"Drivel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... puke, keck^, retch, heave, upchuck, chuck up, barf; belch out; cast up, bring up, be sick, get sick, worship the porcelain god. disgorge; expectorate, clear the throat, hawk, spit, sputter, splutter, slobber, drivel, slaver, slabber^; eructate; drool. unpack, unlade, unload, unship, offload; break bulk; dump. be let out. spew forth, erupt, ooze &c (emerge) 295. Adj. emitting, emitted, &c v.. Int. begone!, get you gone!, get away, go away, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sharply interrupted the general. "Why do you drivel? You know I detest beds and blankets. Drop it! Here, take this," and he gave him a sheet of crested paper folded in four, which was lying beside him. "Read it, please. Aloud! ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... a saloonkeeper, or turn it into a moving-picture house and burn people to death in the rotten old fire-trap. And if you don't raise your hand, when I come to you fair and square, with an honest story—if you dare to order me out of here, because you've got to gab a lot of your charity drivel to a board of directors, instead of taking the interest any real man would take in something that was real and vital and eating into the very heart of New York life, I'm going to show you up, and put you out of the charity business——so ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... Hag of old, by Fiend possest, He swells, wild Frenzy heaves his panting breast, His bristling hairs stick up, his eyeballs glow, And from his mouth long strakes of drivel flow.'] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—who? 10 ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... journalists fetch up their drivel? I aim only at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no higher degree of merit, not even at brevity—I am sure it could have been all done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Odofried the Outcast." The title was ominous of the fate which the production met. The author naturally felt that the age was unappreciative. To relieve his mind he wrote eleven or twelve hundred lines of fresh drivel, in which he assailed everything and everybody. The satire was of that dreadful kind which requires notes and commentaries to point out who is hit and what is meant; and the annotation, as is usual in such cases, took up much more space than the text. This ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... this bears The palm, "That all men are about to live," For ever on the brink of being born. All pay themselves the compliment to think They, one day, shall not drivel; and their pride On this reversion takes up ready praise; At least, their own; their future selves applauds; How excellent that life they ne'er will lead! Time lodg'd in their own hands is Folly's vails: That lodg'd in Fate's, to Wisdom they consign; The thing ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Mr. Coulson; "you are a fool. I pay you to take care of this house. I am freezing to death in my own room, and you come in and drivel to me about ivy and hand-organs. Get me an overcoat at once. See that all doors and windows are closed below. An old, fat, irresponsible, one-sided object like you prating about springtime and flowers in the middle of winter! When Higgins comes back, tell him ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Thing ensued; 'Twas so insufferably crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it openly as "Drivel." Never was such Collapse. In brief, The poor Professor died ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... drivel," cried Bright-Wits, interrupting him, "I have come to announce the completion of a task so simple that it should not have ...
— Bright-Wits, Prince of Mogadore • Burren Laughlin and L. L. Flood
... very good words, Sedgwick," said Mr. Thompson approvingly. "The word I had on my tongue was—balderdash. But your thought was happier. Balderdash is a vague and shapeless term. It conjures up no definite vision. But drivel and drool—very ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... with pleasure from this medley of balderdash and drivel to the more sober tome of Mr Collier, because we know that whatever he gives us will at least have the merit of being genuine. Out of the thousand black-letter broadsides which constitute the Roxburghe collection, the editor has selected upwards of fifty, and thus states ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... have overlooked that, Sir, if they had retained the lines I had written for him. But they've only let him speak the first four words—'Passengers in Railway Carriages'—and then drivel on thus: 'which are provided with blinds must keep the blinds covered so as to cover the windows'—a clumsy tautology, Sir, for which I am sure no Home Secretary would care to be held responsible, and from which I had been at some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... to you," Mordaunt said. "You are talking nonsense, my friend, arrant drivel—nothing less. Chris will ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... 'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They would request me to resign ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sentimental drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... can put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... yet," said Peter hopefully, "a few country people in a bally little school-house, and the girl gets up and harangues. She's been to the city, and knows a few catch phrases. There's nothing to it. We wouldn't have known of it—only for the enthusiastic friend who pours his drivel into this paper." ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... enough, I fear too long, tormented you with my drivel. It must be your consolation, that, in spirit, you have been with me to-night, as I have thought of the old days, pausing for a moment over these mute but eloquent companions, to dream or to sigh, and then once more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... he announces. "She has said something to you, the spiteful little cat! See here, I can guess what unmitigated drivel it is. She has accused you of flirting with me, and said I stayed at home to keep you company when I should have been ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... nonsense verse is the very fine line that divides a masterpiece from utter drivel. Nonsense verse is very good or very bad. When it plays along the edges it is very pleasing but when it oversteps it ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... lying and pretending, and let you lie and pretend, and let your parents and Sam lie and pretend, you would find me—almost tolerable. Well, I'm not that kind. When there's no especial reason one way or the other, I'm willing to smirk and grimace and dodder and drivel, like the rest of your friends, those ladies and gentlemen. But when there's business to be transacted, I am business-like. Let's not begin with your thinking you are deceiving me, and so hating me and despising ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... snapping shut in a peculiar fashion, as though he were squirting venom all over the floor. He was as sensual as Maximum Max, only his voluptuous talks of women were far more offensive in form. But then his lewd drivel was apt to glitter with flashes of imagination. I do not remember ever ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... d'Alison," &c.—tells us that the clergy are going to be lampooned. Sometimes, where the fun is no worse than childish, it is childish enough—plays on words, jokes on English mispronunciation of French, and so forth. But it very seldom, though it is sometimes intolerably nasty, approaches the sheer drivel which appears in some English would-be comic writing of the Middle Ages, or the very early Renaissance—such, for instance, as most of that in the prose "Pleasant Historie of Thomas of Reading,"[135] which the late Mr Thoms was pleased to call a romance. Yet the actual stuff ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... But what drivel I am writing! It is just an attempt to pass the weary time. Mrs. Challenger has gone to the inner dressing-room, and the Professor says that she is asleep. He is making notes and consulting books at the central table, as calmly as if years of placid work lay before him. He writes ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... abolished; if the Riviera, and Italy can be removed from the map of Europe as used by novelists, so much the better. But failure will always be secured, while the huge majority of authors do not aim high, but aim at being a little lower than the last domestic drivel which came out in three volumes, or the last analysis of the inmost self of some introspective young girl which crossed the water from ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... younger missionaries had retired, probably dispirited by the loss of their leader. It is evident that the fever when untreated is as fatal now as it proved in the case of Commodore Owen's officers in this river, or in the great Niger Expedition. And yet what poor drivel was poured forth when I adopted energetic measures for speedily removing any Europeans out of the Delta. We were not then aware that the remedy which was first found efficacious in our own little Thomas on Lake 'Ngami, in 1850, and that cured ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... absolute power. The crowds upon the street snapped eagerly at that huge portrait and searched as eagerly through the paper for more about the Boss. They did not find it, except upon the editorial page, where, in the space usually devoted to drivel about "How Kind We Should Be to Dumb Animals," and "Why Fathers Should Confide More in Their Sons," appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: "Sam Stone Must Leave Town." Beneath was the additional information: "Further ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... well entrenched and fortified, it is well to remember that it is the man with vision who finally prevails. The time has passed when the freethinker could be held up to the community as an example of a base and degraded individual. No manner of pulpit drivel can delude even the unthinking masses to this misconception. The freethinker is today the one who beholds the vision, and this vision does not transcend the natural. It is a vision that is earth-bound; a vision it may be called, since it leaps ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... there is an amazing amount of drivel written over here, most of which, I think, would never get past the office-boy of an American publication. The English short story and the English music-hall are things ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Frenchmen, as we see them in the streets and in the fields, but men in general, as they ought to be on leaving the hands of Nature, or after the teachings of Reason. As to the former, there is no need of being scrupulous because they are infatuated with prejudices and their opinions are mere drivel; as for the latter, it is just the opposite: full of respect for the vainglorious images of his own theory, of ghosts produced by his own intellectual device, the Jacobin will always bow down to responses that he himself ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... lunchers spun round in their chairs, and a Rand magnate, who was eating peas at the next table, started and cut his mouth. "Go? It's the limit! This is just the sort of thing to get right at them. It'll hit them where they live. What made you think of that drivel at the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... solemn, carol, very, spirit, coral, borough, manor, tenant, minute, honor, punish, clamor, blemish, limit, comet, pumice, chapel, leper, triple, copy, habit, rebel, tribute, probate, heifer, profit, cavil, revel, drivel, novel, hovel, city, pity, british, critic, madam, credit, idiom, body, study, tacit, licit, hazard, ezad, lizard, closet, bosom, vicar, liquor, liquid, ...
— A Minniature ov Inglish Orthoggraphy • James Elphinston
... want any more of the drivel!" Bristow objected again, his voice raucous and still directed to Greenleaf. "What's your idea? I admit I'm wanted in New York on a trumped-up charge of embezzlement. This detective, by a stroke of blind luck, ran into that; and, as I say, I ...
— The Winning Clue • James Hay, Jr.
... denounced "a bondholder's war"; it is in the whole business of collecting debts due to cosmopolitan finance. But a stranger in Egypt hears little denunciation of cosmopolitan finance, and a great deal of drivel in the way of cosmopolitan idealism. When the Palestinians say that usurers menace their land they mean the land they dig; an old actuality and not a new abstraction. Their revolt may be right or wrong, but it is real; and what applies to their ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... space—drivel written in the old days. When you're not blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller
... lost you and I've won you," Mackenzie broke in. "He's had his chance and he's missed it. You don't want to be worried with his drivel." ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... with their endless drivel about the Church of the Spirit of Mankind Incarnate. It's enough to make a man wish for ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... know details of this kind; but it surely is their duty to investigate before starting on a crusade. In the case of people who knew the facts, this particular blunder merely made the newspapers that committed it look ridiculous; but the majority of those who read the drivel in all probability had no idea of the facts, and were led to imagine that promotions to the various ranks of general officer had hitherto all been a matter of seniority. It is an example of the way in which ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell |
