Wheedle Quotes

“The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one ... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules ... I feel sick.”

— John Niven

“I've noticed there are overnight camping trips that are reenactments of that arrival. In the promotional photos advertising the trip, entire families wear costumes and indeed pull a handcart over the granite rocks and creek beds of the nearby canyons and back country. The kids learns how very little actually can be brought in one of these carts
no television, for instance
and the parents learn a lot more than they bargain for, I expect; how shallow our own civilizing is, and the iron grip you have to keep on the instinct to wheedle and blame and shove, and how tender our feet will always be.”

— Liz Stephens

“I don't trick." he replied, his voice huffy. "I wheedle and cajole. Occasionally I manipulate, but I'm always very sneaky about i, so you wouldn't know it was happening until it was far too late.”

— Cameron Dokey

“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles
kingons, or possibly queons
that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.”

— Terry Pratchett

“The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc's greatest philosopher* who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.”

— Terry Pratchett

“He has some explaining to do, but right now I want to revel in the feel of his comforting, protective arms around me. And in that moment it occurs to me; any explanations on his part have to come from him. I can't force him-he's got to want to tell me. I won't be cast as the nagging wife, constantly trying to wheedle information out of her husband. It's just exhausting. I know he loves me. I know he loves me more than he's ever loved anyone, and for now, that's enough. The realization is liberating. I stop crying and step back.”

— E.L. James

“Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.”

— Stephen Fry

“I started writing sketches with Dennis Kelly, who I ended up writing 'Pulling' with. We entered a BBC competition and did quite well, then started writing bits for other people's shows. You wheedle your way in, write pilots and eventually you end up writing a sitcom.”

— Sharon Horgan

“Do not let a flattering woman coax and wheedle you and deceive you; she is after your barn.”

— Hesiod

“Dorcas, you already reek like a Marseilles cat house; don't wheedle Mike for more stinkum.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

“They climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends' goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?”

— Walter Murch

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion ... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”

— Aldous Huxley

“I can try to wheedle information out of people," Holly offered. "For which I'll need a lower-cut top.”

— Sarah Rees Brennan

“This I said in the Irish way, about which there is allowed to be something very engaging. It's a remarkable thing, and a testimony to the love with which our nation is regarded, that this address scarce ever fails in a handsome fellow. I cannot tell how often I have seen a private soldier escape the horse, or a beggar wheedle out a good alms, by a touch of the brogue.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

“A director's job is to make something happen and it doesn't happen by itself. So you wheedle, you cajole, you flatter people, you tell them what needs to be done. And if you don't bring a passion and an intensity to it, you shouldn't be doing it.”

— James Cameron

“To wheedle and coax is safer than to command.”

— Anne Bronte

“If I can wheedle
A knife or a needle,
Why not a Silver Churn?”

— W.S. Gilbert

“Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

“A man cannot wheedle nor overawe his Genius. It requires to be conciliated by nobler conduct than the world demands or can appreciate.”

— Henry David Thoreau