"Twaddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... it be publicly preached to the people that the Mass as men's twaddle [commentitious affair or human figment] can be omitted without sin, and that no one will be condemned who does not observe it, but that he can be saved in a better way without the Mass. I wager [Thus it will ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... 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
... intemperate women, five cases are all of whom the writer has ever heard, in such circles, and two of these many believed to be unwarrantably suspected. After following in Miss Martineau's track, and discovering all the falsehood, twaddle, gossip, old saws, and almanac stories, which have been strung together in her books, no charitable mode of accounting for the medley remains, but to suppose her the pitiable dupe of that love of hoaxing so often found in ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... proceed to show how the universe of Astral Light may be considered under the symbol of an Icosahedron. I shall only state that this conception of the Aryan philosophers is not to be looked upon as mere "theological twaddle" or as the outcome of wild fancy. The real significance of the conception in question can, I believe, be explained by reference to the psychology and the physical science of the ancients. But I must stop here and proceed ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... whole, but they were a little too strong, too violent against the Bill,' because Harrowby had declared that he felt the same objection to the measure he had felt before. Sefton was outrageous, talked a vast deal of amusing nonsense, 'that he had never heard such twaddle,' 'but that the success was complete, and he looked on Harrowby and Wharncliffe as the two most enviable men in the kingdom.' I have no doubt that all the ultras will be deeply mortified at the moderation of Lord Grey and of the Duke of Wellington, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... grace and genuine kindness, and many a pleasant evening I 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, walked up to me, as I thought, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... wind and falls asleep. Then the sky darkens, the Flying Dutchman comes 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 ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... 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
... believe in all that silly love-making," he rejoined roughly, "it is good enough for the loutish peasants of the alfold (lowlands); they are sentimental and stupid: an educated man does not make use of a lot of twaddle when he woos the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... are the most maudlin twaddle!" said Lancelot, as if he found some consolation in ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and consequently of the conversation of lady politicians, made up as 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 name several, but ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... the Prince o' Wales,' he said. (That interesting young man had arrived on the Harriet Lane that morning and ridden up Broadway between cheering hosts.) 'I've got a sketch of him here an' it's all twaddle. Tell us something new about him. If he's got a hole in his sock we ought to ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... pointed out, setting down the 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 wholesale and being ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... to do with the Cat Stane? Not 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. I haven't ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... chapter respecting the sermon till the violence of the storm had expended itself; but they left Mr. Slope behind them nothing daunted, and he went about his work zealously, flattering such as would listen to his flattery, whispering religious twaddle into the ears of foolish women, ingratiating himself with the few clergy who would receive him, visiting the houses of the poor, inquiring into all people, prying into everything, and searching with his minutest eye into all ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... had taken up the fourth volume of Jerdan's Autobiography,—wretched twaddle, though it records such constant and apparently intimate intercourse with distinguished people,—and was reading it, between asleep and awake, on the sofa, when Mr. Jerdan himself was announced. I saw him, in company with Mr. Bennoch, nearly three years ago, at Rock ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the crest into the ridgeway, which they followed till it intersected the high-road at the Brown House aforesaid, the spot of his former fervid desires to behold Christminster. But he forgot them now. He talked the commonest local twaddle to Arabella with greater zest than he would have felt in discussing all the philosophies with all the Dons in the recently adored university, and passed the spot where he had knelt to Diana and Phoebus without remembering that there were any such people in the mythology, or that the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... repeated the patient, with a short laugh. "Well, I've heard that it would do great things, but I never took any stock in it; it seemed like so much twaddle to me. You are sure you're ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... themes, changed or unchanged, woven into the tissue; and to go hunting for these 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; ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... body, what he thought of Lady Jane's "panegyric," which 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, his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it's all right—the usual twaddle!" ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... tersely put! Hammer this into BULL's big noddle, Until he just puts down his foot On temporising timid twaddle, And you will do a vast deal more To keep our drowsy British Lion In health, and strength and wakeful roar Than all the schemes Tryon may try on. Battle's not always to the strong; The race, though, must be to—the Fleet, With us at least. We can't ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... wish, dear Ellen, 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 single man with whom such a union would ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... I'm going to Fomishka's and Fimishka's oasis. And do you know what I should like to say? There's twaddle here and twaddle there, only that twaddle, the twaddle of the eighteenth century, is nearer to the Russian character than the twaddle of the twentieth century. Goodbye, gentlemen. I'm drunk, so don't be offended at what ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... write an American book," said Bart, laughing. "But your question is a good answer to my solemn twaddle on literature." ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... to 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 ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... of Scotchmen did not pass without comment. The pleasantest remark made upon it was that of Christopher North (John Wilson) some dozen years later (after he had met Lamb), in a Blackwood paper entitled "Twaddle on Tweedside" (May, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... 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. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the testy interruption; "but the world is not so easily led in matters of religion. The message, as you say, is divine; but it may sound like meaningless twaddle to the world at large. If we are to heal mankind and dispel the heresy of disease and death, why can't Holiest Mother save herself? Mind you, I am looking at this thing with the eyes of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... extremely attentive to all that was said, though he had heard the same stories every night for twenty years, and upon all occasions winked oracularly to his nephew to particularly mind what passed. About ten the innocent twaddle closed by a man coming in with a lantern to light home old Bickerstaff. They were simple and happy times that Steele describes with such kindly humour; and the London of his days must have been full ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of similar twaddle, meant to show that the mayor of Amiens was a most tolerant prince, in that he had not ordered the destruction of every cross set up on ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... 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 your acceptance of ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... to the waterhole, it's cool there, and better fun than listening to an old woman's twaddle. The ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... 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 you, per Bacco! hush, it's because they ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... propagandist of the New Ideas is something more than a bookish philosopher,—when he is a thorough 'man of the world,' and is what we emphatically call 'practical.' Yes, you owe me much that I secured to you such tuition, and saved you from twaddle and sentiment, the poetry of Wordsworth and the muscular Christianity of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... twaddle. There's no man Ismail fears so much, because he's the idol of the cafes and the bazaars. He's the Egyptian in Egypt to-day. You talk about me? Why, I'm the foreigner, the Turk, the robber, the man that holds the lash ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 60,000, 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 ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... hand 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 ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... addressed. Nothing would stop him, apparently. He even made the most stupid repetitions. Nora finally stamped her foot formidably. "Will you stop? Will you stop ? " she said through her clenched teeth. " Do you think I want to listen to your everlasting twaddle about her? Why, she's-she's no better than other people, you ignorant little mamma's boy. She's no better than other people, ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... children with nothing at all! Lord! how you twaddle and waddle and squall Like common-bred geese and ganders! What sad little bad little figures you make To the rich Miss K., whose plainest seed-cake Was stuff'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Misses Frost—not only talking but in a 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 ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a friendly way, as is the usage in such cases. I hold that no power can deprive us of the right to administer our functions as a body comprising electors from all parts of the country, associated together because their country is dearer to them than drowsy twaddle, unmeaning routine, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... was a woman of much the same tastes as her ladyship, only somewhat of a more active temperament; and they were most stedfast friends. It was such a comfort to Lady Cashel to have some one to whom she could twaddle! ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... awoke 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-yue to at last be quiet and go to sleep. By the morrow, all recollection of the discussion had ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... cousin excusing herself, she gets a mocking letter telling her that he is married already; when the remorseless turn of Fortune's wheel loses her the real lover whom she at last really does love—then it is not mere sentimental-Romantic twaddle; it is a slice of life, soaked in the wine of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Who taught us that drawing-room twaddle? Call on your grandmother! Listen to the wind among the pines! Yours is a ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... I advise parents to think nothing more important than the education of their children, so I maintain that it must be a sound and healthy education, and that our sons must be kept as far as possible from vulgar twaddle. For what pleases the vulgar displeases the wise. I am borne out by the lines of Euripides, "Unskilled am I in the oratory that pleases the mob; but amongst the few that are my equals I am reckoned rather wise. For those who are little ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... 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 high admiration, or ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of this from Swinburne. 'I myself,' he said, 'very seldom read the magazines. But Algernon always has a look at them.' There was something to me very droll, and cheery too, in this picture of the illustrious recluse snatching at the current issues of our twaddle. And I was immensely pleased at hearing that my article had 'interested him very much.' I inwardly promised myself that as soon as I reached home I would read the article, to see just how it might have struck Swinburne. When in due course I did this, I regretted the tone ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... titled appeared again upon his 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 ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... 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 and ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... "More twaddle! Anybody might think that the man was going to be robbed!" cried Lousteau. "Why, my dear boy, if the minister buys the newspaper, the druggist may make twenty thousand francs in six months on an investment of thirty thousand. Matifat is not looking at the newspaper, but at Florine's prospects. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... place discreetly and on tiptoe, talking twaddle as she went and bending her head and her eyeglass over various objects with an air of imperfect comprehension that didn't prevent Nick's private recall of the story of her underhand, commercial habits told by Gabriel Nash at the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... the burden of 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 when I had come back ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... talk to the half-wise, twaddle; when you talk to the ignorant, brag; when you talk to the sagacious, look very humble, and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... verbal rambling continues; so the search for mind in matter goes on, with a seriousness scarcely equalled in any other line of strife. There is nothing more certain to permanently bewilder a vocal student than to deluge him with pseudo-scientific twaddle about the voice. And this for the simple reason that he comes to learn to sing, not ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... this mass of contradictory quotations and opinions, this nauseous style, this spasmodic rhetoric, models of which are so common at the bar, though seldom found elsewhere? Do you take for philosophy this twaddle, this intolerable pettifoggery adorned with a few scholastic trimmings? No, no! a writer who respects himself, never will consent to enter the balance with these manipulators of law, misnamed JURISTS; and for my part I object to ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... true character of note-writing—how compressed and unrambling and direct it ought to be, and illustrate by the villainous twaddle of many ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... like French and Germans, but who have never lived by 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 ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... 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 ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this talk, he failed to see—unless she were seeking to establish an entente cordiale, or to gain time. The latter was the likelier—yet time for what? They both were aware that all this discussion was twaddle—like much that is done in diplomacy; that they were merely skirmishing to determine something as to ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... say to you; let an author of renown fill a book with twaddle, and if it is not praised by the critics, you may ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... fox-hunting: Bjarni of Fell caught a white vixen night before last, or Einar of Brekka caught a brown dog-fox yesterday. Or if a man stepped over to a neighbour's for a moment: Any hunting? Anyone shot a fox? Our Gisli here caught a grayish brown one last evening. Such incessant twaddle! ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... 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, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... should. There is unsoundness in the kindly, loveable man, whose opinions are preposterous, and whose conversation that of a jackass. But still, who can help loving the man, occasionally to be met, whose heart is right and whose talk is twaddle? Let me add, that I have met with one or two cases in which conscience was quite paralysed, but all the other intellectual faculties were right. Surely there is no more deplorable instance of the mental screw. Tou may find the ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... pause in the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles things about. When I've been on the bridge," he continued, "of a night that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing his silent overture. Don't you take in the twaddle about God sending thunderbolts; it's that old war-horse down below.—And then I've kept a sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts would be walking down on us, or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... misuse terribly. We put our man into a pulpit, and we virtually tell him 'Now, you may stand there and talk to us for half-an-hour. We won't interrupt you by so much as a word! You shall have it all your own way!' And what does he give us in return? Shallow twaddle, that, if it were addressed to you over a dinner-table, you would think 'Does the man take me ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... that what women can do well is no work for men. But I soon saw I was wrong. It increased my respect for women in a way. To find, for instance, that you could do what you do single-handed and make light of it; that was rather an eye-opener. Whenever any pal of mine talks twaddle about what women can't do, I shall bring him to ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... you were she. No music, thanks; I have never listened to it since she died. Your mother played beautifully, children; she played and she sang. I liked her songs; I hate the twaddle of the present day. Now I am returning to my Virgil. My renderings of the original text become more and more full of light. I shall secure a vast reputation. Music! I hate music. Don't disturb me, ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... fiddlesticks!" interrupted Endicott. "Wherever did you get all that, rot? It sounds as if you had been attending society functions and listening to their twaddle. It doesn't matter what you are the child of, if you're a mind to be a man. This is a free country, son, and you can be and climb where you please. Tell me, where did ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... 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 ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... English agent, of course, goes out in behalf of the old line; and all sorts of stories are told about winter passages, the importance of boats especially built for strength, and the advantages of experience. Now, the history of the American line is a perfect refutation of all this twaddle. The truth is, that all voyaging is connected with exposedness to some danger; and up to this moment the Americans have had, in all their ocean steam voyages, the full measure of success. They have lost no boat, ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... think I'd made a kind of a start that time—only I got pulled up too short. I dare say I quite deserved it. That's no way of liking a woman. When you do really, you know all the rest's been half twaddle and half greed. Your father and mother are all right—so are mine really, though they do blow each other's heads off—still, there's something ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... 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
... 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 to make a pretense of redeeming the kangaroo promise of the Republican ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Your...? Twaddle! You'll simply refuse the challenge! You're not going to let yourself be killed for the ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... over,'" whispered Sibley, as Miss Burton rose from the piano. "I'm sick of all this pious twaddle, and would a thousand-fold rather listen to the music of your voice ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... that his daughter should have seen it all, but such infamous 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 ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... with a strident laugh; "and where did you pick up your sense of right, madam, I should like to know? From what Methodist parson's hypocritical twaddle have you learnt to lay down the law to your poor old father about the sense of right? 'Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land,' miss, that's what your Bible teaches you; but the Bible has gone out of fashion, I dare say, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... we gave our attention to the reading of some curious letters, said to have been written by two Persians of distinction then traveling in Europe, which were being published anonymously in Paris. At first, I could not bring myself to listen to such twaddle, dubiously moral, which, under the guise of light, small talk, struck at the foundations of government, religious beliefs, and all which I had before held sacred. Listening only to contradict, I grew interested in spite of myself, and only at some allusion more than ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... 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 ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... things, and it is only they that concern us. They alone preserve us from false conclusions, and sentimental twaddle. These facts teach us that to-day we find women engaged in the following occupations, among others:—in cotton, linen and woolen weaving; in cloth and flannel making; in mechanical spinning, calico printing and dyeing; in steel pen and pin making; in the preparation ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... rattling, wondering, mimicking, the cicerone attending them with his nasal twaddle, anon pausing and silent, yielding to the melancholy pity and wonder which the aspect of that strange and smiling place inspires,—behold they come upon another party of English, two young men ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... first toast 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 history ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... determined that this lady, who she saw was simple, should disgust her husband by talking twaddle before a band of satirists. So she said warmly: "It is not fair on us. Pray, madam, your budget of country news. Clouted cream so seldom ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... 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 were home on leave ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... 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 ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... 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 expects ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... courage, for it is hard to deal with the darker powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse which the well-known Satyricus Empiricius was for ever using in his now classical attacks on the grammarians; and without any Alexandrian twaddle of accents I intoned to her—and so left her astounded to repentance ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... polishing and practice and all that; but I'm sure it is oceans better than half the sentimental twaddle we see in the papers, and I KNOW that some of those pieces ARE paid for, because I have a friend who is in a newspaper office, and he told me so. Yours are quaint and simple and some very original. I'm sure ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... life of a settled nation,—words like basket (to take an instance which all the world knows) form a much larger body in our language than is commonly supposed; it is said that a number of our raciest, most idiomatic, popular words—for example, bam, kick, whop, twaddle, fudge, hitch, muggy,—are Celtic. These assertions require to be carefully examined, and it by no means follows that because an English word is found in Celtic, therefore we get it from thence; but they have not yet had the attention which, as illustrating through language this matter of ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... "Eh, what twaddle!" said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. "When one's head is gone one doesn't weep for one's hair! Take what any of you like!" And flourishing his arm energetically he turned ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... 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 ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... no power to express my loathing for such twaddle!" cried Stoneman, snapping his great jaws together and pursing his lips ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... gone or superseded by new sources of mechanical energy. We got rich by pursuing 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
... 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 association terminable ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... 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. ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... with the Germans. The German military party 'fear' that the Entente may, perhaps, be inclined to agree to a general peace, and could not think of ending the war in this 'unprofitable' fashion. It is intolerable to have to listen to such twaddle. ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... the wonderful information that you once had an aunt Susan. The unseen world imagined in our hypothesis is not connected with the present material universe by any such "invisible bonds" as would allow Bacon and Addison to come to Boston and write the silliest twaddle in the most ungrammatical English before a roomful of people who have never learned how to test what they are pleased to call the "evidence of their senses." Our hypothesis is expressly framed so as to exclude all intercourse whatever between the unseen world of spirit ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... the evil would be stopped at once if the law 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, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... telling your child how wicked he is; what a naughty boy he is; that God will never love him, and all the rest of such twaddle and blatant inanity! Do not, in point of fact, bully him, as many poor little fellows are bullied! It will ruin him if you do; it will make him in after years either a coward or a tyrant. Such conversations, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... Dreamland in the beautiful twilight. Delighted to find that you are neither reading nor writing,—the absurd dolt! as if a man weren't at work unless he be wielding a sledge-hammer!—he will preach out, and prose out, and twaddle out another hour of your golden even-tide, "because he is your friend." You don't care whether he is judge or jury,—whether he talks sense or nonsense; you don't want him to talk at all. You don't want him there any way. You want to be alone. If you don't, why are you sitting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... 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
... impressions we shrank 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 writers have evidently never talked to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the whole affair as a huge joke, "how romantic it sounds! Fancy meeting you again after all this time, and saving your life! I suppose the papers will be full of it if they get to know—gallant rescue, and all that kind of twaddle." ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... ever utilize them properly. The water front, Telegraph hill, the ocean shore, Sutro Heights, and Lincoln Park are all waiting to be developed in such a way as the Exposition suggests. The talk of cost is idle twaddle. If the Exposition, as an artistic investment, pays - and I see no reason whatever why it should not pay for itself - then we cannot do anything better than to invest our money wisely in other artistic improvements of ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... concluded that the soft music and all that had dazed her. It does sometimes—lots of 'em; makes the most virtuous wife wish she could be a sinner and resume her normal goodness next day. But Kitty is different. And it was only that infernal twaddle caused it and made her write you that letter. A week hadn't passed before she wrote to me and told me how miserable she was. But I knew all through she didn't care a d———about me. And that's the ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... telegram from Trefort and Szapary (President of the Hungarian Exhibition in Paris) alters my negative decision. Without ever talking twaddle about patriotism, yet in all modesty I will not be wanting where there is something to be ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... drunkard or the women slovenly or the whole family was just naturally vicious. Ignorance may excuse some of this but not all of it. Perhaps I'm not what you'd call sympathetic but I've heard a lot of men talk about these people in a way that sounds to me like twaddle. I never ran across a family down here in such misery as that which Steve Bonnington's wife endured for years without ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... insane. I don't care to read any more such twaddle and I won't pay for the services of such a man out of the funds ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... a sudden overwhelming desire to make Francis stop this maddening twaddle; also the events of the morning were beginning to take on an air of reality, and as this grew he felt the need of sympathy of some kind. Francis might not be able to give him anything that was of any use, but it would do no harm to see if his cousin's buoyant unconscious philosophy, which made ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... the fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni). Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante,' and both his poetry ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... vicissitudes of life. The earth was made for man. One has said "there is nothing great in the world but man; and there is nothing great in man but his soul." With this in view, how absurd to talk about "fixed laws" and "unchangeable order," in a way to keep man in his trouble from God. It is all the twaddle of the conceit of man setting himself up to judge and limit his maker. "To whom then will ye liken Me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One." The Creator is greater than his creation; the law giver is supreme over all ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... discussing the events and tendencies of their time. And how they must have talked—no wonder Frederick, though the idol of his subjects, withdrew for such discourse from the society of the day, with its twaddle of the tea-cups and ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... 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 seek it. In this ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... there are those for whom all this is unmitigated twaddle and bosh. To mention abnegation, sacrifice, etc., to such people is to speak in a language no more intelligible than Sanskrit. Naturally one of these will expect his children to appreciate the sacrifices he makes for their happiness, but with ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... repeating the same idiotic words: 'You can't create art out of science,' says one; 'Mechanical appliances kill poetry,' says another; and a pack of fools wail over the fate of the flowers, as though anybody wished the flowers any harm! I'm sick of all such twaddle; I should like to answer all that snivelling with some work of open defiance. I should take a pleasure in shocking those good people. Shall I tell you what was the finest thing I ever produced since I first ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... up my ears; and it needed all my diplomacy to enable me to conceal my sense of triumph. Forty odd letters! There must be an enormous amount of information in forty odd letters; unless the woman wrote the direst twaddle ever penned by ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... for days together I was rushing about town paying calls and listening to compliments which my soul abhors. Alas and alack! In Petersburg I am becoming fashionable like Nana. While Korolenko, who is serious, is hardly known to the editors, my twaddle is being read by all Petersburg. Even the senator G. reads me.... It is gratifying, but my literary feeling is wounded. I feel ashamed of the public which runs after lap-dogs simply because it fails to notice elephants, and I am deeply convinced ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... street. My friend shot the face 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 over my proposition to settle our ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... This man is an honour to the profession, and I believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a week, close to fifteen hundred a year—that is a fair showing for the head reader of ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... him! Here's a fuss! That I should such twaddle as this discuss. Was it for this that I left the school? That the scribbling desk, and the slavish rule, And the narrow walls, that our spirits cramp, Should be met with again in the midst of the camp? No! Idle ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... An Inca can do nothing. He is tied hand and foot. A constitutional monarch is openly called an India-rubber stamp. An emperor is a puppet. The Inca is not allowed to make a speech: he is compelled to take up a screed of flatulent twaddle written by some noodle of a minister and read it aloud. But look at the American President! He is the Allerhochst, if you like. No, madam, believe me, there is nothing like Democracy, American Democracy. Give ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes, 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
... paper describing Sir G. Bonham's investiture as K.C.B., and advises me to imitate him for my own interest, rather than Sir J. Davis, who was recalled. Davis, says Yeh, insisted on getting into the city, and Bonham gave up this demand. Hence his advice to me. All through the letter is sheer twaddle. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... read, "Last week's baby will surely talk some day," and you are amazed, as at a brilliant discovery. And you cannot but ask: To whom are these exhortations addressed? To children or to idiots? The grown men and women of the United States, can hardly regard such poor twaddle as this with a serious eye. And what of the writers? How can they reconcile their lofty tone, which truly is above suspicion, with the shameful sensationalism of their news-columns? They know not ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... doubt that he meant this melodramatic twaddle. It did not seem twaddle or melodramatic to her—or, for that matter, to him. She clasped him more closely. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... 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
... beginning of Lent, and Markel would not fast, he was rude and laughed at it. "That's all silly twaddle, and there is no God," he said, horrifying my mother, the servants, and me too. For though I was only nine, I too was aghast at hearing such words. We had four servants, all serfs. I remember my mother selling one of the four, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... away with your chord-factories! Not all the twaddle of the harmonic kitchens would ever help him to find a new harmony that was alive, alive, and ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... see the whole scheme of letter-writing; you sit down every day and pour out an equable stream of twaddle. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hands of Boiardo and Ariosto, of Tasso and Spenser, only a strange, trumpery material, muddled by jongleurs and romance writers, and reduced to mere fairy stuff, taken seriously only by Don Quixote, and by the authors of the volumes of insane twaddle called after Amadis of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... that was a desperate measure. He got what he expected—cynicism. Begin afterwards issued a letter to the press in which he tried to set the clergy above the law of conscription. No doubt the Cardinal came at Hughes with the twaddle invented by the Nationalists and later adopted by Laurier, about enforcing the Militia Act which ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... in all this twaddle about titles," continued Madariaga implacably, "swords and uniforms, what did you come here for? What in the devil did you do in your own country that you had to ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in fact, as Quicherat has very clearly demonstrated, and, since him, Lecoy de la Marche. The study of archives has, on this point, completely overset the hobbies of architects, and demolished the twaddle of the Bonzes. Besides, there is abundant evidence of the employment of the pointed arch side by side with the round arch in a perfectly systematic design, in the construction of many Romanesque churches; in the Cathedrals of Avignon and Frejus, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... are wise and thoughtful words. Young as you are, you are nevertheless, so far as the true perception of art is concerned, a long way ahead of many of our old and much vaunted masters, who have a good deal of stupid foolish twaddle about their painting, but never get at the true root of the matter. Body alive, man! When you were talking about my pictures, I then began to understand myself for the first time, I believe; and because you do not imitate my style,—do not, like ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... dark eyes had turned from the window to her face, and she paused and looked up. There was a faint dash of color on Mr. Vernon's cheeks, and a tightening of the lips. It seemed to Nell, judging by his expression, that he had suddenly become impatient of the twaddle, and she instantly dropped the paper on her lap. But Mrs. Lorton was enjoying herself too much to ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... 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 in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, and his astounding trick of finding ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... and lifted their heads wearily, and gazed at each other wistfully, dreamily, dazed; then presently began to twaddle to each other in a wandering and childish way. At intervals they lapsed into silences, leaving a sentence unfinished, seemingly either unaware of it or losing their way. Sometimes, when they woke out of these silences they ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... baffled and sombre, biting his pen and wondering what was meant by the "rewards" of literature, he generally ended by tossing away the composition deflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the sort of twaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music. Success in these experiments wouldn't be a reward of literature, but it might very well become a labour of love. The experiments would be pleasant enough for him if they were pleasant for his inscrutable neighbour. That was the way he thought ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... all this well-meant twaddle was misery indeed. Perhaps, upon the whole, good honest dullness does unknowingly inflict more grievous wounds than the barbed ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... 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
... injudicious are their plans, that if carried out, they will result in more evil than good. The plainest and most obvious declarations of the Bible, if they contravene their favorite theories or doctrines, are to them unmeaning twaddle; though they are always ready to press the good book into their service, so far as they are able by forced constructions of detached passages, to give plausibility to their ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... of nationalities was discussed in a newspaper which Durtal showed him. The abbe shrugged his shoulders, putting aside the patriotic twaddle. "For me," he said calmly, "for me my country is that where I can ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... nation composed of all social excrescences; the friars and their enslaved Spaniards want again to cajole and cheat us with offers of participation in public affairs, recognition of the military grades of ex-rebel chiefs, and other twaddle degrading to those who would listen to it. In fact, they have called into their councils the sons of the country, whilst they exclusively carry out their own ideas, and reserve to themselves the right to set aside all the resolutions at a stroke. They offer to enrol in their ranks the insurgents ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Vexed 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 ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... said she, "I thought you were a cook who prided herself on attending to her business. Since I have been sitting here, listening to your twaddle, the cat has been making herself comfortable in that pan of bread dough that you set ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... how about your daughters and their husbands? And their husbands' solicitors? Will they throw their arms round your neck, and break forth into twaddle? No! I have made inquiries. Your husband's affairs are desperate. I won't throw your money into his well; and you will both live to thank me for seeing clearer than you do, and saving this L1900 for you ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... affinity to each other except that they were all of them not worth mentioning. And all the while she thus discoursed, Mrs. Gaunt's thoughtful eyes looked straight over the chatterbox's white cap, and explored vacancy; and by and by she broke the current of twaddle with the majestic air of a camelopard marching across ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... 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, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... 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 ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... does the poor man work for? But I'm not going to argue that kindergarten twaddle of the college highbrows, Wayland. I'm out for all I can make; so is the Smelter; so are you; but the point is you've fought this timber thing; you have filed and filed and filed your recommendations ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... the chap that's defending Australia. But there's Union men and Union men. They're mainly good, but some are bad. That's one of the bad ones there. His name is Neverwork, and he never worked in his life. He's a blowhard, a gasbagger, a balloon full of curses and twaddle. This bloke thinks we're fools. He's kidded his Union on that he's a smart fellow—a sort of High Priest of Salvation. He's talked himself into a job, and he's drawing about five hundred a year out of another fellow's pockets. He's ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... was talking that ridiculous twaddle. It was trying to flirt with a silly school-girl. What will do for fifteen is ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... old boy,' he said; 'all that about thought-transference is just simply twaddle. You've been over-working. Take a holiday. ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit |
