"Silliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... back as she hung on him. Was it sheer silliness? Or had certain doors in her nature never been opened, even enough for her to know all that lay behind them? He pushed her off, holding her by both wrists: "Are you quite willing to marry Mr. Muller? Do you love him? Think what it is to marry without ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... it is turned to an engine of iron, and by opportunity furnished with water and fire to impel it on a resistless course through the world. And a man must be governed by others before he will govern himself. The silliness about liberty which is sometimes obtruded into discussions of this subject, is fit for very young children and very old women. There is no desirable liberty but in obedience. The cant about it sometimes illustrates only a pitiable feebleness of intellect, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... as she had seen much, and known many great men, and gone through a vast variety of experience, she had always something to tell which was interesting. But how largely it was informed by egotism, and how narrowly at times it escaped the reproach of silliness, may be understood, I think, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... long for his promotion, the poor man whom he hoped to succeed dying indeed of the fever that had seized him; so we lost our curate. But it seems he prated to his patron about the fair young lady he had hoped should share his preferment, lamenting her silliness in preferring a moonstruck Quaker youth; also he complained of Mrs. Golding for not discouraging such follies, and he even deplored Mr. Truelocke's obstinate heresies as to ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... all kinds of things in which there was no sense. Think of reading one or two morning and evening papers every day. To be sure we said there was nothing in them, but we used up our eyesight over them, and let a stream of silliness and scandal dribble through our minds. As to ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... my baby, what will they do to us? They will kill you, and they will ill-treat me so that never again shall I be able to look my husband in the eyes—his brave eyes; but now perhaps they are closed in death!" There was an older, harsh-featured woman who rated the mother for her silliness, and, while we ate our omelette, the room was filled with the clamour of them until a dog outside began to howl. Then the mother went and sat down in a chair by the fire and stopped crying, but every now and then moaned and clasped her baby strongly to her breast, murmuring, "My poor baby, ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... who was often very tired, and who sat for the greater part of the day making blouses for which she was seldom paid. Mrs. Avory was not a strong woman, nor in any way a great-minded woman, but she was one who, in spite of weakness and a good deal of silliness, clung almost fiercely to the fact that she must be good, and who kept faithfully the promises she had made to a wholly unworthy person in the village church at home twelve years ago. Every word of the letter was an appeal to her dear, dear Nigel to ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... a man had made an affidavit that Bishop Kavanaugh had come to the Pacific Coast as a secret agent of the Southern Confederacy, to intrigue and recruit in its interest! Five minutes' inquiry would have satisfied General McDowell of the silliness of such a charge—but it was in war times, and he did not stop to make the inquiry. In Kentucky the good old Bishop had the freedom of the whole land, coming and going without hinderance; but the fact was, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... innocence was in his eyes, and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature; for he was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to which he paid not the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too high among the clouds to concern themselves with such materialities. This great unknown artist belonged ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... Bruges, the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those are real epochs in our inner life. To the men of fifty years ago, the bare avowal itself would have seemed little short of affected silliness. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... outlook upon life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving mood should not be forgotten, because later on it was partly quenched by ill health, responsibility and the advance of years. He was often, in the old days, excessively, delightfully silly—silly with the silliness of an inspired schoolboy; I am afraid our laughter sometimes sounded ill ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... to fondness, as we are told by the poets that pity is akin to love, was much the foolish fashion of the day. Men of the highest rank, and doubtless of the haughtiest arrogance, were called Tom, and Dick, and Harry; and this silliness was the language of high life, until the French Revolution and the democratic war at home taught them, that if they adopted the phraseology of their own footmen, their footmen would probably take possession of their title-deeds. The hollowness of public life is as soon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... not only what he seemed to want, what he had feebly longed for. She was more than this. Her nature was the complement of his. A lack of shrewdness, of mental grasp, a certain silliness were absolutely essential to the maintenance of a lifelong devotion to him. Wentworth had found the right woman to give him what he wanted. Fay ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... the other five that he threw it at B's head. And all ten have really seen it, so firmly are they convinced of the correctness of their swift judgment of expectation. Now, before we treat the witness to some reproach like untruth, inattention, silliness, or something equally nice, *we had better consider whether his story is not true, and whether the difficulty might not really lie in the imperfection of our own sensory processes. This involves ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... folly—not want of cunning and cleverness, but want of heart—want of feeling—what Solomon calls folly (Prov. i. 22-27), stupidity of soul, when he calls on the simple souls, How long ye simple ones will you love simplicity or silliness, and the scorners delight in their scorning (delight in laughing at what is good), and fools hate knowledge—hate to think earnestly or steadily about anything—the stupidity of the ass, who is too stubborn and thick-skinned to turn out of his way for any one—or the ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... a most wonderfully strong and valiant spirit: she was once timid; now she tramples on all the evil spirits. She has put far away from herself all the littleness and silliness of women; she is singularly free from scruples, ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... enhance, Inspirited by self-esteem, Is quite a common thing in France; A French disease it well might seem. The strutting cavaliers of Spain Are in another manner vain. Their pride has more insanity; More silliness our vanity. Let's shadow forth our own disease— Well worth a hundred ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... of his dismissal broke the strain under which Stuart had been labouring for hours. It was ridiculous. He began to laugh at the silliness of the whole thing—what an idiotic performance anyhow—these lovers' quarrels! He saw the comedy of it, ate a hearty supper, and went to bed firm in the conviction that he would see Nan again ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... season approached Mrs. Shiffney's life became increasingly agitated. Miss Fleet was an excellent hand at subduing, or, if that were impossible, at getting neatness into agitation. She knew well how to help fashionable women to be absurd with method. She made their silliness almost business-like, and assisted them to arrange their various fads in apple-pie order. Amid their often hysterical lives she moved with a coolness that was refreshing even to them. She never criticized their actions except sometimes ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... you spoke the truth, mademoiselle. Silliness is the capacity for happiness. It is the sovereign content. It is the prime asset ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... philosophic bent. My vocation is the study of finance. I am a student of financial law and I have chosen as the subject of my dissertation—the Past and Future of the Dog Licence. I need hardly point out that young ladies, songs, moonlight, and all that sort of silliness are entirely ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... this saying is also true. Not fools exactly, but wisdom disguised in the motley of wit, often gains entrance to ears deaf to angelic voices. There are follies that are to be laughed out of their silliness and sinfulness. There are tyrants, big and little, to be dethroned by ridicule. There are offences, proof against appeals to conscience, that wince and vanish before keen satire. Even as a well-aimed joke brings back good-humor to an angry mob, or makes mad and pugnacious bullies cower ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... citizens will, of course, depend upon themselves; but may we pray them to beware of the silliness of local pride—(we imagine that upon reading this paper the cities and towns named will at once move in the business of monuments, and we would not leave them unadvised in any particular)—in choosing their sculptors and architects? Home talent is a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... adorable silliness! Could you not be happy with me here in this palace? You would be a princess, indeed, a queen of my heart. I would put every luxury at your command." In mingled eagerness and wariness he watched her, incredulous of her assenting mood, but with a hope that lured him on to believe. And in his eyes, ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... "Because I was—afraid—to ride. Doesn't it seem ridiculous, now I'm over that silliness? But oh, how I did wish I could get over being afraid! That was about the only wish you couldn't grant, ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... was appointed, with Brander Matthews for managing director and spokesman. It issued a list of three hundred words, of average silliness as to spelling, and proposed new and sane spellings for these words. The President of the United States, unsolicited, adopted these simplified three hundred officially, and ordered that they be used in the official documents of the Government. It ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... conducted by experience. And besides, Mr. Fenwick, is not love a warfare? has it not rules? have not our fair antagonists their tactics, their weapons, their place of arms? and is there not a touch of - pardon me the word! of silliness in one who, having fought, and having vanquished, sounds a parley, and capitulates to his own prisoner? Had the lady chosen, had the fortune of war been other, 'tis like she had been Mrs. Austin. Now I . . . You know ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... himself, and finally went off to his club. There seemed to be no way in which he could drown his anger, disappointment, and sense of loss, except by a debauch, and he was brought home by his faithful Phipps at the stage of confidential silliness. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... I should not tell you my story. Perhaps that is just the reason why I am going to do so. At least, you seem so well prepared to hear a tale of silliness that I cannot find it in my heart to disappoint you. My name, in spite of your example, I shall keep to myself. My age is not essential to the narrative. I am descended from my ancestors by ordinary generation, and from them I inherited the very eligible ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... there ain't anything else in all this big world that anywhere near comes up to it for silliness. Why, don't you think," and here her voice took a lower and more solemn tone, and the wide cap frill trembled with earnestness. "Don't you think, there's men and women who believe that every word in that Bible over there is true, ...
— Three People • Pansy
... liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would untune the sky. It would be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with laughter at the sudden vision of the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers, prisoners working on the roads, deserters being driven towards the trenches would throw down their guns and their spades and their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving in artillery waggons or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... counsel was: "Tametomo's method of fighting is rustic. There are here two Emperors competing for the throne, and the combat must be conducted in a fair and dignified manner." To such silliness the Minamoto hero made apt answer. "War," he said, "is not an affair of official ceremony and decorum. Its management were better left to the bushi whose business it is. My brother Yoshitomo has eyes to see an opportunity. To-night, he will attack us.". It is true that ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Willison, her son, an extraordinary individual, apparently destined to be more notorious than his father, in so much as his character was composed of that mixture of simplicity, bordering on silliness, and shrewd sagacity in the ordinary affairs of life, which is often observed in people of Scotland. Though common, the character is nearly inexplicable to the analyst; for the individual seems conscious of the weaker part of his character, but he appears to love it, and often makes ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... could not press the keys. As he sat there in the twilight made by the shaded electric lamps, the struggle rose in his heart against the admission of anything into his scheme of life but material things, and the conflict raged unchecked. What a silliness, he said, to think that the mummery of a woman over a rose could affect a life. Life is what the succession of the days brings. The thing is or is not, he said to himself, and the gibber about prayer and the moral force ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... such silliness as this pleases my daughter, it makes no difference to me. For, after all, you would be the one they'd poke fun at, ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... too stubborn to tell. This setback is your own fault. You've let other notions become more important to you than the idea of getting well. And you've no excuse for it. After I had to warn you a month ago, I expected that silliness to ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... Since there was so much practising to do, it had been arranged that she should remain there from the night of the sermon until after she was graduated. If Mrs. Comstock decided to attend she was to drive in with the Sintons. When Elnora begged her to come she said she cared nothing about such silliness. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... a little manikin in their eyes, and when their mother told them to take him with them anywhere they were angry, because then they had to take care of him, and on account of his silliness could not play so many tricks. Paul felt that very well, and in order to escape their angry faces and still more angry blows, he generally said he wanted to stay at home, however sore his heart might feel. Then he seated himself on the pump-handle, and, rocking himself to and fro, ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... — N. want of -intelligence &c. 498, want of - intellect &c. 450; shadowness[obs3], silliness, foolishness &c. adj.; imbecility, incapacity, vacancy of mind, poverty of intellect, weakness of intellect, clouded perception, poor head, apartments to let; stupidity, stolidity; hebetude[obs3], dull ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Husband. Yet of what will you talk with this Ana? Of poems, I suppose, and silliness. Or will it be perchance of Merapi, Moon of Israel, whom I gather both of you think so beautiful. Well, have your way. You tell me that I am not to accompany you upon this journey, I your new-made wife, ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... performers most delicately handled. They are a very young, inexperienced (almost childish), and quarrelsome couple. Frivolity so extreme as they were required to represent demands the utmost nicety of colouring to rescue it from silliness and inanity. But the actors kept their portraits well up to a pleasing standard, and made them both quite spirituels (more French—that Morning Post will be the ruin of us), as well as in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class. We may say what we like of popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness it is nothing. But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed. The present writer's father, a compositor ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... she said. "I know it's absurd. But, somehow, little things do worry me, even when I know they're silly. And there's just enough that's not silliness in this to let it be ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... if I were I'd go ahead and defeat his intentions as I'm doubtless doing this minute. Let's make up now, so you'd as well stop talking silliness." ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... his mind since the wooden poke had been put on him, and somehow his running away seemed very foolish now. He wondered how he could ever have thought it any fun, and he was so disgusted that he couldn't keep his ears still, but moved them restlessly when he remembered his own silliness. ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... engagement, ay, and a death; yet neither the interest of the first, nor the romance of the second, nor the solemnity of the last, could check for more than a few hours the steady development of the family characteristics of love, modesty, hate, frivolity, wisdom, and silliness. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... Sunday he came over to talk, like he always does after Sunday-school is out, and I said, real quick, Mary giving signs of silliness: ...
— Mary Cary - "Frequently Martha" • Kate Langley Bosher
... no whit better than the very worst of his paper, for besides the silliness of his appeal, by which he makes these good women to be judges in their own cause, his words have a direct tendency in them to puff them up to their destruction. I have wondered sometimes, to see when something ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... will get it. Sharp practise and double-dealing among the people find an outcrop in public affairs. Rogues in a community will have no trouble in finding rogue lawyers to do their bidding. In fact, rogue clients evolve rogue attorneys. Foolish patients evolve fool doctors. And superstition and silliness in the pew find a fitting ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... works I scattered that bilious humour which had occasioned this very occupation." Our author's character in his works was the very opposite to the one in which he appeared to these low people. Feeling his degradation among them, for they treated his simplicity as utter silliness, his personal timidity assumed a tone of boldness and originality in his writings, while a strong personal sense of shame heightened his causticity, and he delighted to contemn that urbanity in which he had never shared, and which ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... 'It might be the last bottle of some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it. Don't you see there's something sacred in the silliness of ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... behind a house, So, evil falls, and a fool foretells the truth." "Well," quoth Lord Raoul, with languid utterance, "'Tis very well — and thou'rt a foolish fool, Nay, thou art Folly's perfect witless man, Stupidity doth madly dote on thee, And Idiocy doth fight her for thy love, Yet Silliness doth love thee best of all, And while they quarrel, snatcheth thee to her And saith 'Ah! 'tis my sweetest No-brains: mine!' — And 'tis my mood to-day some ill shall fall." And there right suddenly Lord Raoul gave rein And galloped straightway to the crowded square, — What ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... thoughtful of you," declared the other. "With all your silliness, you're not half a bad sort. Gertie, go in and ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... when its colour was fixed enough to be told, was a shade of pink so faint and creamy that you would hardly dare to call it by its name. Her mouth was perfect, not small enough to give that expression of silliness which is so common, but almost divine, with the temptation of its full, rich, ruby lips. Her teeth, which she but seldom showed, were very even and very white, and there rested on her chin the dearest dimple ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... delicacy of the sentiment and of the painting combine to effect a little masterpiece of Louis Quinze art. It is simple and natural, and entirely free from the besetting sins of so slight a picture triviality, affectation, empty prettiness, or simply silliness. In its way it is perfect, and for that perfection is for ever reserved the popularity which we find temporarily accorded to pictures like Frith's Dolly Varden ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... business. "She is my elder," he said. Perhaps an existence like his, always solitary, reduced to the satisfaction of mere needs, deprived of money and all pleasures in youth, may explain to physiologists and thinkers the clownish expression of the face, the feebleness of mind, the vacant silliness of the man. His sister had steadily prevented him from marrying, afraid perhaps to lose her power over him, and seeing only a source of expense and injury in some woman who would certainly be younger and undoubtedly ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... 1771 opened very unfavorably for the new administration; omens of impending dangers were to be seen on all sides. Ten or twelve years before, Goldsmith, whose occasional silliness of manner prevented him from always obtaining the attention to which his sagacity entitled him, had named the growing audacity of the French parliaments as not only an indication of the approach of great changes in that country, but as ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... for the brilliancy of his wit and repartee: he was never afraid to speak the truth. Once when the poet in one of his fits of petulance exclaimed, intending to produce a terrible impression, "I shall go mad!" Davies calmly and cuttingly observed, "It is much more like silliness than madness!" He was the only man who ever laid Byron under any serious pecuniary obligation, having lent him 4800l. in some time of strait. This was repaid on March 27, 1814, when the pair sat up over champagne and claret from six till midnight, after which "Scrope could ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... aware that no one on earth but themselves had any idea where I had gone. And I had further divulged to them the important fact that I had plenty of ready money in Bank of England notes! I stood aghast at my own silliness. But still, ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... bear an oath; it will be a strange madness to dare, a great folly to hope the persuading it thereby. What were more ridiculous than to swear the truth of a demonstrable theorem? What more vain than so to assert a disputable problem: oaths (like wagers) are in such cases no arguments, except silliness in the users ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... blockhead Dr. Burney is to be always sending for his daughter home so! what a monkey! is she not better and happier with me than she can be anywhere else? Johnson is enraged at the silliness of their family conduct, and Mrs. Byron disgusted; I confess myself provoked excessively, but I love the girl so dearly—and the Doctor, too, for that matter, only that he has such odd notions of superiority in his own house, and will have his children under his ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... this morning, and I could not feel as if I ought to be there till I had made a resolution to tell her all about it, though I should like it not to be till you are come home, and can tell her that I am not really like Dolores, as she will be sure to think me, for I really did it, not out of silliness and opposition, but because I knew how good they were, and I did tell you. Honestly, perhaps there was some opposition in the spirit of it; but I mean to make a fresh start when I come back, and you will be near at hand then, and that will ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shouting in their excitement, a band playing delirious waltz music, champagne corks popping merrily, painted women laughing, jesting loudly, all kinds of revelry and devilry and Bacchic things undreamed of. This was silly of her, no doubt, but the silliness of inexperienced young women is a matter for the pity, not the reprobation, of the judicious. If they take the world for their oyster and think, when they open it, they are going to find pearl necklaces ready-made, we must not ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... his own part he studied Courbet and then Delacroix, and, assuredly, from these picked up useful hints for converting sensibility into significant form. Sensibility he never lacked. Renoir's painting gift may, without unpardonable silliness, be compared with the singing gift of Mozart. His conspicuous characteristics are loveliness and ease. No painter, I suppose, gives more delight, or gives it more frankly. That is why his name provokes an odd, personal enthusiasm in thousands of people who have ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... spirits have appeared; the ghosts of the greatest men have said their say, and yet the substance of it has always been the absurdest silliness. Not one inspiring thought has yet been transmitted by this mystical way; only the most vulgar trivialities. It has never helped to find the truth; it has never brought forth anything but ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... very angry to be accused by the young brothers of making a fuss, and Claude's silence was equally offensive. It was upon principle that he said nothing. He knew it was nothing but a transient attack of silliness, of which she was herself ashamed; but he was sorry to leave her in that condition, and feared Lady Rotherwood's coming into the neighbourhood was doing her harm, as certainly as it was spoiling ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ain't so unprofessional as to remember all that silliness against me, are you? I was only a girl, and you couldn't expect me to love you—either of you. I'm a poor widow now," she sighed, "and I need work. And here you have been laying up grudges against me—the two of you—all these years! What ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... to go there, or that you are certain to come to harm if you frequent them, but there is more chance of temptation, and an inferior entertainment for your money. Well acted plays may open out your mind, but the silliness of the music hall entertainment will only react upon you. You can tell a music hall frequenter, not by the words of his mouth so much as by the shuffle of his feet: his highest ambition seems to be to dance the double shuffle, and perhaps sing a few verses of some jingling rhyme. ...
— Boys - their Work and Influence • Anonymous
... walk to Fleet Street by way of Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn Fields, and upon this he would subsist till the day came. He could make no longer excursions because of his lameness. All this may sound very much like simple silliness to most people, but those who have not been bound to a wheel do not know what thoughts come into the head of the strongest man who is extended on it. Clark sat side by side in his gallery with other young men of rather a degraded type, and the confinement bred in ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... silliness!" her mother laughingly chided her. "You are a regular circus clown or monkey in a cage when ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... last decided. "And there he found a disengaged angel, who very imprudently lowered herself to the point of marrying him. And so he lived happily ever afterward. And so, till the day of his death, he preached the doctrine that silliness is ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... engaged to another lady." There was a moment's silence, and then he caught his breath and exploded with, "Oh, good God! Don't tell me it's some silliness of Paul's." ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... flecks the mirror in a cotillon. It was James; but why he had been so moved, how moved, how so lightly satisfied, how his conduct at other times could be fitted in—really, it didn't matter two straws. It meant nothing but a moment's silliness, it led to nothing, it mended nothing—and it broke nothing. Her soul was her own, her heart was her own. It was amiable of him, she dared say, but had become rather a bore. She conceived of a time at hand when she might have to be careful that he shouldn't. ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... part of it, especially his troubles. Which was the greatest of these? Was it not the chain? What melancholy hours Tylo had spent fastened to an iron ring! And what humiliation he endured when the woodcutter used to take him to the village and, with unspeakable silliness, keep him on the lead in front of everybody, thus depriving him of the pleasure of greeting his friends and sniffing the smells provided for his benefit at every street-corner and in ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... has not availed to save me from my fate. I see it; everyone sees it: I grow more "theatrical" every day. And no one could be more painfully aware of the pungent silliness of theatrical ways. The quiet, nervous, but pleasing E.C. Cummins vanishes. I cannot save him. I am driven like a dead leaf before the winds of March. My tailor even enters into the spirit of my disorder. He has a peculiar sense of what is fitting. I tried to get a dull ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... discussed in the vilest language; to see all that is foolish or lascivious in your own sex exaggerated with a malignant licence, which makes a young and beautiful woman an epitome of all the vices, uniting the extreme of masculine profligacy with the extreme of feminine silliness. Will you encourage by your presence the wretches who libel your sex? Will you sit smiling to see your sisters ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... notoriously experience in their relations with each other. It may be useful to state the principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love, absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste, in other words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and crime, vulgarity and slovenliness, are the leading and inevitable creators of alienation, dislike, and misery in marriage. Whatever tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply irritations, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... woman whose early life has been directed by native silliness and social bias, will submit to a tardy education at the hands of her own children. Thus was ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was consumed by his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of war, the realisation which had come upon him in a flash with the bullet that had destroyed his skill and use as an artificer for ever. He was looking at the vestiges with a horror that made him impenetrable ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... though we may not always understand every word of it, we want to feel the thrill and glamour of it. And when Wordsworth remembers his own rules and keeps to them there is no glamour, and his simplicity is apt to seem to us mere silliness. ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... father and mother. If there had been that fear about the dressmaker's model on top of the rest of her anxieties she would have broken down with nervous prostration. But, thanks to her for saving him (without his knowledge), Peter seemed to have got over his silliness and was able to stand by ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... rattletrap. In appearance she is a plain woman; sensible, gracious and nice. Her position is a trying one which she supports with tact. So far she has been guilty of no error of taste and her manner with her husband is pleasant without bearing a trace of that silliness which the Senator's great age encouraged Washington to expect. No one has yet enjoyed any spiteful fun at Mrs. Depew's expense though many were on the ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... present use of the word "hospitality" will be drowned in its pink tea, choked with cheese-wafers, rescued from the nervous clutch of the managing mama, and the machinations of the chaperone. A society built on the sands of silliness must give way to the universal university, and the strong, healthful, helpful, honest companionship and comradeship of men ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... shows you, as your riches swell Your wants increase; have you no friend to tell? A healing simple for a wound you try; It does no good; you put the simple by: You're told that silly folk whom heaven may bless With ample means get rid of silliness; You test it, find 'tis not the case with you: Then why not change your Mentor for a new? Did riches make you wiser, set you free From idle fear, insane cupidity, You'd blush, and rightly too, if earth contained Another man more fond of ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... perils the college woman in the United States is happily exempt. President Jordan offers as a plea for co-education the healthy sense of companionship between boy and girl students. "There is less of silliness and folly," he says, "where man is not a novelty." But, in truth, this particular form of silliness and folly is at a discount in every woman's college, simply because the interests and occupations which crowd the student's day leave little ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... not stupid: it is the want of stupidity or silliness that makes trifling of that kind impossible to him," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... would try to root up this great fiction, which has bothered us for the last three centuries; if only they would open their eyes and see—what great men like Rousseau and Tolstoy saw so clearly—the silliness of opera; if only they would see the anomalies of the Bayreuth show. In the second act of Tristan there is a celebrated passage, where Ysolde, burning with desire, is waiting for Tristan; she sees him come at last, and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... as life is always mingled in sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet, we had the melancholy experience of finding, when we got ready to come home, that Jules had taken a drop too much, and was in a state of ineffable silliness, which made George prefer ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... details of Tutt's second blooming would be needlessly to derogate from the dignity of the history of Tutt & Tutt. There is a silly season in the life of everyone—even of every lawyer—who can call himself a man, and out of such silliness comes the gravity of knowledge. Tutt found it necessary for his new client to come to the office almost every day, and as she usually arrived about the noon hour what was more natural than that he should invite her out to lunch? Twice he walked home with her. The telephone was ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... He adds, "How some parsons would have goggled and what would Hannah More say? I don't like clergymen, but here and there one. Cary, the Dante Cary, is a model quite as plain as Parson Primrose, without a shade of silliness." ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... anything human about him; without so much as simple curiosity even, or else surely he would have responded in some way to all these hints he had been given. . . . Such insensibility was almost mysterious. Massy's state of exasperation seemed to Sterne to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary silliness ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... time she sat there in the rocky clearing amidst the litter of pine-tops and small undergrowth, contemplating her own silliness with keen amusement. ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... message said about the same thing, so now, you see, it was ridiculous in Eleanor to tease about it being a love-note. Had she been sensible I would have read it aloud to all, but because of her silliness, I made up my ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... minute. Leslie Goldthwaite and Dakie Thayne and the Josselyns half way up above there, in the Minster. Mr. Wharne and Miss Craydocke at the top. And I down here, where I belong. Impertinence! To think of the things I've said in my silliness to that woman, whose greatness I can no more measure! Why didn't somebody stop me? I don't answer for you, Frank, and I won't keep you; but I think I'll just stay where I am, and ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... being a trait of the performer in esse. To this rule Mr. Selby, in this part, is a melancholy exception; for he seems utterly ignorant of such a distinction, broad as it is—he is silly himself, instead of causing silliness in Spooney. This is the more to be regretted, as whoever witnessed, with us, the first piece, saw in Mr. Selby a respectable representative of an old dandy in "Barnaby Rudge." Moreover, the same gentleman ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... forfeited that confidence?" said Father Letheby, who began to see a certain deliberate insult under all this silliness. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... accomplish without being oppressed; and we always tried to make our progress more a pleasure than a toil. To hurry over the ground, abuse, and look ferocious at one's native companions, merely for the foolish vanity of boasting how quickly a distance was accomplished, is a combination of silliness with absurdity quite odious; while kindly consideration for the feelings of even blacks, the pleasure of observing scenery and everything new as one moves on at an ordinary pace, and the participation in the most delicious rest with our ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... dare—even knowing I was all right!"... The laughter died in her eyes; a swift tenderness melted them: "I do care for you so truly, Clive! I can't bear to think of ever again living without you.... You know it isn't silliness or love or anything except what I've always felt for you—loyalty and devotion, endless, eternal. And that is all there is or ever will be in my heart ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the champions of the enfranchisement of the sex have loudly protested against the hackneyed truisms, formerly so rife, which impute to women every imaginable form of silliness and frivolity; that they, like Alphonse Karr's typical woman, have nothing to do but "s'habiller, babiller et se deshabiller." But it will be well to remember the existence of another class of maxims of even greater weight, which dwell on the subtle influence of women, and of its illimitable ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... proved very pretty. It is more gracious to begin with this declaration, instead of saying that, in the first place, she proved very silly. It took a long day to arrive at the end of her silliness, and the two ladies at Posilippo, even after a week had passed, suspected that they had only skirted its edges. Kate Theory had not spent half an hour in her company before she gave a little private sigh of relief; she felt that ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... just say what it was," he presently replied, in a hard, matter-of-fact tone. "You see, one's feelings can change, Sarge. It looks different to me now than it did then. I reckon I could have written essays on the futility of sentiment, and the damned silliness of a man who thinks he cares for a woman. But I'm past that stage. And so I can't say for sure just how it was or why. Something came up between me and Lyn—and I drifted, and kept drifting. Went through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana; finally rambled here, and went into the Force ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Christ's; but the good Sioux Fallians are above it. They pull all the hay to their side of the manger and forget that we, having never used such food, don't miss it now. It is a pity that we can't infuse more of the "God-honor-and-the-ladies" spirit into this depth of silliness out here. ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr |
