Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such unedifying conversation as about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, carriages, villages, towns and cities, countries, women, heroes, street- and well-gossip, talk of the departed, desultory chat, speculations about land and sea, talk about being and non-being, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such conversation.
A woman and a mouse, they carry a tale wherever they go.
Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, novelists who had a strong interest in gossip and made good use of it in their fiction, understood both gossip's attractions and its literary value. So, too, did writers whom one doesn't think of as primarily social novelists. Gossip plays a strong hand in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as it does in the novels of Balzac, Dickens, and Flaubert.
He's my friend who speaks well of me behind my back.
To create an unfavourable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said.
What kind of story am I going to give them next? Because that's what we are to other people, boy, we are their gossip. That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip. And so I could be the story of the man who rode high and fell hard, and had his spirit broken and crawled off into a hole like a dog, to die as soon as he could manage it. Or I could be the story of a man who rode high and fell hard, and then got up defiant, and walked away in a new direction.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Whoever keeps an open earThe trumpet of contention.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
Tell tales out of school.
He's gone, and who knows how may he reportThy words by adding fuel to the flame?
He that repeateth a matter separateth very friends.
This act is as an ancient tale new told;Being urged at a time unseasonable.
Foul whisperings are abroad.
If my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.
I heard the little bird say so.
Tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not.