"Wishy-washy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Did you, in America, ever write stories for children?" What a quaking of knees there will be! For there will stand the victims of this sort of literature, who began in their tender years to enfeeble their minds with the wishy-washy flood of commonplace prepared for them by dull writers and commercial publishers, and continued on in those so-called domestic stories (as if domestic meant idiotic) until their minds were diluted to that degree that they could ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and because she doesn't want the man to talk. Now, if you talked to-night, I don't know what you might not say. You'd probably be enormously sentimental, and I hate sentimental people. I do, really. Sentiment is wishy-washy, isn't it? I always associate it with comedians on the stage. Look over there. Do you see that girl in the big droopy hat and the thin hands? And the boy—one must say 'boy,' I suppose? He's a little fat and slightly bald, and he's got three pips up, and has had them ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... open to the first promising flirtation. They see elegantly-dressed and diamonded ladies, and their imagination is fed from the fountains of vulgar literature until they dream that they, too, are destined to be won by some splendid cavalier of fabulous wealth. Learning from the wishy-washy literature that their face is their fortune, and so, reading what happened to others, and how perfectly lovely and romantic it all was, they are ready for the wiles of the first gay deceiver. Waiting in vain for their god-like ideal, they are finally ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... assure you, Henrietta, you would find it very little exciting to be shut up in this room with half a teaspoonful of wishy-washy pudding twice a day, and all just to fill Philip Carey's pockets! Now, there was old Clarke at Rocksand, he had some feeling for one, poor old fellow; but this man, not the slightest compunction has he; and I am ready to kick him out of the room when I hear that silky voice of his trying to be ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tongue, he would shut him up with the words, "Oh, stuff!" But once he laughed sarcastically and burst, with all the Monty enthusiasm and emphasis, into a diatribe against Broad Churchmanship, the ignorance of laymen, the timidity of the clergy, wishy-washy sermons—in short, the criminal lack of dogmatic teaching. Not seeing any connexion between dogmatic teaching and a gramophone, Doe looked so amazed that ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... really are? There! you see the great painter here present. Yes; I mean the young gentleman in front of you. Well, the whole trick consists in pilfering his originality, and dishing it up with the wishy-washy sauce of the School of Arts! Quite so! you select a modern subject, and you paint in the clear bright style, only you adhere to correctly commonplace drawing, to all the habitual pleasing style of composition—in short, to the formula which is taught over ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola |
