"Grubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Adulated Clergyman has probably been a mean and grubby schoolboy, with a wretched but irresistible inclination to sneak, and to defend himself for so doing on principle. It is of course wrong to break rules at school, authority must be respected, masters must be obeyed, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... gate into the garden, the American soldier, the children and I together. The little girl, with that wistful confidence that all French children show for men in khaki, slipped her grubby little paw into my hand. I expect Joan was often ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... with the greatest intellectual enthusiasm, "baby beets folds up jest that way," and he illustrated after Sam, with his grubby little paddies, "same as chickens ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... wedding of six years back, when she had deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the picture. Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar. An unusual situation was abhorrent to him. That he should marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to the conventional. If she had ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... do, or Goggles, or Grubby, or Nigger, or Toad. I want to have some name, else I shan't be able to talk to him so well. I wish mother had helped me; it's very differcult. I can't seem to think of a name quite ugly enough. I expect p'raps ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... instructions to the chief of them. When he believed himself alone with Chalmers a touch on the arm reminded him that the messenger, who had followed the cortege upstairs, was still lingering on the threshold of the bedroom. With his grubby hand he held out the telegram he had brought, pointing to the name ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... happens, unfortunately, to be neither a dairy-maid nor a warming-pan," said Garth. "My appointment is with a very grubby small boy, whose rural beauties consist in a shock of red hair and a whole ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... no further advances to him, though, as I recalled how I hammered his body and head, and how he must have been pricked by falling into the gooseberry bush, I felt sorry, and if he had offered to shake hands I should have forgotten how grubby his always were, and held out ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... hall Lady Kitson held out a delicate white hand, with sparkling rings on her fingers, and took Kitty's grubby one in hers. Some persons might not have noticed the roughness and stains and marks made by the reins, but Kitty knew that Lady Kitson did. Her keen eyes missed nothing, and probably before very long she would be retailing to Dr. Trenire all his daughter's shortcomings, and the crying necessity ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... Old Mother Nature. "Now I am going to tell you of one of my little plowmen who also lives in the Far West but prefers the great plains to the high mountains, though he is sometimes found in the latter. He is Grubby the Gopher, a member of the same order the rest of you belong to, but of a family quite his own. He is properly called the Pocket Gopher, and way down in the Southeast, where he is also found, he is called a Salamander, though what for ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... in the A.S.C officer's kind but musty little chilly second-class carriage, it is somewhat of a change. And I hadn't had my clothes off for three days and two nights. This billet is only for one night; to-morrow I expect I shall be in some grubby little room near by. It has taken the Town Commandant, the O.C. of No.— F.A., a French interpreter, and an R.H.A. officer and several N.C.O.'s and orderlies, to find me a billet—the town is already packed tight, and they have to continue the ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... his gear. He never went down to the harbour for work like the other fishermen and never worked on the land. Humming away and talking to himself he fiddled about in his shed, around his boat-house or his croft, his hands all grubby with tar and grease. If addressed, he was abrupt and curt in his answers, sometimes even abusive. Hardly anyone dared ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... that flare and lurk In the big street whose lamps are gems, For there she stops when off to work To covet silks and diadems. At evenings, too, the organ plays "My Hero" or in "Dixie Land"; And in the odoured purple haze, Where naphthas blaze, The grubby little girls the dust of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... here aren't talking about it, they're doing it. Grubby, earthy work. And it was to prepare for this sort of thing that I loafed through Leyden and Heidelberg! Yes, and loafed through, creditably, too; even if Oom Peter did bully me into making a specialty of botany. Botany! Dry as dust. After the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... and wrote saying that she would be there, and that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby quarters and practiced such strict economy ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Harry dirty—very dirty,—but from the mud on his boots to the marks on his face where he had pushed the hair out of his eyes with earthy fingers, I never saw him quite so grubby before. And if there had been a clean place left in any part of his clothes well away from the ground, that spot must have been soiled by a huge and very dirty sack, under the weight of which his poor little shoulders were bent nearly to ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... in their sable hides: So dark, so dingy, like a grubby lot Of sooty sweeps, or colliers, and besides, However the poor elves Might wash themselves, Nobody knew if they were clean or not— On Nature's fairness they were quite a blot! Not to forget more ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... "Hands look grubby. You should wash 'em. I say, what a beastly out-of-the-way place this is. Where's Uncle Dick? I only had a coffee and roll before I left London. Can I have ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... provokingly, condescendingly, solemnly. It is well for every one to have a friend or friends with whom he can talk quite unaffectedly about what he cares for and values; and he ought to be able to say to such a friend, "I cannot talk about these things now; I am in a dusty, prosaic, grubby mood, and I want to make mud-pies"; the point is to be natural, and yet to keep a watch upon nature; not to force her into cramped postures, and yet not to indulge her in rude, careless, and vulgar postures. It is a bad sign in friendship, if intimacy seems to a man to give him the right ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Ballard's guns? Afghans black and grubby Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi; And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword are Hanging in a Marri camp just ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... lighted candles. Upon a further table was a tumbler filthy to look upon. The bed was painted iron; it wanted a leg, and to supply the deficiency a grocer's box had been thrust underneath. The blankets of the bed (which contained two pillows) were as grubby as the sheets. The pillows beside the one on which she had slept bore the impress of somebody's head. Over everything, walls, furniture, ceiling, and floor, lay a thick deposit of dust and grime. Misspelt lewd words were fingered on the dirt of the window-panes. The horror ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... play is a glory to that city as well as to Hazelton and Benrimo. But every town in the United States has something as striking as the Chinese Theatre, to the man who keeps the eye of his soul open. It has its Ministerial Association, its boys' secret society, its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice of the Peace court, its free school for the teaching of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its fire-engine house, its milliner's shop. All these could be made visible in photoplays as ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... suppressed excitement prevailed over Montricheux. It was the day when the pretty lakeside town celebrated the Fete des Narcisses, and from the smallest street urchin, grabbing a bunch of narcissi in his grubby little hand and trying to induce the good-natured foreigner to purchase his wares, to the usually stolid hoteliers, vying with each other as to which of their caravanserais should blaze out into the most arresting ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... was to conquer the world—almost entirely for the world's own good—she did not see. Most of the girls who were not betrothed meant to be teachers. Of these there were two sorts: careless young women who admitted that they intended to leave the "beastly classroom and grubby children" the minute they had a chance to marry; and studious, sometimes bulbous-browed and pop-eyed maidens who at class prayer-meetings requested God to "guide their feet along the paths of greatest usefulness." Neither sort tempted Carol. ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... pavin'-stones, An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand? Beefy face an' grubby 'and — Law! wot do they understand? I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to Mandalay . ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... grubby for a client—but appearances are deceptive, and you offer him a seat, assuring him that he may speak with perfect security—whereupon he proceeds in a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... sobbed the youngest Miss Rainham. She stood up, tears raining down her plump cheeks. No one, Cecilia thought, ever cried so easily, so copiously, and so frequently as Queenie. As she stood holding out a very grubby forefinger, on which appeared a minute spot of blood, great tears fell in splashes on the dark green linoleum, while others ran down her face to join them, and others trembled on her lower eyelids, propelled from some ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... they've ever been brought up to." He put sixpence into each little grubby paw, and smiled down at the awestruck faces. "Go and spend it all on sweets," he told them, "and be really, wonderfully, happily sick for once in your lives. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... the lawn, at the green cluster of holly-berries by the drive-gate, at the few flakes of snow that fell, lazily, carelessly, as though they were trying to decide whether they would make a grand affair of it or not, and perhaps at the small, grubby boy who was looking at him with one eye and trying to learn the Collect for the day (it was Sunday) with the other. Hugh had never before seen any one in the least like Mr. Pidgen. He was short and round, and his head was covered with tight little curls. His cheeks ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... near her mouth showed itself, and the laugh in her eyes was so reassuring that the penny she put into the grubby hand was less productive of effect than her mere self. She walked on, leaving the group staring after her breathless, because of a sense of having met with a wonderful adventure. The grand young lady with the black hair and the blue hat and tall, straight body was the adventure. She left the same ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the matter with your clothes?" asked Susanna, casting a maternal eye over him while she pulled him down here and up there, with anxious disapproving glances. "You look so patched, and wrinkled, and grubby." ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at these times used to be acute. The head printer would send up a relay of small and grubby boys to remind us that "On Your Way" was fifty lines short. At ten o'clock he would come in ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... the smallest details—in my dream. I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the fading outline of some queer new development I had imagined still hung about me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that made me thank God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained looking at the woman, and rejoicing—rejoicing that I had come away out of all that tumult and folly and violence before it was too late. After all, I thought, this is life—love and beauty, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... woman told me where to buy a bushel of coal and some kindlings, and milk and meal, and all I wanted. I worked like a beaver for an hour or two, and was so glad I'd been to a cooking-class, for I could make a fire, with Lotty to do the grubby part, and start a nice soup with the cold meat and potatoes, and an onion or so. Soon the room was warm, and full of a nice smell, and out of bed tumbled 'the babies,' to dance round the stove and sniff at the soup, and drink milk like ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... into a roar of laughter, for the poor fellow's face was not only thoroughly grubby, but decorated with ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn |
