"Flippant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... message to him from Ida, what could it mean save an overture toward a reconciliation? And if that, why had she not used the same methods of the post instead of this uncertain and even flippant means of communication? A note in an empty bottle, cast into the sea! There was something light and frivolous about it, if not ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... is the evil thereof," was Mrs. Ogilvie's flippant remark. "But that attitude is much encouraged by you. You ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... be that certain writers think they best oppose the advancing spirit of the time—questioning as it does the "divinity" that hedges the throne—by adopting the worse than foolish adulation of a by-gone age. In a silly flippant book just published—a thing called Cecil—the author speaks of the first appearance of VICTORIA in the House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... disappointed or flippant persons, a seat in the House of Commons still remains one of the highest prizes of citizen life. When membership becomes a business, bringing in say L6 a week, the charm will be gone. As things stand, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... gentleness of the man's tone, the simple dignity of his words, went straight to Chloe Elliston's heart. She felt suddenly ashamed of her air of flippant defiance, felt mean, and small, and self-conscious. She forgot for the moment that this big, quiet man who stood before her was rough, even boorish in his manner, and that he was the oppressor ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... harshness.[354] Bowring was not a judicious reporter, indeed, and capable of taking hasty phrases too seriously. What Bentham's remarks upon these and other friends suggest is not malice or resentment, but the flippant utterance of a man whose feelings are wanting in depth rather than kindliness. It is noticeable that, after his early visit at Bowood, no woman seems to have counted for anything in Bentham's life. He was not only never in love, but it looks as ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... than wear weeds which attract attention on account of their flaunting bad taste and flippancy. One may not, one must not, one can not wear the very last cry of exaggerated fashion in crepe, nor may one be boisterous or flippant or sloppy in manner, without giving the impression to all beholders that one's spirit is posturing, tripping, or dancing on the grave ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... perceived that Harry was paying little or no attention to the game—although it was poker—his attention being almost entirely fixed on Nellie, who was flirting outrageously with her admirers. Every time her flippant laugh reached him a pained look crossed his sensitive face, but she pretended to be as unconscious of it as she appeared to be ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... fastened his eyes on Ashe's in a piercing stare. Ashe met them smilingly. His spirits, always fairly cheerful, had risen high by now. There was something about the little man, in spite of his brusqueness and ill temper, which made him feel flippant. ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... infidelity it is not the truth that leads him there. I imagine it is half truth that leads him astray; and a half truth is often really a falsehood. So if a man takes up the idea of Restoration in a careless or flippant spirit, thinking chiefly of it as a happy escape from punishment, it is a half truth; to him it is really a falsehood. But let him consider also the facts by which the idea of Restoration is sustained; let him be imbued thoroughly with these; and I think there ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... impressed,' she says, but, 'being bound to speak the truth, she does not think it possible that any trick could have been used.' To hear her say so was like hearing Mr. Chorley say so; all her prejudices were against it strongly. Mr. Spicer's book on the subject is flippant and a little vulgar, but the honesty and accuracy of it have been attested to me by Americans oftener than once. By the way, he speaks in it of your interesting 'Recollections,' and quotes you upon the possibility ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... not that the historical facts are alluded to in English, unless by Dr. Moore in his View of Italy[368]. His account is false and flippant, full of stale jests about old men and young wives, and wondering at so great an effect from so slight a cause. How so acute and severe an observer of mankind as the author of Zeluco could wonder at this is inconceivable. He knew that a basin ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... seas, of the Paris streets—of what, in fine, you pleased. Or he would spin you yarns, sober, farcical, veridical, or invented. And, with transitions infinitely rapid, he would be serious, jocose—solemn, ribald—earnest, flippant—logical, whimsical, turn and turn about. And in every sentence, in its form or in its substance, he would wrap a surprise for you—it was the unexpected word, the unexpected assertion, sentiment, conclusion, that constantly arrived. Meanwhile it would enhance ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... and simplicity of this statement is not at all affected by Joseph's flippant suggestion that by this Napoleon probably meant that he would read his enemies to sleep with his Homer, and then use his sword to cut their heads off. Joseph, as we have already seen, had been completely subjugated ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... late— With itch of rhyme am visited by fate, Expend on air my unavailing force, And, hunting sounds, am sweated like a horse. In vain I often muse from dawn till night: When I mean black, my stubborn verse says white; If I should paint a coxcomb's flippant mien, I scarcely can forbear to name the Dean; If asked to tell the strains that purest flow, My heart says Virgil, but my pen Quinault; In short, whatever I attempt to say, Mischance conducts me quite ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... himself an adept in all the arts; as a squire of dames he held himself peerless, and he assured the ineffable Combe, who recorded his flippant utterance with a credulous respect, that he had sacrificed hecatombs of innocent virgins to his importunate lust. Prose and verse trickled with equal facility from his pen, and his biography is a masterpiece. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... women—one, a thin little crooked creature, with sharp contracted features, which put him in mind of the head of a skinned rabbit—another with an immense flat unmeaning face; and the third, though better-looking than her two companions, was a silly little flippant miss in her teens, rejoicing in a crop of luxuriant curls which swept over her shoulders as she returned Frank's polite bow—when the squire introduced him to the assembled company—as much as to say, "I'm not for you, sir, at any price; so, pray don't for a moment ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... It may be as well to explain here that the straddle-leg patent, as it was called, often caused sailors to be both killed and drowned. They used to give advice in a flippant way to each other that if they were forced to let go their hands to be sure to hold on by the skin of their teeth or their feet. This little joke was rarely successful in saving them from being smashed to pieces ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... listened. She heard his voice below quite plainly. They had two suits of rooms in the house—the bedrooms up stairs and reception-rooms below. Here Lord Hawbury was, now, within hearing of Ethel. Well she knew that voice. She listened and frowned. The tone was too flippant. He talked like a man without a care—like a butterfly of society—and that was a class which she scorned. Here he was, keeping her waiting. Here he was, keeping up a hateful clatter of small-talk, while her heart was ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... agitation were making her flippant, and Robert was nearer than she deemed. He was assisting her to her seat, and then held out his hand, but never raised his eyes. 'Goodbye, Robin,' she said; 'Reason herself shall meet you at the Holt ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in mind how much had been said, as well as how little was known about Mr. Choate; what wonderfully loose and idle notions of him had got abroad; how the most essential and notable points of his character and genius had been so clumsily handled by flippant or careless critics, that the popular impression of him was, to a great degree, extravagant and absurd. Remembering all this, and properly respecting the subject in which he appears to have interested himself so ardently, Mr. Parker should have applied to his task a somewhat gentle hand; gratifying, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... this versatile Lorenzo dei Medici, this flippant, egotistic artist and despot, has at last been broken the long spell of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance has sung no longer of knights and of spring, but of peasants and of autumn. An immoral and humanistic time, an immoral and humanistic man, have had at ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... like that, anyhow," said Mr Evans, who, for a responsible head clerk of a big business, was the most flippant person I had ever met; "look at his hair—all out of curl! Come here, little girl, and be ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... gentleman drew himself up with dignity, made a gesture of impatience, and remarked that if I intended to be flippant he would leave me. Of course I would not hear of this, now that my curiosity had been aroused, ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... introduction to the book St. John Adcock calls the private letters of the soldiers "the most potent of recruiting literature." Undoubtedly this is true of some of them. The casual, almost flippant, records of splendid heroism, the reflection of a spirit of gay courage, the description of the most picturesque and romantic aspects of battle—these tend, certainly, to fill the mind of the stay-at-home readers with a desire for participation in ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... was full to the brim of a flippant, girlish humor that appealed to him monstrously. He felt that it was a man's place to think seriously, if serious thought were needed. And he intended when he married to do the thinking. His wife must be wholly delightful and feminine, in fact, just as Helen was. Pretty, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... even on the most grave occasions. Sometimes he sinned against good taste, and I once heard his sister Catherine say that "Henry rarely delivered a speech or a sermon which did not contain something that grated on her ear." His most frequent offenses were in the direction of flippant handling of sacred themes and Scripture language. This he inherited from his ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... no reply to their flippant remarks, for just then I felt very solemn and thoughtful. I hope I was not priggish. No, I am sure I was not; every word I uttered was too sincere, though they chaffed me afterwards, and I have thought since that they felt ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... chilliness and the fairly menacing air that everything in the place wears. Let people have confidence in the truth and in work, that is good; but that a religion founded on mysteries, on obscurities, should build a bright, challenging, flippant temple, is ridiculous." ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... might have been a very successful novel. It was entirely devoid of incident or interest, and, consequently, was a good deal like real life, as real life appears to many cultivated authors. On the other hand, all the characters were flippant. This would never have done, and I do not regret novel No. I., which had not even ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... bombastic. He will grow awfully dry. He is sure to fall into the unpardonable sin of tiresomeness. The rule has exceptions; but the earliest productions of a man of real genius are almost always crude, flippant, and affectedly smart, or else turgid and extravagant in a high degree. Witness Mr. Disraeli; witness Sir E.B. Lytton; witness even Macaulay. The man who as mere boy writes something very sound and sensible will probably never become ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... second line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse than Dickens's mention of the lady who went home "in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indulgence in this habit is never a mere concession to the reader's flippant taste. His epigrams often strike deeply home, as in this ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... in Teddy Tucker's movements. He strolled out into the concourse, gazing up at the crowded seats, winking and making wry faces at the people, as he moved slowly along, causing them to laugh and shout flippant remarks at him. ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... this revival of his brother's flippant Gallic formula. He contented himself with giving a brief and stern account of the processes that he had been driven to employ. He had prosecuted his inquiries through one of those extra-legal agencies which ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... about which Order he proposed to join; and Mark ashamed to go back on what he had said lest they should think him flippant answered that he thought of joining the Order ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... are, no doubt, trivial, as I have said above, and may be regarded by many even as flippant; but the fact is that a successful study of the Chinese people cannot possibly be confined to their classics and higher literature, and to the problem of their origin and subsequent development where we now find them. It must embrace the lesser, not to say meaner, details of their ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... gentleman and the son of a gentleman. A little over-dressed perhaps; as, also, a little lofty to the two rather battered but otherwise decent enough men who, being so much older than he, took the liberty of first accosting him. "Brisk" is his biographer's description of him. Feather-headed, flippant, and almost impudent, you might have been tempted to say of him had you joined the little party at that moment. But those two tumbled, broken-winded, and, indeed, broken-hearted old men had been, as an ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... this flippant tone of address. He was, as has been recorded by SHAHSTEAD (a gentleman of whose patronage he is proud) not a man you may take liberties with. For SCHEHERAZADE, taking mean advantage of a French agglomeration of letters which did not represent ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... principle, that he would do what had to be done,—if nobody else appeared to do it,—and that he could do it, too,—he soon found himself with work enough on his hands. English's flippant attack on the New Testament Scriptures appeared while Mr. Everett was minister of Brattle-Street Church. Because it appeared, he considered it his place to defend the New Testament against that specific attack; and he did it. The "Defence of Christianity," which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... scholarship. He himself has told us of his love of port and bananas, his joy in early morning celebrations in the chapel of Pusey House, his tea-parties, his delight in debates at the Union, of which he became President, and of his many friendships with undergraduates of a witty and flippant turn of mind. Like many effeminate natures, he was glad of opportunities to prove himself a good fellow. In spite of no heel-taps when the port went round, he won the Hertford in 1907, the Ireland and Craven in 1908, and in 1910 took ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... years old, a student by fits, and a young man given to be moody. He had powers of gaiety far eclipsing Algernon's, but he was not the same easy tripping sinner and flippant soul. He was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and reflection alternately usurp the mind; remorse succeeded dissipation, and indulgences offered the soporific to remorse. The friends of the two imagined that Algernon was, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... society. My husband says she's level-headed. Sound as a rivet, he also says. Nothing silly or flip about her, he adds when he is particularly enthusiastic, and he knows I hate the word 'flip.' Of course he means flippant. He is ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... observed a number of details of dress and manner which showed that he was not versed in the usages of fashionable life despite his early experiences. These lapses, or rather differences, did not affect me disagreeably,—indeed, I was well content that he should be as unlike as possible the flippant youths of so-called society,—but they were much more noticeable than when he was in the midst of such artistic surroundings as he found at ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... seriousness of his position, or the meaning that such an uplifting of his financial status conveyed to a man. She did not even know what he was about to propose. It would steady her considerably when she heard that; she would be less flippant then. Out of the corners of his eyes, he watched her face—the little, round, childish face almost perfect in outline—the gentle force, petulance almost, in the shapely chin, and the lips—tantalizing—they looked so innocent. In another few moments he would ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... an honor, my lord, that does not often befall men of my humble condition," said the master of the house, in the flippant utterance of a vulgar cockney; "but I thought it would be more agreeable to your lordship, to receive the a—a—here, than in the place where your lordship, just at this moment, resides. Will your lordship please to rest yourself, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... The next is, that adroit and practical style of speaking by which the details of public business are carried forward; a style which requires briskness of capacity, united to extent of information, and in which the briskness must not be suffered to become flippant, and the detail to become dull. We are perfectly confident, that, beyond those two classes, no speaker can ever expect to retain the ear of the House. Our theory, however, is not the favourite one with that crowd, whose diatribes nightly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation—Mrs. Crowe, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... who proses about a Club for Milliners. There is GRIGSBY, who develops an undesirable interest in the Milliners' Club. Have they a Strangers' Room? Do they give suppers? Are they Friendly Girls? Everyone thinks GRIGSBY flippant and coarse; I wish I had not asked him to come. There is a Positivist, who sneers at the Clergyman; there are a Squire and his wife from Rutlandshire: she is next the Radical Candidate for the Isle of Dogs. They do not seem ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... or Collings, I ain't sure which," said the hardy-looking, bronzed seaman, to the gaily-dressed, flippant-mannered, be-whiskered man of vast importance, presiding over the affairs of one of our ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... with great truths, but contents himself in ridiculing those who have proclaimed them; and, in his cold cynicism, depreciates human knowledge, and all the great moral teachers of mankind. He is even shallow and flippant upon Socrates. But he was well read in human nature, and superficially acquainted with all the learning of antiquity. In wit and sarcasm, he may be compared with Voltaire, and his end was the same, to demolish and pull down, without substituting any thing in its stead. His skepticism ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... whimpering, had far more grit than I anticipated; he was inquisitive and flippant-faced, and looked at the noose flaunting before him, and the people gathered below, and the haggard face of Atzerott, as if entirely conscious and incapable ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... ribbons. Silly, silly child!" he went on, shaking his forefinger at her. "I tell you women have done their greatest work in the world when their brains have been covered with a pretty hat. . . . There she goes, he growled," as she left the room. "Thinks I'm a flippant old windbag, I know. And I'm not. Why don't you fall in love with her, Maraton? It would be the making of you. Even a prophet needs relaxation. She is yours, body and soul. One can tell it with every sentence she speaks. ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... help believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her. If Claire had been different—no, don't interrupt me— this would never have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but that ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... back here," says Cousin Lucy, without heeding these flippant and heartless words, "I found an old gentleman who has something to do with the boats, and he sat down, as if it were a part of his business, and told me nearly the whole history of his life. Isn't it nice of them, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Taylor. He was deferential, complimentary, and genial, and he made a suave, impressive offer of his personal services, in response to which Mrs. Taylor regarded him with smiling incredulity—a smile which Selma considered impertinent. How dared she treat his courtly advances with flippant distrust! ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... took stock of his surroundings. The two or three buildings Mr. Hicks had erected stood midway of the clearing and were very modest improvements adapted to their owner's somewhat flippant pursuit of agriculture. While Carrington was still staring about him, the cabin door swung open and a woman stepped forth. It was the girl Bess. She went to a corner of the building ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... an amusing child," she returned carelessly, "but she makes a very common mistake. She thinks a pretty face and a flippant tongue and a childish manner are perfectly irresistible, but in her study of mankind she is certainly an ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the mind with exalted contemplations, and the imagination with inspiring and ennobling apparitions. Surroundings that contribute a quality of awfulness embrace in such scenes the soul of the traveller, and hold him in their tremendous thrall. Mean or flippant ideas may not enter here; but the man puts off the smaller part of him, as the Asiatic puts off his sandals on entering the porches of his god. Of such is the Eternal Sphinx, as Eothen Kinglake beheld her. We cannot feel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no permanence in such work, unless—which is seldom the case—it is totally ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... acquainted with at least one young man who fulfilled that duty with a completeness and a perfection never since attained. Now, however, they will declare, the case is different. Young men have become selfish and arrogant. Their respect for age has vanished, their behaviour to ladies is familiar and flippant, their style of conversation is slangy and disreputable, they are wanting in all proper reverence, they are pampered, luxurious, affected, foolish, and disingenuous; unworthy, in short, to be mentioned in the same breath with those who have preceded them, and have left to their ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... expect to act together in a continental theatre, did we?" I was deliberately flippant. "But I'm glad to be in this great play with you, even in one scene, and such ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... trusted her one moment.... No! all the pride, the spite, the suspicion, the prejudice of years, rolled back upon me. "An aristocrat! and she, too, the one who has kept me from Lillian!" And in my bitterness, not daring to speak the real thought within me, I answered with a flippant sneer— ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... to the race problem is a statement heard so often in America that it has become almost proverbial; that the solution is simple if our citizens would approach the problem fairly is an observation made less often; but that there is no problem would seem to be either the flippant remark of one who dabbles in sociology or the profound ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... She was about sixty feet long, and having been built at Shanghai, rejoiced in a Chinese name—the Yuen Hung. But as something was the matter with her engines, which coughed and wheezed most disgracefully, the flippant Americans had rechristened her the One Lung, much to the ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... remaineth to me? A heart weary and flippant; an unstable will; fluttering wings; ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... "It is flippant for thee to talk of heaven this way. We do not go dancing into it. We must fashion our lives on more godly things," said ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... ears that were practically deaf to spiritual truth, and found no place in hearts already stuffed with great stores of evil. To the profound wisdom and saving instruction of the word of God to which they had listened, they responded with a flippant request: "Master, we would see a sign from thee." Had they not already seen signs in profusion? Had not the blind and the deaf, the dumb and the infirm, the palsied and the dropsical, and people afflicted with all manner of diseases, been healed in their houses, on their streets, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... as any other ordinary, common, everyday man! Why should not my blood boil when I think of it? Then, too, when I recall how often my addresses are ignored in the local press, ought not I to be aroused to fierce ire? When a hotel clerk fails to recognize my national importance and gives me a flippant answer when I ask for information should I not deem it time that the Secretary of State interfere and write a ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... with the fiery fervour of a righteous indignation. Burns used the weapon he could handle best; and a powerful weapon it is in the hands of a master. We acknowledge Horace's satires to be scathing enough, though they are light and delicate, almost trifling and flippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as effective. 'Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?' Burns might have well replied to his censors with the same question. Quick on the heels of this poem came ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... "Don't be flippant, Turkey. Listen to me. I've told you very often that no boys in the school have a greater influence for good or evil than you have. You know I don't talk about ethics and moral codes, because I don't believe that the young of the human animal realizes what they mean for ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... with the half dozen young men round her, who are all laughing at some joke. Presently she herself is laughing louder than any of them (being partial to boys and their "fun," as she calls it). Bestowing now a smart blow with her fan upon the youngest and probably therefore most flippant of her attendants, she stalks away from them across the lawn, to where two ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... He wasn't flippant any more, and I had a sense of triumph in forcing his return to sobriety. I wanted to ask him what his name was, once we were back to earth again. But as that seemed a little too direct, I merely inquired where his home ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... sententious that Serviss instantly became flippant, as an offset. "Yes, one by one we round 'em up! But don't think me unfriendly to the 'beasts.' They have their uses. I'd no sooner kill a bacterium than a song-bird. I think we care too highly for the cancerous and the consumptive. I'm not at all sure that humanity oughtn't to ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Christian Majesty, for the space of a year. That the prisoners taken in the skirmish of Jumonville should be restored, and until their delivery Captain Van Braam and Captain Stobo should remain with the French as hostages. [Footnote: Horace Walpole, in a flippant notice of this capitulation, says: "The French have tied up the hands of an excellent fanfaron, a Major Washington, whom they took and engaged not to serve for one year." (Correspondence, vol. iii., p. 73.) Walpole, at this early date, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... swimmingly; besides, we could not have got away from each other if we would; and ere long I found Mrs. Lumley—for that was the lady's name—a most amusing and satirical personage, with a variety of anecdotes about all her friends and acquaintances, and a sort of flippant charm of ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... reminded Ivy that her admission to the side show—the bright silver dime—was given her by Lafe, and that before he had any hope of himself seeing the circus. So she began to feel sorry for her flippant attitude and said in a ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... new kind of conversation to Virginia. Of all the young men she knew, not one had ever ventured into anything of the sort. They were either flippant, or sentimental, or both. She was at once flattered and annoyed, flattered, because, as a woman, Stephen had conceded her a mind. Many of the young men she knew had minds, but deemed that these were wasted on women, whose ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... my inner consciousness," I answered with flippant familiarity. "Didn't you know that I have what they ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... was the paid secretary of one of the women's unions; but she had been a tailoress for years, and had known a tragic life. Once, at a meeting where some flippant speaker had compared the reality and frequency of "starvation" in London to the reality and frequency of the sea serpent, Tressady had seen her get up and, with a sudden passion, describe the death of her own daughter from hardship and want, with the tears ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... His flippant tone made Langholm writhe, and drove him into the conversation to change its tenor. He asked by whom the evil had come. "Surely ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... heard. His excuse for not personally communicating the story which he had allowed to drift to the governor's ears by chance, was that he thought that what he had heard must have come to King's knowledge also: a supine and almost flippant explanation of neglect in a matter which was serious if the allegations were true. He affirmed also that one of the French officers had pointed out to him on a chart the very place where they intended to ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... the worker, I leave untouched, with regret. But I must forewarn my readers by mentioning some of the refuted criticisms which have been applied to the cartoons. Reading the criticisms and their answers ought to render us modest and wary in 'picking holes' in great pictures, as forward and flippant critics, old and young, are tempted to pick them. With regard to the 'Miraculous Draught of Fishes,' a great outcry was once set up that Raphael had made the boat too little to hold the figures he has placed in it. But Raphael made the boat little advisedly; if he had not done so, the picture would ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... responsibility were words she had been taught to revere, and to hear them light-heartedly disavowed seemed an upturning of the foundation of things. You will perceive that her education had not included that valuable art, the appreciation of the flippant. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... the Reverend Matthew and Mrs. Cotton were the incumbents of the parish church of Cluhir (and had been profanely described as "the incumbrance of Cluhir"); even to speak of them as, respectively, its curate and its rector, might, though more accurate, be, perhaps, considered flippant. It would also be open to the reproach of lack of originality. Yet, unoriginal though the dominant clergywoman of fiction may be, it cannot be denied that St. Paul's injunctions in connection with the subjection of wives did not commend themselves ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Liberty, and climbing carefully down on to the lady's parting, was seen by Sarah Brown to bend down till her head hung apoplectically upside down, and gaze long and curiously into that impassive bronze eye. Presently she remounted Harold, and, with a flippant and ambiguous gesture of her foot, launched herself eastward. She disappeared ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... habit of regarding God as the author of all the great movements of the universe, but as having nothing to do directly with the minor movements. Mr. Emerson becomes equally flippant and irreverent when he speaks of a "pistareen Providence." We kindly take the Creator and upholder of all things under our patronage, and say, "it is very well for him to swing a star into space, and set bounds to the sea, and order the goings of great systems, and even to minister to the lives ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... did not nod—an act—which she considered as too flippant for the solemnity of devotion—but she gently bowed her head, and closed her eyes in assent—upon which was heard a somewhat cheerful groan, replete with true unction, inside the parlor, followed by a voice that said, "ah, Susannah!" pronounced in a tone of grave but placid remonstrance; Susannah ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... was too angry to be flippant. "The fact is you care for nothing but yourself and your horrid old business. I always told you ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... expressions of preference. I told the story as I would have told it of a dear sister whose maidenly pride was precious to me; told how she had gone, at his request, to speak with him in the conservatory, and how, there, she had heard, herself unseen, those flippant, unmanly words, so unlike him, yet from the lips of ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... they were soon touched by the old-fashioned grace with which he greeted them. The words he used were full of that amenity which amiable old men convey as much by the ideas they suggest as by the manner in which they express them. The younger notary, with his flippant tone, seemed on a lower plane. Mathias showed his superior knowledge of life by the reserved manner with which he accosted Paul. Without compromising his white hairs, he showed that he respected the young man's nobility, while at the same time he claimed the ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... pernicious prejudices, have made a part of our great inheritance from England, have been originally obtained. Certainly I have seen no thing, nor any person, after a long residence in the country, to serve as models to the flippant marquis, the overdressed courtiers, or the petites maitresses of the English dramatists. Even a French perruquier is quite as homely and plain a personage as an English or an American barber. But these Athenians grossly ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... made a speech this evening about the modern generation being flippant and superficial. He says that we are losing the old ideals of earnest endeavour and true scholarship; and particularly is this falling-off noticeable in our disrespectful attitude towards organized authority. We no longer pay a ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... convincing, persuasive, zealous, enthusiastic, and inspiring. Avoid that which is timid, familiar, violent, cold, indifferent, unreal, artificial, dull, sing-song, hesitating, feeble, unconvincing, apathetic, monotonous, pompous, formal, arbitrary, flippant, ostentatious, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... serious circumstances when exasperation at the flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... may be assured that the remark of the writer in question is only one of those pitiful "cracks" which flippant authors utter in plain ignorance of Cymru, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... a London omnibus a notice warning passengers to be careful as they alight, which is couched in these terms: "Cinema actors risk their lives for pay! Don't do it for nothing!" a New York journalist remarks that "an American advertisement on that subject would be serious; the British are more flippant in ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... the Palace—cared for, kept Even as they were when our arch-monarch died— The books, the chair, the inkhorn, and the pen He quizzed with flippant curiosity; And entering where our hero's bones are urned He seized the sword and standards treasured there, And with a mixed effrontery and regard Declared they should be all dispatched to Paris As gifts to ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... at Clifford's absolutely frank confidence. There was nothing flippant about it either. It was the simple expression of a nature that had nothing to conceal. There was not even a hint of gossip about it, nor of ill nature. In a land where there were no newspapers, telegraphs, telephones, railroads, or neighbours, it seemed ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... enlarge that we may grow. That's false. It isn't of the nature of growth. Why not do it the way of Silas Morton and Walt Whitman—each man being his purest and intensest self. I was full of this fervour when you came in. I'm more and more disappointed in our students. They're empty—flippant. No sensitive moment opens them to beauty. No exaltation makes them—what they hadn't known they were. I concluded some of the fault must be mine. The only students I reach are the Hindus. Perhaps Madeline Morton—I don't quite make her out. I too must have gone into a ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... makes her images dance before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... a flippant speech, as Lettice acknowledged to herself; but, then, Mr. Walcott's speech had been flippant to begin with, and she wanted to give as good ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... first of all, have told her that any excuse she had before for calling him by his Christian name was now at an end. But there was no opening for speech such as that. "Well," she continued, "have you got nothing to say to me? You can write flippant letters to other people, and turn me into ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope |
