Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Scribble   Listen
noun
Scribble  n.  Hasty or careless writing; a writing of little value; a scrawl; as, a hasty scribble. "Neither did I but vacant seasons spend In this my scribble."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Scribble" Quotes from Famous Books



... stood within reach of his hand. He took a pencil, drew a writing-pad toward him and began to scribble a few characters. ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... Dan chimed in. "I've just been telling her," he said, "that little heads like hers can't contain books. It's all very well to scribble a little for pastime, and all that, but she mustn't seriously imagine she can do that sort of work. She'll only do herself ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... counsel of that learned and pious Prelate: And having, by long experience, found the truth and benefit of it, I conceive, I could not without ingratitude to him, and want of charity to others, conceal it.—Pray pardon this rude, and, I fear impertinent scribble, which, if nothing else, may signify thus much, that I am willing to obey your desires, and ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... ago, a tattered flag, its broad stripes and bright stars still gleaming through the smoke of a fierce battle, moved Francis Scott Key to scribble a few words on the back of an envelope, the words that became our National Anthem. Today, that Star-Spangled Banner, along with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are on display just a short walk from here. They are America's treasures. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... But if I scribble longer now, [xviii] The deuce a soul will stay to read; My pen is blunt, my ink is low; 'Tis almost time to ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... to scribble a line on my card. Our father is dangerously ill—his lawyer has been sent for. Come with me to London by the first train. Meet ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... second. "Meet me next Sunday at———." "I must," said she. We had no opportunity of speaking before, for her husband or some one was always in the way. To make sure I next day slipped an envelope into her hand, in which was one addressed to myself, and a scribble asking her to say where I was to meet her. It came back by post containing in execrable writing the words, "My dear, same time, and place, if he be out, on Saturday night." I did not comprehend, but waited outside her cottage that night. She did not show. On Sunday I went to ———, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... off, as she always does, toward the opposite side of the stage and facing a little away from me. Then she moved a step and looked down at the stage-parchment letter in her hands and began to read it, though there was nothing on it but scribble, and my heart sank because the voice I heard was Miss Nefer's. I thought (and almost said out loud) Oh, dammit, he funked out, or Sid decided at the last minute he couldn't trust him with the part. Whoever got Miss Nefer out of the ice cream ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... Highness would not be convinced. Thus she suffered this needless affront. Pardon this parenthesis, but when one talks from behind a curtain the parenthesis is the only available thing.) There was silence. I saw Steinbock poise the pen, then scribble on the parchment. It was done. ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath

... opinion, a rule of profound sense, and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... through the streets gave Erik Dorn a picture. It was morning. Above the heads of the people the great spatula-topped buildings spread a zigzag of windows, a scribble of rooftops against the sky. A din as monotonous as a silence tumbled through the streets—an unvarying noise of which the towering rectangles of buildings tilted like great reeds out of a narrow bowl, seemed an ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... must rest on the gossip which departed spirits utter in dark rooms through the mouths of hypnotized business mediums, and our deepest personality comes to light when we scribble disconnected phrases in automatic writing. Is life then really still ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... Hence, unless your beautiful Duchess be like the 'King's daughter' of David's psalm, 'all glorious WITHIN'—her APPARENT loveliness will have no charm for me!—Now"—and he smiled, and spoke in a less serious tone.. "if you have no objection, I am off to my room to scribble for an hour or so. Come for me if you want me—you know I don't in the least ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... lightning, to the oppressor. To play Providence in some tragic crisis of human lives; at the moment when all seemed lost to step out of the darkness and set all right with a touch of that magic wand. To walk by the side of lost and lonely men, an unexpected friend; to scribble a word on a card and say, "Present this tomorrow morning at such a number Broadway and see what will happen," and then to disappear once again into the darkness. To talk with sad, wandering girls, and arrange that wonderful new hats and other forms of feminine hope shall fall out of the sky into ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... been standing all day on the summits of roofs, in front of ovens, among machines, and in the water, and underground, with nothing to eat but a little bread; and I feel almost ashamed, I, who in all that time have accomplished nothing but scribble four small pages, and that reluctantly. Ah, I am discontented, discontented! I see plainly that my father is out of humor, and would like to tell me so; but he is sorry, and he is still waiting. My dear father, who works so ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis

... much amusement from the way we sit and scribble, and one man asked me if I were writing a book! All this time I haven't mentioned the Port Said letters. We got them before we left the ship, and, determined for once to show myself a well-balanced, sensible young ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... sending you into a home," said Gaisford. "Why not go out to California for six months? You can scribble there ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

... science so far, and I doubt if I ever get beyond that portion of my subject. And I don't care to. Any Muggins can write about old days on the Mississippi of five hundred different kinds, but I am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day, and no man has ever tried to scribble about it yet. Its newness pleases me all the time, and it is about the only new subject ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... Miss Morley, in her deplorable tone, "I am continually ordering Sir Gerald not to scribble in books, ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... from this short, spasmodic dream I had one evening in a steamer chair, of what I imagined was to happen on our coming voyage, I started to scribble; and following the fantastic idea in the vision, I shall adopt the abbreviated name of The Cork, for our good ship—although some of the passengers preferred to call her The Corker, as she was big and fine, and justly celebrated among those who go down to the sea in fear and trembling. ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... returned from chambers to take a walk with his wife in the Park, as he peeped through the rich tapestry hanging which divided the two drawing-rooms, he found his dear girl still seated at the desk, and writing, writing away with her ruby pen as fast as it could scribble. ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray

... had shaken down in Aurora's mind, Gerald's letter, which she from time to time re-read, impressed her as a most gentle and reasonable production of his pen, while her own letter, preserved in the original scribble, appeared to her horrid, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... he replied somewhat curtly. He crossed over to his father's desk where he sat down to scribble a few words, while Mr. Bagley, who had followed him in scowling, was making frantic ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... therein, that they pass from schools to the Universities and return from thence (some of them) more unable to write true English, than either Latin or Greek. Not to speak of our ordinary Tradesmen, many of whom write such false English, that none but themselves can interpret what they scribble in ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius

... world had nothing more to teach him. Think of it a while, my friend, and you will admit that I am not raving. Think of his seeing that spotless image, not for a moment, for a day, in a happy dream, or a restless fever-fit; not as a poet in a five minutes' frenzy—time to snatch his phrase and scribble his immortal stanza; but for days together, while the slow labour of the brush went on, while the foul vapours of life interposed, and the fancy ached with tension, fixed, radiant, distinct, as we see it now! What a master, certainly! But ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James

... called 'A Canzonet' is brief enough for your Majesty's immediate consideration," replied Teresa;—"It is just such a thing as a man might scribble in his note-book after a bout of champagne, when he is in love for ten minutes! He would not mean a word of it,—but it might sound pretty by moonlight!" Whereupon ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... in the morning and scribble on the margin the lessons which I get out of the portion. I can only do it by using a new copy each time I finish, because it brings new thoughts according to the peculiar experiences, tasks, needs, and environments of the day. I change I know. It does not—and yet it does—for we ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... won't go anywhere else. However, we don't mean to stay long, so it's no great matter. Oh, I can't begin to tell you how I enjoy it all! I never can, so I'll only give you bits out of my notebook, for I've done nothing but sketch and scribble since I started. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... sculpture? The Princess Beatrice, has she not done something in the way of designing? The Duke of Edinburgh, he is a musician. And it is in these little excursions into art that the family most truly manifests its bourgeois nature. The sincerest bourgeois are those who scribble little poems and smudge little canvases in the intervals between an afternoon reception and a dinner-party. The amateur artist is always the most inaccessible to ideas; he is always the most fervid admirer of the commonplace. ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... diaries are for ... to work off blue moods in, moods that come on without any reason whatever and therefore can't be confided to any fellow creature. You scribble away for a while ... and then it's all gone ... and your soul feels clear ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... one fytte of Harold's pilgrimage. Ye who of him may further seek to know, Shall find some tidings in a future page, If he that rhymeth now may scribble moe. Is this too much? Stern critic, say not so: Patience! and ye shall hear what he beheld In other lands, where he was doomed to go: Lands that contain the monuments of eld, Ere Greece and Grecian arts ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... morning and I beat him, four out of five. We're in the lab now. He's watching me scribble this. His thumb and forefinger are twitching in fury. He looks like some great white spider ...
— Competition • James Causey

... were enjoying the confusion into which the mention of this phantom beast threw her persecutor, she continued to scribble on scraps of paper which the concierge was told to take to the lawyer, who ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... young miss closely watched by governess or guardian—a ward in Chancery—an heiress of expectant thousands! It is but "child's play" to break through the entourage that surrounds one of such. To scribble sonnets and scale walls is but an easy task, compared with the bold effrontery that challenges the passions and prejudices of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... always taken an interest in sculpture and painting, and he had said before Rodney was born that he would like to have a son a sculptor. And he waited for the little boy to show some signs of artistic aptitude. He pondered every scribble the boy made, and scribbles that any child at the same age could have done filled him with admiration. But when Rodney was fourteen he remodelled some leaves that had failed to please an important customer; and his father was overcome with joy, and felt that his hopes were about ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... 1,000 Nights advertised at the same time, not to speak of the bastard. [363] I return you nine sheets [of proofs] by parcels post registered. You have done your work very well, and my part is confined to a very small amount of scribble which you will ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... the muse pleases to grace my dull page, At the sight of reward, she flies off in a rage; Prayers, threats, and intreaties I frequently try, But she leaves me to scribble, to fret, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various

... scribble a few remarks on the subject, and would give them to him in a day or two. I remarked that Mr. Newman had treated these great subjects very briefly, but that I could not be quite so concise ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... the ground-floor, and a window adjoining the street lets in upon me the light and air through a heavy crimson curtain, near which I sit and scribble. I was just enlarging upon the necessity of resignation, while the frown yet lingered on my brow, and was writing myself into a more calm and complacent mood, when—another knock at the door. As I opened it, I heard Peter's voice asserting sturdily that I ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... with your foot, and the other way you work with your fingers, but I rather guess there's more headache in the stories than there is in the stitches, because you don't have to think quite so hard while your foot's going as you do when your fingers is at work, scratch, scratch, scratch, scribble, scribble, scribble. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... some particulars how I passed my life when I was absent from MD this time; and so I tell you now that I dined to-day at Molesworth's, the Florence Envoy, then went to the Coffee-house, where I behaved myself coldly enough to Mr. Addison, and so came home to scribble. We dine together to-morrow and next day by invitation; but I shall alter my behaviour to him, till he begs my pardon, or else we shall grow bare acquaintance. I am weary of friends; and friendships are all ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... Wellington with the Judge. Here we had sea room and no fear of driving upon rocks. It is blowing a good deal now, as you see by my writing. I have a small ink-bottle of glass, made like an eel-pot (such as tax- gatherers use), tied to my buttonhole, and with this I can scribble away in almost any sea. Dear me! you could not sit still a minute, even now. I was qualmish on Saturday, and for a minute sick, but pretty comfortable on Sunday, though wearied by ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... ride of two hours yesterday on Calvert's pony, and he is improving fast in horsemanship. The school appears to answer very well. We shall have the Governess in a day or two, which will be a great satisfaction. Will you send my Mother this scribble with my ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me. I ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... am not sending you any address, for I don't want you to know where I am, dear. I shan't write to you again unless I scribble things and tear them up without posting. This is final. When a woman makes such a break she must do it once and for all. Oh, Simon, when you kissed me two days ago you thought you loved me; but I know what the senses are and how they deceive ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... one of the learned professions; but he could not give up his mind to anything but drawing,—as annoying to his father as Galileo's experiments were to his parent; as unmeaning to him as Gibbon's History was to George III.,—"Scribble, scribble, scribble; Mr. Gibbon, I perceive, sir, you are always a-scribbling." No perception of a new power, no sympathy with the abandonment to a specialty not indorsed by fashions and traditions, but without which abandonment genius cannot easily be developed. At last the father yielded, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... Here's a scribble upon grave matters! I ought to be acknowledging instead your scrupulous honesty, as illustrated by five-franc pieces and Tuscan florins. Make us as useful as you can do, for the future; and please us by coming often. I am afraid your German Baroness could not make an ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... up the printers—ply their typesetting machines, and cast and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above which, in a beehive of little, brightly lit rooms, disheveled men sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking of telegraph instruments, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins a roar of machinery catching the infection, going ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... to allude to the transactions which took place between him and the unfortunate Chatterton; a text upon which so much calumny and misrepresentation have been embroidered. The periodicals of the day, and the tribe of those "who daily scribble for their daily bread," and for whom Walpole had, perhaps unwisely, frequently expressed his contempt, attacked him bitterly for his inhumanity to genius, and even accused him as the author of the subsequent misfortunes ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... his brother Charles wondered that he did not become sick at the stomach over his poor Journal: "Yet is obdurate habit callous even to contempt. I must scribble on...." Charles evidently was not a born scribbler like his brother. He was clearly more fond of real life and of the society of his fellows. He was an orator and could not do himself justice with the pen. Men who write Journals, as I have said, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... of us. Vain of trivial things all the first half of her life, and still vain of them at seventy and recording them with naive satisfaction—even rescuing some early rhymes of hers of the sort that we all scribble in the innocent days of our youth—rescuing them and printing them without pity or apology, just as the weakest and commonest of us do in our gray age. More—she still frankly admires them; and in her introduction of them profanely ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... you have ever taken the book seriously, dear reader (if any). You dip into it for a moment, choose a suitable quotation and scribble it down with a blunt pencil on your blotting-pad; then you wind the lanyard of the listening-box round your neck and start talking to the germ-collector in that quiet self-assured voice which you believe spells business success. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various

... topped by its aureole of frizzy yellow curls. She leaned against the sun-warmed granite, and cried a little. That was the way of women when the man was late at the tryst. Then she dried her eyes and hummed a song, and, finally, taking a stump of pencil from her pocket, she began to scribble on the smooth red stone—all part of the old play, the boulder knew. The first woman whom he remembered had drawn a figure meant for a portrait of her lover, with a sharpened ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... slaps me on the back. "Come, brother," he says, "and have dinner with me." I just drop in the office for a couple of minutes to say this is to be done so, and that is to be done that way. There's a rat of a clerk there for copying letters who does nothing but scribble all the time—tr, tr—They even wanted to make me a college assessor, but I think to myself, "What do I want it for?" And the doorkeeper flies after me on the stairs with the shoe brush. "Allow me to shine your boots for you, Ivan Aleksandrovich," ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol

... to scribble a few lines, so as not to miss the post, for here as every where, there are charitable people, who, taking for granted that you have no business of your own, would save from the pain of vacancy, by ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... learned men, that are in love, do thus; what can the unlearned Notary's do less? Even nothing else, but when they are writing, scribble up a multiplicity of several words, unnecessary clauses, and make long periods; not so much as touching or mentioning the principal business; and if he does, writes it clear contrary to the intent of the party concern'd: By that means making both Wills and other Deeds in such a manner, that the end ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... Father Mestienne's reversion. One gets to be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the labor of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener's stall in the market of the Rue de Sevres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love letters; in the evening I dig graves. Such is ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... so they wouldn't let us go no more. But I caught my alphabet in them two days. So I just caught what education I've got, here and there. I can read well—best on my Bible and Testament and I read the newspapers. I can sorta scribble my name. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration

... at himself because he was not experienced as a guide) rattled off all the information he could remember about Roman foundations—a sack by the Danes; William the Conqueror, and William Rufus, and a British fort older than the time of the Romans—she would scribble bits down hastily. But Mr. Norman took no notes, and when he saw her writing, ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... is puzzled to find out what the business is, for all Hal does is to call for drinks, take a sheet of paper from the rack, and scribble a few words, put it in an envelope, ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang

... was required for the task. The centuries during which the papacy rose to the zenith of its power are notorious for the illiteracy of the masses. It was considered a remarkable achievement even for a nobleman to be able to scribble his name. Among those who possessed the ability few had the inclination and persistency necessary for the effort to transcribe the Bible. The cloisters of those days were the chief seats of learning and centers of lower education, but even these asylums of piety sheltered many an ignorant ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... can, but never sufficiently; and, latterly, I can weave a nine-line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning. When I began Childe Harold, I had never tried Spenser's measure, and now I cannot scribble ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... him with angry astonishment; when Rodin, growing still more imperious and haughty, and with an air of more sovereign disdain than ever, pushed aside the paper with the back of his dirty hand and said: "What is the date of that scribble?" ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... really take my pen to scribble a little before I set off. The Gentlemen are just set off to the races, and I am preparing to set off for Chantilly. ...
— Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, 1782 • Lucinda Lee Orr

... mean conscience in English? I speak of your wife's death as I speak of a possibility. Why not? The respectable lawyers who scribble-scrabble your deeds and your wills look the deaths of living people in the face. Do lawyers make your flesh creep? Why should I? It is my business to-night to clear up your position beyond the possibility ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... now with authority, Turpin's or Monmouth Geoffry's Chronicle; Men whose historical superiority Is always greatest at a miracle. But Saint Augustine has the great priority, Who bids all men believe the impossible, Because 't is so. Who nibble, scribble, quibble, he Quiets at once with ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... would black thy dexter eye, They hate thee with a bitter spite, But scribble since thou must, or die, Take tip the pen, my friend, ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang

... too hard for me, although not so for the Lord! Jer. xxxii. 17.... And now a word: is ridicule the right thing in so solemn a matter as the discussion of Holy Writ? [Is food for ridicule the right thing? Did I discuss Holy Writ? I did not: I concussed profane scribble. Even the Doctor did not discuss; he only enunciated and denunciated out of the mass of inferences which a mystical head has found ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... to scribble a few notes of her impressions during the journey, for the benefit of Reverend Mother and the nuns, posting her letter in Paris; but as the Frenchman appeared surprised at her travelling alone, and everybody else seemed to be with ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... corresponding gain of money, but perhaps also by the nobler desire of increasing, or at least living up to, their reputations. Even short of the unbroken drudgery which, it is said, compelled one lady novelist, of high rank for a time, to scribble her novels as she was actually receiving and talking to morning callers, the production of three or four novels a year—and those not the cock-boats we often see now but attempts at least at "the old three-decker" in its fullest dimensions—could ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury

... verse, Am found as false as Parthia, maybe worse; Before the dawn I rouse myself and call For pens and parchment, writing-desk, and all. None dares be pilot who ne'er steered a craft; No untrained nurse administers a draught; None but skilled workmen handle workmen's tools; But verses all men scribble, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... words, as in a multitude of counsellors, there is wisdom! O ye critics, who vote yourselves the Areopagites of Intellect, whose decrees confer immortality in the Universe of Letters! O all ye that write or scribble,—all ye tribes, both great and small, of pen-drivers and paper-scrapers!—know ye, that, while ye are listening in your imaginative ambition to the praise of the elect or the applause of nations, your wives are often counting the coppers that are to buy the coming meal, alarmed at the approaching ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... short letter. The "Night Piece," to which you refer me, I meant fully to have noticed; but the fact is, I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of it, frightened with fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down and scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me,—I mean voluntary pen-work), I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne or any casual image, instead of that which I had meditated (by the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... received the intimation that a palaver was beginning, and that a fight was imminent, she would not be ready, and would resort to stratagem: she would seize a large sheet of paper and scribble some words—any words—upon it and add some splashes of sealing—wax to make it look important. This she would despatch by a swift runner to the chiefs, and by the time they had discussed the mysterious official—looking ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... sign manual; autograph, monograph, holograph; hand, fist. calligraphy; good hand, running hand, flowing hand, cursive hand, legible hand, bold hand. cacography^, griffonage^, barbouillage^; bad hand, cramped hand, crabbed hand, illegible hand; scribble &c v.; pattes de mouche [Fr.]; ill-formed letters; pothooks and hangers. stationery; pen, quill, goose quill; pencil, style; paper, foolscap, parchment, vellum, papyrus, tablet, slate, marble, pillar, table; blackboard; ink bottle, ink horn, ink pot, ink stand, ink ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... clock; there was just time to scribble a note before she dressed for the picnic, and of course, though she had no wish to encourage Reggie's friendship, yet a birthday was a special occasion, and had she remembered it ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh

... over," Drusilla explained—"mother and I together. If we were you we'd simply scribble a few lines on your card and send ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... cock-crow, composing a love-letter, a most elaborate affair, the pure overflowing of la belle passion, all about Venus, Cupids, bows and arrows, hearts, darts, and them things, which, having copied neatly over on a handsome sheet of foolscap, turned up with gilt, (for, though I say it myself, I scribble a smart fist,) I made a blotch of red wax on the back as large as a dollar, that thereon I might the more indelibly impress a seal, with a couple of pigeons cooing upon it, and 'toujours wotre' for the motto. This I popped into the post-office, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various

... imagine that I have obtained, and prepare myself for death. One thing only makes me uneasy: I fear that as I approach the prescribed limit, I may push it continually back, and that at forty-five I may still be thinking only of continuing to live and, perhaps, of continuing to scribble. Hard as I try to think, or to make others think, that I am different from the rest of mankind, I fear, I tremble lest I ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... He there says, referring to the French Revolution of July 1830, that "unless God send us some miraculous help, we have to look forward to a period of destruction similar to that which the Roman world experienced about the middle of the third century." Now, when I see a man scribble such abject nonsense about events which are passing under our eyes, what confidence can I put in his judgment as to the connection of causes and effects in times very ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... letter and am still going on. It seems to me that nothing matters and yet I scribble verses. I don't read them to Mariana and she is not very anxious to hear them, but you have sometimes praised my poor attempts and most of all you'll keep them to yourself. I have been struck by a common phenomenon in ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... feel as if publishers had a code of signals or private marks like freemasonry, which they scribble sometimes, like the concealed marks on bank-notes, on the first page of a manuscript, so as to spare their brother publishers the trouble of looking through a manuscript which is below market value. I have ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... I began to scribble furtively on the back of an old manuscript—the book of an operetta I had once written, a musical version of Les Miserables called "Jumping Jean," in reference to which one of the New York producers, Dillingham, I think, wrote me: "You have out-Hugo-ed Hugo; this is more miserable than Les ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... in it.' From that central wrong of an evil government, an infectious depravity spreads and corrupts all particulars. Everything turns from its true and natural course. Thus scribbling is the sign of a disordered age. Men write in such times instead of acting; and scribble, or seem to perhaps, instead of writing openly ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... begun to scribble rhyme, I tell ye wut, I ha'n't ben foolin'; The parson's books, life, death, an' time Hev took some trouble with my schoolin'; Nor th' airth don't git put out with me, Thet love her 'z though she wuz a woman; Why, th' a'n't a bird upon the tree But half forgives ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... doggerel, and desecrated the spot by the following impromptu, which, as he had the delicacy not to scribble on Camoen's Cave, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... many, and our number went on growing continually. This was one of the first good effects of my having learnt a little to scribble; another was, that the leading men, seeing a newspaper now in the hands of one who could also handle a pen, thought it convenient to oblige and encourage me. Bradford still printed the votes, and laws, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... well. The woman I love is a woman forbidden to me while I suffer as I suffer now. Realize that—and then fancy you see a man sitting at this table here, with pen, ink, and paper before him, who has only to scribble a line or two, and to begin the cure of you from that moment. Deliverance in a few months from the horror of the fits; marriage in a few months to the woman you love. That heavenly prospect in exchange for the hellish existence that you are enduring now. And the one price to pay for it, a discolored ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... not write much; she explained that she could only scribble a line or two while mommie slept. Mommie was about the same. She did not think there was anything Ward could do, and she thanked him for offering to help. There was nothing, she said pathetically, that anybody could do; even the doctors did not seem able to do much, except tell ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower

... under the purao. Now they would write a word or two, now scribble it out; now they would sit biting at the pencil end and staring seaward; now their eyes would rest on the clerk, where he sat propped on the canoe, leering and coughing, his pencil racing glibly on ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... have scratched their names on the frescoes. We found one name "Battista," with the date "1485" against it. It is a mistake to hold that the English scribble their names about more than other people. The Italians like doing this just as well as we do. Let the reader go to Varallo, for example, and note the names scratched up from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present day, on the walls of the chapel containing the Crucifixion. Indeed, ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... one; and then I believe in arriving at a circle of books, which one really knows through and through, and reads at all times and in all moods, till they get soaked and enriched with all sorts of moods and associations. I have a dozen such, which I read and mark and scribble in, write when and where I read them, and who were my companions. Of course the same books do not always last through one's course. You grow out of books as you grow out of clothes; and I sometimes look at old favourites, and find myself lost in wonder as to how I can ever have cared ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... In my hand, as I write, lie his last written words, a hasty scribble ere the steamer left port on her voyage across the Atlantic. He is busy, as is evident by the greasy thumb-mark on the corner. He sat down in the midst of his work to send a last line to his friend. There is the inevitable joke ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... I've begun to scrawl, but whether In rhyme or prose, or baith thegither, Or some hotch-potch that's rightly neither, Let time mak proof; But I shall scribble down some blether Just ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... memory I cherish, and I have torn up their work as if it were a scrap of paper covered with a child's meaningless scribble." ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... pamphlets; neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me.... My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I'll try and contrive to scribble a line and half every time the man goes with "The ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... had a taste for poetry, and taught the lad to scribble rhymes. Very proud was the boy's mother, and very carefully did she preserve these ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... the influences of Nature. Before his disease became serious he writes: "I wander about here with music-paper among the hills, and dales, and valleys, and scribble a good deal. No man on earth can love the country as I do." But one of Nature's most delightful modes of speech to man was soon to be utterly lost to him. At last he became so deaf that the most stunning ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... a year or two later, The sweetest and neatest of wives, I found, after peeling a tater Or imparting a polish to knives, I could scribble with frenzy and passion, That the breaking of coal would inspire, In a truly remarkable fashion, My soul with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various

... very pleasant rout: The message certain to be done to-morrow. 'Tis perhaps as well that it should be to borrow Some precious book from out its snug retreat, To cluster round it when we next shall meet. Scarce can I scribble on; for lovely airs Are fluttering round the room like doves in pairs; Many delights of that glad day recalling, When first my senses caught their tender falling. And with these airs come forms of elegance Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance, Careless, ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats

... out very well now. They were sort of blurred to him, but I described them and he told me who they were. "That's a girl o' mine," he said, with reference to one—a jolly, good-looking bush girl. "I got a letter from her yesterday. I managed to scribble something, but I'll get you, if you don't mind, to write something more I want to put in on another piece of paper, and address an envelope ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... An idea struck Barry, and without stopping to think he gave it utterance. "Look here, Mrs. Rose, you can help Owen no end! You must take it down for him. You could easily scribble it off and then type it ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes

... was six, as we have seen, he had already begun his musical studies. If not sitting at the piano, he would scribble notes—for he had learned without instruction how to write them long before he knew the letters of the alphabet, or rudiments of writing. His small hands were a source of trouble to him, and he resorted to all kinds of comical expedients, such as sometimes playing extra notes with ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower

... to Elysium? There, seated on Elysian lawns, browsed by none but Dian's (no allusion to little Mrs. Lollipop) fawns, amid the noise of fountains wonderous and the parle of voices thunderous, some wag might scribble on his door, "Here lies Ali Baba"—as if glancing at his truthfulness. How is he to pass effectively into the golden silences? How is he to relapse into the still-world of observation? Would four thousand five hundred a month and Simla do it, with nothing to do ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... Egbert; "well, let's collaborate on this letter of thanks and get it done. I'll dictate, and you can scribble it down. 'Dear Mrs. Froplinson—thank you and your husband so much for the very pretty calendar you sent us. It was very good of you to ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... the household rather anxiously for the arrival of a fresh wedded pair. Next week I move off across the lake to a sort of lodge of Lord Kenmare, where I have persuaded an old lady to take me into the family. I am going to live with them, and I am going to have her ladyship's own boudoir to scribble in. It is a wild place enough with porridge and potatoes to eat, varied with what fish I may provide for myself and arbutus berries if it comes to starving. The noble lord has been away for some years. They will put a deal table into the said boudoir for me, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... them, we do mischief. And that is just what we are: children that have not learnt to read let loose upon the library of the universe; and all that we can do is to pull the books about and play games with them and scribble on their pages. Everywhere the earth is defaced with our meaningless scribbling, and we tell ourselves that it means something because we want to scribble. Or sometimes we tell ourselves that there is no meaning in anything, no ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock

... short-breathed or accuse us passionately of reading ahead, we would, on the slightest provocation, out-Fletcher Fletcher chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. And we would underline and bracket and side-line and overline the ragged little paper volume, and scribble up and down its margins, and dream over its footnotes, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... crept slowly by, and times grew more and more uncomfortable in the little sod house. Often when Obadiah was doing his "sums" his pencil would shy off to a corner of his slate and scribble a list of ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... gone; and with a stab of pain I realized that, if the colonel had sent for him, he must miss out his dance with me. Would he even remember it? Would he scribble me a line of farewell? I longed to run out and catch him before he went, if only for a word, but I dared not dash past Di, and give her the shock of learning that I had been within three yards of her all the time. Again I was trapped, unless Di and Major Vandyke should go indoors to ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... after one day and night, all of which she spent—vainly—in trying to find another plan. A letter did come from her father, as she and Ourieda had hoped it might (Colonel DeLisle, while still at Sidi-bel-Abbes, found time to scribble off a few lines to his girl for each camel post that travelled through the dunes from Touggourt to Djazerta), and in sickness of heart Sanda pretended that she was wanted "at home." The Agha was grieved and astonished, but, great Arab gentleman that ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... is written here the finis, for even as I scribble we are on our journey to another hunt, and bowmen seem ever to ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... no hope that what I write can be convey'd to your hands! I have now nothing to do but write and weep and fear and pray! But I will tell you what has befallen me, and some way, perhaps, may be opened to send the melancholy scribble to you. Alas, the unhappy Pamela may be undone before you can ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... intervention, Bellairs had seemed uneasy; and at this new attack, he began (in his turn) to scribble a note between the bids. I imagined naturally enough that it would go to Captain Trent; but when it was done, and the writer turned and looked behind him in the crowd, to my unspeakable amazement, he did not seem to ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... Here I am sitting at the old desk again, in the old office of the Banner. I could only scribble you a little note on the train last night to tell you that my heart still was with you, and I did not have the time to explain why I was coming. It is a dead secret, little woman, and perhaps I shouldn't tell even you, but I feel that I must bring everything to ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... this, he said to Mrs. Cliff that he was not sure but what the parsons were quite correct, and although everybody was sorry to lose two members of the party, it could not be helped, and all who had letters to send to New York went to work to scribble them as fast as they could. Mrs. Cliff also wrote a note to Captain Horn, informing him of the state of affairs, and of their reasons for not waiting for him, and this the departing clergymen undertook ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton

... Was any one of "the others," the playwrights, a player, holding a share in his company? If not, the fact makes an essential difference, for Shakspere WAS a shareholder. Collier, in his preface to Henslowe's so-called "Diary," mentions a playwright who was bound to scribble for Henslowe only (Henry Porter), and another, Chettle, who was bound to write only for the company protected by the Earl of Nottingham. {159b} Modern publishers and managers sometimes make the same terms with novelists ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... physicians to furnish those drugs in unlimited profusion. If reams of paper, scrawled over with barbarous technicalities, could smother and bury a quarrel which had its origin in the mutual antagonism of human elements, here were the men to scribble unflinchingly, till the reams were piled to a pyramid. If the same idea presented in many aspects could acquire additional life, here were the word-mongers who, could clothe one shivering thought in a hundred thousand garments, till it attained all the majesty which decoration ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... write fiction a year ago," she explained. "Before that I'd done nothing except scribble a ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... unfastened his shirt a scrap of paper slipped from it and fluttered to the floor. It was Gemma's letter, which he had worn all day upon his neck. He picked it up, unfolded it, and kissed the dear scribble; then began folding the paper up again, with a dim consciousness of having done something very ridiculous, when he noticed on the back of the sheet a postscript which he had not read before. "Be sure and come as soon as possible," it ran, "for I want ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... so you would even have married her! You, the descendant of St. Louis, and she the Scarron widow, the poor drudge whom in charity I took into my household! Ah, how your courtiers will smile! how the little poets will scribble! how the wits will whisper! You do not hear of these things, of course, but they are a ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle

... perception and it seems to me my concern—at least my musical concern—is enclosed by Canada and Mexico, the Pacific and Atlantic. So, rightly or wrongly, even if the miracle occur and I do finish in time, I cannot leave. A short distance, such a short distance from where I scribble these words, Vanzetti died. No more childish thought than atonement was ever conceived. It is a base and baseless gratification. Evil is not recalled. So I do not sentence myself for the murder of Vanzetti or for my manifold ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... offers 50,000 bushels of wheat for October delivery at $1.43 7/8 per bushel. It's that fellow down there with the blazing red tie half way up his collar. He hits out with both hands at the air as he yells. A surge of buyers overwhelms him. They scribble notes upon their sales cards and go at ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse

... management of an old driveler, join with them as an associate: praise them, that you may be praised in your absence. This too is of service; but to storm [the capital] itself excels this method by far. Shall he, a dotard, scribble wretched verses? Applaud them. Shall he be given to pleasure? Take care [you do not suffer him] to ask you: of your own accord complaisantly deliver up your Penelope to him, as preferable [to yourself]. What—do you think ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... yours." They fought, at midnight, in a wood, with swords. And not a spark of light but those that leapt Blue from the clashing blades. Tycho had lost His moon and stars awhile, almost his life; For, in one furious bout, his enemy's blade Dashed like a scribble of lightning into the face Of Tycho Brahe, and left him spluttering blood, Groping through that dark wood with outstretched hands, To fall in a death-black swoon. They carried him back To Rostoch; and when Tycho saw at last That mirrored patch of mutilated flesh, Seared as by fire, between the ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... creature, very inconsistent, very stupid, very silly. You do not write to me. You do not love your husband. You know how much pleasure your letters would afford, and you do not write to him even six lines, which you can readily scribble out." ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach

... said Mr. Copley, whose pen did not cease to scribble. "I can hear. No time for anything like the present minute. I've got this case by heart, and don't need to think about it. Go on, Lawrence. Has your father sent you ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... his hand from hers—withdrew it sharply—flung himself into a seat beside the table, and began to scribble on the back of Virgie's rumpled pass; while the child stood watching, trusting, with the simple trust of ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple

... cigar-case, I am soon wreathed in the fragrant clouds engendered by the incineration of a halfpenny cheroot, and, with a sigh of satisfaction, I spread out my writing or sketching materials and proceed to scribble or paint, calm in the knowledge that nothing on earth is in the least likely to disturb the flow of ideas, or interrupt the laying on of a broad flat wash. Now and again, lazily, I lean back to watch the witless hoverings of a big butterfly, or sleepily listen to the increasing sound of the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... there is a charming desk particularly adapted to its place. It is a standing desk which can be lowered or heightened at will, so that one who wishes to scribble a line or so may use it without sitting down. This desk is called a bureau d'architect. I found it in Biarritz. It would be quite easy to have one made by a good cabinet-maker, for the lines and method of construction are simple. My hall desk is so placed that it is lighted ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe

... right at 'em 'n' we wanged 'em best we could. 'Twas either bed 'n' breakfast or a scribble and a wreath. Haynes bust a Prussian's almond, took the bay'net where he stood, Then heaved his last 'arf-Brunswick, split the demon's grinnin' teeth, And Son went down in ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... Menzies. She promised to turn out a fine girl, has a fine fortune, and could James get her, he might sing, "I'll go no more to sea, to sea." Give my love to him when you write.—"God preserve us, what a scrawl!" says one of the ladies just now, in admiration at the expedition with which I scribble. Well—I was never able in my life to do anything with what is called ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... the mesh of a shopping-bag she was embellishing. And when, in due course, a funny-looking, canary-colored envelope carried this fragment to the desk of some bored phlegmatic editor, he would, as like as not, grin and scribble an order to the cashier for two dollars (or some such munificent sum) and pin it to the stamped "return" canary envelope, which would presently reach Number 98 ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... was then summoned into the royal presence, and commanded to take the cardinal into custody and conduct him to the Bastile. He was, however, permitted to visit his home. The cardinal contrived, by the way, to scribble a line upon a scrap of paper, and, catching the eye of a trusty servant, he, unobserved, slipped it into his hand. It was a direction to the servant to hasten to the palace, with the utmost possible ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... was awful lazy, he would laugh and talk, and crack jokes all the time, didn't love work, but did dearly love his pay." He liked to lie under a shade tree, or up in the loft of the cabin and read, cipher, or scribble. At night he ciphered by the light of the fire on the wooden fire shovel. He practised stump oratory by repeating the sermons, and sometimes by preaching himself to his brothers and sister. His gifts in the rhetorical line were high; when it was announced in the harvest field that Abe had taken ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... wrote it to amuse myself," said Lesley, meekly. "I've had so little to do since I came here, and I thought I would scribble down ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... busy, had put off writing. She could not dismiss a vision of a boarding-house in London upset from top to bottom by the grave illness of one person in it, and a distracted landlady who had not a moment even to scribble a post card. And all the time, as this vision tore and desolated her, she was thinking: "Fancy that child having a follower, at her age! She's ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from 1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, is short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caracteres." It started, probably, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... heroine, and there will be no logical development at all, which my English teacher insists is an elemental requirement of fiction if it isn't of life. I thought this summer I was going to begin some sort of book just for practice, but by the time I get through putting down the things I scribble about the day's doings, and write to Father and send my weekly letter to Mother and the girls, and run off something every now and then to Billy, and answer the notes I get from Whythe and some of the kiddies around here who think they're grown, ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher

... "mark for the prize," if we have a clearer and more desirous view of the yet far-distant goal. "Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty, they shall behold the land that is very far off," must have been addressed to one still "very far" from the promised land. Thus I scribble to thee the musings with which, in my now shady allotment, I try to encourage myself to hope; and which perhaps are as incorrect as the lament which the beautiful spring will sometimes prompt, "With the year seasons return, but not to me." It would, however, be most ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... like the Duke of Gloucester, who, when Gibbon brought him the second volume of the Decline and Fall, 'received him with much good nature and affability, saying to him, as he laid the quarto on the table, "Another d——d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?"' Best's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... Nature meant but fools. In search of wit these lose their common sense, And then turn critics in their own defence: Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write, 30 Or with a rival's, or an eunuch's spite. All fools have still an itching to deride, And fain would be upon the laughing side; If Maevius scribble in Apollo's spite, There are who judge still ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al

... "I went to get your M. Gaudissart out of a fix. He wants some music for a ballet, and you are hardly fit to scribble on sheets of paper and do your work, dearie.—So I understood, things being so, that a M. Garangeot was to be asked to set the Mohicans ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... of her hand stopped and the automatic writing ceased, her powers of thought seemed suddenly to reassert themselves. Probably what she had been writing was mere unintelligible scribble. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... on 'Worms' has been sent to the printers, so I am going to amuse myself by scribbling to you on a few points; but you must not waste your time in answering at any length this scribble. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... moment they sent regrets. Sandy said there would be a monument put up there, where Moses and Esau had stood, with the date and circumstances, and all about the whole business, and travellers would come for thousands of years and gawk at it, and climb over it, and scribble their names ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain

... in need of a Boswell than Henley. Dr. Weir Mitchell once complained to me that in America nobody waited upon great men to report their sayings, while in England a young man was always somewhere near with a clean cuff to scribble them on. The enthusiast, with his cuff an impatient blank, never hung about Henley. Anyway, that was not what our Thursday evenings were for. Of all his Young Men who climbed up the Buckingham Street ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... I exercised my new poetical talent in an epistle to Colonel Godard, whom I ridiculed to the utmost of my abilities. I showed this scribble to Madam de Merveilleux, who, instead of discouraging me, as she ought to have done, laughed heartily at my sarcasms, as well as her son, who, I believe, did not like M. Godard; indeed, it must be confessed, he was a man not calculated to obtain affection. I ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... painter received Mrs. Vostrand's card at his studio in Boston, and learned from the scribble which covered it that she was with her daughter at the Hotel Vendome. He went at once to see them there, and was met, almost before the greetings were past, with a prayer ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... over, and then sat down at the table and began to scribble on the back of the envelope. She convinced herself that three times fifteen was forty-five, and that so many lire amounted to not quite two pounds. Then there was the fare out to be reckoned. Finally, she decided that she would ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... pseudonym of "Uncle Scribble," contributed to the pages of the Sporting Magazine an admirable series of photographs—to adopt a modern word—of hunting and hunting men, as remarkable for dry wit and common sense, as a thorough knowledge of sport. But "Uncle Scribble," ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey

... Let them form a grand committee, How to plague and starve the city; Let them stare, and storm, and frown, When they see a clergy gown; Let them, ere they crack a louse, Call for th'orders of the house; Let them, with their gosling quills, Scribble senseless heads of bills; We may, while they strain their throats, Wipe our a—s with their votes. Let Sir Tom,[4] that rampant ass, Stuff his guts with flax and grass; But before the priest he fleeces, Tear the Bible all to pieces: At the parsons, Tom, halloo, boy, Worthy ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... the charms of Goldsmith's later style are to be traced in the letters of his youth, and he began to scribble verses when he could scarcely write. At the age of eight he went to the Rev. Mr. Gilpin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, where he was considered "a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom everyone made fun of." Indeed, from his earliest youth he was made to feel ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... But look here, whoever sent you that cowardly bit of scribble thought that because you lived out here in this lonely place you would be easily frightened. Look here," he continued, taking a scrap of dirty paper out of his old pocket-book; "that bit of rubbish ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... intervals, where medals and prints and miniatures were suspended upon a surface of faded stuff. The place had both color and quiet; I thought it a perfect room for work, and went so far as to say to myself that, if it were mine to sit and scribble in, there was no knowing but that I might learn to write as well as the author of Beltraffio. This distinguished man did not turn up, and I rummaged freely among his treasures. At last I took down a book that detained me awhile, and seated myself in a fine old leather chair by the window to ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... have been nearly an hour later that a messenger boy handed James a note. It was a hasty scribble ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... a chair without table or note paper and are satisfied to scribble an occasional note on some scrap of paper they seem to have picked up by accident. Clarence Darrow got more out of this easy going method than any man ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis

... agreed. Upon this, General Richman politely requested the favor of my company at dinner. I accepted his invitation, and bade them good night. I shall do the same to you for the present, as I intend, to-morrow, to scribble the cover, which is to enclose your ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... wife, during most of the ride. But, if he proposes taking me on the same distant journey, he shall be forgiven. Also, I have something to tell you, Ronnie, and I see the turret clock gives us an hour before luncheon. I must scribble out a message for the village; then I will come to you at ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay

... himself, when he found the ship still remaining in her unusual position, and heard the uproar going on overhead, began to entertain some very disagreeable doubts as to the possibility of the event to which he was alluding actually occurring, and looked very blue about the gills; whereat little Scribble, the clerk, laughed heartily at him, and seated himself on the table, with his feet on the side of the ship, affirming that he was not afraid, and was as contented and happy as ever—the truth being, not that the young donkey ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... is funny!" Allen glanced at Dan with frank admiration. "You write well—praise from Sir Hubert—I scribble verses myself! So our acquaintance really began a long time ago. It must have been last October that we ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson

... feeble-minded enough for Annuals and Keepsake Books, and so fetch him an occasional guinea. For, my dear, the verses I write of my own accord are not sufficiently genteel to be vended in Paternoster Row; they smack too dangerously of human intelligence. So I am compelled, perforce, to scribble such jingles as I am ashamed to read, because I must write something. . . ." Paul Vanderhoffen shrugged, and continued, in tones more animated: "There will be no talk of any grand-duke. Instead, there will be columns of denunciation and tittle-tattle ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... the whole world beside, and yet neglect yourself? If you do not, you wrong a perfect friendship; and if you do, you must consider my interest in you, and preserve yourself to make me happy. Promise me this, or I shall haunt you worse than she does me. Scribble how you please, so you make your letter long enough; you see I give you good example; besides, I can assure you we do perfectly agree if you receive not satisfaction but from my letters, I have none but what yours ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry



Words linked to "Scribble" :   scratch, script, hand, doodle, cacography, scrabble, drawing, scrawl, squiggle



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com