"Verbose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the affair had not, perhaps, been laboriously collected as yet, but luckily Mrs. Heth was not the sort that requires a mass of verbose testimony and dull statistics. The right note awaited her touch six floors below, and time was pressing. Already her mind had flown well ahead, perceived with precision just what was required. Willie must be seen, and at least two ladies, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... be constantly on the alert to avoid including non-essential details. Take pains, of course, to show the director just what bit of by-play it is that is responsible for a certain situation that will "get a laugh," but do not be verbose, and do not go into tiresome details. "It is a very easy matter, for a writer fired with ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... European makes voluntary gratuities to the natives, he is considered a fool—they entertain a contempt for him, which develops into intolerable impertinence. If the native comes to borrow, lend him a little less than he asks for, after a verbose preamble; if one at once lent, or gave, the full value requested, he would continue to invent a host of pressing necessities, until one's patience was exhausted. He seldom restores the loan of anything voluntarily. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... couched in the most impressive words, that the traitor shall be punished; which will make all the more noticeable the utter defeat which verbose royalty soon afterward suffers. Renard worsts the king's messengers; Bruin the bear has his nose torn off; Tybert the cat loses half his tail; Renard jeers at them, at the king, and at the Court. And all through the story he triumphs ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... prompt answer. 'Well, what did you think of the Dare-all,—as the vicar calls her sometimes? is she not like a pleasant edition of Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy,—verbose and full of long sentences? How many words did she coin ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... all the principal authors, who had died within a century of the present time; and, in this revision, paid no sort of regard to the reputation they had acquired — Milton was harsh and prosaic; Dryden, languid and verbose; Butler and Swift without humour; Congreve, without wit; and Pope destitute of any sort of poetical merit — As for his contemporaries, he could not bear to hear one of them mentioned with any degree of applause ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... rendered very concise, preferring the main points in each to a verbose and tiresome description of the minutiae; and although the number might have been extended to many hundreds, I trust a sufficiency have been detailed to establish the success of my practice, and to show the afflicted the ...
— Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Nature of Scrofula or King's Evil, Scurvy, and Cancer • John Kent
... there was any particular gift in Mr. Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one upon another, after this fashion. But this can only be received as a proof of their determination to persecute, since it must be within everybody's experience that the Chadband style of oratory is widely received ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... naturally anxious, as we thought that in steering straight ahead, as we had done, we ought to have reached the ships with which we had the rendezvous. So far as we could, with the roar of the wind and the propeller, we held a consultation—nothing verbose—in mid-air to determine what would be the best move. We decided to alter our course so as to be sure of getting in sight of land. Half an hour later we saw the first sign of life since we had been out—an old ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... son. "A habit of facile enthusiasm, not perhaps altogether insincere, but totally without moral value . . . convictions assumed at will, as a matter of fashion, or else of singularity . . . the lack of stable purpose, save only in matters of gross self-interest . . . an increasing tendency to verbose expression . . . an all but utter lack of what old-fashioned people still call principle. . . ." these phrases recurred to his memory, with disagreeable significance. Was that in truth a picture of his son, of the boy whom he had loved and watched over and ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... and vernacular, from (Professor Antoine) Galland's delightful abbreviation and adaptation (A.D. 1704), in no wise represent the eastern original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster's, which is diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey's, which is a re- correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and all degrade a chef d'oeuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice present for ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... my story after his fashion. Of course I shall not go and print his version; you might like his concise way better than my verbose; and I'm not here to hold up any man's coat-tails. Short as he made it, Edouard's eyes were moist more than once; and at the end he caught Raynal's hand and kissed it. Then he asked time to reflect; "for," said he, "I ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... works of Homer. Plato had banished Homer from his ideal state. Why should not Caligula? He was with difficulty restrained from doing the like for Vergil and Livy. The former, he said, was a man of little learning and less wit;[23] the latter was verbose and careless. Even when he attempted to encourage literature, his eccentricity carried him to such extremes that the competitors shrank in horror from entering the lists. He instituted a contest at Lugudunum in which prizes were offered for declamations in Greek ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... music, who have sat in the dark (mentally and physically), applauding what they didn’t understand, and listening to vague German mythology set to sounds that appear to us outsiders like music sunk into a verbose dotage. I am convinced the greater number would have preferred a jolly performance of Mme. Angot or the Cloches de Corneville, cut in two by a ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... powerful, his voice was sweet and resonant. His gestures and movements, elegant though they were, had nothing theatrical about them, and his oratory, though quick and fluent, was neither redundant nor verbose.' [Sidenote: Financial crisis at Rome.] The year before his tribunate had been a turbulent one at Rome. The Social War and Asiatic disturbances had brought about a financial crisis. Debtors, hard pressed by their creditors, invoked obsolete ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... admirably clear and terse statement of an argument which is often presented in so verbose a manner that its real nature is, to a considerable extent, disguised. But in this case, clearness of statement makes for ease of refutation, as ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... on himself, as a prelude in the book last mentioned, and adding a long reply. The proceeding was honest, but rather suicidal. One may not wholly admire the famous editor of the Univers.[441] But nothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, classical French and trenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and the cabbage-stick ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Walton rivers, where one may "study to be quiet and go a-fishing"! The Babylonian streams by which we have all pined in captivity; the sentimental Danube's which we can never forget because of "that night in June"; and at a very early age I had already developed a decent respect for the verbose manner in which the "waters come down ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... time kept open with earth, and made to assume their embossment in the operation of healing. In their movements they are sluggish, though agile when stimulated to action. Their limbs are of surprising tenuity. In their communications with one another they are volatile; verbose in conversation, and puerile in manner: continually embroiled in some quarrel, which either ends in words, or terminates in the act of the secret assassin; rarely coming to an open rupture while the ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... set aside as a basic principle, the reason invoked by the dramatist is positive reason, the reason of science, of justice, of rational logic. In verbose monologues, he combats the superstitions and fanaticism of the orthodox. The whole force of the Maskil's hatred against obscurantism is expressed through the character named Zibeon, Jewish hypocrite and chief adjutant in the camp of Sheker (Falsehood). This ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... freely with those correspondents in whom he had confidence, and permit them to copy his opinions in advance of their delivery upon their pledges that they should not be printed before they were officially made public. He wrote a great many editorials, somewhat ponderous and verbose, for the Washington Union, and the elaborate statements on executive matters made by the correspondents who enjoyed his favor ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... justified the prediction, he scarcely surpassed the favorable sense which it incloses. Verbose, incorrect, poor in form, pale and washy as diluted Indian ink, his verses occasionally display witty touches, because every one was witty in the eighteenth century; but to class them with the works of the poets of his day as poetry is impossible—they merit only being considered in the light ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the bon-ton of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... apparently his principal endeavour to avoid all harshness and severity of diction; he is therefore sometimes verbose in his transitions and connections, and sometimes descends too much to the language of conversation; yet if his language had been less idiomatical it might have lost somewhat of its genuine Anglicism. What he attempted, he performed; he is never feeble and he did ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... wheelwright managed to send the boy six florins, and that sum was immediately expended on Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum and Mattheson's Volkommener Capellmeister—heavy, dry treatises both, which have long since gone to the musical antiquary's top shelf among the dust and the cobwebs. These "dull and verbose dampers to enthusiasm" Haydn made his constant companions, in default of a living instructor, and, like Longfellow's "great men," toiled upwards in the night, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... is a second epistle ascribed to Clement, but we know not that this is as highly approved as the former, and know not that it has been in use with the ancients. There are also other writings reported to be his, verbose and of great length. Lately, and some time ago, those were produced that contain the dialogues of Peter and Apion, of which, however, not a syllable is recorded by the primitive Church" (Eusebius' "Eccles. Hist." bk. iii., ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling; while Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language. Cast Coleridge at once aside, as sickly and useless; and Shelley, as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... long, florid, and complex. Sometimes, indeed, he is quite beyond the comprehension of his students—but when they do not understand, they admire, and feel they are in the presence of greatness. His writings contain many of the faults of his lectures. They are often laboured and obscure, diffuse and verbose. ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... of (so-called) philosophy still meets at Concord in July—the last survival of the speculative ignorance of the dark ages, and the worship of Greek literature. The copious ridicule of the press has no effect upon this serious gathering. Its verbose platitudes and pretentious inanities continue to be repeated, furnishing almost as good an antithesis to science and philosophy as Mrs. Eddy and her disciples. There is no lack of fluency and ingenuity in the use of language, and occasionally there are glimmering and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... was Nan who furnished the greater part of the composition. Mrs. Challoner was rather verbose and descriptive in her style. Nan cut down her sentences ruthlessly, and so pruned and simplified the whole epistle that her mother failed to trace her own handiwork: and at the last she added a postscript in ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... peace by sending a challenge to fight a duel to one Col. Anglesea, at present a resident of this county. You can take my warrant in your own hands and read it with your own eyes, if you wish to do so, young gentleman," said the mild, old officer, handing the verbose document to which he so briefly referred ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth |
