"Tattling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blossom, Infant fair, Fondling of a happy pair, Every morn and every night Their solicitous delight, Sleeping, waking, still at ease, Pleasing, without skill to please Little gossip, blithe and hale, Tattling many a broken tale, Singing many a tuneless song. Lavish of a heedless tongue; Simple maiden, void of art, Babbling out the very heart, Yet abandon'd to thy will, Yet imagining no ill, Yet too innocent to blush, Like the linnet in the bush To the mother-linnet's note ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... was a page who was handsome, spirited, and saucy. One of the daughters of the royal pair, wearied with the forms and ceremonies of her state, which, in the most punctilious court in Europe, were especially trying, found means to converse with this well-appearing, quick-witted scamp. A tattling courtier, recalling a faux pas of the last queen, and desiring no more scandals, reported that the princess had been seen to smile on the youngster. No guilt was proven upon him, but handsome pages were ill-chosen company for young women of ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... do you know about your aunt Nannie's babies?" Mrs. MacDougall exclaimed, in amazement. "Who have been tattling to you about ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... him when it was all over, if she won. The debt was owed by the father; it might help if it was known that the daughter had paid. Then she would go away; it was not in her mind to gain any favor for herself. If she merely ran to him, tattling an exposure of the plot, Echford Flagg, if her well-grounded estimate of his character were correct, might repudiate her as a mere tale-bearer; she remembered enough to know that he was a square fighter. She felt ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... want to do him any real harm," growled Shalleg, "but I'm going to put him out of the game, just as I was kept out of it by his tattling tongue. I'm going to make him fail to show up to-morrow, and the next day, too, maybe. That'll put a crimp in his record, and in the Cardinals', too, for he's been doing good work for them. I'll say that about him, much ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... he was interested in spite of himself in the proposed plan, and would have been more so had he known how much had been already discovered. But Cuthbert kept much of that to himself, not willing that tattling tongues should spread the rumour. Only to real believers in the hidden treasure did he care to speak of the gipsy's strange words and the visit to the wise woman of Budge Row. Philip, he thought, would ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... character of this Polly Jessup. She is particularly solicitous about every thing which relates to you. It has occurred to me, since reading your letter, that she is not entirely without design in her prattle. Something more, methinks, than the mere tattling, gossiping, inquisitive propensity in the way in which she introduces you ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... are bound to know, and she is Miss Bessie McPherson, of Stoneleigh, and she is not dead at all, and never has been. She had the fever in Rome, but she got well, and it was her mother who died there; this is the truth, and may God forgive me if I have done harm by my tattling." ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... as she had never been, Mrs. Wix suffered her wound to bleed and her resentment to gush. Her great bitterness was that Ida had called her false, denounced her hypocrisy and duplicity, reviled her spying and tattling, her lying and grovelling to Sir Claude. "Me, ME!" the poor woman wailed, "who've seen what I've seen and gone through everything only to cover her up and ease her off and smooth her down? If I've been an 'ipocrite it's ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... stylish dresses and a season or two would make her a belle of the first water. She had that air of indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community. On the other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play; and the modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some hundreds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Loudun. The bulk of nuns, well-nigh a dozen out of the fifteen who made up the house, being rather forsaken by the monks, who preferred ladies of loftier position, were poor creatures, sick at heart, and disinherited, with nothing to console them but tattling, child's play, and other ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... to burn That roast meat, which it cannot turn. The groaning-chair began to crawl, Like a huge insect, up the wall; There stuck, and to a pulpit grew, But kept its matter and its hue, And mindful of its ancient state, Still groans while tattling gossips prate. The mortar only chang'd its name, In its old shape a font became. The porringers, that in a row, Hung high, and made a glitt'ring show, To a less noble substance chang'd, Were now but leathern buckets rang'd. The ballads, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... a little, between an immeasurable relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What WAS this monstrous web of Craik's? What HAD the creature been nodding and ducketing about?—those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end, when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his hands over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his spectacles, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... bribed him with a mighty bribe; and I have prepared possible disguises for this nephew of the barber; and I have had the witnesses of thy betrothal despatched to foreign parts, far kingdoms in the land of Roum, to prevent tattling and gabbling; and ye that were left alone for debating as to the great deed, ye have not yet deliberated as to that! Is't known to ye, O gabblers, aught of the punishment inflicted by Shahpesh, the Persian, on Khipil, the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... than it seems An entrance to the great to gain. The honour oft hath cost extremes Of mortal pain. The craft of spies, the tattling art, And looks more gracious than the heart, Are odious there; But still, if one would meet success, Of different parishes the dress He, like the ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... a gentleman, and always holding up Jack Darcy to ridicule. Jack, on the other hand, had a bashful fear of girls, and fancied they were laughing at every little awkwardness; then they cried so easily, went off in a huff if they could not have their own way, were silly, vain, and tattling, ready enough to beg your assistance if there was a munching cow by the roadside, a worm swinging from a tree, or a harmless mouse running across the floor. The great fascination to the Darcy house was, that the boys could sit ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... relating to the Rebellion of '45 may be found a curious and interesting account of a secret hiding-place, reached by lifting a sheet of lead on the roof. A tattling young woman told the story upon oath, describing a staircase that descended to a little room with a fireplace, a bed, and a few chairs, with a door in the wainscot that opened to a place full of arms. Unfortunately, both history ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... Crown-Prosecutor. "I know what I should like! I should like to get at that old Scroope, or whatever his name is, and get it all out of him. I'd give him a piece of my mind, gossipy old humbug!" It then occurred to Sally that she was being unfair. No, she wouldn't castigate old Major Roper for tattling, and at the same time cross-examine him for her own purposes. It would be underhand. But it would be very easy, if she could get at him, to make him talk about it. She rehearsed ways and means that might ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... so tractile in disposition and so easily trained for good or bad that he was frequently developed in the practice of deceit, hypocrisy, tattling and numerous other weaknesses, as the result of the course of training which he received from those who were directly responsible for his physical and moral well being. That peculiar nature of his education in the school of bondage, which taught him that his owner's will ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various |
