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More "Stodgy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to play off Dobell or Mitchell on ME—you hear! Much YOU know of either, don't you? Look at that copy. If Johnny couldn't do better than that, I'd lick him. Of course it's the pen—it ain't your stodgy fingers—oh, no! P'r'aps you'd like to hev a few more boxes o' quills and gold pens and Gillott's best thrown in, for two bits a lesson? I tell you what! I'll throw up the contract in another minit! There goes another quill busted! Look here, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... England or the English counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for English literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism itself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother; or whether if he had come from Iceland, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... actions prior to the Revolution, the first significant attack not occurring until 1788. Instead, the stolid and often plodding king tended to rely upon men like the unimaginative Lord Bute or his somewhat stodgy wife, Charlotte of Mecklenberg (for whom two Virginia counties and the town of Charlottesville are named.) The breakdown of the once-powerful Whig political coalition also ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... there were the shining eyes of the watching dogs, growling, if one came too near, and outside the stodgy sentries; and above ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... Saturday morning until the Tuesday following, when it was placed on a gaily decorated trolley and drawn through the town by eight oxen, followed by a large and expectant crowd of people. But the pudding did not come up to expectations, turning out rather stodgy: so in 1859 a much larger pudding was made, but this time it was baked instead of boiled, and was drawn by twenty-five horses through the streets of the town. One feature of the procession on that occasion was a number of navvies ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... verve and elan and ringing, ruthless wit. There was always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour, dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I have the mess of pottage—stodgy, porridgy ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... with the clattering of knives and forks upon plates, and, the meat being ended, the pudding came along, round, stodgy slices, with glittering bits of yellow suet in it, and here and there a raisin, or plum, as we called it, playing at bo-peep with those on the other side,—"Spotted Dog," we used to call it,—and I got on a little better, for it was nice and warm and sweet, ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... "That stodgy old house," she said, "and two old people! A general house-work girl, and you cooking on her Thursdays out! I wish you joy ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... same way," he confessed. "The trouble of it is that when the really right person comes along, one hasn't any doubt about it whatever. I should have made you a stodgy ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... down, with his fervid imagination, his intimacy with the masterworks of music and poetry, he must have drawn in a richer air than the reek of a Leipzig cafe, his inner vision must have seen a diviner light than the common light of the stodgy Leipzig streets, with his inner ear he must have heard a music sweeter than the hoarse arguments of students half-filled with lager-beer. In the accounts of this time there is not—to use the phrase ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... Jerry Benham wrote his own memoir, for no matter how veracious, this history must be more or less colored by the point of view of one irrevocably committed to an ideal, a point of view which Jerry at least would insist was warped by scholarship and stodgy by habit. But Jerry, of course, would not write it and couldn't if he would, for no man, unless lacking in sensibility, can write a true autobiography, and least of all could Jerry do it. To commit him to ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... not a rapid thinker. He enveloped her in a stodgy gaze. It was only too plain to Elizabeth that he was a man who liked to digest one idea slowly before going on to absorb the next. Jerry Nichols had told him to drive to Flack's. He had driven to Flack's. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... and darkness, the dish of Johnny cakes became the base of the pyramid, and was consequently missing at breakfast time. After a long hunt Mac recovered it and stood looking dejectedly at the ruins of his cookery—a heap of flat, stodgy-looking slabs. "Must have been sitting on 'em all night," he said, "and there's no other bread ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... but she belongs to rather stodgy people. Bothers about respectability, and that sort of thing. But she came along with me this afternoon distributing handbills all over the City for two hours! Not many women of her kind are ready to do ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... it open to careless treatment, and many who would be the first to appreciate its good qualities if it were placed before them well cooked and served, now recoil from the idea of habitually feeding off what they know only under the guise of a stodgy, insipid, or watery mass. A few hints, therefore, respecting the best manner of preparing ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... his eyes, the house righted itself again. Slowly it drew together, ironed out its queer angles, readjusted its dimensions, became once again the stodgy house he knew it ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak
... civilization, friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for that's the trouble—that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond. Look at our Parliament—a hurdy-gurdy turning out, age after age, a sing-song of pigmy regulations, accompanied for grum kettledrum by a musketry of suicides, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare, laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man—if he has any receptive faculty that is—and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I don't the least undervalue my good fortune.—But you talk of remembering. That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear Damaris, when you ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... but he had a facile and specious method of arguing, a most gay and in some respects magnetic personality, far from stodgy or gross, which for a time attracted many to him. Very briskly then indeed he proceeded to make friends with all those with whom I had surrounded myself, to enter into long and even private discussions with them as to the proper conduct of ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Maggie. "How stodgy they look, Tom! Is it marls (marbles) or cobnuts?" Maggie's heart sank a little, because Tom always said it was "no good" playing with her at those ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... her young lord into amiability and resignation to fate. That proved more difficult than usual: Archie felt the sting of the older man's taunts, especially the horrid word "adventurer" rankled in his subconsciousness. He saw himself reflected in the opinion of other men,—at least of stodgy, middle-aged men like Mr. Smith, who worked hard for what they got and had families,—and it ruffled him seriously. He was not in a happy temper otherwise. A fortnight of conjugal picnicking in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... on through the sand-wastes of Fact, Long level of gritty aridity; With pompous conceit make a pact, Be bondsman to bald insipidity; Be slab as a black Irish bog, Slow, somnolent, stupid, and stodgy; Plunge into sophistical fog, And the realms of the dumpishly dodgy. With trump elephantine and slow, Tread on through word-swamps, dank and darkling; But no, most decidedly no, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... the pride of the Germans, as dear as their pipe And their beer, is their wonderful old Gothic type; It makes ev'ry page look as black as your hat, For the face of the letters is stodgy and fat; It adds to the labour of reading, and tries The student's pre-eminent asset, his eyes, And in consequence lends a most lucrative aid To people engaged in the spectacle trade. But these manifest drawbacks to little amount When tried by the only criteria that count: ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... descriptive geography, he once launched forth into an elaborate account of his rail journey on the Canadian Pacific, from Montreal westwards. Marie was not disappointed in the letters; they were what she would have expected. But sometimes, as she read their terse and uninteresting sentences, their stodgy bits of information, she smiled to think how marriage changed ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... architectural mass of a Buddhist temple far away projected itself in dead black on the sky. We lost the thief of course; but in my disappointment I had to admire Hermann's presence of mind. The velocity that stodgy man developed in the interests of a complete stranger earned my warm gratitude—there was something truly cordial in ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... must either be treated in the spirit of romance and fantasy as by Balzac and the colossally fantastic Zola; or in the spirit of humor as by Charles de Bernard, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens. The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich [laughter] produces no permanent literature, produces but temporary "Tracts ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... writing; these last days have been so stodgy—sticky, I was going to say. Endless infant talk. The methods of head nurses, teething, the knavish tricks of nursemaids, patent foods, bottles, bibs—everything. Enough to put one off forever from wishing to get married. And Mary ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... does not appear to have been a major factor in his actions prior to the Revolution, the first significant attack not occurring until 1788. Instead, the stolid and often plodding king tended to rely upon men like the unimaginative Lord Bute or his somewhat stodgy wife, Charlotte of Mecklenberg (for whom two Virginia counties and the town of Charlottesville are named.) The breakdown of the once-powerful Whig political coalition also added to ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were entrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... very diligent attempt. Nietzsche, always under the influence of French models, wrote a German that differs materially from any other German that I know. It is more nervous, more varied, more rapid in tempo; it runs to more effective climaxes; it is never stodgy. His marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger Germans of today. They are getting away from the old thunderous manner, with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. In the course of time, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... every one who can make even that plain sauce as it should be. The thin, watery mixture, or grey "stodgy" mass which is sometimes served with cauliflower or parsnips, even where the other viands are fairly well cooked and served, is certainly enough to condemn "vegetables." Yet, how simple it is if done the right way. In a small saucepan—preferably ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... man was not a rapid thinker. He enveloped her in a stodgy gaze. It was only too plain to Elizabeth that he was a man who liked to digest one idea slowly before going on to absorb the next. Jerry Nichols had told him to drive to Flack's. He had driven to Flack's. Here he was at Flack's. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... a stodgy sort of bat, and having a habit of sitting on the splice, always get put in first. I'm a hitter, so they generally shove me in about fourth wicket. In this sort of match the man who goes in fourth wicket ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... act of pleasure. He was long ago one of the first to rebel against old Mrs. Toplofty's exactions of party calls, by saying he did not care in the least whether his great-aunt Jane Toplofty invited him to her stodgy old ball or not. And then Lucy Wellborn (the present Mrs. Bobo Gilding) did not care much to go either if none of her particular men friends were to be there. Little she cared to dance the cotillion with old Colonel ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... dinner and a little stodgy for that time of the year, but the two men were hungry and sat at table, almost alone in the upper room, for a long time, saying how good everything was, and from time to time despatching the saturnine waiter, a Madrileno, for more peppers. When at last they came ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... business with the sea these days," he reflected moodily. "Confound this stodgy port and ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... The Sassenach, stodgy and prosy, Lacks any distinguishing mark; The Semite has merely been nosey Right back to the days of the Ark; The Teuton proclaims himself edel And points to his family tree; But the Celt is tattooed in his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
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