"Wordy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe it—for there are lots of very foolish politicians and preachers in the world! You may even hear a short-sighted labor leader say the same thing, but you know very well, my friend, that they are wrong. You may not be able to confute them in debate, not having their skill in wordy warfare; but your experience, your common sense, convince you that they are wrong. And all the greatest political economists are on your side. I could fill a volume with quotations from the writings of the most learned ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... walked over early to Great Beeding. His aunt would have received the pamphlet by the first post and he wished to seize the first fine careless rapture of her comments. But he found her in a mood of distress rather than of wordy impatience. ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... thought to see His people as they are in daily life, And not in holiday attire to meet their prince. In merchant's dress, his charioteer his clerk, The prince and Channa passed unknown, and saw The crowded streets alive with busy hum, Traders cross-legged, with their varied wares, The wordy war to cheapen or enhance, One rushing on to clear the streets for wains With huge stone wheels, by slow strong oxen drawn; Palanquin-bearers droning out "Hu, hu, ho, ho," While keeping step and praising ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... infant—the child he had never seen. He stepped out into the cabin, with its panelled walls of cedar and maple, and with its long table that seated ten, and at which he had eaten by himself through all the weary time. No laughter and clatter and wordy argument of the mess-room had been his. He had eaten silently, almost morosely, his silence emulated by the noiseless Asiatic who had served him. It came to him suddenly, the overwhelming realization of ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... to tell every bit of your story by dramatic means and therefore face a long speech that may seem tiresomely wordy, break it up with natural movements which lend a feeling of homely reality to the scene. For instance, don't let the character who is delivering that long speech tell it all uninterruptedly from the chair in which ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... the instant, so ludicrous to Richard that, in spite of the distressing situation, he had to choke back a laugh. Years afterwards, if he wished for any momentary revenge upon Marion (and he had a keen sense of wordy retaliation), he simply said: "Wo-won't you let me ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... side Mr. —— took. Mr. —— fidgeted, pulled himself together with a violent jerk, and finally spoke his mind. Someone else did likewise, also someone else, then the women interposed, and jumped on the men, the men retaliated, a wordy war ensued, and the whole matter ended by nothing being decided, pro or con—generally the case in wordy discussions. Moi? Well, I sawed wood and said nothing, but all the while there was forming in my mind, no, I won't say forming, it was there already. It was this, Why should well-salaried women ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... the stones on the river bank, children to Abraham, meant to those who heard that even the lowest of the human family might be preferred before themselves unless they repented and reformed.[283] Their time of wordy profession had passed; fruits were demanded, not barren though leafy profusion; the ax was ready, aye, at the very root of the tree; and every tree that produced not good fruit was to be hewn down and cast into ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... deadly; whence to Greece Unnumbered ills arose; which many a soul Of mighty warriors to the viewless shades Untimely sent; they on the battle plain Unburied lay, a prey to rav'ning dogs, And carrion birds; but so had Jove decreed, From that sad day when first in wordy war, The mighty Agamemnon, King of men, Confronted stood ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Cove, and when his tutors were out of sight began blazing at the numbers on the boxes, though warned by "young Alfie Price" not to; and after a wordy altercation the Kaiser knocked down Alfie, who got up and went for him "just like a ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... passion were visible in a scene I witnessed in a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood assembled at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between two poor women. One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent husband, and the other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The assailant was washing, and twenty times she left her tub to revile the besieged, who ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... to speak, Lucy seized the opportunity of the lull in the storm, and hurried the old woman, sobbing and moaning, up the stairs. By this time the shrieks of Mrs. Bolton, and the wordy wrath of Braddock, had drawn the cook and her husband, along with the housemaid, from the basement to the ground floor. The sight of their surprised faces only added to their master's ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... wordy warfare," she said gayly. "I pity you, Mr. Bower. You cannot wriggle out of your difficulty. The snow will soon be a foot deep in the valley. Goodness only knows what would have become of us up there ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... these persons, the justice of what has been said as to the duty and importance of improving these people. We have sometimes tried; but the want of real gratitude which, in them, is associated with such warm and wordy expressions of regard, with their incorrigible habits of falsehood and evasion, have baffled and discouraged us. You say their children ought to be educated; but how can this be effected when the all but omnipotent sway of the Catholic ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... my good old aunt presently got to wordy wars with Frank; in which, as you may suppose, she had little chance of victory. But she called in Clifton, to be her auxiliary; and he fell into the same pettish, half-haughty, half-contemning kind of ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... skilfully to each should yield its due. The narrower total seems to suit the few, The wider total suits the common run; Each obvious in its sphere like moon or sun; Both provable by me, and both by you. Befogged and witless, in a wordy maze A groping stroll perhaps may do us good; If cloyed we are with much we have understood, If tired of half our dusty world and ways, If sick of fasting, and if sick of food;— And how about these ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... discussing social problems and bartering village gossip, for the Hindu is by nature staid. After a while, at the second bottle perhaps, cheerfulness will supervene, then mirth and garrulity, ending, as the night closes round, with wordy contention and a general brawl. But nothing serious will happen, for toddy, though decidedly heady, is at the worst a thin potation. A strong and very pure spirit is distilled from it, which has its ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... the burden, she bore him to her own bed. Wilson was not at leisure to attend to reproaches just then. She was engaged in a wordy war with Jasper, leaning over the balustrades ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the novels also, there is much carelessness. The style, more formal than that of the present day, is prevailingly wordy and not infrequently slipshod, though its vitality is a much more noticeable characteristic. The structure of the stories is far from compact. Scott generally began without any idea how he was to continue or end and sent off each day's instalment ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Ye Gods, give me patience! By the help of Juno the protectress it was this brain and this arm that—But I will not justify myself by imitating the Athenian fashion of wordy boasting. Pass on to ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... observations, the worthy German had lined his nose with a good pinch of snuff and was now beginning his tale. It would be difficult to reproduce it in his own language, with his frequent interruptions and wordy digressions. Therefore, I now write it down in my own way; leaving out the faults of the Nuremburger, and taking only what his tale may have had of interest and poesy with the coolness of writers who forget to put on the title pages of their ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... professions, if after all she would listen to a marquis and would not listen to a groom? To suppose such a thing was to wrong her grievously. To herald his suit with his rank would be to insult her, declaring that he regarded her theories of humanity as wordy froth. And what a chance of proving her truth would he not deprive her of, if, as he approached her, he called on the marquis to supplement the man!—But what then was the man, fisherman or marquis, to dare even himself to ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... again, Charlie had only a wordy wrath for the vanished officer, and grim worship of Anna, while Constance and Miranda, behind a veil of mirthful recapitulations, tenderly rejoiced in the relief of mind and heart which the moment had brought to her who had made it amazing. And now the conditions around them in streets, ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... between them. The latter held meetings in the calkers' hall in the lower part of the city, at which resolutions were adopted and speeches made denouncing the soldiers, who, on their part deriding the wordy war offered, sneeringly snubbed their opponents "The Calkers," which by an easy corruption became "the caucus," and finally a term ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... wordy battles waged in the scientific world over the questions of priority, exclusive discovery or invention, indebtedness to others, and conscious or unconscious plagiarism. Some of these questions are, in many minds, not yet ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... "The long wordy discussions by which he tries to reason us into admiration of his poetry, speak very little in his favor: they are full of such assertions as this (I have opened one of his volumes at random)—'Of genius the only proof is the act of doing well what is worthy ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... walk down the street, a talk of mere wordy nothings, but of deep and tender looks. In point of words, a make-talk affair; in point of feeling, a vague shadowy suggestion of twenty delicious possibilities; in point of fact a walk without any serious ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... you for pious jargon," said Varillo, beginning to lose temper, yet too physically weak to contend with the wordy vagaries of this singular personage who had evidently been told off to attend upon him. "I asked you who is the Head or Ruler of this community? Who gives you the daily rule of conduct which you ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... books contain depends largely upon the strength of the impression made upon the mind when reading. And this, in turn, depends much upon the force, clearness and beauty of the author's style or expression. A crude, or feeble, or wordy, redundant statement makes little impression, while a terse, clear, well-balanced sentence fixes the attention, and so fastens itself in the memory. Hence the books which are best remembered will be those which are the best written. Great as is the power of thought, we are often obliged to confess ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Henry as did this message from his captain. But that was scarcely to be wondered at. The work for the commander of the Pennsylvania guards had promised nothing but the sending of uninteresting and wordy despatches, though to be sure it had turned out quite differently before it was ended. But the task now in view promised excitement from the start. It breathed adventure, romance. To hunt spies—to trace traitors—to ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... not whether I see your meaning: if I do, it lies Upon the wordy wavelets of your voice Dim as the evening shadow in a brook, When the least moon has silver on't no larger Than the pure ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... and does not object sometimes to recognise the wisdom of Shakspere. Mr. Adams is a good platform speaker, and he can give straight shots as a preacher. Sometimes his discourses are only common-place, wordy, and featherless; but in the general run he is much above the average of sermonisers. He has good action, can put out considerable canvas when very warm, smacks the pulpit sides with his hands when, particularly earnest, and occasionally ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... looking after him, and then sitting down opposite Miss Grey, spreading out her wide silk skirts, and preparing herself solemnly for a wordy war—that is, if it could be called a war which was all on one side—"yes, I have come to the bottom of it all. I knew I should. Nothing ever escapes me. And pray, Maria, what do ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... one of the transients thoughtfully cautioning me to put my moccasins under my pillow, as these articles were the object of almost universal covetousness during the evening. No sooner am I comfortably settled down, than a wordy warfare breaks out in my immediate vicinity, and an ancient female makes a determined dash at my coverlet, with the object of taking forcible possession; but she is seized and unceremoniously hustled away by the men who assigned me my quarters. It appears that, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... high-sounding words. Explanations, which profess to cover all the ground, are as futile as the ordinary blundering attempts at comfort, which only charm ache with sound and patch grief with proverbs. The sorrow of our hearts is not appreciably lessened by argument. Any kind of philosophy—any wordy explanation of the problem—is at the best poor comfort. It is not the problem which brings the pain in the first instance: it is the pain which brings the problem. The heart's bitterness is not allayed by an exposition of the doctrine of providence. Rachel who weeps ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... sucree. It was an awe-inspiring assembly; "for the men who talked, held a city of two millions of inhabitants in their hands, and were free to put into practice any or all of the amazing theories that might come into their heads. Their speeches, however, were brief; they were not wordy, as they might have been if reporters had been present. Most of them wore uniforms profusely decorated with gold lace," and, says an Englishman who saw them in their seats, "one had only to look in their faces to judge the whole truth in connection with the Commune,—its ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not worth the time ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... They had cultivated a bitter sectional enmity, amounting to contempt, for the people of the north, growing partly out of the subserviency of large portions of the north to the dictation of the south, but chiefly out of the wordy violence and disregard of constitutional obligation by the Abolitionists of the north. They believed in the doctrine of an irrepressible conflict long before it was announced ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... prolonged torrent of words with which you incessantly weary them, do you think there are none they may misunderstand? Do you imagine that they will not comment in their own way upon your wordy explanations, and find in them a system adapted to their own capacity, which, if need be, they can ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... which had been spoken to Henry by Admiral Bell, more than any others, induced him to hasten his departure from Bannerworth Hall; he had walked away when the altercation between Jack Pringle and the admiral began, for he had seen sufficient of those wordy conflicts between those originals to be quite satisfied that neither of them meant what he said of a discouraging character towards the other, and that far from there being any unfriendly feeling contingent upon those little affairs, they were only a species of friendly sparring, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... interruption to talk is poor table-service. There can be no good conversation at table where the talk is constantly interrupted by wordy instructions to servants. A hostess who takes pride in the table-talk of her guests assures herself in advance that the maid or the butler serving the table is well trained, in order that no questions of servants can jeopardize the flow of conversation. If anything makes ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... always affects me as though I had accidentally overheard offensive talk about my own daughter. It offends me that these charges are wholesale, and rest on such worn-out commonplaces, on such wordy vapourings as degeneration and absence of ideals, or on references to the splendours of the past. Every accusation, even if it is uttered in ladies' society, ought to be formulated with all possible definiteness, or it is not an accusation, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... a rifle and their hands untied, while Cookie, in a lugubrious silence made eloquent by his rolling eyes, passed around among us the remnants of the food. No one can be said to have eaten with appetite except Mr. Tubbs, who received his portion with wordy gratitude and devoured it with seeming gusto. The pirates, full-fed, with pipes in mouths, were inclined to be affable and jocular. "Feeding the animals," as Slinker called it, seemed to afford them much agreeable diversion. Even Magnus had ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... surrounding the shaft in place of them. I strongly demurred to this, but without avail, until a party of men who were our camp neighbours came over and took my part. Through them I recovered my claim without more than wordy warfare. After doing well out of the claim I found I could not continue it without a mate. Having to throw the wash-dirt eleven feet, a lot of the pebbles in it would come back on and bruise my ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... a wordy tourney of which the participants hardly knew the purpose. Nekhludoff tried to ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... of wordy pyrotechnics, the dazed and bewildered stranger asked, "What will be the upshot of ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... executed owing to the opposition of the Spanish Government. The seminary priests did not, however, allow themselves to be drawn away from their work either by the terrors of treason or by the echoes of the wordy war, that was being carried on between Lord Burghley and his friends on one side, and Dr. Allen and his friends on the other. A catechism introduced by them was bought up so rapidly that in a few ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... new ages, and better races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... conventional Christianity differ from the religion founded by Christ it soon became among a certain set almost equivalent to a religious act to promulgate bits of personal scandal about him, flavored, of course, with wordy lamentations as to the views he entertained. Thus, under the name of defenders of religion, conventional Christians managed to appear very proper and orthodox, and at the same time to dispose comfortably of all their sense of responsibility. There was a meanness about their way of doing ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... parliament were carrying on a wordy war, matters had assumed a more serious aspect in America. Committees had been appointed in nearly all the principal sea-ports of the colonies, to examine cargoes arriving from Great Britain, and to report to their constituents ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... be less than 100 yards apart, and when the wily snipers of both sides saw nothing to snipe at, they used to exchange pleasantries at the expense of one another, from the safety of their entrenchments. Sometimes these wordy compliments made the opponents decidedly "chummy", to borrow a trench phrase. In that mood, they would now and again wax derisive or become amusing, bespeaking the fates of one another or the eventual outcome of ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... but not in the way that sort of thing is too generally done—not by methods which have come to be called diplomatic and which involve a great deal of surface affability, of wordy beating about the bush and concealing one's real purposes from persons who see his hand and wonder if they ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... the Unseen World open before their wondering gaze; but gradually the spirit of devotion claimed them, and they closed their eyes with him, and who shall say if the savage prayers within their breasts were not more acceptable to the Father than many a wordy petition put up ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... learned the destination of the family; but in spite of her efforts to please everyone, Dinah could not overcome the strong dislike which Biddy openly and emphatically expressed for all "nagers." Consequently, a wordy warfare spiced the day's doings occasionally, but, thanks to Aunt Jennie's tact and kindness, even this grew less and less, as occasion ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... garments was surviving and present. Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account of that swell company, and I didn't know just how to get at it —with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already been liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would be just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantial ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... counsel will have something to say about it; the Chancellor will have something to say about it; the satellites will have something to say about it; they will all have to be handsomely feed, all round, about it; the whole thing will be vastly ceremonious, wordy, unsatisfactory, and expensive, and I call it, in general, wiglomeration. How mankind ever came to be afflicted with wiglomeration, or for whose sins these young people ever fell into a pit of it, I don't ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... I did the talking, and it would have amazed me beyond measure if any one had told me that mine was not the greater intelligence in these wordy encounters. Parload was a quiet youth, and stiff and restrained in all things, while I had that supreme gift for young men and democracies, the gift of copious expression. Parload I diagnosed in my secret ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... needs seat beside him. Not one of his gay company but seemed an adept in the high-flown compliment of the age; out of very idleness and the mirth born of that summer hour they followed his Excellency's lead, and plied the two simple women with all the wordy ammunition that a tolerable acquaintance with the mythology of the ancients and the polite literature of the present could furnish. The mother and daughter did not understand the fine speeches, but liked them passing well. In their ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... yet made dry land, the Israelites, full of trust in God, were ready to cast themselves into its waters. The tribes contended with one another for the honor of being the first to jump. Without awaiting the outcome of the wordy strife, the tribe of Benjamin sprang in, and the princes of Judah were so incensed at having been deprived of pre-eminence in danger that they pelted the Benjamites with stones. God knew that the Judaeans and the Benjamites were animated by a praiseworthy purpose. The ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... women, gilded women, haughty women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry women. Fine women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor women in fine clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick-glimpsed, in multiple veils of white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women draped, coifed, and befrilled in the ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... in a room, sleeping in outhouses and bath-rooms, refugee Bulgars from the lost Bulgar territories, refugee Turks, refugee Russians. You return to the station and it is closed for the night, and you have a wordy discussion with the eternal cabman as to whether you shall pay a hundred or two hundred francs—Bulgarian francs or levas which are, however, worth a bare three-farthings each to-day. You find shelter in a wayside cafe ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... deceived by the wordy civility of D'Artagnan, smiled like a man who understands perfectly the reasons given ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... soul waiting to be gathered with the harvest," said the lad, pointing to the outcast. "If Christian prayers could lift from his shaking hands the pagan doom, it would not do more to make converts here than wordy argument." ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... formal contract with the crown, and had received a regular commission, constituting him Adelantado. This must be matter of record, and he insisted loudly, that the books of the department should be consulted. The wordy strife at length attracted the attention of an old, gray-headed clerk, who sat perched on a high stool, at a high desk, with iron-rimmed spectacles on the top of a thin, pinched nose, copying records into an enormous folio. He had wintered ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... At this wordy warfare none proved more adept than Martin Luther. He became Senior Wrangler; secured his degree; remained at the college as a post-graduate and sub-lecturer; finally was appointed a teacher, then a professor, and when twenty-nine years old ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... dragged by with no developments worth while. Judah, much inflated with the importance of his commission as a member of the Kendrick secret service, made voluminous and wordy reports, but they amounted to nothing. Mr. Phillips had borrowed five dollars of Caleb Snow. Had he paid the debt? Oh, yes, he had paid it. He smoked "consider'ble many" cigars, "real good cigars, too; cost over ten cents a piece by the box," so he told Thoph Black. ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... taken from the Definition of the council, a rather wordy document, but ending with a passage indicating the action of the council. From this concluding passage this condemnation is taken. See Hefele, 274, also PNF, ser. II, vol. XIV, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... other, we may admire his prudence, but we are glad when so delicate a business comes to an end. In The Natural Son the latter scene, though very long, is the less disagreeable of the two. And just as in Diderot's most wordy and tiresome pages we generally find some one phrase, some epithet, some turn of a sentence whose freshness or strength or daring reveals a genius, so in this scene we find a few lines whose energy reminds us that we are not after all in the hands ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... your honest sonsie face, [jolly] Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, [Above] Painch, tripe, or thairm: [Paunch, guts] Weel are ye wordy o' a grace [worthy] As ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman's most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he had indulged in a wordy argument with Chester, the Literary Page editor, on the question of whether or not the telephone was to be used by the office boys to 'phone telegrams through to the post office. It was a custom just founded by Strangman ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... me that we need no wordy assurances from each other," said Crownwall, and he puffed a cigarette aglow. "We can arrange something a little more trustworthy, I believe. On your side, you have the power to destroy our only planet at ...
— Upstarts • L. J. Stecher
... following, it must be explained that the first draft of the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, when it reached me about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... feyther's feyther, and we mun respect him. But it's dree work havin' a man i' th' house, nursing th' fire, an' such weather too, and not a soul coming near us, not even to fall out wi' him; for thee and me must na' do that, for th' Bible's sake, dear; and a good stand-up wordy quarrel would do him a power of good; stir his blood like. I wish Philip ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to acknowledge that the Major's counsel was wise, and to refrain from either argument or sarcasm; but the effort required to check his natural tendency to wordy conflict was almost too great for him, and when not engaged in his own special duties he spent hours in one of the angles of the terrace keenly watching every tree and bush within range, and firing vengefully whenever he caught sight of a lurking native. So accurate ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... office expired—these so-called "charters" were called in question as having been unauthorised by the aldermen of the city and as tending to favour the richer members of the guilds to the prejudice of the poorer. After a "wordy and most abusive dispute" carried on in the Guildhall between the ex-mayor and Gregory de Rokesley who acted as spokesman for the body of aldermen, Hervy left the hall and summoned the craft-guilds to ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... given up lightly?'"—With more of the like sort; which Friedrich, in writing of it long after, seems rather ashamed of; and would fain consider to have been mock fustian, provoked by the real fustian of Sir Thomas Robinson, "who negotiated in a wordy high-droning way, as if he were speaking in Parliament," says Friedrich (a Friedrich not taken with that style of eloquence, and hoping he rather quizzed it than was serious with it, [OEuvres de Frederic, ii. 84.]—though ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to the West they journeyed then, And in a quarrel got; One said 't was his, he knew it was, The other said 't was not. One drew a knife, a pistol t' other, And dreadfully they swore; From Northern lake to Southern gulf Wild rang the wordy roar. ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... Caroline's influence, and to that influence alone. The dependent fondness of her nursling, the natural affection of her child, came over her suavely. Her frost fell away, her rigidity unbent; she grew smiling and pliant. Not that Caroline made any wordy profession of love—that would ill have suited Mrs. Pryor; she would have read therein the proof of insincerity—but she hung on her with easy dependence; she confided in her with fearless reliance. These things ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Art will utterly perish, as in the manual arts so in literature, which will become, as it is indeed speedily becoming, a mere string of orderly and calculated ineptitudes and passionless ingenuities; Science will grow more and more one-sided, more incomplete, more wordy and useless, till at last she will pile herself up into such a mass of superstition, that beside it the theologies of old time will seem mere reason and enlightenment. All will get lower and lower, till the heroic ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch. In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then, the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his wordy feints and thrusts. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... A wordy war followed, lasting the best part of a half an hour. Through this it was learned that the hotel man had prepared for the spread, and so had the professor of music. Just after noon telephone messages had come ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... thoughtless laughter, language, imaginations, sights, sounds, etc. As regards such things it is uncertain whether they are sins, or temptations by which merit is increased. And yet it is marvelous how a patent is vexed and worried in these matters by the present wordy manner of confessing. A purpose ought to be certain, and directed toward things which are certain and which can be shunned in common living, like the aforesaid open, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... There you might read how the wood-cutter gloried in his axe, and the gardener scorned to be ashamed of his spade. It was not very well written, this poetry of labour, but the pluck of the sentiment redeemed what was weak or wordy in the expression. The martial and the patriotic pieces, on the other hand, were tearful, womanish productions one and all. The poet had passed under the Caudine Forks; he sang for an army visiting the tomb of its old renown, with arms reversed; and sang not of victory, ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said than done, on this corner of the estate. I tell you, Abiram, there is need of moving, for more reasons than one. You know I'm a man that very seldom enters into a bargain, but who always fulfils his agreements better than your dealers in wordy contracts written on rags of paper. If there's one mile, there ar' a hundred still needed to make up the distance for ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... published an account which differed from that in every other paper, and which undoubtedly came from the inside. In details it was far more generous than the official report; it gave names, speeches, arguments; it described the wordy battles of the ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... with a captious sophister, who gathers the worst out of every thing in which you are mistaken.' It is this captious sophistry which fans disagreement till it blazes into dissension, which changes the simplicity of gospel-truth into wordy declamation; and, in zeal for the phylacteries of religion, rends its substance, which is peace. Thus is Christendom convulsed with tempests which obscure the Sun of Righteousness, and prevent its beams from warming the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... surprised to think I got off with m' life, last winter, when I hazed him away from line-camp; I guess I must uh had a close call, all right!" Billy snorted contemptuously and shut the door upon the wordy revelation of the Pilgrim's deep inner nature which had been until that night carefully hidden from ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... may contend, Reproach is infinite, and knows no end, Arm'd or with truth or falsehood, right or wrong; So voluble a weapon is the tongue; Wounded, we wound; and neither side can fail, For every man has equal strength to rail: Women alone, when in the streets they jar, Perhaps excel us in this wordy war; Like us they stand, encompass'd with the crowd, And vent their anger impotent and loud. Cease then—Our business in the field of fight Is not to question, but to prove our might. To all those insults ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... at school is pretty safe to be a peace-day also; and none of the wordy collisions went too far, although it was plain that the new-comers had not yet attained ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth, not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in Latinisms like effusive, precipitant, irriguous, horrific, turgent, amusive. The lover who hides by the stream where his mistress is bathing—that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"—is described as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... clank of chains, and presently Joan entered with her keepers and took her seat upon her isolated bench. She was looking well now, and most fair and beautiful after her fortnight's rest from wordy persecution. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... The wordy seemed meaningless, all save those of the last sentence. "The situation is serious, but by no means hopeless." Nancy had not spoken of that. The ignorant cruelty of its convention! The man must have known what Hambleton Durrett ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his spirit have listened to the jargon which I had just heard proclaimed as Platonism, consisting of common-place thoughts, laboriously tortured and involved, till their true semblance was lost, and instead of them a wordy mist—glowing indeed oftentimes with rainbow colors—was presented to the mind of the hearer for him to feed upon, he would at the moment have as heartily despised, as he had formerly gloried in, the name ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... felt the need to speak. The wordy silence troubled her. "Mother, mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much? I know why I love him. I love him because he is like what Love himself should be. But what does he see in me? I am not worthy of him. And yet—why, I cannot tell—though I feel so much beneath him, I don't ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... of passion? In short, why should he have shown consideration for persons whose merit consists in never allowing themselves to be seen as they are? He was very disrespectful, likewise, toward certain friendships that he knew by experience to be full of wordy counsel, but finding nothing to say in the way of consolation or defense. This peculiar variety of friendship had made him suffer greatly. In his serious poems he calls it "the loss of his illusions;" and expresses himself with misanthropical indignation, or with a bleeding heart. But, returning ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which each number of the Watchman is made up, we are arrested again and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary manner—the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... read the wordy epistle of his correspondent half through, he raised himself briskly to an upright sitting posture in his bed, his head was lifted with a proud movement from its drooping attitude, and an expression of gratified pride and pleasure came ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... understanding what the gentleman in black—the dark shadow of the government of progress—so glibly states, he might as well be talking Turkish or Japanese. Every one looks at Monsieur le Cure, they scan his face, and ask him what they are to do; and let him only feel angry or disgusted with the wordy nonsense, and just make one sign, or raise one finger, and 1200—aye, 2000 men would in a trice surround him, and send the orator and all his staff to preach their pestilential doctrines under the turf, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... desire to have us extinguished, even while it has repeatedly refused to take steps preparatory to war; and the two countries should be persuaded to understand that neither can perish without the life of the other being placed in great danger. The best answer to be made to the wordy attacks of Englishmen is to be found in success. That answer would be complete; and if it cannot be made, what will it signify to us what shall be said of us by foreigners? The bitterest attacks can never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... most peculiar. The same persons who discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon have also complimented him with the title of the English Demosthenes. Upon this hint, Lord Brougham, in his address to the Glasgow students, has deluged the great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvious prudence in lodging your praise upon an object from which you count upon a rebound to yourself. But here, as everywhere else, you look in vain for any marks or indications ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... apologise for this wordy explanation? No - you will see by it with what readiness I am happy, to believe that our interest in each other ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... her guests swept back into the drawing-room, Monsieur de Fleury and the grand chamberlain were again closely engaged in some political battle. Maurice, after waiting impatiently for a favorable moment when he might come between the wordy belligerents, whispered to Ronald,— ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Great Britain has been singularly unfortunate in the literature of aphorism. One too famous volume of proverbial philosophy had immense vogue, but it is so vapid, so wordy, so futile, as to have a place among the books that dispense with parody. Then, rather earlier in the century, a clergyman, who ruined himself by gambling, ran away from his debts to America, and at last blew his brains ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... them that Pope called Philips "a rascal," and Philips hung up a rod with which he said he would chastise Pope. He probably had recourse to this kind of argument, because he felt that he was worsted by his adversary in wordy warfare, having little talent in satire. In fact, his attempts in this direction were particularly clumsy as—"On a company of bad dancers ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... a little man, he was soon in a passion, and once in a passion he soon boiled over. Summoning his council on the receipt of this news, he belabored the Swedes in the longest speech that had been heard in the colony since the wordy warfare of Ten Breeches and Tough Breeches. Having thus taken off the fire-edge of his valor, he resorted to his favorite measure of proclamation, and despatched a document of the kind, ordering the renegade Minnewits and his gang of Swedish vagabonds to leave the country immediately, under pain ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... book is also filled with dialogues ethical and theological; and, with the exception of some brilliant and forcible expressions here and there, consists of an exposition of truisms, more cloudy, wordy, and inconceivably prolix, than any thing we ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the Bible bear witness to the intellectual outburst at the Reformation; things like the Declaration against the Mass bear witness to the great wars of the Puritans; and things like the allegiance of the Bishops bear witness to the wordy and parenthetical political compromises which (to my deep regret) ended ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... drown in wordy praise The kindly thoughts that rise; If friendship owns one tender phrase, He reads it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... judges and set up stakes. Oginski lost three thousand acres of woodland over a wolf, and a badger cost Niesiolowski several villages! Now do you gentlemen follow the example of your elders, and settle your dispute in this way, even though you may set up a smaller stake. Words are wind; to wordy disputes there is no end; it is a shame to tire our ears longer with a brawl over a rabbit: so do you first choose arbitrators; and, whatever their verdict may be, conscientiously abide by it. I will beg the Judge not to forbid the master of the hounds to lead the chase even across the ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... attended to as the methods of attack and defence in the chase and on the war path. By some, not strange, personal argument, he concluded to appropriate the six valuable horses above mentioned, in the law wordy vocabulary of civilization, "to his own, use, benefit and behoof, without asking the consent, good-will, approbation, permission and personal, directions of the said ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... 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, and about the corners of his roughly-cut ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot |
