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More "Silly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with an idea; jump to a conclusion, rush to a conclusion; think the moon is made of green cheese; take for granted, grasp the shadow for the substance; catch at straws, grasp at straws. impose upon &c (deceive) 545. Adj. credulous, gullible; easily deceived &c 545; simple, green, soft, childish, silly, stupid; easily convinced; over-credulous, over confident, over trustful; infatuated, superstitious; confiding &c (believing) 484. Phr. the wish the father to the thought; credo quia impossibile [Lat.] [Tertullian]; all is not gold that glitters; no es ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... breakfast. It seemed a silly thing to do, but I ate it heartily. The Warden came with a quart of whiskey. I presented it to Murderers Row with my compliments. The Warden, poor man, is afraid, if I be not drunk, that I shall make a mess of the function and cast reflection ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... you are crying," exclaimed Samuel, thoroughly angry, "you are not only hard-headed, but also silly, simply silly! 'Long of hair but short of sense.' To cry and cry, and not know wherefore!" With this Samuel turned towards us, and began ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... work that sport is the only thing they can occupy themselves with when they have any leisure, and the men who don't have to work are even duller than the men who do, and vicious as well; and the women live for display and silly amusements and silly immoralities—do you know how awful that life is?... Of course I know there are clever people and people of taste in that set, but they're swamped and spoiled, and it's the ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... has largely done. The European world is using black and brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that "darkies" are born beasts of burden for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured world, with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier, traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker peoples are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... that astonishing utterance of Menelaus to his servant who proposed to turn away the guests: "Thou prattlest silly things like a child, verily have we come hither partaking of the hospitable fare of other men." Therefore we ought to give that which we have received. One likes to note these touches of humanity in the old heathen Greek; he too knew and applied the Golden Rule. The ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... it would have less charms for the ignorant, who are pleased only with obscurity, terrors, fables, prodigies, and things incredible. Romances, silly stories, and the tales of ghosts and wizards, are more pleasing to ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... "You silly old man," said she, "Why did you not bring the large box? Just think what we have lost. We might have had twice as much silver and gold as this. You are certainly an old fool!" she screamed, and then went to bed as angry as she ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... think city children would care for such a name. You see, dear, they are so precocious from their daily experiences that they might think a bird-name silly," said Mrs. Talmage. ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... stared and rubbed their eyes; and looked angry. "You lie, Bennie!" one cried; "You are a silly girl, Elsa," ...
— The Faery Tales of Weir • Anna McClure Sholl
... must! you must! You must all like him! You don't know—his thoughts, his ideals—they are wonderful. He's like some knight of the Middle Ages.... Ah, but you'll think that silly, Mr. Durward. You're a practical Englishman. I ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... back of them, stronger than them. You started it. I want the big things now—I want to be worth while. But yet clothes and gayety and horses and automobiles—I'm glued tight in that round. I don't believe I can tear loose. I don't believe I want to. Do you see—I'm in torment. And—silly idiot that I am—it's not for me to decide anything. I'm turning into a ton of stone—I'll be a horrible unhuman monster and have to give it all up and have nothing in return. Soon I'll lay down my life and not find it. I won't. I'll pull the trigger. ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... call it silly," said Mrs. O'Mara from where she stood with her partner in all the glory of a maroon satin that fitted her as if she were an upholstered sofa. "I'd no more go live in that clearin' with the Wendigees, or whatever ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... I am babbling these silly nothings when I have some real news up my sleeve. We have a new worker, a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... should have traded herself to save Garvington from a well-deserved punishment, seemed inexcusable to the gypsy. If he had been the man she loved, then indeed might she have acted rightly. But having thrown over that very man in this silly fashion, for the sake of what did not appear to be worth the sacrifice, Chaldea felt that Agnes did not deserve Lambert, and she then and there determined that the Gentile lady should never ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... of Windsor, says that but for his "admirable dexterity of wit the knave constable had set me i' the stocks, i' the common stocks." "What needs all that and a pair of stocks in the town," says Luce in the Comedy of Errors. "Like silly beggars, who sitting in stocks refuge their shame," occurs in Richard II; and ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... turned back laughing at her, and then he jumped straight into the middle of the puddle and began to dance up and down in it, the muddy water splashing up to his knees. She ran over to him crying 'Stop, silly!' When she came into the house, I bolted my door and I gave no ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... into silly giggling," was the rather tart reply. "I abhor that myself. But a smile on a child's face is much to be preferred to a frown. 'And a merry heart doeth good like ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... majesty," The beggers all gan cry; "Vouchsafe to give your charity, Our childrens food to buy." The king to them his purse did cast, And they to part it made great haste; This silly woman was the last That after them did hye. The king he cal'd her back againe, And unto her he gave his chaine; And said, "With us you shal remaine Till ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... are tired of this already. Josephine has probably been filling you with a lot of my foolishness. She says I must be silly or I would have my stuff published in books. But I am waiting, waiting until I have come down to the last facts. I am experimenting now with the black and the silver fox. And there are many other experiments to come, many of them. But you are ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... meadow, our two friends went arm in arm about the fair grounds; Miss Beal bought, as her first purchase, a spool of ribbon; and Mrs. Grumble had her fortune told. They rode on the carousel, all the while thinking: "This is really too silly." As Mrs. Grumble climbed down from her wooden horse, she said to herself: "I'm having as good a time as that little girl with the pigtails, who is going around for the ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... was enough to have softened the heart of the vilest "Legree;" but probably, had one of those gentlemen, whose highly respectable occupation it is to deal in the traffic of buying and selling—man, been present, they might have been led to remark, "The silly creatures seem to ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... as his mates called him—did not intend this for a compliment by any means, though it may sound like one. Being an irreligious as well as a stupid man, he held that all who professed religion were hypocritical and silly. Manliness, in poor Jo's mind, consisted of swagger, quiet insolence, cool cursing, and general godlessness. With the exception of Fred Martin, the rest of the crew of the Lively Poll resembled him in his irreligion, ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... He contrives to eke out a tolerable livelihood: I should say that his provincial blasphemies and his city practise bring him a clear five hundred pounds a year at the least. But is it not the wages of iniquity? He has a few followers here, but only a few. He has recently done a very silly act; for he has, all at once, converted "Voltaire Villa" into a glass house, and the whole neighborhood can now see into the wigwam, where he dwells in true Red Indian fashion with ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... information that I can obtain on the subject; and here, take the order, and go and see your friend the Duke. Tell him I will come and see him to-morrow, and give him what consolation you can; but yet do not act like a silly boy, and make too light of the business, for two reasons: first, because the matter is really serious—the good folks of London have an appetite for blood upon them just now, and will not be satisfied unless they see a head struck off every now and then; and next, because, if his lordship do ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Englishman of this type can't refrain from quoting such phrases as, "Too proud to fight," whenever opportunity offers. His American counterpart insists that he is not fighting for Great Britain, but for the French. He makes himself offensive by silly talk about sister republics, implying that all other forms of Government are essentially tyrannic. He never loses an opportunity to mention Lafayette, assuming that one French man is worth ten Britishers. A very ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... tell him about some silly men who killed the sparrows and other birds, and the next year their fruit and corn were eaten up by grubs. Even the leaves on the ...
— Chambers's Elementary Science Readers - Book I • Various
... they are saving something, that way. Nonsense! I know better. It is all foolishness, this craze for giving. Most things are better destroyed as soon as you are done with them. Why, nobody wants such truck as this. Now, could any child ever have cared for so silly a thing?" She pulled out a faded jumping-jack, and regarded it scornfully. "Idiotic! Such toys are demoralizing for children—weaken their minds. It is a shame to think how every one seems bound to spoil children, especially at Christmas ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... opposite side of the house, he said, "O what a splendor and glory will all the elect and redeemed saints have one day, and O! how much more will the glory of the Creator be, who shall communicate that glory to all his own, but the shallow thoughts of silly men are not able to ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... and his wife and visitor exchanged glances. Foolishly credulous and blindly superstitious, as well as prejudiced, their minds were like the fallow ground ready to receive any impression, however silly. ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... what did Giglio know of the heavenly bodies? Once, when on a sweet night in a balcony where they were standing, Angelica said, 'There is the Bear.' 'Where?' says Giglio. 'Don't be afraid, Angelica! if a dozen bears come, I will kill them rather than they shall hurt you.' 'Oh, you silly creature!' says she; 'you are very good, but you are not very wise.' When they looked at the flowers, Giglio was utterly unacquainted with botany, and had never heard of Linnaeus. When the butterflies passed, Giglio knew nothing about them, being as ignorant of entomology as I am of algebra. ...
— The Rose and the Ring • William Makepeace Thackeray
... behind them. He would have liked to make a theatrical bow and say something silly, too, but he only smiled, felt an awkwardness that was like shame, and waited impatiently for what would ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... suggested. He tried to keep his mind on the flower-beds, but it drifted away to the cave below. He thought of the danger of coming into some underground body of water, where he would be drowned; but he knew that was a silly idea. If the shell had gone through [v]subterranean reservoirs, the water of these would have run out, and before it reached the bottom of the shaft would have dissipated ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... wanting. In a tale told by the Saxons of Transylvania it is said that a young man shot at a witch again and again. The bullets went clean through her but did her no harm, and she only laughed and mocked at him. "Silly earthworm," she cried, "shoot as much as you like. It does me no harm. For know that my life resides not in me but far, far away. In a mountain is a pond, on the pond swims a duck, in the duck is an egg, in the egg burns a light, that light is my life. If you could put out that light, my life would ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the justice of the peace is a silly institution," Levin answered gloomily. He had been all the time looking for an opportunity to enter into conversation with Vronsky, so as to smooth over his rudeness at ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... it. "What if it is pretty? it is old-fashioned. No matter that the lace is rich, when nobody wears it. I must look as though I were dressed in my grandmother's clothes. I wish I was back in my poor home. There I am at least sheltered from criticism. I am a fool in daring to face fashion: I am the silly moth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Amber, summarising the episode as succinctly as he could. "He didn't call me by your name, but I've no doubt he's telling the truth about mistaking me for you. At all events he hazoor-ed me a number of times, talked a lot of rot about some silly 'Voice,' and finally made me a free gift of a nice little bronze box that wouldn't open. After which he took to his heels, saying he'd call later for my answer—whatever he meant by that. He did call by night and stole the box. That's about all I know of ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... had achieved. The reward of all his struggles with trial and temptation was lavishly bestowed in her commendation, and if fidelity had not been its own reward, he could have accepted her approval as abundant compensation for all he had endured. There was no silly sentiment in Harry's composition; he had read no novels, seen no plays, knew nothing of romance even "in real life." The homage he yielded to the fair and loving girl was an unaffected reverence for simple purity and goodness; that which the True Heart and the True Life never ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... your spite—or shall I call it, temper?—against Patricia. For the moment, you are intensely angry at her. Not only that, you feel that you have been out-done, at every point. That she has acted unreasonably, I will not deny. But what a silly thing it would be for you and me to stand together at the altar, and pledge ourselves to each other for life, or until such time as the divorce-courts might intervene, just because of the events of to-day!" ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... and Rome on purpose to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk— very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly—of the angry nobility. On the contrary in Caesar's organizations the Latin nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin, although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were at ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... proposed that we speak to the Allies with ultimatums, but did those who made this silly proposal think that this road might lead to the breaking of diplomatic relations with the Allies, and to that very separate peace which is condemned by all factions among us? Did Lenine think of the actual ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... "That's silly," said Jacob Peters, speaking with some warmth. "It can't hurt you to be seen there. They sell oysters, and all we should go there for would be to buy oysters. Come along. Don't be foolish!" And Jacob grasped the arm of Ralph, and tried to draw him towards the refectory. But ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... they were so closely pursued, that those who escaped the slaughter threw themselves into the river, where they perished. Tallard, being surrounded, was taken near a mill behind the village of Sonderen, together with the marquis de Montperouz, general of horse, the major-generals de Seppeville, de Silly, de la Valiere, and many other officers of distinction. While these occurrences passed on the loft wing, Marsin's quarters at the village of Oberklau, in the centre, were attacked by ten battalions under the prince of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... 'Silly girl,' responded her mother—'don't you know that the men will all run distracted after a pretty woman in male attire? Besides, such a costume will ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... at sea. If the convoy sailed well and steered right I never barked at them. You are a modest, sensible girl, and have always steered a good course. Why should I hoist a petticoat and play the small tyrant? Wait till I see you going to do something wrong or silly." ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... ahead of his he recognized the man who had been annoyed one day by the silly question of the Montague girl. They had said he was a very important director. He still looked important and intensely serious. He was a short, very plump man, with pale cheeks under dark brows, and troubled looking ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... save or please her. We have seen, too, on how slight a provocation these islanders will commit suicide, an act which proves a weak intellect rather than strong feeling. A man capable of feeling true love would have brains enough to restrain himself from committing such a silly and useless act in a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... rather remarkable against that green. She glanced around, evidently in rapt admiration of everything she saw. Her eyes were very bright and big, her young, red lips a little apart. "Silly thing, gaping with her mouth open!" Aline relieved her feelings by ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would be the same again as soon as you went away." I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: "Now, you mustn't mind what I say. I'm nothing but a silly old woman, and Eveleth would never forgive me if she could know what ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... to make a pitiful defence of poor poetry, which, from almost the highest estimation of learning, is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children; so have I need to bring some more available proofs, since the former is by no man barred of his deserved credit, whereas the silly latter hath had even the names of philosophers used to the defacing of it, with great danger of civil war among the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... were brought! ... Simply loads of flowers!' And how on that day a foreigner, a wealthy, tremendously wealthy person, had shot himself from love—and how Orlov too had been there.... And going up to Alexey Sergeitch, he had congratulated him and called him a lucky man.... 'A lucky man you are, you silly fellow!' said he. And how in answer to these words Alexey Sergeitch had made a wonderful bow, and had swept the floor from left to right with the plumes of his hat, as if he would say: 'Your Excellency, there is a line now between you and my spouse, which you will ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the young lady ran to tell her father, and said there was a pretty young man in the back kitchen; and immediately the gentleman came to him, and questioned him, and asked what work he could do. Jack said, the silly fellow, that he could do anything. (He meant that he could do any foolish bit of work, that would be wanted about ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... all, going out without your hat and standing there like a silly fool cleaning that bit of paper. I wonder what the lightermen thought ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... I just read this through and it's silly. It sounds like some kind of a myth, written in the Fifteenth Century instead of the Twentieth, but I am not going to tear it up. The thing I really wanted to write about this morning was the goodness of being ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... the man turn pale under his tan, and for a moment he was speechless, while his mate Silas whispered something in his ear. But he would not listen. Instead, he pushed the man roughly away, angrily exclaiming, "Hold yer silly tongue, ye blame fool!" Then, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... in weak moments, we are sometimes heard to say: 'After all, youth was a great fool. Look at the tinsel he was sure was solid gold. Can you imagine it? This tawdry tinkling bit of womanhood, a silly doll that says "Don't" when you squeeze it,—he actually mistook her for a goddess.' Ah! reader, don't you wish you could make such a splendid mistake? I do. I'd give anything to be once more sitting before the footlights for ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... between medicine and astrology survives in the sign of Jupiter 4, which still heads medicinal prescriptions.] and that by casting "horoscopes," showing just how the stars appeared at the birth of any person, the subsequent career of such an one might be foreseen. Many silly notions and superstitions grew up about astrology, yet the practice persisted. Charles V and Francis I, great rivals in war, vied with each other in securing the services of most eminent astrologers, and Catherine de' Medici never tired of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... horrid nightmare. Fear entered into her soul, took full control; then followed the wild erratic circling around the room, with various ridiculous attempts to run up the walls, which were so insanely silly that little James shrieked for joy, and joining in with the broom, urged the cat to still more amazing evidences of muscular activity not ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... one else ought to interfere," cried Alexia, with a little pout, provoked at his indifference; "that's just the way she does in school all the time. Oh! I'm vexed at her, I can tell you. She's so silly—dear ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... light, and the easels and lay-figure stood gaunt and ghostly along the further wall. I waited there and reasoned with myself, arguing that there was no possible cause for fear, that a strong man ought to control his nerves, that it was silly at my time of life to begin to be afraid of the dark, but I could not get rid of the sensation. As I went back to the bedroom I experienced the same succession of physical shocks; but whether they followed each other in the same order or not I was ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... veld traveller, Clifford, my friend; one more step of those silly beasts, and down below there would have been two red heaps with bits of bones sticking out of them—yes, there on the rocks five hundred feet beneath. Ah! you would have slept soundly ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... written down at all. Their great adventure here in England has been most written of by far; but I say again no one has made enough of them; no one has brought them back out of their graves. The character of what they did has been lost in these silly little modern quarrels about races, which are but the unscholarly expression of a deeper ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... appeal to her, and she felt that she must rest contented with the fact as it was, without seeking to know how or why. One point, however, stood out very clearly: Beverly Cruger had been obviously jealous last night at the opera. Octavie's silly prattle about a young and handsome foreign nobleman had had a marked effect upon him, and Helene's heart beat slightly faster as she pondered over this phase of ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... angry eye (Corkine) Shall I abide this jesting (Alison) Shall I come, sweet Love, to thee (Campion) Shall I look to ease my grief (Jones) She whose matchless beauty staineth (Jones) Shoot, false Love! I care not (Morley) Silly boy! 'tis full moon yet, thy night as day shines clearly (Campion) Simkin said that Sis was fair (Farnaby) Since first I saw your face I resolved to honour and renown ye (Ford) Sing we and chant it (Morley) Sister, awake! close not your eyes (Bateson) ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... beautiful face: but her whole aspect showed that she thought nothing about herself, and never troubled her head to think whether she was pretty or ugly. The younger, who was about seventeen, was not nearly so handsome; but she would have been pleasant enough to look at if it had not been for a silly simper and a look of intensely satisfied vanity, which quite spoiled any prettiness that she might have had. She had just fastened a pair of ear-rings into her ears, and she was turning her head from one side to ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... companion. He never bored her, as did some others; and he was always thoughtful of cushions and footstools and cups of tea when one was tired. He was, in fact, an ideal friend, just the sort she wanted; and it was such a pity that he must spoil it all now with this silly sentimentality! And of course he had spoiled it all. There was no going back now to their old friendliness. He would be morose or silly by turns, according to whether she frowned or smiled; or else he would take himself off in ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... "Of course not. How silly of him!" I puts in. "There, Steele, that's all straightened out, and here is the original Josie Vernon. What have you got ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... mat, because they shall not see the fiercenesse of the fire, yet there are many that will haue them plucked away, shewing therein an heart not fearefull, and that they are not affrayd of that sight. When this silly woman hath reasoned with the people a good while to her content, there is another women that taketh a pot with oile, and sprinckleth it ouer her head, and with the same she anoynteth all her body, and afterwards throweth the pot into the fornace, and both the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... give you something, my child I wish I could take a quiet corner Mother, I do want to leave off my lessons Mother, let us imagine we are travelling Mother, the folk who live up in the clouds Mother, the light has grown grey Mother, your baby is silly On the seashore of endless worlds O you shaggy-headed banyan tree Say of him what you please Sullen clouds are gathering Supposing I became a champa flower The boat of the boatman Madhu The night was dark when we went ...
— The Crescent Moon • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... generous and enlightened policy. When reason failed, he resorted to sarcasm and mockery. "Because," said he, "we have a right to tax America we must do it; risk everything, forfeit everything, take into consideration nothing but our right. O infatuated ministers! Like a silly man, full of his prerogative over the beasts of the field, who says, there is wool on the back of a wolf, and therefore he must be sheared. What! shear a wolf? Yes. But have you considered the trouble? Oh, I have considered nothing but my right. A wolf ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... "Silly one! What you see is your own sweet face," replied the man, delighted to know that his wife did not recognize herself. "This circle of metal is called a looking-glass. In the city, every woman has one, although here in the country no one has seen ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... silly of me!" she murmured. "There are lots worse things happening every moment over there than being gored by ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... and this is this very fact which I like and regard as wonderful and worthy of worship.—But let me speak no more of this. The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly—yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... you think he is rather silly? He can't talk about anything—anything interesting, I mean. And he pretends to know a lot about books, but I heard him say the other day he had never read The Prince of the House of David ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... "No, silly. How could I when they are all plastered over thick with snow?" was Bob's scornful retort. He was silent for a moment. "But don't you worry," he declared. "I am certain we came this way—at least I think ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... it's my weak health, dear," answered the mother. "I didn't use to be so. But now I don't really seem to have the strength to be sensible. I know it's silly as well as you. The talk just seems to keep going on of itself,—slipping out, slipping out. But you needn't mind. Mr. Ferris won't think you could ever have done anything out of the way. I'm sure you don't act with him as if you'd ever encouraged anybody. ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... excessive objectiveness. She judges woman by the heart and intellect of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss Fullers on the whole face of the earth. Holding these opinions in regard to 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century,' I still feel myself called upon to disavow the silly, condemnatory criticism of the work which appeared in one of the earlier numbers of "The Broadway Journal." That article was not written by myself, and was written by my associate, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... see he has been everything to me; I have never loved any one as I love Father Ambrose. When he comes here I always ask him for some rule or direction, so that I may have the happiness of obeying him till his next visit; and it is so trying, is it not, Sister Teresa, when the novices make their silly little jokes about it? Of course, they don't understand, they can't; but to me Father Ambrose means everything I care for; besides, he is really a saint. I believe he would have been canonised if he had lived in the Middle Ages. He has promised to profess me. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his "pug, his duck, his bird." He answered a letter she wrote him describing her success ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Pennsylvania. They say he is very pious, and frowns on gambling, as well he might for the good of his kingdom, and that he is determined to do as his mother told him and be a real king. He doesn't look as though he'd exactly know how. You should have heard him laugh over a little silly joke, when one of the actors sat in a chair on a make-believe baby and a ventriloquist squalled just like a baby. But they says he's obstinate and the colonies can't make him yield to ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... inheritance which he did not know what to do with. He had no profound views of statesmanship, like Augustus or Tiberius. He had no conception of what the true greatness of a country consisted in. Hence his vast treasures were spent in useless wars, silly pomps, and inglorious pleasures. His grand court became the scene of cabals and rivalries, scandals and follies. His wars, from which he expected glory, ended only in shame; his great generals passed away without any ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... laughed. "That sounds very silly, and does not indicate much self-esteem, but there is a deep meaning in it after all. A connection with Austria has always been disastrous to France. Louis XVI. died of his marriage with Marie Antoinette, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... yellowish gray color—much like the hue of badly laundried clothes. His skin prickled, as if with an electric current, for hot rage ate into his soul. His name was not even mentioned. He wasn't there at all—and he was the member for Millford. Of all the silly ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... In the morning he met Anne with some consciousness and distress. A womanly reserve and delicacy made the girl unwilling to affect an intimacy that might not be graciously acknowledged. She treated him coldly, and began to read some silly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... wrathful. There is such a rush of all other kinds of words in our days, that it seems desirable to give kind words a chance among them. There are vain words, and idle words, and hasty words, and spiteful words, and silly words, and empty words, and profane words, and boisterous words, and warlike words. Kind words also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is. They smooth, and quiet, and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... me, upset me in much the same way, acting on much the same nerves as the valley in which I had walked with that puzzling girl. I remembered that she had said she stood for the future, that she was a symbol of my own decay—the whole silly farrago, in fact. I reasoned with myself—that I was tired, out of trim, and so on, that I was in a fit state to be at the mercy of any nightmare. I plunged into Southampton Row. There was safety in the contact with the crowd, in jostling, in ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... which he preached with a keen, breathless fervor. Scofield had given him a home, clothed him, felt for him after that the condescending, curious affection which a rough barn-yard hen might feel for its adopted poult, not yet sure if it will turn out an eagle or a silly gull. It was a strange affinity between the lank-limbed, cloudy-brained enthusiast at one end of the porch and the shallow-eyed, tobacco-chewing old Scofield at the other,—but a real affinity, striking something deeper in their natures than blood-kinship. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... war. But you want revolution. You are against war and for revolution. That's silly. Just a different kind of war. You're both wrong. There's no ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... a movement. He shivered when the lodge door was heard to open and shut and heavy footsteps crunched on the gravel and snow around the church. "Juist fair silly" on his quaking legs he stood up, head and tail drooped. But he held his ground bravely, and when the caretaker sighted him he trotted to meet the man, lifted himself on his hind legs, his short, shagged fore paws on his breast, begging attention and indulgence. Then he sprawled ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... am sure you believe that I want to be liberal and reasonable, and not to act like those weak alarmists who, whenever the silly sheep begin to skip as if something was after them, and huddle together in their fright, are sure there must be a bear or a lion coming to eat them up. But for all that, I want to beg you to handle some of these points, ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his assistant, since there is danger to the gunner in balls to which sand or dirt adhere, is placed in the piece without forcing it till it touches gently on the wad, the gunner being careful not to hold himself in front of the gun, for it is silly to run danger without reason. Finally he will put in one more wad, and at another roll of drums the piece ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... box and looked at him. "Randy is only a boy. I am very fond of him. But we aren't either of us—silly." ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... looked upon this affair of the singing-bird as a freak that must end—and then perhaps his Grace, who was a charming young man, would return to his senses. There also was her sister, a long, fair girl, who looked sentimental, but was only silly. There was a little French actress, like a highly finished miniature; and a Spanish danseuse, tall, dusky, and lithe, glancing like a lynx, and graceful as ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... restless, and his nerves were all quivering. He would have given anything for a cigarette, but he did not wish to scent himself with tobacco. He had cut himself in shaving, and his nose was peeling from a hot day on the cricket-field. What a silly thing to expose his nose to the sun before his wedding! Perhaps when Maude saw it she would—well, she could hardly break it off, but at least she might be ashamed of him. He worked himself into a ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... laughed heartily at the foolish fellows who were so positive that they knew everything when they knew nothing, you begin to see the danger in what are called "snap judgments." "Look at these ridiculous fellows," says Father Laughter, "and consider how silly it is to jump to a conclusion unless you ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... later, with bands playing and people cheering, they wheeled out of barracks, brown and businesslike. Jane was in the front somewhere, waving her handkerchief—not such a silly Jane, after all. And at the back, very proud for her, Celia and I stood silent, with a something in the throat ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... absorbing others. So long as they are mere representatives, elected by the whims of universal suffrage, their meaning will be a perfect volatile, and to cork it up for the next century is an employment sufficiently silly, (to speak within bounds,) for a modern Bible dictionary maker. There never was a shallower conceit than that of establishing the sense attached to a word centuries ago, by showing what it means now. Pity that hyper-fashionable ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... begged. "Please don't! It's bad enough to have to hear that silly chorus every time I happen to wake up during the night—bad enough, I say, without being obliged to listen to ...
— The Tale of Kiddie Katydid • Arthur Scott Bailey
... fun," replied Filippa. We place a pail of water in a dark place, and light a candle which floats on a saucer. The ants fly to the light. Their wings are burnt off; and, silly, half-blind things, they all get drowned or wet, so that we ...
— Fil and Filippa - Story of Child Life in the Philippines • John Stuart Thomson
... believe he means me. I like his awe. The Duke of Richmond, taking me for his son, reproached himself to Lady Caroline Fox for not wishing me joy. She is so sorry she undeceived him! Charles Townshend has turned his artillery upon his own court: he says, "Silly fellow for silly fellow, I don't see why it is not as well to be governed by my uncle with a blue riband, as by my ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... me somewhere. That is what you say you mean to do. And why? Because you get some silly nonsense into your head, and then make yourself and me ridiculous in public. If you think I am what you seem to suspect, you had better let papa have me back again,—though that is so horrible that I can hardly bring myself to think of it. If you do not think so, ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... nibbled, and was almost persuaded to be a Christian,—that is, to forswear thenceforth and forever all company which I could not afford to keep, all appearances which were not honest, all foolish pride, and silly ambition, and moral cowardice;—as I did after I had ridden in a certain carriage I have mentioned, and which I am coming to now ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... a feeling of not altogether unpleasant lassitude stole over Mrs. Bunting. It was a comfort to have Daisy out of her way for a bit. The girl, in some ways, was very wide awake and inquisitive, and she had early betrayed what her stepmother thought to be a very unseemly and silly curiosity concerning the lodger. "You might just let me have one peep at him, Ellen?" she had pleaded, only that morning. But Ellen had shaken her head. "No, that I won't! He's a very quiet gentleman; but he knows exactly what he likes, and he ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... with a letter from his solicitor. Oh, how stupid we were to believe what Mrs. Keithley wrote—just silly gossip. We ought to have remembered that she couldn't know; and she never got a story straight, anyway. Do hurry and ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... what is the young man talking about?" exclaimed Scarecrow, Nightmare and Shakejoint, one to another, with great appearance of astonishment. "A pair of flying slippers, quoth he! His heels would quickly fly higher than his head if he was silly enough to put them on. And a helmet of invisibility! How could a helmet make him invisible, unless it were big enough for him to hide under it? And an enchanted wallet! What sort of a contrivance may that be, I wonder? No, no, good stranger! we can tell you nothing of these marvelous things. You ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... forsooth," returned Bruno; "'tis my firm belief that at this very moment he is at breakfast at home, having left to us this wild-goose chase of black stones in the Mugnone." "Marry," quoth Buffalmacco, "he did but serve us right so to trick us and leave, seeing that we were so silly as to believe him. Why, who could have thought that any but we would have been so foolish as to believe that a stone of such rare virtue was to be found in the Mugnone?" Calandrino, hearing their colloquy, forthwith imagined that he had the stone ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... "Don't be so silly," said Mrs. Dale calmly, "or think that no one loves your father but yourself. He was my brother for thirty-four years before he was your father. I only spoke for your good, and his too, for of course he would be ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... he plied; The busy daw flew with him, side by side, And by a thousand teasing questions drew The important secret from him as they flew. 20 The daw gave honest counsel, though despised, And, tedious in her tattle, thus advised: 'Stay, silly bird, the ill-natured task refuse, Nor be the bearer of unwelcome news. Be warned by my example: you discern What now I am, and what I was shall learn. My foolish honesty was all my crime; Then hear my story. Once upon a time, The two-shaped Ericthonius had his birth (Without ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... trembling and crying, she went down on her knees and begged me to give yer father up; but I liked him, and I felt angered with her for taking on what I called foolish, and I wouldn't yield; and I told her she was real silly, and I was ashamed of her. They were the bitterest words I ever flung at her, and they seemed to freeze up her whole heart. She got up off her knees and walked away with her pretty head in the air, and wouldn't speak to me for the evening; ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... "I've listened to some silly stories in my life, colonel," the general said coldly, "but this takes the cake. You come in here with an insane asylum inmate in a strait jacket and you have the colossal gall to sit there and tell me that this poor soul has ...
— A Filbert Is a Nut • Rick Raphael
... the Marshpees—a small tribe who have their hunting-grounds on the shores of the Great Lake, and near the Cape of Storms[A]—a woman whose name was Awashanks. She was rather silly and remarkably idle. For days together she would sit doing nothing, while the other females of the village were busily employed in weeding the corn, or bringing home fuel from the distant wood, or drying the fish, or thatching the cabins, or mending ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... have gone to all this trouble," spoke up the fair and spirited Mollie, "only for that silly letter my friend in Harmony wrote me, saying that it was a foregone conclusion Harmony would sweep the earth this year because their team had been terribly strengthened. In fact she gave me to understand that everything, even to the crepe, had been ordered ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... him a good chase into the bargain. But next night he was back again, and this time got safely off with the goose. A couple of nights after he must have come with recruits, for next morning three large goslings were reported missing. The silly geese now got it through their noddles that there was danger about, and every night thereafter came close up to the ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... not with the blaring of trumpet, To herald the birth of a king; I come, not with traditional story, The life of a savior to sing; I come, not with jests for the silly, I come, not to worship the strong, But to question the powers that govern, To point out a ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... one day he visited Black Creek, where he crouched near the water with the hope that some silly fish would swim within reach of his ...
— The Tale of Timothy Turtle • Arthur Scott Bailey
... bitter moods, when it prompts sentiments and declarations that are very little in accordance with its real impulses. I was so much ashamed of what I had just said, and, in truth, so much frightened, that, instead of attempting to laugh it off, as a silly, unmeaning opinion, or endeavouring to explain that this was not my own way of thinking, I walked on some distance in silence, myself, and suffered my companion to imitate me in this particular. I have since had reason to think that Lucy was not pleased at my manner ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... put back behind her ears, which were red with shyness and modesty. She did not please me very much at first sight; I looked at her with prejudice. Chvabrine had described Marya, the Commandant's daughter, to me as being rather silly. She went and sat down in a corner, and began to sew. Still the "chtchi"[40] had been brought in. Vassilissa Igorofna, not seeing her husband come back, sent Palashka for the second time to ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... "I don't believe he did, for he asked all sorts of silly questions about it that he wouldn't have asked if he ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... Lyceum? That's so silly of you, Jim. We're not all crazy there; and that," said Miss Sissons, demurely, "is what makes a girl like me ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... child knew, and was conscious that she knew, that she was doing wrong because she had been forbidden. There was rational ground for her fear. How would Jesus have received the confession of the darling? He would not have told her she was silly, and "never to mind." Child as she was, might he not have said to her, "I do not condemn thee: ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the man going crazy over silly stories, and then burst out laughing, but still showed considerable interest as I related to him the chief outlines ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... a God lay lurking under a gray cloake, Silly Shepheards gray cloake, and arm'd with a paltery sheephooke? And yet no pety God, no God that gads by the mountaines, But the triumphantst God that beares any sway in Olympus: Which many times hath made man-murdring Mars to be cursing His blood-sucking ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... a little. This was not a nice boy, and she did not like to be called "silly." Still, he was somebody besides—old folks. "Where did ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... And then—well your course would be run! No,—study up spleen's nomenclature; Learn all the mad logic of hate, And then, though your style be like skilly, Your sense frothy Styx in full spate. And your maxims portentously silly; You will find party scope for your pen, Coin meanness and malice to money; But sour dulness must keep to his den, And never ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... them has the most power?" she said in conclusion. "The Marquise was very near getting you into trouble in the silly business of the commission on her husband, and we ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... intermingling of organs." An appeal was made to Parliament against the singing of the noble cathedral music by "chanting choristers disguised, as are all the rest, in white surplices, some in corner caps and silly copes, imitating the fashion and manner of Antichrist the Pope, that man of sin and child of perdition, with his other rabble of miscreants ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... just a little scandalised the town with a most engagingly flippant and piquant farce all about an accidentally bigamous beauty, certainly shows courage in launching so serious a discussion as The Unknown. And in the silly season too. I see that in a quite unlikely interview (but then all modern interviews are unlikely) he defends his right to discuss religion quite openly on the stage. Of course. Why should anybody deny that religion is to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... brings Adam and Eve before us, rejoicing in the abundant delights of Eden. The guiding principle of the scene is the folly and wickedness of the Fall. Here is no thought of excuse for silly Eve. With every good around her, and with God's prohibition unforgotten, she chooses disobedience, and drags Adam after her. But Adam's guilt is no less than hers. The writer had not Milton at his elbow to teach him how to twist the Bible narrative into an argument for the superiority of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... know that silly talk!" broke in the student rudely. "A bunch of ignorant peasants like you hear somebody bawling a few catch-words. You don't understand what they mean. You just echo them like a lot of parrots." The crowd laughed. "I'm a Marxian student. And I tell you that this isn't ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... "It's silly," burst out Andrews excitedly. "We should have faith in our own selves. We can't live a little rag of romance without dragging in literature. We are drugged with literature so that we can never live ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... we are!" answered the laughing peasants. "It is our duty to be silly. If we cannot laugh at something, we laugh at nothing, since this is Sillyburg, the merriest ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... almost fifteen, when I overheard a young lady say I was growing pretty. I went to my mirror and spent some moments in unalloyed happiness and triumph. Then I thought, "Pretty face, the worms will eat you. All the prettiest girls I know are silly, but you shall never make a fool of me. Helen's beauty ruined Troy. Cleopatra was a wretch. So if you are pretty, I ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... momentous one. There were plenty of aspirants for the honor. Her brother-in-law Philip, since the abdication of Charles V., his father, was a mighty King, ruler over Spain and the Netherlands, and was at the head of Catholic Europe. He saw in this vain, silly young Queen of England an easy prey. By marrying her he could bring England back to the fold, as he had done with her sister Mary, and the ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... for twelve years not a single coin has passed through my hands. For I have lived on this island twelve years, sir, with the other two, for I count Almira as a person. Noemi declares we are four; she counts Narcissa, too—silly child! ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... upon the time the dead of night, (a) When heavy sleep had closed up mortal eyes. (b) No comfortable star did lend his light, (a) No noise but owls' and wolves' death-boding cries; (b) Now serves the season that they may surprise (b) The silly lambs. Pure thoughts are dead and still, (c) While lust and murder wakes ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... talking silly, Mr. Wix. How many young folk tell you their christened names right off?" But she had got on weak ground. She got off it again discreetly. "Anyhow, Mrs. Treadwell she's inventing nothing, having no call to." She turned to Aunt Elizabeth Jane with the question:—"How come she to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... my cricket has learnt, I am sure of it quite, That this earth is a silly, strange place, And perhaps he's been beaten and hurt in the fight, And perhaps he's been passed in the race. But I know he has found it far better to sing Than to talk of ill luck and to sigh,— Little we care for the outside world, My friend ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... himself as he saw a nut roll to the ground, "now that nut will take root and grow into a tree and I will have to lie here for ages beneath its branches. I wish the silly squirrel had gone some other ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... arms. Both bared their blades and exchanged cuts, when the Baliyy found that his old flamberge was too blunt to do damage. Consequently he had the worse of the affair; a slicing of the right hand forced him to drop his "silly sword." He then closed with his adversary, who again proved himself the better man, throwing the assailant, and at the same time slashing open his left leg. The wounded man lay in the "bush" till he gathered strength to "dot and go one" homewards. Amongst ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... crackled in his hands and fluttered to the floor. He opened his mouth to speak and thought better of it, and repeated the action more than once. Then he scratched his head with a helpless air, and picked up his newspaper. 'Silly girl!' he said at last; 'silly girl!' and relapsed into silence. At the close of breakfast, however, he made an effort at expostulation. 'You will make the man believe you're in love with him,' he said, and in fact he ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... sadder Than if my master were an adder, With brains within the latitude Of such immense ingratitude. This, gentles, is my honest view; And so I bid you both adieu.' The man, confounded and astonish'd To be so faithfully admonish'd, Replied, 'What fools to listen, now, To this old, silly, dotard cow! Let's trust the ox.' 'Let's trust,' replied The crawling beast, well gratified. So said, so done; The ox, with tardy pace, came on And, ruminating o'er the case, Declared, with very serious face, That years of his most painful toil Had clothed ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... said Mr. Lambert thickly. "I don't want any of your silly games! I shall be late enough home as it is. You unlock that door, and show me the way to this Beg's at ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... learning things, the desire to be keeping apace with just a little bit of the world's progress, and, best of all, teaching oneself how to live wisely and well. There never was—to my way of thinking—a brainless, silly woman who was beautiful. It takes the light of intellect, the splendor of sweet womanliness, the glory of kindness, unselfishness and goodness to complete a perfect picture of ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... could go there and make them see how silly they are," she impatiently declared. "If they would only be friendly with the ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... master silly pieces have got into the paper, fust an' last," said Mrs. Robbins. "Recollect how your Len come 'way over here to git his shoes cobbled, the week arter Tom Brewer moved int' the Holler, an' folks hadn't ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... oak and wainscot old, Within doth eat the silly worm: Even so a mind in envy cold, Always within itself ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... you don't like him enough." She laughed a little, teasingly, "Perhaps it's all just our nonsense, and he never has thought of you in that way. Maybe when he comes to see you he'll tell you about a beautiful girl in Urbana or Cincinnati that he's engaged to—and then what would your silly ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of Briarfield; of the natives of Yorkshire generally; complaints of the want of high society; of the backward state of civilization in these districts; murmurings against the disrespectful conduct of the lower orders in the north toward their betters; silly ridicule of the manner of living in these parts—the want of style, the absence of elegance, as if he, Donne, had been accustomed to very great doings indeed, an insinuation which his somewhat underbred manner and aspect failed to bear out. These strictures, he seemed to ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Tuttle family, this place is, I suppose," says Tink. "It got father, and it has almost got me. Some folks can breathe brass filings and carbon dioxide and thrive on it; but we can't. So I gave up and hid myself away in here to work out one of my silly dreams. Last spring I caught a bad cold, and Sister sent me West. There we have an uncle. She thought the change of climate might help my cough. It didn't do a bit of good; but it was out there that I picked up this option. That was when I saw a chance of making my dream ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... have failed humanity if it is so blinded by the monstrous agony in Flanders as to miss the essential triviality at the head of the present war. Not the slaughter of ten million men can make the quality of the German Kaiser other than theatrical and silly. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in every-day life we would smile credulously at our informant and doubt his sanity, but in a patent medicine advertisement we expect to read of miracles and we almost hope to be told of impossible happenings. The more glaringly false and silly they seem to be, the more they seem to exert their subtle hypnotic influence on anyone whose physical or mental temperament ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... went into the house, and found the old man sitting over the fire, rubbing his hands, and half-crying about 'the few poor dollars,' that he said he had had stolen from him. Father had never seen him before, but he knew he had the name of being half silly, and question him as much as he liked, he could make nothing of him. The daughter said that they had gone to bed at dark the night her father was robbed. She slept up stairs, and he down below. About ten o'clock she heard him scream, and running down stairs, ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... of nothing, our prince was guilty of incredible outrages upon various persons and, what was most striking these outrages were utterly unheard of, quite inconceivable, unlike anything commonly done, utterly silly and mischievous, quite unprovoked and objectless. One of the most respected of our club members, on our committee of management, Pyotr Pavlovitch Gaganov, an elderly man of high rank in the service, had formed the innocent habit of declaring vehemently on all sorts of ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... certificated. He wasn't even trained, as the rest of us understood training; and he scoffed at the drawing-office, and laughed outright at logarithms and our laborious methods of getting out quantities. But he could set sheers and tackle in a way that made the rest of us look silly. I remember once how, through the parting of a chain, a sixty-foot girder had come down and lay under a ruck of other stuff, as the bottom chip lies under a pile of spellikins—a hopeless-looking smash. ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... had realized that she might have said: "Did you want to see father?" ... in the idiom of the shop-girl or clerk, and that if she had said 'did' he would have been gravely disappointed and hurt. But she had not. Of course she had not! Of course she was incapable of such a locution, and it was silly of him to have thought otherwise, even momentarily. She was an artist. Entirely different from the blonde and fluffy Mrs. John Orgreave—(and a good thing too, for Mrs. John with her eternal womanishness ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Byng. I don't say that the expert couldn't find what the cause of death was, if suspicion was aroused; but it could be managed so that 'heart failure' or some such silly verdict would be given, because there was no sign of violence, or of injury ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... any one did that to a silly old woman like me," she said musingly. "Was it you or your brother," she asked abruptly, "who nearly broke ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... nurse; "for in that case he will be the first to tire of you, and then hold him if you can. To-day he may be as sweet as honey to you, but to-morrow it will be another story. What are you going to say? That he is young, and handsome? Silly, silly girl. Is he any the less a man for that? Do you want to ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... master and mistress labored under the delusion that he was silly enough to look up to them as kind-hearted slave-holders, to whom he should feel himself indebted for everything, William thought that they would be sadly puzzled to conjecture what had become of him. He was sure that they would be slow to believe that he ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... replied. "Some of the young chaps thought it first-rate, even though they were a little startled for the moment. Though why people should feel startled by anything so self-evident as my remarks beats me. Be hanged to them for silly idiots! Eh, Jean?" ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... truly—a French gentleman—a man of truth and courage and spirit and honor and everything good. A man who wouldn't tell a lie or do a mean thing, or flatter a silly woman, or persecute a very unhappy girl—no, not to save his soul, Mr. Sheppard. Do you happen to ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... false tenderness. There, take it away," he said, as Mrs. Lawson was placing her most comfortable footstool under his feet; "there was no attendance, no care, not a civil action or kind look for me when I was poor John Lawson, the silly, most silly old man, who had given up all to his son and his son's wife, for the love of them, and expected, like a fool as he was, to live with them on terms of perfect equality, and to have the family purse open to him for any trifling sums he wished to take. Go, go for ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... don't be silly. Now is your chance. I want to be introduced to those nice girls. Exceedingly nice they look, and pleasant companions they will be for you. Come and do your duty, ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... question set Nils laughing. He clapped little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly as to kill himself at ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... very silly. If he let one of us out and didn't let him back how could we both be here now? I don't want to cast any reflections on General What's-His-Name's intellect, but I should think he might figure that out for himself. Come around in the morning and we will talk ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... endure—solitude—and I have found it delightful. The hard and stubborn things that were beat into my head at school, and which I despised at the time, are useful pieces of knowledge now, and, viewing them, I wonder that I could ever have been so silly as to find my ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... Cross; and in the evening dressed myself in a plain suit of the true Paris cut, and appeared in a front box at the play, where I saw a good deal of company, and was vain enough to believe that I was observed with an uncommon degree of attention and applause. This silly conceit intoxicated me so much, that I was guilty of a thousand ridiculous coquetries; and I dare say, how favourable soever the thoughts of the company might be at my first appearance, they were soon changed by my absurd behaviour into pity or contempt. I rose and sat down, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... more there is," said Mrs White with a half-ashamed smile; "but Jem, he knows I'm a bit silly over them, and he got 'em at Cuddingham t'other day. You see, the day I said I'd marry him he gave me a bunch of white laylocks—and that's ten years ago. Sitting still so much more than I'm used lately, with the baby, ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... When I was reading the Treaty, I thought all the names of foreign places, viz. Poindicherry, Chandenenagore, Cochin, Martinico, &c, all cessions. Not they—they are all so many traps and holes to catch this silly fellow in, and make a merchant of him! I really think the best way upon this principle would be this:—let the merchants of London open a public subscription, and set him up at once. I hear a great deal respecting a certain statue ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... at him, but his uncle Hildebrand grasped him firmly. "I ween, thou wouldst rage in thy silly anger. Then hadst thou lost forever ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... again to the dolls. "I hear that you dispute and quarrel sometimes, and I am very sorry for it. That is very foolish. It is only silly little children that we expect will dispute and quarrel. I should not have supposed it possible in the case of such young ladies as you. It is a great deal better to be yielding and kind. If one of you says something that the other thinks is not true, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... Do you hear? You are mine!' Then he whirled upon the priest. 'O what a fool I was to ever let you wag your silly tongue! Thank your God you are not a common man, for I'd—but the priestly prerogative must be exercised, eh? Well, you have exercised it. Now get out of my house, or I'll forget who and what you are!' Father Roubeau bowed, took her hand, ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... if I ever again walk abroad with a peruke at night!" grumbled Cale, as he let himself be hurried along by the eager Tom. "I am not a watchman. Why should I risk my goods for every silly wench who should know better than to be abroad of a night alone? Come, come, my young friend, my legs are not as long as yours; I shall have no wind for fighting if you drag ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... drink of buttermilk. We have lots of strawberries and cream, pot-cheese, Johnny-cakes, and there are always eggs and milk at our service. From diplomatic motives I advise you not to say too much about Hunter to people asking questions. It would entirely spoil its only great charm if a rush of silly city folks should scent it out. It is really a primitive place and that you can say. Mr. Coe preached an excellent sermon ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Edward, as some have called him, in derision I suppose, being a very silly fellow, had all the faults incident, and almost inseparable, to fools. He married my daughter Editha from his fear of disobliging me; and afterwards, out of hatred to me, refused even to consummate his marriage, ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... chatelaines; bull-fighters, Spanish ladies; vivandieres, beguiled away from their homes under the pale of the church, "near a stream of running water, by a gay and handsome chevalier," and many other such silly things—Amedee will remember them always! They bring back to him, clearly and strongly, certain happy hours in his childhood! They make him smell again at times even the odor that pervaded the Gerards' house. A mule-driver's song will bring up before his vision the engraver ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... did not look very silly? My lord, smiling, and gazing at me from head to foot; Lord Jackey grinning and laughing, like an oaf, as I then, in my spite, thought. Indeed the countess said, encouragingly to me, but severely in persons of birth, "Lady Davers, you are as much too teazing, as Mrs. B. is too bashful. But you ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... said: "Now you speak of lamps, I know not whether the princess may have observed it, but there is an old one upon a shelf of the prince's robing-room. If the princess chooses, she may have the pleasure of trying if this fool is so silly as to give a new lamp for an old one, without taking anything ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... The Wench gives it out only to vex thee, and to ruin me in thy good opinion. 'Tis true, I go to the House; I chat with the Girl, I kiss her, I say a thousand things to her (as all Gentlemen do) that mean nothing, to divert myself; and now the silly Jade hath set it about that I am married to her, to let me know what she would be at. Indeed, my dear Lucy, these violent Passions may be of ill consequence to ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... rich blush permeated his surface. "Well, it seems a silly thing to say and all that, but I'm in love with ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... his hand towards another model, the one for which his assistants were preparing the stone. And this model represented an angel of the correct type, with symmetrical wings like those of a goose, a figure of neither sex, and commonplace features, expressing the silly ecstasy that tradition requires. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... resolutely for power and wealth. So Frederick Norman knew precisely what he was facing when Galloway's tall gaunt figure and face of the bird of prey appeared before him. Galloway had triumphed and was triumphing not through obedience to the Sunday sermons and the silly novels, poems, plays, and the nonsense chattered by the obscure multitudes whom the mighty few exploit, but through obedience to the conditions imposed by our social system. If he raised wages a little, it was in order that he might have excuse for raising prices a great deal. If he gave ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... might be said that whatever folly is possible to a moneyless man, that folly I have at one time or another committed. Within my nature there seemed to be no faculty of rational self-guidance. Boy and man, I blundered into every ditch and bog which lay within sight of my way. Never did silly mortal reap such harvest of experience; never had any one so many bruises to show for it. Thwack, thwack! No sooner had I recovered from one sound drubbing than I put myself in the way of another. "Unpractical" I was called by those who spoke ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakspeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... learnt, I am sure of it quite, That this earth is a silly, strange place, And perhaps he's been beaten and hurt in the fight, And perhaps he's been passed in the race. But I know he has found it far better to sing Than to talk of ill luck and to sigh,— Little we care for the outside ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... land only and not the people, the nation, the government? Or, loving these, have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country with only that kind is never long ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... for the maid and said to her, when she arrived: "Please, Tinette, pack a lot of fresh, soft coffee-cake in this box." A box had been ready for this purpose many days. When the maid was leaving the room she murmured: "That's a silly bother!" ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... would heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners; it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... loud voices, a tall burly yeoman of the King's guard came forward and plucked Robin by the sleeve. "Good master," quoth he, "I have somewhat to tell thee in thine ear; a silly thing, God wot, for one stout yeoman to tell another; but a young peacock of a page, one Richard Partington, was seeking thee without avail in the crowd, and, not being able to find thee, told me that he bore ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... cried Mrs. Davis, exhibiting the half-drowned brood. "You might as well be deaf and blind, Mell, for any care you take of 'em. Give you a silly book to read, and the children might perish before your eyes for all you'd notice. Look at Isaphine, and Gabella Sarah. Little lambs,—as likely as not they've taken their deaths. It shan't happen again, though. Give me that book—" And, snatching Mell's treasure from her hands, Mrs. Davis ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... character like him, but it was irritating, all the same, to have to wonder every night whether he would come in or not. When it got dark, Lantier again suggested the music-hall, and this time she accepted. She decided it would be silly to deny herself a little pleasure when her husband had been out on the town for three days. If he wasn't coming in, then she might as well go out herself. Let the entire dump burn up if it felt like it. She might even put a ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Don't laugh at me, please. I turned faint like a great silly girl. You touched the tenderest place, where my ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... of God, whose providing frugality is on an infinite scale, vigilant alike in heaven and on, earth; whose art colours a universe with beauty and touches with its pencil the petals of a flower. A soul thus pure and large disowns the paltry rules of dignity, the silly notions of great and mean, by which fashion distorts God's real proportions; is utterly delivered from the spirit of contempt; and, in consulting for the benign administration of life, will learn many a truth, and discharge many ant office, from which lesser beings, esteeming themselves ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... fierce, angry, proude, hasty and violent," and how also "he is reputed hoat and drie in the highest degree, bearing sway over redde choler." I should like to tell him about the passions, actions, and the gestures they occasion, described as they are with a sweet and silly unreasonableness that is very charming to read, and makes no demand whatever upon the understanding. But charming as are the pages of Lomazzo, those of Torrotti are more charming still, and they have a connection with our subject which Lomazzo's have not. Enough, therefore, that Mr. Haydocke did ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing. As for saying I left our child to starve, that, of course, is untrue and silly. My mother offered you six hundred a year. But you wouldn't take anything. You simply disappeared, and carried ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde
... it all, going out without your hat and standing there like a silly fool cleaning that bit of paper. I wonder what the lightermen ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... collar-bone. Looks to me as if 'twas high time to stop calling women the weaker sex when it takes so little to bring about a man's undoing. I've known plenty of foolish women in my time, but the most scatter-brained, silly girl I ever set my eyes on could see any number of men with their collars off and their trousers rolled up and not be any more allured than if she was looking at so many gate-posts. You men have certainly got to be a feeble sex, Joel. The wonder is you don't mind owning ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... on him with unfathomable disdain] YOU box! Slap an old woman with the back o your hand! You hadn't even the sense to hit her where a magistrate couldn't see the mark of it, you silly young lump of conceit and ignorance. Hit a girl in the jaw and ony make her cry! If Todger Fairmile'd done it, she wouldn't a got up inside o ten minutes, no more than you would if he got on to you. Yah! I'd ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... a cynical smile curled his sensual lips; "we are to say to as many silly flies as possible, 'come, walk into my parlor;' and if we cannot induce them to come ourselves, we are to employ some of our imps to accomplish that purpose; and, when we get them there, we are not to ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... went off very well, as I hear. No alterations were suggested by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know. Sometimes people criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest all sorts of improvements. Who was that silly body that wanted Burns to alter "Scots wha hae," so as to lengthen the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... tell it. It upsets me too much.... No, that's silly, I've got to begin facing realities.... It was just when the Germans were taking Bruges, the Uhlans broke into this convent.... But I think it was in Louvain, not Bruges.... I have a wretched ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... all know that you will be happy enough, with your beloved Harriet. How frivolous and silly you will be, by the end of the first ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more as a companion than a servant. I was a vain, giddy girl, then, sir. A young man, the son of a neighbouring farmer, courted me, and I was much attached to him; but neither of us had money, and his parents would not give their consent to our marrying. I was silly enough to think that, if William loved me, he should have braved all; and his prudence mortified me, so I married another whom I did not love. I was rightly punished, for he ill-used me and took to drinking; ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... you are very kind," she said, "but if you please, I would much rather have you decide for me, because I am only a silly little girl, and you are so ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... shrugged. "He's out West or down South, prospecting about, I imagine. Awful bore, I thought him, and so silly to spend most of his time in the wilds when he could stay in the New York office and live like a ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... metaphysician can discern none either, the others certainly are in the right of it, as against him. His science is then but pompous trifling; and the endowment of a professorship for such a being would be silly. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... which is the earliest known specimen of Castilian prose; and several smaller works, now collected under the general title of 'Opuscules Legales' (Minor Legal Writings). It was long supposed that he wrote the 'Tesoro' (Thesaurus), a curious medley of ignorance and superstition, much of it silly, and all of it curiously inconsistent with the acknowledged character of the enlightened King. Modern scholarship, however, discards this petty treatise from ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... been very anxious, met her at the corner. Perhaps it was not to be wondered at that Jason was somewhat cross and unreasonable. He said only a girl would be so foolish as to send that feather to the minister's daughter. Girls were all silly, even those who had high foreheads, and he would never trust one again. He hoped she was going to have sense enough not to tell, no matter what ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... them, on the next turn of the team, Uncle Aleck said, "Did you catch the lapwing, you silly boy? That ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... am a goose! What am I confessing here to myself? That I am in love with Karl? What silly nonsense. Come, Olga, you ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... This silly affair, however, greatly increased his rancour against me, which was before not a little, on account of my conduct in the Assembly respecting the exemption of his estate from taxation, which I had always oppos'd very warmly, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... will frankly confess to you, that my health most seriously and urgently requires the balmy air of dear Naples, and the more balmy atmosphere of those I love, and who love me; and that I shall forego my garret with more regret than most people of my silly rank in society forego a ...
— The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, Vol. I. - With A Supplement Of Interesting Letters By Distinguished Characters • Horatio Nelson
... be a silly old man," said Mrs. Craven. "And what on earth were you whispering about to ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... was a justice-deput to examine some women who had confessed judicially, and one of them, who was a silly creature, told me under secresie, that she had not confest because she was guilty, but being a poor creature who wrought for her meat, and being defamed for a witch, she knew she would starve, for no person thereafter would either give her meat or lodging, and that ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... night. She looked into the bedroom for a few minutes, and saw the old woman asleep. Her old hand lay out on the coverlet, and still between the fingers was twisted the silly string of beads. Mabel went softly across in the shaded light, and tried to detach it; but the wrinkled fingers writhed and closed, and a murmur came from the half-open lips. Ah! how piteous it was, thought the girl, how hopeless ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... brought it up before. You spent weeks convincing me I ought to carry through with my internship and establish a practice. You said the time element didn't make any difference to you. You talked me out of the silly idea I had about cashing in on the man with two hearts. I admitted it was a silly idea. I turned away from it completely. Then you did the world's fastest about-face and began asking questions. You began pushing me in the direction you'd ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... eagle, my wings have failed, and my vision has been blinded. Disappointment and sickness have hitherto held dominion over me; twin born with me, my would, was for ever enchained by the shall not, of these my tyrants. A shepherd-boy that tends a silly flock on the mountains, was more in the scale of society than I. Congratulate me then that I have found fitting scope for my powers. I have often thought of offering my services to the pestilence-stricken towns of France and Italy; but fear of paining ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... he would never take the pains To seek the prize that labor gains, Until the time had passed; For, all his life, he dreaded still The silly bugbear of uphill, And ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of honour to his memory, the record of his three years' wanderings has been made public. What is the expression of his gratitude to the English? One service he certainly rendered us: he disabused, if that were possible, the French of their silly and most ignorant notions as to our British government in India and Ceylon: he could do no otherwise, for he had himself been astounded at what he saw as compared with what he had been taught to expect. Thus far he does us some justice and therefore some service, urged to it by his bitter contempt ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... notwithstanding such precedents, persons should still be found to object to Darwin's discovery, not because they were anxious to maintain the dignity of the heavenly bodies, but because they were so ludicrously anxious to maintain the dignity of their own! Good it is for man, puffed up with such silly pride, that ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... dramatic art which must have free play in the serious development of the one-act play than the readers of a "popular" magazine in America (or England either) would appreciate Kipling's "They," or George Moore's "The Wild Goose," or de Maupassant's "La Ficelle." To expect them to is silly; and to expect that because the supreme, vivid example of any form is comprehensible to all classes and all mixtures of classes, therefore the supreme example is going to be developed out of the commonplace stuff such mixed audiences daily enjoy, is ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... really seems as though the game were too small to take time for its killing, but as these weak and febrile maunderings really represent the "System's" reply to my charges, it may be worth while to show, once and for all, what idiotic lies they put forth and what a silly and ineffective falsifier it is that they have made their champion. I shall take the second article of the series and contrast Donohoe's statements ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... a sportin' man and a A 1 feller, he's goin' to waltz down inter that hotel, rigged out ez he is? D'ye reckon he's goin' to let his partners get the laugh onter him? D'ye reckon he's goin' to show his head outer this yer ranch till he can do it square? Not much! Go 'long. Dad, you're talking silly!" ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... the driver's encouraging, "Pop-pop! Dih-dih-dih! Ho-ho-ho! children of jungle swine; brothers to buffalo!" addressed to the horses lagging in the climb, fluttered away with his silly little cackle. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... make a man repose, with slumbering virtue upon them, for the distinction he is to receive in society, than to inspire the effort of rendering himself worthy of them. They are to men what beauty is to women, a dangerous gift, which has a natural tendency to make them indolent, silly, and worthless. Let property be hereditary, but let titular honours be the reward of noble or useful exertions. France, in her folly, has destroyed them totally, instead of making them conditional.” Howbeit, titled people appear to have been ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... "Don't be silly! Snap out of it!" Bud gave his pal a cheerful poke in the ribs, hoping to buck him up. "You heard what Blake said—Washington itself was hardly touched. Without your setup, think of all the people that might ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... we strolled towards the Twelve Golden-Haired, "I hope you have no silly notions about confession, about telling the literal truth and so on. Because I want you to promise me that you will lie stoutly to your wife about Sylvia Joy. You must swear the whole thing has been platonic. It's the only chance for your happiness. Your wife, no doubt, will lure you ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... gradations Flora felt herself without shades, a creature of violent contrasts and impulses. If Clara had been going to carry the ring about with her she would have had a reason for it. But Flora had nothing but a silly fancy. ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... to the Columbine dance at the San Diego, and when Lieutenant Ames wanted to make a foursome with Kitty and Arnold to go boating, she said most regretfully to each,—"Isn't it a shame? But my sister is having some kind of a silly club there to-night, and I ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... was just a little afraid of his self-confidence, and of this tall nobleman's habit of getting what he wanted, in the end: but she dispiritedly felt that Pevensey had failed her. Why, George Bulmer treated her as if she were a silly infant; and his want of her, even in that capacity, was a secondary matter: he was going into France, for all his petting talk, and was leaving her to shift as she best might, until he could spare the time ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... her breath. Her eyes grew big. She had not thought that Alice Weston—But then that did not matter now. Lorry was so abjectly sorry about something or other. He felt her hand on his sleeve. She was smiling. "You're just a great big, silly boy, ranger man. I'm really years older than you. Please don't tell me anything. I don't want to know. I just want you ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... of the four guardians of Anne Lovely, the heiress. He is a silly, half-witted virtuoso, positive and surly; fond of everything antique and foreign; and wears clothes of the last century. Mr. Periwinkle dotes upon travellers, and believes more of Sir John Mandeville than he does of the Bible. Colonel Feignwell, to obtain his consent ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... And then, thing of silly, cruel impulses that I was, I saw what I had done. The very thing that I wished to avert I had precipitated. For Allan, in his sudden terror and pity, had bent and caught her in his arms. For the first time they were together; and it was I who had ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... walking up and down, his room's next to mine, you know. And then if I listen hard enough, I can hear footsteps all over the house— you know how you do in the middle of the night. And there's always some one coming upstairs. This will sound silly to you up in London, but it doesn't seem silly here, I assure you. All the servants feel it, and Gladys is going at the end ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... is no hurry about Bellairs," said I. "It's rather a long story and rather a silly one. But I think we have a good deal to tell each other, and perhaps we had better wait till ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... was to be made we might not yet know. We all kept to our own tasks and our own fires, with the exception that Daniel gawked and strutted in the manner of a silly gander, and made frequent errands to ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... when I can get nothing else out of a man. Someone says, I forget who, that "a woman can always know in what opinion she is held by the conversation addressed to her," and is it not true? The foolish compliments paid to the pretty, but silly little debutante; the small talk to the fools; the sparring with the witty; the risque tales enjoyed by those of a more rapid style. Men find out first what are our tastes, and then dish up their conversation accordingly, and they do not ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... expedients of a man who was silly enough to tell the secrets of his Government, as regarded the intended injustice of the Brazilian Ministry towards me—in spite of stipulations thrice ratified by the Emperor's own hand. But in confiding them to Lieutenant Shepherd, the Envoy's want of common honesty, ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... for my money," he perorated. "Stingaree, sir, is the greatest chap in all these Colonies, and deserves to be Viceroy when they get Federation. Thunderbolt, Morgan, Ben Hall and Ned Kelly were not a circumstance between them to Stingaree; and the silly old Bishop's a silly old fool to him! I don't care twopence about right and wrong. That's not the point. The one's a ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... him to judgment, which he pretends to believe with a full assurance and persuasion: And yet for all this, he shuts his eyes against all conviction, and rusheth into the sin like a horse into battle; as if he had nothing left to do, but, like a silly child to wink hard, and to think to escape a certain and infinite mischief, only by ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... it is, Hans," said one, "give her up. You have no chance of gaining the required sum for many years, and it's a hard case to keep a poor girl waiting. Give her up, man, and don't go on like a silly love-sick boy." ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... poor old Whiggery should have been so silly as to go a-wooing. Infirm and tottering as he is, it was the height of insanity. Down he dropped on his bended knees before the object of his love; out he poured his touching addresses, lisped in the blandest, most persuasive tones; and what was his answer? Scoffs, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... much correction; you are a very bombastic, disagreeable, silly, ignorant girl, but I will own it—I do admire spirit, you have a look of your father, and I was very fond of poor John; not as fond of him as I was of my own dear Tom, but still I respected him. Had he lived you would have been ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... moment he is at breakfast at home, having left to us this wild-goose chase of black stones in the Mugnone." "Marry," quoth Buffalmacco, "he did but serve us right so to trick us and leave, seeing that we were so silly as to believe him. Why, who could have thought that any but we would have been so foolish as to believe that a stone of such rare virtue was to be found in the Mugnone?" Calandrino, hearing their colloquy, forthwith imagined that he had the stone ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... "And then that silly custom of eating bon-bons, that brutal gluttony for sweetmeats, those abominable preparations for the wedding, those discussions with mamma upon the apartments, upon the sleeping-rooms, upon the bedding, upon the morning-gowns, upon the wrappers, the linen, the ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Mart. They're all old men, for a fact, and I've noticed that Borden complains of rheumatism pretty bad. Pirates don't have rheumatism, in any book I ever read. Still, they're a queer gang—Birch with his one eye and Yorke with that silly-lookin' twisted mouth ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... her maid, had only held her silly tongue, Gerty might have been almost happy now. But Mary hadn't held her tongue, but conjured up Jack, and he was before her mental eyes at this very moment just as she had seen him last, the young and handsome lieutenant, ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... Hodges, "have we one of the faculty here? I see how it is, friend. You have been reading some silly book about the disease, and have frightened yourself into the belief that you have some of its symptoms. I hope you haven't been doctoring yourself, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... her self-possession partially. "Your father gave promise of attaining great eminence in a profession that was very proper for him, but I thought better of Dr. Leslie than this. I cannot understand his indulgence of such a silly notion." ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... when I see other scholars criticising the ancient literature of India as if it were the work of the nineteenth century, as if it represented an enemy that must be defeated, and that can claim no mercy at our hands. That the Veda is full of childish, silly, even to our minds monstrous conceptions, who would deny? But even these monstrosities are interesting and instructive; nay, many of them, if we can but make allowance for different ways of thought and language, contain ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... people: when any one is faring ill their sympathies are touched, they rush to the aid of the unfortunate; but when fortune smiles on others, they are somehow pained. "I do not say," he added, "this could happen to a thoughtful person; but it is no uncommon condition of a silly mind." (9) ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... easily be persuaded that, on slow work, the same sort of food should have even a more salutary effect on their horses. How prevalent was the notion, at one time, that horses could not be expected to do work at all, unless there was hard meat in them! 'This is a very silly and erroneous idea, if we inquire into it,' as Professor Dick truly observes, 'for whatever may be the consistency of the food when taken into the stomach, it must, before the body can possibly derive any substantial support or benefit from it, be converted into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... CHARLES. Because your silly schemes miscarry, you come here to turn rogue and assassin! Murder, boy, do you know the meaning of that word? You may have slumbered in peace after cropping a few poppy-heads, but to have a murder on ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the mighty ones, the conquering ones of this earth? the joyous? I believe not. The fool is happy, or comparatively so—certainly the least sorrowful, but he is still a fool: and whose notes are sweetest, those of the nightingale, or of the silly lark? ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... thought the chariot-races were pretty nifty, but if an old Roman should reassemble himself and watch the dray-race to a Homeburg fire, he'd wonder how he ever managed to sit through a silly little dash around an arena. From the south comes a cloud of dust and a terrific racket. At an equal distance from the east comes another cloud of dust and an even more terrible uproar, Clay Billings's dray having more loose spokes than Bill Dorgan's. The clouds approach with tremendous ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... found the diary, then," said Darrow easily. "Rather silly of me to complain so. But really, in conditions like these, tobacco becomes a ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and then he went up to the first pace and preached a sermon to the people, shewing them that as our lord Jhu dyed upon the Tree of his deare mercy for us, so we too owe mercy to the beasts his Creatures, for that they are all his poor lieges and silly servants. And that like as the Holy Aungells do atheir suit to him on high, and the Blessed xii Apostles and the Martirs, and all the Blissful Saints served him aforetime on earth and now praise him in heaven, ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the a at the close into ie, as so many young people—and older ones, too, who ought to know better—are in the habit of doing; for I never could understand why girls with so noble names as Anna and Mary and Helen and Margaret and Caroline should change them into the weak and silly forms that we hear every day. This change, which usually shortens the name and ends it with an ie, is called a diminutive, which, according to Worcester, means "a thing little of its kind," and so may well enough be used in the ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... seen how the great orators Crassus and Antonius pretended that they did not know Greek: the same silly pride made others pretend they had never heard of the Jews, even while they were practising the Mosaic rites. And the number of noble names (Cornelii, Pomponii, Caecilii) inscribed on Christian tombs in the reigns of the Antonines proves that Christianity had made way even ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... what other people might think or would think so engrossed all my time that I had no means of enjoying the presence, thought, or favor of the divine creatures I met, and I must have appeared 'cracked' to them with my reticence, pride, and silly airs. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... all of you silly bladder-brains...! This is Belt Parnay...! Ever hear of him? Come back from hell, eh? Not with just rocks, this time! The latest, surest equipment! Want to give up, now, Nelsen—you and your nice, civilized people? Cripes, what will you cranks ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... are in safety. They are not liable to be impressed for soldiers, and forced to cut one another's Christian throats, as in the wars of their own countries. If some of the religious mad bigots, who now tease us with their silly petitions, have in a fit of blind zeal freed their slaves, it was not generosity, it was not humanity, that moved them to the action; it was from the conscious burthen of a load of sins, and a hope, from the supposed merits of so good a work, to be ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... said his father. "I suspect we have a young philosopher where you see only a silly little brother. He has, I fancy, got a glimpse of something he does not yet know ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... man turn pale under his tan, and for a moment he was speechless, while his mate Silas whispered something in his ear. But he would not listen. Instead, he pushed the man roughly away, angrily exclaiming, "Hold yer silly tongue, ye blame fool!" Then, turning ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... marriage, Celeste was seen to be a little woman, fair and faded almost to sickliness, fat, slow, and silly in the countenance. Her forehead, much too large and too prominent, suggested water on the brain, and beneath that waxen cupola her face, noticeably too small and ending in a point like the nose of a mouse, made some people fear she would become, sooner or later, imbecile. Her ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of aspirants for the honor. Her brother-in-law Philip, since the abdication of Charles V., his father, was a mighty King, ruler over Spain and the Netherlands, and was at the head of Catholic Europe. He saw in this vain, silly young Queen of England an easy prey. By marrying her he could bring England back to the fold, as he had done with her sister Mary, and the Catholic cause ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... applause or your money. I don't care for money. I think you know enough of me through the newspapers to vouchsafe that. You are rich, and it is your chief misery. Listen! Whether you believe it or not, you are very unhappy. Let me read your horoscope. Your club life bores you; you are tired of our silly theatres; no longer do you care for Wagner's music. You are deracinated; you are unpatriotic. For that there is no excuse. The arts are for you deadly. I am sure you are a lover of literature. Yet what a curse it has been for you! When you see one of your friends drinking wine, you ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... interest of seeing a wedding company go by. The surliest, the most whining of the onlookers will spare a little relenting, a happier thought, for "two lunatics," "a couple of young fools whose eyes will soon be opened," "a pore delooded lad," "a soft silly of a gal;" who are still so enviable in ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... Jove, it's like some years ago, The traffic stopping in a row In Piccadilly! The Vestry does not care a pin For all the muddle that we're in; They're much too silly. ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... Maids must kiss no men Till they did for good and all; Then she made the shepherd call All the heavens to witness truth Never loved a truer youth. Thus with many a pretty oath, Yea and nay, and faith and troth, Such as silly shepherds use When they will not Love abuse, Love, which had been long deluded, Was with kisses sweet concluded; And Phillida, with garlands gay, Was made the Lady of ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... as the mule backed and caught the camel two kicks in the ribs that rang like a drum. "Another time," he said, "you'll know better than to run through a mule battery at night, shouting 'Thieves and fire!' Sit down, and keep your silly neck quiet." ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... may be forty-one. Something of the style and manners of la tante de La R. Is about as silly; talks as much, and as much nonsense; is certainly good-tempered and cheerful; rather comely, abating a flat chest; about two inches taller than Theodosia. Things are not gone to extremities; ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... off me was to give the whole thing away. My rig underneath, though good enough for your girl, Tom, on a holiday, wasn't just what they wear in the Square. And, d'ye know, you'll say it's silly, but I had a conviction that with that coat I should say good-by to the nerve I'd had since I got into the Bishop's carriage,—and from there into society. I let her take the hat, though, and I ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... back soon, nor that day. We had no news of him the next day. A few women were in his workshop, when I called, hunting about for footwear that should have been repaired and returned, but was not. "'Ere they are," cried one. "'Ere's young Bill's boots, and nothing done to 'em. The silly old fool. Why didn't 'e tell me 'e was going to sea? 'Ow's young Bill to go to school on Monday now?" The others found their boots, all urgently wanted, and all as they were when Pascoe got them. A commination began of light-minded cripples who took in ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... a job; the satisfied, brutal egotism of Brome Porter, who lived as if life were a huge poker game; the overfed, red-cheeked Caspar, whom he remembered to have seen only once before, when the young polo captain was stupid drunk; the silly young cub of a Hitchcock. Even the girl was one of them. If it weren't for the women, the men would not be so keen on the scent for gain. The women taught the men how to spend, created the needs for their wealth. And the social game they were instituting in Chicago ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the Hindu people are controlled and handicapped by silly superstitions which make life a burden to them and which rob them ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... a volume of poems, the sentimental and rather mawkish 'Fantasies and Sketches,' product of a journey in Jutland and of a silly love affair. This book was so harshly criticized that he resolved to seek a refuge and new literary inspiration in a tour to Germany; for all through his life, traveling was Andersen's stimulus and distraction, so that he compares himself, later, to a pendulum "bound to go backward ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "I'm a silly fool," said Miss Emily, lifting her head, and wiping the tears from her merry little eyes, as she went on ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... side of the tall fence that looks as if it were made of crocheted wire. Sometimes Jehosophat's father opens the gate in the fence and lets the geese wander down to the pond. A silly way they have of stretching out their long white necks and crying, "Hiss, hiss!" This frightens Hepzebiah who always runs away. Then the geese waddle along in single file, that is one by one, like fat old ladies crossing a muddy street on their ...
— Seven O'Clock Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... ye silly callant!" she exclaimed, in great tribulation, "ye are as great a fool as your faither is. He sees what he has made o' you. But as the auld cock craws the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... the tremulous wabbly-legged divan. Kedzie didn't like the phrase, either, now. When he had first smitten it from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king. Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter it—"Kiss me again—who are you?" Why, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... all the evening; had already decided that the Lacys and Dinsmores were nice people who made her feel happy and at home with them; that she liked Mr. Calhoun Conly and his brother, Dr. Arthur, very much, but detested Ralph; thought Ella silly, proud, and haughty, and that with no excuse for either pride or arrogance. So now her principal attention was given to the ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... seemed to me, I must confess, a very foolish as well as dangerous amusement. Nevertheless the children seemed to be greatly delighted with the hideous faces they made. I pondered this subject a good deal, and thought that if little children knew how silly they seem to grown-up people when they make faces, they would not be so fond of doing it. In another place were a number of boys engaged in flying kites, and I could not help wondering that some of the games of those little savages should be so like to our own, although they had never seen ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... his embrace he felt the acquiescence of her whole happy self in whatever future he decided on, if only it gave them enough of such moments as this; and as they held each other fast in silence his doubts and distrust began to seem like a silly injustice. ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... is, Hans," said one, "give her up. You have no chance of gaining the required sum for many years, and it's a hard case to keep a poor girl waiting. Give her up, man, and don't go on like a silly love-sick boy." ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can't trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water—steamboats! Why shouldn't I try to get charge of one? ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Lord of Callice, Sterne Falconbridge commands the Narrow Seas, The Duke is made Protector of the Realme, And yet shalt thou be safe? Such safetie findes The trembling Lambe, inuironned with Wolues. Had I beene there, which am a silly Woman, The Souldiers should haue toss'd me on their Pikes, Before I would haue granted to that Act. But thou preferr'st thy Life, before thine Honor. And seeing thou do'st, I here diuorce my selfe, Both from thy Table Henry, and thy Bed, Vntill that Act of Parliament ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... as it was no longer daylight, the faces of none could be easily distinguished. The mate and captain would not have been missed more than any others. Their authority existed no longer, and their silly behaviour in belabouring the cook, when they should have been using the time to better advantage by endeavouring to stifle the fire, had led to the belief that both were "half-seas over," and, therefore, ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... "Why, the silly great bull will let the bear get close up to him!" cried Steve at last, after looking at one of these evolutions. "He managed quite six yards then. Why doesn't the creature give ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... Lichfield, England. On market-days he used to carry a package of books to the village of Ottoxeter, and sell them from a stall in the market-place. One day the bookseller was sick, and asked his son to go and sell the books in his place. Samuel, from a silly ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... what they heard, and what I have now to tell, was perfectly incredible. When 'some' years (two apparently) had passed, Will Harrison, Gent., like the three silly ewes in the folk-rhyme, 'came hirpling hame.' Where had the old man been? He explained in a letter to Sir Thomas Overbury, but his tale is as hard to believe ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... know; I would not be frightened, only it is all so horrible. I am never afraid when I can see and understand what the danger is. You do not believe me a silly girl?" ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... doctor. He was, I daresay, not less unhappy than we were, but he told us not to give way to unmanly fears, and scolded us for talking about our dreams. "It is a foolish and bad practice silly people are apt to indulge in. It makes them nervous, promotes superstition, and, worse than all, frequently causes them to doubt God's superintending care and watchfulness. Your dreams have just been made up of what has occurred, and ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... years before that the child, then but ten years old, had nearly managed to make a quarrel between Harry Esmond and his comrade, good-natured, phlegmatic Thomas Tusher, who never of his own seeking quarrelled with anybody: by quoting to the latter some silly joke which Harry had made regarding him—(it was the merest idlest jest, though it near drove two old friends to blows, and I think such a battle would have pleased her)—and from that day Tom kept at a distance from her; and she respected ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... verge of doom. I saw a Monster, a malign, marine, Mysterious, many-whorled, mug-lumbering Bogey, Stretched (like Miltonian angels on the marl) In league-long loops upon the billowy brine. Beshrew thee, old familiar ocean Bogey, Thou spectral spook of many Silly Seasons, Beshrew thee, and avaunt! Which being put In post-Shakspearian vernacular, means Confound, you, and Get out!!! The monstrous worm Wriggling its corkscrew periwinkly twists Of trunk and tail alternate, winked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... the ferry, and then we had to wait for hours on the other side. When I came out of the ferry-house, I put my foot on the grass, and I thought, 'This is Virginia!' It was as if I had stepped on some place where a murder had been done. I was as silly as a half-witted person," blushing apologetically. "I have had great kindness done to me in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof—for of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women, laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. And because it is so, he exhorteth to give diligence to make your calling and election sure, by giving all diligence to add to faith ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... between the older magazines and the recent ones is the conspicuous absence from the journal of a century ago of what is commonly called "light literature." Magazines were then conducted by scholars for scholars. "Popular" essays and silly novels had not yet depraved the taste of readers who could relish Somerville and Shenstone, Savage and Johnson. Articles appeared monthly in the Port Folio that could not by any chance win recognition from an editor of these days. One of the favorite ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... hateful porcupine quills again this winter! I will not! It's wicked, WICKED to expect me to! Oh! How I wish there never had been any porcupines in the world, or that all of them had died before silly, hateful people ever thought of trimming hat with them! They curl round and tickle my ear! They blow against my cheek and sting it like needles! They do look outlandish, you said so yourself a minute ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... responsible for your present condition. I now say however that you have been chosen by nature for a great and glorious work and from this time forward you must make use of your reasoning faculties for reasonable purposes and cast aside all the animal passions, silly ideas and antiquated superstitions which you have inherited from the ignorant of ages, and begin afresh. Before starting on our journey perhaps it would be well for us to take some refreshments in order that our minds may remain strong and clear during the trip. We take our nourishment in a different ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... these People, that I compos'd my ninth Satire; where I think I have shewn clearly enough, that without any prejudice either to one's Conscience or the Government, one may think bad Verses bad Verses, and have full right to be tir'd with reading a silly Book. But since these Gentlemen have spoken of the liberty I have taken of Naming them, as an Attempt unheard-of, and without Example, and since Examples can't well be put into Rhyme; 'tis proper to say one word to inform 'em of a thing of which they ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... his head perhaps, and now I confess to you, unprovoked. I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it. I do not even 'see the better part,' I am so silly. ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... years old—by that time I was engaged to be married—I took him round to all the day schools. I went from one to the other, and no one would take him. And he cried. . . . 'What are you crying for, little silly?' I said. I took him to Razgulyay to the second school, where—God bless them for it!—they took him, and the boy began going every day on foot from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyay Street and back again . . . . Alyosha paid for him. . . . By God's grace the boy got on, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... empress expect to bribe me, for I hope she does not think me so silly and childish as to consider her words commands, merely because they fall from the lips of an empress. No, the little Morien is at this moment a more important person to the empress than the empress is to me, and it is, therefore, very natural ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... doubtless, are superstitious. But I appeal to every master mariner here, whether the superstitious men are generally the religious and godly men; whether it is not generally the most reckless and profligate men of the crew who are most afraid of sailing on a Friday, and who give way to other silly fancies which I shall not mention in this sacred place. And I appeal, too, to public experience, whether many, I may say most, of those to whom seamanship and sea-science owes most, have not ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... am not so silly or so wicked as to try to persuade you that my mother will open her arms to you. She knows neither ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... universal and particular grace respectively embody? The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is certainly, to use the familiar expression, a very pleasant doctrine conducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as assuming them to be, what they really are, at the worst, God's silly sheep. It has something in it congruous with the rising of the physical sun on the evil and on the good, while the wheat and the tares grow naturally, peacefully together. But how pleasant also the opposite doctrine, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... can fancy that an easy-going butterfly should laugh at the painful industry of the ant; and I should think much of the butterfly who should own that he was only a butterfly because it was the age of butterflies. "The few wise," said I, "have ever been the laughing-stock of silly crowds." ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... me exactly, or careless of my enjoyment, because, to be sure, Harry Jardine is courting all of us. Nonsense, Joanna, you need not affect to be sage and precise and unconcerned. I am not so silly, and it is very conceited of you, and I have no patience with you. Of course I was not blind and deaf, and I have not lost my memory. Harry Jardine is continually looking after you, whatever his mother persuades herself. He never notices what ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... my boy, to-morrow you will be standing on your own feet, as it were; you'll be responsible for yourself. For it's like this: before one has served one is a silly youth: but afterwards, a man. Therefore you want something that you can steer by; and I tell you, you must make a rule for yourself that you can look to. The printed ones—they're only just by the way. Always ask yourself: is it right, is it honest, what you're doing? If yes, ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... think the German bogey is very silly?" was Bob's retort. "I was in Germany last summer with my mother, and we had a great time. She knew some German families there, and we became great friends with them. They don't want war any more than we do. All they desire is to develop their ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... mean those silly things you have been teaching me? Why should I learn them? I'm happy as I am. I love you, you love me, and that ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... chimerical," Pecuchet ended by declaring. "He believes in the occult sciences, in monarchy, in rank; is dazzled by rascals; turns up millions for you like centimes; and middle-class people are not with him middle-class people at all, but giants. Why inflate what is unimportant, and waste description on silly things? He wrote one novel on chemistry, another on banking, another on printing-machines, just as one Ricard produced The Cabman, The Water-Carrier and The Cocoa-Nut Seller. We should soon have books on every trade and on every province; then on every town and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the mischievous brute, had been placed in the wrong stall and Beelzebub was making for freedom. He gave another triumphant baa as he swept between Dolph's legs and through the gate, and, with an answering chorus, the silly sheep sprang to their feet and followed. A sheep hates water, but not more than he loves a leader, and Beelzebub feared nothing. Straight for the water of the low ford the old conqueror made and, in the wake of his masterful summons, the flock swept, like a Mormon household, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... torments of his life. It was here that they made those products with the wonders of which they pestered him so—by placards that defaced the landscape when he traveled, and by staring advertisements in the newspapers and magazines—by silly little jingles that he could not get out of his mind, and gaudy pictures that lurked for him around every street corner. Here was where they made Brown's Imperial Hams and Bacon, Brown's Dressed Beef, Brown's Excelsior Sausages! Here was the headquarters of Durham's Pure ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... love with a term that Othello hit upon; only they used it not once, but fifty times a day, and struck decent women with it on the face, like a scorpion whip; and then the scalding tears were sure to run in torrents down their silly, honest, burning cheeks. But this was not all; they had got a large tank in a flagged room, nominally for cleanliness and cure, but really for bane and torture. For the least offence, or out of mere wantonness, they would drag a patient stark naked across the yard, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... hers,—"I was just as bad by little Sue. I was only fourteen then, but it was the same evil, unsuitable vanity and selfishness. I was busy, while she was sick, making a white muslin burnouse to wear to a fair. I had teased mother for it. It was a silly thing for a girl like me to wear; it had a blue ribbon run in the hem of the hood, and a bow and long blue ends behind. Poor little Sue was just down with the fever. Mother had to go out, and left me to tend her. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... down with accuracy and good faith. Every turn of phrase, awkward or coarse though it may seem to cultured ears, must be unrelentingly reported; and every grotesquery, each strange word, or incomprehensible or silly incident, must be given without flinching. Any attempt to soften down inconsistencies, vulgarities or stupidities, detracts from the value of the text, and may hide or destroy something from which the student ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Then it struck her for the first time that he was a very handsome young man—quite the Prince Charming of the girls' dreams. A thousand times finer than Moravia's Italian prince with whom for her part she had been horribly disappointed when she had seen his photograph. Only it was too silly to consider this one in that light, since he wasn't really going to be hers—only a means to an end. Oh! the pleasure to be free and rich and to do exactly what she pleased! She had been planning all these days what she would do. She ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... said softly, and the colour flamed in her sensitive face. Miss Craven nodded. "You mean that in unearthing the buried treasure of a dead past she has found the living treasure of a man's love? Yes, and not any too soon, poor silly child. Men like Horringford don't bear playing with. I wonder whether she knows how near she has been to making ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... sound of subdued laughter at this from the guests, who had all kept silence to listen to the dean's jokes, that Pennie saw she had said something silly, though she had no idea what it could be. All the faces were turned upon her with smiles, and the dean, quite ignorant of the misery he was causing her, drank up his coffee ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... was very silly," agreed Helmsley, watching her narrowly from under his half-closed eyelids. "But most thinkers are silly, even when they don't take opium. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... afterwards," I answered, laughing with a silly, unbelieving air; "after you have had me hanged by those gendarmes to whom I have just given such a drubbing. Come, now; prove that you love me at once; I will save you afterwards. You see, I can talk ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of "honor and vital interests." Honor and vital interests—could any words be more vague and indefinite? Are these not the very cases which interested nations are least competent to decide? A complete answer to that silly reservation is found in our hundred years' peace with Great Britain. As John W. Foster, that keen student of our diplomatic history, has said, "The United States can have no future dispute with England more seriously involving the territorial integrity, the honor of the nation, its vital ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... as if he were trying to take it out of the ball. It was a grisly sight to see him, head and shoulders above the ditch, hewing at his obstinate colonel. It was a similar spectacle that once induced a lay spectator of a golf match to observe that he considered hockey a silly game. ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... without the least surprise at his figures, "I don't know what he could have been thinking of—your Priam Farll! I call it just silly. It isn't as if there wasn't enough picture-galleries already. When what there are are so full that you can't get in—then it will be time enough to think about fresh ones. I've been to the National Gallery twice, and upon my word I was almost the ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... my little pigeon of God, what are they doing now? Do you see Mishka Gurki? She is a silly woman. Tell me, my little pet, if you see her. Watch her well, and tell me how she looks at me. That woman is an enemy of the Revolution and a friend of Sophia Kensky.... Ah! it is ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... see it. On this point I will tell a little story from Mr. Kirk's Study of Silent Minds. At a concert behind the front, an audience of soldiers had listened to the ordinary items, a performance, as Mr. Kirk says, 'clean, bright, and amusing', which means of course silly and ugly. Then the orchestra played the introduction to the Keys of Heaven, and a gunner remarked—'Sounds like a bloody hymn.' That was his fear of beauty, his false shame. But when the Keys of Heaven was ended, the whole ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the former and latter part of the service. For a while, regardless of the worship of God, I looked around me, and was anxious to attract notice myself. My dress, like that of too many gay, vain, and silly servant girls, was much above my station, and very different from that which becomes an humble sinner, who has a modest sense of propriety and decency. The state of my mind was visible enough from the ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... The latter was placed between them in such a way that the heads of the bull and cow were in opposite directions, and thus both flanks were guarded. In this way the buffaloes might have held their ground, but the silly calf when closely menaced by the wolves foolishly started out, rendering it necessary for its protectors to assume ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand, like Christian, with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and everything that is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and strangers'-greeting to Lucy,—is it Lucy, or Ruth?—that gathers wise ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... grabbed him. Come out of it. What are you giving me, you josser?" said Collins, with a wink and a grin. "Ain't you found out even yet, you silly? Why, it was only a faked-up thing, the taking of a kinematograph picture for the Alhambra. You and Petrie ought to have been here sooner and got your wages, you goats. I got half a quid for my share when I let ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... take them to a river or pond to drink, when they say that sorrowfully discerning their loss of beauty these mares lose their self-respect and allow themselves to be covered by asses.[77] To select a wife for wealth rather than for her excellence or family is dishonourable and illiberal; but it is silly to reject wealth when it is accompanied by excellence and family. Antigonus indeed wrote to his officer who had garrisoned Munychia[78] to make not only the collar strong but the dog lean, that he might undermine the strength of the Athenians; but it becomes not the husband of ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... propos of her father, "She always let us have her own way." If the bottle of ink was upset, or the back of a book burst, she never waited to find out who had done it, but in a torrent of words crashed into the first girl she suspected, her face becoming a silly mauve and her bust heaving with passion. This made me so indignant that, one day when the ink was spilt and Mlle. de Mennecy as usual scolded the wrong girl, I determined I would stand it no longer. Meeting the victim of Mademoiselle's temper in the ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... this fire, but, on the contrary, claim that we saved what of Columbia remains unconsumed. And without hesitation I charge General Wade Hampton with having burned his own city of Columbia, not with a malicious intent or as the manifestation of a silly 'Roman stoicism,' but from folly, and want of sense, in filling it with lint, cotton, and tinder. Our officers and men on duty worked well to extinguish the flames; but others not on duty, including ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... billiard-rooms, we ran up to town for the day, we had wine in one another's rooms after hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threw oranges wildly at one another's heads, and generally enjoyed ourselves. It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it was life, it was reality; while the pretended earnestness of those pallid Somerville girls is all an affectation ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... He tried to keep his mind on the flower-beds, but it drifted away to the cave below. He thought of the danger of coming into some underground body of water, where he would be drowned; but he knew that was a silly idea. If the shell had gone through [v]subterranean reservoirs, the water of these would have run out, and before it reached the bottom of the shaft ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... her husband presently disclosed The love these cit-gallants to her proposed; Both known for arrant blockheads through the town, And ever boasting of their own renown. To him she gave their various speeches, tones, Each silly air: their tears, and sighs, and groans; They'd read, or rather heard, we may believe, That, when in love, with sighs fond bosoms heave. Their utmost to succeed these coxcombs tried, And seemed convinced they ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... only knew what that lady gave us!" "It matters nothing to me!" "But to-morrow evening you must go!" "Yes, yes! you would have had it!" Their father says: "Let us go to supper and let her alone; you are really silly!" ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... would become so fixed in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under the impression that he was saying something ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... will make a nice mess for the Bosnians and Servians because they have been rather troublesome about wanting to be united into one country instead of two, and called Greater Serbia. That seems a silly sort of reason for throwing bombs and killing people. But foreigners have a way of thinking bombs settle everything. Harriet brought out her old school geography and we looked up Sarajevo on the map of Austria-Hungary. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... replied; "and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... intolerably fatiguing unless very sparingly used. Take the song which Blondel sang under the window of King Richard's prison. There was not one syllable in it to say that Blondel was there, and was going to help the king to get out of prison. It was about some silly love affair, but it was a letter all the same, and the king made language of what would otherwise have been no language, by guessing the meaning, that is to say by perceiving that he was expected to enter then and there into a new covenant as to the meaning of the symbols that were ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... cam' an Irish beggar, wi' a stripy cloot him and a bellows under 's arm, and ca'd himsel' a Hielander, the lad wad gi'e him his silly ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... policy; he has enough sympathy to be kind to his old mother, and help a friend in distress; but the need of romantic and elevated conduct rarely occurs to him; and the heroic, if he meets it, appears to him as an exception, not far removed from the silly. He does not reflect—especially if he cares nothing for history—how even the society in which he is a contented unit has been built up, and how much loyalty and heroism has been needed for the work; nor even, to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... share in the sacrifice she made of her virtue. She had felt poverty, and was far from disliking power. Mr. Howard was probably as little agreeable to her as he proved worthless. The King, though very amorous, was certainly more attracted by a silly idea he had entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety; and he added the more egregious folly of fancying that inconstancy proved he was not governed; but so awkwardly did he manage that artifice, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... know. But really, really, I can't. It was so silly of me to be frightened. I am not generally silly ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... ran into quite a peace demonstration, called by placards the night of the Peace Interpretation in the Reichstag. Soon disbanded by the police with many arrests. One man told me that they were tired of a silly war and days without meat. There has been nothing in the papers about these demonstrations; of course, each arrest makes an ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... so she whispered soft words of love to it and told the little flower that it must never follow the breeze, for he was a wanderer and might take it far from its home, where it would be very unhappy and perhaps die out in the cold world. But the silly little Morning-glory still wanted to leave the big vine, and the next time the breeze came along it pushed up its head and the breeze took it off the big vine and bore it along with ...
— Sandman's Goodnight Stories • Abbie Phillips Walker
... them die. The first it sall be wind and weet, The next it sall be snaw and sleet, The third it sall be sic a freeze, Sall gar the birds stick to the trees, But when the Borrowed Days were gone, The three silly hogs came hedglin home." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... particles and absorbing others. So long as they are mere representatives, elected by the whims of universal suffrage, their meaning will be a perfect volatile, and to cork it up for the next century is an employment sufficiently silly, (to speak within bounds,) for a modern Bible dictionary maker. There never was a shallower conceit than that of establishing the sense attached to a word centuries ago, by showing what it means now. Pity ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... himself. A poor shift indeed, for him to think that he could hide himself from him to whom darkness is as light, and to flee from him whose kingdom is over all, and who is present in all the corners of his universal kingdom,—in hell, in heaven, in the utmost corners of the earth. But this silly invention shows ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... subsequently edited by Bode, the reader will find some allegorical explanations of these benefits given by Prometheus. See Myth. primus I. 1, and tertius 3, 10, 9. They are, however, little else than compilations from the commentary of Servius on Virgil, and the silly, but amusing, mythology of Fulgentius. On the endowment of speech and reason to men by Prometheus, cf. Themist. Or. xxxvi. p. 323, C. D. and xxvi. p. 338, C. ed. Hard.; and for general illustrations, the notes of Wasse on Sallust, Cat. ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... startled from repose by the shrill squeal of some unlucky brute, complaining of the torture inflicted by the sharp teeth of its ill-natured mate or vicious neighbor; or, perhaps, the flutter of fans is suspended at the obstreperous neigh by which some anxious dam recalls the silly foal that has strayed from her side; or the dissonant creaking of a cramped wheel makes doleful interludes between the verses of the hymn. Here naughty boys, escaped from the confinement of the sanctuary, are wont to lounge in the wagons during prayer and sermon time, munching green pears and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... hasty ones are generally the most generous. There are hundreds and hundreds of leaves in it, and I expect it will be years before it's finished. I'm not going to write things every day—that's silly! I'll just keep it for times when I want to talk, and Lorna is not near to confide in. It's quite exciting to think all that will be written in these empty pages! What fun it would be if I could ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... secretary, "there is all the information that I can obtain on the subject; and here, take the order, and go and see your friend the Duke. Tell him I will come and see him to-morrow, and give him what consolation you can; but yet do not act like a silly boy, and make too light of the business, for two reasons: first, because the matter is really serious—the good folks of London have an appetite for blood upon them just now, and will not be satisfied unless they see a head struck off every now and then; and ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... him.] Silly, have you forgotten that this is Tuesday—Maggie's night out? She's gone—I told her she needn't wait to clear away. We've arranged master's supper. Master! ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn't ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Phonzie; the whole evening don't need to be spoiled for you just because I went and got a silly fit of blues on. You—you go get some live one like Gert and—and take ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... but she might lace or not just as she pleased. No one would look at her in any case since her kind, good-humoured, silly ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... for doing that!" she exclaimed afresh, when she had finished the brandy he had poured out for her. "Did I say anything foolish, silly—did I? Oh, I hope I didn't. ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Joan, no—you don't understand. At the worst, this is some virtuous but silly school-girl, who, though she may be intending only an innocent flirtation with him, has made this man actually and deeply in love with her. Yes; it is a fact, Joan. I know Dick Demorest, and if ever there was a man honestly in love, it ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... told 'em he did it to dodge the ship's news reporters. Then he said he really was a brother of Adolph Meyer, the banker; but it seems Smedburg is a friend of Meyer's, and he called him hard! It was a silly ass thing to do," protested the purser. "Everybody knows Meyer hasn't a brother, and if he hadn't made THAT break he might have got away with the other one. But now this Smedburg is going to wireless ahead to Mr. Meyer and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... nervous dread of losing you. It is not selfishness, for I do love to have treats; but when you go away I don't seem to take any pleasure in anything; it is all so flat and disagreeable. Sometimes I lie awake and cry when I think what I should do if you were to die. I know how silly and morbid it is, but how am I to help it?" And here Hatty broke down, and hid her ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... has the right idea, sir," he replied. "While the report indicates that a group of people on Venus are meeting regularly and secretly, and wearing some silly uniform, I think we need more information before ordering a ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... secretary told Lennard[6]), and said 'he was sure it was all Leach's doing.' What a man! how wonderful! how despicable! carrying into the administration of justice the petty vanity, personal jealousy and pique, and shuffling arts that would reflect ridicule and odium on a silly woman of fashion. He has smuggled his Privy Council Bill through the House of Lords without the slightest notice ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... correspondent from Williams College says, "We speak of a person whom we despise as being a nuts." This word is used in the Yorkshire dialect with the meaning of a "silly fellow." Mr. Halliwell, in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, remarks: "It is not applied to an idiot, but to one who has ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... present silly system of restricted production, with the majority of the population engaged in useless, unproductive, unnecessary work, and large numbers never doing any work at all, there is enough produced to go all round after a fashion. More than enough, for in consequence of what they call "Over-Production", ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... that you thought me so silly? I really liked that account of himself better than anything else he said. Everything else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke about himself so simply—with so little of the pretence that makes the vulgarity of shop-people, and with such tender respect ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... have a song made by one of these prisoners, wherein he bids them "come all, and dine upon him, and welcome, for they shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has served to feed and nourish him. These muscles," says he, "this flesh and these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little think that the substance of your ancestors' limbs is here yet; notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh:" in which song there is to be observed an invention that ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... deuce is that?' thought Val. 'What silly brutes lawyers are! Not for months! I know one thing: I'm not going to dine in!' And ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Turtlets fared wonderfully well that day; but the poor little Partridges went hungry, and had dreadful headaches, and went home peeping sadly to their silly mother. And Mrs. Partridge had no more sense than to be angry with Madame Tortoise, which I think was very unfair, don't you? For the latter had only done as she was bidden by her silly and ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... very honourable, and I thank you. Mon Dieu, they talk enough about me—you have heard them—do not deny it, Monsieur Marche. It is always, 'Lorraine did this, Lorraine did that, Lorraine is shocking, Lorraine is silly, Lorraine—' O ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... see why you ask such silly questions," retorted the Lefthandiron. "What do we sit on? Why, you might just as well ask a dog what he barks with, or a lion what he eats his breakfast with—and that would be as stupid as the Poker's poem ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... ha! the silly creature! Tell me who would lose the most? Nonsense, you are not so foolish as to play such ...
— The Jealousy of le Barbouille - (La Jalousie du Barbouille) • Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere
... the kings of the fallen dynasty had received support from the valley of the Tigris. Hosea continually reproached his countrymen with this vacillating policy, and pointed out the folly of it: "Ephraim is like a silly dove without understanding; they call unto Egypt, they go unto Assyria; when they shall go I will spread My net upon them," said ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... voice to say, "Oh, Ester, I don't see but what you will have to give it up," and Ester would have turned quickly and with curling lip, to that pan of potatoes, and have sharply forbidden any one to mention the subject to her again. Once more Sadie, dear, merry, silly ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... been for some time—silly, And lengthy correspondences are rife. We have, alas! to read them willy-nilly; They take a deal of pleasure out of life. To flee such evils here's an easy way— Let morning dailies idly rant or vapour, At the Lyceum go and see the play, The programme ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... of returning into the absolute nothingness whence he had crept—to commit a horrible crime against immortal society, and creep back again, with a heart full of love and remorse and self-abhorrence, into the black abyss. Therefore, why should he not let them tell their lies and utter their silly incantations? Aloof and unharmed he stood, safe on the shore, all ready to reach the rescuing hand to Helen, the moment she should turn her eyes to him, for the help she knew he had to give her. Certainly, for her sake, he would rather ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... neighborhood was to be married that morning, and all the little girls of John's acquaintance were dressed in white and had strewn flowers along the main street and the road beyond as far as the castle gates. He thought it a silly business and a sinful waste of posies; but in the church-yard he took his place in the throng with ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... daughter, and asked for the ring in order to set matters to rights again. But when he heard the fatal trick played by the false merchants he was ready to throw himself out of the window, cursing a thousand times the ignorance of his daughter, who, for the sake of a silly doll had turned him into a miserable scarecrow, and for a paltry thing of rags had brought him to rags himself, adding that he was resolved to go wandering about the world like a bad shilling, until he should ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... appeared in the streets of the town. He is worn out, shabby and half-witted. Almost always intoxicated, he appears now gloomy, with knitted brow, and with head bent down on his breast, now smiling the pitiful and melancholy smile of a silly fanatic. Sometimes he is turbulent, but that happens rarely. He lives with his foster-sister in a little wing in the yard. His acquaintances among the merchants and citizens often ridicule him. As Foma walks along the street, ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... a wild-haired youth in tarred boots and a pink shirt, exclaimed, uncovering his pale gums in a silly grin, that Ziemianitch had got his skinful early in the afternoon and had gone away with a bottle under each arm to keep it up ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to attacks, which, though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than malice—such is our unfeigned respect for G.D.—might, we think, much better have been omitted. Such was that silly joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely assured our friend—who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies—that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Such silly paradoxes provoked, of course, merely a smile of compassion; what alarmed the sensible, respectable "Philistine" was the method of cleansing the Augean stable recommended by these enthusiasts. Having discovered in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... simplicity gives even to the most forcible reasoning and the most brilliant wit an infantine air, generally delightful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little ludicrous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when they use it. It becomes Nicias incomparably, and renders all his silliness infinitely more silly. We may add, that the verses with which the Mandragola is interspersed, appear to us to be the most spirited and correct of all that Machiavelli has written in metre. He seems to have entertained the same opinion; for he has introduced ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... knee. "My own grandfather heard it and he told daddy and daddy told me that to hear her sing made a man think he was in Heaven. So when Mrs. Lenox gave me this beautiful bird for my very own, of course, I named her Jenny Lind. Mrs. Lenox called her Cleopatra. Wasn't that a silly name for a bird? Mrs. Lenox must have liked it or she wouldn't have given it to anything. Isn't it the luckiest thing that everyone hasn't the same likes? Just suppose everyone had been like my father and my mother and all the little girls were named Mary Rose? I think it's the most beautiful name ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
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