"Twaddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great by skill, and greater by a writer's soul honestly flung into its pages, "Uncle Tom," to the surprise of many that twaddle traditional phrases in reviews and magazines about the art of fiction, and to the surprise of no man who knows anything about the art of fiction, was all the rage. Not to have read it was like not to have read the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... 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 be possible ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... 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 ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... those words our sign of parting!" cried DUNRAVEN, swift upstarting; "Sweating's an accursed system, but if now our toil is o'er, We leave twaddle as sole token of the swelling words we've spoken. Public faith in us is broken! Bah! I quit, I "bust", boil o'er! Take my seat, sign your Report, about such bosh my spirit ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, April 5, 1890 • Various
... difficulty, as a monitor who is encouraging rather than severe. Mr. Cleves has the wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand; not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively, and you will see that his face is a very interesting one —that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his grey eyes, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... want of education, ambition, animation, and push, are indulging in practices that are fast working their own destruction and those they are brought into contact with, and a great deal of this may lay at the door of flattery, twaddle, petting, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... 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 permit of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... 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
... distance, an intense feeling of misery crept over me, as I reflected that perchance I had left those most dear to return to them no more. But I forget; a description of private feelings is, to uninterested readers, only so much twaddle, besides being more egotistical than even an account of personal adventures could extenuate; so, with the exception of a few extracts from my "log," I shall jump at once from the English Channel to the ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... carry a novel into chapel to read, not out of any respect for some people's old-womanish twaddle about the sacredness of the place,—but because some of the blues might see you.—Yale Lit. Mag., ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... far Mr. Tiralla had not said a word, but now he started up from his seat and banged the table with his fist. "Stop that twaddle!" He [Pg 125] raised his hand as though he were going to box the child's ears. She shrank back ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... 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 ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... had the organ-grinders play. But such organs are noisy and draw people to the windows and into the street. And why butcher the victim, since so many strong men could easily have strangled him? Show me the medical report. Monsieur, does it not speak of a gash rather than a stab? And what twaddle, that about the funeral train, what betraying arrangements in a country where every sign-post has eyes! I am accused of having rushed into my uncle's house the following day and stolen some papers. Where are those papers? My uncle died almost poor. His claim against me was transferred to President ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the 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 at the success so far ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... later and less skillful hand, and we should be sorry to have anyone lay the book aside and lose the pleasure of reading Snorre's and Olaf's charming work, because he became disgusted with what seemed to him mere silly twaddle. And yet these Forewords and Afterwords become interesting enough when taken up in connection with a study of the historical anthropomorphized Odin. With a view of giving a pretty complete outline of the founder of ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... Thorn," I repeated with emphasis. I knew he had in mind that abominable twaddle about ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy of courage and endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained to speak of life as "all good" when he knows of inherited disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... one can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny Cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied bowls, and reeled home to chambers ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... look with astonishment and distrust at any one trying to break away from their tiresome old ways and habits, and wonder why all the world is not as pleased with their personalities as they are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things are altered. No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the "complacent" ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... from good," sighed old gentleman No. 2; "but we will continue to endure our hardships for months, or for years if need be, rather than allow the Prussians to enter Paris." This sort of Lacedemonian twaddle went on during the whole time of my visit, and my cousin evidently was proud of being surrounded by such Spartans. I give a specimen of it, as I think these worthies ought to be gratified by their heroic sacrifices being made public. "I'd rough ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... 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 ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... you 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 the meaning of sincerity. If they really believed that "a baby ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... cheek flush and your eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting flood" of insipidity, twaddle, bosh, and heart-rending sorrow, you do not shut the book with a jerk. Why not? Because in the dismal distance you dimly descry two figures swimming, floating, struggling towards each other, and a languid soupcon of curiosity detains you till you have ascertained, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... VERE DE VERE, I vow that you were not a flirt, The daughter of a hundred Earls Would not a single creature hurt. "Kind hearts are more than coronets," What abject twaddle, on my word; And then the joke is in the end,— We know they made the bard ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... artistic shape, there came to the 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 Gaul and ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... mind never deals in anecdotes, unless it be for the purpose of illustrating some general principle. Women and weak men are all addicted to the vice. If a person of this description begins to annoy a company with his or her twaddle, the only cure for it is to affect deafness—a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... at Hookham-cum-Snivey Church, by the Reverend Peter Twaddle, on the occasions, of building a dusthole for the national schools; of outfitting the missionaries who are exported annually to be eaten by the Catawampous Indians; on the death of Mr. Grubly, the retired cheesemonger, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of these nations: we marvel, we wonder at them exceedingly. Greece we shall omit, because to talk of the arts, and Phidias, and Pericles, and 'all that,' is the surest way yet discovered by man for tempting a vindictive succession of kicks. Exposed to the world, no author of such twaddle could long evade assassination. But Rome is entitled to some separate notice, even after all that has been written about her. And the more so in this case, because Mr. Finlay has scarcely done her justice. He says: 'The Romans were a tribe of warriors. All their institutions, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... handle it with antiseptic precautions. When a critic who has risen high enough to be allowed to sign his reviews in a daily paper calls a new book "a great human novel," you may be absolutely sure that the said novel consists chiefly of ridiculous twaddle. Mr. Whitten is not a humanist in that sense. He has no sentimentality, and a very great deal ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... of Elizabethan literature, and I rashly concluded at once that he must be most delightful. He likewise came. I showed him my few poor books, which he condemned, and I found that such observations as I could make he considered as mere twaddle. I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the editions or the curiosities, or the proposed emendations of obscure passages, and he, too, departed abruptly. I began to think after he had gone that my study ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... 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 ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... your fancy, and, in addition to keeping your journal, keep it locked up, for it is quite enough to endure all the children's twaddle, ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... here, too, the old leaven of Oxford burst forth sometimes. Of course, we generally performed the music of Handel and other classical authors; Mendelssohn's compositions were still considered as mere twaddle by some of the old school. At one of these evenings, the old organist of New College, with his wooden leg, after sitting through a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Hymn of Praise, which I was conducting at the pianoforte, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... to see Cardinal Begin. For an Orangeman like Hughes 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 provided for ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... set aside the proposed discussion on "The Effects of High Intellectual Culture on the Efficiency and Respectability of Manual Labor," and take up pressing questions. When one man was indulging in a lot of the senseless twaddle about his wife which many of them are fond of introducing in their speeches, she called him to order saying that the kind of a wife he had, had nothing to do with the subject. She introduced again the resolution ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Cross 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 ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whether you have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not all spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is but ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... babble, gabble, jabber, tattle, twaddle, blab, gossip, palaver, parley, converse, mumble, mutter, stammer, stutter.> (With this group compare the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... it, but there were a great many vulgar suggestions and unpleasant innuendoes. As a dramatic critic said in my hearing a day or two later, when discussing the popular entertainments of London, 'Most of these shows consist of vulgar, brainless twaddle.' Still, the audience laughed and cheered, and when the curtain finally fell, there was a good deal of applause. Certainly the entertainment would be a great contrast to the experiences which the lads who were home on leave had been going through. But as I reflect ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... far removed from the average drawing-room medley of twaddle and rattle that the music interpreted the words into its own universal language, and ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... degree, not of kind. The Pharisees of Scripture pretended to be what they were not, and got roundly denounced as hypocrites for their pains. As a fact, they were only incipient actors. The talk about teaching is, to my thinking, undiluted twaddle. The inherent desire to simulate grows, or it does not grow. You cannot make it grow. If a naturally awkward man can simulate the graces of a dancing master, if a naturally graceful man can simulate the limp ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Elizabeth again, surrounded by a circle of admirers—men and women—an oasis of intelligence, it seemed to him as he listened, in a desert of twaddle. She smiled at him with her eyes, as he looked at her through the press, and just as he had won to a place by her side, the tide was sent flooding into a large room where, it was announced, Professor Blatherwick and Madame le Claire ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... of "those great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in the company, I am worse ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... is, when I joined Dubedat after his conversation with Mr Walpole, he said the Jews were the only people who knew anything about art, and that though he had to put up with your Philistine twaddle, as he called it, it was what I said about the drawings that really pleased him. He also said that his wife was greatly struck with my knowledge, and that she always admired Jews. Then he asked me to advance him 50 pounds on ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... else 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 for suit to be instituted; so have the Land Office ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... 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, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust! Priapus—worshipping obscenity. Rant and rubbish. Linguistic silliness. Inhumanly insolent. Apotheosis of Sweat. Mouthings of a mountebank. Venomously malignant. Pretentious twaddle. Degraded helot of literature. His work, like a maniac's robe, bedizened with fluttering tags of a thousand colors. Roaming, like a drunken satyr, with inflamed blood, through every field of lascivious thought. Muck ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... interest, and presently began to laugh. "So she begins to fear we have been somewhat hasty, asks a little time for reconsideration of her precise sentiment toward me, and feels meanwhile in honour bound to release me from our engagement! Yet if upon mature deliberation—eh, oh, yes! twaddle! and commonplace! and dashed, of course, with ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... these torsos of the haberdasher, one is not brought to thoughts of sad mortality. Their joy is so exultant. And all the things that they hold dear—canes, gloves, silk hats, and the newer garments on which fashion makes its twaddle—are within reach of their armless sleeves. Had they fingers they would be smoothing themselves before the glass. Their unbodied heads, wherever they may be, are still smiling on the world, despite their divorcement. Their tongues are still ready with a jest, their lips still parted ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... 'meetin's 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
... 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
... to Sidonia, who dashed it away, crying—"Stuff! nonsense! you have learned all this twaddle from the priest, who, I know, is nephew to the shoe-maker in Daber, and therefore hates any one who is ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... wrote, some years later; 'how that name recalls the happy, happy hours I passed with you at Eartham; when by the title 'Muse' you summoned me to the morning walk!' Amongst the drossy twaddle which passed current as poetry at Eartham, a sonnet in Romney's honour by a true poet—William Cowper—may be counted ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... wretched twaddle I ever did read," he exclaimed, "this is positively the worst. Why, the rag would have the police arrest ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... paid no attention to the innocent twaddle of poor old Katie, though at a less horrible moment it might have served to amuse her. She hurried as fast as her agitation would permit her from the scene of the dreadful tragedy, unconscious how closely this poor murdered girl's fate would be connected with her own future destiny. She ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... good fortune when the 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
... no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... is possible to push altruism too far, and for Margaret, at her age and with her attractions, to go fooling around with medicine, with the mistaken idea that she was benefiting humanity, was nothing more or leas than damned twaddle. If she wanted to do something why not take up her ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... utter twaddle, and what may all this nonsense have signified, pray? If it had any meaning at all!" said Mrs. Epanchin, cuttingly, after having listened ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... not a 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, her head on ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... cant words, of no very definite, and of merely conventional, meaning, for any thing said or done in ignorance of the true propriety of the matter in question. "C'est du rococo," it is mere stuff, or nonsense, or rather twaddle. It was born on the stage, about ten years ago, at one of the minor theatres at Paris, though probably borrowed from a wine-shop, and most likely will have as brief an existence as our own late "flare-up," ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... freedom from all effort, that were in their way the perfection of breeding. I have seen these often in the peasantry, in the poor. It is your middle classes, with their incessant flutter, and bluster, and twitter, and twaddle; with their perpetual strain after effect; with their deathless desire to get one rung of the ladder higher than they ever can get; with their preposterous affectations, their pedantic unrealities, their morbid dread of remark, their everlasting imitations, their ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... answered, Paul. Of course, in a sense, you are right. I am an old woman, and the twaddle of a London drawing-room would fall strangely upon my ears now, but I had my share of it before Arthur was born. If I were a man, I should want variety,—a little sauce,—and you are right to seek for it. And now, won't you go and have a ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... distinctive characteristic of an era in architecture, is not so 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
... all this interesting enough! But why expect me to wade through pages of twaddle about Scottish peasants and their doings—for it is evident that is what it will ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... go. They had parted, the evening before, after a bitter quarrel; and he had left her, vowing that he would not return till she sent for him. He had waited the whole day, in vain, for a sign. What was Dove with his pompous twaddle to him? Every slight sound on the stairs or in the passage meant more. He was listening, listening, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... every 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, they have sacrificed ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... his cab and smoked his cigar he cursed vigorously. "Damn the cursed half-breed of a fellow! He's clever enough, and all that; but what the devil Helen can see in him to make me invite him down to Te Ariri I don't know. Curse her infernal twaddle about the rights of humanity and such fustian. Once you are my wife, my sweet, romantic cousin, I'll knock all that idiotic bosh on the head. It's bad enough to sit in the House and listen to this fellow frothing, without having to bring a quarter-bred ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors among my ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... ailments and cossetings. Griffiths, luckily, 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
... 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 not guying ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... certainly, 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 dropped, and the speakers ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... it "a human book, written out of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an author, full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness without twaddle—a book that makes one feel friends at once and for always with the man or woman who wrote it." She guessed the author was "a man of middle age, with a wife, from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a good many children, and a dog that he has as much fondness for ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... to take this trouble. I always contemplate the possibility that hereafter my journal will be read by the public, always greedy of such things, and I regard with alarm and dislike the notion of its containing a heap of twaddle and trash concerning matters appertaining to myself which nobody else will care three straws about. If therefore I discard these scruples and do what I meditate (and very likely after all I shall not, or only for a very short time), the next ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the only charge which had made any impression upon the minds of the committee was that relating to Moulin, the Frenchman. Three, indeed, of the members, (Messrs. Voorhees, of Indiana, Potter, of New York, and Peters, of Maine,) said it was a shame and disgrace that such ridiculous and monstrous twaddle should be listened to for a moment; but a majority considered it their duty, under the order of reference, to hear the matter patiently. They had, therefore, allowed Hastings the widest latitude and listened to everything ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... 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 there—you know what ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... 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
... Rebecca, angrily, "ef I can hev the pleasure o' bein' rid o' you, Copernicus Droop, it'll be cheap at the price—but the's no sech luck. Ef you think ye can fool us any more with yer twaddle 'bout cuttin' meridians, ye're mistaken—that's all I ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... unsound as his statement that he could bring the Trust to terms. Yet Gordon seemed thoroughly in earnest. Either he expected to fool his present hearer, or else he had become hypnotized by the spell of his own magnificent twaddle— O'Neil could not ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... to Europe by McKinley to talk a little twaddle about international bi-metallism has completed its alleged labors, and the net product is nothing—just as the people knew it would be when saddled with the expense of this high-fly junketing trip to enable the administration to make a pretense ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... "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. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... on dinner invitations. And because he was a son of Vondeplosshe the same family friends endured his conceited twaddle and his knock-kneed, wicked little self, and sighed with relief when he went away. It would be so much easier to send these dethroned sons of rich men a supply of groceries and an ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... returned Lamotte, sulkily. "Vandyck don't seem to realize that I have a prior claim, and that his twaddle, therefore, only serves ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... her, and (not without 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 or ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... denouncing bad work by the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's books; the feeble chirrupings of the bardlings who manufactured verses for the "Annuals;" and the twaddle of the "genial" incapables who praised them in flabby reviews—all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though his writings are unmoral, can they be called in any sense immoral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... on the fat o' the land, and wears the best of everything, and they does nothing for it but talk a lot of twaddle two or three times a week. The rest of the time they spend cadgin' money orf silly old women who thinks it's a sorter ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... [here Miss Rita smiled artfully.] 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 are so abominably ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... things live on and affect the human mind for ever. Bad things are born of bad. Who can tell what may be the effect of seeing day by day an hideous building, of hearing day by day indifferent music, of constantly reading a lot of feeble twaddle? Surely one effect will be that we shall gradually lose our appreciation of what is good and beautiful. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." Ah! but we must have eyes to see it. This springtime is lovely, if we have the eyes to see it; but, if we have not, its loveliness is nothing to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... 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 ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... unpleasant, no doubt, but I rather fancy it will affect more important people than you. There is no use whining about it.... No, I couldn't possibly. You must take your chance.... That's enough, sir. Nonsense! I have something more important to do than to listen to such twaddle." ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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; it is the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and 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
... out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing—oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... was inartistic, and helplessly, childishly stupid as to any literary merits,—a mere mass of gossip and twaddle; but after all, when one remembers the taste of the thousands of circulating-library readers, it must not be considered the less likely to be widely read on that account. It is only once in a century that a writer of real genius ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the fact that he was beginning to give vent to a lot of twaddle, and speedily, pleading fatigue, she paid no further notice to him. This compelled Pao-y to at last be quiet and go to sleep. By the morrow, all recollection of the discussion ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... 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 I say, only ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... "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 sideways to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... are apprehensive of an invasion,—not an impossible event; some writing odes to the Duke of Wellington; and I am putting my good friend to sleep with the flattest prose that ever dropped from an English pen. I wish that it were better; I wish that it were even worse; but it is the most undeniable twaddle. I must go to bed, and invoke the Muses in the morning. At present, I cannot touch ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... muddle, bull; Irishism^, Hibernicism^; slipslop^; anticlimax, bathos; sophism &c 477. farce, galimathias^, amphigouri^, rhapsody; farrago &c (disorder) 59; betise [Fr.]; extravagance, romance; sciamachy^. sell, pun, verbal quibble, macaronic^. jargon, fustian, twaddle, gibberish &c (no meaning) 517; exaggeration &c 549; moonshine, stuff; mare's nest, quibble, self- delusion. vagary, tomfoolery, poppycock, mummery, monkey trick, boutade [Fr.], escapade. V. play the fool &c 499; talk nonsense, parler a tort et a travess [Fr.]; battre la campagne [Fr.]; hanemolia ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... needs 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
... appeal for the marsupial martyr Is based upon an ancient nursery model; But he will find that he has caught a Tartar, Who hints that Punch is talking heartless twaddle. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... threatened to materialize before me. I rose and fled from the room bare-headed Into the dusk, afraid of my gift. And after that the spirits swarmed— Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe, Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt— Wherever I went, with messages,— Mere trifling twaddle, Spoon River agreed. You talk nonsense to children, don't you? And suppose I see what you never saw And never heard of and have no word for, I must talk nonsense when you ask me ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... it—and I love it. It's my poison and my medicine. Most of all I hate the society twaddle. And, of course, that's what ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... could wish. The purport of these messages, which were written rather quickly, and without perceptible thought or hesitation, changing from one handwriting to another without the least apparent difficulty, was in some instances the veriest twaddle, while others contained tolerably good sense, even in language rather above the Medium, unless appearances were misleading, for she looked the embodiment of ignorant simplicity, ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... 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 ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... sharply featured faces, and their wigs bobbing at each other, 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
... It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church and destined to be, more formidable in its ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lightened any burden, purified any taste? Does he play any real part in our lives? When we are in love, do we whisper him in our lady's ear? When we sorrow, does he ease our pain? Can he calm the strife of mental conflict? Has he had anything to say, which wasn't twaddle, on those subjects which, elude analysis as they may, and defy demonstration as they do, are yet alone ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... the waterhole, it's cool there, and better fun than listening to an old woman's twaddle. The sun's down now. ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... reached its acme," he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 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 formulated ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... Street by half-past nine. He rather expected to see old Grogan on the platform, and was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by his absence. On the one hand, he could hardly have borne Grogan's twaddle on the journey to Tilbury, his mind being engrossed as it was. On the other, he looked to him to cover his presence at ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan |
