"Rigmarole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... talk like a woman in a Shaw play. I don't like this rigmarole about "pursuit." Say you're in love, like a civilized human being. And take a cigarette, ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... the subject gracefully introduced without unnecessary palaver or reference to family antecedents—the simple name given without a long rigmarole of dazzling titles or senseless adjectives. The Muse is neither pathetically invoked nor anathematically abused, but the author proceeds at once to describe his hero's present situation, which, it strangely appears, is in "a corner." The indefiniteness of the locality—a ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... long rigmarole, which he called a "Declaration": I saw that it was but a heap of lies, and thrust it into the blacksmith's fire, and blew the bellows thrice at it. No one dared attempt to stop me, for my mood had not been sweet of late; and of ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... long and merrily. "Old Bloggs taught you the silly rigmarole you men call logic, but he didn't teach you woman's logic, that's plain. Don't you see what I've ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the same rigmarole about Oceanus and Mother Tethys that she had told Venus, and when she has done ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... appending a glossary, in order that my readers may be spared the trouble of making out the meaning of some of the words. It was a long time before it dawned upon me that "vouled earms" meant "folded arms "; "auverdrow" likewise was very perplexing. Like many of the old ballads, it sounds like a rigmarole from beginning to end; but there is really a great deal more in it than meets the eye. George Ridler is no less a personage than King Charles I., and the oven represents the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... must be going now," chimed in Fidge, jumping up eagerly, for all this rigmarole had been very uninteresting ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... finds himself still short o' that tail I'll venture my guess 't he won't find the joke 's fine 's he did at first.' But she was too used up to know when she was havin' good common-sense talked to her; she jus' kep' wipin' her eyes, 'n' then Mrs. Sperrit drove up 'n' the whole rigmarole had to be gone over again for her. I mus' say that she behaved kind of un-neighborly, f'r she laughed fit to kill herself, 'n' Mrs. Craig was nigh to put out over such doin's,—'n' the cat not dead ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... "don't you know"—then checking himself suddenly, "Ah! by the by, that rigmarole oath! I was not to tell; though now it's past caring for, I fear! It is no use looking after the seal when ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had got to a certain distance, therefore, Cortado followed, and having overtaken him as he was mounting the steps of a church, he took him apart, and poured forth so interminable a string of rigmarole, all about the theft of the purse, and the prospect of recovering it, that the poor Sacristan could do nothing but listen with open mouth, unable to make head or tail of what he said, although he made him repeat it two or ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... tugging off her mask viciously, as she spoke. "Hang me if I didn't think so all the time!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of tactics. "That Jasper's a thief. I heard you say something about those deeds, and Jasper told me a long rigmarole that you wouldn't sign them. Whether that's true or not, Heaven only knows. Jasper's a bad one, an' he's sold me. He's got the coin, and I'll split on him, as I threatened. No, it's no use your trying to make me hush up, I will speak out. I'll show you what a fool he's made of you, you ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... "What's all this rigmarole got to do with Francis, Dicky?" I asked, vainly trying to suppress the bitterness in my voice. "This looks like a list of copybook maxims for ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... slow," broke in his excited, self-appointed lawyer. "Can't you see through it? Can't you see what he was after? Why, good Lord, man, he has made you the principal legatee,—he has actually given you everything. All this rigmarole about a trust or a foundation or whatever you want to call it amounts to absolutely nothing. The money is yours to do what you like with as long as you live. You have complete control of every dollar of it. No one else has a thing to say about it. Why, it's the slickest, ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... traversed it from the snowy range to Bombay on the west, must have seen something of the country, and may be supposed to know something of the natives"—among whom, by the way, he seems to have mingled more familiarly than most Feringhis; and in spite of all the egotism and rigmarole with which his pages abound, the rambles of this "stout gentleman" through Upper India, and some other parts of the country not much visited by Europeans, present us with a good deal of plain sense and sterling matter, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Sancho, "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole you have been treating us to, and all ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... down ex cathedra, and accepted without question by the poor humble public? I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my own and that I should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not use it. If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and Fraunhofer's lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask one who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly. Is it not evident that if the ether were affected to the degree which he maintains, ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... heat. Do you know what's happened? The chief has saddled Old Signal Corps on me. Yes, sir, I've got to take his old pet, the major, on the city staff. It seems he's succeeded in losing what little property he had—the chief told me some rigmarole about sudden financial reverses—and now he's down and out. So I'm elected. I've got to take him on as a reporter—a cub reporter sixty-odd years old, mind you, who hasn't heard of anything worth while since ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... knowledge and the control of policy is most perfect. During the war in many British Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard an ambassador say that he never reported anything to Washington which would ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... His majesty's message concluded by expressing the firmest confidence in the zeal and public spirit of parliament, and the power and resources of the nation. His majesty's declarations concerning his conduct towards Spain were fully borne out by the manifesto, which was a loose rigmarole, in which scarcely anything else was clear than that war with Great Britain was fully resolved upon. The opposition in both houses took credit to themselves for having prognosticated, in the spirit of true prophets, a war with Spain, and taunted ministers with folly and blindness in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... . . Mrs. Andrews lowered her voice . . . "I believe he tells queer stories. Gracie came home from school one day last week with the greatest rigmarole he had told her about people who lived down at the shore . . . stories there couldn't be a word of truth in, you know. I told Gracie not to believe them, and she said Paul didn't intend her to. But if he didn't what did he tell them to ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... "The queerest rigmarole you ever heard!" Aurora called that simple Italian spelling-exercise for little beginners. It might have been funny to hear him, only it was disquieting, he did it so earnestly and ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... whims that were against her good, and making light of right and wrong, as if they turned on money; but Mary (such a prudent lass, although she was a fool just now) must see through all such shallow tricks, such rigmarole about Parson Beloe, who must be an idiot himself to think so much of Simon Popplewell—for Easter offerings, no doubt—but there, if Mary had the heart to go away, what use to stand maundering about it? Stephen Anerley would be ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... a lunch . . . you'll get your cab-fare. Come along, dear chap. You spout out some rigmarole like a regular Cicero at the grave and what gratitude ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hadn't, because he had told her not, and, of course, she didn't want to; she liked coming to Mr. Stone so much. And she got on very well, and she liked London, and she liked the shops. She mentioned neither Hughs nor Mrs. Hughs. In all this rigmarole, told with such obvious purpose, stolidity was strangely mingled with almost cunning quickness to see the effect made; but the dog-like devotion was never quite out of her eyes when they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... full well that old-time tales are things to scorn; that such a man as William Tell, in liklihood, was never born. If Gessler lived and had a hat, he didn't hang it on a pole; the rules of Euclid show us that—so goes King Skeptic's rigmarole. But, granting that he had a lid, and hung it on a pole awhile, and granting that the people did bow down to reverence that tile, this does not prove that William shot an apple through an apple's core, and so the anecdote is rot—don't let us hear ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... protected him from such gross insults as are poured upon him in this pamphlet. Of the author's literary talent, we shall say but little: the phrases, "setting down to count the cost"—"the rights of the man the greatest bore in nature"—the appellation of rigmarole ramble, given to a correct sentence of Dr. Priestley—which the author attempts to criticise—may serve ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... said Jack, interrupting him, "do listen to me and hear my story, or else Fritz will begin upon my adventures and tire you out with his rigmarole descriptions." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a sort of a clue. A wretched hobbledehoy of a fellow, something in the bookseller's shop at the corner of Kettle Street, has come with a rigmarole about a society that he and a few more belonged to, including this Francois Gaspard, who is missing. He protests that the thing was legal, and all that—only a Radical inner ring—but he says that at the last meeting this fellow was dropping hints about ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... the Napo, our travellers had an opportunity of visiting some of these old missionary establishments; and observing the odd rigmarole of superstitions there practised under the guise, and in the name of religion—a queer commingling of pagan rites with Christian ceremonies—not unlike those Buddhistic forms from which these same ceremonies ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... precious and costly? Would the illustrations have so enriched photographers? And would the amanuensis have made L350 more out of the thing then Mr. Murray himself? The price was not extortionate. But it was farcical. The entire rigmarole combines to throw into dazzling prominence the fact that modern literature in this country is still absolutely undemocratic. The time will come, and much sooner than many august mandarins anticipate, when ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... fleecy clouds appeared one day in the sky and everyone ran out and stared solemnly at them as if they were angels. But there is one phrase that sums up the prolonged effects of heat better than any scientific rigmarole. It takes the silk out of ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... sooty wreck. It is sad, most sad. I shun all such persons and circles, as much as possible; and pray the gods to make me a brick layer's hodbearer rather. O the "cabriolets, neatflies," and blue twaddlers of both sexes therein, that drive many a poor Mrs. Rigmarole to the Devil!*—As for me, I continue doing as nearly nothing as I can manage. I decline all invitations of society that are declinable: a London rout is one of the maddest things under the moon; ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... tinkling cymbal." nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; absurdity &c. 497; vagueness &c. (unintelligibility) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... brace himself for a great effort, and then started on the queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at first, and I had to stop and ask him questions. But here ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... into deeper and deeper privacy, to live fifty-three years more and become very venerable, though the more rude of the country-people would persist in calling him "Tumble-Down Dick." In the week of his abdication there was on the London book-stalls a rigmarole poem on the subject, called The World in a Maze, or Oliver's Ghost. It opened with this dialogue between father ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion. I stayed away from the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious and natural, but which you somehow seem to have ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... "was makin' shoes in Montopolis when I come here goin' on fifteen year ago. I guess whiskey's his trouble. Once a month he gets off the track, and stays so a week. He's got a rigmarole somethin' about his bein' a Jew pedler that he tells ev'rybody. Nobody won't listen to him any more. When he's sober he ain't sich a fool—he's got a sight of books in the back room of his shop that he reads. I guess you can lay all ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... After all this rigmarole Charity Badge bade Mary take a seat at the table. Then she drawed the blind, and lighted a lamp; and then she fetched out a pack of cards and her seeing-crystal. 'Twas all done awful solemn, and Mary Tuckett without a doubt felt terrible skeered ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... varies it. For it actually came to pass that a very well- known man of letters, while he, with the refined politeness characteristic of his style, spoke of mine as "rigmarole," still praised ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... completely imbued With genius not to be controlled, Be thou not untractable Within the court of thy king; Until thy rigmarole shall be known, Be thou silent, Heinin, As to the name of thy verse, And the name of thy vaunting; And as to the name of thy grandsire Prior to his being baptized. And the name of the sphere, And the name of the element, And the name of thy language, And the name of thy region. Avaunt, ye ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... a long rigmarole tale of an attack which had been made on his house by a party of brigands, as he called them, from Venezuela, the chief object of which, as he suspected, was to carry off his wife; however, they, or ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... day to day, enjoying the life he gives us, eating the bread and meat he gives us, drinking his good refreshments, resting upon his warm beds, and so on.... Every day, and every day, and every day—and who among us, I, most especially for one, ever thinks, except may be by scuttling through a few rigmarole words—ever thinks, I say, of thanking Him for it—of lifting up a warm, honest heart, of true real thanking, I mean? Of loving Him the better, and trying to serve and please Him the better—when He, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... with the glass in it, dropped nervelessly at her side. "If he uttered one single syllable of all that rigmarole, then Ollendorf is a myth, that's all I have ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... coming down the stairs. Our after-dinner oratory, that sounded so telling as we delivered it before the looking-glass, falls strangely flat amidst the clinking of the glasses. The passionate torrent of words we meant to pour into her ear becomes a halting rigmarole, at which—small blame ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... dreamy he would shove his scratch back from his forehead and shut his eyes and recite Homer or Virgil by the page together, while Lancelot and I listened open-mouthed, and I wondered what pleasure he got out of all that rigmarole. The heroes of Homer and of Virgil seemed to me very bloodless, boneless creatures after my kings and wizards out of Mr. Galland's book; even Ulysses, who was a thrifty, shifty fellow enough, with some touch of the sea-captain in him, was not a ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... even reached the point of his mentioning certain of the postillions by name! Next, the tchinovniks sounded him on the question of Chichikov's possible identity with Napoleon; but before long they had reason to regret the step, for Nozdrev responded with a rambling rigmarole such as bore no resemblance to anything possibly conceivable. Finally, the majority of the audience left the room, and only the Chief of Police remained to listen (in the hope of gathering something more); but at last even he found himself ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... thing you had your dinner, honey, before I started this yarn," she said, looking at me quizzically over her glasses, "for I'll be a long time bringin' you to the dinner-party. But I've got to tell you all this rigmarole first, so you'll understand what's comin'. If I was to tell you about the dinner-party first you'd get a wrong idea about Mary. That's how folks misjudges one another. They see people doin' things that ain't right, and ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... continued, after a very beautiful specimen of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been beaten in a libel suit, "I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... was in dire confusion; but for all that our own home was delightful, and we had the most outrageous appetites you ever heard of. George is in ecstasies with his house, his land, his pig, and his horse.... I hope you are not sick and tired of all this rigmarole; it isn't in human nature to move into a house of its own and talk of anything else. I got a warm-hearted letter a few days ago from the city of Milwaukee, from an unknown western sister, beginning, "Whom not ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... auld family, that, like mony ithers, cam' down the brae wi' Prince Charles, poor fallow; and they were baith rank Episcopawlians. I found the mither had just sae muckle a year frae some o' her far-awa relations; and had it no been that they happened to ca' me Stuart, and I tauld her a rigmarole about my grandfaither and Culloden, so that she soon made me out a pedigree, about which I kenned nae mair than the man o' the moon, but keept saying 'yes' and 'certainly' to a' she said—I say, but for that, and confound ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... Songs—why (except that Spirit of the Nation which we so audaciously put together), the popular ballads and songs are the faded finery of the West End, the foul parodies of St. Giles's, the drunken rigmarole of the black Helots—or, as they are touchingly classed in the streets, "sentimental, comic, and nigger songs." Yet Banim, and Griffin, and Furlong, Lover and Ferguson, Drennan and Callanan, have written ballads and songs as true to Ireland ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... said, "the reason I call her a dreadful old woman is that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... means a landlady," Sebright chuckled. "Old but good, he says. He expected to die there in peace, a good Christian. And what's that about the priests getting hold of his very last bit of silver? I must say that sounded truest of all his rigmarole. For the salvation of his soul, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... rigmarole again. I suppose, when the fit comes on, he will telephone to headquarters for some sort of absent treatment. What charms me is the way those fellows seem to turn on the same tap, whatever the disease. A child down ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... that he took me for a Jacobite, for he began a rigmarole about loyalty and hard fortune. I hastened to correct him, and he took the correction with the same patient despair with which he took all things. 'Twas but another of ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... rigmarole comin' to? Here we are 'most at my house. If you ain't goin' to work for me, what are you goin' ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... does not appear; but there can scarcely be a shadow of doubt, that he was for a considerable while at some school or other, where he had a number of cronies. In proof of this, and to show that we have good reasons for our suppositions, James recommends me to print the following rigmarole meditations, on the top of which ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... the very first assertions made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic, whereas Iago himself had often fought by Othello's side, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... was beginning to be bored. Had the butler fallen prey to one of the graminophile sects like Brother Paul's and gone through all this rigmarole merely to give me notice ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... himself has told me the whole affair; but, what is more, I have discovered that all this pretty rigmarole about Celia being carried off by gypsies, and having a great nobleman for her father, who is setting out from Spain to come hither, is nothing but a mere stratagem, a merry trick, a made-up story, a tale raised by Lelio to ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... writing was good, but precise; it was sealed with red wax, but the impression was sunk: a proper seal had not been used! Especially where his own family was concerned, Mr. Wylder was not the most delicate of men! he opened the letter, and in it found what he called a rigmarole of poetry and theology! "Confound the fellow!" he said to himself. Lady Ann did well to warn him! There should be no more of this! The scatter-brain took after her mother! He would give ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Mr. Ivolgin," he said irritably. "What is the good of all this rigmarole? Pardon me. All is now clear, and we acknowledge the truth of your main point. Why go into these tedious details? You wish perhaps to boast of the cleverness of your investigation, to cry up your talents as detective? Or perhaps your ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is true? Go ahead and let me have all the facts. She is Hare Sahib's daughter; Ali told me that. Precious rigmarole of some ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... the Schein for it. If you lose the Schein you are undone. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen, because it would be a tragedy without precedent, but it is impossible that German officials would surrender a trunk without receiving a Schein in exchange; at least, not without months of rigmarole and delay. Even when it is the official who blunders the public suffers for it. We were travelling some years ago from Leipzig to London when the guard examining our tickets let one blow away. Luckily some German gentlemen in the carriage with us saw what happened, gave ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... with his feet on the stove smoking away and reading something or other, and letting them all gabble like a lot of ducks, it just makes me mad. But when he wakes up he puts the fear of death on you, and when he reads he makes you shiver through and through. You know that long rigmarole, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen'? I used to hate it. Well, sir, he told us about it last Friday. You know, on Friday afternoons we don't do any work, but just have songs and reading, and that sort of thing. Well, sir, last Friday he told us about the big row in Rome, and how ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... people would pull such a trick, Harlan—any more than the ones like you and Arv and Hank who are above suspicion. Most of them could have easily obtained the news without going through such a rigmarole." ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... first time in her married life she was led to discuss her husband's ways and actions with another; and, to her amazement, she found that it was easier to talk to Purdy about Richard than to Richard himself. Purdy and she saw things in the same light; no rigmarole of explanation was necessary. Now with Richard, it was not so. In conversation with him, one constantly felt that he was not speaking out, or, to put it more plainly, that he was going on meanwhile with his own, very different thoughts. And behind what he did say, there was sure to lurk ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... I've been left in charge of the cottage, and have been writing ever since this long rigmarole to you. Mrs. Macdonald's words have given me food for reflection, and, the more I reflect, the more fully convinced I am how thoroughly unfitted I am to fill the place allotted to me. Had Major Lessing left me money enough to carry out my own ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... be noticed here:—the rigmarole, snatches of which probably most of us have heard, which contains an immense number of mere truisms having no connexion with each others, and no bond of union but the metrical form in which their juxtaposition is effected, and the rhyme, which is kept up very well throughout, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... rapid and wise to gulp down the obsolete doctrine of ancient fanaticism, and the preachers of to-day are painfully alarmed at the decreasing number of pewholders and patrons, who once listened to their rigmarole platitudes or eloquent dissertations on the power and locution ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... dealings with one another than if they were as ignorant of the Ten Commandments as the most benighted heathens, to whom even the name of Moses was never spoken. Yet, from your looks, I see that you are wondering within yourselves what all this rigmarole about England, France, the Six Nations, and disputed territories, can have to do with George Washington. Had you held a tight rein on your impatience a little while longer, you would have found out all about ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... high enough to be just above their reach, and a handful of Scotch snuff on a dry leaf on the ground under it, and the rabbits, while smelling for the apple, would inhale the snuff, and sneeze themselves to death in no tune. Well, I was a child then and simple enough to be gammoned by this rigmarole. I set the apple and the snuff, but I got no rabbit, while I did get laughed at hugely for my credulity. This satisfied me that people should never impose upon the simplicity of childhood. I remember my mortification on the occasion. It was so long ago that it stands ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... at, Jim?" I asked. "What object have you in all this"—rigmarole, I was about to say, but regard for his feelings changed ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... "We'll wait till night if he takes as long to go through his rigmarole as he done yesterday. If I got to fight I want to hop to it, not set round in the shade o' the shelterin' palm while them guys are heatin' up the stewpot. This waitin' stuff ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... What an absurd rigmarole she was uttering! Yet such was the spell of her eyes, her voice, her nearness that I merely felt like saying, "Tell me ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... talked glibly about infinity ever since the beginnings of Greek thought, nobody had ever thought of asking, What is infinity? If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all. Twenty years ago, roughly speaking, Dedekind and Cantor asked this question, and, what is more remarkable, they answered it. They found, that is to say, a perfectly ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... criterion by which Teachers ought to be sanctioned, countenanced, and patronized—incited, ordered, and directed, the aforesaid Lampooner—a reckless, heartless, illiterate, evil-minded ghost, yes my friends an evil-spirit, created by the wrath of God—to pour out the rigmarole effusions of his silly and contemptible lucubrations. It is a well-known fact, that this vile calumniator is the shame, the disgrace, the opprobrium, and brand of detestation; the sacrilegious and perjured outcast of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... amusing to Jack, and scarcely less so to Carlos, to observe the sympathetic courtesy with which the English Consul listened to all this rigmarole, which, from his manner, one might have believed to have been absolutely ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... times and ways in which Lot and Abraham were walked into the conversation were incalculable,—and unintelligible except to the person who understood it only too well. On one occasion Mrs. Evelyn went on with a long rigmarole to Mr. Thorn about sea-breezes, with a face of most exquisite delight at his mystification and her own hidden fun; till Fleda was absolutely trembling. Fleda shunned both the gentlemen at length with a kind of ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... expression could possibly excel his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole. But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table—one leg usually supported by a folio volume—surrounded by the cats and dogs whom he had taken to solacing himself ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... much pardon in milk and water. I wonder if there's time to change the spooney simplicity, and come out in something spicy, with a dash of the Bloomer. But, maybe, there's some news of him in the other sheet, now she has delivered her conscience of her rigmarole. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hands—and that is a lengthy business, for it is bad manners to be the first to let go of an Arab's hand, so that tact is required as well as patience; but it was well worth while standing in the sun repeating the back-and-forth rigmarole of Arab greeting if that meant that Ali Baba and his sixteen sons and grandsons were to be our companions on the adventure. They followed us at last into the governorate, and sat down on the hall carpet with the air of men who know what fun the ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... tobacco-smoke; familiar with nothing but whist, yarn stockings, flannels and shooting-jackets; without the least possible relish for landscape or color, for the twittering of birds, or the swarming of bumble-bees and forest-leaves; with no sense of poetry, and a mortal hatred of rigmarole, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... islander, speaking no English and about fifty words of Samoan, recently promoted from the bush work, and a most good, anxious, timid lad of 15 or 16 - looks like 17 or 18, of course - they grow fast here. In comes Mitaiele to Lloyd, and told some rigmarole about Paatalise (the steward's name) wanting to go and see his family in the bush. - 'But he has no family in the bush,' said Lloyd. 'No,' said Mitaiele. They went to the boy's bed (they sleep in the walled-in compartment of the verandah, once my dressing-room) and ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... delivery of Abbe Raynal's address.) "This is the first and only time I found Robespierre clear and even eloquent.... He spun out his opening phrases as usual, which contained the spirit of his discourse, and which, in spite of his accustomed rigmarole, produced the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... description at once accurate and fair, brief and adequate, of this peculiarity; it is best hinted at in a remark on De Quincey's conversation which I have seen quoted somewhere (whether by Professor Masson or not I hardly know), that it was, with many interesting and delightful qualities, a kind of "rigmarole." So far as I remember, the remark was not applied in any unfriendly spirit, nor is it adduced here in any such. But both in the printed works, in the remembrances of De Quincey's conversation which have been printed, in his letters which are exactly like his articles, and in those astonishing ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... my father, that, not knowing what he might do, I rushed between them, and hastily pushed back the arm-chair to the wall. Then the monk, speaking in a mournful tone, which was rendered still more terrifying by the approach of night, began to pour out some lamentable rigmarole of a confession, and ended by asking pardon for his crimes, and declaring that he was already covered by the black veil which parricides wear when they ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... he is recording, and he will wax amazingly sentimental, and perhaps shed as many real tears as Sterne or Dickens do sham ones over their figments. This realism of Carlyle's gives a great charm to his histories and biographies. The amount he tells you is something astonishing—no platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles which are the staple of most biography, but, instead of them, all the facts and features of the case—pedigree, birth, father and mother, brothers and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress, mode ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... there, Dixie," he said, firmly. "I'm going to stick right here, and do the best I can. Folks may talk some about me and Hettie not living together, but I can't put up with all that rigmarole over there. It ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... the poet replied. "Death or Foedora! On with you! That silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There is nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours." ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... of dandyism unrestrained by taste, he parodied in his person the foibles of Mr. Brummell and the King. His diamonds and his equipage and other follies became the gossip of every newspaper in England. Nor did a day pass without the publication of some little rigmarole from his pen. Wherever there was a vacant theatre—were it in Cheltenham, Birmingham, or any other town—he would engage it for his productions. One night he would play his favourite part, Romeo, with reverence and ability. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... he never can, I should think, now that he sees not only the road but the rate they are going, continue to take a part so contrary to all his own interests and feelings, and to the feelings and interests of all the respectable part of his country.... But what is to be the end of all this rigmarole of mine? To conclude, this—to advise you, for your own sake as a tradesman, for Lord Byron's sake as a poet, for the sake of good literature and good principles, which ought to be united, to take such measures as you may be able to venture upon to get Lord Byron to revise these two cantos, ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... they've a single thing to do with it, but Mr. Roger says they have, and he says a man called Darwin proved it. This is the rigmarole he got off to me the other day. The clover crop depends on there being plenty of bumble-bees, because they are the only insects with tongues long enough to—to—fer—fertilize—I think he called ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... intended to speak again, but thought better of it, and contented himself with staring at me very hard. In the next street a man stopped me, and started a long rigmarole, but I pushed him ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... inspected Quentin Durward's palm, according to the form of the mystic arts which he practised, so the swarthy prophetess opened her Book of Fate, and favoured Mr. Verdant Green with choice extracts from its contents. First, she told the pretty gentleman a long rigmarole about the stars, and a planet that ought to have shone upon him, but didn't. Then she discoursed of a beautiful young lady, with a heart as full of love as a pomegranate was full of seeds, - painting, in pretty ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the Early Kings of Norway. "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February 15th, 1872.—Froude, Carlyle's Life in London, vol. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... us, good sir, all this rigmarole about love, in the presence of the king; for the ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... Balder, seating himself on the side of my bed, although I forestalled his intention, and left hardly an inch for him to sit on. Then he entered into a long and not very lucid rigmarole on souls which are destined to come together. The story was rendered all the more difficult to understand from the fact that I kept falling asleep, and dreaming between his rhapsodies; but I gathered that Balder had met ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... I have written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for utterance which only confession can slake; as one ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... melting eyes. Fred turned his back and went through the fruitless rigmarole of trying to appear indifferent, going to the usual length at last of humming ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... all this rigmarole which appealed to Master Boltay most strongly was that this worthy woman had eaten no food that day. So he considered it his Christian duty to there and then take a plate of lard-dumplings and a tumbler full of wine ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... of sight, than Godmamma said, with a long rigmarole, that she felt it her duty to you to look after me, and she must tell me that it was inconvenant for a young girl to smile or speak to a man as much as I had done to the Marquis. I was so furious at that, that I said, as I found it impossible to understand their ways, I would ask Agnes ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole,—IERY FIERY ICHERY VAN, TITTLE-TOL-TAN. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... that this petrified man is nothing but a graven image, proves that he is a little soft in the upper story. There is no shadow of doubt that this is a genuine petrifaction. I would take my oath of it. Dr. Boynton writes a long rigmarole to show that he is a statue made by the Jesuits; but in my opinion the Dr. is just laying low so that he can buy the curiosity and make his pile on him. Why, you can see the very cords in his legs, ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... long?—a dozen, more than fifteen, years ago. He never recognised Miss Pansy, nor, knowing what he was about, would have anything to say to her; and there was no reason why he should. Osmond did, and that was better; though he had to fit on afterwards the whole rigmarole of his own wife's having died in childbirth, and of his having, in grief and horror, banished the little girl from his sight for as long as possible before taking her home from nurse. His wife had really died, you know, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... repeat the alphabet before they can recollect the relative place of any given letter; others repeat a column of the multiplication table before they can recollect the given sum of the number they want. There is a common rigmarole for telling the number of days in each month in the year; those who have learnt it by heart, usually repeat the whole of it before they can recollect the place of the month which they want; and sometimes in running over the lines, people miss the very month ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... immediately this awful-looking boy, to whom she introduced me as 'Sir Robert' something or another, had appeared upon the scene; and then there had followed—well, I have not the patience to tell you the whole of the rigmarole they had concocted. The upshot of it was that the robbers, defeated in their attempt to get into the house, had fired a secret mine, which had exploded in the kitchen. If I did not believe them I could go into the kitchen and see for myself. Say what I would, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... being somewhat overloaded, did not escape their notice. They were hailed successively, as a grocer's wife upon a party of pleasure with her eldest apprentice—as an old woman carrying her grandson to school—and as a young strapping Irishman, conveying an ancient maiden to Dr. Rigmarole's, at Redriffe, who buckles beggars for a tester and a dram of Geneva. All this abuse was retorted in a similar strain of humour by Greenjacket and his companion, who maintained the war of wit with the same alacrity ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... off on a long rigmarole about her and her talent, and how vain he and I should be if leading articles appeared in the Spectator about us as they did about her. I did not know there had been anything of the kind, but he said every one else did. And then he went on more slowly that Hester was under a foolish hallucination, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... fat as a stage financier, paused here to gasp; for the utterance of this string of banalities, this rigmarole of commonplaces, had left him breathless. He was very much dissatisfied with his performance; and ready to curse his barren imagination. He longed to hit upon swelling phrases and natural and touching gestures, but in vain. He could ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... "Get off some rigmarole of your own, I tell you," laughed the coming bridegroom, speaking to his companion, "It's no matter what it is, only don't make me burst out laughing in the middle of it, for Estella might resent it. She's a bright little one, and that's no josh. ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... very well," said Mr. Deane; "but it doesn't alter what I was going to say. Your Latin and rigmarole may soon dry off you, but you'll be but a bare stick after that. Besides, it's whitened your hands and taken the rough work out of you. And what do you know? Why, you know nothing about book-keeping, to begin with, and not so much of reckoning as a common shopman. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... to stop here and listen to a long rigmarole about that dreadful hole, you're mistaken; so hold ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... here. The children could not understand about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... mother was much in the habit of playing upon it, as the only means of persuasion or dissuasion within her command which was likely to make any impression upon his knotty young rind. So, while she was spinning out her rigmarole, Sprigg was making a great show of amusing himself with Pow-wow, slapping him over the muzzle with his coonskin cap, or setting that ornament in divers ways on the old dog's head; now with the tail over the right ear, then over the left, or over the nose; the young sauce-box the while keeping ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... the White House, which seemed to have been "edited" by the President himself—as often royalty revises plays—for his special entertainment, the Cabinet being invited, after a rigmarole of stilted phrases purporting to be by Washington, Franklin, Napoleon, and other past celebrities, Mr. Welles, secretary of the navy, remarked: "I will think this matter over, and see what conclusion to arrive at!" (His ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... heard such a rigmarole in all my born days." And then, angrily to Rachel, "Go down and look on th' top ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... the Rome express. I came straight to Cap Martin, expecting to find Mary. Instead I found my brother and his wife alone. My sister-in-law, I must say in justice, seemed terribly grieved at what had happened. She could or would tell me nothing. But Angelo—my brother—began some rigmarole about Mary having run away from her convent-school years ago with a man, and—but I won't repeat the story. I refused to listen. I ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... jingle—"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you could not see! Blind, blind, that you could ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... would not justify what he had done, To say the best, it was extreme ill-breeding; But there were ample reasons for it, none Of which he specified in this his pleading: His speech was a fine sample, on the whole, Of rhetoric, which the learn'd call 'rigmarole.' ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... any thing in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... more—float on water like one log—den you come—white man, Spaniard, say you kill us—ah, no, no—you very good—we very happy—yes, massa, Peter Pongo very happy now." Such was Peter's brief account of himself. You will not consider it too much of a rigmarole. I was, I know, much interested when he told it me, and I had some little difficulty in making out what he meant. Soon after this we entered the magnificent harbour of Rio de Janeiro, which looks like a lake surrounded by lofty hills, the curious sugar-loaf ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... ought to be his crown." At this solemn moment the fraternization of the king with the people took place, and "the next day the same king betrayed, calumniated, and disgraced the people!" Manuel's rigmarole surpasses all that can be imagined. "After this there arises in the panelings of the Louvre, at the confluence of the civil list, another channel, which leads through the shades below to Petion's dungeon... The department, in dealing a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... bearing the hearse on their backs, the Corean cavalry and infantry forming two lines in good style. There stood the Corean horsemen, each supported by two men, apparently unconcerned at the long Japanese rigmarole, of which they did not understand a word; there rode as stiff as statues outside the ranks the officers of Cho-sen, on their little ponies. All of a sudden, however, the two field-guns went off, and with the most disastrous effects. Half the cavalrymen tumbled off their saddles ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... what rigmarole 's this? Married—ay, an' so you shall be, in gude time. You 'm light-headed, lass, I do b'lieve. But doan't fret, I'll ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... himself had not come. He could not understand why it was that he had so much difficulty in talking easily with strangers. Lensley was prattling as if he were determined to discharge an entire novelful of "chatter" at Lady Cecily, and Boltt's little clipped, pedantic voice recited a long rigmarole about a glorious view in France which he had lately seen while motoring in that country. Boltt admired Nature in the way in which any man of careful upbringing would admire a ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Crobble came into the office with an open letter in his hand. "Here,"—cried he, "I've received a remittance at last from that, German fellow—two good bills on the first house in the city—but I can't make top nor tail of his rigmarole. Do you know any chap among your acquaintance who ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... understand, reforming our prisons) brought him the offer of an appointment quite beyond his deserts. I was very glad to hear of it, however, and I asked the creature to contribute a paper recording his first impressions of this notable man; instead of which he begins with an opinionated rigmarole about himself, and goes on from bad to worse by describing a long conversation he had about prison reform with that horrid, masculine Mrs. C——, whom all the officers call 'Charlie,' and who thinks that for men to grow humane is a ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... cackle about, she has fulfilled the purpose for which she came into existence, and women—the average Society women, at least—do not. Then there'll be singing, of a sort, and—but you know, Colonel, all the usual rigmarole. Now I want a long, long talk with you about the subject you have just broached. We could not talk, as we would, in the crowd that will be in the drawing-room presently, so I wonder if you would give me an hour in the library, tomorrow morning after breakfast. I suggest the library because ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... of the little school histories there is but a tedious, bare narrative of apparently unconnected facts, and there is a profitless rigmarole of dates and names: but when the sequence of cause and effect is not obscured, and form and life are given to the actors, and the development of events and institutions is traced, the story of the United States becomes, as it should become, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 19, March 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various |
