"Sordid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now I sing, where whiskey flows And two-cent makes life coleur de rose, Where negro shanties line the sordid way And rounders wake by night who ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... always catch yourself a-thinkin' what if they all was true, and he had the right of it," answered Mrs. Todd. "He's a good sight better company, though dreamy, than such sordid creatur's ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... and tender-hearted This hermit waft to yonder shore, From which for sordid gold he parted Ten weary years and one before. Ho! there's the pier where last he left her, That dear, loved one, to weep alone, And for that love of gold bereft her Of all the pleasures she ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... merely by selfish cupidity; but their chief, Lord North, a man of high honour, amiable temper, winning manners, lively wit, and excellent talents both for business and for debate, must be acquitted of all sordid motives. He remained at a post from which he had long wished and had repeatedly tried to escape, only because he had not sufficient fortitude to resist the entreaties and reproaches of the King, who silenced all ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... steadiness and consistency of my adhesion to my own. If I depart from this in any one instance, I shall be called upon by my friends to do the same in many. An invidious and inquisitorial scrutiny into the personal disposition of public officers will creep through the whole Union, and the most sordid and selfish passions will be kindled into activity, to distort the conduct and misrepresent the feelings of men, whose places may become the prize of slander ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... or brave, he must disgrace our house no farther. His time is come! his fate cries out for him! Aulus must die! happy to die without the taint of public and detected infamy—happy to die unseen in his father's house, not in the base and sordid Tullianum." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... David understand. He told in its sordid details his failure to kill it, his attempts to sink memory and conscience in Chicago and their failure, the continued remoteness of Elizabeth and what seemed to him the flesh and blood reality ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... seen elegance and beauty since she went away; she had entered into the life of the cultivated, the intellectually great. In spite of her deep affection for Aunt Raby, she came back to the ugliness and the sordid surroundings of home with a pang which she hated herself for feeling. She forgot Aunt Raby's sufferings for a moment in her uncouthness. She longed to shower riches, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... whose hands are red with blood is honoured and caressed in proportion to the number of his victims; while "he who departs from evil makes himself a prey." This is true, universally, in our land. Why should not the Slave Power make colossal strides over the continent? "There is no North." A sordid, truckling, cowardly, compromising spirit, is everywhere seen. No insult or outrage, no deed of impiety or blood, on the part of the South, can startle us into resistance, or inspire us with self-respect. ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... society, where the family merely, and not the community, is all- important. The average Oriental cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His life, too, is more complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low- thoughted than you might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but it is never empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse, and to forget that it is the man that is elemental, not the book. 'The corn and the cattle are all my care, And the rest is the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... makes us realize the magical rapidity of growth so much as to look from this steel city and to see the woods close by. For instead of being surrounded by the sordid congestion of an industrial center, the Fore River Shipyard is in the midst of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... of life, by a religious sense of duty and desire to do right. Ten thousand weaknesses and absurdities might have been detected in the breasts of both; ten thousand vanities additional, possibly, in the breast of the woman. But the hard wrathful and sordid nature that had wrung as much work out of them as could be got in their best days, for as little money as could be paid to hurry on their worst, had never been so warped but that it knew their moral straightness and respected it. In its own despite, in a constant conflict with itself ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Washington is a well-ordered community with a high moral tone—it is said to have fewer scandals than any city in the country—and there is no sordid commercial atmosphere to lower it. It is the great city of leisure in everything but legislation and paying calls; so it seems to me that it would be the last place to fondle in its bosom ninety distinguished scoundrels. But go on. What did ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... of Seapoys was dispatched to Chitlang, with positive orders to prevent the princess from advancing farther; and, if the arrears of dower had accompanied the officer, I do not believe that she would have made any attempt; but the sordid dispositions of the regent and her favourite did not suffer them to part with money. The officer commanding the company met the poor princess and her attendants on the road, and, being a man of true honour, with a good deal of difficulty mustered courage to disclose his orders. ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... were as completely unaware of his existence as they well could be in the same carriage. For a time, as I talked in commonplaces, Mr. Mafferton in monosyllables, and Mr. Dod and Miss Portheris in regards, the most sordid realist would have ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... all my ideas. Women to me are something so serene, so fine, so feminine, and politics are so dusty, so sordid, so wearisome and quarrelsome. It seems to me a woman's duty to be beautiful, to BE beautiful and to behave beautifully, and politics are by their very nature ugly. You see, I—I am a woman worshipper. I worshipped women long before I found any woman I ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Penisault was a sordid dog. He would cheat the Montagnais of his gifts, and so discontent them with their charge. He had neither courage nor spirit for an adventure. He was in his right place superintending the counters of the Friponne. He despised Penisault, while glad ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... someone who had seen this pile of gold. He seemed near it; it was there, somewhere close by, under his eyes, under his fingers; it was red, gleaming, ponderous. He gazed about him wildly; nothing, nothing but the sordid junk shop and the rust-corroded tins. What exasperation, what positive misery, to be so near to it and yet to know that it was irrevocably, irretrievably lost! A spasm of anguish passed through him. He gnawed at his bloodless lips, at the hopelessness ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... home, and friends, Die in a sordid strife — You can count your friends on your finger ends In the critical hours of life. Sacrifice all for the family's sake, Bow to their selfish rule! Slave till your big soft heart they break — The heart ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... sordid passion lull'd to rest, Man knows each gift of nature how to prize: Flies from the storm unto his fair one's breast, And there reposing waits ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations, receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth. The portion of the edifice with which Shakspeare had anything to do is hardly large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's stall that one of his descendants kept, and that still remains there, windowless, with the cleaver-cuts in its hacked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... he loved his wife as he loved her that night. He glanced at her, and she looked wonderful to him; in fact, there was in Sylvia's face that night an element of wonder. In it spirit was manifest, far above and crowning the flesh and its sordid needs. Her shoulders, under the fine lace gown, were bent; her very heart was bent; but she saw the goal where she could lay ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the Countess, under whose motherly wing Marguerite was being sheltered. I therefore soon discovered that my income of a million marks a year would be absorbed quite easily by Royal Society. The entire system appeared to me rather sordid, but such matters were arranged by bankers and secretaries and the principals were supposed to be quite innocent of any knowledge of, or concern ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... the various subterfuges by which such a caution might be baffled, he ought to have taken advice of those who were better informed. Mr Briggs, too! what a wretch! mean, low, vulgar, sordid!—the whole city of London, I believe, could not produce such another! how unaccountable to make you the ward of a man whose house you ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... out of Doctor Grimshawe's mouth, seemed already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to be in the study,—if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,—the sordid and rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... protection and avenged him. Was this a case of the kind,—or but a flying false anecdote? I would not be certain;—but at least, when Davidge died one evening, and Douglas was informed of the hour, he remarked, "I did not think he would have died before the half-price came in!" Sordid fellows are not safe from genius even in the grave. It spoils their sepulchral monuments,—as the old heralds tore the armorial blazonry from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... private inclinations to the main object he had in view. He avowedly married, in the first instance, for money, although at a later stage his wife was able to afford herself the consolation, and to pay him the graceful compliment of obliterating the sordid reproach by declaring that "if he had the chance again he would marry her for love"—a statement confirmed by his passionate, albeit somewhat histrionic love-letters. The desire of fame, which may easily degenerate ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... also as an instance of his ordinary conduct towards the servants of his house; it shows too, at the same time, whether the severe economy that he required in his domestic management, and of which I will speak elsewhere, was the result, as has been stated, of sordid avarice, or whether it was not rather a rule of prudence, from which he departed willingly whenever his kindness of heart or his humanity ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... an honour which, in the absence of San Martin, none could dispute with him. Although it was obvious that the circumstances about him were changing, and that the once high ideals of many were becoming affected by sordid considerations, Bolivar's exaltation of spirit seems to have continued unimpaired. That he had become sterner and more imperious there is ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... endeavour, the reckless effort, the gambler's anxiety, the self-indulgence, the crude passions, with a far-off, vague idealism, the selfish outlook, and yet great breadth of feeling, with narrowness of individual purpose. The rough life, the sordid struggle, had left their mark, and this easy, coaxing, comfortable life of London had not covered it up—not yet. He still belonged to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he himself feeling, that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but dared not pursue it unadvised, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... compass of their object; be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... admiring thousands. The original was fair; he had beautiful brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little feminine, a little hard, a little weak; still full of the light of youth, but already beginning to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness. He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver; his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons; for he had held a levee in the afternoon and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through an ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... much to say that one of the best things about the Tuskegee Institute is that it wins our young men and women from mean and sordid environment and brings them in contact with teachers whose minds, hearts, and lives have been enlarged and graced by the highest learning in the best educational institutions of the country. The school teaches no more important ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... "Very sordid magnificence," replied Lambert, raising his shoulders. "But I understand your feelings. On occasions we all have the nostalgia of the primitive life at times, and delight to pass ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... fight may go, Have turned my back on the sordid fray, To face the tranquil sunset-glow, And hope for the dawn of ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... across places that are pleasant. It is none the less glorious though no man follow it—nay, by the greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be quickened into loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song. From the mean squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun and Bassarid dance there no more. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... one of the ladies, 'do I live to see one so base, so sordid, as to be an enemy to liberty, and a defender of tyrants? Liberty, that sacred gift of heaven, that glorious privilege ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... of quite another value than her actual smartness, as London people would call it, her well-appointedness and her evident command of more than one manner. Handsome as she had been the year before, she had suggested sordid lodgings, bread and butter, heavy tragedy and tears; and if then she was an ill-dressed girl with thick hair who wanted to be an actress, she was already in these few weeks a performer who could even produce an impression of not performing. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... years after his boyhood his life was one of continual hardship. With that unsubdued conviction of his own powers, which often is the sole consolation of genius, he toiled on and bravely struggled through the sordid miseries of a strolling player's life. The road to success lies through many a thorny course, across many a dreary stretch of desert land, over many an obstacle, from which the fainting heart is often tempted to turn back. But hope, and the sense of power within, which no ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... had been spent in the respectable middle-class environment of his home at Halle; then came the three years at Hamburg, fantastic and exciting, yet, despite all the artistic stimulus of Keiser's opera-house, inevitably sordid and provincial. Italy introduced him to an entirely different atmosphere—to a life of dignity and serenity in which a classical culture, both literary and artistic, was the matured fruit of wealth, leisure, and good breeding. That exquisite ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... nature neither mean nor petty. In ordinary circumstances he remembered noblesse oblige, and though boastfulness may have been among his failings, he had a love of greatness which preserved him from sordid misdemeanours. Even if we agree with Parkman that greatness must be denied him, it yet remains to be pointed out that absolute greatness is a high standard attained by few. Frontenac was a greater man than most by virtue of robustness, ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... Trade, in its ideal, is generous and beautiful. It is the reality that he makes of it, by the way in which he does it, that seems to him sordid. ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... should find all slaves to come from princes and all princes from slaves. But fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy, in a long story of revolutions. It is most certain that our beginning had nothing before it, and our ancestors were some of them splendid, others sordid, as it happened. We have lost the memorials of our extraction; and, in truth, it matters not whence we come, but whither we go. Nor is it any more to our honor the glory of our predecessors, than it is to their shame the wickedness of their posterity. We are all ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... earth;' 'tis well That sordid earth should pass to earth again: In those dark fanes where truth has ceased to dwell, Why should the shrine remain? Deep in the dust let all such pass away; Why should they not?—clay mingles but with clay: Such is dark Manhood's prime, From whose high nature all of Heaven has past, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... marriage of her eccentric son— whose wife she never saw—had actually come between the wind and her nobility? Was there no finer, more ethereal touch in Elizabeth Gunning's stolen marriage with her Duke than is recorded in Horace Walpole's malicious gossip? Could such beauty have been utterly sordid? What were the fears and hopes of the lovely Maria Walpole as, after long concealment of her marriage, she trembled on the steps of a throne? How did those about her judge of Fanny Burney in the Digby affair? Did she wholly conceal ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... to the window, and regarded the sordid lines of washed clothes contemplatively. "What if Jimmy has been up to somethin' on the quiet, that the bulls ain't on to, and this bunch of securities is on the level? If I went to him on the square, and offered him a percentage to play dead, wouldn't ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... lord of the treasury, do we not owe them to the King who made him so? Did not the late King make my father an earl, and dismiss him with a pension of 4000 pounds a-year for his life? Could he or we not think these ample rewards? What rapacious sordid wretches must he and we have been, and be, could we entertain such an idea? As far have we all been from thinking him neglected by his country. Did not his country see and know these rewards? and could it think these rewards inadequate? Besides, Sir, great ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... mine had ever forfeited, I was ridiculed, sneered at, and looked upon with jealousy and hate by those whose souls were too narrow to believe in a noble action—and who, measuring and judging me by their own sordid standards of avaricious justice, deemed I would spare no pains to legally rob them, as they termed it,—when I saw this, I say, my blood became heated, my fiercer passions were roused, and I inwardly swore, that if it were now in my power to ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... night. I don't know where she went, but I am sure if I saw her again it would kill me. The rest of my story is of no interest; sordid misery, that is all. You may think, Villiers, that I have exaggerated and talked for effect; but I have not told you half. I could tell you certain things which would convince you, but you would never know a happy ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... people craves is the ditties of the music-hall. It has no desire to consider its own imperfections with a self-conscious eye. It delights in the splendour of mirrors, in the sparkle of champagne, in the trappings of a sordid and remote romance. The praise of liberty and equality suits the ear not of the democrat, but of the politician and dilettante, and it was to the dilettante and politician that Walt Whitman addressed his exhortations. Even his studied contempt ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... if I could see my brothers around me prospering, and be relieved from this cloud that hangs over us all, I feel as if I could be contented to give up all the gayeties of life; I certainly think that no hope of gain, however flattering, would tempt me again into the cares and sordid concerns of traffic. . . . In protracting my stay in Europe, I certainly do not contemplate pleasure, for I look forward to a life of loneliness and of parsimonious and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Poe was then unbalanced and not wholly responsible for his action. At forty he became engaged to a widow in Richmond, who could offer him at least a home. Generous friends raised a fund to start him in life afresh; but a little later he was found unconscious amid sordid surroundings in Baltimore. He died there, in a hospital, before he was able to give any lucid account of his last wanderings. It was a pitiful end; but one who studies Poe at any part of his career has an impression of a perverse fate that dogs the man ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... many ways, Romola had been disappointed in her husband's character; she had found that his handsome face and gay air masked a cowardice, a cunning meanness, a sordid selfishness of disposition that were all at variance with her high ideal of him; but that final unspeakable treachery of the dead man who had trusted him so implicitly shattered her ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... side to this gambling; it was a sordid struggle for money. At Brooks's in 1781 Fox, in partnership with some allies, kept the bank at faro as a regular business, one partner relieving another, and play going on continuously night and day. As the dealer and the partners could be seen at work through ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... that ever has been obeyed in China is to be fruitful and multiply." Craving for progeny has brought into existence thousands upon thousands of human beings who exist on the very brink of starvation. Nowhere in the civilized world is there a more sordid and desperate struggle to maintain life or a more hopeless poverty. But fear and self-love oblige them to continue their blind breeding. The apparent atrophy of the entire race is due to ancestor worship which binds it with chains of iron to its dead and to its past, and not until these bonds ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... laughing philosopher as long as the blue sky is overhead and the green grass underfoot. 'To lie,' says he, 'with relaxed muscles on the carpet of pine needles and look up through the gently swaying branches of majestic trees at the fleecy white clouds, dreaming away the hours far from the sordid activities of the market place, is one of the best nerve tonics in all the world.' It was an unfortunate phrase for Wilfred, because some of the husbands had tiptoed out of the grillroom to listen, and ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... I do?" he said to himself, in disgust. "I have no right whatever to betray this man's private affairs; at the same time I should never forgive myself—Mrs. Gaddesden would never forgive me—if I were to allow Lady Merton to run any risk of some sordid scandal which might get into the papers. Of course this young man ought to take himself off! If he had any proper feeling whatever he would see how altogether unfitting it is that he, with his antecedents, should be associating in this very friendly way ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... employment had filled Herzl with revulsion. The first reports of the Dreyfus trial, which appeared while he was working on his New Ghetto, therefore made no particular impression on him. It looked like a sordid espionage affair in which a foreign power—before long it was revealed that the foreign power was Germany, acting through Major von Schwartzkoppen—had been buying up through its agent secret documents of the French general staff. An officer ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... camping place, perhaps the old reservation would not have proved a spot to the heart of the woods lover, but it was sequestered and had about it that romance which attaches to deserted habitations that are not tainted by the sordid environments of city life. The old buildings had never been beautiful and it was only the atmosphere of a place deserted which gave them a sort ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... had just left me, and I wandered on and on, wrapped in my own thoughts, until I found myself in a quarter of London into which I had never hitherto penetrated. The streets were narrow, and, as if to be in keeping with the general air of gloom, the shops were small and their wares of a peculiarly sordid nature. ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... jackal is one of the most squalid and sordid creatures and features of war. We saw him in Dublin the other day emerging from his slum den to loot Sackville Street. Every battlefield feeds its ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... disingenuously limiting the advantage gained by the victory to the possession of a few wretched wrecks, without at all appreciating the grand political consequences which it so fully accomplished; exhibit, in the whole, a disposition meanly selfish, conspicuously sordid, and deplorably deficient in all the most lofty qualities of mind. What a contrast to our immortal Nelson! whose single sentence, in his letter of rebuke for this man—"God forbid that I should destroy an unresisting Dane! When they became my prisoners, I became their protector!"—deserves ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... individuality, in fact, was so abnormal that it rendered him unfit to play with others in quartets or other chamber music. As a man he had all the worst faults of a genius. The vast sums of money which he accumulated were gambled away. His whole life was disgraced by unbridled sensuality coupled with sordid avarice. This explains in a measure Paganini's inferior rank as a composer. Famous are his variations on the tune "God Save the King," his "Studies," his twenty variations on "Il Carnevale di Venezia," and the concert allegro "Perpetual Motion." The celebrated ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... But—I don't like Colonel Arran," he added with a sneer, "and I haven't any overwhelming admiration for Captain Hallam. And there you are, with your kindness and gentleness and—everything—utterly wasted on a dull, sordid brute who had already insulted you once. . . . Shall ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... mine, Willie, And fancy I've the art To see, while gazing in your face, What's passing in your heart: 'Tis joy an honest man to hold, That gem of modest worth, More prized than all the sordid gold Of all the mines of earth, Willie, Of all the mines ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... easy-going cameraderie incomprehensible when one took into consideration the disillusioning circumstances of her life, her vocation as a paid government spy, trusted with secrets and worthy of her trust, dedicated to days of adventure always dangerous, generally sordid, and like at any time ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... civil list for your wife and for the requirements of the house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in twelve equal portions month by month, has something in it that is a little mean and close, and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and mistrustful souls. By acting in this way you ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... of a Coroner's Inquest," pursued YORICK. "Sensibility would probably have 'skipped' the sordid circumstance. 'FREDERICK MARTIN, aged seventy-two, a well-known Violinist, and Professor of Music, formerly a member of the orchestra of the Italian Opera at Her Majesty's and Covent Garden Theatres,' found life too ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... rest so peacefully. "No wretch comes here, at dead of night." I said, "To drag the weary from his hard-earn'd bed; No schoolboys here with mournful relics play, And kick the 'dome of thought' o'er common clay; No city cur snarls here o'er dead men's bones; No sordid fiend removes memorial stones. The dead have here what to the dead belongs, Though legislation makes not laws, but wrongs." I sought a letter'd stone, on which my tears Had fall'n like thunder-rain, in other years, My mother's grave I sought, in my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... overhead. The prospect alarmed me, for it seemed to me that this was not a likely world for adventures; nor was I reassured by the sight of the town, whose one long street of low, old-fashioned houses struck me as being mean and sordid. I was conscious that the place had an unpleasant smell, and I was already driven to thinking of my pocket-money and my play-box—agreeable thoughts which I had made up my mind in the train to reserve carefully for possible ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... another artist full of a genuine enthusiasm and love for his art, which placed him high above those sordid temptations which urge meaner natures to make time the measure of profit. He was born at Gyffn, near Conway, in North Wales—the son of a gardener. He early showed indications of his talent by the carvings in wood which ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... roomy castle and its grounds and the cliffs hard by he could command every move and aspect of her who was the rejuvenated Spirit of the Past to him—in the effulgence of whom all sordid details were disregarded. ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... city increased rapidly the price of grain, and augmented the alarm of the people, who began to urge the magistrate to listen to their prayers, and coerce the sordid corn- dealers, who had, no doubt, numerous pits yet unopened. The alarm became still greater in the cantonments, where the commanding officer attributed all the evil to the inefficiency of the commissariat and the villany of the corn-dealers; ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... is Liberality, Alike beneficent and wise, To shun wild prodigality, And sordid avarice despise. Yet, for thy favor lavish grown, A prodigal I mean to prove; An honorable vice I own, But giving ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... traveler had announced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific, "There was honor amongst thieves, and this was what distinguished thieves from honest men." That was it. It hit the nail on the head. These modern supermen were a lot of sordid banditti who had the successful effrontery to preach a code of right and wrong to their victims which they themselves did not practise. With them, a man's word was good just as long as he was compelled to keep it. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL was only applicable to the honest worker. They, the supermen, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the men and women of character and ability who, as Home Missionaries, are devoting their lives to such fields—the most difficult in the world—where no picturesqueness of scenes or people relieves the strain—where sordid sin, monotony, crudity, and newness prevail, but where the returns in character-building contribute to the life of a nation whose ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... he could dare to link his supreme littleness with consummate perfection; to freight the miserable barque of his fortunes with so precious a cargo; to encounter the feeling—and there is no escape for it—"I must drag that woman down, not alone into obscurity, but into all the sordid meanness of a small condition, that never can emerge into anything better." He cannot disguise from himself that it is not within his reach to attain power, or place, or high consideration. Such men make no name in life; ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... a rude isle his ruder lineage came, The spark, that, from a suburb-hovel's hearth Ascending, wraps some capital in flame, Hath not a meaner or more sordid birth. And for the soul that bade him waste the earth - The sable land-flood from some swamp obscure That poisons the glad husband-field with dearth, And by destruction bids its fame endure, Hath not a source more ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... settled if she persuades him to take a room outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and hide ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... after the escapade of Easter Eve, was visited with a sharp attack of inflammatory rheumatism, only just stopping short of rheumatic fever. Hannah got a doctor, and tended her sufficiently while the worst lasted, partly because she was, after all, no monster, but only a commonly sordid and hard-natured woman, and partly because for a day or two Louie's state set her pondering, perforce, what might be the effect on Mr. Gurney's remittances if the child incontinently died. This thought undoubtedly quickened ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... everyday existence in which she had to work and endure was becoming day by day more anxious and troubled. An almost unliveable life it seems, recalling it, stifled with the vulgar tragedy of Branwell's woes, the sordid cares that his debts entailed, the wearing anxiety that watched the oncoming blindness of old Mr. Bronte. These months of 1846 during which, let us remember, Emily was writing 'Wuthering Heights,' ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... writer, 'would have been intolerable enough had they been confined to the stronger sex; but, unfortunately, the women of the day were equally carried away by this criminal infatuation. The disgusting influence of this sordid vice was so disastrous to female minds, that they lost their fairest distinction and privileges, together with the blushing honours of modesty. Their high gaming was necessarily accompanied with great losses. If all their ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... she asked. "Isn't it little and mean and sordid and stingy and unjust? You create a condition which will tie me to the house; you are angry with the condition because it's expensive; you're angry with me for being house-tied. Can I help it? Can I help anything? Do you think I don't want theatres and to go out to dinner with you ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... and pious Puritan magistrates and these gentlewomen of Boston and Salem the only colonists who displayed such sordid and mercenary bargaining and stipulating in matrimonial ventures: numberless letters and records throughout New England prove the unvarying spirit of calculation that pervaded fashionable courtship. A ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... those who wrongfully appropriate their neighbours' goods and put to death those who have done no wrong. These are they who cause our adversaries to grow and multiply, and who in very truth are traitors, not to their friends only, but to themselves, spurred on by sordid ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... now called Broadway." A block of houses and another street now lie between that highway and the east front of the manor-house. The building is closely hemmed in by the sordid signs of progress. Ugly houses, in crowded blocks, cover all the great surrounding space that once was thick forest, fair orchards, gardens, fields, and pastoral rivulet. The Neperan or Saw Mill River flows, sluggish and ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... through the following week he hardly knew how. He found occupation, to a much greater extent than he was actually aware of, in a sordid and yet heroic struggle with himself. For several months now, he had been leading, under Gertrude's inspiration, a strictly decent and sober life. So long as he was at comparative peace with Gertrude and with himself, such a life was more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... tried to think of it, had left the bewilderment of a mysterious terror. Her face was streaming with water and tears; there was a wisp of hair on her forehead, another stuck to her cheek; her hat was on one side, undecorously tilted; her soaked veil resembled a sordid rag festooning her forehead. There was an utter unreserve in her aspect, an abandonment of safeguards, that ugliness of truth which can only be kept out of daily life by unremitting care for appearances. He did not know why, looking at her, ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... and year! She sent a Pict to play the felon here. Yet Caledonia claims some native worth, [11] As dull Boeotia gave a Pindar birth; 150 So may her few, the lettered and the brave, Bound to no clime, and victors of the grave, Shake off the sordid dust of such a land, And shine like children of a happier strand; As once, of yore, in some obnoxious place, Ten names (if found) ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... depths of Chelsea, with the usual dull scent of stale paint and staler tobacco, and very little else; it was quite devoid of the ordinary artistic trappings. From the window shrill cries were heard from the ragged children, who fought and played in the gutter of a sordid street. Woodville had come ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... democracy, but each country assumed that it itself must be the controller of that democratic principle. Another frequently expressed view of the purposes of England and America is that they have purely sordid interests, that they are capable of fighting only for ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... good deeds. Gratitude for some such acts is supposed to have caused even the tomb of Nero to be adorned with garlands. But Henry VIII. never had a kind moment. He was the same moral monster at eighteen, when he succeeded to his sordid, selfish father, that he was at fifty-six, when he, a dying man, employed the feeble remnants of his once Herculean strength to stamp the death-warrants of innocent men. No wonder that Mr. Froude's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... on the continent; and an alderman of London, a relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner. The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire, surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck with ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... may choose to do. She'll know that, and so shall we. Besides, we can beg to have the tomb kept like this for the great shrine of Meroee. Our memory of this place can't have the glamour torn away whatever happens. Nothing sordid will come between it and us, as it would if—why, after all, where's the great difference between opening the coffin of a woman dead thousands of years ago, or a few months? Supposing people wanted to dig up Queen Elizabeth, to see what had been buried ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Brouwers'; and it is hardly necessary to say that the painter has seen nothing of the legendary patriarchal beauty and solemnity which lends so holy a charm to Millet's Breton folk. Mr. Clausen has seen nothing but the sordid and the mean, and his execution in this picture is as sordid and as mean as his vision. There is not a noble gesture expressive of weariness nor an attitude expressive of resignation. Mr. Clausen seems to have said, "I will ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... comes home with peculiar force to the people of America. Do we want the millions of abortions performed annually to be multiplied? Do we want the precious, tender qualities of womanhood, so much needed for our racial development, to perish in these sordid, abnormal experiences? Or, do we wish to permit woman to find her way to fundamental freedom through safe, unobjectionable, scientific means? We have our choice. Upon our answer to these questions depends in a tremendous degree the character ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... of Alaska, and Cape Horn. The one question of the hour is how to make all the coming millions patriots towards their country, scholars towards the intellect, obedient citizens towards the laws of nature and God. Our national peril is Mammonism, and the sordid pursuit of gold. Our fathers came hither in pursuit of God and liberty,—not gold and territory. Sixty of our present ninety millions of people have entered the earthly scene since the Civil War. Our young men and women, and the children of foreign born ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... marriage, led entirely by Marion and her ways and desires, never went towards Edinburgh. The wretched old lady soon began to feel herself utterly deserted; and when her anger at this position had driven love out of her heart, she fell an easy prey to the most sordid, miserable, and degrading of passions, the hoarding of money. Nor was it until death opened her eyes that she perceived she had had ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... her share of trouble, no doubt; but Fate had shown her fair play. Just simple everyday Death!—maternity troubles lived through in shelter; nursing galore, certainly—who escapes it? Of purse troubles, debts and sordid plagues, a certain measure no doubt, for who escapes them? But to that life of hers the scorching fires that had worked so hard to slay her sister's heart, and failed so signally, had never penetrated. Indeed, the only really acute grief of her placid life had been the supposed ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Pavaglione behind the Cathedral; he employed three assistants, from Florence—Lapo Antonio di Lapo, a sculptor; Lodovico del Buono, called Lotti, a founder; and Pietro Urbano, a man who worked for him for a long time. His way of life was frugal and sordid in the extreme. In his letter to ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... which she had so looked forward, and yet had dreaded as much because it meant the end,—this moment which might, nevertheless, have meant much to them both even though it were the end, she herself had spoiled! All its delicate beauty changed to a sordid suspicion, it lay in ruins now because of her thoughtless words. She dared not guess at what he must be thinking! For a desperate second she considered flight. Then proudly she raised her head. One more thing, at least, about her now he ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... who chanced to be unpopular with their fathers, of that unrestrained license of speech which left nothing untouched, however sacred, however holy it might be, which chanced to stand in the way of gross and sordid interest. The ideas of the hot-blooded, fire-eating Southern youth of to-day, the recklessness and the treason, the denationalizing spirit of revolution and blood which so readily manifests itself in contempt of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... affirmatively by showing the disadvantage to the public and to civilization of a lawyer refusing to serve a known offender. The popular interest, like any other good cause, can be and commonly is, served by foul means. Justice itself may be promoted by acts essentially unjust. In serving a sordid ambition a powerful scoundrel may by acts in themselves wicked augment the prosperity of a whole nation. I have not the right to deceive and lie in order to advantage my fellowmen, any more than I have the right to ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... with happiness, turned to look at Adelaide and her mother, and saw that they were tremulous with pleasure and delight at their little trick. He felt himself mean, sordid, a fool; he longed to punish himself, to rend his heart. A few tears rose to his eyes; by an irresistible impulse he sprang up, clasped Adelaide in his arms, pressed her to his heart, and stole a kiss; then with the simple heartiness ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... "The sordid wretches judge of others by their own base minds, and conceive those temptations too powerful for men of worth, which they are themselves conscious they would be unable to resist. But are the insurgents then so insolent and so powerful? We have ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... she is beset and tortured. But though our contract is at an end, and broken past all redemption; though I charge upon her want of firmness and want of truth, both to herself and me; I do not now, and never will believe, that any sordid motive, or her own unbiassed will, has led ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... determined that, in spite of geography and diplomacy, in spite of Rocky Mountains and Lake Superior wildernesses, Laurentian plateaus and Maine intrusions, {210} Canada should be made one and independent. Often this national spirit has been manipulated to serve sordid ends in railway as in tariff matters; the flag has covered a multitude of sinners. Yet whether it was the Grand Trunk or the Intercolonial, the Canadian Pacific or the Grand Trunk Pacific, the national purpose has been strong, and must fairly be ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... woman any less an elegant woman because her love of neatness, order, and beauty leads her to make vigorous personal exertions to keep her own home undefiled? For my part, I think a disorderly, ill-kept home, a sordid, uninviting table, has driven more husbands from domestic life than the unattractiveness of any overworked woman. So long as a woman makes her home harmonious and orderly, so long as the hour of assembling around the family table is something to be looked forward to as a comfort and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... state of things reigns supreme which cannot be surpassed by the most corrupt of South American Republics. There the Boer shows his character in its most unpleasant features. Low, sordid, corrupt, his chief magistrate as well as his lowest official readily listens to 'reasons that jingle,' and, like the gentleman in the 'Mikado,' is not averse to 'insults.' He calls his country a republic—it is so in name only. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of our great cities would carry out the example set by their Master, would refuse to take the words of those who are blinded and callous by conventional thought and the indifference which comes to sordid natures long accustomed to mingle with wretchedness, and themselves frequently visit the exiles of society in the cities where they dwell; if its members would for one day in each week visit the miserables of society, I doubt not that the pulpit would soon become ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various |
