"Gibe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "is it you who fling such a taunt to shame your own kin? If there is aught of impropriety in what this man Sir John has done, is it not our affair with him in place of a silly gibe at Dorothy?" ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... circulars, money-lenders' circulars, and bucket-shop lures. His mother's great sprawling letter had pleased him better than any save one. The exception was his stepfather's. Edwin Clayhanger, duly passing on to the next generation the benevolent Midland gibe which ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... hears no mention of living immigrant or pioneer save in terms of gibe and sneer and taunt. The color and high romance of his own township is a thing undreamed of, as vague and shapeless as the foundations of Enoch, the city of Cain. And for his own farmstead, though for the first ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... And in the dusk, as they sauntered over the old bridge, she flung out gibe after gibe at her lover. Her cheeks grew hotter and hotter; it was like tearing her own flesh. The shame of it! The rapture of it! It hurt her so that the tears stood in her eyes; so she did it again, and yet again. "I don't pretend to live up ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... you one. You won't let me convert you, I know; you always used to gibe and jeer at my ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed. Nan, she knew, would tease and baffle, withhold and gibe, but would always say what she thought in the end, and what she thought was always worth knowing, even ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... dim and flickering tapers might be lighted. His fingers were more deft at this business, it would seem, than in the making of arrows. Fitzooth, in the intervals of his eating, took up Robin's arrows one by one and had some shrewd gibe ready for most of them. Of the score only five were allowed to pass; the rest were tossed contemptuously into the black hearth on to the little heap ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... instead, out into the dark indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were some old worn-out song. Seeing, however, that the school-master's flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself to gibe it into life. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... street, and watched the old man as he crept along down the hill to his house, with many a shaken head and many a murmured blessing. In this last scene all were unanimous; there was no one to cast a gibe or an unkindly look upon that slow aged progress from the scene of his greatest labours to the death-bed which awaited him. When the spectators saw him disappear within his own door, they all knew that it was for ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... spoken, and no respecter of persons; and a woman may forgive an injury, but never a scornful gibe. It is this that has brought both France and Russia on him. Madame Pompadour, who is all powerful, hates Frederick for having made disrespectful remarks concerning her. The Empress of Russia detests ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... tended, simply for the want of breeding and tastes, as infallibly as the needle points to the pole. Cards were often introduced in Mr. Effingham's drawing- room, and there was one apartment expressly devoted to a billiard- table; and many was the secret fling, and biting gibe, that these pious devotees passed between themselves, on the subject of so flagrant an instance of immorality, in a family of so high moral pretensions; the two worthies not unfrequently concluding their comments ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... scorn Margaret eyed his elegant attire, his face with its expression of an intelligence concentrated upon the petty and the paltry. Her eyes suggested a secret amusement so genuine that she could not venture to reveal it in a gibe. She merely said: "I confess I was more interested in him than ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Hanyards onwards, Mistress Waynflete had always acted promptly and exactly to my wish. I felt a boor, and was in truth a boor, in comparison with her. Brocton's 'yokel blood' gibe had put murder into my blows, but it had truth enough in it to make it rankle like a poisoned arrow. Yet here was this wonder-woman, trustful as a child and meeker than a milkmaid. My work was new, but at any rate I had sometimes dreamed that I could do a man's work ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... as Ainsworth elaborately explains, "a mocking by grimaces, mows, a flout, a frump, a gibe, a scoff, a banter;" and Sannio is "a fool in a play." The Italians change the S into Z, for they say Zmyrna and Zambuco, for Smyrna and Sambuco; and thus they turned Sannio into Zanno, and then into Zanni, and we caught the echo ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... worth answering: indeed, I knew it was not meant for an answer; it was a palpable gibe. I held my tongue, but now I knew I should get no information out of this soft-voiced ruffian until it suited him to give it. Our fate was still a mystery—if we were beaten in the struggle that was imminent, and I could not flatter myself ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... seat in the saddle. This time the docile animals had refused to obey their mistress, and the duchess expressed the suspicion that she had not intended to call them off; for, though she had carelessly apologised, she asked, as if the words were a gibe, if there was anything more delightful than to curb a refractory steed. She had an answer ready for Cordula, however, and retorted that the disobedience of her dogs proved that, if she understood how to obtain from horses what she called the greatest delight, she certainly failed in the case of other ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... far since then; but whither have you been travelling? The whole wide heaven was not too wide for you then; but now you can be jolly in your "nutshell." Then, you held spiritual, or human, values to be final, infinite, absolute, and could gibe in your own incomparable way at the besotted conventionalism which would place commercial values above them; now, who chants with such a roaring, pious nasal at that apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially is? Then, with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... an eternal type. His little exclamations, his assurance of sympathy, his terror of the commonplace—surely one knows them well? His tolerance of any impertinence, lest he should be thought to have misunderstood a jest, is a great distinction. But Congreve's gibe in the dedication at the critics, who failed 'to distinguish betwixt the character of a Witwoud and a Truewit,' is hardly fair: as Dryden said of Etherege's Sir Fopling, he is 'a fool so nicely writ, The ladies might mistake him for a wit.' Then, ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... struck him. Lucy, seeing that all her guests were reasonably occupied, lent herself to Lingen's murmured conversation, and felt for it just so much tolerance, so much compassion, you may say, as to be able to brave Mabel's quizzing looks from across the room. Mabel always had a gibe for Francis Lingen. She called him the Ewe Lamb, and that kind of thing. It was plain that she scorned him. Lucy, on the other hand, pitied him without knowing it, which was even more desperate for the young man. It had never entered Lingen's head, however, that anybody could pity ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... each gibe at army rules Appreciated fully; I sparkled when describing mules As "embryonic bully," Or, aided by some hackneyed tune, Increased my easy laurels By stringing verses to impugn The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... jury-stumps. Old Joe pulled rather the better oar, and called his son "a one-legged fiddler" when he missed the dip of wave; while Mordacks stood with his leg's apart, and playing the easy part of critic, had his sneers at both of them. But they let him gibe to his liking; because they knew their work, and he did not. And, upon ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... nothing to move either laughter or contempt, and if the quaint velvet mask which lay beside the coat of mail was effeminate in the tinsel of its gold embroidery, it was at least no child's toy to raise a sneer or gibe a moral. ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... The gibe brought no response; yet slowly, so gradually that it was not possible to tell when it began, a look that was wholly rational came into his eyes. He blinked, touched his dry lips with his dry tongue and, turning his ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... flushed under this gibe, but before he could set his retort in order Tom had turned to Wilson, and was saying, with placid indifference of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to Siegmund that he was meriting the old gibe of the atheists. He was shirking the responsibility of himself, turning it over to ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... heart has prayed, When men may reap and sow? Ah, God! back to the cold earth's breast! The sages chuckle o'er their jest! Must they, to give a people rest, Their dainty wit forego? The tyrants sit in a stately hall; They gibe at a wretched people's fall; The tyrants forget how fresh is the pall Over their dead and ours. Look how the senators ape the clown, And don the motley and hide the gown, But yonder a fast rising frown ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... did so, she looked up. A streak of light shot right across the statue, and the cruel face with its leering eyes seemed to smile down upon her mockingly, jeeringly, and she actually shrank, as if she dreaded to hear the satyr lips shoot some evil gibe ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... and sots may swill, Cynics gibe, and prophets rail, Moralists may scourge and drill, Preachers prose, and fainthearts quail. Let them whine, or threat, or wail! Till the touch of Circumstance Down to darkness sink the scale, Fate's a ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... the Cinque Ports, with a stipend of L3,000 a year, intimating at the same time that he would not hear of his declining it (6th August).[55] It is a proof of the spotless purity of Pitt's reputation that not a single libel or gibe appeared in the Press on his acceptance of this ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... give handsome tribute to a potential foe. On occasion the Ragusans could be nobly firm, refusing to deliver a political refugee to the Turks, and so forth. In such tempestuous times the little State was forced to trim its sails; there was the gibe that they were prepared to pay lip service to anyone, and that the letters S.B. on the flag (for Sanctus Blasius, their patron saint) indicated the seven flags, sette bandiere, which they were ready ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... home, the sick tall yellow Duchess Was left with the infant in her clutches, {90} She being the daughter of God knows who: And now was the time to revisit her tribe. Abroad and afar they went, the two, And let our people rail and gibe At the empty hall and extinguished fire, As loud as we liked, but ever in vain, Till after long years we had our desire, And back came the Duke and his ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... workshop, and there was no lack of brutish chaff to disorder him. This the decenter men would have no part in, and even protested against. But the ill-conditioned kept their way, till, at the cry of 'Bell O!' when all were starting for dinner, one of the worst shouted the cruellest gibe of all. Bob Jennings turned on him and knocked him over ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... auditorium already nearly empty. Glover undoubtedly had his bad quarter-of-an-hour that night, but the next morning he regained his usual equipoise, and cast off his chagrin with a characteristic gibe, at his own expense. A sympathetic friend ventured to ask if the fiasco was caused, perhaps, by too much blood ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... sneer shows wisdom, That a gibe outvalues a reason, That slang, such as thieves delight in, Is fit for the lips of the gentle, And rather a grace than ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the great procession organized by the Italianists, when they could not scrape together more than about 4000 persons, including many schoolboys and girls, the municipal clerks, visitors from Italy, Triest and Zadar. One need not gibe the Italianists with the numbers who followed Dr. Vio on that famous day when, weary of palavering, he summoned round him his supporters and strode off to the Governor's palace, where General Grazioli, who had succeeded General di San Marzano, was installed.[18] Arrived ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... or other Bagshaw was always very decent to me, and when he heard that Ward, Dennison, Collier, Lambert and I were going to finish the evening at The Reindeer he asked me to come home in the brake, but that gibe of Dennison's was heavy upon me and I had determined to stick to my promise and do whatever came my way. I did not expect that the evening was going to be anything but a rowdy one, for when Lambert did undertake a ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... those surroundings into account, and allowed nothing for his originality of character. One of these critics heard at Washington that Mr. Lincoln, in speaking at different times of some move or thing, said "it had petered out;" that some other one's plan "wouldn't gibe;" and being asked if the War and the cause of the Union were not a ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... green. These kept not line, For Alp was still recounting battles old, Aodh of wizards sang, and Ir of love; While bald-pate Conan, sharpening from his eye The sneering light, shot from his plastic mouth Shrill taunt and biting gibe. The younger sort Eyed the dense copse and launched full many a shaft Through it at flying beast. From ledge to ledge Clomb Angus, keen of sight, with hand o'er brow, Forth gazing on some far blue ridge of war With nostril wide ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... explained the nature of His kingdom, so as to remove any suspicion that it would bring Him and His subjects into collision with Rome, but He asserted His kingship, and it was His own claim that gave Pilate the material for His gibe. It is worth notice, then, that these two claims from His own lips, made to the authorities who respectively took cognisance of the theocratic and of the civic life of the nation, and at the time when ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... off for fee Our beards and eyebrows; never are we free, Not once, to rest; but here and there still sped, Drive at its wild will by the wind's change led, More pecked of birds than fruits on garden-wall; Men, for God's love, let no gibe here be said, But pray to God that he forgive ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the Englishmen mounted and formed up on the quay, the mob, which consisted of about two hundred wharf labourers, with a small sprinkling of half-breed women and fifty or sixty boys, gave back sullenly and scowlingly with a few low-muttered threats and an occasional hissing gibe of hereticos! But there was no attempt at violence except when some half-dozen boys began to throw stones. But the stringing of the Englishmen's bows, and the fitting of a few arrows to the strings, sent the mischievous young urchins to the right-about in ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... a scornful laugh and a gibe; but the arrow had hit its mark. But, indeed, what Thomas Bradly said was true. Broken hearts and dislocated families had been set to rights in that room. There would appointments be kept by wretched used-up ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... me it seems to express the generally accepted sense of exacerbaverunt: and here a cognate language will show us the way. Icelandic geip, futilis exaggeratio; atgeipa, exaggerare, effutire: aegype, then, means to mock, to deride, and is allied to gabban, to gibe, to jape. In the Psalter published by Spelman it is rendered: hi gremedon spraece godes. In Notker it is widersprachen, and in the two old Teutonic interlinear version of the Psalms, published by Graff, verbitterten ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... that "the pilgrims did find no answer to the riddle, and the Clerk of Oxenford thought that the Prioress had been deceived in the matter thereof; whereupon the lady was sore vexed, though the gentle knight did flout and gibe at the poor clerk because of his lack of understanding over other of the riddles, which did fill him with shame and make ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... from the speaker to her husband. But Frederick had again put on his mask of apathetic indifference and answered his wife's gibe only by a shrug of his shoulders. Noting her brother's scowling face, she ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... created me a lover of the picturesque. In heart and soul I am an artist, I dabble in colours, I dream of lights and shades and glorious effects; but the power of working out my ideas is denied me. If I try to paint a tree my friends gibe at me. I am a poor literary hack; but I give you my word, my dear old Philistine, that I would willingly change places with you." Anna smiled, she was accustomed to this sort of talk; but to her surprise Verity, who had ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was making progress with them. The hated gibe "white slave" was less frequently heard. Sam, passionately bent on making good in the community, weighed every shade of the men's manner toward him, ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... harmonious, more beautiful to look at, than most of the works of men. This was, perhaps, the view of his comrades, for they did a good deal of looking at the Colonel. He said he was a modest man and didn't like it, and Mac, turning a little rusty under the gibe, answered: ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... that a wanton breach of the peace was alien to his thoughts; that, on the contrary, his motive for action deserved high praise—it was to compel the rebellious Rumanians to obey the behest of the Conference and withdraw to their frontiers. The plenipotentiaries bore this gibe with dignity, and decided to have recourse once more to their favorite, and, indeed, only method—the despatch of exhortative telegrams. Of more efficacious means they were destitute. This time their message, which lacked ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... go to the Opera, his general faculty of enjoyment was unimpaired, and, as always, he loved a gibe at the clergy. On the 30th of November 1841, Samuel Wilberforce wrote to a friend about George Augustus Selwyn,[140] Missionary Bishop of ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... he began. "I was just thinking if they could only see me now—the crowd down at Morrison for instance. They used to gibe me. They called me the immaculate Garry, once. Aren't you a lot ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Plautus. But if Davies was in the great Secret, a world of others must have shared le Secret de Polichinelle. Yet none hints at it, and only a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a straw as the off-chance that Davies KNEW, and used "Terence" as a gibe. {149a} ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... was scared, friends! Call me fool and coward, but nothing worse! Jeer at the fool and gibe at the coward! 'Twas ever the coward's curse That fear breeds fancies in such: such take their shadow for substance still, —A fiend at their back. I liked poor Parkes,—loved Vincent, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... a crape mask, I assure you." And Trotto put aside the cover, only to let it fall with a little crash as he stared at the white thing, and glanced up to meet my eyes, and hear my gibe. ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... meaning, Milton, says, "I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the King might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the closet companion of these his solitudes, William Shakespeare." Though not an overt gibe, there certainly lurks an insinuation to Milton's Puritan readers, to whom stage plays were an abomination—an unworthy device of rhetoric, as appealing to a superstition in others which the writer himself does not share. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... plaything of people seventy or eighty years younger than herself, who talked and laughed with her as if she were a child, finding great delight in her wayward and strangely playful responses, into some of which she cunningly conveyed a gibe that caused their ears to tingle a little. She had done getting out of bed in this world, and lay there to be waited upon like a queen or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Power and then propose to limit it to the land or to any particular continent. Now, did our believers in the Balance of Power ever wish to see power balanced anywhere else than on the continent of Europe? That, if we studied history in any other language than our own, we should know was the gibe which other peoples flung at our addiction to the Balance of Power. We wanted, they said, to see a Balance of Power on the continent of Europe, to see one half of Europe equally matched against the other, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... the living language and the genius of the people. Their prose was an artificial language, the language of a polite chronicle with the best, that of a vulgar feuilletonist with the worst. Their poetry justified Goethe's gibe: ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... uncle of large fortune. The second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley—a gibe at the poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... noticed nothing about Simon de Montfort except his French accent. The man who jeers at Jones for having dropped an "h" might have jeered at Nelson for having dropped an arm. Scorn springs easily to the essentially vulgar-minded, and it is as easy to gibe at Montfort as a foreigner or at Nelson as a cripple, as to gibe at the struggling speech and the maimed bodies of the mass of our comic and tragic race. If I shrink faintly from this affair of tourists and tombs, it is certainly ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... is this reply to the oft-repeated gibe to which we have referred, it is also true that nowhere does the square man in the round hole do quite as great and as lasting injury as he does from the pulpit. The right man for the work—that must be the ideal of the Church, that man and no other, whatever be the ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... afflictions far from being ended; nevertheless, though sorely tried, Providence has been kind to her. Many of her rights have been restored, and she is no longer the slave of hard task-masters. When she now speaks, her voice is no longer met by the gibe and sneer, but with a kind of awe akin to respect, her enemies seeming to feel instinctively that it is the voice of a nation which no longer ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... horrible tale, and the rest rejoicing in it; and the bright sun, glowing on their withered skin, discovered perhaps no viler thing in all the world to shine upon. One of them even pointed at my mill-wheel with a witty gibe—at least, perhaps, it was wit to him—about the Sawyer's misfortune; but the sun was then in his eyes, and my dress was just of the color of the timber. So on they rode, and the pleasant turf (having lately received some rain) ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... it isn't where it might be," Hugh amended, taking no notice of Dick's gibe. "It's what Papa calls the process of elimination. You've got to do it with almost everything worth having really. You've only got to look at this river bed to see there's pretty sure to be something worth having there—in fact I know there ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... when all the rest Crushed his spirit with gibe and jest, Whispered softly, "Whatever they say, I know you will build the wheel some day!" Chirping crickets and singing birds Were not so sweet as her heartsome words; Straight he answered, "If ever I do, I know it will only ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... of St. Mark began to lose a portion of its gaiety. The cafes were now occupied by parties who had the means, and were in the humor, to put their indulgences to more substantial proof than the passing gibe or idle laugh; while those who were reluctantly compelled to turn their thoughts from the levities of the moment to the cares of the morrow, were departing in crowds to humble roofs and hard pillows. There ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... on, prostitutes in their gay attire accosted them from the doorways in which they lurked, but looking into Leandro's grim countenance and Manuel's poverty-stricken features the girls let them walk on, following them with a gibe ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... century was so popular with the awakened intelligence of England, aroused at last to the imminent importance of her call to expansion by sea, that it was greeted by a general pealing of the bells, which drew from the reluctant prime minister, Walpole, that bitter gibe, "Ay, to-day they are ringing their bells, and to-morrow they will be wringing their hands." Howe embarked with Anson's squadron, celebrated for its sufferings, its persistence, and its achievements, to waste the Spanish colonies of the Pacific; but the ship in which he had started was ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... that Pacifists of any kind have ever urged that war is impossible is due either to that confusion of thought just touched upon, or is merely a silly gibe of those who deride arguments to which they have not listened, and consequently do not understand, or which they desire to misrepresent; and such misrepresentation is, when not unconscious, always stupid ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... weak faith. The example in itself is potent for evil. The Catholic is usually not a persona grata as a Catholic but for some quality he possesses. Consequently, he must hide his religion under the bushel for fear of offending. Then a sneer, a gibe, a taunt are unpleasant things, and will be avoided even at the price of what at other times would look like being ashamed of one's faith. If ignorant, he will be silent; if he has not prayed, he will be weak; if vicious, he ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... I conceive, was the fear of being ridiculous. The position of a poor tutor aspiring to the favours of the heiress destined for his master invites the unkind gibe. And Harry could not be sure that Alison herself was free from the desire to make him a figure of scorn. Such a suspicion might disconcert the most ardent of lovers. Harry Boyce, whatever his abilities in the profession, was not that yet. ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... thing to hold up their heads at the shanty, and quite another to hold them up on the noisy, swarming campus where they knew nobody, and where the ill-bred bullies of the school felt free to jeer and gibe at their poor clothing and their shy, ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... vale above! Listen! dearest, etc. "Why is't thus, this sylvan Petrarch Pours all night his serenade? 'Tis for some proud woodland Laura, His sad sonnets all are made! But he changes now his measure — Gladness bubbling from his mouth — Jest and gibe, and mimic pleasure — Winged Anacreon of the South! Listen! dearest, etc. "Bird of music, wit and gladness, Troubadour of sunny climes, Disenchanter of all sadness, — Would thine art were in my rhymes. O'er ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... boy, I was one morning playing at marbles in the village ball alley, with a light heart and lighter pocket. The gibe and the jest went gaily round, when suddenly there appeared amongst us a stranger, of a very remarkable and very cheerful aspect; his intrusion was not the least restraint upon our merry little assemblage, on the contrary, he seemed pleased, and even delighted; he was ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... Osborne and losing no advantage inadvertently given him. The noise of the conflict filled the court house and drowned the uproar on Broadway. Nightly and each morning the daily press gave columns to the proceedings. Every time the judge coughed the important fact was given due prominence. And every gibe of counsel carried behind it its insignia of recognition—"[Laughter]" It was one of those first great battles in which the professional value of compressed air as an explosive force and small pica type as projectiles was demonstrated. It was a combat of wind ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... and tragic, and so touching all at once that the gibe ended in a sob. It was not the stinging effervescence of the gingerade that made her choke and brought the smarting tears to her eyes. It was envy of that other girl. And then she noticed, under his left eye, a tiny scar, and she knew how he came ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... My gibe, harmless though it was, stung them into speech, and both at once, for I have noticed, however stupid they may be, that men never like ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... black trousers;—he held in his hand five shillings which had been thrust into his hand when the prison gates had opened to him that morning. He had taken the money and swaggered out with a parting gibe at the constable who ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... were the sayer or propounder of them, you might say that my arguments walk away and will not remain fixed where they are placed because I am a descendant of his. But now, since these notions are your own, you must find some other gibe, for they certainly, as you yourself allow, show an inclination ...
— Euthyphro • Plato
... there to gibe at, Sybrandt?" remonstrated Catherine more mildly. "Is not our Kate afflicted? and is she not the most content of us all, and singeth like a merle at times between her pains? But I am as bad as thou; prithee ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... well for Menfolk at Womankind to gibe, And swear they do not care for games without some lure or bribe, But e'en in JAMES PAYN's armour there seems some weakish joints; He does not care for "glorious Whist" unless for "sixpenny points!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... like a bitter gibe," said Hilda, with the tears springing into her eyes. "But I cannot help it. It does not alter my perception of the truth. If there be any such dreadful mixture of good and evil as you affirm,—and which appears to me almost more shocking than pure evil,—then the good ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all the rites and usages of the Church." [615] Curiously enough, while bringing forward all the evidence she could adduce to prove that Burton was a Christian, Lady Burton makes no reference in her book to this paper. Perhaps it was because Sir Richard continued to gibe at the practices of her church just as much after his "conversion" as before. However, it gratified her to know that if he was not a good Catholic, he was, at any rate, the next best thing—a Catholic. An intimate friend of Burton to whom ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... round to give the only reply possible to such a gibe. These breakfast interludes had not lost piquancy in all these months. "I'm half a mind to go to this thing. I would, if it didn't break up ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... black and scowling mask. He paid sternly and furiously, like a villain who has lost at play; and without a 'good-night,' or any other leave taking, glided ominously from the room; and the gentlemen who carried on the discourse and convivialities of the Salmon House, followed him with a gibe or two, and felt the pleasanter for the removal of that ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... gibe in this, and Grange at once retreated to a less exposed position. "I am quite willing to wait for her," he said. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... yesterday—" and Duke repeated a bit of gossip that had a gibe at the Lorrigans for its point. "He got it over to Hitchcocks. It come from the Douglases. I guess Mary Hope don't want nothing of us—except what she can get out of us. We been a ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... in hand?" inquired Nell's husband, John Peebles, at dinner. The good-natured wink which accompanied the words, the hearty voice and friendly manner, robbed the words of offense. They seemed rather a humorous gibe directed against Nell. These two got along excellently well. There was about John Peebles an effect of tender strength, re-assuring and at the same time illuminating—responsive to weakness, but adamant to imposition. Even the managerial Nell ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... her voice—the gibe at her own poor ruins of love fallen about her—was lost on him. He was in total ignorance of her friendship with Quarrington. But the plain significance of her words came home to him clearly enough. He did not speak for ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... by the force of that Stentorian sound, Rose Belcour, dressed, and soon the lobby found. About the door a throng of varlets stood, A grinning and ill-favoured brotherhood, That scoff and gibe at every wight that wears Linen less black, or better coat than theirs. For these, young Belcour was too fair a mark; 'Make way,' cries one, 'he's going to the Park: His horses wait; he's going for a ride.' 'Fool, 'tis his tilbury,' another cried; 'D'ye think his lordship rides without ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... hyperbolical conceits, Tuscan purists bent on using only words of the Tre Cento, Petrarchisti spinning cobwebs of old metaphors and obsolete periphrases, all felt in turn the touch of his light lash. The homage paid to Petrarch's stuffed cat at Arqua supplied him with a truly Aristophanic gibe.[203] Society comes next beneath his ferule. There is not a city of Italy which Tassoni did not wring in the withers of its self-conceit. The dialects of Ferrara, Bologna, Bergamo, Florence, Rome, lend the satirist vulgar phrases when he ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... state; Where change of fav'rites made no change of laws, And senates heard, before they judg'd a cause; How would'st thou shake at Britain's modish tribe, Dart the quick taunt, and edge the piercing gibe? Attentive truth and nature to descry, And pierce each scene with philosophick eye; To thee were solemn toys, or empty show, The robes of pleasure, and the veils of woe: All aid the farce, and all thy mirth maintain, Whose joys ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... carl'll boide naw questionin', odd rottle him!" replied Ashbead. "He awnsurs wi' a gibe, or a thwack o' his staff. Whon ey last seet him, he threatened t' raddle me booans weel, boh ey ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... gibe—and some smack of an evil jest lurked in his tone—he played the host so far as to urge his bewildered companion along the passage and into the living-chamber on the left, where he had seen from without that his orders to light and lay were being executed. A dozen candles shone ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... discourse of things Most holy, to their tribe; What does they do?—they mocks at me, And makes my harp a gibe.' ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... debate, Or seen a new-made mayor's unwieldy state; Where change of favourites made no change of laws, And senates heard before they judged a cause; 60 How wouldst thou shake at Britain's modish tribe, Dart the quick taunt, and edge the piercing gibe! Attentive, truth and nature to descry, And pierce each scene with philosophic eye, To thee were solemn toys or empty show The robes of pleasure, and the veils of woe: All aid the farce, and all thy mirth maintain, Whose joys are causeless, or ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... hundred such as he to these high-placed and heartless transgressors? Priests though they were, and therefore bound by their office to help any poor creature that was struggling with a wounded conscience, they had nothing better to say to him than this scornful gibe, 'What is that to us? See ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... century," says the strolling player in the Vicar of Wakefield,(7) "Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and all the plays of Shakespeare are the only things that go down." The whole passage is a satire on Garrick(8) and a gibe at Drury Lane: "The public go only to be amused, and find themselves happy when they can enjoy a pantomime under the sanction of Jonson's or Shakespeare's name." But, whatever was done with Shakespeare's plays, they were the very life of the theatre. When we remember ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... on Mr. Bland's "skittishness", and Mr. Max also indulged in a gibe or two. These the haberdasher met with a wan smile. So the dinner came to an end, and the guests of Baldpate sat about while Mr. Peters removed all traces of it from the table. Mr. Magee sought to talk to Miss Norton, but found her nervous ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... called the plague, and he died, and his body had to be committed without much delay or ceremonial to the sea. He had built his monument to no purpose. He was never to occupy it. It stood a vast and solid gibe at the vanity of ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the poisoned weapons of savages—in this warfare the advantages of wit and delicate irony lay on the side of the nobles. But it should never be forgotten that the wounds made by the tongue and the eyes, by gibe or slight, are the last of all to heal. When the Chevalier turned his back on mixed society and entrenched himself on the Mons Sacer of the aristocracy, his witticisms thenceforward were directed at du Croisier's salon; he stirred up the fires of war, not knowing ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... no opportunity to elaborate for Nellie's benefit his opinions concerning the handy-man's utter worthlessness. At length this good Samaritan paused from his labors, and regaling himself with a fresh chew of tobacco and a parting gibe at Joe, set briskly off for ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... a moderate way, for the nominal beneficiaries; and, in the case before us, the brethren being so comfortably provided for, the Master is likely to be at least as comfortable as all the twelve together. Yet I ought not, even in a distant land, to fling an idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really know nothing, except that the people under his charge bear all possible tokens of being tended and cared for as sedulously as if each of them sat by a warm fireside of his own, with a daughter bustling round the hearth to make ready his porridge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... realized that there might be something seriously amiss in this protracted, unexplained absence. However, and to a certain degree, the child was allowed to be independent, and she was liable to reappear at any moment and to gibe at their "foolish fear" for her. But to summon her, at once, was the surest way of comforting Mrs. Trent, and Samson went out again to distribute the assembled ranchmen into ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... fainting fits at being disowned; no hysterics at being turned out of house and home; no prayers for mercy, but a quick retort for every gibe from her father; and her defiant attitude ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... praising the gods for preserving his favourite's life. Then the worthy philosopher recollected that his wisdom taught him there were no gods, and he plunged into a rambling explanation of his position, which would have lasted forever, unless Agias had cut him short with a merry gibe, and told him that he must positively come to a tavern and enjoy at least one beaker of good Massic in memory of old friendship. And Pisander, whose spareness of living arose more from a lack of means than from a philosophic aversion to food ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... in Tai y's apartments relating about the rat-elves, when Pao-ch'ai entered unannounced, and began to gibe Pao-y, with trenchant irony: how that on the fifteenth of the first moon, he had shown ignorance of the allusion to the green wax; and the three of them then indulged in that room in mutual poignant satire, for the sake of fun. Pao-y had been giving way to solicitude lest Tai-y should, by ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... be some, who, vain and proud, May ape the manners of the crowd, Lisp French, and lame it at each word, And jest and gibe to all afford:— But we, as in long ages past, Will still be ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... surrounded her, and the law stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman. That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had imagined it to be. Only De Launay's careless gibe as he had left her at the hotel held promise of performance. "To-morrow we'll start our private butchery," he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted at a recklessness that matched her own ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... the word friend was almost like a gibe, though it was not intended as such. There was none present, however, but knew of the defection of the Earl's father from the Society of Friends, and they chose to interpret the reference to a direct challenge. It was a difficult moment for the young Earl, but he only ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rose, but granted it, And moved away, and left me, statue-like, In act to render thanks. I, that whole day, Saw her no more, altho' I linger'd there Till every daisy slept, and Love's white star Beam'd thro' the thicken'd cedar in the dusk. So home we went, and all the livelong way With solemn gibe did Eustace banter me. "Now," said he, "will you climb the top of Art; You cannot fail but work in hues to dim The Titianic Flora. Will you match My Juliet? you, not you,—the Master, Love, A more ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... wheat to the millers and hoped that "in a few weeks" the consumer might begin to receive the benefit. The CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER excused the delay in publishing the Economy Committee's reports on the ground that the MINISTER OF MUNITIONS was "at sea," and elicited the inevitable gibe that he was not the only one. Sir ERIC GEDDES, with a judicious compliment to the motorists for setting "an extraordinary example of voluntary taxation," got a Second Reading for his Roads Bill; and Sir GORDON ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... ejaculated as a signal! and click! went the glasses in the hands of a party of tipsy men, drinking one night at the bar of one of the middling order of taverns. And many a wild gibe was utter'd, and many a terrible blasphemy, and many an impure phrase sounded out the pollution of the hearts of these half-crazed creatures, as they toss'd down their liquor, and made the walls echo with their uproar. The first and foremost in recklessness was a girlish-faced, fair-hair'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... all goes out—my real stuff; my fool failures stay by me—this thing, for instance." He indicated the big clump of nude forms. "I had an 'idea' when I started, but it was too ambitious and too literary. Moreover, it isn't democratic. It don't gibe with the present. I'd be a wild-animal sculptor if I ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... know not that; I know how folk would gibe If one of us pushed courtesy so far. She has always loved love's fashions well; you wot, The marshal, head friend of this Chastelard's, She used to talk with ere he brought her here And sow their talk with little kisses thick As roses in rose-harvest. For myself, I cannot see which side of ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... debate that were published, it is difficult to gain a very clear idea of the Bishop's speech; but it is certain that it was eloquent and facile, and that it appealed strongly to the religious prejudices of the majority of the audience. He ended by a gibe which, under ordinary circumstances, might have passed simply as the rude humour of a popular orator, but which in that electric atmosphere stung Huxley into a retort that has become historical. He asked Huxley whether ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... starve the little frightened child Till it weeps both night and day: And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool, And gibe the old and grey, And some grow mad, and all grow bad, And none ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... its fine dark eyes and strong lines and the luxuriant black mustache, became to him furtive witnesses to his shame—secret commentators upon his weakness. He recalled pictures of men held in pillories for communities to gibe at—and he felt that his position was not unlike theirs. He had at times a frantic realization that he had unconquerable strength, but that by some ironic circumstance he could not ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge |
