|
|
|
More "Silly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Ay, the silly creature! Ah, well, you think about my plan," and, with a bow, he pricked his horse and trotted after the ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... being silly," she replied, pettishly. "Dan, behave yourself, and speak when you are ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... traversed the walks two days, before she was found to want spirit and life. Miss Chudleigh was remembered by those who wished for the brilliant mistress, and scorned the wifelike quality of sedateness—and Miss L. is now seen with a very silly fellow or two, walking backwards and forwards unmolested—dwindled down from the new beauty to a very quotes pretty girl; and perhaps glad to come off so. For, upon my word, my dear, there are very few pretty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... supposed to entertain. In the pen of this nameless romancer, I seemed to possess something like the secret fountain of coined gold and pearls vouchsafed to the traveller of the Eastern Tale; and no doubt believed that I might venture, without silly imprudence, to extend my personal expenditure considerably beyond what I should have thought of, had my means been limited to the competence which I derived from inheritance, with the moderate income of a professional situation. I bought, and built, and planted, and was considered by myself, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... be so silly," Gladys cried, "of course there isn't any water here. It's only a trick, a trick to frighten you—and I'm beginning to ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... be silly," barked the dog, wagging his tail joyfully at the thought of another good dinner. "Surely! surely! I will do anything you like if it will bring ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... signifies "a fool," and that in the general sense of the term as used in Scripture; not merely a silly, untaught, feckless person, but a godless and an impious one. Thus, in the Book of Proverbs, Divine Wisdom is represented ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... vowed a life dependent upon God. . . . Nevertheless, my employment with several popes has forced me to desire their greatness for my own advantage. But for this consideration I should have loved Luther like myself, not to free myself from the silly laws of Christianity as commonly understood, but to put this gang of criminals under restraint, so that they might live either ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... "Don't be silly. You're worn out and irritable, both of you, and you're acting like perfect idiots. You'll ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... paint in unfavourable colours; whose doctrines they wished to blacken; whose systems they sought to render odious: they were certain of alarming the illiterate, of rousing the antipathies of the silly, by a loose imputation, or by a word, to which ignorance attaches the idea of horror, merely because it is unacquainted with its true sense. In consequence of this policy, it has been no uncommon spectacle ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... little ashamed of the distinction, when I reflected on the absurd figure I must have cut, with my head in a string like a grocer's parcel, and Boy imploring me, with all his astonished eyes, not to submit to so silly an operation. So he and I tacitly agreed to hush the matter up ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... to." Quick as lightning came the words. "Go on and don't be silly! Of course you can do it! ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... that I compos'd my ninth Satire; where I think I have shewn clearly enough, that without any prejudice either to one's Conscience or the Government, one may think bad Verses bad Verses, and have full right to be tir'd with reading a silly Book. But since these Gentlemen have spoken of the liberty I have taken of Naming them, as an Attempt unheard-of, and without Example, and since Examples can't well be put into Rhyme; 'tis proper ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... the name of a man who in Chamisso's tale sold his shadow to the devil, a synonym of one who makes a desperate or silly bargain. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... action, That this cup of grief may pass thee, That this sorrow may escape thee, And this darkened cloud pass over. Hie thee straightway to the Northland, Visit thou the Suomi daughters; Thou wilt find them wise and lovely, Far more beautiful than Aino, Far more worthy of a husband, Not such silly chatter-boxes, As the fickle Lapland maidens. Take for thee a life-companion, From the honest homes of Suomi, One of Northland's honest daughters; She will charm thee with her sweetness, Make thee happy through her goodness, Form perfection, manners easy, Every step and movement graceful, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness, Harbour more craft, and more corrupter ends, Than twenty silly ducking observants."—Beauties of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and learn the facts, if they ever do learn them, they will be sorry. They are not a bad people at heart, though I am ashamed, as their old fellow-townsman, to say that they have acted like children in this matter. There's a half-crazy, half-silly old doctor there by the name of Radcliffe, and an old parson by the name of Snow, whom I have helped to feed for years, who lead them into difficulty. But they're not a bad people, now, and I am sorry ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... six months ago, when she had called him 'the limit.' Whence came it, or was it ghost of scent—sheer emanation from memory? She looked round her. Nothing—not a thing, no tiniest disturbance of her hall, nor of the diningroom. A little day-dream of a scent—illusory, saddening, silly! In the silver basket were new cards, two with 'Mr. and Mrs. Polegate Thom,' and one with 'Mr. Polegate Thom' thereon; she sniffed them, but they smelled severe. 'I must be tired,' she thought, 'I'll ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... married couples, provided there be no scandal. You did not absolutely confess the existence of your mistresses, but you pleaded extenuating circumstances. You were very sarcastic upon the subject of those poor, silly women who object to their husbands being gallant toward other women, since, according to you, such gallantry is one of the laws of the polished society to which you belong. You laughed at the foolish man who does not dare to pay compliments to a woman in the presence of his own wife, and ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... fluttering officers who never fight; Of such a wretched rabble who would write? Much less half wits: that's more against our rules; For they are fops, the other are but fools. Who would not be as silly as Dunbar? As dull as Monmouth, rather than Sir Carr?[52] The cunning courtier should be slighted too, Who with dull knavery makes so much ado; Till the shrewd fool, by thriving too, too fast, Like AEsop's fox becomes a prey at last. 60 Nor shall the royal mistresses be named, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Him in His name Jah and rejoice before Him." Jah was God's pet-name, short for Jehovah. It was a silly name—Jah. Somehow you couldn't help thinking of God as a silly person; he was always flying into tempers, and he was jealous. He was like Papa. Dank said Papa was jealous of Mark because Mamma was so fond of him. There was a picture of ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... you don't," said Burr major, taking off his jacket; "I don't want to knock your silly head off. You wait till I've thrashed Master Physic, and then old Dicksee shall give ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... the laughter of Mr Pyke and Mr Pluck, who were, evidently, Sir Mulberry's toads in ordinary. Indeed, it was not difficult to see, that the majority of the company preyed upon the unfortunate young lord, who, weak and silly as he was, appeared by far the least vicious of the party. Sir Mulberry Hawk was remarkable for his tact in ruining, by himself and his creatures, young gentlemen of fortune—a genteel and elegant profession, of which he had undoubtedly gained the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... afraid, while I have such a mother as you are—a woman in whom I can place no confidence with safety. Why did you betray me to this silly family?" ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... consent, sometimes without it. One old gentleman, whose name is not to be mentioned, was sealed thus for eternity to Martha Washington and to Empress Josephine. It sounds farcical and foolish in the extreme; fit only to be counted as a silly joke, unworthy the attention of a sane soul for a minute; but it is terribly sober when it is remembered that there are hundreds of thousands of innocent, honest, and unsuspecting Mormons who really and truly believe this to be the only road ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... glanced at my partner's face again, and saw there not only the expression of happiness, health, and good temper which had just pleased me in my own, but also a fresh and enchanting beauty besides, I felt dissatisfied with myself again. I understood how silly of me it was to hope to attract the attention of such a wonderful being as Sonetchka. I could not hope for reciprocity—could not even think of it, yet my heart was overflowing with happiness. I could not imagine that the feeling of love which was filling my soul ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... figurative cold water," said Ethel, smiling for a moment. "I was only silly enough to tell Richard my plan, and it's horrid to talk to a person who only thinks one high-flying and nonsensical—and ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... used to think it very silly of me to burden myself with extra food upon the march, though she was quite glad to eat it with me, if the way chanced to be barren ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fluttering, feeding, And aloft upon the ridge-pole Kahgahgee, the King of Ravens, Sat with fiery eyes, and, screaming, Flapped his wings at Pau-Puk-Keewis. 205 "All are gone! the lodge is empty!" Thus it was spake Pau-Puk-Keewis, In his heart resolving mischief;— "Gone is wary Hiawatha, Gone the silly Laughing Water, 210 Gone Nokomis, the old woman, And the lodge is left unguarded!" By the neck he seized the raven, Whirled it round him like a rattle, Like a medicine-pouch he shook it, 215 Strangled Kahgahgee, the raven, From the ridge-pole ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... youth in tarred boots and a pink shirt, exclaimed, uncovering his pale gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch had got his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone away with a bottle under each arm to keep it ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the dog was born; the gathered crowd Cheered their approval of this wise remark; A glad tail wagged its pride, and clear and loud Rang out the music of the earliest bark, While envious Nature sighed, "O parlous miss! I was a silly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... must endeavor to put such silly projects out of his head, my dear friend. I am more troubled about that sweet girl than about any thing else. I cannot ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... I never saw such a child. Now take your pumps and find the plush bag. Why not? Put them right with Ruth's. That's what the bag was made for. Well, how do you want to carry them? Why, I never heard of anything so silly! You will knot the strings. I don't care if they do carry skates that way—skates are not slippers. You'd lose them. Very well, then, only hurry up. I should think you'd be ashamed to have them dangling around your neck that way. Because people never do carry them ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... And she, in recognition of my favor, made a plush tobacco bag, on which my name was worked in gold threads, and sent it to me, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, with her brother. Now, that is the opening chapter. I will abruptly come to the last, skipping the intermediate parts, for they are too silly, all of them. I will only say that I was as earnest, as sincere, as devoted in this affair of love as I was in my craft. Of a truth, I ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... if any, one beyond our ken. Gravitation drives us, not love. We are attracted and repelled by a force we cannot control, a force that resides in our muscles and our nerves, not in our will and spirit. "Click—click—click—tick—tick—tick," so goes the economic clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America is a clock," I said; and then I remembered ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... dear Julia," he replied, wiping the tears from her eyes, "will you suffer yourself to be overcome by a weakness of mind so unworthy of you? The morning is dark and gloomy, and calculated, apart from such silly anticipations—pardon me, Julia—to fill the mind with low spirits. Cheer up, my dear girl; is not this season, in a peculiar manner, set apart for cheerfulness and enjoyment? Why, then, will you indulge in this ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... it's time this mutual admiration society broke up," the young girl said, with tears trembling in her eyes. "When I think of it all, and what a home I've found, I'm just silly enough to cry. I think it's time, Burt, that you obtained your father's and mother's forgiveness or blessing, or ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... to his daughter, and asked for the ring in order to set matters to rights again. But when he heard the fatal trick played by the false merchants he was ready to throw himself out of the window, cursing a thousand times the ignorance of his daughter, who, for the sake of a silly doll had turned him into a miserable scarecrow, and for a paltry thing of rags had brought him to rags himself, adding that he was resolved to go wandering about the world like a bad shilling, until he should get tidings of those merchants. So saying he threw a cloak about his neck and a ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... no King Elect, but must e'en remain as you were ever, Sir, a most seditious pestilent old Knave; one that deludes the Rabble with your Politicks, then leaves 'em to be hang'd, as they deserve, for silly mutinous Rebels. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... "It's too childish and silly to remain silent any longer," thought Marta. Tired nerves revived spasmodically under another call to action. "Yes, certainly, mother—yes, do!" she said in ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... e'en, and, gif ye 're kind, I needna court anither! He humm'd and haw'd, the lass cried "pheugh," And bade the coof no deave her, Syne crack'd her thumb, and lap and leugh, And dang the silly weaver. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a great smack on the back. "You've given her the money, it's you has done it; nobody else would he such a silly sheep!" he said threateningly. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... well-stored with useful knowledge—a thorough practical acquaintance with all domestic duties; (the sphere where woman can exhibit her highest attractions, and her most valuable qualities,) tastes, habits, and views of life, drawn not from the silly novels of the day, but from a discriminating judgment, and the school of a well-learned practical experience in usefulness and goodness:—these are the elements of a good name, a valuable reputation ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... mother had christened the mischievous brute, had been placed in the wrong stall and Beelzebub was making for freedom. He gave another triumphant baa as he swept between Dolph's legs and through the gate, and, with an answering chorus, the silly sheep sprang to their feet and followed. A sheep hates water, but not more than he loves a leader, and Beelzebub feared nothing. Straight for the water of the low ford the old conqueror made and, in the wake of his masterful ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... and in an instant the model villa with its front garden was like a tiny doll's house at Paul's colossal feet. He went striding away with his head above the clouds to visit Niagara and the Himalayas. But when he came to the Himalayas, he found they were quite small and silly-looking, like the little cork rockery in the garden; and when he found Niagara it was no bigger than the tap turned on in the bathroom. He wandered round the world for several minutes trying to find something really large and finding everything small, till in sheer boredom he lay down ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... around and steals her eggs into the nests of other birds, and some of them are so silly they don't know the difference. They hatch the egg and bring up the young one as if it were their own. The young Mo-los are greedy things and they eat up everything away from the other little birds. ...
— The Magic Speech Flower - or Little Luke and His Animal Friends • Melvin Hix
... enough to support her after we are married. I've waited too long for her arrival to waste time with silly delays," ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... wondering over his meekness, and his agreement to be tied up again, at night. But still, what did a day matter? a man humors women's notions; and starving was so tedious. Between whiles he elaborated a scheme to attain his end. How easy to outwit the silly Thekla! His eyes shone, as he hid the little, sharp knife up his cuff. "Let her tie me!" says Lieders, "I keep my word. To-morrow I be out of this. He won't git a ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... the woman sternly, "you are right for once. You won't indeed believe ill of YOUR husband, but you'll have to believe ill of MINE. There's no use of your putting on such airs any longer. No matter how rash and silly you may have been, if you have a spark of honesty you'll be open to proof. If you and he try to brazen it out, the law will open both your eyes. Look at that likeness, look at these letters; and I have other proof and witnesses which can't be disputed. The name ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... the boy forward, and he, all silly and blushing as sailors will be when they see a pretty woman above their station—he took her hand and heaved it like a pump-handle; while old Aunt Rachel, the funny old woman in the glasses, she began to talk a lot of nonsense about seamen, as she always did, and for a minute ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... you silly piebald, you starveling mouse-hunter! what has come into your head? How dare you ask me how I am getting on? What sort of education have you had? How many arts are you ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... of the native gentlemen at Lucknow, or the landed or official aristocracy of the country. He sometimes admits a few poets or poetasters to hear and praise his verses, and commands the unwilling attendance of some of his relations, to witness and applaud the acting of some of his own silly comedies, on the penalty of forfeiting their stipends; but any one who presumes to approach him, even in his rides or drives, with a petition for justice, is instantly clapped into prison, or otherwise ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... poor soul, if I got the world with it. And Old X——? Is he still afloat? Harmless bark! I gather you ain't married yet, since your sister, to whom I ask to be remembered, goes with you. Did you see a silly tale, John Nicholson's Predicament,[15] or some such name, in which I made free with your home at Murrayfield? There is precious little sense in it, but it might amuse. Cassell's published it in a thing called Yule-Tide years ago, and nobody that ever I heard of read or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you've said, of course, all that you've been silly enough to say. How could he doubt the story? You have explained it all to me ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... frizzled black hair, divided behind, and smelling strong of pomatum, a well-oiled mustache, and a simpering, supercilious expression—one of those nasty creatures that old Kit North says never can be washed clean. He looks conceited and silly enough to be an attache to the court of his imperial highness the emperor. When this fellow knelt before the picture and slavered it with his ugly mouth, a dizzy sensation of disgust came over me. Upon a general review of all the circumstances, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... about me that draws out their sentimentality, and they've all got to say something about my youth, and the heritage of peace that the 1917 conscripts won for me. They talk as if I had been busy with a feeding-bottle instead of compressing my silly face ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... us to death about it. I don't know where we'll go," she added, for she was getting rather cross. "I wish we'd left the old cat in the cellar anyway; it was a silly plan to ...
— Kristy's Rainy Day Picnic • Olive Thorne Miller
... too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage[7-7] green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin', Baith ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... think always with propriety in little things as well as in great, and neither be too solicitous of our dress in the parlor nor negligent because we are at home. I think it as improper and indecorous to write a stupid or silly letter to you, as one in a bad hand or upon coarse paper. Familiarity ought to have another and a worse name, when it relaxes in its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... at a distance with a number of acquaintances, Roger and Mr. Cledd and I sat down—perhaps more promptly than need be—over our accounts in the great cabin. I felt bitterly disappointed that none of my own people had come to welcome me; but realizing how silly it was to think that they surely must know of our arrival, I jumped at Roger's suggestion that we gather up our various documents and then leave Mr. Cledd in charge—he was not a Salem man—and hurry home as fast as we ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... And the winsome Violet Is, forsooth, too holy. 'But the Touchmenot?' Go to! What! a face that's speckled Like a common milking-maid's, Whom the sun hath freckled. Then the Wild-Rose is a flirt; And the trillium Lily, In her spotless gown, 's a prude, Sanctified and silly. By her cap the Columbine, To my mind, 's too merry; Gossips, I would sooner wed Some plebeian Berry. And the shy Anemone— Well, her face shows sorrow; Pale, goodsooth! alive to-day, Dead and gone to-morrow. Then that bold-eyed, buxom wench, Big and blond and lazy,— She's been chosen ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... may well bear in mind. To attack a specific type is one thing, to attack a specific quality is another. It may be impossible to set aside selected persons from the population and say to them, "You are cowardly, weak, silly, mischievous people, and if we tolerate you in this world it is on condition that you do not found families." But it may be quite possible to bear in mind that the law and social arrangements may foster and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... wee lived in fortunes despite, Thoughe poore, yet contented with humble delighte; Full forty winters thus have I beene A silly blind beggar of Bednall-greene. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... impossible. What but youth can echo back the soul of youth—all the music of its wild vanities and romantic follies? The good nurse did not sympathize with the sentiments of her young lady, but she sympathised with the deep earnestness with which they were expressed. She thought it wondrous silly, but wondrous moving; she wiped her eyes with the corner of her veil, and hoped in her secret heart that her young charge would soon get a real husband to put such unsubstantial fantasies out of her head. There was a short pause in their conversation, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... to be revenged for this, yet he knows it is in vain to attack the person of Christ; He [Christ] has overcome him; therefore he [Satan] tampers with a company of silly men; that he may vilify him by them. And they, bold fools as they are, will not spare to spit in his face. They will rail at his person, and deny the very being of it; they will rail at his blood, and deny the merit and worth of it. They ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... under his breath for the rest of the day, whilst on Gladys Norman it had several distinct effects, the biting of her lower lips, the snubbing of Thompson, the merciless banging of her typewriter, and a self-administered rebuke of "Gladys Norman, you're a silly little ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... restaurant, in which she joined him, was the result, and there he told her how at first sight he had fallen in love with her beauty. After lunch he suggested a visit to his bachelor apartments, but this she refused. Seeing that this plan was a failure, he asked her to marry him then and there. The silly girl, believing he loved her, and enchanted by the picture he had painted of his father's wealth and fine home in New York City, consented, and they were married. After the ceremony he told her that he was about "broke," and said that he would take her to a place where she could make enough money ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... long way from silly. You know a little about what I'm trying to do—this appropriation that would assure our future. If Silas Morton's granddaughter casts in her lot with revolutionists, Morton College will get no help from the state. Do you know enough about what you are doing ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... he muttered, after a long silence; "the wilful minx cannot be playing at hide-and-seek with her friends! The hussy had ever too much of la famille de Barberie, and her high Norman blood about her, as that silly old valet has it, to stoop to such childish trifling. Gone she certainly is," he continued, looking, again, into the empty drawers and closets, "and with her the valuables have disappeared. The guitar is missing—the lute I sent across the ocean ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Lizzie, "the vanity of men in their faces! Talk of women!" and the silly creature looked up at her lover ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... Satire Savonarola Scenes of Clerical Life Schelling Scientific illustration Scott Seaside Studies "Self and Life" Sex in literature Shakspere Shelley Silas Marner "Silly Novels" Simcox, Edith, quoted Society Social Organism Sorrow Spanish Drama Spanish Gypsy Speculation, Love of Spectator Spencer, Herbert Spinoza Spiritual, the "Stradivarius" Strauss Sterling, John Sympathy Sully, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... his ignorance is anything but feigned, it brought him out safely under the protection of his accustomed habit, without suffering from the imputation of the ignorance he affected. It was, indeed, the ambition of a vain and silly mind; but provided he could work out this paltry joke upon a grave and sensible though unsuspecting individual, he felt quite delighted at the feat; and took the person thus imposed upon into the number of his favorites. It was upon this principle among others that ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... "Oh, silly! Everything isn't there just because you say it's there. If I close my eyes just a little eeny, I can see birds and fountains and a beautiful stage, and me with my hair all gold, and a blue satin train that kicks back when I walk, and all the music in the world winding around me like—like ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... fly away with him! He wants to fight a duel, does he? I am not afraid of his pistols; I have one, too, and a sword into the bargain. But it 's a silly business altogether! I am to fight about a woman I have n't even seen! And what will my wife say? I wish I had n't come into this crazy castle! I wish I had n't sealed a compact of fraternity with the baroness! Why did not ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... I were a thing with wings! A bird, that in a May-hedge sings! A lonely heather bell that swings Upon some wild hill-side; Or even a silly, senseless stone, With dark, green, starry moss o'ergrown, Round ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... silly woman! Cannot you see that Captain Hocken is dying to leave us? . . . But you are to bring your friend, ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... that rose to his lips faded away, for he saw, close by the inquisitive dame, a pair of dark blue eyes—they belonged to the daughter of the speaker, and any one who has such a daughter cannot be silly! The mother was like a fountain of questions, and the daughter, who listened, but never spoke, might pass for the beautiful Naiad of the fountain. How charming she was! She was a study for the sculptor to contemplate, but not to converse with; ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the silly, the childish things which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... am a little peculiar," she continued, "but to me this public kissing at parties and huskings seems not only silly, but just a trifle vulgar. When we were children at the district school, I thought it was fun, but it appears different now." Then, after a pause: "If I were a young man I would not want the girl I thought most of kissed a dozen times by every other fellow at a party. It is customary here ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... "Hark! I am going to strike now; one, two, three, four. There it is for you. How silly you look! You can say nothing." 5. The sun, at that moment, broke forth from behind a cloud, and showed, by the sundial, that the clock was half an hour behind the right time. 6. The boasting clock now held his tongue, and the dial only smiled at his ...
— McGuffey's Third Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and all round the ships echoed terribly to the voice of the Achaians as they praised the saying of god-like Odysseus. And then spake among them knightly Nestor of Gerenia: "Out on it; in very truth ye hold assembly like silly boys that have no care for deeds of war. What shall come of our covenants and our oaths? Let all counsels be cast into the fire and all devices of warriors and the pure drink-offerings and the right hands of fellowship ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... lay there, and my heart absolutely failed me. Instead of going straight to the rocks, I began to creep along the base to see whether I could find some easier track. Suddenly the voice of Amroth said, rather sharply, in my ear, "Don't be silly!" This homely direction, so peremptorily made, had an instantaneous effect. If he had said, "Be not faithless," or anything in the copybook manner, I should have sat down and resigned myself to solemn despair. But now I felt a fool and a coward ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Newton, on preaching Christ. His views on the subject are very different from Wesley's, and as different from mine. I have heard many silly sermons on the subject, but not one wise one. Many seem to be afraid of being sensible on religious subjects. They are wise enough on smaller matters; it is only on the greatest that their understandings are at fault. But the silliest preachers repeat ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... walks, clothed in a fine tunic, without meeting Hyperbolus(4) and his unceasing quibblings, without being accosted on the public place by any importunate fellow, neither by Cratinus,(5) shaven in the fashion of the debauchees, nor by this musician, who plagues us with his silly improvisations, Artemo, with his arm-pits stinking as foul as a goat, like his father before him. You will not be the butt of the villainous Pauson's(6) jeers, nor of Lysistratus,(7) the disgrace of the Cholargian deme, who is the incarnation of all the vices, and ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... but is certain to penetrate, from whatever corner it comes. It is this disposition which inspires the empty Cacus to deny his acquaintance, and overlook men of merit in distress; and the little silly, pretty Phillida, or Foolida, to stare at the strange creatures round her. It is this temper which constitutes the supercilious eye, the reserved look, the distant bowe, the scornful leer, the affected astonishment, the loud whisper, ending in a laugh directed full in the teeth of another. ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... of things. In the first place she apologized for having been so silly the time before—after the ball. She said she was ill then, she didn't want to talk about it. Now she had come to ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... unclean lips. You don't hurt her, for you cannot. You hurt yourself infinitely. Why, a dog would do as you did, and possibly be right; but you, not being a dog, have broken your own rules. You have trodden on your own honour, and, like the dull fool that you are, come out wrapped in your silly self-esteem as if it was a flag. I wish that you could see yourself as I see you—or rather I hope you never may; for if you did you would see no reason to live." The words, frozen with scorn, cut like hailstones. The guest cowered, with the whip ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... a woman more full of common sense than Mrs. Bertram. She had quite an appalling amount of this virtue; no one ever heard her say a silly thing; each step she took in life was a wise one, carefully considered, carefully planned out. She had been a widow now for sis years. Her husband had nearly come into the family estate, but not quite. He was the second son, and his eldest brother had died when his heir was a month old. This ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... to build a railway at all in this stupid, silly place," she said, as we sat in the veranda in the cool of evening, "I'm sure I can't imagine. We MUST go somewhere. This is maddening, maddening! Miss Wade—Dr. Cumberledge—I count upon you to discover SOMETHING for me to do. If I vegetate like this, seeing nothing all day long but those ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... measure at the thing that had occurred. The subsequent conversation threw absolutely no light on the matter so far as Fotheringay was concerned; the general opinion not only followed Mr. Cox very closely but very vehemently. Everyone accused Fotheringay of a silly trick, and presented him to himself as a foolish destroyer of comfort and security. His mind was in a tornado of perplexity, he was himself inclined to agree with them, and he made a remarkably ineffectual opposition to ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Mather, who was a man of uncommon dispatch and activity in the management of his numerous affairs, and improved every minute of his time, that he might not suffer by silly, impertinent, and tedious visiters, wrote over his study-door, in large letters, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... here now. It was a game we got off on one of the big strike partners long before the strike. I'll tell YOU, dad, for you know what happened afterwards, and you'll be glad. Well, that partner—Demorest—was a kind of silly, you remember—a sort of Miss Nancyish fellow—always gloomy and lovesick after his girl in the States. Well, we'd written lots of letters to girls from their chaps before, and got lots of fun out of it; but we had even a better show for a game here, for it happened ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... go far beyond the intentions expressed in what may be called the official preamble and in the new Committee's terms of reference. One of the clauses seems, with all deference to its august composers, to be merely silly. This is (1)(c) forbidding sub-division of securities. If a L10 share is split into ten L1 shares this operation cannot make the smallest difference to the supply of capital for essential industries or cause any drain on the Foreign Exchanges. I am ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... her work into her lap. 'You silly men are going to make a hunt of it? Then, let me tell you, you will not get that boy of mine to-morrow, nor this week, nor next. Was ever such a pack of fools! Let Dickie think he is being hunted, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... I know of, Sir— Lord, he's very silly, or very innocent, I hope he has his Maidenhead; if so, and rich too. Oh, what a booty were this ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... sublunary affairs, from the fate of empires to the washing of hands or the paring of nails. The modern prophetical almanac is the legitimate descendant and the sufficient representative of the ancient Chaldee Ephemeris, which was just as silly, just as ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and had to bear the whole blame for the silly joke we had played. The faculty has suspended me for a term. I would have got off with only a reprimand if I would have told the names of the other fellows, but I ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the interesting thing is that the flash of the shotgun burned all the hair off the head of the guy that was doin' the drivin'. It didn't scratch him, just scorched his hair off. It scared him silly." ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... interrupted, "he'll be alive, and he'll want me and I shall want him. Dreams are silly. I prefer being up." She clapped her hands. "That's it." Then, silent, she looked at me with an expression of new interest. "I've been wondering and wondering what it was: you are not really awake ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... home to-day. Oh, it is so terrible! I don't know how I can bear to live even for a little while without him. But this is silly of me, because I know he has to go and he will write often and come to me often. But, still, it is so lonesome. I didn't cry when he left me because I wanted him to remember me smiling in the way he liked best, but I have been crying ever since and I can't stop, no matter how hard ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... civilian of Delhi to tiffin on the morrow brought him in touch with Alixe Delavigne's proposed victim once more. The delighted rascal mused: "I will surely have letters from her to-morrow, possibly even a telegram of her arrival. When the silly Swiss woman is the partner of an innocent secret, she is mine to control! Then the chase for a few lacs of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... her up, saying: "Let them come and they will see what I do with the devils!" (p. 18, Novena de San Vicente). To believe that God permitted a similar infamy is a gross insult to God. True, the act is committed by a silly lad, but sillier still is the work of the saint in speaking of the physical ugliness of the demon, when according to the understanding of all, the demon ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... that Lord Chelford would see more clearly what was best for little Fairy. I am so very slow and so silly about business, and you so much my friend—I have found you so—that you might think ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... precious time listening to silly talk," snapped out the lady of the house, and she looked reprovingly ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... reading the evening paper with gold spectacles, and I never saw such a straight-backed old lady in my life, nor any so tall and thin and commanding. She looked up at us, kind of startled to see two soldiers walking into her kitchen, and Benny smiled a silly ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... is ineffectual and silly, even in a grizzly bear. The only result was that he bruised his head and nose, tumbled among stones and stumps, and strained the rope so powerfully that the limb of the tree to which it was attached was violently shaken, and Little Tim was obliged to hold ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... had rushed to the conclusion that this girl had married an old and broken gambler for his money, and that she was of those to be easily won. Her air of demure reserve piqued him—pleased him. "She is no silly kitten," he mentally remarked, after their second meeting. "She's in for a big career. With beauty and youth and barrels of money she will go far, and I will be her guide—unless I have lost my cunning. She will share her fortune with me some ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... success. He was certainly proud of the position he had made. He liked to see his wife sweep along the streets in her fine robes of Indian silk, which seemed to set a great gulf between her and her neighbours. He allowed his son to copy the fopperies of the Court gallants, and even to pick up the silly French phrases which made the language at Court a mongrel mixture of bad English and vile French. All these things pleased him well, although he himself went about clad in much the same fashion as his neighbours, save ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... her, John, don't mind my writing this letter, for it pleased me much to play this little trick upon you before I left; and the dear girl must never know—unless indeed you love her—and then I do not care—for I know she will forgive me for writing this silly letter, and love me just ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... worth six millions," he thought to himself, "and my eyes were not able to see that gold shining in the darkness! With such a fortune I could be peer of France, count, marquis, ambassador. I've replied to middle-class women and silly women, and crafty creatures who wanted autographs; I've tired myself to death with masked-ball intrigues,—at the very moment when God was sending me a soul of price, an angel with golden wings! Bah! I'll make a poem ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... incense fling! Through Him—by Him—for Him—all goodness know! 'Tis from the source alone each stream must flow. To please Him, wife, and wealth, and rank, and state Must be forsaken—strait the heavenly gate. Poor silly sheep! afar you err and stray From Him who is The Life, The Truth, The Way! My grief chokes utterance! I see your fate, As round the fold the hungry wolves of hate Closer and fiercer rage: from sword and flame One shelter ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... San Salvatore," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, "and it is rather silly that Mrs. Fisher should behave as if ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... talk your language," said Alan. He realized it was a silly thing to say. But his smile answered hers, and he went forward until he was standing close beside her. She did not appear so tall now, for he towered over her, the strength and bigness of his frame making hers seem all the ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... protection, silly," Margot told him smoothly. "I always lock my door when I go out, so I locked it today. Naturally, we won't have a chance to apply for a new lock. Besides, ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... that is but a goose—a silly, weak, worthless goose,' answered the knight, greatly alarmed at the effect the sight of the damsel had had on his son. Nevertheless they entered the fair, where not one but hundreds of damsels presented themselves to the astonished gaze of the ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... kind," she said, "but if you please, I would much rather have you decide for me, because I am only a silly little girl, and you are so ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... simple men; for many sweat Under this act, that knows not the law's debt Which hangs upon their lives; for silly men Plod on they know not how, like a fool's pen, That, ending, shows not any sentence writ, Linked but to common reason or slightest wit: These follow for no harm; but yet incur Self penalty with those that raised this stir. A God's name, on, to calm our private ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... feeling changed. Was he then going to carry the old life into the new, and rebuke a silly garish woman whose faults were generic more than personal? He hurried forward to the door and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... walked on down the corridor with MacHeath. "That man is scared silly! But what an actor! You'd never know he was eating his ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... it?" answered Aggie. "That just shows how silly one can be. I almost thought Alfred was going to say that Zoie had lunched ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... of course I care for him. I have known him ever since I was a child; but I don't love him. Besides, he stays at home while others are in the field. Silly boy, would I have let you kiss me in the summer-house if it were so? No, sir! We are not such fine ladies as your friends in the city of Philadelphia, perhaps, we Virginia country girls upon whom your misses look ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... near Redruth, in Cornwall, lived till 1841. He was interested in mines, and a man of substance. Unluckily the versions of his dream are full of discrepancies. It was first published, apparently, in The Times during the "silly season" of 1828 (August 28). According to The Times, whose account is very minute, Mr. Williams dreamed of the murder thrice before 2 a.m. on the night of May 11. He told Mrs. Williams, and was so disturbed ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... who have seen them unite in a chorus of praise. Their leaders, elected persons, guides chosen by votes and popular acclamation, have shown in a hundred ways that they will not, dare not, trust the people. Our silly censorships, our concealments of unpleasant truths, our suppression of criticism, our galling infringements of personal liberty, witness to the fact that authority distrusts the source from which it sprang; that the leaders of our democracy reckon the common people unfit to know, to think or to ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... begged the loan of it for the evening. But the Corporal, who as a soldier and Lady Eleanor's servant was a staunch supporter of Church and King, did not like the preacher, who was always railing against all authority and driving silly maids into hysterics with his ravings; so he answered him very civilly (for he never quarrelled with any one) that he was afraid he could not. The preacher, however, would not take no for an answer, and ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... went that distressing "HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!" was always in my ears. For a nervous man, this was a fine state of things. Some sounds are hatefuler than others, but no sound is quite so inane, and silly, and aggravating as the "HOO'hoo" of a cuckoo clock, I think. I bought one, and am carrying it home to a certain person; for I have always said that if the opportunity ever happened, I would do that man an ill turn. What I meant, was, that I would break one of his legs, or something of that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... some time ago,—they used to say that swallows lived in the mud all winter, as the eels do. The books made no such stupid blunder; only the ignorant people, such as never seem to use their eyes or their reason. It was one of the popular errors of the time. Silly as the notion seems, it has been held by a great ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... chief. "And yet, I think, if your countryman sang every night to me, he would make me want the other. Whether David's singing would send me to his, I do not feel sure. But how silly to compare them! As well compare the temple in Accho with the ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... set down her glass and put away her pocket-handkerchief. 'How silly of me to worry about Mr. Harbinger,' she said. 'After all, I suppose Fate never intended ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... was regarding Joan impartially. "They might object to having you break in on their silly tea-talk, the police might raid the place if you danced—but palm reading! Oh! my dear, you've struck ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... everything that looked strange, and for all that appeared cold-hearted, almost cruel, in Sir Lionel to Ellaline, who had heard the wrong side of the story, certainly from Madame de Blanchemain—a silly woman, I fancy—and perhaps even from Madame de Maluet, whose favourite pupil ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... far better musicians, with far finer voices, attempted to copy her inimitable musical recitation; nobody ever sang like her, and still less did anybody ever look like her while she sang. Practical jokes of very doubtful taste were the fashion of that day, and remembering what wonderfully coarse and silly proceedings were then thought highly diverting by "vastly genteel" people, it is not, perhaps, much to be wondered at that so poor a piece of wit as this should have furnished diversion to a couple of light-hearted ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... fussing around the engines, heard that. They knocked off what they were doing and began asking him questions—I suppose he thought they were awfully silly, but he answered all of them patiently—about horses and riding. I was looking at a couple of spare power-unit cartridges, like the one Al Devis had strained his back on, clamped to the ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... anxious to accept it) if, after a thorough investigation, his process could not be explained by well-known physical laws. The conditions he demanded were such as to render any investigation simply silly. His exclusive use of the dark room, which could have nothing to do with Spiritual forces, for the Spirits had already done their work in the Camera, utterly precluded us from discovering whether his processes were in anywise different from ordinary photography. ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... remembrance of the delight she had felt in his society. The last few weeks had been the happiest she had ever known. No words of his would justify her, either. She was vexed at herself. Here it had turned out that she was just like any other silly girl, holding her heart in her hand, ready to bestow it unasked. In her self-accusing spirit, she forgot that looks and tones may speak volumes in the absence ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... brutal candor and womanly weakness always have gone about encouraging one another, you know. I cannot see any good reason for Mr. Denham's not coming except that he declines my invitation. It is very silly in him, and I regard it as no reason at all. I am quite unused to being declined and do not intend to acquire the habit until I am a good deal older than I was my last birthday. Still, I can understand that ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... under thirty-five will actually have the audacity to say to me that he takes small pleasure in society because the girls he meets are so silly, and he must use small-talk in order to meet them on their own ground. I am aghast at his temerity, as he, too, will be when he has heard our side of the subject. We girls never have allowed ourselves the ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... least, if he didn't, smokin' must 'ave 'ad somethink to do with it, for after the dear man was gone a pipe an' a plug of the nasty stuff was found under 'is piller, so I can't stand it; an' what's more, Mr Crossley, I won't stand it! Just think, sir, 'ow silly it is to put a bit of clay in your mouth an' draw smoke through it, an' then to spit it out again as if you didn't like it; as no more no one does on beginnin' it, for boys only smoke to look like men, an' men only smoke ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... "Silly girl!" snapped Renaud. "There is no nursing for you in this case. Assuredly, Mlle. Pauline, you do not enter the house, I cannot allow it. Besides, mademoiselle, you return home too late. If you remained at Clairville longer, and had the place cleaned ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... least bad of these is by Lancre, a man of some wit, whose evident connection with some young witches gave him something to say. The accounts of the Jesuit Del Rio and the Dominican Michaelis are the absurd productions of two credulous and silly pedants. ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... was well rewarded; from thence a very respectable tour of about 30 miles in every direction may be accomplished. Walcheren and Lillo (the celebrated fort which prevented our ascending the Scheld) were visible without any difficulty, with Cadsand and all the well-known names of that silly expedition,[90] rendered apparently more silly by seeing how impossible it would have been to have taken Antwerp unless by a regular siege, which might have been of endless duration; we might have bombarded the basons in which the men-of-war were deposited, and with about as ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... you talk like a gutter-snipe to a gentleman old enough to be your grandfather? Or, damme, have you and Goodfellow been coming to blows? By the nose of you and the state of your shirt a man would say you've come from a street fight; and by your talk, that your head was knocked silly." ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... cause to make a pitiful defence of poor poetry, which, from almost the highest estimation of learning, is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children; so have I need to bring some more available proofs, since the former is by no man barred of his deserved credit, whereas the silly latter hath had even the names of philosophers used to the defacing of it, with great danger of civil war among ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... utterances of the wretched drudge. Bullied into silence by the brutal schoolmaster, Smike limped away with a vacant smile, when we heard the female scoundrel in the dimity night-jacket saying,—"I'll tell you what, Squeers, I think that young chap's turning silly." ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... worship in her face, with the bright tears, trembling on her cheeks. And Paul thought he had never seen a fairer thing; but wishing to dry the tears, he made a little merry song, like the song of gnats that dance up and down in the sun, and love their silly play—so ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... saw, was trusting. Not credulous, silly trusting, but thoughtful trusting, accepting such facts as were definitely known. Faith was trusting. And faith without works was dead simply because there could be no faith without works. There was no such thing as belief that did not result ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in that silly way, Elma; of course it matters. She says too that you are to be publicly exposed at Middleton School to-morrow, and your conduct—I must say I could not make out what she was talking about; I don't see that you did anything very wrong—but your conduct is ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... of that!" answered Pelle, taking his arm to help him up the hill. "The children are quite silly ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... he walked on down the corridor with MacHeath. "That man is scared silly! But what an actor! You'd never know he was ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett
... And—"Don't be a silly," the boy would say. "If you go and get yourself drowned, in any stupid way like that, Carette, I'll never speak to you again ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... number of silly stories. At one moment you said you had come from Italy. Then you said that you had hired a motor-car and the driver had attacked you in the night. Afterwards you believed yourself to be in some office, and talked about ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... running in the direction of Potchefstroom. In the farmhouse were only two young girls, the elder a charming golden-haired fairy with tender eyes of cornflower blue. And her smile!—it was enough to make one say all kinds of silly things just for the pleasure of seeing her ripe lips part, revealing her wholesome, even little teeth! No wonder I delayed my departure! I left at last, however—not without the loaf of bread—and made for the camp. I had not gone far before ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... dream I have is being compelled to go back to the lecture platform. In it I am always getting up before an audience, with nothing to say, trying to be funny, trying to make the audience laugh, realizing I am only making silly jokes. Then the audience realizes it, and pretty soon they commence to get up and leave. That dream always ends by my standing there in the semi-darkness talking to an ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Leonard, approaching his wife with an air of good humour, told her he was sorry for their foolish dispute the last night; but he was now convinced of his error. She answered, smiling, she believed she owed his condescension to his complacence; that she was ashamed to think a word had passed on so silly an occasion, especially as she was satisfyed she had been mistaken. A little contention followed, but with the utmost good-will to each other, and was concluded by her asserting that Paul had thoroughly convinced her she had been in the wrong. Upon which they both ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... and silly dispatch went over the wires to the effect that during the trial of A. W. Howie for homicide (in which the jury consisted of six women and six men) the men and women were kept locked up together all night for four nights. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... enough of me through the newspapers to vouchsafe that. You are rich, and it is your chief misery. Listen! Whether you believe it or not, you are very unhappy. Let me read your horoscope. Your club life bores you; you are tired of our silly theatres; no longer do you care for Wagner's music. You are deracinated; you are unpatriotic. For that there is no excuse. The arts are for you deadly. I am sure you are a lover of literature. Yet what a curse it has been for you! When you ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... CHARLES. Because your silly schemes miscarry, you come here to turn rogue and assassin! Murder, boy, do you know the meaning of that word? You may have slumbered in peace after cropping a few poppy-heads, but to have a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... note I should strike if I were you," his mother responded, "only with a little different accent. What would Captain Carey's eldest son like to do for his only cousin, a little girl younger than himself,—a girl who had a very silly, unwise, unhappy mother for the first five years of her life, and who is now practically fatherless, for ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... "How silly you are, my dear Juliette!" expostulated Mademoiselle Aurelie, the elderly lady, an old friend in straitened circumstances, who had seen her come ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps ... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and fathers, brought additions ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... lives are in safety. They are not liable to be impressed for soldiers, and forced to cut one another's Christian throats, as in the wars of their own countries. If some of the religious mad bigots, who now tease us with their silly petitions, have in a fit of blind zeal freed their slaves, it was not generosity, it was not humanity, that moved them to the action; it was from the conscious burthen of a load of sins, and a hope, from the supposed merits of so good a work, to be ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... Commander-in-Chief." Therefore, a Commander-in-Chief is not like a poet. But when a Commander-in-Chief dies, the spirit of a thousand Beethovens sob and wail in the air; dull cannon roar slowly out their heavy grief; silly rifles gibber and chatter demoniacally over his grave; and a cocked hat, emptier than ever, rides with the mockery of despair on ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... speak in that silly way, or I shall be angry with you. Vayate! you may take away the wine. We can come again when ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... who passed on quite unconcerned without taking any notice of her prey. For an instant Downy could scarce credit her own eyes when she saw her enemy pass on; but fearing that if puss should return, she should not again escape so miraculously, she darted away as she hoped unseen, but, silly little thing! she had better have laid where she was, for the kitten beheld her as she ran, and sprung upon her. Poor Downy felt her claws, but exerting all her speed, she flew to the hedge—this friendly hedge which had so often been her refuge, ...
— Little Downy - The History of A Field-Mouse • Catharine Parr Traill
... woeful Damian, That languisheth for love, as ye shall hear; Therefore I speak to him in this manneare. I say. "O silly Damian, alas! Answer to this demand, as in this case, How shalt thou to thy lady, freshe May, Telle thy woe? She will alway say nay; Eke if thou speak, she will thy woe bewray; * *betray God be thine help, I can no better say. This sicke Damian in Venus' fire So burned that he died for ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to king Jareb, yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound," and chap. vii. 8, 11. "Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people, Ephraim is a cake not turned, Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart, they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria," 2 Cor. vi. 14, 15. "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... nibbled, and contemplated my late experiences; nibbled, and was almost persuaded to be a Christian,—that is, to forswear thenceforth and forever all company which I could not afford to keep, all appearances which were not honest, all foolish pride, and silly ambition, and moral cowardice;—as I did after I had ridden in a certain carriage I have mentioned, and which I am coming to now as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... is a silly thing, and I have always regretted allowing the man to publish it. He certainly called upon me and asked me a lot of questions, after which he went away and wrote that article. Ever since then I have felt like a conceited ass, who ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... the moon is made of green cheese; take for granted, grasp the shadow for the substance; catch at straws, grasp at straws. impose upon &c. (deceive) 545. Adj. credulous, gullible; easily deceived &c. 545; simple, green, soft, childish, silly, stupid; easily convinced; over-credulous, over confident, over trustful; infatuated, superstitious; confiding &c. (believing) 484. Phr. the wish the father to the thought; credo quia impossibile [Lat][Tertullian]; all is not gold that glitters; no es oro todo lo ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... baby of me here," she told herself, "they treat me like a silly child. It's a wonder that they don't send a nurse-maid with me to my classes. It's a wonder"—she was growing vehement—"that they give me credit for enough sense to wear rubbers when it's raining! I," again she glanced at the watch, "I haven't ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... "What you think of—that silly and vulgar idea of the beating and the fright—is what would occur to any one. You have not an ounce of brains, Remedios; to solve a serious question you can think of nothing better than a piece of folly like that. I have thought of a means more worthy of noble-minded and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... with the express intention of asking her to marry him, another young gentleman. He had a light moustache and a fancy waistcoat, both of which looked new. He was young, rich, handsome, and sufficiently silly to make any woman wish to take charge of him, and her father had told him to "go in and win, my boy, there's no one I'd like better, sir," a very good heartener for a slightly dubious youth, even though he may consider ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... begged, patting her relative between the shoulders. "What's the good o' goin' on like that just because a silly ass ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... devote his life to literature, which circumstances largely prevented; while Clough was eager to take a more active part in life, not being content with the uneventful career of a poet, irk'd (l. 40). Annoyed; worried. keep (l. 43). Here used in the sense of remain, silly (l. 45). Harmless; senseless. The word has ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... guns, except Giles and some beater men, only that Tom's was single-barrelled? Then there were others whom I need not describe, stretching to left and right, and worst of all, perhaps, there was Giles's great black dog, a silly-looking beast which always seemed to have its mouth open and its tongue hanging out, and to be wagging a big tail like the fox's, only black and ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... happened that I've known to 'appen to sailormen afore. At Sydney 'e got silly on another gal, and started walking out with her, and afore he knew wot he was about he'd promised to marry ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... day, after its happy but meaningless triviality, the throng and mixed perfumery and silly courteous gestures, his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind! He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: but sometimes he suspected that he loved them as God does—at a judicious distance. From his rather haphazard religious training, strange ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... of this nonsensical twaddle. It was the silly custom of the Bridgeboro Record to make heroes of the town and county officials, and soberly to print the rubbish which they uttered for the pleasure of seeing ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... word on behalf of a now utterly forgotten novel. I had a letter from the authoress thanking me, but alas! the illusion vanished. I was tempted by this one novel to look into others which I found she had written, and I discovered that they were altogether silly. The attraction of the one of which I thought so highly, was due not to any real merit which it possessed, but to something I had put into it. It was dead, but it had served as a wall to re-echo ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... of it was that, often, when they had done these seemingly silly things, the boat would start. So they were rather superstitious about it, and they did carry a tin of talcum powder with them, much to ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... Annie, you little silly—you aren't scared of me. Now don't let on you are. What you doing—trying to kid me? There, ain't that a splendid plant? I believe I'll take back a couple shovelfuls this rich wood earth to put in under it. It'll never know it's ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the face of it, and, besides, silly braggadocio, if not actually malicious. And even if it were malicious, Code thanked Heaven that the race had not been sailed, and that he had been spared the exhibition of Nat's malice. He had ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each coal owner sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you know of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over the country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get it into the silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful, ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... can do a turn of any sort, let the women have it. All the fun they get. Be an ass, like the rest of us. Maskee how silly! Mind you, it's all ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... felt it my duty to inform Miss Walton of her cousin's death and called on her at noon. Miss Walton's parents and Ed's were not intimate when the two were children; some silly misunderstanding in regard to a division of old Colonel Phelps's property after he died. As it turned out they might have spared themselves the quarrel, for a later will was afterwards found leaving his entire estate to churches and ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped our plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient business warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all), and all the "unmeaning repetition" of silly little sham Gothic churches and meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and mortar without love, invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men had thrust into the face of their sweated ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... ancient of eighty—in brief, the ideal citizen of Christendom. The present plan surely fails to produce a satisfactory crop of such ideal citizens. On the one hand its impossible prohibitions cause a multitude of lamentable revolts, often ending in a silly sort of running amok. On the other hand they fill the Y. M. C. A.'s with scared poltroons full of indescribably disgusting Freudian suppressions. Neither group supplies many ideal citizens. Neither promotes the sort of public morality that ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... robberies that had taken place between the countries. Then said the peasants sons, "If our king has lost most people, his sheriffs will make it even with the lives of twelve men when they come from the south after Yule; and ye little know, ye silly fools, why ye are kept here." Thorod took notice of these words, and many made jest about it, and scoffed at them and their king. When the ale began to talk out of the hearts of the Jamtalanders, what Thorod had before long suspected became evident. The day after Thorod and his comrade took all ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... "I'm being silly!" He drew his hand back to throw the ornament into the chest. Then, he felt himself stopped. An irresistible compulsion seized him, and he dazedly secured the amulet about his neck. Feeling sick and weak, he tucked it into his garments. ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... all this don't signify that I forgive you in the least for coming between her and me. I'm willing to call a truce because falling out is horrid inconvenient, and looks silly. But your intrusive existence has turned love's young dream into a farce, and this suggestion of yours can only make things worse. I never bargained for being a sort of Siamese twin, but that's how it comes out. The unfortunate girl will never be able to think of one of us without the other. ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... man, "and silly you must remain, but that does not much matter, for the others are as silly ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... be off, and don't jaw any more!" answered Archer— "asking such silly questions, as if you did not know better than ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... 'Away,' quoth he, 'with this silly fool! In prison fast let her lie: For she is come of the English blood, And for ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... my eyes. They are—queer, perhaps. And my hair, which I also hide under the cap. The poor soldiers ascribe all sorts of—of virtues to them. Magic qualities, which, of course, is silly. And ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... to change their skin. The third time she hinted vaguely that there was "another." The star of Abinger Vennard was now blazing in the firmament, and she had conceived a platonic admiration for him. The truth is that Miss Claudia, with all her cleverness, was very young and—dare I say it?—rather silly. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... from a sharp fit of goose, such as attacks many boys who, because matters do not go exactly as they like at home, consider that they are ill-used, and long for what they call their freedom—a freedom which is really slavery, inasmuch as they make themselves the bond-servants of their silly fancies, and it takes some time to win ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... must be made the subject of gossip because of the foolishness of two young men," he said doggedly, returning to his argument. "They will say that it is because of my daughter that you fight; and the friendship of years must be set aside while two hot-heads vent their silly spite—" ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... rule; and that they have only to organize to come into their heritage. These sycophants, who, as Aristotle of old pointed out, bear the greatest resemblance to the court favourite of the tyrant, ask the people to believe the silly paradox that the united wisdom of the whole people is greater than that of the wisest part. The truth is that no people is fit to exercise equal political rights which is not sensible enough to choose the wisest part to carry on the government, providing only they have control over ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... which seized both of us whenever we passed by the door of a certain unfurnished room, in which we neither saw nor heard anything. And the strangest marvel of all was, that for once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman though she be,—and allowed, after the third night, that it was impossible to stay a fourth in that house. Accordingly, on the fourth morning I summoned the woman who kept the house and attended on us, and told her that the rooms did not quite suit us, and we would not stay ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... another. She did not look merry indeed. Neeld knew his ignorance of feminine things, and made guesses with proper diffidence; but he certainly fancied she had been crying—or very near it—not so long ago. Yet the daughter of William Iver was sensible and not given to silly tears. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... be very silly of you. I should lose a day, that's all. Whereas you would lose all the days that remain to you to live. But no, the hiding-place is too good. A fellow doesn't invent a thing like that for fun. Come on, Sebastiani. You shall ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... this unexpected scent. And his companion's own suggestion was right to his hand, and, as it seemed, again quite providential! He laughed, with a quick color, which, however, appeared to help his lie, as he replied half hysterically, "You're right, old man, I own up, it's mine! It's d—d silly, I know—but then, we're all fools where women are concerned—and I wouldn't have lost that slipper ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... like bright bits spinning about a common centre. She looked up at the wide sky and it was borne in upon her that the universe was mighty and wonderful and infinite; she looked into her own heart and saw where she had been small and silly and finite. She saw that the snow-covered ridges stretching endlessly were like a concrete symbol of that infinity which extended above and about her; that they were clothed in beauty. She knew that when ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... good solid crime, among any tribe anywhere. Moreover, the Ajumba wanted meat, and the Fans, they said, offered them human. I saw no human meat at Egaja, but the Ajumba seem to think the Fans eat nothing else, which is a silly prejudice of theirs, because the Fans do. I think in this case the Ajumba thought a lot of smoked flesh offered was human. It may have been; it was in neat pieces; and again, as the Captain of the late s.s. Sparrow would say, "it mayn't." But the Ajumba have a horror of cannibalism, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... why you ask such silly questions," retorted the Lefthandiron. "What do we sit on? Why, you might just as well ask a dog what he barks with, or a lion what he eats his breakfast with—and that would be as stupid as ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... probably, like many other ladies, she looked upon this affair of the singing-bird as a freak that must end—and then perhaps his Grace, who was a charming young man, would return to his senses. There also was her sister, a long, fair girl, who looked sentimental, but was only silly. There was a little French actress, like a highly finished miniature; and a Spanish danseuse, tall, dusky, and lithe, glancing like a lynx, and graceful as ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... all right, what I say," the American lady went on. "But"—and she lost interest in Mary—"aren't we silly? Miss Wardrobe had better come in here, where there's only one place, and my daughter and I'll take a compartment together, as the car seems ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in her innocent glee— "What a fool of yourself with the whistle you'd make! For only consider how silly 'twould be To sit there and whistle for ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... see the works I made up a sort of story for myself, about the works being new ones, and the firm not being able to get them finished in time for Richard to start work, so that we had him hanging about the house all to ourselves. That was silly. Of course. But I am silly about him. I suppose I will soon ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Mlle. Silly, the daily papers inform us, has been engaged for the Grand Opera House in opera bouffe, and will make her debut about the middle of September. The lady should not be confounded with any of our New York "girls of the period" who bear, (or ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... "Oh, how silly you are!" she cried then, beginning with a laugh and ending with a strange catch in her throat. "Why, you're only just out ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... of individual Harpagons, but of the indifference of virtuous young gentlemen to the condition of the city they live in, provided they live at the west end of it on money earned by someone else's labor. The notion that prostitution is created by the wickedness of Mrs Warren is as silly as the notion—prevalent, nevertheless, to some extent in Temperance circles—that drunkenness is created by the wickedness of the publican. Mrs Warren is not a whit a worse woman than the reputable daughter who cannot endure her. Her indifference to the ultimate social consequences ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... intended to be a rascal," said Rosey, earnestly, "and you couldn't be a fool, except in heeding what a silly girl says. I only meant if you had taken me into your confidence it would have ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... honourable name of citizen which was formerly the right of the members of the Gallic cities, have degraded the idea till it has no longer any sort of meaning. A man who recently wrote a number of silly criticisms on the "Nouvelle Heloise" added to his signature the title "Citizen of Paimboeuf," and he thought it a capital joke.] No, sir, that modest bearing, that timid glance, that hesitating manner, proclaim only a slave adorned with ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... child, of course. I believe in children praying—well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles. It seems such cheek. Anyhow, this morning I—I have never done any harm to any God's creature knowingly—I prayed. A sudden impulse—I went flop on my knees; so you ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... the truth which Epameinondas is said in later times to have uttered about his own table, when he said that "such a dinner has no room for treachery." He saw that such a house as that has no place for luxury and expense, and that there is no man so silly and tasteless as to bring couches with silver feet, purple hangings, or golden goblets into a simple peasant's house, but that he would be forced to make his furniture match the house, and his clothes match his furniture, and so on. In consequence of ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... 1722, there arose a conscientious objector to boiled coffee in the person of Humphrey Broadbent, a coffee merchant who wrote a treatise on the True Way of Preparing and Making Coffee[375], in which he condemned the "silly" practise of making coffee by "boiling an ounce of the powder in a quart of water," then common in the London coffee houses, and urging the infusion method. He favored ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... even a swallow to be chased—he barked twice (the humbug!) for sign that he understood thoroughly, and at once fell to new capers by way of changing the subject. Tilda became severe. "Look here, Godolphus," she explained, "this is biz-strict biz. You may wag your silly Irish tail, but that don't take me in. Understand? . . . Well, the first thing you 'ave to do is take ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "You silly boy! I forbid you ever to write or talk of yourself in such a way again. You are not a cripple; and if you had ever had a mother or a sister, you would know how little women think of such things. How many more assurances do you expect ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... high spirits. Mahmoud was noted, too, for his ability to answer intelligently all reasonable inquiries and for his great patience in replying to many questions, that must have appeared to him very silly. Each day on the boat while we were all seated at dinner, Mahmoud came into the dining saloon and announced the program for the following days, always beginning: "Ladies and gentlemen, if you please," and closing with, "Monument ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... "I'll be with you in a second, Brady. I'm going your way, and I don't care which way you're going. My car's outside." Re-entering the room, Mr. Dodge walked up to Anne and actually shook her as a parent would shake a child. "Don't be silly about it, Anne. You've got to accept the house. He ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... "Poor little silly! Don't you know that if you go on like that, you will grow into a perfect donkey and that you'll be the laughingstock ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... thing rest! Besides, Sir," said Eloise, with a more gracious air, and forgetting her wicked temper, "you don't know the relief I feel! how free I am! no more figures! such a sad weight off me that I could fly! You would be silly to be such a Don Quixote as you threaten; it would do nobody any good, and would prove the ruin of all these poor creatures for whom you are now responsible. Don't you see?" said Eloise, taking a step nearer, and positively smiling upon him. "It isn't now just as you like,—you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... minister, on his way to martyrdom, to speak as a man in earnest, to express himself with some degree of dignity, and to eschew trivial and ridiculous comparisons. But, when treating of a grave subject, what can be more silly or indecorous than such language as the following—"Ye are raised on high by the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, and ye are drawn by the rope, which is the Holy Ghost, and your pulley is your faith." [422:1] Well may the Christian reader exclaim, with indignation, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... played upon the countenance of the chancellor as he replied—"Such friendship, my lord, as is consistent with perpetual strife—open and concealed—shall, if it please you, subsist between us. Pardon me, but we prate a silly jargon when we talk of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... him, for instead of making off to leeward, as he might easily do, he rushes up to windward with the intention of passing ahead of the wagon, and sometimes passes so near the front oxen that one may get a shot at the silly thing. I have seen this stupidity of his taken advantage of when he was feeding in a valley open at both ends. A number of men would commence running as if to cut off his retreat from the end through ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... "It's a silly, worryin' hen I am," she laughed. (But, oh, her laugh was a tragic thing, for while her lips curved in a smile her ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... those who escaped the slaughter threw themselves into the river, where they perished. Tallard, being surrounded, was taken near a mill behind the village of Sonderen, together with the marquis de Montperouz, general of horse, the major-generals de Seppeville, de Silly, de la Valiere, and many other officers of distinction. While these occurrences passed on the loft wing, Marsin's quarters at the village of Oberklau, in the centre, were attacked by ten battalions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... castle-builders are rather nearer the state of insanity than of reverie; they reason well upon false principles; their airy fabrics are often both in good taste and in good proportion; nothing is wanting to them but a foundation. On the contrary, nothing can be more silly than the reveries of silly people; they are not only defective in consistency, but they want all the unities; they are not extravagant, but they are stupid; they consist usually of a listless reiteration of uninteresting ideas; ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... "But that's just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin. No wonder you couldn't find out about it. You were looking for something that doesn't exist, just like all these old cranks that sit around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin's going to do for them, and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... of a man who was silly enough to tell the secrets of his Government, as regarded the intended injustice of the Brazilian Ministry towards me—in spite of stipulations thrice ratified by the Emperor's own hand. But in confiding them to Lieutenant Shepherd, the Envoy's want of common honesty, no less than of common ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... and you. You would have thrown up the stall in disgust." Would that he had! That was Mark's wish now,—his futile wish. In what a slough of despond had he come to wallow in consequence of his folly on that night at Gatherum Castle! He had then done a silly thing, and was he now to rue it by almost total ruin? He was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the dirt through which he was forced to wade. He had become unconsciously connected ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... "Make friends with them and sooner or later they'll let it slip out without meaning to. That is if they know anything about a lost village. And truly, Professor, we always thought that was just a lot of silly talk about there being an ancient Indian town near here. I've never seen it and I've never seen anyone else who ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... it was for myself, you silly thing. Are you not myself? and the part of myself I love the best?" And her supple wrist was round his neck in ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... out of you, temper, laziness, gambling, and all. You got it in you to be something more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey. It's only you 'ain't got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar windfall and—a—and a sporty girl. If—if two glasses of beer make you as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you under the table ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... a silly idea, but it still haunted her and would not be shaken off. Granny Thomas was a very old woman who lived at Burnley Cove and was reputed to be something of a witch. That is, people who were not Sparhallows or Burnleys gave her that name. Sparhallows or Burnleys, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... author's relation to his parents is adapted directly from Shandy, since he here possesses an incapable, unpractical, philosophizing father, who determines upon methods for the superior education of his son; and a simple, silly mockery of a mother. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... Spicer grinned, and Mr. Pile looked as though he were about to be sick. How was it that a set of gentlemen, who generally knew their business so well as did the political leaders at Percycross, had got themselves into the same boat with a man silly enough to ask such ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... said quick and shaky; 'it was silly of me. I only thought——' Well, she was tremblin' with cold or somethin', and kind of near cryin', too—one of them women that wears themselves out by botherin' to be good, and if they are good, botherin' about what ought to be done ...
— Mr. Scraggs • Henry Wallace Phillips
... simplicity of nature. Like many of his predecessors, he had a habit of making long speeches to prisoners on their conviction; but his intention was to help them to a better mode of life, not to aggravate their feelings by silly or coarse remarks. This habit, however, led him occasionally into enunciating principles which rather astonished his friends. In a murder case he found that the woman killed was not the wife of the prisoner but his mistress, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... put a box away for you in case you wanted it," Seldon continued. "Don't expect much. It's a silly piece, and I've a silly part, and I'm very bad in it. You must come around to supper, and tell me where I'm bad in it, and we will talk ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... time for sentiment, McKay. I have known Miss Waring three years; you, perhaps three weeks. I tell you solemnly that if she has tempted you to 'run it' down there to see her it is simply to boast of a new triumph to the silly pack by whom she is surrounded. ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... other one, and so the wolf, like Lord Ullin, is "left lamenting."[114] M. Berenger-Feraud thinks this version somewhat analogous to a fable in his French collection of popular Senegambian Tales,[115] of the Clever Monkey and the Silly Wolf, of which, as it is short, I may offer a free ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... want to be bothered when his head's full of his specimens and he's thinking about nothing else but classifying and numbering and labelling! He'd laugh, and call it a silly trifle, and tell us to ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... to do with it, for after the dear man was gone a pipe an' a plug of the nasty stuff was found under 'is piller, so I can't stand it; an' what's more, Mr Crossley, I won't stand it! Just think, sir, 'ow silly it is to put a bit of clay in your mouth an' draw smoke through it, an' then to spit it out again as if you didn't like it; as no more no one does on beginnin' it, for boys only smoke to look like men, an' men only smoke because they've got up the 'abit an' can't 'elp it. ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... crowned by Persuasion. And Apollo and Artemis, Athene and Hercules, are standing by, and at the end of the platform Amphitrite and Poseidon, and Selene apparently urging on her horse. And some say it is a mule and not a horse that the goddess is riding upon; and there is a silly tale about this mule. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... not why, but I was aware of a twinge or pang like the cut of a knife when he mentioned her. I thought it a certain silly fastidiousness on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... "you're as bad as the silly people who call killing things cruel! I wouldn't have thought ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... end—a poor devil. He would not have liked to stand in his shoes. Men were not evil, after all. He did not like his sleek hair, his queer way of standing at right angles, with his nose in the air, and glancing along his shoulder at you. No. On the whole, men were not bad—they were only silly ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... there with his sleeves rolled up, making himself mightily at home, chucking wheat and wool and cotton and sugar and stuff out of the hold, slewing it, hoisting it, and letting it down plunk onto France! The boys in khaki were on trains already. He could hear the silly, piping screech of the French locomotives. His mind was half numbed, but he hoped that all this would encourage those French people and remind them that before Uncle Sam rolled down his sleeves again, he intended to bat out a ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Look [keenly], fix thy glance sharply, especially if it be a girl. When she is half-frightened, she will tell you much without knowing it. When thou shalt have often done this thou wilt be able to twist many a silly girl like twine around thy fingers. Soon thy eyes will look like a snake's, and when thou art angry thou wilt look like the old devil. Half the business, my dear, is to know how to please and flatter and allure people. When a girl has anything ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... "I do like 'em a bit noisy and silly," he admitted. "That sort is so—so gemuthlich, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... looking into a deep pit in your dream, you will run silly risks in business ventures and will ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... neatly turned down, her dressing gown and slippers laid out, the shaded lamps shining on the gold and ivory of her dressing table, she was conscious of a sudden homesickness. Homesickness for her bare little room in the camp barracks, for other young lives, noisy, chattering, often rather silly, occasionally unpleasant, but young. Radiantly, vitally young. The great house, with its stillness and decorum, oppressed her. There was no ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... think I'm big enough to take care of myself?" Lane asked, with a little laugh. "Besides, there's an American Consul here, and plenty of English witnesses who saw the whole thing. Can't think why they're trying on such a silly game." ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... terms of Euclid. If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven't remembered the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, 'Lay AB along DE' till all's blue and you'll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip can blether to his silly heart's content and he'll never prove that I'm a bold girl. Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world except the enfranchisement of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... like it, of course," she said, "Horace fairly simpers with pleasure while he sits and holds her hand. But a woman doesn't impose on other women so easily. It's silly." ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a wild speech with action all is wild - The children's leader, and himself a child; He spins their top, or, at their bidding, bends His back, while o'er it leap his laughing friends; Simple and weak, he acts the boy once more, And heedless children call him Silly Shore. ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... keyboard carefully before commencing her exercises. I struggled bravely against this unjust ostracism; but all in vain. I was so unlike these other girls in character and disposition, and I had, moreover, been guilty of a great imprudence. I had been silly enough to show my companions the costly jewels which M. de Chalusse had given me, but which I never wore. And on two occasions I had proved to them that I had more money at my disposal than all the ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... accustom ourselves to think always with propriety in little things as well as in great, and neither be too solicitous of our dress in the parlor nor negligent because we are at home. I think it as improper and indecorous to write a stupid or silly letter to you, as one in a bad hand or upon coarse paper. Familiarity ought to have another and a worse name, when it relaxes in its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... again! If you will not mind what I say about your silly fears, you shall hear from the pastor how wicked they are. I see him yonder, in the garden. ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... babe at the battle, silly!" cried the young woman with a chuckle. "S'pose he were only twenty, then he couldn't be less than ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "Oh, it's silly to tell; but sometimes I wonder whether it wouldn't help you a little, at the same time. I'd love to feel it did; you have been so good to me. I know you worry about Allyn. You watch him as a cat watches a mouse, and you always seem to understand his queer ways and know just how to manage him. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... sank rapidly: the delirium left her; but, as she whispered, she was "clean silly;" it was the lightening before the final darkness. After having for some time lain still, her eyes shut, she said, "James!" He came close to her, and, lifting up her calm, clear, beautiful eyes, she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly but shortly, looked for Rab but could not see him, ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.
... their own cows, making their own butter, and performing tasks of household work that few of our farmers' wives would now condescend to take part in. Instead of despising these useful arts, an emigrant's family rather pride themselves on their skill in these matters. The less silly pride and the more practical knowledge the female emigrant brings out with her, so much greater is the chance for domestic ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... they got to her; and, only stopping to give the man a lecture, mamma picked up her silly little girl, and the procession moved off. First came Cy, as grave as a sexton; then the wheelbarrow with Poppy, white and limp and speechless, all in a bunch; then mamma, looking amused, anxious ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... who lived in the same house now, and who visited Dora's apartment at all hours, she was too silly and too deeply infatuated with her friend to ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... remarked,—"She is free-handed enough! She gives what costs her nothing, and takes all she can get, and is, after all, a trollop, like the rest of us, Fanchon, who would be very good if there were neither men nor money nor fine clothes in the world, to tempt poor silly women." ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... why? The lonely inhabitants of the desert of Chazy County don't need a daily—or a weekly—or a monthly. A semi-annual would about hit their gait, and be more than they deserve. So I've decided it's merely a silly way to spend money—and an easy way, too, I'll be bound. Oblige me by explaining this ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... winks her wicked old eyes. "She wants to marry her son to Teresa Ottolini. He's a poor silly little ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... No—only a silly girl would think that. Was I ever good? I'm sure I don't know. If I was a woman soon knocked it out ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... she clasps me all sudden in her arms and setting soft cheek to mine falls a-chiding me, yet kissing me full oft, calling me "silly," ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... humiliate Lucien by various aristocrats' sarcasms. Lili the religious thought it a charitable deed to use any means of enlightening Nais, and Nais was on the brink of a piece of folly. Francis the diplomatist undertook the direction of the silly conspiracy; every one was interested in the progress of the drama; it would be something to talk about to-morrow. The ex-consul, being far from anxious to engage in a duel with a young poet who would fly into a rage at the first hint of insult ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... that kind of thing!' said she, in an altered tone, her cheeks glowing; 'it is very silly of him to get himself talked about; but of course ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was so silly? When madre was talking to him last night, and when I was singing my pretty serenade, he heard nothing at all. He was thinking his ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... new red-brick houses, in which ribbon-looms were rattling behind long lines of window, alternating with old, half-thatched, half-tiled cottages—one of those dismal wide streets where dirt and misery have no long shadows thrown on them to soften their ugliness. Here, about half-past five o'clock, Silly Caleb, an idiot well known in Dog Lane, but more of a stranger in the Bridge Way, was seen slouching along with a string of boys hooting at his heels; presently another group, for the most part out ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... be surprised at his pouring out on me the reproaches of his silly tongue, against you, too, does he make objections worthy of shame. Is it base for me, with a false crime to have charged Palamedes, {and} honourable for you to have condemned him? But neither could {Palamedes}, the son of Nauplius, defend a crime so great, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... humour of the situation. He was uneasy and suspicious. Moreover, he was puzzled by this American girl, and he hated to be puzzled. She had social aspirations, of course; she cared nothing for decayed or reformed criminals, and this silly bazaar was only designed so that the ambitious girl could find her way into the county set. Then she would choose a husband, and nothing more would be heard of Merritt and Co. Henson had a vague notion that all American girls are on the look-out for English husbands ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... sometimes, but then he was Archie, and had a right to his bad humors; but with the boys and girls it was less endurable. It was, "Oh, you stupid old Matt! Of course it was all your fault;" or, "Mattie, you goose!" from Fred; or, "You silly child, Mattie" from her father, who found her a less amusing companion than Grace; and even Dottie would say, "Oh, it is only Mattie: I never care if she ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... your words brought to my mind! Have you not heard men and women, those who have outlived such glimpses of high things as nature ever sent them, making a jest of love in young lives, treating it, from the height of their wisdom forsooth, as a silly dream of boys and girls? If we ever live to speak or think like that, it will indeed be time to have done with the world. Even as I love you now, my heart's darling, I shall love you when years of intimacy are like some happy journey ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... of. It is true we were good friends, and had been such before I had yet made your acquaintance. But he was a man for whom I had a strong distrust, and that in spite of his swaggering airs and gallant speeches, fit to turn the head of some silly, vain girl who knew nothing ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... I acknowledge it? I acknowledge nothing in the will. But it is clear, from that document, that she presumes herself to be under his protection. It is manifest that that silly fool intended that she should be so. Now I am not the man to put up with this. I ask you once more, Mr. Bertram, will you tell me where ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... swept up and down, as if the green-room was a shell, and this glorious creature must burst it and be free. Meantime, the others saw a pretty actress studying her business; and Cibber saw a dramatic school-girl learning what he presumed to be a very silly set of words. Sir C. Pomander's eye had been on her the moment she entered, and he watched keenly the effect of Vane's eloquent eulogy; but apparently the actress was too deep in her epilogue for anything else. She came in, ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... friendship reign between mine eyes and insomny; * Yet can my heart forget you not, nor tears can I restrain: You made me swear with many an oath my troth to hold for aye; * But when you reigned my bosom's lord you wrought me traitor bane: I loved you like a silly child who wots not what is Love; * Then spare the learner, let her not be by the master slain! By Allah's name I pray you write, when I am dead and gone, * Upon my tomb, This died of Love whose senses Love had ta'en: Then haply one shall pass that way who fire of Love hath ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... What bolting, tramping, and rushing would they not have made through the ranks of the astonished professors and students? The Anniversary set, for example, who sweep the pews of men, or, coming upon one forlorn, crush him as a boa does a sheep. Our silly little flock only laughed, colored, and retreated to the volantes, where they held a council of war, and decided to go visit some establishment where possibly better ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... cheek of James under this reproof. It is often the case that more shame is felt for a blunder than a crime. In this instance the lad felt a sort of mortification at having done what Mr. Carman was pleased to call a silly thing, and he made up his mind that if they should ever overpay him a thousand dollars at the bank, he should bring the amount to his employer, and let him do as he pleased with ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... see why you ask such silly questions," retorted the Lefthandiron. "What do we sit on? Why, you might just as well ask a dog what he barks with, or a lion what he eats his breakfast with—and that would be as stupid as ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... to exclaim, in that same letter to Spalatin, 'I think that at Rome they are all mad, silly, and raging, and have become mere fools, sticks and stones, hells and devils.' His remarks on this pamphlet, written in Latin, contain the strongest words that we have yet heard from his lips about the 'only means left,' and the 'short ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... not have coal, but we can have conferences. A conference is the most typically English thing that there is. The old Anglo-Saxons had them and called them moots. Why they called them a silly name like that, when "conferences" would have done just as well, one can't imagine; but they had their notions and stuck to them. They would have called Parliament a moot; in fact they did. They called it a moot of wise men. Sarcastic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... of Henry the Second were far better educated than the contemporaries of Francis the First. The public mind, through the elevating tendencies of schools fostered by royal bounty, was to a considerable degree emancipated from the thraldom of superstition. It repudiated the silly romanese, passing for the lives of the saints, with which the public had formerly been satisfied. It scrutinized minutely every pretended miracle of the papal churches and convents, and exposed the trickery by which a corrupt clergy sought to maintain itself in popular ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... that silly old Cadi, and my handsome Sheikh Sidi? I must see them before the inquiry,or they'll give Captain Kearney quite a false impression of ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... in a temper. He's a silly, stupid kind of a dog, and Mr. Giles said yesterday if he caught him chasing his sheep round the field, he would give him a good beating; and I hope he will, for he nearly chased ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... the terms of this document, on any interpretation of them, go far beyond the intentions expressed in what may be called the official preamble and in the new Committee's terms of reference. One of the clauses seems, with all deference to its august composers, to be merely silly. This is (1)(c) forbidding sub-division of securities. If a L10 share is split into ten L1 shares this operation cannot make the smallest difference to the supply of capital for essential industries or cause any drain on the Foreign Exchanges. ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... the civilized nations, from the time of great-great-great-grandfather Moses down to the time of President Buchanan, have used the precious metals for their standard of values; while your barbarians only, your silly Sandwich-islanders, your stupid troglodytes of interior Africa, your savage red men, have used for that purpose fish-bones, beaver-skins, cowries, strings of beads, or a lump of old rags. Q.E.D., then, on Paley's principles, the precious metals were meant by Divine Providence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... a foolish way. There was no pain then about dying, he thought with a pleased and remote surprise—only this silly smiling content. ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... and in the scuffle it was torn from the stick and I cried with vexation. One of the teachers, however, supplied me with another, which you may suppose I took good care of. Will the Americans never get over their silly jealousy with respect to the flying of foreign flags in their country? We Canadians are always pleased to see the Star Spangled Banner waving alongside the Union Jack, and hope it may ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... the rascal calling himself Sir Gilbert Galbraith!—the half-witted wretch his fool of a daughter insisted on marrying! Here he was, ubiquitous as Satan! And—bless his soul again! there was the minx, Jenny! looking as if the place was her own! The silly tears in her eyes too!—It was all too absurd! He had just been dreaming of his dead wife, and clearly that was it! he was ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... must confess, a very foolish as well as dangerous amusement. Nevertheless, the children seemed to be greatly delighted with the hideous faces they made. I pondered this subject a good deal, and thought that if little children knew how silly they seemed to grown-up people when, they make faces, they would not be so fond of doing it. In another place were a number of boys engaged in flying kites; and I could not help wondering that some of the games of those little savages should be so like to our own, although they had never ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... hope, unnecessary for me to give a formal contradiction to the silly fiction, which is assiduously circulated by the fanatics who not only ought to know, but do know, that their assertions are untrue, that I have advocated the introduction of that experimental discipline which is absolutely indispensable ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... and put hand No. 2 softly on Foker's head, which was bent down kissing and weeping over hand No. 1. "Foolish boy?" she said, "it shall be loved as it deserves: who could help loving such a silly creature!" ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The moment my aunt was restored, she flew at Peggotty, and calling her a silly old creature, hugged her with all her might. After that, she hugged Mr. Dick (who was highly honoured, but a good deal surprised); and after that, told them why. Then, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... ninth Satire; where I think I have shewn clearly enough, that without any prejudice either to one's Conscience or the Government, one may think bad Verses bad Verses, and have full right to be tir'd with reading a silly Book. But since these Gentlemen have spoken of the liberty I have taken of Naming them, as an Attempt unheard-of, and without Example, and since Examples can't well be put into Rhyme; 'tis proper to say one word to inform ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... have. The queer thing is—I haven't, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... eyes of the Goblin danced and twinkled in their caverns; a merry, careless laugh came bubbling forth as it answered, "I will not leave your shop, nor will you throw me from the window, nor yet kill me, Nick Baba. Why, you silly fellow, the sharpest tool on your bench cannot draw blood from me, and that blackened lapstone, if driven with all the force of your great arm through my seeming substance, would leave me sitting here still, not to mock, but to ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... is the best of fellows! When he came down here first, I laughed at him, and thought him the most silly molly of a chap I ever met. But he's so good-hearted and patient, and takes everything so well, and all the time so genuinely plucky as soon as he makes up his mind to face anything, that you ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... a great, strong, willing, kindly man—calm in the glory of a fearless heart, serene in your trust and belief in God, the Father of the world, and so sure of the justice of His providence that you go about your daily business free from those silly cares which ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton—well, wouldn't the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque and heroic, instead of slightly silly. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... do I talk nonsense of subduing passion?—I should say, when no other passion could surmount my love, I returned to visit her; and now I attempted the strangest project which ever entered into the silly head of a lover. This was to persuade Amelia that I was really in love in another place, and had literally expressed my meaning when I asked her advice and desired ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... they are, and there they run! The Black-a-moor enjoys the fun. They have been made as black as crows, Quite black all over, eyes and nose, And legs, and arms, and heads, and toes, And trousers, pinafores, and toys— The silly little inky boys! Because they set up such a roar, ...
— Struwwelpeter: Merry Tales and Funny Pictures • Heinrich Hoffman
... it seemed a silly piece, but he spoke it to please Miss Amanda, and because it was a hit at Dick Hardman. To his surprise he received a roar of applause. After the supper, dancing began. Some of the cowboys got drunk. There were fights, two of which ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... Relacion, Ms., cap. 8, 27. - Ondegardo, Rel. Seg., Ms. It was only, however, the great and good princes that were thus honored, according to Sarmiento, "whose souls the silly people fondly believed, on account of their virtues, were in heaven, although, in truth," as the same writer assures us, "they were all the time burning in the flames of hell"! "Digo los que haviendo sido en vida buenos y valerosos, generosos con los Indios en les hacer mercedes, perdonadores ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... The same silly idea prevails with regard to race-equality. It is judged by a similarity to our own in matters of dress; or choice of foods; by inconsequential differences, rather than by an estimate of what a given race may contribute to the variety of human knowledge; and yet it is evident that nature aims ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... fashion were less studied, chlorosis would not be such a frequent complaint. This disease generally takes its rise from mismanagement—from Nature's laws having been set at defiance. I have heard a silly mother express an opinion that it is not genteel for a girl to eat heartily! Such language is perfectly absurd and cruel. How often, too, a weak mother declares that a healthy, blooming girl looks like a milk maid! It would be well if she ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... drawing-rooms are open every evening until the end of the month, and one meets there all the chic people who are delayed in Paris, or who stop here between two journeys. Madame Fontaine is a very amiable and influential old lady; she has a fancy for writers when they are good company. Do not be silly, but go and order yourself some evening clothes. By presenting you there, my dear fellow, I assure you, perhaps in fifteen years, a seat in the Academy. It is agreed! Get ready for ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... They don't speak. Now, in women, you know, vices are controlled by vices— see Pope. The conspiracy you dread will be averted by the other faults of their character, their jealousy and their petulant tempers. Take my word for it, they are sparring at this moment; and that poor, silly Severne meditating and moderating, and getting scratched on both sides for trying ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the daughter of a farmer!" she declared. "Then I could wear pretty ribbons and go dancing and the boys would come courting me! As it is I have to spend all my time with funny old men and silly old women!" ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... Uncle Win," wrote Betty, "and Cary could not have gone away, neither could he have brought home a strange woman. This was the only satisfactory ending. But I hope you will be awfully in love with each other and sweet—and silly and all that. I am sorry for Captain Hawthorne, for, Doris, he loved you sincerely, but your French cousin can console himself with an ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... nation, the government? Or, loving these, have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country with only that kind is never long ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... eyes are just like the eyes of a dog that is hurt and wants so much to tell you something, and can't. I don't care what the newspapers say—and those men from the police station! I don't believe he is really bad. Now please don't smile and tell me I'm silly." ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... almost fifteen, when I overheard a young lady say I was growing pretty. I went to my mirror and spent some moments in unalloyed happiness and triumph. Then I thought, "Pretty face, the worms will eat you. All the prettiest girls I know are silly, but you shall never make a fool of me. Helen's beauty ruined Troy. Cleopatra was a wretch. So if you are pretty, I will be ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... you believe it? directly my father caught the sound of your name he turned round quite hastily, and, like a poor silly thing, I was so persuaded that every one must be as much affected as myself by the utterance of your name, that I was not surprised to see my father start, and almost tremble; but I even thought (though that surely must have been a mistake) ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his bedroom is one thing and a band of drunken Uhlans making for his women is another. Tom's nerves are racked with problems: How the dickens is he to steer his car and protect his women at the same time? And if it comes to a toss-up between his women and his wounded? You've got to stow the silly things somewhere, and every one of them takes up the place of ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... tried to keep his mind on the flower-beds, but it drifted away to the cave below. He began to wonder if he would come to some underground body of water where he would be drowned; but he knew that was a silly thought. If the shaft had gone through subterranean reservoirs, the water of these would have run out, and before they reached the bottom of the shaft would ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... Truly, that is spoken like a king. Thou art a king, so thou wouldst prefer to lose thy head than that silly circle of gold that so foolishly sits upon it. But it is well. Thou art a king. Thou couldst not prefer otherwise. (He walks calmly ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... said: "Bevis, my darling, you have not drunk half enough of me yet, else you would never ask such silly questions as that. Why, those are like the silly questions the people ask who live in the houses of the cities, and never feel me or taste me, or speak to me. And I have seen ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... together in the tranquil twilight, and she had no longer reason to be anxious for the morrow, what pleasure would he have in the reflection that this was his doing—his—poor foolish Barnaby's; and in patting her on the cheek, and saying with a merry laugh, 'Am I silly now, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... it was that that brought Bill round, and the next moment Dodgy was on 'is back with a blow that nearly knocked his 'ead off. Charlie grabbed at Tom's watch and began to count, and after a little bit called out Time,' It was a silly thing to do, as it would 'ave stopped the fight then and there if it 'adn't been for Tom's presence of mind, saying it was two minutes slow. That gave Dodgy a chance, and he got up again and walked round Bill very careful, swearing 'ard at the ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... down at the fire, her lips still shaped in that firm, wise, and philosophical smile with which doctors and nurses—and indeed, sometimes, anybody who happens to be feeling pretty well himself—console, or exasperate, suffering humanity. "A very good thing the poor silly child did come to me!" That was the form her thoughts took. For although Dr. Mary Arkroyd was, and knew herself to be, no dazzling genius at her profession—in moments of candor she would speak of having "scraped through" her qualifying examinations—she had a high ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... such as few poets have possessed, a perfect facility and a perfect finish. Alone of poets of the period he rarely gives the impression of labouring a point. Compared with Martial, Seneca and Lucan, Statius and Juvenal are, at their worst, stylistic acrobats. But Martial, however silly or offensive, however complicated or prosaic his theme, handles his material with supreme ease. His points may often not be worth making; they could not be better made. Moreover, he has a perfect ear; his music may be trivial, but within its narrow ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Claparon angrily, "that I am just the man to lend you a slap in the face. When a man is in trouble, it is no time to play silly jokes ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... their baptismal names, not for anything so silly. Ah! oh—I thought you said they were in bed: ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... and (greatest danger of all for one of his ardent nature) no winning enchantress or artful siren coaxed him to her cave, or lured him into her waters—haunts into which we know so many young simpletons are drawn, where their silly bones are picked and their ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Put that silly thing down," I told him, as he ran up to me with his head lowered and that indescribably desperate look in his big frightened eyes. "If you're not a fool I can get you hidden," I told him. It reassured me to see that his knees ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... his mazed mind doth wish Some part, at least, of that brave wealth was his; But seeing empty wishes nought obtain, At night turns to his Mother's cot again, And tells her tales (his full heart over glad), Of all the glorious sights his eyes have had; But finds too soon his want of Eloquence, The silly prattler speaks no word of sense; But seeing utterance fail his great desires, Sits down in silence, deeply ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... intelligent report speak of things unless there was the highest degree of truth, and varied crimes of the worst character called, from a sense of decency, for an apology. I hear that they adore the head of an ass, that basest of creatures, consecrated by I know not what silly persuasion—a worthy and appropriate religion for such morals. Some say that they worship the genitalia of their pontiff and priest, and adore the nature, as it were, of their parent. I know not whether ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Princess mine, be light * On me, for Love hath robbed me of my reason's sight' 'Slaved me this longing and enthralled me love of you; * And clad in sickness garb, a poor and abject wight. I wont ere this to think small things of Love and hold, * O Princess mine, 'twas silly thing and over-slight. But when it showed me swelling surges of its sea, * To Allah's hest I bowed and pitied lover's plight. An will you, pity show and deign a meeting grant, * An will you kill me still forget not ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and honest history of any country the historian should, that he may avoid overpraise and silly and mawkish sentiment, reside in a foreign country, or be so situated that he may put on a false moustache and get away as soon as the advance copies have been sent to ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... Dom's leavings. A series of proverbs represents him as making friends with members of various castes and faring ill or well in the process. Thus the Kanjar steals his dog, and the Gujar loots his house; on the other hand, the barber shaves him for nothing, and the silly Jolahaa makes him a suit of clothes. His traditions associate him with donkeys, and it is said that if these animals could excrete sugar, Doms would no longer be beggars. "A Dom in a palanquin and a Brahman on foot" is a type of society turned upside down. Nevertheless, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... you lose." Surely he could not be accused of selfishness in the matter, when, if Mr. Gorham were eventually dethroned by the directors, and he, Covington, crowned in his place, it would simply result in keeping the Consolidated Companies still in the family. And as for Gorham's silly threat to disintegrate the corporation—that was too absurd ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... trickling in a moonlit fountain! I only know it's like what I tried to put into my little Pandora—that it was like what Barrie was thinking when he let Peter Pan cry, 'I'm Joy! Joy! Joy!'—Even the Painter Boy, who has a silly pose that he hates music, used to hang around to hear her whistle—he pretended he was just looking at her so's he could paint her, but that didn't fool me—Listen, there's Nor' stumping up stairs now—he's awfully lame on these rainy days ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... she. "There! Just look at those silly orchids! Aren't they sights?" With that she snakes 'em out and tosses the wilted bunch careless over the veranda rail. "And now," she adds, "I must ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... the fear into the silly brutes," said Harris, speaking calmly, although his own flesh was creeping just a little. "I suppose they've ripped their tether ropes to pieces. Well, we'll tie them down here, where they'll have company." And he led them back a short ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... nor Hussar is here! Ah, and stout horses, a proper relay belonging to Duke Choiseul, do stand at hay, but in the Upper Village over the Bridge; and we know not of them. Hussars likewise do wait, but drinking in the taverns. For indeed it is six hours beyond the time; young Bouille, silly stripling, thinking the matter over for this night, has retired to bed. And so our yellow Couriers, inexperienced, must rove, groping, bungling, through a Village mostly asleep: Postillions will not, for any money, go on with the tired horses; not at least without ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... wee bit housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage[7-7] green! An' bleak December's winds ensuin', Baith ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... "No, you silly,—except that he'll never be president! I'm thinking about Blue Bonnet,—I was just going to tell you when she came in. I don't believe she intends to ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... looks like a queen; and she has a beautiful carriage." He laughed and said yes, she had money, and a good deal of influence in high places, but the women she knew were not the sort of people I would care about; and he finished by saying I was a silly child to go staring ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... dunce! How shamefully your guardian neglects your education! Never even heard of the Ellewomen? Why, they compose the most brilliant society all over the world. Iduna was a silly creature, with a large warm heart, and loved her husband devotedly; and in order to cure her of this arrant absurd folly she was carried away and shut up with the Ellewomen, very fair creatures always smiling sweetly. The more bitterly ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... girl, I think Belle stood very much in her own light. She is not rich, and if she would marry him she could have everything heart could wish. What a silly girl! You wouldn't catch me ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... precious jewel, and it is improved, not by books, but by looking here and there, above and below, everywhere and anywhere, as the butterflies and the birds do. Let us teach our children as nature teaches us. Let us burn our books and our schools. Do not drive our dear little ones to silly words and cruel numbers. It makes our heart bleed to see parents call their children from some pleasant game and shut ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... went on, "don't you remember that time I took you over to see my queer old maiden aunt, who's got the rheumatics so bad, and lives in the big house all alone with a colored woman, and all her silly pets,—cats, squawkin' crows she cares for like they might be humans; and with that big bulldog chained under ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... not believe that womanly women and manly men are most successfully made by way of silly, shoddy, sorry-for-themselves girlhoods, or lying, swaggering, loafing boyhoods; and it is the empty, the vulgar, the cheap, smart, trust-to-luck story, rather than the gory one, ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... that you silly child, returned Emily, but I am intruding upon school hours I fear, so if you will allow me Miss Leicester I will come for a chat ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... to have been the character of General Joseph Reed, from documents decidedly authentic—so authentic as to have led to their partial destruction, by his vain and silly descendants, who imagined that truth could be extinguished, while vanity was kindling a spurious flame to consummate an imaginery[TN] apotheosis, for one whose actual deeds consigned him to the keeping of the furies ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... to recount them, but the waiter had fled on his phantom slippers to Lord Chipendale, stranded, full length, upon a sofa and crying, in mournful tones: "Tchempegne!.. tchempegne!.." The cork flew with its silly noise, and nothing more was heard save the gusts of wind in the monumental chimney and the hissing click of the ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... young fellow, Brown, paid his attentions in my despite, and in defiance of me. He perhaps considered me, on his part, as an oppressive aristocratic man, who made my rank in society, and in the army, the means of galling those whom circumstances placed beneath me. And if he discovered my silly jealousy, he probably considered the fretting me in that sore point of my character, as one means of avenging the petty indignities to which I had it in my power to subject him. Yet an acute friend of mine gave a more harmless, or at least a less offensive, construction to his attentions, which ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... bounding forward! Her silly heart leaps at the sight of the old place—and so in good truth does mine. What a pretty place it was—or rather, how pretty I thought it! I suppose I should have thought any place so where I had spent eighteen happy years. ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... you know, are expected to go to the sea-shore or the Springs; and my sister and her two eldest daughters are so silly, as to fear that they will lose caste, if it is known that they could not go this season. Do ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... All this silly little world—all this quintessence of fashion and elegance, long out of date, all exhaled the acrid odour of rose-water and essence of ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... of silly mortals," said Verena, "Aunt Sophia is a fashionable lady, and fashionable ladies dine between ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... of absence to Murree was absolutely essential for my recovery, and a recommendation that I might be allowed to proceed immediately in anticipation of the leave being granted. So the next evening saw me start from Peshawur for Rawul Pindee, in a Dak Gharie, accompanied by my dog "Silly" and my Madrapee servant or "Boy." Onwards we sped at a gallop, the horses being changed every six miles, through Nowshera, the furnace; over the rapid and icy cold Indus by boat; past Fort Attock, the oven in which our soldiers are done to death; and Hussan Aboul of Lallah ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... will you make for me? Tell me how many bright golden prospects you will blot out for the silly ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
