"Twaddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Heaven he looks up to is but a vault of ice,—that these two indications, leading to the same conclusion, go far to convince me he was a profoundly immoral and irreligious spirit, with as rare faculties of intelligence as ever belonged to any one. All this may be mere goody weakness and twaddle, on my part: but it is a persuasion that I cannot escape from; though I should feel the doing so to be a deliverance from a most painful load. If you could help me, I heartily wish you would. I never take him up without ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... behaviour?" Nick inquired with an interest which surprised his sister, Mr. Nash's discourse striking her mainly as the twaddle of the under-world. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... to the fact that he was beginning to give vent to a lot of twaddle, and speedily, pleading fatigue, she paid no further notice to him. This compelled Pao-y to at last be quiet and go to sleep. By the morrow, all recollection of the discussion had vanished ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the grammatical persons for rational souls, has contrived to crowd into his definition of person more errors of conception and of language,—more insult to common sense,—than one could have believed it possible to put together in such space. And this ridiculous old twaddle, after six and twenty years, he has deliberately re-written and lately republished as something "adapted to the schools of America." It stands thus: "Person is a distinction which is made in a noun between its representation ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... old themes, to try to recognise them whenever they crop up, is not only to lose one's enjoyment of the music, but to run a fair risk of misapprehending it altogether, and the drama as well. This jack-fool twaddle about there being not a single phrase in an opera which has not grown out of another is manifestly absurd—for out of what does the first one grow?—and utterly untrue. In every scene of Tristan an enormous amount of new material is added; it is the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers's eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought. When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat overstudied "appreciations," he offered a copy to Mrs. ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... see, Mr. Cockayne," said his wife, "this Mr. Karr, whose book about the garden—twaddle, I call it—you used to think so very fine and poetic, is just a market-gardener and nothing more. He ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... and connived with the Czar; His Bulgarian twaddle once caused a great war, Where thousands were slain, but what did he heed, He still went to Church ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... manner so familiar that it must have been extremely nauseating to the cultured young women. The three were standing under the electric light at the corner, and the young women instead of appearing annoyed at the heathen's twaddle, seemed to be highly amused. Only the greatest exercise of self-restraint kept Mr. Hamshaw from kicking Sago into the middle ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her clear face. "How does such stuff, in this ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... she both dislikes and despises. And, further, she must be proof against the weakness which some of her sex exhibit, of growing fond of husbands who, without being Admirable Crichtons, treat them kindly and with forbearance. Next, she must have thrown overboard all the twaddle about domestic duties and responsibilities. If her child sickens of the measles just as she is starting for her bivouac in Norway, or a course of dinners in the Palais Royal, her duty is to call in the doctor and go. Weeks ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... off of your poor tool last night. I do not care to repeat the tragedy. I shall not strike you here and now, because the act might mean my arrest and detention on no one knows what sort of a trumped-up charge. You need not bother me with any silly twaddle about swords and pistols I shall pay no attention to it. Ordinarily Americans do not delay actual combat. We usually fight it out on the spot and the best man wins. I will, however, give you the chance to deliberate ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... Be serious if you want, only don't take so long about it. But understand one thing. I want no preaching, no philosophical or socialistic twaddle. No Tolstoi—he's a great thinker, and you're not. No Bernard Shaw—he's funny, and you're not. Now ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... friendly recognition. For had not the King, when Crown Prince and Heir-Apparent, hunted game in his preserves?—yea, had he not even dined with him?—and had not he, Jost, written whole columns of vapid twaddle about the 'Royal smile' and the 'Royal favour' till the outside public had sickened at every stroke of his flunkey pen? How came it, then, that his Majesty seemed on this occasion to have no recollection of him, and looked ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the fairy— Flew she down to Ealing. "GEORGIE, stop it! Pray you, drop it; Hark to my appealing: To this foolish Papal rule-ish Twaddle put an ending; This a swerve is From our Service ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... Helen. They were wrong through and through; so don't be absurd." Then turning half apologetically to John Ward, he added, "You'll have to keep this child's ideas in order; I'm sure she never heard such sentiments from me. Mr. Ward will think you haven't been well brought up, Helen. Principle? Twaddle! their pockets were what they thought of. All this talk ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in the world when we're driven to do this protecting business ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are yet felt only as blemishes in the admirable beauty and brilliance of the poem. The successive scenes are given with so firm and clear a touch—there is such a sense of form, the language is such a dexterous elevation of the ordinary social twaddle into the mock-heroic, that it is impossible not to recognize a consummate artistic power. The dazzling display of true wit and fancy blinds us for the time to the want of that real tenderness and humour, which would have softened some harsh passages, and given a more enduring charm ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... general, the public may, without injury to Art or history, employ the painters who make the prettiest pictures of them; it doesn't matter to the future, if Mr. Jenkins, or even the Hon. Mr. Twaddle, has employed the promising Mr. Mahlstock to perpetuate him with a hundred transitory and borrowed graces,—if the talented young litterateur, Mr. Simeah, has been found by his limner to resemble Lord Byron amazingly, and has in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... answered, very disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we both talked ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... a great deal of unnecessary twaddle is abroad as to the extreme cruelty of branding. Undoubtedly it is to some extent painful, and could some other method of ready identification be devised, it might be as well to adopt it in preference. But in the circumstance of a free range, ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... no farther than he can see, and he sees truly enough the evil and imperfection in the world. He notes the weakness and failures of the best intentioned, takes cognizance of the low motives that so often dominate, and bases his conclusions on them. He spurns the idealistic twaddle of those who, he says, are guided by their hopes rather than by ordinary good sense, and fancies himself a practical man. He ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... sea-power, and peoples who, like the Russians and Chinese, have neither sea-power nor a sea-folk's blood, never use sea terms in their ordinary talk. They may dress up a landsman and put him on the stage to talk the same sort of twaddle that our own stage sailors talk—all about "shiver my timbers," "hitching his breeches," and "belaying the slack of your jaw." But they do not talk the real sea sense we have learnt from the handy man of whose strange life we know ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... quit the subject. I have put in this chapter on fighting of malice prepense, partly because I want to give you a true picture of what everyday school life was in my time, and not a kid-glove and go-to-meeting-coat picture, and partly because of the cant and twaddle that's talked of boxing and fighting with fists nowadays. Even Thackeray has given in to it; and only a few weeks ago there was some rampant stuff in the Times on the subject, in ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... assimilation, have, in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, been followed by a new generation which seeks to take up a standpoint other than the traditional towards the question of Zion. These new Jews shrug their shoulders at that twaddle which has been the fashion among rabbis and literati for the last hundred years, and which boasts of a "Mission of Jewdom," said to consist in this, that the Jews must live forever in dispersion among the peoples in order ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... was drunk the company braced themselves to the mental work of the afternoon, and although, as a matter of course, a good deal of twaddle was spoken, there was also much that threw light on the subject of ocean telegraphy. One of the leading merchants said, in his opening remarks: "Few of those present, I daresay, are really familiar with ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle? ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there were a great many vulgar suggestions and unpleasant innuendoes. As a dramatic critic said in my hearing a day or two later, when discussing the popular entertainments of London, 'Most of these shows consist of vulgar, brainless twaddle.' Still, the audience laughed and cheered, and when the curtain finally fell, there was a good deal of applause. Certainly the entertainment would be a great contrast to the experiences which the lads who ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... the true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... life, L'enjouement vaut mieux que l'esprit. If I wish to discuss a question of political economy, or of metaphysics, I can go to men; but the art of talking the men of to-day have lost. They either lecture, dispute, or twaddle. A Rabbinical story relates that twelve baskets of chit-chat fell from heaven, and that Eve secured nine while Adam was picking up the other three. Since then, Eve seems to have obtained possession ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Alder man, who was far more dogmatical than courteous in argument. "This is the language of men who have read all sorts of books, but legers. Here have advices from Tongue and Twaddle, of London, which state the nett proceeds of a little adventure, shipped by the brig Moose, that reached the river on the 16th of April, ultimo. The history of the whole transaction can be put in a child's muff—you are a discreet youth, Captain Cornelius; and as to you, Master Seadrift, the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... suddenly find, after their first great success, that they have arrived, by a tortuous and secret path, at being a sort of public man. They are dazzled by contact with the world. They go into society, they make speeches, they write twaddle, they drain their energy, already depleted by creation, in fifty different ways. Now I am strongly of Ruskin's opinion that the duty of the artist is to make himself fit for the best society, and then to abstain from it. Very fortunately ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... her song, till at last I got very tired of it, and on the third evening I broke away from her, saying, "Law, granny how you do twaddle!" upon which she called me a good-for-nothing young blackguard, and felt positively sure that I should be hanged. The consequence was, that granny and I did not part good friends; and I sincerely hoped that ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... upon the floor, and then jumped up from his seat. "I hate all that sort of twaddle about childhood's friends, and you know I do. You'll make me swear that I'll never come into this ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... in, and the storm music rages once more. It is woven into Vanderdecken's magnificent scena (surely the greatest opera scena written up to the year 1842); and then disappears. In its place we get pages of (for Wagner) wearisome twaddle. The reason is obvious. For the purpose of explaining the subsequent movement of the drama there is a lot of conversation which Weber, in the Singspiel, would have left to be spoken, and Mozart would have set to dry recitative. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... to the waterhole, it's cool there, and better fun than listening to an old woman's twaddle. The ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... the Duke of Wellington; and I am putting my good friend to sleep with the flattest prose that ever dropped from an English pen. I wish that it were better; I wish that it were even worse; but it is the most undeniable twaddle. I must go to bed, and invoke the Muses in the morning. At present, I cannot touch one ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... many persons who devote—well, at least, their time to literature, who can hardly be said to have 'a call' in that direction, nor even so much as a whisper. At the same time I will venture to observe, notwithstanding a great deal of high-sounding twaddle talked and written to the contrary, that it is not necessary for a man to feel any miraculous or even extraordinary attraction to this pursuit to succeed in it very tolerably. I remember a now distinguished personage (in another line) who had written a very successful work, expressing his ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... no attention to the innocent twaddle of poor old Katie, though at a less horrible moment it might have served to amuse her. She hurried as fast as her agitation would permit her from the scene of the dreadful tragedy, unconscious how closely this poor murdered girl's fate would be connected with her own future destiny. She gained ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Tragic overture that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle, there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many of the songs ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... possible to push altruism too far, and for Margaret, at her age and with her attractions, to go fooling around with medicine, with the mistaken idea that she was benefiting humanity, was nothing more or leas than damned twaddle. If she wanted to do something why not take up her music seriously. .. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... your own house, so long as you do not attempt to interfere with my plans. Sit up, girl, if you choose, and talk. I am prepared to listen even though your twaddle bores me." ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... she had read—not connecting it however with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, with his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it's all right—it's the usual twaddle!" ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Carlyle thought it "a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle—a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it." She guessed the author was "a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a good many children, and a dog that he has as much ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... had ever been exhibited there. The plan of Mission work was simple, practicable, commended itself to hard-headed men of business. Many came to hear who had been disgusted with the usual sentiment- alism and twaddle, the absence of knowledge of human nature, the amount of conventional prejudice, &c. They were induced to come by friends who represented that this was something quite different, and these men went away convinced in many cases, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... erudition; others still through a slashing sneer at everything that is said ... many with the terrible Russian word YERUNDA: "Fiddlesticks!"—"Fiddlesticks!" they say contemptuously in reply to the warm, sincere, probably truthful but clumsily put word. "But why fiddlesticks?" "Because it's twaddle, nonsense," answer they, shrugging their shoulders; and it is as though they did for a man by hitting him with a stone over the head. There are many more sorts of such people, bearing the bell at the head of the meek, the shy, the nobly modest, and often even the big minds; ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... surrounded by a circle of admirers—men and women—an oasis of intelligence, it seemed to him as he listened, in a desert of twaddle. She smiled at him with her eyes, as he looked at her through the press, and just as he had won to a place by her side, the tide was sent flooding into a large room where, it was announced, Professor Blatherwick and Madame le Claire were ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... keen on dinner invitations. And because he was a son of Vondeplosshe the same family friends endured his conceited twaddle and his knock-kneed, wicked little self, and sighed with relief when he went away. It would be so much easier to send these dethroned sons of rich men a supply of groceries ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... more wisely and sensibly than their friends report them to do, I put them in the same category. The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance. [(Quoted from a review in the "Daily News," October 17, 1871, of the Report on Spiritualism of the Committee of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... "What mean you by preaching so much about faith and Christ? Are the people thereby made better? Surely works are essential." Arguments of this character have indeed a semblance of merit, but, when examined by the light of truth, are mere empty, worthless twaddle. For if deeds, or works, are to be considered, there are the Ten Commandments; we teach and practice these as well as they. The Commandments would answer the purpose indeed—if one could preach them so effectively as to compel ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... back in his cab and smoked his cigar he cursed vigorously. "Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... under such circumstances? What, indeed, but retire into the country? A man may shine there long after he is voted a bore in town, provided none of his old friends are there to proclaim him. Country people are tolerant of twaddle, and slow of finding things out for themselves. Puff now turned his attention to the country, or rather to the advertisements of estates for sale, and immortal George Robins soon fitted him with one of his earthly paradises; a mansion ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... wholly in hygienic regulations with little respect for physiology, or lavishly advertises with hygienic prefixes, we may at once consider it a display, not of genuine scientific knowledge, but only of the ignorance of a quack. Some of the modern twaddle about health is a conglomeration of the poorest kind of trash, expressing and inculcating more errors and whims than it does common sense. Many persons dilate upon these subjects with amazing flippancy, their mission seeming to be to traduce the profession rather than to act as help-mates ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... condition, about other people's affairs, they are over anxious. Every nice piece of gossip stops at their door, and they fatten and luxuriate in the endless round of the great world of tittle-tattle. They invite and sumptuously entertain at their house Colonel Twaddle and Esquire Chitchat and Governor Smalltalk. Whoever hath an innuendo, whoever hath a scandal, whoever hath a valuable secret, let him come ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... to review it, I hope. I have had a sniff of it already in the proceedings of the Antiquarian Society. It is a brilliant specimen of the pedantic pottering of the learned body which enables me to append to my name the A.S.S., fraudulently inverted into S.S.A. Such twaddle always excites me into feverishness. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Guiteau" was spelled, Who threatened to materialize before me. I rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don't you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me What it is ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... it is of these details and personalities. And the more interested I am in the thing itself, the more angry I am with the nonsense they talk about it, and had rather listen to the most humdrum domestic twaddle. Mind, I mean the regular hardened lady politicians who talk of nothing else, of whom I could ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... said Murray, fidgeting. "She has been very patient and kind of an evening in listening to me, though I am afraid I have often bored her terribly with my long-winded twaddle about ornithology and botany." ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... I?... Very unpleasant, no doubt, but I rather fancy it will affect more important people than you. There is no use whining about it.... No, I couldn't possibly. You must take your chance.... That's enough, sir. Nonsense! I have something more important to do than to listen to such twaddle." ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... began to laugh. "So she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me, and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement! Yet if upon mature deliberation—eh, oh, yes! twaddle! and commonplace! and dashed, of course, with a jigger ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the Faculty at Siwash, like all other Faculties, didn't know its place. It wasn't satisfied with teaching us Greek and Latin and Evidences of Christianity and tall-brow twaddle of all sorts. It had to butt into our athletics and regulate them. Did you ever see a farmer regulate a weed patch with a hoe? You know how unhealthy it is for the weeds. Well, that was the way the Faculty regulated ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... ne'er had prayed To have an earless head. Since she did not, Bear me, ye whirlwinds, to some favored spot— Some mountain pinnacle that sleeps in air So delicately, mercifully rare That when the fellow climbs that giddy hill, As, for my sins, I know at last he will, To utter twaddle in that void inane His soundless organ he will play ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... This is by the beautiful method of rock-crystal prisms, not the Rochon method of double-image, but by thin wedges cut to given angles. I have told Mr. Alvan Clark my "experiences." and I hope he will apply his excellent mind to the scheme. I am insisting upon this point in some astronomical twaddle which I am now printing, and of which I shall soon have to request ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... game once this year, and the beef is far from good," sighed old gentleman No. 2; "but we will continue to endure our hardships for months, or for years if need be, rather than allow the Prussians to enter Paris." This sort of Lacedemonian twaddle went on during the whole time of my visit, and my cousin evidently was proud of being surrounded by such Spartans. I give a specimen of it, as I think these worthies ought to be gratified by their heroic ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... moulding the next generation. It will not, I think, be amiss to pass beyond policy for a space, and to insist—even with heaviness—that however convenient an institution may be, however much it may, in the twaddle of the time, be a "natural growth," and however much the "product of a long evolution," yet, if it does not mould men into fine and vigorous forms, it has to be destroyed. We "save the state" for the sake of our children, that, at least, is the New Republican view of the matter, and if ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... laugh at my dreams as you may, to me my dream-life is far more attractive and beautiful than what you term Life. Forgive me if I hurt you, cousin. I'm peculiarly constituted, perhaps, but I don't like this twaddle, and I can't help it! Everything in England is so beautiful, and yet its society seems so—so hopelessly unsatisfactory to one who longs ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... practice I recommend. Few accomplishments are more rare, though few more desirable, than that of reading aloud with ease and grace. Great are the sufferings inflicted on a sensitive ear by listening to one's favourite passages, touching in pathos, or glorious in sublimity, travestied into twaddle by the false taste or the want of practice of the reader. For it is not always from false taste that the species of reading above complained of proceeds; on the contrary, there may be a very correct perception of the writer's meaning and object, while from want of practice, from mere mechanical ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... voluminous romances were their code; and it is supposed these tomes preserve some of their lengthened conversaziones. In the novel system of gallantry of this great inventor of amorous and metaphysical "twaddle," the ladies were to be approached as beings nothing short of celestial paragons; they were addressed in a language not to be found in any dictionary but their own, and their habits were more fantastic than their language: a sort of domestic chivalry ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... power to prevent an absolute effusion of lead. He was a great hand at an apology, and could regulate its proper degree of indifference or abjectness to the exact state of the case; he could make it almost satisfactory to the receiver, without being very disagreeable to the giver; he could twaddle about honour for ever without causing bloodshed; and would, if possible, protect a man's reputation and body at ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... humbug you are"—he gave the dead man words—"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle. But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and no worse than I was. You are exactly ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... a very accomplished and clever writer. Her criticisms on subjects relating to art, and especially her original and sparkling remarks on painting and architecture, although qualified by Mr Boas as twaddle, stamp her at once as a woman of no common order. She has profound and poetical conceptions of Beauty, and at times a felicity of expression in presenting the effects of nature and art upon her own mind, that strikes and startles by its novelty and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... must wash his hands of every law or prejudice that dooms woman to an inferior position, and makes her the victim of miserable wages and fatal competitions with herself. It means that he must clear himself of this senseless twaddle about "woman's sphere," a matter surely no more for his legislation, than his "sphere" is for hers; and one upon which, at this stage of their experience, it is unbecoming in either to dogmatize; and it means that as a simple act of justice, he must resign ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... favor. Impatient at Gibbon's occupying so much of her attention by his conversation, the doctor said crossly to him, "Quand milady Elizabeth Foster sera malade de vos fadaises, je la guerirai." [When my Lady Elizabeth Foster is made ill by your twaddle, I will cure her.] On which Gibbon, drawing himself up grandly, and looking disdainfully at the physician, replied, "Quand milady Elizabeth Foster sera morte de vos recettes, je l'im-mor-taliserai." [When my Lady Elizabeth Foster is dead from your ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... children, these children and roadside arabs, for the want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, and fear. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... hairy, sly face. "Those blasted nationalists," he growled; "they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks' heads, and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and their military tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when their war does come they say ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... to the point. I'm glad to see that you are not so foolish as most lads in your situation. Why should not a man talk as wisely about a partnership of this kind as of any other? I do declare that these rhapsodies, this highblown, high-flown, sentimental twaddle is nauseating." ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... the fierce monosyllable. "All that lot—the poor devils you despise—are mostly made from the wrong sort of both races—in point of breeding, I mean. And that's a supreme point, in spite of the twaddle that's talked about equality. Women of good family, East or West, don't intermarry much. And quite right too. I'm proud of my share of India. But I think, on ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Street by half-past nine. He rather expected to see old Grogan on the platform, and was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by his absence. On the one hand, he could hardly have borne Grogan's twaddle on the journey to Tilbury, his mind being engrossed as it was. On the other, he looked to him to cover ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... Europe by McKinley to talk a little twaddle about international bi-metallism has completed its alleged labors, and the net product is nothing—just as the people knew it would be when saddled with the expense of this high-fly junketing trip to enable the administration ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... twaddle for him," he had said in reply to Ethelyn's questions as to whether he would like to see what Aunt Van ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ''). Also called 'squiggle', 'sqiggle' (sic — pronounced /skig'l/), and 'twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also {shotgun debugging}). 3. /vt./ To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... to Sidonia, who dashed it away, crying—"Stuff! nonsense! you have learned all this twaddle from the priest, who, I know, is nephew to the shoe-maker in Daber, and therefore hates any one who is ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... deeds the truth and honesty of their convictions. They had trusted the North until trusting had ceased to be a virtue. They wished peace, but feared not war. All this idle talk, so common since the war, of a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight" is the merest twaddle ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... and looked hard at us. His eyes were as keen as frost; but they twinkled—just a little, as I have discovered they can and do twinkle if one isn't afraid to say right out what one means, without unnecessary fuss and twaddle. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... fall on your estate instead of on your enemy; and you would be here eighteen months instead of eight or ten days. No, Sir Charles, you can't mix champagne and ditch-water; you can't make Invention row in a boat with Antique Twaddle, and you mustn't ask me to fight your battle with a blunt knife, when I have got a sharp knife that ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... by looking on these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things that they hold dear—canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle—are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. Their tongues are ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... creatures as Raeburn had no business to have daughters. No doubt she would stand it very well anything, you know, for a little notoriety. Such people lived for notoriety. Of course the papers had put in a lot of twaddle that he had said on his death bed 'always had tried to work entirely for the good of humanity,' and that sort of nonsense. This coffee ice is excellent. Let me get you another," after which the subject would be dropped, and the speakers would return ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... misfortune behind, as I understand it. Just coincidence; but you couldn't drive that into an Oriental skull. This is what makes the study of precious stones so interesting. There is always some enchantment, some evil spell. To handle the drums is to invite a minor accident. Call it twaddle; probably is; and yet I have reason to believe that ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... exceedingly. Greece we shall omit, because to talk of the arts, and Phidias, and Pericles, and 'all that,' is the surest way yet discovered by man for tempting a vindictive succession of kicks. Exposed to the world, no author of such twaddle could long evade assassination. But Rome is entitled to some separate notice, even after all that has been written about her. And the more so in this case, because Mr. Finlay has scarcely done her justice. He says: 'The Romans were a tribe of warriors. All their ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the one can be accepted, or the other is required. This contemptuous neglect arises from two causes, first because it is out of place, and secondly because it too often contains a great deal of twaddle. Unfortunately, one half of what is said in this world is unmeaning compliment. A man who wishes to mark his respect for you, among other inconvenient methods of shewing it, offers to accompany you to the Hall. You are in consequence arrested in your progress. You are compelled ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... "Celestial twaddle, sir!" cried Mr. Obstinate hoarsely. "He went stark, staring mad, and now is dust, as we shall soon all be, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... appeal for the marsupial martyr Is based upon an ancient nursery model; But he will find that he has caught a Tartar, Who hints that Punch is talking heartless twaddle. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... he cared little for Voltaire and Rousseau, and was unmoved even by Diderot, whose so greatly praised Salons he found strangely saturated with moralizing twaddle and futility; in his hatred toward all this balderdash, he limited himself almost exclusively to the reading of Christian eloquence, to the books of Bourdaloue and Bossuet whose sonorously embellished periods were imposing; but, still more, he ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Then he asked me all about you heretics, and he told me you were all going to—be burned up, as soon as you died; for the Inquisition couldn't do it for you in these degenerate days. After a great deal more twaddle like this, I asked him why you heretics all had such hard names, that we others never could speak them? Then he looked mysterious, so! [here Miss Rita diabolically winked one eye,] and said he: 'I will tell ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... is all right now," said Arthur, congratulating himself. "Graeme has too much sense to be put about by mamma's twaddle, and there is no fear as far as Fanny ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... say of him that he is an optimist, but this is not true. He is cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy of courage and endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained to speak of life as "all good" when he knows of inherited disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... though wicked in intention, were simple and superficial dealers in big words. In the literary application the same sturdy common sense was opposed to the Pope tradition so far as that tradition opposed common sense. Conventional diction, pastorals, and twaddle about Nature belonged to the nonsensical side. He entirely sympathised with Crabbe's substitution of the real living brutish clown for the unreal swain of Arcadia; that is, for developing poetry by making it thoroughly realistic even at the cost of ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... and 34,000 kindred hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... and the difficulty of getting a suitable governess for her little boy. She said she objected to meeting people "one would not care to invite to one's house." She swamped me with tea and ruled the conversation, so that Dunstone and I, who were once old friends, talked civil twaddle for the space of one hour—theatres, concerts, and assemblies chiefly—and then parted again. The furniture had all been altered—there were two "cosy nooks" in the room after the recipe in the Born ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... from criticising a lady's novel: her English might be faulty, but we said to ourselves her motives are irreproachable; her imagination may be uninventive, but her patience is untiring. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears. But no! This theory of ours, like many other pretty theories, has had to give way before observation. Women's silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally different circumstances. The fair ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... record of his life, but, upon some basis of hints and vague traditions, improves the actual Cyrus into an ideal fiction of a sovereign and a military conqueror, as he ought to be. One thing only we shall say of this work, though no admirers ourselves of the twaddle which Xenophon elsewhere gives us as philosophic memorabilia, that the episode of Abradates and Panthea (especially the behaviour of Panthea after the death of her beloved hero, and the incident of the dead man's hand coming away on Cyrus ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe of the infinite! I'm not such a fool. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... your fancy, and, in addition to keeping your journal, keep it locked up, for it is quite enough to endure all the children's twaddle, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... spent there with musical performances. But here, too, the old leaven of Oxford burst forth sometimes. Of course, we generally performed the music of Handel and other classical authors; Mendelssohn's compositions were still considered as mere twaddle by some of the old school. At one of these evenings, the old organist of New College, with his wooden leg, after sitting through a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I was conducting at the pianoforte, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... wanting. But she knew her subject, which was Herself—her experiences, her reminiscences: and bad sense enough to stick to it. Until the moment when she took "the liberty of chipping in," to use her own expression, the amount of twaddle talked had been appalling. The bishop had told us all he had learnt about China during a visit to San Francisco, while the man who had spent the last twenty years of his life in the country was busy explaining his views on the subject ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... God's sake, drop that bib-and-tucker twaddle! Couldn't help it! Every scoundrel, too weak to face the consequences of his sin, says he couldn't help it. So help me, Joseph, I'd like to thrash you. Couldn't help it! Now, sit up in your chair, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... our own immediate advantage instinctively; that is, with a natural childish selfishness; and when any question of our justification arose, we found it easy to silence it with any sort of plausible twaddle (provided it flattered us, and did not imply any trouble or sacrifice) provided by our curates at L70 a year, or our journalists at a penny a line, or commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded, and not only lost all intellectual ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... fingers impatiently at this ill-timed twaddle. Sylvia was too nervous just then for sentiment. "Come here, Poppet," he said, "and look through this door. You can see them from here, and if you do not recognize any of them, I can't see what is the use of putting you in the box; though, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... boys should learn from original, intellectually keen men than they should learn from perfectly respectable men, or perfectly orthodox men, or perfectly nice men. The vital thing to consider about your son's schoolmaster is whether he talked lifeless twaddle yesterday by way of a lesson, and not whether he loved unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he doubted the Apostles' Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any disgraceful thing like that, so many years ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... whom have we to take their place?" It is not until an age has receded into history, and all its mediocrity has dropped away from it, that we can see it as it is—as a group of men of genius. We forget the immense amount of twaddle that the great epochs produced. The total amount of fine literature created in a given period of time differs from epoch to epoch, but it does not differ much. And we may be perfectly sure that our own age will make ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... course, in a sense, you are right. I am an old woman, and the twaddle of a London drawing-room would fall strangely upon my ears now, but I had my share of it before Arthur was born. If I were a man, I should want variety,—a little sauce,—and you are right to seek for it. And now, won't you go and have a bath, and change ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dining-room at Hunsden Wood, where a singular insight was given of the sentiments entertained by resolute minds respecting old northern despotisms, and old southern superstitions: also, I have heard much twaddle, enounced chiefly in French and Deutsch, but let that pass. Hunsden himself tolerated the drivelling theorists; with the practical men he seemed ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... remind one of a sentient world. Perhaps the author and his Indian guides occasionally exchanged a word, or the two white companions and himself indulged in a laugh that started the rattling echoes of the hills, but there was no chatter, no twaddle, no dissensions. The narrative reads like a story. Reading it, one longs to start for LAKE GLAZIER to-morrow, and thence descending, halt not in his long course until his faithful canoe slips out into the waters of the Southern Gulf, three thousand miles ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... starch, or crinoline, or even the protection of pleats and gathers; and insult good, sound, wholesome common sense with the sickening affectations they are pleased to call 'aesthetics.' Don't waste your time, and dilute your own mind by quoting the silly twaddle of a poor girl who was turned loose too early on society, who falls on her knees in ecstasies before a hideous broken-nose tea-pot from some filthy hovel in Japan; and who would not dare to admire the loveliest bit of Oiron pottery, or precious old ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpass! Data! facts that say, "Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a world is no world for a philosopher to have to do ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... William Morris: 'Marriage under existing conditions is absurd. The family, about which so much twaddle is talked, is hateful. A new development of the family will take place, as the basis not of a predetermined lifelong business arrangement to be formally held to irrespective of conditions, but on mutual inclination and affection, an ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... you would tell me what is the "twaddle about my marrying, etc.," which you hear. If I knew the details I should have a better chance of guessing the quarter from which such gossip comes—as it is, I am quite at a loss. Whom am I to marry? I think I have scarcely seen a ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... with every kind of cheap, second-rate matter. I am very fond of him. There are innumerable characters that he has created which symbolize vices, virtues, follies, and the like almost as well as the characters in Bunyan; and therefore I think the wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. Of course one fundamental difference between Thackeray and Dickens is that Thackeray was a gentleman and Dickens was not. But a man might do some mighty good work and not be a gentleman ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... that's enough," said Bernard, his features relaxing into a broad grin. "I may be planked down in a country village for the rest of my very unnatural life, but I'll be shot if I'll regulate mine or my wife'& behaviour by the twaddle they talk! I'll have that dagger." Slipping it slowly into its sheath he watched it travel home, the supple female curve gliding and yielding as a woman yields to a man's caress. "Voluptuous, I call it. Under ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... that relating to Moulin, the Frenchman. Three, indeed, of the members, (Messrs. Voorhees, of Indiana, Potter, of New York, and Peters, of Maine,) said it was a shame and disgrace that such ridiculous and monstrous twaddle should be listened to for a moment; but a majority considered it their duty, under the order of reference, to hear the matter patiently. They had, therefore, allowed Hastings the widest latitude and listened to everything that ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... was founded, that real education was impossible for anybody. The whole theory of their so-called education was that it was necessary to shove a little information into a child, even if it were by means of torture, and accompanied by twaddle which it was well known was of no use, or else he would lack information lifelong: the hurry of poverty forbade anything else. All that is past; we are no longer hurried, and the information lies ready to each one's hand when his own inclinations impel him to ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... were enforced. The question is full of difficulties. To prevent or attempt to prevent the owner of a garden from shooting the bullfinches or blackbirds and so on that steal his fruit, or destroy his buds, is absurd. It is equally absurd to fine—what twaddle!—a lad for taking a bird's egg. The only point upon which I am fully clear is that the birdcatcher who takes birds on land not his own or in his occupation, on public property, as roads, wastes, commons, and so forth, ought to be rigidly put down. But as for the small ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... a pinch, but are wholly out of place here. The slavery that Lessing had really taken on him was that of a great library, an Alcina that could always too easily witch him away from the more serious duty of his genius. That a mind like his could be buried in a corner is mere twaddle, and of a kind that has done great wrong to the dignity of letters. Where-ever Lessing sat, was the head of the table. That he suffered at Wolfenbuettel is true; but was it nothing to be in love and in debt at the same time, and to ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... know it," returned Lamotte, sulkily. "Vandyck don't seem to realize that I have a prior claim, and that his twaddle, therefore, only serves to render ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch |
