"Indecent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on so well with women of her own age—or older than herself. She was ready with a laugh and a word, and though she was unable to venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an amazing faculty for looking knowing and indecent beyond words, rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way—oh, it was quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would have ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... had told me I could not help taking a great deal of notice of this lady, and began to lust for her, and of course took to talking to her about Sarah. She was nothing loth, and asked me curious, and at last down right indecent questions about her, but not in smutty language. Hannah when there used to laugh at the questions and my replies; they made my cock stand, which perhaps was what Louisa intended, or it may only have been curiosity ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... in this case; for it was no wonder that in their company the flute-girl was not regarded; but it is strange that, in the midst of the entertainment, the extreme pleasantness of the discourse had not made them forget their meat and drink. Yet Xenophon thought it not indecent to bring in to Socrates, Antisthenes, and the like the jester Philip; as Homer doth an onion to make the wine relish. And Plato brought in Aristophanes's discourse of love, as a comedy, into his entertainment; and at the last, as it ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... language and second in the language of the Hebrews, Frederick called his fellow- lodgers together earlier than usual on the evening before Thanksgiving Day. He explained to them, in the patois which they used together, that it would be indecent for them to carry this supply of food farther than next Monday for their own purposes. He told them that the occasion was one of exuberant thanksgiving to the God of heaven. He showed them that they all had great reason for thanksgiving. And, in short, he made ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... Pure we should watch and pray, [Matt. 26:41] avoid idleness, evil company, bad books and papers, indecent songs and pictures, immoral plays, intemperance in eating and drinking, and all that would incite to impurity. We should keep our minds occupied with good thoughts and desires, so that we have no room for evil ones. ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... hour. Perceiving the uselessness of attempting to bribe him to secrecy, I left him, cursing him for his obstinacy, and came direct to you. Heavens!' added her ladyship, drawing her robe over her partially denuded bosom, 'how desperate the fear of exposure has made me, that in this indecent attire I go at midnight to the chambers of male servants!—Simpson, can you help me in this dreadful emergency? You have heretofore proved faithful to me,—do not desert me now. Lagrange must be silenced!—do ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... mindful of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried to be a sober worker all my life—all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt, having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also from artistic conviction. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Romano caused Marc' Antonio to engrave twenty plates showing all the various ways, attitudes, and positions in which licentious men have intercourse with women; and, what was worse, for each plate Messer Pietro Aretino wrote a most indecent sonnet, insomuch that I know not which was the greater, the offence to the eye from the drawings of Giulio, or the outrage to the ear from the words of Aretino. This work was much censured by Pope Clement; and if, when ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... disappointed at first; but only at first. Once she hit on the idea that her kingdom would be the "dinkiest" in Europe, indeed in the world, she was pleased. The negotiations were rushed through at a pace which struck even Gorman as indecent. But everybody concerned was in a hurry. Konrad Karl was afraid that the Emperor might hear of the sale through the Megalian ambassador in London. But that gentleman—he was a Count, I think—was under the influence, probably in the pay of the Emperor, and had been instructed to ignore King ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... recently at Washington and launched a double-shotted anathema at the female bike fiend. The Leaguers attribute to the bicycle craze "the alarming increase" in the number of courtesans, and call upon ministers and respectable women everywhere to denounce cycling by the sex as "vulgar and indecent." Nor do they stop there. The bike, in their opinion, is irremediably bad. While destroying the morals of the maid, it wreeks the prospective motherhood of the matron. It is provocative of diseases peculiar to women, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to the judges, requiring them to order execution. He insisted on the nature of his late commission, and on that plea being overruled, submitted with his usual calmness and dignity. The execution, with indecent haste, was ordered to take place on the following morning. In this last stage of life, his greatness of mind shone with even more than its usual lustre. Calm, and fearless without bravado, his behavior and speech expressed the piety and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... indeed, arose against Sir Geoffrey Peveril as having proceeded with indecent severity and haste upon this occasion; and rumour took care to make the usual additions to the reality. It was currently reported, that the desperate Cavalier, Peveril of the Peak, had fallen on a Presbyterian congregation, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... clearly than on former occasions, how such charters to legalize industrial piracy were devised, was somewhat dashed—by President Taft's approval. Perhaps it still hoped that the creation of a non-partisan Tariff Commission of experts would put an end to this indecent purchase and sale of privileges and would establish rates after the scientific investigation of each case. Soon, however, these hopes were swept away; for on September 17, 1909, the President delivered at Winona, Minnesota, a laudatory ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... he was buried with indecent haste in one of the public cemeteries. His funeral took place on Thursday. On the Sunday following, the grounds of the cemetery were, as usual, much thronged with visiters, and about noon an intense excitement was created by the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... all its glory. What scenes of infamy did the Society for the Suppression of Vice lay open to our astonished eyes! tradesmen's daughters dancing, pots of beer carried out between the first and second lesson, and dark and distant rumours of indecent prints. Clouds of Mr. Canning's cousins arrived by the waggon; all the contractors left their cards with Mr. Rose; and every plunderer of the public crawled out of his hole, like slugs, and grubs, and worms after a ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... often very indignant when the editors of a new edition of an old book think it proper to leave out certain passages which they think are indecent or unsuitable for people to read. This is called "expurgating" the book; but people who disapprove often call it to bowdlerize. This word comes from the name of Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 published an edition of Shakespeare's works in which, as he said, "those ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... declaring, at the same time, he thought she had great innocence in her countenance. Robinson said she was committed thither as an idle and disorderly person, and a common street-walker. As she past by Mr. Booth, she damned his eyes, and discharged a volley of words, every one of which was too indecent to be repeated. ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... not to bite, still less to tear, like a dog. Witticisms and repartee should be to the point, and should have elegance and appropriateness without exciting the indignation of any. Do not let your pleasantries degenerate into those of buffoons, who raise laughter by extravagant representations and indecent action. If you are clever in repartee, if you say a good thing, manage if possible, in making others laugh, ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... granted: Even the direct contrary I have affirmed, and am endeavouring to support. But if it be supposed upon any other ground, it does not concern me; I have nothing to do with Shakespeare's indecorums in general. That there are indecorums in the Play I have no doubt: The indecent treatment of Percy's dead body is the greatest;—the familiarity of the significant, rude, and even ill disposed Poins with the Prince, is another;—but the admission of Falstaff into the Royal Presence (supposing, which I have a right to suppose, that his Military ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... him, nor could she help remarking how remarkably jovial and carefree he appeared, in spite of his lowered voice and studious air of reverence when speaking of the dead man. Moreover, there seemed to her something almost indecent in the haste with which he had arrived on the spot. It had less the appearance of solicitude for the sorrowing relatives than the eagerness of a vulture swooping down upon a good square meal it had long ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... is nasty. But it puts on airs. The world has eaten. But the world says it's best to starve. Folks will say they've got to be parents. But they say they will regret it. They say sex is here. They say we're up against its mandates or its passions. But let's be as decent as we can with the indecent. Let's not linger on its margins. Let's not overstay our dissipation. Sex is like eating. Who would eat if he didn't have to? To say you enjoy a meal is carnal. To say that you derive some sense of ecstasy from paternal and maternal desires ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... are three reasons at least for informing him thus early in life. One is that sufficient curiosity has usually developed by this time, another is that the first information should come from a pure source, and a third is that this instruction should anticipate sex consciousness and the indecent language and ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... severe thing; the recreation of the judgment, the jubilee of reason. It was the result of a real good, suitably applied. It commenced upon the solidity of truth and the substance of fruition. It did not run out in voice or indecent eruptions, but filled the soul, as God does the universe, silently and without noise. It was refreshing, but composed, like the pleasantness of youth tempered with the gravity of age; or the mirth of a festival managed with ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... had not been flogged once during the whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally some old and evidently precious memory of his "Christian" life, as he called his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full, were for the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers employ, but those folk sayings which taken without a context seem so insignificant, but when used appositely suddenly acquire a significance ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... normal circumstances would have perished rather than gone into his bedroom. To-day when she saw him there, lying on his wide, tumbled bed, among his littered belongings—his clothes strewn untidily on the floor, his books on their shelves, his pictures that struck her rigidity as indecent, his photographs of people who had touched his life, some perhaps closely, but were unknown to her, she had a queer sense of the revelation of poor, pathetic secrets. This, then, was Martin when he was away from ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... weekly in hard cash, when the collector came; let the payment fail, and they knew perfectly well what the result would be. The children of the upper world could not even by chance give a thought to the sources whence their needs are supplied; speech on such a subject in their presence would be held indecent. In John Hewett's position, the indecency, the crime, would have been to keep silence and pretend that the needs of existence are ministered to as ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... and P. B. PLUMB, on the list of speakers to canvass the State in behalf of Republican principles, for the reason that they have within the last few weeks, in public addresses published articles, used ungentlemanly, indecent, and infamously defamatory language, when alluding to a large and respectable portion of the women of Kansas, and to women now engaged in canvassing the State in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... dance, any man of the company comes forward and recites, in a sort of low guttural tone, some little story or incident, which is either martial or ludicrous; or, as was the case this evening, voluptuous and indecent; this is taken up by the orchestra and the dancers, who repeat it in a higher strain and dance to it. Sometimes they alternate; the orchestra first performing, and when it ceases, the women raise their voices and make a music more agreeable, that is, less intolerable than that ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... public palate. A facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week—admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his movements—his recoil, especially—are wanting in the true antique severity—might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... befouling the pure waters of life with the turbulent stream of their own vanity. They pollute the purity of real beauty by the foul arts of beautifying, and cry out in loud rude voices in every assembly and gathering. They strut about in vain-glorious conceit, and flaunt their gaudy apparel in indecent boldness. They claim what does not belong to them and meddle with what does not concern them. They do not blush to cloud the precious jewel of modesty with the selfish airs of passion. Nothing is said which they do not hear, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... in the council-chamber of heaven, the sudden intervention of the latter in the life of Job, the ease with which he breaks through the chain of causality and bends even the human will to his purpose, the indecent haste with which he overwhelms the just man with a torrent of calamities in the course of one short day, the apparition of Jahveh in a storm-cloud, and many other equally improbable details. Improbability, however, is the main feature ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... would be considered indecent haste to present my tributary offering at once, I paid my morning's visit, only taking my revolving-pistol, as I knew Rumanika had expressed a strong wish to see it. The impression it made was surprising—he had never ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... young Hamlet, less than two months, she had married again, married his uncle, her dear husband's brother, in itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage, from the nearness of relationship, but made much more so by the indecent haste with which it was concluded, and the unkingly character of the man whom she had chosen to be the partner of her throne and bed. This it was, which more than the loss of ten kingdoms, dashed the spirits and brought a cloud ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of a long program astounded or charmed him; and her enjoyment was enhanced by recognizing how completely he had thrown off the narrowness or prejudice of village life. Listening to his laughter at almost indecent jokes, his ejaculations of wonder when conjurers showed their skill, his enthusiastic clappings after acrobats had proved their strength, she understood that all his natural sternness was temporarily relaxed; he would not allow himself to be disturbed by ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... literature,—and, bitterest sting of all, the "peasant" could give every woman in the room a lesson in deportment, grace, and perfect taste in dress. Every costume looked tawdry beside her richly flowing velvet draperies—every low bodice became indecent compared with the modesty of that small square opening at Thelma's white throat—an opening just sufficient to display her collar of diamonds—and every figure seemed either dumpy and awkward, too big or too fat, or too lean and too lanky—when ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... to-morrow, and will be open for three days. The republican members of assembly for this city will be carried by a greater majority than last year, unless some fraud be practised at the polls. The corporation have bad the indecent hardiness to appoint known and warm federalists (and no others) to be inspectors of the election in every ward. Hamilton works day and night with the most intemperate and outrageous zeal, but ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... as some do their complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the most perfectly matter-of-fact way, and I trembled. I feared lest this display of what Miss Hallam would consider little short of indecent laxity and Bohemianism, would shock her so much that I should lose everything by it. It was not ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... his country." The imputation on his honor stung so keenly that he declared "he would rather be in his grave than in the Presidency," and in private correspondence he complained that he had been assailed "in terms so exaggerated and indecent as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." The only rejoinder which his dignity permitted him to make is that contained in his Farewell Address, ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... 'So indecent!' she murmured. 'My dear,' she said, when she had steered Hazel past the shop, 'you want a nice cup of tea. And I do hope,' she went on softly, putting a great deal of cream in Hazel's cup as she would have put lubricating oil on a stiff sewing-machine—'I ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... is lit up in preparation, as the dancers, male and female, hurry away to adorn themselves. Much has been said about the impropriety of Samoa dancing by travellers who have only witnessed the degrading and indecent exhibitions, given on a large scale by the loafing class of natives who inhabit Apia and its immediate vicinity. The natives are an adaptive race, and suit their manners to their company, and there are always numbers of sponging ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... disordered conglomeration of water-tanks and skylights and chimney-pots. Then nearer, almost under her feet, she looked into a courtyard of the hospital and saw a pale, emaciated man in a wheel-chair. She drew back as if it were something indecent. Would Vincent ever become like that? she thought. If so, she would rather he died now under ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... to spare. It is only a desire to save my friends and my age that has induced me to go on practising so long, for I am afraid people would think that if I retired my object was not to shun these indecent scenes but to escape hard work. Yet I am making fewer appearances than usual, and that is the beginning of gradually ceasing to ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... places on Eros and Ceres and a few of the other well-settled places where a man or woman is required to put on shorts and jacket before entering. And in good old New York City, a man and woman were locked up for "indecent exposure" a few months ago. The judge threw the case out of court, but he told them they were lucky they hadn't been picked up in Boston. It seems that the eye of the bluenose turns a jaundiced yellow at the sight of a union suit, ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... asked her grandfather again, "dressed up in that indecent manner and talking and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... preposterous as unfounded, has lately found its way abroad, stating that I meditated a gross and indecent insult upon the dignity of the legislature, by using an influence which I am supposed to possess, for the purpose of introducing an improper character into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... to have discovered secrets, and plainly knows them, from his wonderful effects of colour on canvas—not merely in words. His portrait of Miss Cushman is a miracle. Gibson's famous painted Venus is very pretty—that's my criticism. Yes, I will say besides that I have seldom, if ever, seen so indecent a statue. The colouring with an approximation to flesh tints produces that effect, to my apprehension. I don't like this statue colouring—no, not at all. Dearest Miss Mitford, will you write to me? I don't ask for a long ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... terror at what she felt to be her indecent madness. "Oh! how—how——" And then seeing Nigel's furious start, his mother's glare and all the servants' alarmed stare at her, she rushed staggering to the only creature she felt she knew—her maid Hannah, clutched her and broke down ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... officer soon dispelled any delusive doubts which, for the purpose of securing his election, he had permitted to be ventilated during the late Presidential campaign, that he would at least see fair play in the struggle between Slavery and Freedom in Kansas. With indecent zeal and unscrupulous partisanship, he concentrated all the energies of his administration, and employed the whole force of the influence and the patronage of the nation, to obtain the indorsement by Congress of the Lecompton Constitution, and thus to compel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... middle class. We are incapable of sending Mr. Gladstone to be tried at the Old Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord Beaconsfield. A majority in our House of Commons is incapable of hailing, with frantic laughter and applause, a string of indecent jests against Christianity and its Founder. But we are not, or were not incapable of producing a Parliament which burns or sells the masterpieces of Italian art. And one may surely say of such a Puritan Parliament, and of those ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... capable of confessing to a woman that he couldn't make a living. Such questions were none of their business (their business was simply to be provided for, practise the domestic virtues, and be charmingly grateful), and there was, to his sense, something almost indecent in talking about them. Mrs. Luna felt doubly sorry for him as she perceived that he denied himself the luxury of sympathy (that is, of hers), and the vague but comprehensive sigh that passed her lips as she took up ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... like a statesman of the dangers of an insincere settlement.—Not only he does not seek for peace, but he seems to fear it.—My own vexation is, that I must pay Caesar my debt, and spend thus what I had set apart for my triumph. It is indecent to owe money ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... something almost abstract in its manifestations; it was something indecent, sinister, secret, foreign to his whole nature felt by him now for the first time, unanalysed, of course, but belonging, had he known it, to that world of which afterwards he was often to catch glimpses, that world of shining white faces in dark ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... required freedom, and chafed and fretted under restraint. Insanity returned upon her with redoubled force, soon after. She used blasphemous and indecent language, and cut up her blankets to make pantaloons. She picked the lock of her room, and tried various plans of escape. When Friend Hopper went to see her again, some weeks later, he found her in the masculine attire, which she had manufactured. She tried to hide herself, but ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... certain secluded and out-of-the-way places, even in the state of Maryland, seldom visited by a single ray of healthy public sentiment—where{48} slavery, wrapt in its own congenial, midnight darkness, can, and does, develop all its malign and shocking characteristics; where it can be indecent without shame, cruel without shuddering, and murderous without apprehension ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... this belief, the Egyptian priests, endeavored in their attire to show a mingling of the male and female sex; they wore long garments like women, vergogna! they wore long hair, guai! and they SHAVED THEIR FACES! It pains me to say, that their indecent example is followed even to this day, by the priests of what should be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... me not be so far mistaken to have this taken by way of Reflection. No! Whatever some of our Rakes of the Town may assert, I freely declare, that I never saw in any of the Nunneries (of which I have seen many both in Spain and other Parts of the World) any thing like indecent Behaviour, that might give occasion for Satyr or Disesteem. It is true, there may be Accidents, that may lead to a Misinterpretation, of which I remember a ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... the peace of the fair spring evening, followed by a dead silence, the birds all scared and dumb—a silence so dead, that Katherine Calmady held her breath, almost awed by it, while the hissing and crackling of the little flames upon the hearth seemed to obtrude as an indecent clamour. This lasted a few seconds. Then the noise of a plunging struggle and the muffled thud of something ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... child," thought Donald, although his exasperation was directed rather at himself, than at her. "It's positively indecent the way she gets inside one. Judged by the standards of her class, Marion is a splendid girl—head and shoulders above the average—yet these unconsciously searching questions of Smiles' are ... Hang it all, I wish I had had sense enough not to ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... babbler of them all, hot with the exercise of the indecent gestures wherewith he illustrated his filthy tale, had slunk off like a ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... and station gave way to a negligence which was easily observable. On the morning of the battle in which he fell, he had shown some care of adorning his person; and gave for a reason, that the enemy should not find his body in any slovenly, indecent situation. "I am weary," subjoined he, "of the times, and foresee much misery to my country; but believe that I shall be out of it ere night."[*] This excellent person was but thirty-four years of age when a period was thus put to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... Her indecent triumph at the success of the plot, and her utter callousness, are expressed in her words to Ahab, in which the main point is the taking possession of the vineyard. The death of its owner is told with exultation, as being nothing but the sweeping aside ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Treasury with rather indecent haste. L—— did not even look at the guard which turned out as we passed the entrance. When we had entered they had hurrahed him, and hoped that his health was good, in a chorus after their custom; and he had made a little speech in return, trusting that his children were also well! ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... at the mouth, swooned upon the slanting temple roof, the drums were silent, the jackals had ceased their indecent noise, being intent doubtless upon the task of tearing some body to pieces before the arrival of the hosts of enemy pariah dogs; and Leonie, beautiful, bewitched Leonie, holding the white sari picked out ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... have spread abroad, under your name, copies of a poem, entitled '<La Cour du Roi Petaud.>' In this, wherein insult is cast on a personage who should be exempt from such offence, is also outraged, in a most indecent way, a lovely female, whom you would adore as we do, if you had the happiness to know her. Is it for the poet of the lover of Gabrielle to carry desolation into the kingdom of the Graces? "Your correspondents use you ill by leaving you in ignorance, that this young person has immense ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... us, and I don't blame him. Our high spirits impress him as untimely and indecent. War for him is not a sport. How could it be, with his homesteads ravaged, his cities flattened, his women violated, his populations prisoners in occupied territories? For him war is a martyrdom which he embraces with a ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... loss. They calculated too largely on the prospective business with California, and have too large a sum invested to make much for the future. And yet, with a smaller investment they could not perform the service, except in that dangerous, cheap, indecent way, of innumerable wants and deprivations, which the American people have begun to despise. They have had some few disasters, but none of those of a fatal character in the Pacific. The "Winfield Scott" was lost in entering the harbor ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... sagacity was unerring; he combined every ancient excellence, and appears original even in the adoption of acknowledged thoughts and allusions. He is the just and adequate representative of Horace, Juvenal, and Perseus, united, without one indecent blemish; and for my own part, I have always considered him as the most finished gentleman that ever wrote." In his Life, translated by Ozell, we are told, that "he was full of sentiments of humanity, mildness, and justice. He censured ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... which we can recommend to the perusal of the daily increasing class of our countrymen who think that a book, although written in French, may be witty and amusing without being either blasphemous or indecent. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... operations on the body, and cause various changes in it; which not being always sensible, do not make a necessary part of the idea of each passion. For SHAME, which is an uneasiness of the mind upon the thought of having done something which is indecent, or will lessen the valued esteem which others have for us, has not ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... asking me with anxious looks, till they found I was not to be caught by chaff, and then, both tired, walked away—the friend advising me, next time I went to court, to put on an Arab's gown, as trousers are indecent in the ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Cozens on the ground weltering in his blood: he was sensible, and took me by the hand, as he did several others, shaking his head, as if he meant to take leave of us. If Mr Cozens' behaviour to his captain was indecent and provoking, the captain's, on the other hand, was rash and hasty. If the first was wanting in that respect and observance which is due from a petty officer to his commander, the latter was still more ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... teach them the Declaration of Independence and make them study our Sunday papers. But you can't deny there's something comic in the rough about all Germans, before you've civilized them. They're a pecooliar people, a darned pecooliar people, else they wouldn't staff all the menial and indecent occupations on the globe. But that pecooliarity, which is only skin-deep in the working Boche, is in the bone of the grandee. Your German aristocracy can't consort on terms of equality with any other Upper Ten Thousand. They swagger and bluff about the world, but ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... with inhabitants: som were scolding, others swearing, or singing indecent songs. What a sight for Mary! Her blood ran cold; yet she had sufficient resolution to mount to the top of the house. On the floor, in one corner of a very small room, lay an emaciated figure of a woman; a window over her head scarcely ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... occasionally, they called us all sorts of bad names, made indecent gestures, and aggravated us, so that between 3 and 4 o'clock in the afternoon, by an inexplicable concert of action, and with a serious breach of discipline, a large number of the men and many of the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... that take it. He cannot help being in a sort of close communion. Perhaps he mainly borrows the very indignation, not so very pure and independent, with which he reproves some ingenuous satirist of what may appear indecent in our fashions of amusement, or unbecoming in the relations of the sexes or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... of Federal officeholders should not be felt in the manipulation of political primary meetings and nominating conventions. The use by these officials of their positions to compass their selection as delegates to political conventions is indecent and unfair; and proper regard for the proprieties and requirements of official place will also prevent their assuming the active ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... The women in New York seemed to her artificial and affected in appearance, and they walked, she thought, as if they were trying to make people look at them. The bold way they laced in their figures she regarded as almost indecent, and she noticed that they looked straight into the eyes of men instead of lowering their lashes when they passed them. Her provincialism, like everything else which belonged to her and had become endeared by habit and association, seemed to her so truly beautiful and desirable ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... 21, 1850. Surrendered by Edward D. Ingraham, United States Commissioner. The case was hurried through in indecent haste, testimony being admitted against him of the most groundless character. One witness swore that Gibson's name was Emery Rice. He was taken to Elkton, Maryland. There, Mr. William S. Knight, his supposed owner, refused to receive Gibson, saying he was not the man, and he ...
— The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 18 • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Mrs. Mountstuart's indecent hurry to be at the Hall before the departure of Dr. Middleton and his daughter, afflicted him with visions of the physical contrast which would be sharply perceptible to her this morning of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror. "Oh, who can have done it? How can it ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... he in his personal antipathy to Philip Rainham—the tide of that ancient hostility surged over him again even while he vowed sternly to make the fullest amends—had he not seized with indecent eagerness upon any pretext or occasion ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... you don't know—a judicial separation, I'll warrant—it's indecent, upon my word it is. To think that there are people who come to me about judicial separations and bring their young ladies ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... mistake and all too common since the rise of the sex-hygiene movement. Undoubtedly a considerable amount of the celibacy in sensitive women may be traced to ill-balanced mothers and teachers who, in word and attitude, build up an impression that sex is indecent and bestial, and engender in general a damaging suspicion ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... letter was sent to George III, asking for peace on the principle of "uti possidetis." The two monarchs parted with every manifestation of personal devotion; but on Alexander's return to his capital his elder sister was married with indecent haste to the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and wrote to Dumas, and what do you think,—by return of post I had a letter from him saying he could not consent to the production of a one-act piece, signed by him, at the Varietes, because his son was then giving a five-act piece at the Gymnase." Then came a string of indecent witticisms by Suzanne Lagier and Dejazet. They were as old as the world, but they were new to me, and I was amused and astonished. These bon-mots were followed by an account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday feuilleton, and how he and Balzac ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 896, who had been deposed from the diaconate, and again from the priesthood, for his immoral and lewd life. By Stephen VII., who followed, the dead body of Formosus was taken from the grave, clothed in the papal habiliments, propped up in a chair, tried before a council, and the preposterous and indecent scene completed by cutting off three of the fingers of the corpse and casting it into the Tiber; but Stephen himself was destined to exemplify how low the papacy had fallen: he was thrown into prison and strangled. In the course of five years, from A.D. 896 to A.D. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... land, but, most of all, of horses, since it was a horsey day. The screaming of a stallion came persistently from the meydan—a naughty screaming which foreboded mischief. I recognised the voice. The culprit was my own Sheytan. The screams were so disturbing, so indecent, that several of the great ones round me frowned and asked: 'Whose horse is that?' in accents of displeasure. I ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... the noisy Sunday dinner-parties, sitting among five or six women, to all of whom her father spoke familiarly. There were actresses, dancers or singers, who, after dinner, would settle themselves down to smoke with their elbows on the table absorbed in the indecent stories so keenly relished by their host. Fortunately, childhood is protected by a resisting candour, by an enamel over which all impurities glide. Felicia became noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved, but without being touched by all ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the actress, severely, "it's positively indecent—the habit you're getting of evesdropping on ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... pay tribute to the real. He could not shake it off all at once. He tacked a Satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies: and if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in Alkestis, showing how one could be indecent in ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... in his aggressive way, 'Damn the spring! It is and always will be the most horrible season. Can you lay hold of one sensible idea, Kroeger, can you work out the tiniest point or effect with any calmness, when you are feeling an indecent prickling in your blood and are upset by a whole mass of irrelevant sensations which so soon as you test them are unmasked as unmistakably trivial and wholly unusable stuff? As for me, I am going to the cafe now. That is neutral ground, untouched by ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... end on gun-metal. In any case, a man of his years should have been thinking of higher things than mere gauds and trinkets. A like criticism applied to Mrs. Coppin's demand for a silk petticoat, which struck Roland as simply indecent. Frank and Percy took theirs mostly in specie. It was Muriel who struck the worst blow by ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... you ask me my opinion," cried Mrs. Freke, "drapery, whether wet or dry, is the most confoundedly indecent ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... even more intimate personal element—the critic's condition. The day may have been vexing. The present indecent haste of the income-tax collector may have worried him. His dinner may have been bad. Perhaps he had to rush off without his coffee; new boots are a conceivable element; a bad seat in the theatre may annoy him; many managers give better places to their friends in the profession than to ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... fellow-footman roar to the Gorgonian coachman, "Half-past seven!" at which hour we are, to this day, convinced that Lady Gorgon was going out to dine. Mr. Jerningham's associate having banged to the door, with an insolent look towards Perkins, who was prying in with the most suspicious and indecent curiosity, retired, exclaiming, "That chap has a hi to our great-coats, I reckon!" and left John Perkins to pace the street ...
— The Bedford-Row Conspiracy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... assistant and has taken a house for Agnes Anne. In a year or two they expect to begin thinking about getting married. But really there is no hurry. They have only been engaged twelve years, and an immediate purpose of marriage would be considered quite indecent haste in Eden Valley. And Aunt Jen ... is still Aunt Jen. No man, she says, has ever proved himself worthy of her, but I myself think that, if there is no infringement of the table of consanguinity on the first page of the Bible after "James, by the Grace of God, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... which doth this world adorn, There is none more fair and excellent Than is man's body, both for power and form, Whilst it is kept in sober government, But none than it more foul and indecent, Distempered through misrules and passions base, It grows a monster and incontinent, Doth lose his dignity and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... fabulously wealthy widow, and a woman prominent in every other respect as well, had come to live in Santa Paloma. Mrs. White determined to play her game very carefully with Mrs. Burgoyne; there should be no indecent hurry, there should be no sudden overtures at friendship. "But, poor thing! She will certainly find our house an oasis in the desert!" Mrs. White comfortably decided, putting on the very handsomest of her afternoon gowns to go and call formally at ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... lucubrations. She had never meant to fly in the face of anything, and considered that she grovelled before the Rhadamanthus of the English literary tribunal, the celebrated and awful Young Person. I assured her, as a joke, that she was frightfully indecent (she hadn't in fact that reality any more than any other) my purpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that her daughter had dropped her not because she was immoral but because she was vulgar. I used to figure her children ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... mission, report that: "owing to an unexampled coalition among all the capable citizens, obstinately refusing to take the office of mayor, in order, by this course, to clog the wheels, and subject the representatives to repeated and indecent refusals," he is compelled to appoint a young man, not of legal age, and a stranger in the department.—At Marseilles, write the agents,[3377] "in spite of every effort and our ardent desire to republicanize the Marseilles people, our pains and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... on these matters. "The man whom the King delighted to honor, this is he, then!" King Friedrich has quitted Town, some while ago; returned to Potsdam "January 30th." Glad enough, I suppose, to be out of all this unmusical blowing of catcalls and indecent exposure. To Voltaire he has taken no notice; silently leaves Voltaire, in his nook of the Berlin Schloss, till the foul business get done. "VOLTAIRE FILOUTE LES JUIFS (picks Jew pockets)," writes he once to Wilhelmina: "will get out of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... ridicule, of which there are several kinds; but at present it is not our business to specify them. It will not be amiss, however, to observe by way of caution, that the powers of ridicule are not to be employed too often, lest we sink into scurrility;—nor in loose and indecent language, lest we degenerate into wantonness and buffoonery; —nor with the least degree of petulance and abuse, lest we appear audacious and ill-bred;—nor levelled against the unfortunate, lest we incur the censure of inhumanity;—nor against atrocious crimes, lest ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... received an invitation to visit his uncle with the special object of renewing the proposal for his marriage with the Princess Mary. William accordingly arrived in London on October 19; and, the assent of the king and the Duke of York being obtained, the wedding was celebrated with almost indecent haste. It was a purely political union; and when, early in December, the Prince and Princess of Orange set sail for Holland, the young girl wept bitterly at having to leave her home for a strange land at the side of a cold, unsympathetic husband. The weeks he spent ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... there can be no indecent haste in these matters. In gaining the important position—in assuming the relations you desire— there should be some show of dignity, otherwise society would be disgusted, and you would lose the respect which should ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... curious and pathetic instance of a man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters; but I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time. His ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white orchards, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Williamsburg a few days after the close of the session, contains a striking narrative of this stormy proceeding, and an almost amusing touch of official undervaluation of Patrick Henry: "In the course of the debate, I have heard that very indecent language was used by a Mr. Henry, a young lawyer, who had not been above a month a member of the House, and who carried all the young members with him."[85] But a far more specific and intense expression of antipathy came, a few ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... the great mystic poet. Only an energetic and beautiful imagination, together with a mastery of the rhythm and swell of impassioned speech, can prevent an invitation to the public to hearken to the raptures of intense personal attachment from seeming ludicrous and almost indecent. Whatever other gifts Comte may have had—and he had many of the rarest kind,—poetic imagination was not among them, any more than poetic or emotional expression was among them. His was one of those natures whose faculty of deep feeling is unhappily doomed to be inarticulate, and to pass ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... holding their tongues, there's another thing I wish you English would do abroad, which is, to dress like sane and responsible people. Men are simply absurd; but the women, with their ill-behaved hoops and short petticoats, are positively indecent; but the greatest of all their travelling offences is the proneness to form ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... a sign of what one might call a philosophically ill-bred nature. It is the indecent "gratitude" of the pig over his trough. It is the little yellow eye of sanctified bliss turned up to the God who "must be in His Heaven" if we are so privileged. This "never doubting good will triumph" is really, when one examines it, nothing but the inverted prostration of the helot-slave, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... in his sanctum, busy with paste and scissors, in the act of putting in a string of advertisements—indecent French novels, Atheistic tracts, quack medicines, and slopsellers' puffs; and commenced with as much ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... works of the Comte de Caylus, and with the libertine tales of Duclos and the younger Crebillon, prove the facility with which he could imitate Voltaire, while his lucubrations must be considered as far inferior to the short tales of the latter author. For the most part too free, too indecent, in short, to show their faces beside some elaborately serious fragments which form what are called his works, they figure in the work we have just named under the title of Recueil de ces Messieurs; Aventures ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... is sufficiently precise respecting the prevalence of domestic servitude. The Egyptians were a people remarkable for jealousy, which was carried to such an extreme, that after the death of their wives, they even entertained apprehensions respecting the embalmers. [51] Having decreed it to be indecent in women to go abroad without shoes, they deprived them of the means of wearing them, by threatening with death any one who should make shoes for a woman. They were forbidden music, probably with a view of preventing their possessing so ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier! There's a minister for you! I can imagine this in a journal: 'M. Gillenorman, minister!' that would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would pass"; he merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the unceremoniousness of his century. It ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... scandal of anarchy,—we did not establish "tutelage," or a protectorate, ourselves. We wisely left Venezuela to work out its destiny in its own way, and in the fullness of time. That policy was far-seeing, beneficent, and strictly American in 1895. Why, then, make almost indecent haste to abandon it ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... having drunk hard), in which the lurking holes of the rebels were discovered to his imagination.[B] Our ears are scarcely more shocked with the profane execrations of the persecutors,[C] than with the strange and insolent familiarity used towards the Deity by the persecuted fanatics. Their indecent modes of prayer, their extravagant expectations of miraculous assistance, and their supposed inspirations, might easily furnish out a tale, at which the good would sigh, and the gay ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... am afraid we are too young a country to tolerate middle-aged heroines. We are steeped in conventionalism, for all our fads. We have certain cast-iron formulae for life, and associate love with youth alone. I think we have a vague idea that autumnal love is rather indecent." ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... eyes Beheld you: don't deny it.—'Tis base in you To be so flippant with your hands. For what Affront's more gross than to receive a friend Under your roof, and tamper with his mistress? And, last night in your cups too, how indecent And rudely you behav'd! ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... fear of mockery from the womenkind. You would have thought I had now all the more reason to pursue my common practice, since I had met this young lady in the city street, seemingly following a prisoner, and accompanied with two very ragged indecent-like Highlandmen. But there was here a different ingredient; it was plain the girl thought I had been prying in her secrets; and with my new clothes and sword, and at the top of my new fortunes, this was more than I could swallow. The beggar on horseback ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and long female robes, above which their flowing dyed beards and their painted eyebrows looked like masks of Carnival time. After Battista's gravity their vain eyes and simpering tones seemed an indecent folly. These were the folk he had called friends, this the life he had once cherished. Assuredly he ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... was sent to it. She came from her home, modest, and her innate spirit of purity rebelled against the liberties taken by the dancing-master, and the men he introduced to her. She became indignant at the indecent attitudes she was called upon to assume, but noticing a score of young women, many of them from the best homes in the town, all yielding to the vulgar embrace, she cast aside that spirit of modesty which had been the development of years ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... called, in the words following: "I, A.B., on condition of being admitted as a member of Yale College, promise, on my faith and honor, to observe all the laws and regulations of this College; particularly that I will faithfully avoid using profane language, gaming, and all indecent, disorderly behavior, and disrespectful conduct to the Faculty, and all combinations to resist their authority; as witness my hand. A.B." —Yale Coll. Cat., ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... throne might now take place, or what might happen in it, hastened away, each man for himself and his own property; the mercenary servants of the court began to rob and plunder; the body of the King, in the indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone, for hours, upon the ground. O Conqueror, of whom so many great names are proud now, of whom so many great names thought nothing then, it were better to have conquered one true heart, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... in his favour, that he has observed some decency in his accounts to you of the most indecent and shocking actions. And if all his strangely-communicative narrations are equally decent, nothing will be rendered criminally odious by them, but the vile heart that could meditate such contrivances as were much stronger evidences of his ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... was sick. Still; once at her rich breast, he forgave and forgot all. He preferred her simple natural breast to more modern inventions. And he had no shame, no modesty. Nor had his mother. It was an indecent carouse at which his father and Miss Insull had to assist. But his father had shame. His father would have preferred that, as Miss Insull had kindly offered to stop and work on Thursday afternoon, and as the shop was chilly, the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... houses; he was in the High Street. He saw then, plastered at intervals on the hoardings, strange phenomena. It was the colour that first attracted him—a bright indecent pink with huge black lettering. Because it was the offseason in Skeaton other announcements were few. All the ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... equal sides. Goals were erected and the play was in some respects like lacrosse. Stakes were wagered on the game. This game is also-described by Domenech, [Footnote: Vol. II, p. 196.] who says the women wore a special costume which left the limbs free and that the game was "unbecoming and indecent." Powers [Footnote: Contribution to North American Ethnology, Vol. III, p. 383.] found a game among the Nishinams, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Sacramento, which in some respects also resembled lacrosse. He says "The 'Ti'-kel' is ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... hear of a fantastic tenderness for morality so very sensitive that it is not at all shocked when the immoral things are done, but glows with virtuous indignation when a Christian man speaks out about them? There are plenty of people nowadays who tell us that it is 'indelicate' and 'indecent' and 'improper,' and I do not know how much else, for a Christian teacher or minister to say a word about certain moral scandals. But they do not say anything about the immorality and the indelicacy and the indecency of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... sons of God. In spite of her wonders they will regard Nature as somehow too humble to be the true parent of such prominent people as simians. They will lose all respect for the dignity of fair Mother Earth, and whisper to each other she is an evil and indecent old person. They will snatch at her gifts, pry irreverently into her mysteries, and ignore half the warnings they get from her about how ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... were extremely arbitrary, desired to establish it as a principle that the commands of the reigning sovereign ought to justify every enormity in those who paid obedience to them. But there is one circumstance not so easy to be accounted for: it is pretended that Richard, displeased with the indecent manner of burying his nephews, whom he had murdered, gave his chaplain orders to dig up the bodies, and to inter them in consecrated ground; and as the man died soon after, the place of their burial ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... found it extremely difficult to bear this obviously insolent form of address without a spasm of rage. Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as "quaint Irene," but that was as far as she got in the way ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to the unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate. King Arthur's people were not aware that they were indecent and I had presence of mind ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... choir over the hymns. Life there is no vulgar, tearing two-step, as it is in Godalming, London, and other vortices of human passions, but the stately measure of a minuet. Delights are deliberate and have lingering ends. A hen would scorn to hatch a chicken with the indecent haste of her sister ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... question, 'Will they marry?'" The attitude reminds one a little of the dear ladies at the seaside who use prism field-glasses in order to be sure whether the costumes of the bathers are really indecent. "Sometimes you think, 'Are they married?' In that play there is throughout a suggestiveness which would not be ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... have the precedents of Defoe and Cobbett for using your own name; but D.D.'s Weekly is unthinkable, and W.C.'s Weekly indecent. Your initials are not euphonious: they recall that brainy song ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Hester is feminine to her finger tips, is she not?' 'She is, she is,' I answers. 'If you only knew the trouble I had with the chit about that horrible old riding skirt of hers when all her girl friends are wearing a sensible costume!' Hetty blushed good and proper at this, not knowing how indecent I might become, and Mr. D. caught her at it. Aggie Tuttle and Stella Ballard at this minute is pretending to be shooting up a town with the couple of revolvers they'd brought along in their cunning little holsters. Mr. D. turns his glazed eyes to me once more. 'The real womanly woman,' ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... lampoon into the upper air of true poetry. "The Holy Fair," though stained in one or two verses with personalities, exhibits a scene glowing with character and incident and life: the aim of the poem is not so much to satirize one or two Old Light divines, as to expose and rebuke those almost indecent festivities, which in too many of the western parishes accompanied the administration of the sacrament. In the earlier days of the church, when men were staid and sincere, it was, no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, of the old and the young, all ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... ambassadors assembled in order to congratulate him. He accepted of their compliments with a modest deportment; he lamented the misfortune of the captive King, as a striking example of the sad reverse of fortune to which the most powerful monarchs are subject; he forbade any public rejoicings, as indecent in a war carried on among Christians, reserving them until he should obtain a victory equally illustrious over the infidels; and seemed to take pleasure, in the advantage which he had gained, only as it would prove the occasion ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... for it; true, The wicked one, but not the wicked ones, has vanished. Herr Baron callst thou me, then all is right and good; I am a cavalier, like others. Doubt me? Doubt for a moment of my noble blood? See here the family arms I bear about me! [He makes an indecent gesture.] ...
— Faust • Goethe
... was her fascination. She belonged to this strange world that was coming into being of discordant rhythmic music, of Russian ballet and novels, of a kind of poetry that anybody could write, of fashions that struck him as indecent, of a Society more riotous and rowdy than ever the Bohemia of his day had been, because women—ladies too—were the moving spirit in it and women never did observe the rules of any game.... And yet, in his boyish, sentimental way, he adored her, and clung to her as though he thought ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... yesterday, to gratify that of my husband. Thus disguised in looks and garb, nay even, as formerly was the fashion, with a rich and pleasant gown with four sleeves, which was called philonium according to Petrus Alexandrinus in 6. Epidem., a physician might answer to such as might find the metamorphosis indecent: Thus have I accoutred myself, not that I am proud of appearing in such a dress, but for the sake of my patient, whom alone I wholly design to please, and no wise offend or dissatisfy. There is also a passage in our father Hippocrates, in the book I have named, which causes some to sweat, dispute, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... "If you have any more where you've been livin' you can put them on; but I hope in my heart the sun peels your back before you arrive, an' I hope when you do arrive the' 'll be enough women awake to give you a raw-hidin' for bein' indecent. Now git." ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... any set of Ministers so ill, or with such indignity, as by those who are removed. . . .(227) said last night that the executions were now near(ly) over. I will open my mind to you. I think both his and Richard's language in all this transaction has been to the last degree indecent, and I am sure, unless these two are better advised, they will do their chief more disservice than any ill-conduct of his own. When people of low birth have by great good luck and a fortunate concurrence ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Ramsey, on the ground that they had published an obscene libel. On the late trial before the Lord Chief Justice, certain numbers of the Freethinker, on which the prisoners were being tried, were charged by the prosecution with being (inter alia) blasphemous and indecent. The judge in the course of his remarks said, the articles inculpated might be blasphemous, but assuredly they were not indecent. The opinion of Sir William Harcourt, consequently, though in harmony with that of the junior counsel for the prosecution, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... "move out of the way, and allow the corpse to pass out. Let me have no indecent conduct; let everything be as ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest |
