"Namby-pamby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and English know these ginks better than we do, and they've put the boots into them from the start," growled Tom. "There's been no namby-pamby dealing with the Huns in the bridge- heads where they've held control. They've made the Boches walk Spanish. If they didn't uncover when the flag went by, they knocked their hats off for them. They know that the only argument that ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... smiled and strove to please. No one really knew much about her. Captain Forrest, her brother, was one of the popular men of his regiment, who years before had become enamoured of and would marry the namby-pamby though pretty daughter of the old post chaplain. She happened to be the only young lady in the big garrison of McPherson, one of those long winters just after the War of the Rebellion, and Forrest was susceptible. Her prettiness ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... and good, red blood—red, like our roses!" She plucked from her breast a handful of scarlet petals, casting them above her head. They fell about them both, a glowing shower. She went on: "How for a moment you could have imagined that you love the woman you call wife—a soft, silly, namby-pamby—" ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... concealed the bald dome that dominated his slight figure. Here we have a clockwork picture, begun and finished by a button and a box of chemicals, from which every projecting feature has been more delicately and dexterously omitted than they could have been by the most namby-pamby flatterer, painting in the weakest ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... namby-pamby stuff," he had once been quoted as saying; "if you got enemies, don't tease 'em—show 'em who's running things. Blackjack 'em, if you ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... form. Their full cup and the accents which experience had graven under them were something he had never dreamed of realizing. It was a Cosway; but a Cosway broadened and without a hint of genteel namby-pamby or overelaborate finesse. Hubert was fairly satisfied. Madame Mineur had little to say. During the sittings she seldom spoke, and if their eyes met, the richness of her glance was a compensation for her lack of loquacity. Hubert did not complain. He was in no hurry. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Murphy with an indignant repetition of the provoking question put to him, threw as much of defiance as he could in his namby-pamby manner, and exclaimed, "I ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... for the most part, unprinted literature,— cherished in remote villages, resisting everywhere the invasion of modern namby-pamby verse and jaunty melody, and possessing, in an historical point of view, especial value as a faithful record of the feeling, usages, and modes of life of the rural population,— had been almost wholly passed over amongst the antiquarian revivals which ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... at Holmes. With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether there might not, after all, be a Something,—some deep of calm, of eternal order, where he and Holmes, these coarse chances, these wrestling souls, these creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian, even that namby-pamby Kitts and his picture, might be unconsciously working out their part. Looking out of the hospital-window, he saw the deep of the stainless blue, impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their silence of the maddest raging of the petty world. There was such calm! such ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... had wandered over the face of the earth with her father and Valentine Hawkehurst. The few elder girls remaining at the Lodge thought Miss Paget unsociable because she preferred a lonely corner in the gardens and some battered old book of namby-pamby stories to the delights of their society, and criticised her very severely as they walked listlessly to and fro upon the lawn with big garden-hats, and arms entwined about each ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... been better matched than my parents, and they had a sincere respect for each other. They were above anything like a namby-pamby, soft sighing, do-sweetest, kiss-me style of love. My father made his offer from the deck of his ship, as she was standing out of harbour, and my mother answered him from the shore through a speaking-trumpet. The truth was, that when the owners heard that she was a woman, they didn't approve ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... of employers and employed. Away with these palliatives; let us rejoice when we see working men starving and ill-clad, for in that way their eyes will be opened. The brute who gets the uttermost farthing out of the toil of his wage-slaves is more a friend to us and our cause than any namby-pamby Socialist, such as the late Dukeling of New Wanley. Socialist indeed! But enough. We have probably heard the last of this parvenu and his loudly trumpeted schemes. No true friend of the Revolution ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... chiefly from the pleasant satire of Charlotte Lennox. She could not, however, help laughing at the vile English into which they were translated. Her own style is very agreeable; nor are her letters at all the worse for some passages in which raillery and tenderness are mixed in a very engaging namby-pamby. ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... her good to model something strong and natural. She'll never amount to anything if she keeps on making namby-pamby gods and pet kittens,' answered irreverent Dan, remembering that when he was last here Bess was vibrating distractedly between a head of Apollo and her ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott |
