"Idiotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perambulator beside her. I instantly recognized the infant—a popular organism known as "Baby Buckly"—the prodigy of the Greyport Hotel, the pet of its enthusiastic womanhood. Fat and featureless, pink and pincushiony, it was borrowed by gushing maidenhood, exchanged by idiotic maternity, and had grown unctuous and tumefacient under the kisses and embraces of half the hotel. Even in its present repose it looked moist and shiny from ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... middle-aged men laughed so heartily at the faintest indecent allusion that the singers grew broader and broader, and the hateful music-hall songs grew more and more risky as the night grew onward. By the way, can anything be more loathsomely idiotic than the average music-hall ditty, with its refrain and its quaint stringing together of casual filthiness? If I had not wanted to fix a new picture on my mind I should have liked better to be in a ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... him without danger! His going in triumph, where another would have gone in shame and secrecy, was startling and disgusting. He was nearly three months under the most skilful treatment-and returned to the Court with half his nose, his teeth out, and a physiognomy entirely changed, almost idiotic. The King was so much struck by this change, that he recommended the courtiers not to appear to notice it, for fear of afflicting M. de Vendome. That was taking much interest in him assuredly. As, moreover, he had departed in triumph upon this medical expedition, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... in talking to him," said Alice desperately: "he's perfectly idiotic!" And she opened the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... Bevan. They want a certain polish. . . . It was just the same in Gilbert and Sullivan's day. They started writing at a time when the musical stage had reached a terrible depth of inanity. The theatre was given over to burlesques of the most idiotic description. The public was waiting eagerly to welcome something of a higher class. It is just the same today. But the managers will not see it. 'The Rose of America' went up and down Broadway for months, knocking ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... did appeal to me! I almost weakened; if he hadn't been so dictatorial, maybe I should have entirely weakened. I can be enticed step by step, but I WON'T be forced. He said I was a silly, foolish, irrational, quixotic, idiotic, stubborn child (those are a few of his abusive adjectives; the rest escape me), and that I didn't know what was good for me; I ought to let older people judge. We almost quarrelled—I am not sure but that we ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... Priest, and that idiotic parson, Platitude; they have just been set down by one of the coaches, and want a post-chaise to go across the country in; and what do you think? I am to have the driving of them. I have no time to lose, for I must get myself ready; so do ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... wait a moment, and there and then—with the tender imaginative Franciscan atmosphere, as it were, still about them—he delivered a short and vigorous protest in the name of decency, good feeling, and common sense, against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate neighbourhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting together at the back of the room looked at each other with a ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... control to keep my eyes blank, my face devoid of expression. Out of the tail of my eye I saw Foulet smiling, a vague, idiotic smile of sympathy with Fraser's glee. But suddenly the glee died—as suddenly as if a button had snapped off the current. He leaned forward, his ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... unmitigated fool when he wants to as the ordinary, every-day farmer of the veldt. I know Chinamen exceptionally well, I have had an education in the ways of the children of Confucius; but no Chinaman that I have come in contact with could ever imitate the half-idiotic smile, the patient, ox-like placidity of countenance, the meek, religious look of holy resignation to the will of Providence which comes naturally to the ordinary Boer farmer. It is this faculty which made ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... it out some day," said Enid. "I'm determined Patty's name shall be cleared. How any of you can be so idiotic as to connect her with it, I can't imagine. Never mind, Patty dear! We know you better than to believe such rubbish. Don't trouble your head about it, for it simply isn't worth worrying over. Everyone with a spark of sense will agree with me, and I'm sure Miss Harper ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... to vex him. And he asks such odd questions, which I don't see the meaning of at first, like traps. He often tells me he never asks any questions, but he does, indirect ones, all the time. I'm getting afraid of being alone with him. Sometimes I think if I stay much longer at Barford I'm so idiotic he'll get it out of me. Has he ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... to listen. Was it possible that that absurd boy had actually followed her up to the Bartletts' with the intention of going with them on their expedition? Hadn't it been enough for him to come to her party in that idiotic coat, with his shirt-front bulging and his face swollen? Of course she liked him—she liked him immensely; but he had no right to impose upon her kindness, to make a pretext of his interest in Papa ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... less importance than the ragamuffins led by Wat Tyler—so little was I impressed by its magnitude that I went to live at Edenburn. There I laid out a lot of money in rebuilding the house, spending over L2000 in additions. This was most idiotic of me, because I had not counted on the infernal devices of Mr. Gladstone to render Ireland uninhabitable for peaceful and ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... the tears started to his eyes as he explained to me that the capture of the ship would leave him and his frau absolutely penniless in their old age. I endeavoured to soften the blow to him as much as possible by sympathetically murmuring some idiotic platitude about "the fortune of war," but of course it was no good; the poor old fellow simply shook his head and ejaculated—"Ay—the fortune of war! It is all very well for you, young sir, who depend upon war to provide you with a career, to talk like that; but ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Fairy, self-conscious for the first time in the twins' knowledge of her, "I suppose you know it was I who suggested that idiotic little stocking stunt. It was awfully hateful of me, and so I bought you some real silk stockings with my own spending money, and here they are, and you needn't thank me for I never could be fond of myself again until I ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... meet him and slid to a halt with his saucer feet scattering gravel and the idiotic grin on his face. "I mair your retter and you ...
— —And Devious the Line of Duty • Tom Godwin
... torn it!" Tai-y remonstrated laughingly. "But wait and I'll ask him about it! so come along all of you, and I vouch I'll make him abandon that idiotic frame of mind and that ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... let the remembrance of her ruin his future. He had a prospect now of regaining what he had lost when he first met her, and he would be a fool to imperil that prospect by mere foolish sentiment. Moreover, he would leave that wretched whisky alone; it was a weak and idiotic habit to drink as he had been drinking, and the knowledge of it would shock Vera terribly. Men in her world, which was, after all, his own world too, did not do those things. He saw it now. Before the Grimmers came down it had been different. For a time, he had lost all ambition, all sense ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... it's this wretched Nupton who must have made—must be going to make—some idiotic mistake. Look here Soames, you know me better than to suppose that I— After all, the name Max Beerbohm is not at all an uncommon one, and there must be several Enoch Soameses running around, or, rather, Enoch ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... know what it means would place such a powerful weapon in the hands of the lawyer for the defence that I should have to withdraw the charge against Hazel Rath at the next police court proceedings if I did not arrest Nepcote in the meantime. I do not want any dramatic developments—as the idiotic newspapers call it-in my cases. There is a certain amount of public sympathy with ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... said, "don't muddle my brains any more with your idiotic reasonings! Take him along, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... "How idiotic and tiresome it all is," he thought as he awoke and saw the dark windows; for it was evening. "I've had sleep enough, and ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... interest me. The person to whom he alluded was a French boy, whose mental powers had been imperfectly developed from his childhood. The mischief had been aggravated, when he was about thirteen years old, by a serious fright. When he was placed in my asylum, he was not idiotic, and not dangerously mad—it was a case (not to use technical language) of deficient intelligence, tending sometimes toward acts of unreasoning mischief and petty theft, but never approaching to acts of downright violence. My friend was especially interested in the lad—won his ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... not say she was too fond!" Bellegarde exclaimed. "Heaven forbid I should say anything so idiotic. She is not too anything! If I were to say she was ugly, I should not mean she was too ugly. She is fond of pleasing, and if you are pleased she is grateful. If you are not pleased, she lets it pass and thinks the worst neither of you nor ...
— The American • Henry James
... and bless it as it passed; a face to which childhood cleaves instinctively, sure of ready sympathy with its little joys and sorrows; one that would never be disfigured by envy or malice; never grow black with passion, and oh! never, never look senseless, idiotic, and drivelling, as another face on which he looked so often did; but to Harry's fancy, it was like the sky on a calm summer's day, always pure and bright, and always the same. It was brighter and happier and better altogether when, in the fresh morning time, the little lady went tripping ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Jack Penny would not smile, for the effect upon his smooth boyish countenance was to make him look idiotic. When the doctor smiled there was a grave kindly benevolent look in his fine heavily-bearded massive face. When Jimmy smiled it was in a wholesale fashion, which gave you an opportunity of counting his teeth from the incisors right back to those ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... (for in any circumstances he was not surely such a confounded sentimental ass as that), he turned on his heel and went straight home without lingering anywhere. It was hard upon him that he should be such a fool; that he should not be able to restrain himself from making idiotic advances, which he could never follow out, and for a mere impulse place himself at the mercy of fate! But he would not be led by impulse now in turning his back. It should be reason that should be his guide; reason and ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... extinguish what they had deemed but an accidental fire, were now paralyzed into idiotic inaction, at the defiance of the incendiary, thinking him some sudden pirate or fiend dropped ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... I had hoped you would escape the slang habit. It is not a bit more manly than the cigaret or cigar. Some slang phrases, like "you're not in it" or "you're off your trolley" and others, may do in familiar conversation with friends, but "bunches of cold" or "cuts no ice" etc., are simply idiotic. When you write return me again the postal card that I may see what words I misspelled. It still keeps very mild here, but is snowing this morning. Nip and I have had some fine skating —like a mirror for over a mile here in front: but the ice is getting thin. I ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... stood by for three years feeding Europe's hungry and selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them. America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters; the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing—that torture never succeeded, that a reputation ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... faithfulness toward his glorious music. I am a little sensitive, too, about admitting that I like Carlyle and Browning. I suppose this is because I have belonged to a Browning and Carlyle club, where I have heard some of the most idiotic women it was ever my privilege to encounter, express glib sentiments concerning these masters, which in me lay too deep for utterance. It is something like the occasional horror which overpowers me when I think that perhaps I am doomed to go to heaven. If certain ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... she cried. "You've watched for two days and been provoked because that letter didn't come. Now you've got it, there you sit like a mummy and let your mind be so filled with this idiotic drivel that you're not ever reading John Jardine's letter that is to tell you what both of us are crazy ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... but were missed above) may be half saddened, half endeared to some by their own remembrance of the "black-crowned red-boled" giants there celebrated—trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... That's a——! (He controls himself with an effort. His voice trembles.) You're not responsible for the idiotic things you're saying or I'd—— (He turns away, seeking some escape from the old man's tongue.) I'll see if the man is still there with the carriage. (He walks to the door on left ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... with red-hot fire inside, and ready to vomit forth flames and lava at any time appealed to the imagination. This lava, it seemed, was a kind of thick treacly stuff, resembling pitch, which ran down the mountain-sides boiling hot and carried red ruin in its track. It seems nothing less than idiotic for people to live on the slopes of a volcano where such an awful fate might overtake them at any time, yet they not only did so ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... to become a blind groper amid the dark places of the earth, in search of a foe whom it is almost certain death to encounter there, seems perhaps the most idiotic of all the idiotic careers open to those who are idiotic enough to engage in modern warfare. However, many of us are as much at home below ground as above it. In most peaceful times we were accustomed to spend eight hours a day there, lying up against the ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... a gruesomely ugly hearse, with glass sides and cheap imitation ostrich plumes drawn by gorged ravens of horses with egregiously long tails, and driven by an undertaker's assistant, who, with a natural gaiety of soul, displayed an idiotic solemnity by dragging down the corners of the mouth. She ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... great deal; but of that you know nothing, and I'm not going to tell you." And then he could stand it no more. "Do you imagine I should have made you that idiotic promise," he cried, "if I had supposed for a moment that I should still be here when you came to claim it?" And so saying he got up and, diplomatic in retreat, hurried ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... understood their arts and knew how to defeat them. As a general rule, whenever silly tricks or practical jokes are played at a seance, we may infer the presence either of low-class nature-spirits, or of human beings who were of a sufficiently degraded type to find pleasure in such idiotic performances ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... had settled on us seemed more noticeable, during our short leave-taking, than the fleeting good-humour of the last few days. My friends were well aware of the terrible and utterly forlorn condition in which I found myself. I had been idiotic enough to count on the proceeds from the Leipzig concert to provide at least the needs of the moment, and I was, in the first place, put into the awkward position of being unable to pay my landlord ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... like manner men differ in regard to want of sense. Those who are most out of their wits we call 'madmen,' while we term those who are less far gone 'stupid' or 'idiotic,' or, if we prefer gentler language, describe them as 'romantic' or 'simple-minded,' or, again, as 'innocent' or 'inexperienced' or 'foolish.' You may even find other names, if you seek for them; but by all of them lack of sense is intended. They only differ as one art appeared ...
— Alcibiades II • An Imitator of Plato
... prostitutes of our day are less responsible for their crimes against themselves, against society, and against Heaven, than those who were instrumental in bringing them into the world? Almost every village has its boy "who was born drunk," a staggering, simpering, idiotic representative of a drunken father, beastly intoxicated at the very moment when he should have been ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... pathway in life; and if—if, by-and-by, some such fatality as that which had cleared the way for Reginald Palliser, should clear the way for Ida, his wife would be the owner of one of the finest estates in Sussex. He wished no evil to the young baronet, he bore no grudge against him for Ida's idiotic fondness; but the fact remained that the boy's death would make Brian Walford Wendover's wife a rich woman. It is not in the nature of a man living among sharp-witted lawyers and men about town to ignore a fact of this kind. His friends had talked ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... that he should be among those to remain. The excitement was too much for his nerves. As his name was pronounced, he sank down on the deck without uttering a word. Captain Power kindly raised him up. An almost idiotic expression had come over the young officer's countenance, and he scarcely seemed aware of ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... said Vane bending over and patting her neck; "but I s'pose it's only in keeping with everything else these days—it's not fairness that counts; it's just luck—fatuous idiotic luck. It's not even a game; it's a wild-cat gamble all over the world. And may Heaven help us all when the bottom does drop out ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... with a sharp-pointed nose and a pysche knot. The nose bumps out in the front and the wad of hair sticks out in the back with a similarity that is positively convulsing to any one with half an eye for the humorous. It gives one an idiotic longing to take a measuring rule and find out the exact distance from "tip to tip." Another waggish picture is made by the snub-nosed girl with her hair arranged a la Madonna. These long hirsute lamberquins on ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... "System's" chief defender. It really seems as though the game were too small to take time for its killing, but as these weak and febrile maunderings really represent the "System's" reply to my charges, it may be worth while to show, once and for all, what idiotic lies they put forth and what a silly and ineffective falsifier it is that they have made their champion. I shall take the second article of the series and contrast Donohoe's statements with ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... with the utmost resentment the determination of the war to come to Leesville, in spite of all his labours to keep it out. Take the most preposterous thing you could imagine—the most idiotic thing on the face of the earth—take German spies! When Jimmie heard people talking about German spies, he laughed in their faces, he told them they were a bunch of fools, they belonged in the nursery; for Jimmie classed ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... investigate, and the result of his examination was most alarming. Voluntary action over one half the frame quite suspended; what was worse, there was little or no sensation. The poor woman essayed to speak from time to time, but with repulsive contortions, so that her words sounded like idiotic babble. As her husband bent over her, she seized his arm with the hand still ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... could not understand.... He did not believe in the inevitability of passion—the idiotic cult of the romantics. He believed that a man can and must fight with all the force of his will.... His will! Where was it? Not a trace of it was left. He was possessed. He was stung by the barbs of memory, day and night. The scent ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... is in him. His chief reliance is on the "fatal mistakes" made since the last election by the other party. There never was a year in which the party in power and the party out of power did not make bad mistakes—mistakes which, unlike eggs and fish, seem always worst when freshest. If idiotic errors of policy were always fatal, no party would ever win an election and there would be a hope of better government under the benign sway of ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... flesh, and gives expression to his wishes concerning it; when forthwith he is miraculously supplied with a shoulder of mutton or a pair of trousers, according to the nature of his necessities. He encounters ridicule or personal insult, and instantly the blasphemer is struck dead, or idiotic, or dumb, after the example of those who mocked Elisha's bald head; and Wodrow generally winds up these judgments with an appropriate admonitory text, as, for instance, "Touch not His anointed, and do His prophets no harm." As the persons ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the purpose? He sifted rapidly for the gist of the conversation; reviewed the manner of it, the words, the sound they had, the feelings they touched; then owned that the question could not be answered. Owning, further, that the recurrence of these idiotic speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him down as both dull fellow and impertinent, he was unabled to restore Aminta to the queenly place she took above the schoolmaster, who was very soon laughing at his fever or flash of the afternoon. The day ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to be, for the rest of this day, the most unaccommodating young person in the whole world. But beware, Ruth Stuart! The boomerang may return and strike you. Don't dare request me to do you a favor until after the bells chime midnight, when I shall be released from my present idiotic vow." ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... their simplicity. His whole soul seemed to be engrossed by the labour of distributing his grain, and he followed the different movements of the poultry with an earnestness of attention which seemed almost idiotic in its ridiculous intensity. If it be asked, why a person so contemptible as this solitary youth has been introduced with so much care, and described with so much minuteness, it must be answered, that, though destined to form no ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... legal profession I see the same principle of self-sacrifice. In 1846, William Freeman, a pauperized and idiotic negro, was at Auburn, N.Y., on trial for murder. He had slain the entire Van Nest family. The foaming wrath of the community could be kept off him only by armed constables. Who would volunteer to be his counsel? ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... he had been doing. Also, he told himself savagely that if Harry ever crossed his trail again, there would be something doing. This thing of letting a cur like that run roughshod over a man on account of a girl that didn't care was plumb idiotic. And beside him the cattle walked and walked and walked, a dim, moving mass in the quiet ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... for the manner in which Edwin had been shut away from the better class of society and the proper helps that are usually thrown about the young, they at once gave him a low and degraded place in their estimation and pronounced him dull, stupid, and idiotic. All commands were given in a harsh tone and in such a manner that ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... suddenly taken on so hazy an aspect? Why did Handlon grin in that idiotic manner? And the Professor ... he was getting farther and farther away ... that perfecto ... or was it an El Cabbajo? What was the old archfiend doing to him anyhow?... Why was he laughing and leering at them so horribly?... ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... him as he was going to mass (it was Sunday) and I gave him five francs as I gazed at him anxiously. He began to laugh in an idiotic manner, took the money, and then, embarrassed afresh at my gaze, he ran off, after stammering an almost inarticulate word that, no ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... life should be allowed to pass without conception taking place. A child begotten in an intoxicated or depraved condition of a parent may be depraved itself in the same way, and is apt to be feeble-minded or idiotic. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... "How idiotic," said Robert, lying flat on the floor and putting one eye to the lead-hole. "Of course the holes go straight down into the gate-house—that's for when the enemy has got past the door and the portcullis, and almost all is lost. Here, hand me the pot." He crawled on ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... "To give up this idiotic motor tour," said Kew. "And go back to London, and talk Jay out of her 'bus-ism. I want her to leave it off, and let the Family discover her romantically enjoying some passable imitation of her Secret World. ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... I was mismanaging this thing in the most idiotic way. Instead of this bovine silence, gay small-talk, the easy eloquence, in fact, of the brisk man of affairs should have been my policy. No wonder Smooth Sam Fisher treated me as a child. My whole bearing was that of a ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... could view without anxiety. All the time that the army was operating on the Atbara it drew its supplies from the fort at the confluence. Between this and the camp, convoys, protected only by a handful of Camel Corps, passed once in every four days. Only the idiotic apathy of the Dervishes allowed the communications to remain uninterrupted. Mahmud was strong in cavalry. It will be evident to anyone who looks at the map how easily a force might have moved along the left bank to attack the convoys. Such ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... said that I was like Connie Esdaile, I should embrace you before the assembled company; and if you said she was like me, she'd never forgive you as long as she lived. It is through reasoning out things in this way that men make such idiotic mistakes." ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... far as possible the prime movers in the intrigue which pointed to Colonel Mashin and a gang of officers of the Sixth Regiment. All these regicides received Russian pay, for King Alexander had become dangerous to Russia, because of his flirting with Austria. Besides, his own idiotic behavior and the flagrant indiscretions of Queen Draga had by no means ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... the law or medicine take special studies; those preparing for athletic contests take special training. If they did not, they would be idiotic. Those who are preparing for marriage should not leave success to chance. For, while happiness is sometimes dependent on luck, in the majority of instances it is not; happiness usually ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... as hapless individuals of this idiotic community have to do is to secretly evade its ridiculous conventions when they don't suit us, and to make the most of them ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... chap. I was in school three years with him and in some ways he was absolutely idiotic. For a while he'd work all right and then without a word of warning he'd break out and do some of the most absolutely fool ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... toward the stairs, and now stared round-eyed at the music-room doorway, his absurd little nostrils sniffing the air. Then, deliberately, Simon Cameron walked to the doorway and sat down there, his huge furry tail curled around round him, staring with idiotic ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... Alyona Ivanovna, whom Raskolnikov had visited the previous day to pawn his watch and make his experiment.... He already knew all about Lizaveta and she knew him a little too. She was a single woman of about thirty-five, tall, clumsy, timid, submissive and almost idiotic. She was a complete slave and went in fear and trembling of her sister, who made her work day and night, and even beat her. She was standing with a bundle before the huckster and his wife, listening earnestly and doubtfully. They were talking ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... I fear that I cannot make this one very long for the simple reason that I am feeling serious. Moods are like dresses. Some of them do not suit me at all. Seriousness not only spoils me, it makes me absolutely idiotic. Most people I know, however, prefer me like that because then I express my agreement with their opinions so very readily. But to be serious. I don't quite understand what you are going to do at Dover. Still, I am glad you've gone, for I'm dying to know what her sisters are like. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... I'm disgusted. This has been the most idiotic thing I've ever done, and if you say the word we'll get out of here on the first train—freight or passenger. The Guggenslockers—pigs!" ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... new species, sir," said the Doctor indignantly; "and if I do employ the hunters to collect for me, I see no inconsistency in that. But I consider this fly-fishing mania just of a piece with your IDIOTIC, I repeat it, IDIOTIC institution of fox-hunting. Why, if you laid baits poisoned with NUX VOMICA about the haunts of those animals, you would get rid of ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... but before Karenin, Charles Bovary was despised by Emma because of his clumsy feet and inexpressive bearing, and his habit of breathing heavily during dinner. George Tesman with his purblind faculties, amiable ways, and semi-idiotic exclamations will go down in the history of fiction with Georges Dandin, Bovary, and Karenin. As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is hermetically ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... more toast dice!' Sophia said to Farnborough. 'You haven't seen Joey's new accomplishment. They're only discussing that idiotic scene the women made the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... is progressive; if an infant was suddenly to arrive at manhood, how idiotic and dangerous he would be! A long training is essential to fit the human being for the important duties of life; and just so is it in the new birth to spiritual existence—first a babe, then the young man; at length the full stature, and at ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... curtin, and they couldn't see it, and she thought it was me. She looked at Ma as though she was wondering why she didn't hit me with a poker, but she went on, and Polly said 'wipe off your chin,' and then the lady got through and got up, and told Ma it must be a great trial to have an idiotic child, and then Ma she was mad, and said it wasn't half so bad as it was to be a kleptomaniac, and then the woman got up and said she wouldn't stay no longer, and Pa said to me to take that parrot outdoors, and that seemed to make them all ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... specimen of a healthy human being as I've ever seen.' And that was that." Parks laughed bitterly. "I guess I was supposed to be happy with the verdict, and instead I was ready to knock him down. It was idiotic, it ...
— Circus • Alan Edward Nourse
... it out at her leisure, to the last link of the chain, the way their prettiness had set them trap after trap, all along—had foredoomed them to awful ineptitude. When you were as pretty as that you could, by the whole idiotic consensus, be nothing but pretty; and when you were nothing "but" pretty you could get into nothing but tight places, out of which you could then scramble by nothing but masses of fibs. And there was no one, all the while, who wasn't ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... idea it was," Salgath Trod snapped. "The whole thing is idiotic, and I won't have ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... turned to his writing till the door closed on Bodine, and then he smiled and rubbed his hands in self-felicitation. "This is better than I had hoped," he said. "I've often laughed at the idiotic pride of these black-blooded, rather than blue-blooded, fire-eaters, but I ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... that hoax statement of Whitburn's, that's a lot of idiotic drivel!" he said angrily. "I heard some of those boys on the telecast, last night; except for a few details in which they were confused, they all stated exactly what they heard me say in class ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... but to us lookers-on its murmurs are but fooleries, its sighs are ludicrous, and its written words absolute imbecilities; and never a memory of our own lost lives can make the spectacle of it in others anything but an irritating and idiotic exhibition. ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... of the probable replies that the Jinnee would meet with in the course of his inquiries. "I'm afraid he won't be particularly impressed by the politeness of a London crowd," he thought; "but at least they'll convince him that I am not exactly a prominent citizen. Then he'll give up this idiotic match of his—I don't know, though. He's such a pig-headed old fool that he may stick to it all the same. I may find myself encumbered with a Jinneeyeh bride several centuries my senior before I know where I am. No, I forget; there's the jealous ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Philomela—who had no hypocritical concealment about her, thank heaven! and always told people what she thought of them—pronounced the first of those luxuries "trash," the second "disgusting," and the other two "idiotic," he met her candid criticisms with a pleasant laugh, and said that, at any rate, they hurt ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... give themselves such beastly airs, and will not talk to us?" Tribolo kept begging me to hold my tongue, while Lamentone told them that we had not the same permission as he had. Benintendi retorted it was idiotic nonsense, adding "Pox take them," and other pretty flowers of speech. Then I raised my head as gently as I could, and said: "Dear gentlemen, you are able to do us serious injury, while we cannot render you any assistance; and though you have flung words at ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... sprang up, found himself actually shaking hands and mumbling something futile and idiotic. Then he was drawn to the horror of horrors, and the door shut ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. He shut himself up in his room, all day long, day after day, devouring one book after another, until he became almost idiotic by the process, and he finally died of softening of the brain. Had he been compelled to use his mental acquisitions in earning his bread, or had the love of Christ constrained him to use them in the instruction of the poor and the ignorant, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... had been bestowed on the crazy quilts and the medley pictures—what extraordinarily idiotic inventions!—and Miss Saunders was tearing down her sketches in the next section. One of them slipped through on the floor, and they came round after ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... one must keep one's temper in this madhouse. I need only insist here that these things, even if a just deprivation, are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old vetoes and punishments were often idiotic and cruel; though they are much more so in a country like England (where in practice only a rich man decrees the punishment and only a poor man receives it) than in countries with a clearer popular tradition—such as Russia. In Russia flogging is often inflicted by peasants on a peasant. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... idiotic? Then Cotton Mather was a greater man than Johann Sebastian Bach. Then the average college critic of the arts, with his balderdash about inspiration and moral purpose, is greater than Georg Brandes or Saint-Beuve. ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... of Lords to alter the Budget to please them, or that we should make a bargain with them that if they pass the Budget we should seek a dissolution in January. Why should we make a bargain with the House of Lords? Every one of those rumours is more silly, more idiotic, than the other. I wish our Conservative friends would face the facts of the situation. "Things are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be." The House of Lords has no scrap of right to interfere in finance. If they do, ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... hospitality and the care of the feeble-minded. Lady Blemley replied that your lack of brain-power was the precise quality which had earned you your invitation, as you were the only person she could think of who might be idiotic enough to buy their old car. You know, the one they call 'The Envy of Sisyphus,' because it goes quite nicely ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... enjoy your lives much longer if you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don't set the office on fire," I said, "and go away ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... agony of mortified embarrassment. "Don'ts" were quite useless and I could think of nothing else to say except "Compose yourself" and that, somehow or other, was too ridiculously reminiscent of Mr. Pickwick and Mrs. Bardell. It was an idiotic situation for me to be in. Some men—men of experience with woman-kind—might have known how to handle it, but I had had no such experience. It was all my fault, of course; I should not have mentioned her father. But how was ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... something in a lower key; at least I thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this place is idiotic unless one is perfectly happy; and that then ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... views. He stands by you. He hears all your inquiries and all the clerk's suggestions. The whole process of your reasoning is visible to his naked eye. He sees the sack, or visite, or cape put upon your shoulders and you walking off in it, and when you are half-way home, he will mutter, in idiotic amazement, "I thought you were going to buy a shawl!" It is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... not be surprising if the Chan Santa Cruz sentinels had seen that idiotic Jake, and followed him in order to learn where we were hiding," he said when Neal asked why they had left the ravine during the hottest portion of the day. "If the Indians should besiege us here, it would only be a few hours ...
— The Search for the Silver City - A Tale of Adventure in Yucatan • James Otis
... bards are sometimes rather free With feminine anatomy; Their catalogues erotic Of pretty girls' peculiar "points," Their eyes and limbs, and curves and joints, Are often idiotic. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 13, 1893 • Various
... speaking I cannot be called an old woman yet—but despite my being stupid and a 'goose,' I have always been wiser than you, and I know which side one's bread is buttered on. Bless me! And is there anything more idiotic than that you, the father of the best son in the world, should sit here alone, fretting yourself yellow and lean until from a stately looking man you grow to be a scarecrow, when one word from you would bring your only child back again and with him the wife and sweet grandchild, that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... herself to many utterances as idiotic as Ernest's, and Mary secretly wondered to find how shadowy and ridiculous such solid people showed in a strange land. They carried their ignorance and their parochial atmosphere with them as openly and unashamedly as they carried their luggage. She was not sorry to leave them, ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... drunkenness prevailed in the more remote ancestors. The following was the fate of the children: eight died shortly after birth of general weakness, seven died of convulsions in the first month, three were malformed, three were idiotic, three were feeble-minded, three were dwarfs, three were epileptics, two were normal. In a second group of three families there were twenty children. The fathers were drunkards, but their immediate ancestors were free: four children ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... Hogan that was with me was a kind of a harmless critter, and he didn't know jest where he was going, nor why. He was mostly scared of things, and if you spoke to him quick he shivered first and then grinned idiotic so you wouldn't kick him, and when he talked he had a silly little giggle. He had been made that-a-way in a reform school where they took him young and tried to work the cussedness out'n him by batting him around. They worked it out, and purty nigh everything ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... while all who had in any way befriended Alexius were impaled, broken on the wheel and otherwise lingeringly done to death. All this was done to terrorize the reactionaries and isolate the tsarevich. In April 1718 fresh confessions were extorted from Alexius, now utterly broken and half idiotic with fright. Yet even now there were no actual facts to go upon. Alexius' "evil designs'' were still in foro conscientiae, and had not been, perhaps never would be, translated into practice. The worst that could be brought against him was that he had wished his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... into a loud laugh. "What a blockhead you are, to be sure!" he shouted, slapping his thighs. "Good heavens, was there ever such an idiotic person! Don't stare at me so stupidly. Come, come, you needn't begin to cry directly. Go and fetch some ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... that the youth of twenty-one would do well to follow me. I did not do all these things. Far from it! I wish I had. I only say that if I were twenty-one, as I now see life, I would do as I have here suggested. But perhaps I would not. I might go about barking my shins and burning my fingers, making idiotic experiments in the endeavour to prove that I was an exception to all the rules, and knew a little more than all the ancients. So let not the young man be discouraged if he has committed follies; for there ...
— 21 • Frank Crane
... remark which Susan considered so simply idiotic, there was, of course, no further conversation between the ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... people so idiotic as to discharge soldiers whose return is dreaded by civilians and whose presence is necessary to the comfort of the Staff? We English adopted a much more intelligent plan for our demobilization. The men were to be classified according to their professions, ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... dress. Teddy retired, left the hotel, and at the opposite pavement engaged a taxicab. He got inside, after instructing the man to be on the alert. He lit a cigarette, telling himself that, by a thousand to one, he had embarked on a futile, idiotic errand. However, within half-an-hour, Bullard appeared in the hotel doorway, and spoke to a braided personage who promptly whistled for a cab. By the time he was on board, the motor of Teddy's cab was running, the chauffeur in ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... the Bantam, ducking his poll. "Noa!" he repeated in a lower note; and then, while a sombre grin betokening idiotic enjoyment of his profound casuistical ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... grouping, the less logical is the mind; and when the proper connection fails to be made between particulars and generals, between facts and their principles, or between parts and their centre, then the mind is in an idiotic or insane condition. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... very fact that he lived in, and was influenced by, such an idiotic set is only proof positive that ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... dropped deeper about him, and within him. There they were dancing, those idiots, dancing on a volcano if ever human beings did, in the little sultry respite from the tornado which was called the world-peace. Well, that was less idiotic than working, at least. How soon before it would break again, the final destructive hurricane, born of nothing but the malignant folly of human hearts, and sweep away all that they now agonized and sweated to keep? What silly weakness to spend the respite in anything but ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... these things than is any one else at the present time. However, I will compromise with you. We can learn much in a month if you will really try, instead of wasting time in fuming around the ship and indulging in these idiotic tantrums. If you will buckle down and really study the problems confronting us for thirty days, we will set out at the end of that time, ready ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... reminding her of her mental weakness and inferiority? And as it has been, so it is. Woman is still believed intellectually inferior to man, by ninety-nine one hundredths of mankind. Poor, weak, silly, drunken, half-idiotic men, whose wives have to support them, will tell you in conscious pride of sex of woman's weakness of mind. I have heard little Lilliputian men, whose minds were as small as a baby's rattle-box, always ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... a boy DANIEL was stupid, but this has been said of so many great men that it's getting stale. Some talented men were undoubtedly stupid boys, but it doesn't follow that every idiotic youth will make an eminent statesman. But there are plenty of vacancies in the statesman business. A great many men go into it, but they fail for want of capital. If they would only stick to their legitimate business of clam-digging, or something of that sort, we should ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... was brought into it, he seemed to recognize the place with his dull big grey eyes, and spoke the first words he had uttered since his capture. "Bread and meat for Monty." "Why," said Tryphena, "it's the ijut boy." "So it is," ejaculated Mrs. Carruthers, "What is your name, Monty?" With an idiotic smile on his face, but no light in those poor eyes, he answered: "Monty Rawn, and mother's in the water place." Mrs. Carruthers explained that the lad had been often in the kitchen in winter, and that she had told Tryphena to feed him well and be kind ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... Bonnot was then captured, fighting to the last. The police reported the finding of Bonnot's will, in which he says: "I am a celebrated man.... Ought I to regret what I have done? Yes, perhaps; but I must live my life. So much the worse for idiotic and imbecile society.... I am not more guilty," he continues, "than the sweaters who exploit poor devils."[12] His final thought, it is said, was for his accomplices, both of whom were women, one his mistress, the other the manager of the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... call his confidence, and then, above all, because he is my husband, instead of you! I feel him between us, although he does not interfere with us much. And then?... and then?... No, it is, after all, too idiotic of him not to guess anything! I wish he would at any rate be a little jealous. There are moments when I feel inclined to say to him: 'Do you not see, you stupid creature, that Paul ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the universities, fighting every inch of their way, till they had achieved success as physicians, lawyers, writers. She spoke passionately, often with the absurd acerbity of her mother. "It's a crime for a young man like you to throw himself away on that idiotic Talmud of yours," she said, pacing up and down the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... fine clocks in Remonencq's shop. He sent for his sister, and La Remonencq came on foot all the way from Auvergne to take charge of the shop while her brother was away. A big and very ugly woman, dressed like a Japanese idol, a half-idiotic creature with a vague, staring gaze she would not bate a centime of the prices fixed by her brother. In the intervals of business she did the work of the house, and solved the apparently insoluble problem—how to live on "the mists of the Seine." ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... can go," Cherry added, feverishly, "I shall join Martin. I suppose Alix would think it was perfectly idiotic for me to go now, just when the whole thing can be closed up so quickly, and Martin, too—" her voice trailed away vaguely. She fell silent, her eyes absent and full of pain. Suddenly they widened, as if some pang had suddenly shaken her into consciousness again. ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... It's the same old tune, brother. If even you are a sensualist at heart, what of your brother, Ivan? He's a Karamazov, too. What is at the root of all you Karamazovs is that you're all sensual, grasping and crazy! Your brother Ivan writes theological articles in joke, for some idiotic, unknown motive of his own, though he's an atheist, and he admits it's a fraud himself—that's your brother Ivan. He's trying to get Mitya's betrothed for himself, and I fancy he'll succeed, too. And what's more, it's with ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... why Western sovereigns should permit their subjects to enjoy the same conveniences and amusements as themselves. "If I had a theatre," he said, "I would allow no one to be present at performances except my own children; but these idiotic Christians do not know how ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... prowling dogs; getting up cricket-matches for the edification of contemptuous blacks. "They judge us, those fellows, you know. They are measuring us with their glazed eyes. The cud they chew has gall in it. I don't suppose anything offends them more deeply than our idiotic games. Is there a more frivolous race ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... friend, and mean to help them. I'd rather be flayed alive than say so to a living soul, but I can now confess to these pages that I was jealous of Rachel myself when I first heard of the engagement, and I wondered, if Will had never seen her, if perhaps he—oh, a lot of silly, idiotic things; for he is so different from the other men you meet that you simply can't help liking him. So now it will be a discipline for me to have to forget myself, and try to keep them together. Perhaps when they are married they will know ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... case was aggravated by the Vicar's death—and not only in the eyes of Mrs Orgreave and her falsely stoic husband, but in Edwin's eyes too! Useless for him to argue with himself about idiotic superstitiousness! The death of the Vicar had undoubtedly influenced his ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... darkness about Lee, his army, his movements, and his plans. And all this while the country, the people, is kept officially ignorant of its honor, of its fate. All publicity and communication is suppressed—not to inform thereby the enemy of our movements. How idiotic, how silly! As if the march and the movements of an army of one hundred thousand men could be kept secret from a vigilant and desperate enemy, and the enemy wanted to read the papers for ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... won't wear any jewels—she never will. You see, Chetwode has such a lot of old ones in his family. She says she's afraid, if she did, the Perfect Lady or Home Chirps might say 'Lady Chetwode as usual appeared in the "Chetwode emeralds"'—or something idiotic of that sort." ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... him from earth to provide them with a weapon to destroy earth; kidnapping Sheilah to seduce him; the idea of even expecting him to be able to produce such a weapon—it was all idiotic. ...
— High Dragon Bump • Don Thompson
... if I'd left you for someone else I should have been afraid to tell you? That I should have written an idiotic note like that? . . . How dared you wire to Penelope? It ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... is difficult to persuade him that all is for the best. But he informed me that "Hoot up" had nothing whatever to do with, the night-cries of owls or any other kind of bird, but was in fact the idiotic way in which the natives of this country pronounce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... of Camber's genius, having decided upon murder, must have arranged for an unassailable alibi. Very well. Are we now to leap to the other end of the scale, and to credit him with such utter stupidity as to place hanging evidence where it could not fail to be discovered by the most idiotic policeman? Preserve your balance, Knox. Theories are wild horses. They run away with us. I know that of old, for which very reason I always avoid speculation until I have a solid foundation of fact upon ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... exclamation of despair; and, when he remembered that he was now far beyond the reach of all human solace and sympathy, even all human aid, for a moment his mind seemed to desert him; and he wrung his hands in forlorn and almost idiotic woe. An awful thing it is, the failure of the energies of a master-mind. He who places implicit confidence in his genius will find himself some day utterly defeated and deserted. 'Tis bitter! Every paltry hind seems but to breathe to mock you. Slow, indeed, is such a mind to credit ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... competently and plausibly. But for all that I couldn't make myself greatly interested in the bold bad Marquis DE SARCEY in those anxious two years before "the Terror," with his insufferable pride, his incredible elegance, his fantastic ideas of love and his idiotic marriage, the negotiations for which, with the resulting complications, take up so large a space in a lengthy book. It gives one the impression of being written not "according to plan" but out of a random fancy, with so hurried a pen that not merely have irrelevant incidents, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... make fun of me! Pip, you know what I mean. When you are reading one of those things about Cavalry, by that idiotic Prince—why doesn't he be a Prince instead ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... do him more good than regular interviews with me, to undo all the harm he has received in between from silly, idiotic women, who make him think he is something out of the ordinary. Isn't that so, Baby? Aren't you labouring under the delusion that you're a remarkable fine specimen of humanity? And all the time, Heaven ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... scandal. I haven't any one in view, and living as I do it isn't likely that I shall be tempted by some knightly or idiotic man, who wants to run away with a middle-aged woman and three children. I am anchored safely—at any rate as long as dad lives and your mother, and the children need my good name. Oh!" she broke off suddenly; "don't let us talk ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... polk, With a freedom that none but you masculine folk Ever know. For, however poor woman aspires, She's always bound down to the earth by these wires. Are you listening? Nonsense! don't stare like a spoon, Idiotic; some light thing, and spacious, and soon— Something like—well, in fact—something ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... The slang's changed since—Oh yes, of course; you've succeeded in talking quite nice and 'idiotic.'" ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... Yettugin, his wife Tengaech, and his brother Keuto, slept out of doors in order to give us more room and not to disturb us when rising. Keuto had inherited no small portion of his father's calamity. He was deaf, half idiotic, and on his body there were already traces of such spots as on the old man's. Keuto was however an obliging youth, who during our stay in the tent did all that he could to be of use to us, and constantly wandered about to get buds and plants for us. He was a skilful archer; ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... real recipe for Fame nowadays is to be a pretty girl and exhibit yourself publicly. The modern editor has got it into the paste-brush he calls his head that the public is infinitely greedy for the minutest theatrical details. It is really too idiotic, this fuss over our parrots. If there were only plays for them to talk! The ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... up for the day. How are you, Joe dear? You look pale. It is this beastly heat—you ought to come down to Newport for a month. It is utterly idiotic, you know, staying in town ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... began the process of teaching the deaf to use articulate speech, and all who have followed him in this work have but extended and perfected his methods. While teaching the blind and deaf, Dr. Howe found those who were idiotic; and he began to study this class of persons about 1840, and to devise methods for their education. As a member of the Massachusetts legislature in 1846, he secured the appointment of a commission to investigate the condition of the idiotic; and for this commission ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... had made a clean breast of it? Was it from love to him, or reviving honesty in herself? From neither, he said. Superstition alone was at the root of it. She had been to church, and the preaching of that honest idiotic enthusiast, Wingfold, had terrified her.—Alas! what refuge in her terror had ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... me. One day, on a drive round by Montecito, I asked her. She wouldn't promise: said she liked me as much as ever, and didn't care about any one else, but didn't think she ought to marry me, and so on. I couldn't get her to say why for a long time, but at last it came out. Some one, that idiotic Englishwoman, I suppose, had put it into the dear girl's head that it was her duty not to ally herself with 'a reactionary' (I think that was the word) and in this case that meant poor harmless me. I argued till I must ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... the lamp above his head. As the light swept them, there leaped out from the walls a collection of Tibetan devil-dance masks, hanging above the fiend-embroidered draperies of those ghastly functions—horned masks, scowling masks, and masks of idiotic terror. In a corner, a Japanese warrior, mailed and plumed, menaced him with a halberd, and a score of lances and khandas and kuttars gave back the unsteady gleam. But what interested Kim more than all these things—he had seen devil-dance masks ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... you ever see such idiotic clumsiness!" he ejaculated. And then, in deepest contrition: "I won't attempt to apologize—it's beyond all that. But you must let me ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... looking rather stupidly through the door at the room whence the unearthly visitor had so suddenly disappeared. "Well," continued Isaacs, "you are more nearly right than you imagine. The pundit is a bigger yogi than any your idiotic religion can produce. Never mind, there is an eight anna bit for you, because I said you were asleep when you were not." Narain bent to the ground in thanks, as his master turned on his heel. "Not that he minds being told that he is a pig, ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... have been along the hillside, wondering much at idiotic sheep, and raising partridges at every second step. One little plover is the object of my firm adherence. I pass his nest every day, and if you saw how he flies by me, and almost into my face, crying and flapping his wings, to direct my attention from his little treasure, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cut if I didn't bully you! You'd lie abed till noon and play your idiotic fiddle till midnight! You're born lazy, and you're born shiftless, and you're ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... to point out to us that the honest German who would benefit his true fatherland by conferring on it the North American constitution, beautified and improved, resembles the idiotic merchant who copied the ledgers of his rich rival, and imagined that being in possession of this copy, he had also come into possession of the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... provides that "When any passenger arriving on board any ship is either lunatic, idiotic, deaf, dumb, blind, or infirm, and is likely to become a charge upon the public," the owner, master, or charterer of the ship shall be required to enter into a bond in the sum of L100 for every such passenger, the person entering into the bond and his sureties being bound to pay to ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... abominably weak, but he did not care. He even felt a certain pleasure in his surrender. Big, muscular men are given to this feebleness with women. Hercules probably wore an idiotic grin of happiness when he spun wool ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... alone," she shouted in shrill falsetto. "You have got yourself up to look like my Joe—and that idiotic grin on your homely face is just like my Joe, but no city sharper can fool me, and if you don't go right along I'll ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard
... said deficiency, which would be painfully illustrated by a serious crisis, is there equally in ordinary humdrum times of peace. The crippled and idiotic life which would bring disaster then is undermining our very existence now. Is it not time that a sensible nation should look to it that every one of its members, when adult, should at least be healthy, well-fed, and well-grown, and that each should ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... twins, you'll discover that you'll have to make Tommy's busted old baby-carriage do, because you've got to use the money to buy a tutti-frutti ice-cream spoon for the young widow who sent you a doormat with "Welcome" on it. And when she gets it, the young widow will call you that idiotic Mr. Graham, because she's going to have sixteen other tutti-frutti ice-cream spoons, and her doctor's told her that if she eats sweet things she'll have to go in the ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer |
