"Idiot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... canoe, safe but senseless. Some tremendous peals of thunder, a roaring wind, and a scathing lightning confirmed his indisposition; and had not the tempest subsided, Popanilla would probably have been an idiot for life. The dead and soothing calm which succeeded this tornado called him back again gradually to existence. He opened his eyes, and, scarcely daring to try a sense, immediately shut them; then hearing a deep sigh, he shrugged ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... his producing "Hamlet" in preference to Mr. Gilbert's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." Stevenson's "Macaire" may have all the literary quality that is claimed for it, although I personally think Stevenson was only making a delightful idiot of himself in it! Anyhow, it is frankly a burlesque, a skit, a satire on the real "Macaire." The Lyceum was not a burlesque house! Why should Henry ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... same conclusion. Mignon La Salle was also possessed of "the seeing eye." Mary was no longer her devoted satellite, although she still kept up an indifferent kind of friendship with the French girl. Mignon soon divined the cause of her lagging allegiance. "You are a little idiot, Mary Raymond, to follow Marjorie Dean about as you do. She doesn't care a snap for you. She may treat you nicely, but that's as far as it goes. She cares more for that miserable Stevens girl in a minute than she cares for you in a whole year. Why can't you let her alone and chum with ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... "As for this idiot here, I am going to give her to an ex-secret judge, at present a smuggler in the Pyrenees at Oleron. He can do what he pleases with her—make her a servant in his posada, for instance. I care not, so that my ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... Then she glanced at her wrist watch. "Will you see if my car is waiting!" she asked. "I had him take the nurse and baby up to the Park—and he ought to be back by now, I think." But as Dwight went to the telephone, she added excitedly to herself, "Now if that idiot of a chauffeur is as late as I told him to be, you and I will have quite a ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... This was the idiot Grisha. Whence he had come, or who were his parents, or what had induced him to choose the strange life which he led, no one ever knew. All that I myself knew was that from his fifteenth year upwards he had been ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... up, even though we treated her so shabbily. That's why I just said I hoped that the girls would appreciate Grace. I'd hate to think that some stupid ill-natured freshman, it's more likely to be a freshman than any one else, would behave like an idiot and spoil her first year at Harlowe House." There was an expression of anxious ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... struck in haste, and they travelled down the Rhine. When their boat was detained at Marsluys, all three sat writing in the cabin—Shelley his novel, Mary a story called 'Hate', and Claire a story called 'The Idiot'—until they were tossed across to England, and reached London after borrowing passage-money ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... record its matter or style. But history does record, that some years afterwards the Duke paid a hundred guineas to get it back again,—and that, on getting it, he instantly burned it, exclaiming, that, when he wrote it, he must have been the greatest idiot on the face of the earth. Doubtless, if we had seen that letter, we should have heartily coincided in the sentiment of the hero. He was an idiot when he wrote it, but he did not think that he was one. I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... window-pane that he might see more clearly. 'Ay, that is he by the driving! So he squanders money along the king's highway, the triple idiot! gorging every man he meets with gold for the pleasure of arriving—where? Ah, yes, where but a debtor's jail, if ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it follows that the death penalty as a punishment even for the worst crimes is morally untenable; for either the culprit is really irredeemable, that is to say, he is an irresponsible moral idiot, in which case an asylum for the insane is the proper place for him; or he is not irredeemable, in which case the chance of reformation should not be taken from him by cutting off his life. The death penalty is the last lingering ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... idiot minds. The coursing of cosmic-ray particles. The wrenching of Earth's magnetic and gravitational fields. Old and sluggish memories were renewed, memories meant to be buried for ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... Quarles, "to my mind, Judge, there ain't no manner of doubt but whut prosperity has went to his head and turned it. He acted to me like a plum' distracted idiot. A grown man with forty thousand pounds of solid money settin' on the side of a gutter eatin' jimcracks with a passel of dirty little boys! Kin you figure it out any other way, Judge—except that ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... 'un," said Paul. "We hadn't been going a fortnight before he asked me to accept half salary, swearing he would make it up, with a rise, as soon as business got better. Like an idiot, I consented." ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... listless, aimless as the green Idiot fishes of my aquarium, Who loiter down their dim tunnels and come And look at me and ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... and I know that I am rather good-looking,' she once said to Nina, 'and I am glad, for, as a rule, people like pretty things better than ugly ones, but I am not an idiot to think that looks are everything, and I don't believe I am very vain. I used to be though, when a child, but Harold gave me so many lectures upon vanity that I should not do credit to his teachings were I now to be proud of what ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... say, the only explanation of a godless life, unless the man is an idiot, is that there lie beneath it, as formative principles and unspoken assumptions, guiding and shaping it, one or both of these two thoughts: either 'There is no God,' or 'He does not care what I do, and I am safe to go on for evermore in the present fashion.' It might seem as if a man ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... thought of the threat of more kicking, in the room afterwards, his heart went hot and faint, and he panted, remembering the one that had come. He had been forced to say, "For my girl." He was much too done even to want to cry. His mouth hung slightly open, like an idiot's. He felt vacant, and wasted. So, he wandered at his work, painfully, and very slowly and clumsily, fumbling blindly with the brushes, and finding it difficult, when he sat down, to summon the energy to move again. His limbs, his jaw, were slack ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... writer only,[*] not the tenderness of the idiot who will always be deceived, not the softness towards other people's troubles which cause all my misfortunes to come from my holding out my hand to weak people who are falling into disaster. In 1827 I help a working ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... but—well, then the Sabbath-day she has all along respected; and I am almost sure that our regular halts on that day, although ordered by Pedro, were suggested by Manuela. Of course, praying and Sabbath-keeping may be done by hypocrites, and for a bad end; but who, save a consummately blind idiot, would charge that girl with hypocrisy? Besides, what could she gain by it all? Pshaw! the idea is ridiculous. Of course there are many more good qualities which I might enumerate, but these are the most important ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the brain the more easily influenced. She couldn't have so impressed an idiot, or an illiterate, unreceptive man. Let me tell you how a ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... infernal jackass. The inscription on the gate of hell ran through his mind. He thought he would make his life— his desolate, broken life—a perpetual exile, like Dante's. At the same time he ground his teeth, and muttered: "Oh, what a fool I am! Oh, idiot! beast! Oh! oh!" The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took out his cigarette case. The Italians looked at him; he gave all the cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself. He determined to spend ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... outgrows. His crowning fact is that dynamite will loosen stumps and break rock. Therefore, all that is not dynamite is not proper man-stuff. Woman, to this sort, is something between "an angel and an idiot." She must be guarded from herself in all that has to do with thought and performance. As panderer and caterer, she emphatically belongs. Young men grasp this. If they reach middle age with it, only an angel ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... them then, but Albert came back after his three years' service, with two of his front teeth gone, and we all know that Jeno now is little better than an idiot. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... hall, but she turned and spoke through the doorway. "I've only asked you not to be an idiot. I merely beg, for all our sakes, that if something precious is flung down at your feet you'll have the common sense to stoop and pick ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... desperately flings himself down and lets death bury him, that is the one picture suggested by the text. The other is of that same wilderness, but across it a mighty king has flung up a broad, lofty embankment, a highway raised above the sands, cutting across them so conspicuously that even an idiot could not help seeing it, so high above the land around that the lion's spring falls far beneath it, and the supple tiger skulks baffled at its base. It is like one of those roads which the terrible energy of conquering ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... finest looking Indian women I have ever met,—tall, straight, lithe and dignified. But, crawling about on the floor on all fours, was the most piteous travesty of the human form I have ever seen. It was an idiot boy, sixteen years of age. He had neither the comeliness of a beast nor the intellect of a man. His name was Hootz-too (Bear Heart), and indeed all his motions were those of a bear rather than of a human being. Crossing ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... their ears and looked at me. Penny let his jaw drop in amazement and, leaving his mouth open, maintained an expression like that of the village idiot. I stared, flabbergasted, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... the foremost of all bowmen! Dhritarashtra's son (Duryodhana) listened not to the words repeatedly spoken by me and Vidura and Drona and Rama and Janardana and also by Sanjaya. Reft of his senses, like unto an idiot, Duryodhana placed no reliance on those utterances. Past all instructions, he will certainly have to lie down for ever, overwhelmed by the might of Bhima!'—Hearing these words of his, the Kuru king Duryodhana became of cheerless heart. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... December, the leaders of the Right used freely to say of Louis Bonaparte: "He is an idiot." They were mistaken. To be sure that brain of his is awry, and has gaps in it, but one can discern here and there thoughts consecutive and concatenate. It is a book whence pages have been torn. Louis Napoleon has a fixed idea; ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... not the only possible reason for this would be intended outrage, murder, and suicide; but though Valorbe is a robustious kind of idiot, he does not seem to have made up such mind as he ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... one reason Donald was such a favorite with his classmates. There was not a fellow in the school who had more friends. To be sure they called him "slow coach", "old tortoise", "fatty", and bestowed upon him many another gibing epithet, frankly telling him to his face that he was a big idiot. Nevertheless they did not conceal from him that he was the sort of idiot ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... of bag of it. It was rather a good idea to keep the idiot scared and quiet, and a devilish hard thing to get out of—head away from the string. My dear Kemp, it's no good your sitting glaring as though I was a murderer. It had to be done. He had his revolver. If once he saw me he would ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... wound, but the burning of things is in itself neither good nor bad. A large number of houses deserve to be burnt, most modern furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and books—one might go on for some time with the list. If our community was collectively anything more than a feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, for example, and build sane and beautiful cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of rotten private property. I have failed in presenting Mr. Polly altogether if I have ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... I shouldn't wonder if mental complications followed. I have seen cases like that at the Bicetre, where operations on an alcoholic patient produced paresis. The man got well," he added harshly, as if kicking aside some dull formula; "but he was a hopeless idiot." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... qualities, although they are born of the same parents at the same time and brought up under similar conditions and environments? How can heredity explain such cases? Suppose a man has five children; one is honest and saintly, another is an idiot, the third becomes a murderer, the fourth a genius or prodigy, and the fifth a cripple and diseased. Who made these dissimilarities? They cannot be accidents. There is no such thing as an accident. ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... of the wider kind. Men debated whether she had a soul, made cynical proverbs about her, called her the "weaker vessel," and debarred her from political and economic equality, classing her up to this very moment in rights with the idiot, the imbecile, and the criminal. Worse than this, they gave her a spurious homage, created a lop-sided chivalry, and caused her to accept as her ideal goal of womanhood the achievement of beauty and the entrance into wifehood. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... not, though thou wert dead to-morrow. But tell me this, why hidest thou, *with sorrow,* *sorrow on thee!* The keyes of thy chest away from me? It is my good* as well as thine, pardie. *property What, think'st to make an idiot of our dame? Now, by that lord that called is Saint Jame, Thou shalt not both, although that thou wert wood,* *furious Be master of my body, and my good,* *property The one thou shalt forego, maugre* thine eyen. *in spite of What helpeth ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... kill," repeated Dr. Silence. Then, after another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued: "And if the Double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that physical body would wake an imbecile—an idiot—or perhaps never ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... idiot," Brinnaria hurled at her, "you never could stand a flogging, you'd die of it most likely. To a certainty you'd be ill, and have to be sent off to be nursed and kept away for a month or more to recover. I won't have Causidiena worried with any such performances. And as sure as the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... of order to be here! I won't put up with much more of it, and so I'll tell him. I shall dress as I like, and do as I like, even if I haven't got a handle to my name. Sir Richard, indeed!— a pattern for me to follow! Next time the fat old idiot say's that to me, I'll throw the books ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... been found, with the boy whom I had first seen, wandering in the garden. He was apprehended for a thief, brought into the house, and not until Dr. Mayhew had been summoned, had it been suspected that the poor creature was an idiot. Commiseration then took the place of anger quickly, and all was anxiety and desire to know whence he had come, who he might be, and what his business was. He could not speak for himself, and the answers of the boy had been unsatisfactory ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... having pitched her tent in their hunting-grounds; several of his friends were near neighbours. He had a dim but horrid recollection of having been on that occasion unlike himself, ill at ease, burning in the face, talking with idiot loquacity of his adventures in the Baltic provinces, and finding from time to time that he was addressing himself exclusively to Mrs Wallace. The other lady, when he joined them, had completely lost the ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... shoulders riz, and exclaimed:—"Ah! Is it possible, this! That these disdaineous females and this ferocious old woman are placed here by the administration, not only to empoison the voyagers, but to affront them! Great Heaven! How arrives it? The English people. Or is he then a slave? Or idiot?" Another time a merry, wide-awake American gent had tried the sawdust and spit it out, and had tried the Sherry and spit that out, and had tried in vain to sustain exhausted natur' upon Butter-Scotch, and had been rather extra Bandolined and Line-surveyed through, when as the bell was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... "ANOTHER IDIOT" wishes to know if there is such an appointment in the gift of the Crown as the office of "Court Sweep." Why, certainly; and, on State occasions, he wears the Court Soot, and his broom is always waiting for him at the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... 16 he writes: 'I sat from two till five staring at my picture like an idiot, my brain pressed down by anxiety, and the anxious looks of my dear Mary and the children.... Dearest Mary, with a woman's passion, wishes me at once to stop payment, and close the whole thing. I ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... contempt. You certainly admire and emulate to a certain extent the fashionable Society women of England, but the ordinary English girl you treat with indifference, and speak of with contumely. You look upon her as a badly-dressed idiot. That may strike your ears as a sweeping assertion, but my ears have tingled over and over again by hearing that very sentiment coming from your own pretty mouths. Now, as we are alone, let me say a word or two on that point. You ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... toward the lady. I may say that I love her truly and deeply. But there is something in the current that runs through my veins that cries out against any form of the calculable. I do not know what I want; but I know that I want it. I'm talking like an idiot, I suppose, but I'm sure of ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Some idiot has invented a "cat teaser" to put on fences to keep cats from sitting there and singing. It consists of a three-cornered piece of tin, nailed on the top of the fence. We hope none of our friends will invest in the patent, for statistics ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... at least, lay in his sense of chivalry, aware that he knew her lurking dread of being flung on the beach, by age. Only ten minutes ago he had uttered a tirade before the cage of a monkey which seemed unhappy. And now she had roused that dangerous side of him in favour of Noel. What an idiot she had been! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... travelling to Africa and hunting lions scared him stiff and when they went into the house, and while the serenade of honour was still going on outside, he made the most frightful scene with Tartarin-Quixote, calling him a crazy dreamer, a rash triple idiot and detailing one by one the catastrophes which would await him on such an expedition. Shipwreck, fever, dysentery, plague, elephantiasis and so on... it was useless for Tartarin-Quixote to swear that he would be careful, that he would ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... idiot, let go!" hissed Escombe through his clenched teeth, as he braced his feet against a stanchion and flung himself back, clinging with both hands to Arima's belt, while that individual vainly strove to hold the now frantically struggling reptile—"let go, man, if you don't want to be dragged ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... himself of the secret before making off? At first I saw no room to doubt it. But your young friend's account of himself sent me to Falmouth, and at Falmouth I began to have my doubts. My earliest inquiries there were addressed to the pedagogue—the Reverend Something-or-other Stimcoe—a drunken idiot, who yielded no information at all; and to his wife, a lady who persisted in regarding me as sent from heaven for no other purpose than to discharge her small debts. From her, again, I learned nothing. But from a talk with one of her pupils—his name was Bates, if I ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... one who had done so much to promote the happiness of some little friends I had at home would be valued beyond measure; that I knew at least half a dozen youngsters who were as well acquainted with the "Little Match Girl," and the "Ugly Duck," and the "Poor Idiot Boy," as he was himself, and his name was as familiar in California as it was in Denmark. At this he grasped both my hands, and looking straight in my face with a kind of ecstatic expression, said, "Oh, is it possible? Do they really read my books in California? so far away! Oh! ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... do, despite all quaint peculiarities of the attire, the customs, or the opinions of their respective ages, with which they were imbued. The spirit of truth and poetry redeems, ennobles, hallows, every external form in which it may be lodged. We may "pshaw" and "pooh" at Harry Gill and the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of sentiment, the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and unvarying purity, which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth, and the exquisite melody of his lyrical poems, must ever continue to attract and purify the mind. The very ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... to the appearance of Dodeth's own race. There could be no question of the genetic linkage between the two species, but, in spite of the physical similarities, their actions were controlled almost entirely by instinct instead of reason. They were like some sort of idiot parody of ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... watches the spiral of smoke. It wavers and unwinds. A finger writing; an idiot flower. Then it opens up into a large smoke eye. Smoke eyes drift casually away. An odor crawls into the air. Sing Lee's eyes close gently and his thin body moves as ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... Jeff declared, indignantly, "to walk in on people like this, without a word of warning! Nobody but an idiot would expect people just coming home from their honeymoon to want to find their house filled up ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... unhappy boy was standing gave way—a loud scream rent the air, echoing through the cliffs—and in another instant all that remained of him was a lifeless, mangled corpse. The poor fellow's story is soon told. He was an idiot, and having wandered from his mother's side, had reached the fatal spot, no one knew how, and thus met a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... at first that she could not "parade around that church and stand up there before the minister. I'd feel like a reg'lar idiot, Louis." ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... "Seemly, idiot?" she stormed at him. "I swear, as I've a soul to be saved, that in spite of all this, I know that man to be a traitor and a Jacobite—that it was the letter from the king he sought, whatever he may pretend ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... latter, and the proceeds of the book were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the spring of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was typically Wordsworthian, ranging from such simple ballads of humble incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy" to the magnificent blank verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a brief poem called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The Rime of the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... average idiot, aren't you?" said I. "Oh, yes; I've been squatting in the wet by that infernal river, too. You ought to get three months, ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... also seems to make Mark out an absolute idiot. Just suppose for a moment that, for urgent reasons which neither of you know anything about, he had wished to get rid of his brother. Would he have done it like that? Just killed him and then run away? Why, that's practically suicide—suicide ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... the dickens did old Wharton marry her? He's an old ass, and he's getting just what he might have expected. She's twenty-five and beautiful; he's seventy and a sight. I've a notion to chuck the whole affair and go back to the simple but virtuous Tenderloin. It's not my sort, that's all, and I was an idiot for mixing in it. The firm served me a shabby trick when it sent me out to work up this case for Wharton. It's a regular Peeping Tom Job, ...
— The Purple Parasol • George Barr McCutcheon
... where's the man that's worthy of their bed? If no disease reduce her pride before, Lavinia will be ravish'd at threescore. Then she submits to venture in the dark; And nothing now is wanting—but her spark. Lucia thinks happiness consists in state; She weds an idiot, but she eats in plate. The goods of fortune, which her soul possess, Are but the ground of unmade happiness; The rude material: wisdom add to this, Wisdom, the sole artificer of bliss; She from herself, if so compell'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... another, demanded her husband Collati'nus, and Spu'rius, her father, to come to her; an indelible disgrace having befallen the family. 16. They instantly obeyed the summons, bringing with them Valerius, a kinsman of her father, and Junius Bru'tus, a reputed idiot, whose father Tarquin had murdered, and who had accidentally met the messenger by the way. 17. Their arrival only served to increase Lucre'tia's poignant anguish; they found her in a state of the deepest desperation, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... rumours passed from lip to lip, growing in sensation and absurdity as they went. A report, telegraphed by an anonymous idiot from Liverpool, to the effect that six air-ships had appeared over the Mersey, and demanded a ransom of L10,000,000 from the town, was eagerly seized on by the cheaper evening papers, which rushed out edition after edition on the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... swim by wriggling his feet in the water as though they were a tail. The hardships, the privations, the terrors, and for the past few weeks the lack of proper nourishment had reduced Erich Obergatz to little more than a gibbering idiot. ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... explained to Hyacinthe, pride of knowledge making him quite amiable, "a most precious wood that grows in warm countries, thou great goblin. Smell it, idiot. It is sweeter than cedar. It is to make a cabinet for the old Madame ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... usual, it's all my fault. When we moved the other day, we left our oil behind in the stable, and I knew the wagon needed oiling when I got down to Kenniston's. I was just going to do it when you drove up, and then, like an idiot, I forgot it." ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... young idiot!" I said. "And I should advise you not to go gassing about like this, round the decks. Take my tip, and turn-in and get a sleep. You're talking dotty. Tomorrow you'll perhaps feel what an unholy ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... Abou's son. Here, in England, you would cruelly designate him as something between a madman and an idiot, but the Easterns look not thus upon those who possess not their ordinary faculties. Through Helfa, Abou had seen many wonderful things, and now he was ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... she perceived that the purpose of morning light was to pick out surfaces of mahogany and orange velvet and glass, and that only an idiot would ever leave this place and go about begging dirty garage men to fill her car ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... prattle and thy mincing gait. All thy false mimic fooleries I hate; For thou art Folly's counterfeit, and she Who is right foolish hath the better plea; Nature's true Idiot I ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... very stove round which they were gathered, stood one with a haggard eye and vacant gaze, and at his feet clung two half-naked infants; a quarter of an hour before he was a hale man, a husband, with five children; now, he was an idiot and a widower, with two. No tear dimmed his eye, no trace of grief was to be read in his countenance; though the two pledges of the love of one now no more hung helplessly round his legs, he heeded them not; they sought a father's smile—they ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... The Friend, the custom amongst German children of making presents to their parents on Christmas Eve, (a custom which he unaccountably supposes to be peculiar to Ratzeburg,) represents the mother as 'weeping aloud for joy'—the old idiot of a father with 'tears running down his face,' &c. &c., and all for what? For a snuff-box, a pencil-case, or some article of jewellery. Now, we English agree with Kant on such maudlin display of stage sentimentality, and are prone to suspect that papa's tears ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... I came to quarter myself on Madame Barbiere and her idiot son, and how I ultimately learned from the lips of the latter the strange story of his own immediate fall from reason and the dear ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... what signifies the life of man? For ninety-nine and a half per cent. of every man's life is made up of these light nothings; and unless there is potential greatness in them, and they are of importance, then life is all 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' Small things make life; and if are small, then it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the world is that old idiot comin' here for? To talk about the minister, I s'pose. How on earth did Laviny ever come to let ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... at the girl in the middle row. What beautiful hair she had! What an idiot she was to give up four years of her life to this round of work and play and pretence of living! Oh, to go back to Germany—to see Bertha and her mother again, and hear the father's 'cello! Hermann had ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... An idiot of a woman has written to me to get her a place as governess in an 'European or Arabian family in the neighbourhood of Thebes!' Considering she has been six years in Egypt as she says, she must be well fitted to teach. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... the back of your hand," Honoria replied, warming to her subject. "They hardly repaid felling for firewood. It made me wretched. Some idiot threw down a match, I suppose. There had been nearly a month's drought, and the whole place was like so much tinder. There was an easterly breeze too. You can imagine the blaze! We hadn't the faintest chance. Poor, old Iles lost his head completely, and sat down with his feet ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... said Maitland savagely, then checking his rage, "but I ought to thank you for getting me out of the grip of that frantic idiot. What is this ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... concentrated significant gaze of the crew. Five pairs of eyes speaking as one, all saying "idiot" plainly, the boy's eyes conveying an expression too ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... although they were the only people on the pier, from force of habit he dropped his voice. "The mamaloi has more power than the Church." He straightened and looked out toward the ship. "Here's her idiot with your trunk. My office is the first house on the left after you leave the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... evaded him as adroitly as she before had evaded her mistress. It was so ludicrous to see her duck down behind her mistress and make use of her as a bulwark, that the uncouth man roared with laughter. "You needn't fear, you idiot," he said good-naturedly. "I'm not going to hit you. I know very well that you're a little devil, but I don't for a moment think you'll put any dirt into ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... idiot!' I yells to Struthers as I jammed the youngster back into the cabin. All of a sudden the gas went out of him and he broke, hanging to me like ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... long. He thought I was the real goods, liked me because I was not stupid, and liked me a bit, too, I think, for myself. Of course I had not the slightest intention of joining him in a life of sordid, petty crime; but I'd have been an idiot to throw away all the good things his friendship made possible. When one is on the hot lava of hell, he cannot pick and choose his path, and so it was with me in the Erie County Pen. I had to stay in with the "push," or do hard labor on bread and water; and to stay ...
— The Road • Jack London
... "Among the idiot pranks of Wealth's abuse, None seem so monstrous, none have less excuse, Than those which throw an heritage away Upon the lawless chance of desperate play; Nor is there among knaves a wretch more base Than he who steals ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Right, you unplumbable old idiot! Do you think you can come into this cave and hide anything from me under that transparent face of yours? The minute you came in and hemmed and hawed, and said as you had nothing to do you guessed you'd have a go with the firesticks—I knew. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... let it stay there. The agony was great, and the language that poured from the patient was of an extremely lurid character. But he had wonderful grit, and I had to laugh when he began abusing himself for being such an idiot. He then allowed a native woman to cover the entire hand with a huge poultice, made of the beaten-up pulp of wild oranges—a splendid antiseptic. But it was a week before he could use his hand again, and his temper was something abominable. However, we managed ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life 's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... nonsense! and you give yourself away just a few lines above, when you assert that you are too proud to confer a favour on me, and read Greek Testament with me. What a funny chap you are! Can't you see, you idiot, what a pleasure you give me? We shall have to compromise, and I'll have to make some concession to your pride. Neither —— nor I know much about your section, but we could help you in your first part papers. Of course, he could do it miles better than I can; but, all the same, ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... tres occupee." After a great deal of this sort of thing, Rust was spurred up to suggest that he also was weary, and that nothing could be more delightful than to sit beside Madame upon those sands and to bewail with her the woes of their common country. The idiot did not reflect that a woman of Madame's taste in dress does not usually mess up her Paris frocks with nasty sea sand. Madame sighed. It was a charming picture, but, alas, quite impossible. Rust still further spurred by ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... indeed, my child, How I do love thee. 'Tis a good young man, And wealthy—no fool, like his brother. Fool, Said I?—a madman, ape, dolt, idiot, ass, An honourable ass to give the land His weak sire left him, to our Basil—Ha! He'll give none back, I think !—no! no! Come, girl! Wouldst thou be foolish, too? I would not marry For money only, understand—no! ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... which made her morning costume more charming than that of the evening, and never did she look so well as when arrayed for a walk. On this occasion she had certainly done her best. But he, poor blind idiot, saw nothing of this. The white gauzy fabric which had covered Isabel's satin petticoat on the previous evening still filled his eyes. Those perfect boots, the little glimpses of party-coloured stockings above them, the looped-up skirt, ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... such a harmless idiot that we laughed with him. But we were silenced at once by a shout from above us, and a command to "Stop that noise." I looked up and saw a man in semi-uniform and wearing an officer's sash and sword stepping from one rock to another ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... Of lavish fancy paints each flattering scene Where beauty seems to dwell, nor once inquire Where is the sanction of eternal truth, Or where the seal of undeceitful good, To save your search from folly! wanting these, Lo! beauty withers in your void embrace, And with the glittering of an idiot's toy Did fancy mock ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... ridiculous that I should be so dull and stupid. She says she fears we are 'fated to misunderstand each other.' I defy such a blind stupid fate. I used to have some brains and tact before I came to this place, and I scarcely think I've become an idiot. I am determined to win that girl's friendship, and I intend to follow her career and watch the rare and beautiful development of her character. That one hour in the garden yesterday taught me what an inspiration her exquisite ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... for a four-year-old child! A burden to the world, a burden to himself, to live on for years after the mind is dead! To be an idiot for ever! It would be good for him if he could be made ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... "You idiot!" He gripped my shoulders. His eyes were gleaming, his face haggard, but his pale lips twitched with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... coming down to see what was the matter. I hear from the Brigade that some doddering idiot has cut our wire. Who in ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... "Dense little idiot!" sighs Giddy. "She cannot understand poor Carol's passion, and yet he kissed her in the hansom. It was like Eleanor to tell me. She always gives herself away. I pity those refreshingly young people who can never keep anything to themselves." Giddy waves up to the ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... at all for it, and the more wholly unreasonable, the better still; that the motive should lie in the feeling itself and not in the object of it—and that the affection which could (if it could) throw itself out on an idiot with a goitre would be more admirable than Abelard's. Whereupon everybody laughed, and someone thought it affected of me and no true opinion, and others said plainly that it was immoral, and somebody else hoped, in a sarcasm, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... your own. Be as much so as you please; I have always respected your right. Only when I have kept myself in durance on purpose to leave you an open field, don't, by way of thanking me, come and call me an idiot." ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... demanded Beulah incisively. "He's tied to the bedpost and I have my gun. I can shoot as straight as you can. What harm can he do me in five minutes? Don't be an idiot, Dan." ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... Koritza, saying that they compelled people to complain to the foreign consuls, the recruiting officer replied: 'We shall imprison every blessed man who steps over the threshold of a consulate. You mean to say you will go to that big idiot the British consul. That fool of a consul must think himself very lucky for England is a friendly power, otherwise we would have killed him!'" He had, in fact, reported their conduct, and they seem to have been aware of this. The letter continues: ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... ye sittin' there for, ye old idiot?" said he savagely. "I do b'lieve ye've larned to sleep on the donkey. Ha! there's two of ye together, an' the wooden one's the best. Wouldn't I just like to be yer leftenant, my boy? an' I'd come to know why you don't go on your beat. Why, ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... long breath, and determined to put the subject out of her mind until after dinner, so that Sir Elmer Cartwright need not think her a complete idiot. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson |
