"Drivel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 'I wish, my dear Mac,' he said, 'you would pay me the compliment of not mistaking me for that detestable little cad with whom I have the misfortune to be connected. You would greatly oblige me if next time he attempts to inflict upon you his vulgar drivel you would kindly ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... calmly. 'I've got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I'm the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it,—by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when he gets ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... their drivel? I aim only at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no higher degree of merit, not even at brevity—I am sure it could have been all done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two months ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a kind of stupefaction. Was it of Farrington the man was talking such drivel? Farrington, who only the week before had told him in high gratification that within the last month he had added a cool million to his ward's marriage portion. Farrington, who had, but two days ago, hinted mysteriously of a gigantic financial coup ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... was not out of it, each time people are manifestly interested—politely, of course—and form a circle, make room for one as they did at that particularly disagreeable Grimshott garden party yesterday, each time—I don't want to drivel, but so it is—one sees a pair of lovers—oh! well, it's not easy to retain one's philosophy, not to obey the primitive instincts of any animal when it's ill-used and hurt, and to revenge oneself—to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! 5 What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—who? ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... told you, Aunt Emily," he said, taking up the check beside his plate, "but it was rather cleverly concealed rot, as far as I am concerned. Drivel; faddy drivel, but the girl's a lady, or whatever that word stands for. I half believe the child takes herself seriously—she has wonderful eyes. She should wear blinders—it isn't fair to leave them outside ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... was good to marry, and her own inclinations seconded the suggestion. She meant to marry when she should find the right man, but the difficulty of choice disturbed her. She had still much of the spirit which made her at twelve see nothing but nonsense in the "Turn, Gentle Hermit of the Dale" drivel, and she was quite prepared to decide with her mind. She never took her heart into consideration, or the possibility of being overcome by a feeling which ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... half afraid you've lived in your musty old books so long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of time. It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of the furniture, to look after the children. Nowadays the jolly, sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... if it be my vice, My pleasure to displease—to love men hate me! Ah, friend of mine, believe me, I march better 'Neath the cross-fire of glances inimical! How droll the stains one sees on fine-laced doublets, From gall of envy, or the poltroon's drivel! —The enervating friendship which enfolds you Is like an open-laced Italian collar, Floating around your neck in woman's fashion; One is at ease thus,—but less proud the carriage! The forehead, free from mainstay ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... is bad sentiment and worse rime, without any resemblance to poetry. The remaining stanzas are mere drivel, unworthy of the poet's talent ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... sort of scurrilous rondeau, consisting of nine lines, so loathsome in its brutal stupidity, and so vulgar in its expression, that we shall not pollute our pages by transcribing it, has been imputed to Shakspeare ever since the days of the credulous Rowe. The total point of this idiot's drivel consists in calling Sir Thomas "an asse;" and well it justifies the poet's own remark, "Let there be gall enough in thy ink, no matter though thou write with a goose pen." Our own belief is, that these lines were a ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... God, quod a? nay let a whoreson drivel Prate here all day, with a foul evil, And all thy sermon goeth on covetise, And biddest men beware of avarice; And yet in thy sermon dost thou none other thing, But for alms stand all ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... off; exenterate[obs3]. vomit, throw up, regurgitate, spew, puke, keck[obs3], retch, heave, upchuck, chuck up, barf; belch out; cast up, bring up, be sick, get sick, worship the porcelain god. disgorge; expectorate, clear the throat, hawk, spit, sputter, splutter, slobber, drivel, slaver, slabber[obs3]; eructate; drool. unpack, unlade, unload, unship, offload; break bulk; dump. be let out. spew forth, erupt, ooze &c. (emerge) 295. Adj. emitting, emitted, &c. v. Int. begone! get you gone! get away, go away, get along, go along, get along ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless did I drivel —Being—who? ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... our popish deceivers who, without the authority of God's Word, boast themselves heads of the Church and of the people of God, at the same time neither teaching nor understanding the Scriptures, but offering their own drivel as God's commands! ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... first time he had looked Truth in the eyes. Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of a sot. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... failed to dislodge from absolute power. The crowds upon the street snapped eagerly at that huge portrait and searched as eagerly through the paper for more about the Boss. They did not find it, except upon the editorial page, where, in the space usually devoted to drivel about "How Kind We Should Be to Dumb Animals," and "Why Fathers Should Confide More in Their Sons," appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: "Sam Stone Must Leave Town." Beneath was the additional information: "Further issues of the Bulletin will tell why." Above ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough—plays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance—such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... old legends that our forefathers came from a world beyond the sky, but I have always dismissed this as religious drivel, fit only ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... sanctimonious fools with their endless drivel about the Church of the Spirit of Mankind Incarnate. It's enough to make a man wish ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... a boy—mere drivel—but of such a kind that even his butts were fond of him. He would make M. Bonzig laugh in the middle of his severest penal sentences, and thus demoralize the whole school-room and set a shocking example, and be ordered a la porte of the salle d'etudes—an ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... my look out. It can't be worse than going about with you and listening while you crow and drivel about her, that's one comfort! [The Pale-haired Lady coughs in a ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers of Sand City—upon which town may God ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... desire and enjoyment, though old and haggard, and bent double with age and infirmities? To have our wish and our revenge—ay, and the bodies of our enemies wasting before our spells, like wax to the flame? But go, sneak and drivel, and mind thy meal and barley-cakes, and go ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... than three months." A pessimistic garrison gunner from Malta, who was playing patience, cheated savagely. "I tell you no European country could stand it." Undoubtedly the fatuous drivel of certain writers had influenced even the Army itself. "Peace will be declared before Christmas. An' I'll have sat on that cursed island, and whenever I see a ship I'd like to poop at, the searchlight will go out, an' I'll be bitten by sand flies." He glared morosely at Draycott; until, suddenly, ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... he sat there, talking on, most of it a pretty dull kind of drivel. Mrs. Brindley listened patiently, because she liked him and because she had nothing else to do until bedtime. At last he rose with a long sigh ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... often content to toy with verse that had exquisite melody and but little meaning. The "Airy, fairy Lilian" and "Sweet, pale Margaret" type of verse had charmed him overmuch. The volumes of 1830 and 1832 were severely criticized. Blackwood's Magazine called same of the lyrics "drivel," and Carlyle characterized the aesthetic verse as "lollipops." This adverse criticism and the shock from Hallam's death caused him to remain silent for nearly ten years. His son and biographer says that his father during this period "profited by friendly and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... horrors fill her breast, When she beholds men mark'd above the rest For qualities most dear, plunged from that height, And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night! Are men, indeed, such things? and are the best More subject to this evil than the rest, 640 To drivel out whole years of idiot breath, And sit the monuments of living death? Oh, galling circumstance to human pride! Abasing thought, but not to be denied! With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought. Constant attention ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... around these majestic ruins, amidst these fascinating scenes of Nature, Khalid spent the halcyon days of his boyhood. Here he trolled his favourite ditties beating the hoof behind his donkey. For he preferred to be a donkey-boy than to be called a donkey at school. The pedagogue with his drivel and discipline, he could not learn to love. The company of muleteers was much more to his liking. The open air was his school; and everything that riots and rejoices in the open air, he loved. Bulbuls and beetles and butterflies, oxen and donkeys and mules,—these were ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... so was drawn thro dark cadaverous with the sound of gabbling dead. Where we heard them hoot palaverous Drivel learned beneath unsavorous Moulds, and saw a glutton's head Grin to a hissing bat, That scraped him ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... overgrown baby, but was a tumbler, and mimicked the barking of a dog. The word Bavian is derived from bavon, a "bib for a slabbering child" (see Cotgrave, French Dictionary). In modern French bave means "drivel," "slabbering," and the verb baver "to slabber," but the bib is now ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... easy soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments—just to freshen the account—and a surety that he who debits is on the spot, to be a right royal king of credit. Only the account must never drivel. 'Stare aut crescere' appears to be his feeling on that point, and the departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and it was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of ...
— Options • O. Henry
... sharply interrupted the general. "Why do you drivel? You know I detest beds and blankets. Drop it! Here, take this," and he gave him a sheet of crested paper folded in four, which was lying beside him. "Read it, please. Aloud! so ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... between you and Eleanor. But what I would give my ears to understand is how you can go through a two hours' conversation with the girl you were engaged to—a conversation which must have affected the lives of both of you—and then come up to me and talk drivel about China ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... is," Lord Henry concluded, "that according to this view of poetry, which I believe is the right view, and the view unconsciously taken by the masses, more than three quarters of Victorian Verse is simply so much superior drivel." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... and crying. He didn't mind the one with the hair-brush; but the conduct of the other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the tomb of Adam—only to be fully appreciated in connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who "never bored, but he struck water"—is an admirable example of the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... your distinguished family done for us? What sort of nerves, what sort of blood, have we inherited? For nearly three years you've been arguing like an ignorant deacon, and talking all sorts of nonsense, and now you've written—this slavish drivel here! While I, while I! Look at me. . . . No elasticity, no boldness, no strength of will; I tremble over every step I take as though I should be flogged for it. I am timid before nonentities, idiots, brutes, who are immeasurably my inferiors mentally and morally; I am afraid of porters, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... startling to one who has never heard the lips of a hoary old sinner drivel out religion. To me they are not so startling as the words of Christian women and bishops of the Church of England, when they say that the doctrine of the everlasting happiness of the righteous stands or falls with the doctrine of the hopeless damnation of the wicked. Can it be that to such ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Sir," murmured the Doctor in return, "the remark shows you to be a novice indeed. Why, I have listened to hours of no better drivel than this, fathered, not upon Indians and unknown elocutionists, but upon some of the wisest and most saintly spirits whose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... preacher over at Old Ebenezer proves that it is all a joke." And this from another one: "'What do you think of young Parson Bostic?' was asked of Banker McElwin. 'I didn't think he was loaded,' the financier replied." It was said that a great batch of this drivel was cut out, credited and sent to McElwin, and Lyman accused Warren, but he denied it, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... voice, and lent a savage gleam to his eye. "Forgeries! Make believes! Miss Challoner never wrote the drivel you dare to designate as letters. It was concocted at Police Headquarters. They made me tell my story and then they found some one who could wield the poetic pen. I'm obliged to them for the confidence they show in my ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... impossible for you to conceive—it's almost impossible even for me to conceive—the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius. Four hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four hours a day is stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But you can't imagine that work like Adrian's is to be done in this dead ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke |
