gossip

There's a kind of radar that you get, after years of being talked about and made fun of by other people. You can almost smell it when it's about to happen, can recognize instantly the sound of a hushed voice, lowered just enough to make whatever is said okay. I had only been in Colby for a few weeks. But I had not forgotten.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can__ get into it do that.

Gossip is never fatal until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

No one gossips about other people__ secret virtues.

It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.

Nobody can buy a hat without gossiping.

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip

I never gossip. I observe. And then relay my observations to practically everyone.

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.

It would have been funny if I had been an observer and not a participant, an idea that gave me a disconcerting insight into gossip. As I walked beside the silent Tamara, I realized that despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.

Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

Don't pretend like you know me 'cause you shook some neighborhood tree and got a li'l rotten fruit.

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".

Gossip needs no carriage.

I heard the little bird say so.

Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.