrote drivel for the papers. We were, every one of us, useless and miserable. At ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... canvassing at a distance, and neither of the Mellor ladies had seen him all day. He slipped up the bench with a bow and a smile to greet them. "I am done!" he said to Marcella, as he took off his hat. "My voice is gone, my mind ditto. I shall drivel for half an hour and let them go. Did you ever ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and fro in search of what he knew she wanted—a love story. Presently he began to weave a tale, sorry enough, with all the ancient claptraps and rusted platitudes. How long he sat there, reeling off this drivel, he never knew. When he reached the happy ending, he waited. But there was no sign from her. By and by he gathered enough courage to lean toward her. She had fallen asleep. The hand that had been clenched lay open, relaxed; and upon the palm he ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, he passed ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... particulars were communicated by a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience." A fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there,—the storm at night, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... morrow—and if there's anything there I shall know it. If I return, I'll find myself a bit of a celebrity. If I don't, this note-book may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents or mysteries, ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... understand it," said Gordon at tea. "Bradford was bowling the most utter drivel half the time, I would have given anything to have been batting. And you were not bowling at your ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... She meant to marry when she should find the right man, but the difficulty of choice disturbed her. She had still much of the spirit which made her at twelve see nothing but nonsense in the "Turn, Gentle Hermit of the Dale" drivel, and she was quite prepared to decide with her mind. She never took her heart into consideration, or the possibility of being overcome by a feeling which ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... matter?' said Hummil calmly. 'I've got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I'm the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it,—by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when he gets ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... there. Does he gain health? Alas, think of the crowd, the rank odours, the straining heart-beats! Does he hear any wisdom? Listen to the hideous badinage, the wild bursts of foul language from the betting-men, the mean, cunning drivel of the gamblers, the shrill laughter of the horsey and unsexed women? Does the youth make friends? Ah, yes! He makes friends who will cheat him at betting, cheat him at horse-dealing, cheat him at gambling when the orgies of the course are over, borrow money as long as he will lend, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... different starting-points behind the threshold might account for certain differences in them. Some of them, namely, seem to include elements of super-normal knowledge; others to show a curious subconscious mania for personation and deception; others again to be mere drivel. But Myers' conception of various strata or levels in the Subliminal sets us to analyzing them all from a new point of view. The word Subliminal for him denotes only a region, with possibly the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of the laws, The nation looks—and shall it look in vain? Will ye sit idle, or in idle wind Blow out your zeal, and crack your party whips, Or drivel dotage, while the crisis cries— While all around the dark horizon loom Clouds thunder-capped that bode a hurricane? Sleep ye as slept the "Notables" of France, While under them an hundred AEtnas hissed And spluttered sulphur, gathering for the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it openly as "Drivel." Never was such Collapse. In brief, The ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... of old, by Fiend possest, He swells, wild Frenzy heaves his panting breast, His bristling hairs stick up, his eyeballs glow, And from his mouth long strakes of drivel flow.'] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of Tennyson has called forth a vast deal of nonsense. Much of it is even insincere. The pulpits have spouted cataracts of sentimentality. Some of them have emitted quantities of sheer drivel. A stranger would think we had lost our only poet, and well-nigh our only teacher; whereas, if the truth must be told, we have lost one who was occasionally a great poet, but for the most part a miraculous ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... startling to one who has never heard the lips of a hoary old sinner drivel out religion. To me they are not so startling as the words of Christian women and bishops of the Church of England, when they say that the doctrine of the everlasting happiness of the righteous stands or falls with the doctrine of the hopeless damnation of the wicked. Can it ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... says, "Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field - a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life." And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh - drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... want any more of the drivel!" Bristow objected again, his voice raucous and still directed to Greenleaf. "What's your idea? I admit I'm wanted in New York on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement. This detective, by a stroke of blind luck, ran into that; and, as I say, I ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... the faithful and harrowing portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he himself is obliged to apologise for the horrors he describes, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... stern sterility, can stint the mind; Whose thistle well betrays the niggard earth, Emblem of all to whom the Land gives birth; Each genial influence nurtured to resist; A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist. [xv] Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain, 140 Till, burst at length, each wat'ry head o'erflows, Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows: Then thousand schemes of petulance and pride Despatch her scheming children far and wide; Some East, some West, some—everywhere but North! In quest of lawless gain, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—who? ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... this thought that he ruminated a memory, and growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and said, 'How beautiful they must ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... round in their chairs, and a Rand magnate, who was eating peas at the next table, started and cut his mouth. "Go? It's the limit! This is just the sort of thing to get right at them. It'll hit them where they live. What made you think of that drivel at ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... soon see you get your deserts: you will not feel so well, you will be wretched enough, once I get back home all right. Be so good as to follow me, you that make a butt of your master with your idiotic drivel. ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... came this morning, and I fancied a special intention in his manner. He was much annoyed about the kitchenmaid, said such talk was "all havers" [anglice: "drivel"], begged me not to employ her again, and undertook to get another, lending me a girl in his own ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... Drink trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... 'I wish, my dear Mac,' he said, 'you would pay me the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad with whom I have the misfortune to be connected. You would greatly oblige me if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar drivel you would kindly ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... Petherton),—What senseless drivel you write on the least provocation! Whether you grew up with the Surbury relics or not, you have certainly decayed with them. Every stone that's left of that confounded ruin (probably only a simple market-cross) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... the much slandered Wilhelm Roux. And yet I am bound to say you display considerable independence in your method. Indeed you do. And more than that, you throw much needed light on the mysteries of God himself. There is a good deal of incoherent drivel these days about the freedom of science. Well, you'll have to show me where it is. Scientists? They are a lot of conceited pin-heads, each working for himself, and incurably jealous of what his colleagues are doing. Up and at 'em, Doctor, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... your smiling at me like a Cheshire cat, Mr Lubin; and I am not going to sit here mumchance like an old-fashioned goody goody wife while you men monopolize the conversation and pay out the very ghastliest exploded drivel as the latest thing in politics. I am not giving you my own ideas, Mr Lubin, but just the regular orthodox science of today. Only the most awful old fossils think that Socialism is bad economics and that Darwin invented Evolution. Ask Papa. Ask ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... father? The dear old man, happy in his communications from his dead son, how would he be pleased to learn that they were not from his dead son at all, but the faked drivel of ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... announces. "She has said something to you, the spiteful little cat! See here, I can guess what unmitigated drivel it is. She has accused you of flirting with me, and said I stayed at home to keep you company when I should have ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... an amazing amount of drivel written over here, most of which, I think, would never get past the office-boy of an American publication. The English short story and the English music-hall are things ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to write ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... thy dearest friends; Unarmed run upon thy foemen's swords; Never fear any plague, before it fall: Dropsies and watery tympanies haunt thee; Thy lungs with surfeiting be putrified, To cause thee have an odious stinking breath; Slaver and drivel like a child at mouth; Be poor and beggarly in thy old age; Let thine own kinsmen laugh when thou complain'st, And many tears gain nothing but blind scoffs. This is the guerdon due to drunkenness: Shame, sickness, misery ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... a fire under him to see if he could swear like a Christian. He had a big head with consider'ble hair on the top of it and nothin' underneath but what he called 'science' and 'sociology.' His science wa'n't nothin' but tommy-rot to Nate, and the 'sociology' was some kind of drivel about everybody bein' equal to everybody else, or better. 'Seemed to think 'twas wrong to get a good price for a thing when you found a feller soft enough to pay it. Did you ever hear the beat of that ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... plunge in the dark, but a preacher over at Old Ebenezer proves that it is all a joke." And this from another one: "'What do you think of young Parson Bostic?' was asked of Banker McElwin. 'I didn't think he was loaded,' the financier replied." It was said that a great batch of this drivel was cut out, credited and sent to McElwin, and Lyman accused Warren, but he denied it, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... he muttered gloomily as he cast the paper from him. "Simple drivel. I wonder what Blix will think of it. I wonder if I amount to a hill of beans. I wonder WHAT she wants ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... of curiosity. I recall having given a friend, who was a journalist, a little book of Nietzsche's to read, which he returned with the remark that he had not been able to get through it, as it was insufferable drivel. I have heard the same opinion, or similar ones, expressed by journalists of Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Dostoievsky, Stendhal and all the most stimulating ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose mortal teachings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... this style till the defendant began to drivel at the mouth a little. At last, after a struggle, he said, with a piteous whine, that he could not help it: he hated signing his name; some mischief always came of it; but this time ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam—only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"—is an admirable example of ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
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