"Puling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mrs. MacDougall answered, looking from one to the other, and putting her hand on Robbie's fair curls, almost as if she were doing him an injustice to say it. "Yes, I think every one would say Elsie was the bonnier baby. Robbie was but a puling, pasty-faced little thing, thin and miserable, not a crowing, bright little thing like the others. He wanted a deal o' care, did Robbie, an' I will say ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... just made the rounds of the tents outside, and he was marvelling. There were men who had fought bravely, who had stood wounds and the surgeon's knife without a murmur; who, weakened and demoralized by fever now, were weak and puling of spirit, and sly and thievish; who would steal the food of the very comrades for whom a little while before they had risked their lives—men who in a fortnight had fallen from a high plane of life to the ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... is black, In puling prose and rhyme, Talk hatefully of love, and tack Hypocrisy to crime; Who smile and smite, engross the gorge Or impotently frown; And call us "rebels" with King George, As ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... mine absence, even to the following of me in another ship, in a shipboy's disguise, and how I rescued her from a scheming Pagan villain; but, as a plain, blunt man, I am no hand at the weaving of puling love tales and such trifling diversions for lovesick mayds and their puny gallants—having only consideration for men and their deeds, which I have here set down bluntly and even at mine advanced years am ready to maintain with the ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... creaking and groaning, and the ship rolling and pitching and tumbling about in a way which made it seem wonderful that wood and iron could hold together. It wasn't exactly under such circumstances that the wife even of a boatswain's mate would have chosen to bring a puling infant into the world. The doctor thought that mother would have died, and, as there was no cow on board, that I should have shared her fate, but she got through it and nursed me, and I throve amazingly, so that in six months I was as big ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... would fain be puny and puling, to have the clear heart that once I had. Oh, hear me! hear ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fettered—I should have thought of it! Do not communicate with me for at least a year: it is imperative. Do not tell me your plans. If we part, we do part. I have vowed a vow not to further obstruct the course you had decided on before you knew me and my puling ways; and by Heaven's help I'll keep that vow. . . . Now go. These are the parting words of ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Deathe's couriers, Fame and Honor, call Us to the field againe. No shrewish teares shall fill our eye When the sword-hilt's in our hand; Heart-whole we'll part and no whit sighe For the fayrest of the land; Let piping swaine, and craven wight, Thus weepe and puling crye, Our business is like men to fight, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Garrison felt repulsion fingering his heart. Then the former trainer shot out a clawing, ravenous hand. "I want that money—want it quick!" he spat, taking a step forward. "You want hatred, eh? Well, hatred you'll have, boy. Hatred that I've always given you, you miserable, puling, ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... painter before us) enables one man to produce such sublime and agreeable impressions on his fellows. To step from the busy pave of New Bond-street and its busy whirl of fashion to this placid meer of reflection is a contrast almost too severe for some of the puling votaries of London gaiety: yet the scene teems with deep-souled poetry. Some such feelings as those so touchingly expressed in Lord Byron's Ode to Napoleon, on his first exile, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... not, he married in his youth a woman of the half-blood, and begot of her a troop of devils. Five sons he had, all great men, knowing not God and fearing none of God's works. And after them came a daughter, a puling slip of a thing, never meant to live, whom they did to death among them with their drinking and ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... victory, Nor are we so high-proof, but grief will find Through all our guards a way to wound the mind; But in thy fall what adds the brackish sum More than a blot unto thy martyrdom? Which scorns such wretched suffrages, and stands More by thy single worth than our whole bands. Yet could the puling tribute rescue ought In this sad loss, or wert thou to be brought Back here by tears, I would in any wise Pay down the sum, or quite consume my eyes. Thou fell'st our double ruin; and this rent Forc'd in thy ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... at the words. The Wangoni did not entirely believe the explanation; and to further their doubts there now arose from the inside of the huts the puling wail of infants which the mothers had not been entirely able ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the highest step, is not bestowed, like the rewards in a child's school, to the most deserving. I love you, Hugo Gottfried, it is true. But I wish a thousand times that I did not. Nevertheless—I do! Therefore make your reckoning with that, and put aside puling shams and whimpering subterfuges." ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer nights collected still ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... of plenty, and the hot walls of profusion, produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world, and natives of paradise!—Thou withered sibyl, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence!—The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care, and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, thy kinsman, or favourite, and adjure the god by the scenes of his infant years, no longer to repulse me as a stranger, or an alien, but to favour me with his ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... cards. So his head settled it: as for his heart,—his neighbors' houses were in ashes, burned by the Yankees; his son lay dead at Manassas. He died to keep them back, didn't he? "Geordy boy," he used to call him,—worth a dozen puling girls: since he died, the old man had never named his name. Scofield was a Rebel in every bitter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... your tributes, and your courts, and your body-guards! Bah! You'd have a gibbet if you could, wouldn't you? You with your rebellion and your tinpot honours! A puling baby could conspire as well as you. And all the world laughing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... retorted, eyeing him shrewdly, "if it is so easy to do why were you undone a minute ago? And puling like ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... of editorial eloquence:—"The work is essentially American. It is the type, the representative, THE AGGREGATE OUTBURST OF THE GREAT AMERICAN HEART, so well expressed, so admirably revealing the sentiment of our whole people—with the exception of some puling lovers he speaks of-—that it will find sympathy in the mind of every true son of the soil." The work thus heralded over the Republic with such perfect e pluribus unum concord is entitled English Items; and the embodiment of the "aggregate outburst of the great American heart" ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... CAMPBELL (walking). Some puling eediots, Sandeman, would applaud this contumacy and call it constancy. Constancy! Now, I've had a lairge experience o' life, and I never saw yet a sensible man insensible to the touch of yellow metal. If there may be such a man, it is demonstrable that he is no sensible man. Fideelity! ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... have laid at your feet my hand, my heart and my flourishing business, and thus—thus I am supplanted by that puling saint, George Jeffreys. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... author, in the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe, expressed a warm wish that he had never written it, and hearty disgust at its puling admirers and imitators. This has been set down to hypocritical insincerity or the sourness of age: I see neither in it. It ought perhaps to be said that he "cut" a good deal of the original version. The confession of Amelie was at first less abrupt and so less effective, but the newer ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... execution among driven grouse in a gale of wind with No. 8 shot, which you had brought out by mistake. You may object that you never, as a matter of fact, did this execution, never having even shot at all with No. 8. Tush! you are puling. If you are going to let a conscientious accuracy stand in your way like this, you had better become dumb when sporting talk is flying about. Of course you must not exaggerate too much. Only bumptious fools do that, and they are called liars for their ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... Man declared. "Bless me, if you're not a Native Son! Nobody but a Native Son would be that fresh. I suppose this is your second voyage, you puling baby?" ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... and one bitterly cold day in February at the end of a long row of prisoners, waiting their turn to appear before the magistrate, stood the woman wretched and ill, with a puling bit of ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... vigorous and laborious class of life has lately got, from the bon ton of the humanity of this day, the name of the "labouring poor." We have heard many plans for the relief of the "labouring poor." This puling jargon is not as innocent as it is foolish. In meddling with great affairs, weakness is never innoxious. Hitherto the name of poor (in the sense in which it is used to excite compassion) has not been used for those who can, but for those who ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... sacrament involved the shade of lingering disgust that had possessed him when he had taken the child to church disappeared and a feeling of natural affection took its place. However much the daughter had sinned, the infant was not to blame. It was a helpless, puling, tender thing, demanding his sympathy and his love. Gerhardt felt his heart go out to the little child, and yet he could not yield his position all in ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... shadow of an Emperour, Not really effecting what you are, A slothfull Epicure, a puling louer, That now en'e trembles at the name of warre, Obliuion all thy former acts do couer, Most willing to remoue you I will dye, The sunne of honour now is scarce a starre, Vertue at first was sire ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... a puling whimper. Sometimes his terror rose to the throat and his entreaties became shrieks. He died a dozen deaths while his foe watched him with a chill stillness more menacing than ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... against him. He fell at my feet and blubbered; he has kissed these very boots, literally, beseeching me 'not to frighten him.' Do you hear? 'Not to frighten him.' What a thing to say! Why, I offered him money. He's a puling chicken—sickly, epileptic, weak-minded—a child of eight could thrash him. He has no character worth talking about. It's not Smerdyakov, gentlemen. He doesn't care for money; he wouldn't take my presents. Besides, what motive had he for murdering the old man? Why, he's very likely his ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... possible scale, is that presented in Monna Vanna. It differs from that of Measure for Measure in the fact that there can be no doubt as to the moral aspect of the case. It is quite clear that Giovanna ought to sacrifice herself to save, not one puling Claudio, but a whole city full of men, women, and children. What she does is absolutely right; but the conjuncture is none the less a grotesque and detestable one, which ought to be talked about and thought ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... is your will, there is your way, and the only effectual way. We really must not call the Kaiser and Von Bernhardi disciples of the mythical Neech when they have either overlooked or shrunk from such a glaring "biological necessity." A pair of puling pious sentimentalists if you like. But Supermen! Nonsense. O, my brother journalists, if you revile the Prussians, call them sheep led by snobs, call them beggars on horseback, call them sausage eaters, depict them in the good old English fashion in spectacles and comforter, seedy ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Swedish and Polish, running into a six-figure issue, while my last novel, a sincere piece of literature, hung fire, so to speak, and never got beyond the publisher's preliminary forecast of a thousand copies. Was I not angry? Far from it. I was no puling undergraduate with a thin broad-margined book of verse to sell. The public was at perfect liberty to buy what it pleased. If they wanted my work, the work I loved and toiled to make as perfect as possible, they would get it, all in good time. For the present I was content to wait and do ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... old Liz suddenly ceased her gesticulations, lifted her black brows in unutterable surprise, opened her mouth, and became a listening statue? Did she too recognise tones which recalled other days—and the puling cries of infancy? It might have been so. Certain it is that when the shout was repeated she broke down in an effort to reply, and burst into mingled laughter and tears, at the same time waving her free ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... his mood, sat in silence with him, then rising suddenly he sat himself on the arm of his father's chair, threw his arm around his shoulder and said, "Dear old dad! Good old boy you are, too. Good stuff! What would I have been but for you? A puny, puling, wretched little crock, afraid of anything that could spit at me. Do you remember the old gander? I was near my eternal damnation ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... have found you, we part not till I know what I desire. The vision that sees through the Past, and cleaves through the veil of the Future, is in you at this hour; never before, never to come again. The vision of no puling fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule, but of a strong man, with a vigorous brain. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force, They swayed about upon a rocking horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue Bowed its eternal bosom, and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... behind him on the bank of the brook. Sam, for his part, turned upon Dick with a ferocious oath, and a fresh demand for the money. Of the whining, puling, weeping Raven they took no notice whatever. No notice! Ah, ha, Messrs. Long Legs and Fiery Nose, you are making ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... reverberation. We know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell by cell, the entire mask. The simple gestures of daily life have been recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a vitality that shames the anaemic imaginings and puling pessimisms of his younger contemporaries. What versatility, what undaunted desire to conquer new problems! He has in turn painted landscapes as full of distinction as Monet's. The nervous vivacity of his brush, his love of rendered surfaces, of melting Boucher-like heads, and of a dazzling ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... discovering in Whitman "the poet of Democracy." Others maintain that he is the greatest of American poets, or, indeed, of all modern poets; that he is "cosmic," or universal, and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's poetry is formally poetry at all or merely the raw material of poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression which it makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... head under the lamp, pulls the chain. Puling, the gasjet lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.) Only the chimney's broken. Here is ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... into a snarl. "Are ye men or puling babes? Hack yer way through them, if they be ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... they stood there side by side, so with a heavy heart he crept up to his own apartment, where, at least, without stint, he could indulge his thoughts. After the brilliance of the salon, the single light in his room seemed puling and weak, so he crossed over and extinguished it. In doing so, he found himself near the window, which, opening to the floor, door wise, looked along the roof of the stone porch. A cooling sweep of moonlight fell on Carter's face and urged him to peace of ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... Gray, meanwhile, live in Gray's Inn Lane aforesaid, with a maid-servant and a nurse, whose hands are very full, and in a most provoking and unnatural state of happiness. They have never once thought of crying about their dinner, like the wretchedly puling and Snobbish womankind of my favourite Snob Aubrey, of 'Ten Thousand a Year;' but, on the contrary, accept such humble victuals as fate awards them with a most perfect and thankful good grace—nay, actually ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of the shop, scarcely heeding the voice of Mr. Mossrose, who said, "I'll take forty per shent" (and went back to his duty cursing himself for a soft-hearted fool for giving up so much of his rights to a puling woman). Morgiana, I say, tottered out of the shop, and went up Conduit Street, weeping, weeping with all her eyes. She was quite faint, for she had taken nothing that morning but the glass of water which the pastry-cook in the Strand had given her, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... You whining, puling fool! Hussey, you have not a drop of my blood in you. What, you are in ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... gentleman; but, to say nothing of the composition of his incomparable letters and of 'The Castle of Otranto,' he is the 'Ultimus Romanorum,' the author of 'The Mysterious Mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play. He is the father of the first romance, and the last tragedy in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living writer, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... (Agostino laughed aside to him). "Let us lead off with a lighter piece; a trifle-tra-la-la! and then let the frisky piccolo be drowned in deep organ notes, as on some occasions in history the people overrun certain puling characters. But that, I confess, is an illustration altogether out of place, and I'll simply jot it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... (darting forward) You thought no doubt to spite me! That to this Royal Christening you did not invite me! BUT—(Mrs. Kean: "You must plaster that 'but' on the white wall at the back of the gallery.")— But on this puling brat revenged I'll be! My fiery dragon there shall have her broiled ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... we very much dislike—alter one word, and it would be voluptuous—nor do we hesitate to call the passage a puling one altogether, and such as ought to be expunged from ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... country has the poor to claim? What boots to me your corn and wine, Your busy toil, your vaunted fame, The senate where your speakers shine? Once, when your homes, by war o'erswept, Saw strangers battening on your land, Like any puling fool, I wept! The aged wretch ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Benjamin), of Cropley Castle, Cornwall. A little, peaking, puling creature, desperately hen-pecked by a second wife; but madam overshot the mark, and the knight was roused to ...
— 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.
... said firmly, as he seemed to shake himself together, "I see it now. It's all right, Miss Linton; and it's better to be a brick of a boy than a weak, puling noodle of a ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... his memories. Olivier's sorrow was growing less: but he did nothing to mitigate it, rather almost taking a pleasure in it: for a long time it had been his only reason for living. He loved his child: but his child—a puling baby—could occupy no great room in his life. There are men who are more lovers than fathers, and it is useless to cry out against them. Nature is not uniform, and it would be absurd to try to impose identical laws upon the hearts of all men. No man has the right to sacrifice his duty ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... to the exaggerated satire of your neighbours. That's a spirit I'm sorry to notice in ye, and I regret to see that ye're already looking sulky at rebuke. The vairse,' pursued Armstrong, 'is mainly sickly, whining, puling stuff, as far away from Nature and experience as it's easily possible to be. Now, I invite ye. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... very skillful. The very ardor in her face was in her favor. Behind her hot eyes lurked cold calculation. She would put the thing through, and show those puling nurses, with their pious eyes and evening prayers, a thing ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pampering and petting, than Jackanapes, and that, consequently, Jackanapes was to blame for leading Tony into scrapes which resulted in his being chilled, frightened, or (most frequently) sick. But when Miss Jessamine said that Tony Johnson was delicate, she meant that he was more puling, less manly, and less healthily brought up than Jackanapes, who, when they got into mischief together, was certainly not to blame because his friend could not get wet, sit a kicking donkey, ride in the giddy-go-round, bear the noise ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... can do without them; And what if you should never know them more!— He is a puny soul who, feeling pain, Finds ease because another feels it too. If e'er I open out this heart of mine It shall be for a nobler end—to teach And not to purchase puling sympathy. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... agoe I lay A puling Infant in my Nurse's arms: Not fourty daies agoe two Daughters gay Did blesse my Vision with ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Hume angrily. "Well, I didn't come to talk. There's going to be something besides a puling ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... everywhere illuminate the heavens with the torches of our triumphs. If the torches now and then come too near some piece of humanity and set it on fire, what is that to us? Germany is our enemy, and if we have a puling compassion on our enemy, we become traitors to our own cause. That's all. But what is the use of this strife and these recriminations?" asked he, suddenly breaking into a smile. "I have only come to ask your excellency when you intend to light these new wedding-torches ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... exclaimed Catiline, "this puling love-sick girl, this timorous, repentant—I had nearly called thee—maiden! Why, thou fool, what would'st thou with the man farther? Dost think to be ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... hopes be ended now," quoth Richard. "What think you she hath fixed on as the name of the poor puling babe yonder? They have called her Arbel ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to sigh, like a school-boy that had lost his A B C; to weep, like a young 20 wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears robbing; to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas. You were wont, when you laughed, to crow like a cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the lions; when you fasted, it was presently after 25 dinner; when you looked sadly, it was for want of money: ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Do you think you can put me off with defences and puling arguments of necessity, or policy, or the sacredness of property? No. You and I are here looking at naked truth. I will go down into your very soul and have it out by the roots, the naked truth. But I will have my answer. Are ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... Dent! I've won! I've solved the problem that gives man immortality! All the epochs that have existed since God first formed the world are mine to play with! I have seen myself as a puling infant, and as a greybeard. I have made myself immortal, because, with this machine, I can set back the clock of time. I have found a land where I am ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... great sea-change that takes place at the Stroke Of Midnight on the date of the person's 21st birthday; no magic wand is waved over his scalp to convert him in a moment of time from a puling infant to a mature adult. The growth of child to adult is as gradual as the increase of his stature, which varies from one ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... aldermanic banquets rise— And though the duns around you troop, Still float in seas of turtle soup. I here forsake the tuneful trade, Where none but lordlings now are paid, Or where some northern rogue sits puling, (The curse of universal schooling)— A ploughman to his country lost, An author to his printer's cost— A slave to every man who'll buy him, A knave to every man who'll try him— Yet let him take the pen, at once The laurel gathers ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... how now, I say? What, you puling, peevish thing, you untoward baggage, will you not be ruled by your father? Have I taken care to bring you up to this, and will you do as you list? Away, I say; hang, starve, beg; begone, pack, I say; out of my sight! Thou ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... she must care for me, or she would not have braved so much to save me from danger. I had difficulty in keeping from shouting aloud, so great was my joy. I felt that my strength had come back to me, and I cared no more for the threats of Cap'n Jack than for the anger of a puling child. I knew that Israel Barnicoat was somewhere lying in wait to do me harm, but I was not afraid. I saw this, too: Richard Tresidder would desire to have as little as possible said about my visit to Pennington, especially as he hoped that Naomi Penryn would be ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... her part, altogether deficient in activity. Exclusive of providing me with a sister, who from some accident or other was but a puling, wrangling, rickety young lady, she initiated me in the mysteries and pleasures of the alphabet. The rector had taken some trouble to make his daughters good English scholars; and my mother, though she had retained much of his solemn song, could not only read currently, and articulate clearly, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... knocked, she heard two or three windows thrown up in neighbouring houses, from which the bodies of unkempt women projected, to cast interested glances in Mavis's direction. As she waited, she could hear the faint puling of a baby within the house. Next, she was conscious that a lath of a Venetian blind was pulled aside and that someone was spying upon her from the aperture. She waited further, the while two of the curious women who ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... upper districts of Quang-tung are peculiarly wanting in facial attractiveness; in some of the villages on the Upper Pi-kiang the entire population, from puling infants to decrepit old stagers whose hoary cues are real pig-tails in respect to size, are hideously ugly. They seem to be simple, primitive people, bent on satisfying their curiosity; but in the pursuit of this they are, if anything, somewhat more considerate or more conservative ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... hurried toward the Mall. She looked her best, and she knew it. She wanted Dick to take away an impression vivid and favorable, something to look back upon and remember with pleasure. She was no puling, sentimental girl to hang about his neck, and crush roses into his hand. The tears were in her heart; the roses in her cheeks. Warm kisses from her ruddy lips would linger longer than the perfume of the sweetest flowers. She had wept a great deal—but in secret—and careful bathing ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... humour, and will meet your jest. She should be one about my Katherine's age; But not so old, by some ten years, in gravity. One that would meet my mirth, sometimes outrun it; No puling, pining moppet, as you said, Nor moping maid, that I must still be teaching The freedoms of a wife all her life after: But one, that, having worn the chain before, (And worn it lightly, as report gave out,) Enfranchised from it by her poor fool's death, Took it not so to heart ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... them, and Wyck turns out the villain you say, think for a moment what the result will be. I am no ordinary girl full of puling sentiment. I love or I hate, and if my love is trampled on, there is a dangerous woman to be faced who will thirst for revenge. So be careful," and her voice took ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... a puling, yelping whelp in her place.... A tall, severe-looking elderly woman entered the verandah by a distant door and approached the savage, miserable soldier. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... bring no puling prayer, Fedalma—ask No balm of pardon that may soothe my soul For others' bleeding wounds: I am not come To say, "Forgive me:" you must not forgive, For you must see me ever ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... say!" and Antoine brought his fist heavily down on the table. "Next thing you will be begging that we take her. Since the good Lord in His mercy has refrained from giving us any mouths to feed, we will not fly in His face for those who do not concern us. And the puling thing would die on the journey and have to be left behind to feed the wolves. Come! come! ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... a great deal of puling over the circumstances in which we are placed. The great refinement of many poetical gentlemen has rendered them practically unfit for the jostling and ugliness of life, and they record their unfitness at considerable length. The bold and awful poetry of Job's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of whom I must say something here, and more immediately. The poor, puling little babe, born in misery and disaster, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... into Swabia and Switzerland. In the latter country he met with the celebrated Father Gassner, who, like Valentine Greatraks, amused himself by casting out devils, and healing the sick by merely laying hands upon them. At his approach puling girls fell into convulsions, and the hypochondriac fancied themselves cured. His house was daily besieged by the lame, the blind, and the hysteric. Mesmer at once acknowledged the efficacy of his cures, and declared that they were ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... can. Watch me," he cried arrogantly. "Henry, I want the advantage of my strength in this world and I'm not going to go puling around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless a ride. Let 'em walk. Let 'em fall. Let 'em rot for all I care. I'm not afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place where ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of my heart, Anne?" she said. "Till late I did not know it beat, myself. My lord says 'tis a great one and noble, but I know 'tis his own that is so. Have I done honestly by him, Anne, as I told you I would? Have I been fair in my bargain—as fair as an honest man, and not a puling, slippery woman." ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the moisture of the Prophet did him credit at that painful period of his life, it must be allowed that his behaviour on being formally introduced into London Society showed no puling regret, no backward longings after echoing colleges, lost dons and the scouts that are no more. He was quite at his ease, and displayed none of the high-pitched contempt of Piccadilly that is often so amusingly characteristic of the young gentlemen ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... executed—and richly he had earned it by a thousand crimes and debaucheries—and old Colonel Rumbald; whose fate, I must allow, caused me a little sorrow (even though he had flung a sharp cleaver at my head), for he was very much more of a man than that puling treacherous hound my Lord Howard, who was taken hiding in his shirt, up his own chimney, and turned traitor to his friends. Holloway too—a merchant of Bristol, and a friend of Mr. Ferguson—was executed, and several in Edinburgh, of the Scottish plotters under Argyle, among whom the ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... with the recollection, "wherefore do I, like a vain and puling schoolboy, enter into this abasing contrast of personal advantages? The proud eagle soars not more above the craven kite, than did my soul, in all that was manly and generous, above that of yon false governor; and who should have prized those ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Lord Kew, shaking away his hand, "be a man, Jack, and have no more of this puling. It's not a baby, that must have its toy, and cries because it can't get it. Spare the poor girl this pain, for her own sake, and balk yourself of the pleasure of bullying and making ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... There are gossiping women, decked in their caps and many-colored finery. There are smartly-arrayed young girls, chatting merrily with the swains at their side. Unruly children scamper, barefooted and bareheaded, around and under the tables. Puling infants and barking dogs add their discord to the din and confusion. It is a scene one is ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... in peers to write at all. Yet did or taste or reason sway the times, Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes. Roscommon! Sheffield! with your spirits fled, No future laurels deck a noble head; No muse will cheer, with renovating smile The paralytic puling of Carlisle. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don't be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory. Why don't you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don't you read it, and learn out of the mouth of the founder of Christianity, that there is one sin for which there is no forgiveness—blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, hey?—and that sin I myself have heard you commit by the hour—in my presence—in ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... would come first. Course it wouldn't make a hit with a man to have a woman puling around all ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... vis-a-vis, and standing with one leg in the grave and the other on their own piazzas, are heard on sunny mornings exciting themselves with the maddest abuse of each other's doctor. There are large boarding-houses, fifty or more of them, each of which has its contingent of puling valetudinarians. The healthy inmates have the privilege of listening to the symptoms, set forth with that full and conscientious detail not unusual with invalids describing their own complaints. Or the sufferers turn their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... at noon, if wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ignoble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty, and cowardice its greatest crime—above all, that ultimate, puling cowardice of accepting life empty for its own ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... power—the Poor— Whom, in their greed and pride of wealth, they spurn— Will rise on them, and tear them from their seats; Drag all their vulgar splendours down, and pluck Their shallow women from their lawless beds, Yea, seize their puling and unhealthy babes, And fling them as foul pavement to the streets. In all the dreaming of the Universe There is no darker ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... offenders were only admonished. In Wareham, in 1772, William Estes acknowledged himself "Gilty of Racking Hay on the Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings; and in 1774 another Wareham citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," was fined five shillings. A Dunstable soldier, for "wetting a piece of an old hat to put in his shoe" to protect his foot—for doing this piece of heavy work on the Lord's Day, was ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... court thy sprightly eyes, With the base-viol plac'd between my thighs; I cannot lisp, nor to some fiddle sing, Nor run upon a high-stretch'd minikin; I cannot whine in puling elegies, Entombing Cupid with sad obsequies; I am not fashion'd for these amorous times, To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes; I cannot dally, caper, dance, and sing, Oiling my saint with supple sonneting; ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... course-featured woman, thin hair streaked with gray, flat- backed, flat-breasted, sat beside the rude bed, silent, motionless, awaiting an end that she had so often watched in the sullen ferocity that is of beast rather than of man. And on her lap lay a little, pink, puling thing that whimpered and twisted weakly—a little, naked, thing half ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... delight in Handel's Allegro and Penseroso. Do you know the fine pompous joyous chorus of 'These pleasures, Mirth, if thou canst give, etc.'? Handel certainly does in music what old Bacon desires in his Essay on Masques, 'Let the songs be loud and cheerful, not puling, etc.' One might think the Water music was ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... are bred by day, Our puling wives do open lay; None friends, none foes we must esteem But whom they so vouchsafe to deem: O 'tis of all our follies chief, Our woe to woo, to ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... the conclusion of the civil war the army had become paramount. He could sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle. As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:—"I had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. I say of the officers: I had that by their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... and would do nothing but walk to the end of the string by which he was attached to a tent peg, roll head over heels, and walk in a contrary direction, when a similar somersault would be performed; and he whined and wailed just like a child; one might have mistaken it for the puling of some villager's brat. Milford was going to give it pure cows' milk when Fordham advised him not to do so, but to mix it with one half the quantity of water. 'The great mistake people make,' he said, 'who try to rear wild animals, is to give them what they think is best for them, ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... Royal sons no longer counts. Czardom with all it meant has gone for ever. The man, whose word a few weeks ago meant glory or shame, life or death, is to-day an exile, a prisoner. His word no more than the cry of a puling child! And to-morrow? God may speak again, and then Kaiserism will fall with all ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... declining from us, Has warranted at full the friendly notice, Which we this morn receiv'd. I hold it certain, The puling, whining, harlot rules his reason, And prompts his ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... the train, and to see them as they tumbled in toward evening, at town after town, one would think that whiskey and tobacco were the main articles they bought. Any number of men and boys, and at least four women, were drunk enough, and they brought bottles with them and added to their puling idiocy as they went on. Nothing short of a pig-sty could match the filth, but it is only in that class of cars that you see anything of the vast number of poor farmers and laborers. If they can not pay exorbitant rates, refined, educated men and women are thrust into pens and seated face ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the British Legation things had seemed more impossible than ever. Orders and counter-orders came from every side; the place was choked with women, missionaries, puling children, and whole hosts of lamb-faced converts, whose presence in such close proximity was intolerable. Heaven only knew how the matter would end. The night before people had been only too glad ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... his living grandson, Mr. William Bradford Reed. Why, instead of deprecation, do not these journals give disproof? Is a fellow to be canonized as a saint, because he is no longer of the living? Then let all history be rewritten, and let the puling mawkishness which the hypocrites call manly indignation, reject from the page of history the infamy of a Nero, the cruelty of a Tiberius, and the treason of an Arnold. If it be proper for the entertainment or instruction of posterity, that the vices and crimes of the men of ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... says: "And when at last the poor thing is toiled and hammered into fit shape, it is in general racked and tortured prose rather than anything resembling poetry." Though Lord Byron wrote a few himself he defined the sonnet as "The most puling, petrifying, stupidly Platonic composition." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... hunted buck along the corridor. He whipped his arms around the lady and kissed her passionately, and then flung on his knees and held out his arms. She put the something in white into them and there was a little puling cry. ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... contriving to pass through the square. And he never passed through it without satisfaction. Here men had been at their intensest, most naked pitch, here, at the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. Since then, always rather puling ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... if true, that when a seaman died, and was reported to them, they exclaimed: "Poor fellow! bring me his bag, and mind everything belonging to him is put into it." This they considered their perquisite. Surely this is wrong and robbery! Ah, Mr. Hume! why were you a puling, helpless babe at that time? Had you been a man and known it, you would have called for reformation and been ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... it is the lamp without the flame. Let the respected reader look or think over some old love-letters that he (or she) has had and forgotten, and try them over again. How blank and meaningless they seem! What glamour of infatuation was it which made that nonsense beautiful? One wonders that such puling and trash could ever have made one happy. And yet there were dates when you kissed those silly letters with rapture—lived upon six absurd lines for a week, and until the reactionary period came, when you were restless and miserable until ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... suit the puling sentimentalism of the boudoir and the boarding-school. The Quixotism of the modern time will be angry with the rough writer who thus rudely lays his hand upon the helm of the mailed knight, and would deflower it of its glory and glossy plumes. It is hard to yield up prejudices and preconceptions, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... seeking for shepherd's purses and shepherd's needles, when she came running back to me, looking rather pale. I askt what had scared her, and she made answer that Gammer Gurney was coming along y'e hedge. I bade her set aside her fears; and anon we come up with Gammer, who was puling at y'e purple blossoms of y'e deadly night-shade. I sayd, "Gammer, to what purpose gather that ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various |
