"Jabber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time the two fugitives remained motionless and listened. There seemed to be a large number of men below, of whom a few were inside the mill, but the greater part remained outside. These kept up an incessant jabber; but it was of a discordant character, some talking about getting ready a supper, some about making a fire, some about forage, while at times a word would be dropped which seemed to indicate that they were in pursuit of fugitives. Nothing more definite ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... naturally frank and truthful, with some liking for me (for she looked forward to our voluptuous dallyings), she gave me for a long time much amusement, and I heard the incidents of her short life. She would jabber like a magpie about them when she knew me well, which she soon did, and began to look to me regularly ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... a jabber of hissings and gutturals. Carmena jerked her hand about in swift signs and cried back in uncouth thick-tongued Apache words. The dispute at last ended in a sullen mutter from below and a sudden thudding of hoofs. The Apaches dashed out from under the cliff, loping their ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... watch with my Punjaubees. They were tall, fierce-looking chaps, Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan by name, both old fighting-men who had borne arms against us at Chilian-wallah. They could talk English pretty well, but I could get little out of them. They preferred to stand together and jabber all night in their queer Sikh lingo. For myself, I used to stand outside the gate-way, looking down on the broad, winding river and on the twinkling lights of the great city. The beating of drums, the rattle of tomtoms, and the yells and howls of the rebels, drunk with ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not easy to say, methinks, for such jabber is hard to interpret. By my lady's leave, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... one's eyelids, I don't like the language, with its strong phrases about nothing, and vibrating like a pendulum between 'rapture' and 'desolation;' I don't like the accent, which one cannot get, without speaking through one's nose; I don't like the eternal fuss and jabber about books without nature, and revolutions without fruit; I have no sympathy with tales that turn on a dead jackass, nor with constitutions that give the ballot to the representatives, and withhold ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... temple" of his idol's fame. That seems to me simply degrading: and then the portentous ass, whose review I read, says that if the editor had done nothing else, he is sure of an honoured place for ever in the hierarchy of impeccable critics! And what is all this jabber about—a few rhymes which a man made when he was feeling a little off colour, and which he did not think it worth ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his hands. Then he stretched out his arms, and yawned in the face of the Council; but he was furious with rage and sorrow, for, wolf-like, the wolves had never told him how they hated him. 'Listen you!' he cried. 'There is no need for this dog's jabber. Ye have told me so often to night that I am a man (and indeed I would have been a wolf with you to my life's end), that I feel your words are true. So I do not call ye my brothers any more, but sag [dogs], as a man should. What ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... cupping his earphones to his head with his hands, nodded. "Give me a minute or two," he told them, "and I'll have a fix. They're excited about something—the way this jabber-jabber is coming through—" ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Sir Jabber," remarked the King to the can-opener, "that you have such a prying disposition. As a matter of fact, all the things you mention are none ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... so long to the same woman, and as to madame, she also was weary of being married to the same man, so each had decided to try a little change, whereupon Lizzie, the second waitress—a buxom Irish girl who despised "furriners" in general and Japanese in particular—bid Oku hold his tongue and not jabber such heathenish nonsense. ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... again, leaving me and my three men, with only two guns, among a suspicious and treacherous tribe that cannot understand a word we say to them. Wish my brothers would come and look after their own sheep. It would do E.'s health more good than sitting in Court, hearing a set of fools jabber. Sand-flies eat us alive here, and the mosquitoes ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... know a fine character and to entertain it with thankful hospitality. When at last that which we have always longed for is arrived and shines on us with glad rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, then to be critical and treat such a visitant with the jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is confusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no longer knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due. Is there ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... call baggage by the appellation of impedimenta. In this country it is so literally, not figuratively. It is absolutely necessary to have an interpreter who can talk Arabic; for though in Algeria there are many natives who jabber broken French or Italian, even this lingua Franca is so disguised that it is almost impossible to comprehend them; and in the interior there are very few "indigenes" who understand anything but Arabic. In Tunisia nothing but Arabic ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... season's stores. They had merely to pick up inert and unresisting beche-de-mer from among the coral five fathoms down, where the deceptive sea looked no more than ten feet deep under the squalid flatties; to smoke and jabber in idle moments; to eat and to sleep, and to listen to Mammerroo's version of the opening phrases of "The Last Rose of Summer" on a mouth-organ worn with inveterate usage to the bold brass. The tune ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... astonishment. They drew together and talked it over, flew down close to the Clubhouse, flew about it in circles, examined it on every side, made even one perilous trip across the roof, the tips of their feet tapping it in vicious little dabs. But flutter as they would, jabber as they would, the Clubhouse preserved a tomb-like silence. After a while they banged on the shutters and knocked against the door; but not a sound or movement ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... marked, stained abominably, that he went from her presence. He said to himself: "I've dished myself now with my silly jabber. Damn those lambs!" ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... like madmen. In drinking they use small phials, the contents of which they pour down their throats. When I first went amongst them I thought the whole nation was under a course of physic, but the terrible jabber of their tongues soon undeceived me. Drak was the first word I heard on entering Dacia, and the last when I left it. The Moldaves, if possible, drink more, and talk more ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the Hyena-swine, I am assured,—but that was all. It was about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a growing disinclination to talk. My Monkey-man's jabber multiplied in volume but grew less and less comprehensible, more and more simian. Some of the others seemed altogether slipping their hold upon speech, though they still understood what I said to them at that time. (Can you imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... out, and scoffed audibly at the mystic literature, and what she called the "insane jabber" that went on in ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... miserably: "Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck. I ain't counting on taking up with those Frenchies. I don't like their jabber, from what I know of it. I saw some pictures of 'em, last week, a fellow in camp had who'd been over there. Their hair is all funny, and fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... decent people among us. But to be a town councilor and discuss how many dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed in the town in which I don't live—to serve on a jury and try a peasant who's stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, 'Do you admit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... and Oliver in a sort of lingua Franca of French Lombard. French jongleurs singing in impossible French-Italian; Italian jongleurs singing in impossible French; Paduan penny-a-liners writing Carolingian cyclical novels in French, not of Paris, assuredly, but of Padua—a comical and most hideous jabber of hybrid languages—this was how the Carolingian stories became popular in Italy. Meanwhile, the day came when the romantic Arthurian tales had to dislodge in Italy before the invasion of the classic epic. Troy, Rome, and Thebes had replaced Tintagil ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... turns the orgin—the best I ever 'eard— Oh lor' he does just jabber, but you can't make out a word. I can't abear Italians, as allus uses knives, And talks a furrin lingo all their miserable lives. But this one calls me BELLA—which my Christian name is SUE— And 'e smiles and turns 'is orgin very proper, that he do. Sometimes 'e plays a polker ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... his own, he was continually jabbering to us in that, and by hearing him the maids and myself contrived to pick up a good deal of the language, so that we understood most that was said, and could speak it very fairly; and the themes of his jabber were the beauty and virtues of one whom he called Holy Mary, and the power and grandeur of one whom he called the Holy Father; and he told us that we should shortly have an opportunity of seeing the Holy Father, who ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... children said, "Ho!" "He!" and "Hi!" respectively, in varying tones according to their varied character. Then they commenced a jabber, which we are quite unable to translate, and turned Tom over on his back. The motion awoke him, for ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... overheard some muskrats engaged in a very gentle and affectionate jabber beneath a rude pier of brush and earth upon which I was standing. The old, old story was evidently being rehearsed under there, but the occasional splashing of the ice-cold water made it seem like very chilling business; still we all know it is not. Our decoys had not been ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... whole month appear every day at a certain hour in the public walks, without wearing any other dress than that in which he saw him. "The fellor has got no more stuff in his pate," continued this polite stranger, "than a jackass, to think I could not find my way hither thof I could not jabber your French lingo. Ecod! the people of this country are sharp enough to find out your meaning, when you want to spend anything among them; and, as for the matter of dress, bodikins! for a thousand pound, I would engage ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... bit of a jabber to keep us goin'," said Peke, then—"Jabberin' do pass time, as the wimin can prove t' ye; an' arter such a jumblegut lane as this, it'll seem less lonesome. We're off the main road to towns an' sich like—this ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... deliberate to-morrow, at midday. What are we coming to? What are we coming to? It is clear that we are making for the abyss. That is what the descamisados have brought us to! To deliberate on the citizen artillery! To go and jabber in the open air over the jibes of the National Guard! And with whom are they to meet there? Just see whither Jacobinism leads. I will bet anything you like, a million against a counter, that there will be no one there but returned convicts and released galley-slaves. The Republicans and the galley-slaves,—they ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... toothpick out of a match, decided that toothpicks were inelegant in his tragic mood, and longed: "Never did see her among her own kind of folks till now. I wish I could jabber about music and stuff. I'll learn it. I will! I can! I picked up autos in three months. I—— Milt, you're a dub. I wonder can they be talking French, maybe, or Wop, or something? I could get onto the sedan styles in highbrow talk as long as it was ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... House—crimson curtains, marble steps, golden balusters, and flunkeys wearing velvet breeches and silk stockings. It grieved him momentarily to discover that two giant commissionnaires were both foreigners. He heard them address each other with a rapid guttural jabber. "Should 'a' thought there's large-sized men enough in England, if you troubled ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... first brisk rat-tat of her knuckles on the door there had sounded a shrill "Come in!" But before she could turn the knob the door was flung open by a kimonoed mulatto girl, her eyes all whites. The girl began to jabber, incoherently but Martha Foote passed on through the little hall to the door of ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs. Jabber. My dear, Mrs. Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a coat on a hot day because of ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... "Tricks! shufflings! jabber of a barbarian woman upon the evolutions of a serpent!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "You were to capitulate, or to furnish reasons for your refusal. You have none. Give him your hand, girl, according to the compact. I praised you to him for returning ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... JABBER. To talk thick and fast, as great praters usually do, to chatter like a magpye; also to speak a foreign language. He jabbered to rne in his damned outlandish parlez vous, but I could not understand him; he chattered to me ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... and nervous-system, none of the soundest, is so tattered and fluttered that it will never recover; but flutter worse and worse, till it crack; and within year and day we hear of her in madhouse, and straitwaistcoat, which proves permanent!—Such brownlocked Figure did flutter, and inarticulately jabber and gesticulate, little able to speak the obscure meaning it had, through some segment of that Eighteenth Century of Time. She disappears here from the Revolution and Public History, for evermore. (Deux Amis, vii. 77-80; Forster, i. 514; Moore, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... camp, assisting the white hunter, several squaws began an excited jabber that brought out ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... you to sit there jabber, jabber, jabber, Miss Dora," exclaimed the unceremonious Elizabeth; "you're dressed, all but your bonnet. You've only just to pop that on, and there you are. But my young lady isn't half dressed yet. And now, come along, Miss ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... blood, old chap! I've always wanted to revolt about something, anyway. One of my ancestors helped throw the English breakfast tea into Boston Harbour. But I don't want to get all het up about this unless there's really something in it besides jabber." ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... larger bed to stretch out in,—not that it ever sleeps much, but it has a larger sphere of action,—do you take? I don't know whether you have had this feeling of surprise, Doctor, but I have, hearing those little imps talk French, when, to save my soul, I can't jabber it that way myself. In course of nature they must talk that lingo, for they are quilted in French—kissed in French—fed in French—and put to bed in French,—and told to pray to the Virgin in ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... a fall and their backs would get broken. So when they were big enough they sat on the floor and she talked to them and told them funny things and acted 'em off and laughed, and they'd laugh too. It was like a play to see 'em. And they'd jabber back and she'd make b'lieve she understood it all. She was a wonderful child's nurse an' there'll be trouble enough without her. But the babies went to bed early an' then she'd come down an' wipe the dishes for me an' they made no call on her. But Jack was a holy terror, he was that bad, ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... things infernally uncomfortable for other people," said Choate bluntly. "Did you know she had squads of them—Italians, Poles, Abyssinians, for all I know, playing on dulcimers—she's had them come up at night and visit her in her bedroom. They jabber and hoot and smoke, I believe. She's established an informal ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... smash! You'll have it all in a crash. Jabber, smash, bother! You'll have the worst of the pother. Smash, ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... shiftless, lazy dogs, black as the ace of spades and twice as natural. But the little "nigs" kill me outright, they looking so much like a lot of monkeys, I know of nothing so comical. I could sit half the morning watching them and hearing them jabber. ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... certainly be dead: a little girl of four or five, decidedly pretty, and as brown as a berry, who, when she came to, shook her head to show she understood no kind of Italian, and jabbered some half-intelligible Eastern jabber, a few Greek words embedded in I know not what; the Superior of the College De Propaganda Fide would be puzzled to know. The child appears to be the only survivor from a ship which must have gone down in the great ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... holiday trip to witness the great festival of St. Agatha. With two exceptions, they were a wild and senseless, though good-natured set, and in spite of sea-sickness, which exercised them terribly for the first two days, kept up a constant jabber in their bastard Arabic from morning till night. As is usual in such a company, one of them was obliged to serve as a butt for the rest, and "Maestro Paolo," as they termed him, wore such a profoundly serious face all the while, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... There's no manner of doubt about it. But even if she wasn't, it's important for all her inhabitants that she should be on the winning side.... Oh, she will be, no doubt, we've the advantage in numbers and wealth, if not in military organisation or talent.... If only the Potterites wouldn't jabber so. It's a unique opportunity for them, and they're taking it. What makes me angriest is the reasons they vamp up why we're fighting. For the sake of democracy, they say. Democracy be hanged. It's a rotten system, anyhow, and how this war is going to do anything ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... puzzles me more and more every day is how such a chap as him should come to be a common soldier. He's a gentleman, every inch of him. Why, didn't they get him to talk to the French officers when we landed at Ceylon, and the French frigate was there? and my word, how he did jabber away! He might have been a real mounseer. Well, 'taint no business of mine; so long as he gets his accoutrements clean, and a good coating of pipeclay on his belts, that's enough for me. I only wish there was more Grays and not so many Sims ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... Albanian's piece, and Pavel Petrovitch's cap went spinning into the air, with a hole right through it just above the forehead. And what do you think the colonel did? Why, he just snapped his fingers at the fellow, and called out to him, in some jibber-jabber tongue only fit to talk ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... myself in smooth water, before I had time to feel anything but the buoyant pleasure of being carried so lightly through this surf amid the breakers. Now and then the Indians spoke to one another in a vehement jabber, which, however, had no tone that expressed other than pleasant excitement. It is, no doubt, an act of wonderful dexterity to steer amid these jagged rocks, when one rude touch would tear a hole in the birch canoe; but these men are evidently so used to doing it, and ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... said he, "to be sure I do. I have been that way often and often. That was the case when I was to Lowel factories, with the galls a taking of them off in the paintin' line. The dear little critters kept up such an everlastin' almighty clatter, clatter, clatter; jabber, jabber, jabber, all talkin' and chatterin' at once, you couldn't hear no blessed one of them; and they jist fairly stunned a feller. For nothin' in natur', unless it be perpetual motion, can equal a woman's tongue. It's most a pity we hadn't some of the angeliferous little ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... alternately by means of a flat wooden spatula. This feeding process had not passed, it need hardly be said, unobserved; and by the time that our meal was concluded quite a large audience of women had gathered round to witness the performance. The animated jabber and hearty ringing laughter of several of the younger women and the somewhat abashed yet pleased expression of our own particular friend seemed to indicate that badinage was not altogether unknown, even in this obscure African village. But everything ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... such a self-respect—not a bold, disagreeable assurance, but a sort of rough, unassuming dignity that was both pleasant and becoming. He did not sit down with his hat on, and his chair tilted backward, and chatter and jabber as if he were of quite as much importance as his benefactor, but stood respectfully, with uncovered head, and answered Mr. Bond's questions modestly and politely, and waited to be asked before he made himself at home in ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... hear me?" he cried. "It was only nums, kid, and jabber of a nazy man. Some day this sleep-talk will grow my neck-weed. Don't mind me, Levin! Come, lush and cock an organ with me, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... No, no, not that,—it's bad to think of war, When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you; And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts That drive them out to jabber ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... mother, why you're so frightened all the time. Rauchhaupt ain't nothin' but an old fool. Let him come all he pleases an' jabber away! Let him, mother. Nobody don't pay ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... jabber, and jabber that is likely to lead to a very good result. A cousin of his is one of the guard that came down with us. He has told this warder about our fight, and asked him to say that he and his comrades were very angry ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... looked out over the level field in the dusk. A quarter of a mile away the light glimmered in the hut of his Chinese help, and there came the good-natured jabber of their supper activities. He felt the expansive thrill of the planter, the employer—the man who organizes an enterprise ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... son was recovered again, and it was I who had saved him for her. She piled wood on the fire that was built up against the face of the rock that formed two sides of her house, and jabbered gratitude as I had never thought any Skunk's Misery woman could jabber. And she did not look like one, either; she was handsome, in a haggard, vicious way, and she was not old. I did not think myself that her son looked particularly recovered. He lay like a log on his spruce-bough bed, awake and conscious but wholly speechless, though his ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... brighter than you have seen it for a year, the sky is a thousand times bluer, and what a cheery clatter of shrill quick French voices comes up from the court-yard under the windows! Bells are jangling; a family, mayhap, is going to Paris, en poste, and wondrous is the jabber of the courier, the postilion, the inn-waiters, and the lookers-on. The landlord calls out for "Quatre biftecks aux pommes pour le trente-trois,"—(O my countrymen, I love your tastes and your ways!)—the chambermaid is laughing and says, "Finissez ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cussed mule—I tell you fair, Massa Tom, dis chile conclude dat riding not such a berry easy ting after all—when dat cussed mule ran into French camp, de soldiers dey catch him, and dey take Sam off, and den dey jabber and laugh for all de world like great lots of monkeys. Well, for some time Sam he didn't say nothing, all de wind shook out of his body. Besides which he couldn't understand what dey say. Den all of a sudden, to Sam's ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... 'in the name of those immortal powers the Beautiful and the Sublime,' etc., while he was at the same time urging the painter to new and greater toils, teasing the jaded man with endless suggestions, bewildering him with a jabber of sham sentimentality and hazy aestheticism. 'Whenever Romney was my guest,' writes Hayley, 'I was glad to put aside my own immediate occupation for the pleasure of searching for and presenting to him a copious choice ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... everything within reach of its moisture is delightfully fresh and green. Palms and other trees, festooned with brilliant flowering creepers, flourish along its course; all kinds of monkeys chatter and jabber in the shade overhead as they swing themselves from branch to branch, while birds of the most gorgeous plumage flutter about, giving a very tropical aspect to the scene. On the other hand, if one is tempted to stray away from the river, be it only for a few yards, one comes immediately ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... island is not generally there. It is an extra one, and they had better have tea on one of the ordinaries. "Pooh, volcanic!" says the leading tourist, and the ladies say how interesting. The island begins to rock, and so do the minds of its visitors. They start and quarrel and jabber. Fingers burst up through the sand-black fingers of sea devils. The island tilts. The tourists go mad. But just before the catastrophe one man, integer vitae scelerisque purus, sees the truth. Here are no devils. Other muscles, other minds, are pulling the island to its ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster |
