"Hand-to-mouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the night before, was to swim out to it and wait for him in the cabin. She knew, no one so well, that it was in the nature of a forlorn hope, but she was desperate. She loved him intransitively, to the utter extinction of the little light of modesty which her hand-to-mouth existence had left burning. She wanted love or death, and she was going to put up this last fight for love with all the ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... who have spare capital and can afford to lose a crop one year to make up for it in the next. The venture pays handsomely in fortunate seasons, but it is not the line of planting to be taken up by hand-to-mouth colonists who must seek immediate returns, nor as ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... things had been. He might tell her only what he wanted, only what would work upon her by the beauty of his appeal; and the result of the direct appeal of ANY beauty in him would be her helpless submission to his terms. All her temporary safety, her hand-to-mouth success, accordingly, was in his neither perceiving nor divining this, thanks to such means as she could take to prevent him; take, literally from hour to hour, during these days of more unbroken exposure. ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... would develop into in a few short years. Individual greed has so little time, to spare from the building of its own nest that politics in the United States, where the common good should be the aim of all legislation, has become a hand-to-mouth affair, and the morrow must shift for itself. Busy hunting for spoil, like our own incompetents of to-day, the legislators of the past cared nothing for the morrow; and, without knowing what they were doing really, ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... Or, "hand-to-mouth cultivators of philosophy," "roturiers." Cf. Plat. "Rep." 565 A: "A third class who work for themselves"; Thuc. i. 141: "The Peloponnesians cultivate their own soil, and they have no wealth either public or private." ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon |
