"Namby-pamby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... under the sun. So engrossed was Dreda in trying to keep other writers to the mark, that it was not until ten day's of the allotted fourteen had passed by that she set to work to think out her own contribution. It was to be a story, of course—not a stupid, amateury, namby-pamby story, such as you could read in other school magazines, but something striking and original, that would make everyone talk and wonder, and lie awake at night. So far so good; but when the time for writing it arrived ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Warrington soon learned how to shake hands in the manner of a candidate,—to take the whole hand and squeeze it soundly. The coal-heaver whose hand the dramatist grasped thereupon returned to his friends with the report that the candidate had a good grip, that there was nothing namby-pamby about him, for all his dude clothes. It is the gift of Heaven to win friends and keep them, and Warrington possessed this gift. His good-humored smile, his ready persiflage, his ease in all environments, and his common sense—these were his bucklers. He spoke in dingy halls, ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... writer of light and playful verse, would have hung half-a-dozen couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid's bow, at the same time bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the said dart, however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for as yet it was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de la Valliere as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she solemnizes her betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization before the registrar being quite out ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... we have a piece of namby-pamby 'to the Small Celandine,' which we should almost have taken for a professed imitation of one of Mr Philip's prettyisms. Here ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... blight. They have stirred the sky, whilst the little white pale-livered untempted clouds floated on the zephyrs—they've brought rain that made the earth glad, they've cleared the air in the very fall of their lightnin'. The lightnin' came—the fall—but give 'em credit fur the other. The little namby-pamby, white livered, zephyr clouds that is so divine an' useless, might float forever an' not even make a shadow to hide ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... precocious singing bird—does not appear: but we suspect the former, for this sonnet is immediately followed by "A Pastoral Ballad!" calling upon some Celia unknown to "pity his tears and complaint," &c., in the usual namby-pamby style of these compositions. To any one who considers the smart, espiegle, highly artificial style of "Tom Moore's" after compositions, his "Pastoral Ballad" will be what Coleridge called his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... this world, so mixed is it with lust and hatred and jealousy. True, there is love, but it is not that one. 'T is the loves filial and paternal, and friendship, better than all the loves the rhymesters hang with their namby-pamby. The love between the sexes—'t is a game wherein the weaker loses, and then— voe victis! ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... again that she thought nothing of Mr. Furnival's alleged handsomeness. She considered him a namby-pamby. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... wormy and obituary joys of La Comedie de la Mort. The little book came out, inspired by "all the poetasters." Christopher North wrote, four years later, in Blackwood's Magazine, a tardy review. He styled it "an ingeniously absurd poem, with an ingeniously absurd title, written in a strange, namby-pamby sort of style, between the weakest of Shelley and the strongest of Barry Cornwall." The book "fell dead from the Press," far more dead than "Omar Khayyam." Nay, misfortune pursued it, Miss Stoddart kindly informs me, and ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it now is, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, 'ladies have nothing to ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately." Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... "stuck up," in his claim of knowledge. He "had had a chance," and took no credit to himself for it. This pleased her, won her confidence—if, already, that had not been done by his frank face, in spite of his fancy clothes and her assumption that he was a namby-pamby weakling. ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... me and the girls, but he does it with a bad enough grace. He's dreadfully tired of Miss Rae; and, to tell you the truth, Mae, she is rather namby-pamby—very different from Miss Hopkins, and then, besides, he had so set his heart on going with ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... of our colony. He is almost as great a pasha among the ladies as Bulbul. They crowd in flocks to see him at Saint Waltheof's, where the immense height of his forehead, the rigid asceticism of his surplice, the twang with which he intones the service, and the namby-pamby mysticism of his sermons, have turned all the dear girls' heads for some time past. While we were having a rubber at Mrs. Chauntry's, whose daughters are following the new mode, I heard the following talk (which made me revoke by ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this 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)
... one old gentleman is his parrot, and another chatters incessantly about his pupils. Some of the singers—the serious order of singers—are as namby-pamby off the stage as they are on it, unless revelling in "sweet sounds;" they are too fond of humming tunes, solfaing, and rehearsing graces in society; they have plenty to sing, but nothing to say for themselves; they chime the quarters ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... Verus was in all respects a model boy. Not the namby-pamby model that all human boys detest, but a right-minded, right-mannered, healthy, wealthy, and wise young Roman of the second century of the Christian era. At that time (for the world was not yet Christianized) there flourished ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... thinking," he said; "that I am too neat and tidy—too namby-pamby to do anything in this country. That my boots are too narrow in the toe, my hair too short and my face too clean. I cannot help it. It is the fault of the individual you saw outside—Joseph. He insists on a strict observance ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... readers of the Lucky Series know that none of the books are namby-pamby—there is in all of them the true strain of things worthwhile. Honor, faith and courage hold ...
— Ted Marsh on an Important Mission • Elmer Sherwood
... "progressed" from the manly independence and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek protection of the consuls of other countries from the spirit that made our flag respected in every land and honored on every sea, to the anserine cackle of "jingoism" whenever an American manifests a love of country or professes a national ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... subject of much speculation among them, and opinions widely differed concerning his character. Some called him a "prig" and declared that he was "stuck up" and conceited. Others said he was a "namby-pamby" without brains or wit. But there were a few who had occasionally talked with the boy, who understood him better, and hinted that he might develop into ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... sufferings and sorrows are such that we feel they are, after all, leading to happiness; and we are not made to dwell upon pictures of unnecessary misery or unavailing misfortune. Let it not be supposed, however, that we are speaking of a namby-pamby tale of the luxuries and successes of what is called "high life," for this book has nothing of that character. We mean only to point out, as far as we may, without entering upon the story itself, that it tells of pleasant people, in pleasant circumstances, among whom it is a pleasure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... out as though let loose from a long bondage. "Ernestine—no one but a man can quite see that. What is a man without a man's work? What is there for him to do but sit around in namby-pamby fashion and be fussed over and coddled and cheered up! Lord"—he threw away her hands and turned his face from her—"I'd ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... The true way to uphold the honor of the Senate was to have none but honorable men in its body. If this Senator had yielded to temptation and had offered a bribe, he was a soiled man and ought to be instantly expelled; therefore he wanted the Senator tried, and not in the usual namby-pamby way, but in good earnest. He wanted to know the truth of this matter. For himself, he believed that the guilt of Senator Dilworthy was established beyond the shadow of a doubt; and he considered that in trifling with his case and shirking it the Senate was ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... to annihilate 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
... obvious; when Mr. W. ceases to please, it is by "abandoning" his mind to the most commonplace ideas, at the same time clothing them in language not simple, but puerile. What will any reader or auditor, out of the nursery, say to such namby-pamby as "Lines written at ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... incorrect to do so as to thank a judge for a favourable verdict): what you have said has pleased me extremely. I am the more pleased, as I would rather have been well attacked than have been handled in the namby-pamby, old-woman style of the cautious Oxford Professor. (404/5. This no doubt refers to Professor Phillips' "Life on the Earth," 1860, a book founded on the author's "Rede Lecture," given before the University of Cambridge. Reference to this work ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin |
