"Drivel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... words, Sedgwick," said Mr. Thompson approvingly. "The word I had on my tongue was—balderdash. But your thought was happier. Balderdash is a vague and shapeless term. It conjures up no definite vision. But drivel and drool—very ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... their chairs, and a Rand magnate, who was eating peas at the next table, started and cut his mouth. "Go? It's the limit! This is just the sort of thing to get right at them. It'll hit them where they live. What made you think of that drivel at the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... the mother of altruism, that self-sacrifice is her first law! One genius observes that 'tis their cruelty and selfishness have arrested the progress of the tiger and the ape! Poor Nature! Never a word of shotguns in all this drivel, of course. Cruelty and selfishness! Qualities purely and solely human—qualities resulting from conscious intelligence alone. You and I are selfish, not the ape; you and I are cruel, not the tiger. He at least learns Nature's lessons and obeys her dictates; ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... and are not absorbed in any grief. It is clear to us that the Eternal Providence has assigned us our tasks, not by your advice, nor by vote of Parliament,—astonishing to sundry as that may seem. Your opinion of the matter we hold, therefore, to be quite beside the matter; and drivel, like that of your nutshell-epic, by no means tends to make us wish that Providence had acted upon European counsel rather than upon His Own! Moreover, we are very busy in these days, and can have small eye to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... (tool) borilo. Drill (military) ekzerco. Drink trinki. Drink (to excess) drinki. Drink trinkajxo. Drinkable trinkebla. Drip guteti. Drive away (expel) forpeli. Drive (in carriage) veturi. Drive back (repel) repeli, repusxi. Drivel (to slaver) kracxeti. Driver (car, etc.) veturisto. Droll ridinda, sxerca. Drollery sxerco—ado. Dromedary unugxiba kamelo. Drone burdo. Droop (pine) malfortigxi. Drop guto. Dropsy akvosxvelo. Dross metala sxauxmo. Drought senpluveco. Drove ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... be so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless did I drivel —Being—who? ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... no sort of patience with the theological snivel and drivel about the sacredness of the Sabbath. I do not understand why they do not accept the words of their own Christ, namely, that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... congealed. With six eyes did he weep, and down three chins Trickled the tear-drops and the bloody drivel. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... at him in a kind of stupefaction. Was it of Farrington the man was talking such drivel? Farrington, who only the week before had told him in high gratification that within the last month he had added a cool million to his ward's marriage portion. Farrington, who had, but two days ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... that bit kinder to one than she would dare be to any man who was not out of it, each time people are manifestly interested—politely, of course—and form a circle, make room for one as they did at that particularly disagreeable Grimshott garden party yesterday, each time—I don't want to drivel, but so it is—one sees a pair of lovers—oh! well, it's not easy to retain one's philosophy, not to obey the primitive instincts of any animal when it's ill-used and hurt, and to revenge oneself—to want to kill, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... so loved, yet so mistaken! What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel —Being—who? ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... it," said Gordon at tea. "Bradford was bowling the most utter drivel half the time, I would have given anything to have been batting. And you were not bowling at your ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Others had lied to him; he had dissembled with himself. He was a drunkard, and had not known it. What he had fondly imagined was a pleasant exhilaration had been maudlin intoxication. His fancied wit had been drivel; his gay humors nothing but the noisy vagaries of a ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... kings were first invented, and thus kings Were burnished into heroes, and became The arbiters of this terraqueous swamp; Storks among frogs, that have but croaked and died. Strange that such folly, as lifts bloated man To eminence fit only for a god, Should ever drivel out of human lips, Even in the cradled weakness of the world! Still stranger much, that when at length mankind Had reached the sinewy firmness of their youth, And could discriminate and argue well On subjects more mysterious, they were yet Babes in ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and worse rime, without any resemblance to poetry. The remaining stanzas are mere drivel, unworthy of the poet's talent or of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... their drivel? I aim only at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no higher degree of merit, not even at brevity - I am sure it could have been all done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Warburton and Doctor Johnson used collectively or individually the following expressions in describing the work of the author of "Hamlet": conceit, overreach, word-play, extravagance, overdone, absurdity, obscurity, puerility, bombast, idiocy, untruth, improbability, drivel. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... portraits he has drawn of them? Would he carry us back to the early stages of barbarism, of clanship, of the feudal system as "a consummation devoutly to be wished?" Is he infatuated enough, or does he so dote and drivel over his own slothful and self-willed prejudices, as to believe that he will make a single convert to the beauty of Legitimacy, that is, of lawless power and savage bigotry, when he himself is obliged to apologize ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... drivel, full of whimpering soft-heartedness and gushing egoism. All the art that Pettit had acquired was gone. A perusal of its buttery phrases would have made a cynic of ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the niggard earth, Emblem of all to whom the Land gives birth; Each genial influence nurtured to resist; A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist. [xv] Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain, 140 Till, burst at length, each wat'ry head o'erflows, Foul as their soil, and frigid as their snows: Then thousand schemes of petulance and pride Despatch her scheming children far and wide; Some East, some West, some—everywhere but North! In quest of lawless gain, they issue ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James |
