"Sordidness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to her own bed. All the aching pain of her proposed future came over her with its dirty sordidness. She could never stand it, she thought, and clenched her teeth. Well, it was not necessary. When Lawrence was gone, there was the lake. That would be her way out of it all. No one need ever know. The thought of death seemed very sweet ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... went on, "I think it must have been something really high and fine in him that made the sordidness of it all seem so intolerable. I suppose it is as Uncle Dan says;—these things are a matter of race. I think Nanni must have more than his share of the family inheritance. Did you never ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Queen Bess rented rooms and sold drinks according to the easy-going ideas of that day. But there was something untouched by the sordidness of her calling about this ample Rabelaisian woman. There was a noise about Queen Bess lacking in her ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... of them; the roar of vehicles pervading me,—wearisome cabs and omnibuses; everywhere the dingy brick edifices heaving themselves up, and shutting out all but a strip of sullen cloud, that serves London for a sky,—in short, a general impression of grime and sordidness; and at this season always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometimes so densely as almost to spiritualize the materialism and make the scene resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in ghostliness. It is strange how little ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hear a woman's fretful voice, and the impatient jerk and jar of kitchen things, indicative of ill temper or worry. The longer he stood absorbing this farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of the homecoming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the pail of milk down on the platform by ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... outside world that knew them not, but to themselves. And he has glorified those lives in the interpretation, not by the introduction of false elements or the elimination of unlovely features, but simply by his insistence, in spite of the sordidness of poverty, on the naked dignity ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... fancy, of cold metals and warm sooty surfaces; of the savour of kippers cooking over innumerable London grates and the aroma of mugs of beer served out over innumerable London bars; something at once acrid yet genial, suggesting sordidness and unlimited possibility. The vibration of adventure was in it and the sentiment, oddly intermingled, of human solidarity ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... You read no trace of greed, of vanity, of sordidness, of—" An angry laugh escaped her lips. "And you are a reader ...
— Passing of the Third Floor Back • Jerome K. Jerome
... marriage. The law allows in these cases compensation to be claimed by the injured partner for the harm suffered, and, though no one can uphold these breach of promise cases (which have increased so unfortunately in the war-period) it should be possible to avoid a similar sordidness. The establishment of right to compensation is not a new thing in divorce; used in the way I suggest it would serve as a safeguard against a too hasty escape from marriage, as well as being an act of justice for the partner who wished for the divorce to compensate, as fully as his ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... life. It has a right to expect that he will not be a victim of the narrowing, cramping influence of avarice; that he will not be a slave of the dollar or stoop to a greedy, grasping career: that he will be free from the sordidness which often ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... The novel became a part of the "Human Comedy" in 1845. The struggle of Balthazar Claes in his quest for the Absolute, his disregard of all else save his work, and the heroic devotion of Josephine and Marguerite, are characteristic features of Balzac's art; the sordidness of life and the mad passion for the unattainable are admirably relieved, as in "Eugenie Grandet" and "Old Goriot," by a certain nobility and purity of motive. The novel is generally acknowledged one of Balzac's masterpieces, both in vigour ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... law in New York, must seem to originate and to grow in his own brain; she would seem to be merely assenting. Also, it was a delicate matter because the basic reason for the change was money; and it was her cue as a lady, refined and sensitive and wholly free from sordidness, so to act that he would think her loftily indifferent to money. She had learned from dealing with her grandmother that the way to get the most money was by seeming ignorant of money values, a cover ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... truer, if not so witty, in this form: "He was of Jewish, hence of poor, parentage." Among German Jews throughout the middle ages and up to the first half of this century, poverty was the rule, a comfortable competency a rare exception, wealth an unheard of condition. But Jewish poverty was relieved of sordidness by a precious gift of the old rabbis, who said: "Have a tender care of the children of the poor; from them goeth forth the Law"; an admonition and a prediction destined to be illustrated in the case of Zunz. Very early he lost ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... that of a convert: his curiosity was that of a connoisseur. As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its "small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls," he glories: in the sordidness of it all, because "every ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the strength and courage which you managed to infuse into my youthful aspirations; but now that I have seen you, will you permit me to say that you have been quite unknowingly a help to me again? A week ago I was half-disheartened of my life because of the apparent sordidness of its daily duties, and now that I have seen you giving your life to perform small and unassuming services for others, my own duties have appeared more sacred. I can't tell you how much I admire your unselfish devotion to these children. Don't think me rude because I say it. I ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... habitual reference made throughout these pages to national interest as the test or standard of national policy has (it may be suggested) a touch of sordidness and selfishness, and implies that statesmanship has ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... vast Sums, or have expended them in a manner suitable to the Honour of the Prince, and the unbounded Zeal of his Subjects. But they were all in a short Time squandered away, among Foreigners, who made him their constant Dupe. Indeed, the best Schemes miscarried thro' his Sordidness, and yet with all these Faults, he maintain'd his Ascendency over the Prince, so that no Courtier dared utter ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... should perish in this manner!" His uncle Claudius spent half his time at playing at dice; that was the main fruit of his sovereignty. I omit the madnesses of Caligula's delights, and the execrable sordidness of those of Tiberius. Would one think that Augustus himself, the highest and most fortunate of mankind, a person endowed too with many excellent parts of nature, should be so hard put to it sometimes for ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... abandon the cause of liberty which they had championed. To his bride Hyperion had promised a redeemed Greece—a lament is all that he can bring her. She dies, Hyperion comes to Germany where his aesthetic Greek soul is severely jarred by the sordidness, apathy and insensibility of these "barbarians." Returning to the Isthmus, he becomes a hermit and writes his letters to Bellarmin, no less "thatenarm und gedankenvoll" himself than his unfortunate ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... secondly, that, as for some purpose or another she required two hundred florins of gold, he out of his abundance should supply her necessity; these conditions being satisfied she would be ever at his service. Offended by such base sordidness in one whom he had supposed to be an honourable woman, Gulfardo passed from ardent love to something very like hatred, and cast about how he might flout her. So he sent her word that he would right gladly pleasure her in this and in any other matter that might be in his power; let her ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... mother, her own young struggles for food and warmth, the woes of Mrs. Banks, had in them something nobler than she could find in the distresses of Christabel and Aunt Rose and Francis Sales, something redeeming them from the sordidness in which they were set. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... himself in the loft of the barn among his cages of pigeons, confronted with the sordidness of material reality. He opened a small window and then flung ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Ishmael a time when the sordidness inseparable from a death in a civilised country made of everything a hideousness, and he was aware of a rising tide of irritability in himself that he found it difficult to keep within the decorous bounds of the subdued aspect ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... The sordidness and trickery of heathen priests[85] is contrasted with the uprightness and single-minded devotion of Daniel. His God moreover delivers him, but their gods do not deliver them. The Bel of this history is as dumb as the Baal of I. Kings xviii.; their names and characters ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... to hear their sweet little voices, and to see their rapt faces and to know that, however sordid their lives might be, here was Dream, founded on the Greatest Truth, which would lift them above the sordidness. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... stirred within him since those days of younger manhood twenty years ago when the world was still a place of dreams and life a tourney where glory might be won. The boy's face, still with its spiritual remembrances in spite of all the sordidness of his past, the utter and obvious surrender of soul that shone from his eyes, made the man almost shudder with a new horror of the foulness that twenty years of wild license upon the plains had flung upon him. A fierce hate of what he had become, an appalling vision of what he was ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... mind from the outside world an almost repulsive narrowness and a pitiful sordidness which amounts to tragedy in the lives of such people as those portrayed in Pembroke, but quite generally the tragedy exists only in the comprehension of the observer and not at all in that of ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... later lifetime, and in which he died at last. Altogether, it is an exceedingly unsuitable place for a pastoral and rural poet to live or die in,—even more unsatisfactory than Shakespeare's house, which has a certain homely picturesqueness that contrasts favorably with the suburban sordidness of the abode before us. The narrow lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity of wretched hovels are depressing to remember; and the steam of them (such is our human weakness) might almost make the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... so little more than nothing was certainly a paltry enterprise for two grown men; but my own tale, as it was to be represented in a court by Simon Fraser, appeared a fair second in every possible point of view of sordidness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dick, and especially Clara, were so jealous of our up-river festival that they would not allow me to have much to say to them. I could only notice that the people in the fields looked strong and handsome, both men and women, and that so far from there being any appearance of sordidness about their attire, they seemed to be dressed specially for the occasion,—lightly, of course, but gaily ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... spirit who would not break a bruised reed—who went about doing good—was wont to blaze forth with hot indignation against sordidness and systematized injustice. Hear His fierce denunciation of the "scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites" who devoured widows' houses and for a pretense made long prayers; and behold Him casting the money-changers out of the temple because they had turned the house ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... comparison, and his absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made him forget the outward setting of their lives. But to-night he recalled the nurse's comment—"it looks so dead"—and the phrase roused him to a fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness of it all—the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was possible to put any ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Shoppe was artistic. You could tell that by the fact that none of the arts and crafts wares exposed for sale were in the least useful. And it was too artistic, too far above the sordidness of commercialism, to put any prices on the menu-cards. Consequently Father was worried about his bill all the time he was encouraging his guests to forget their uncomfortably decorative surroundings and talk like regular people. But when he ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... seemed to bring them closer, and to make the quick beats of their hearts more friendly. The whole picture of the life of the poor was here in all its sordidness; dirty, malicious children played here, and abused each other, and wrangled; a drunkard reeled; grey buckets swung on a grey wooden yoke across the shoulders of a grey woman ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... greater clearness the wonder that a man of such godlike race had held her in his arms. The screaming medley of San Francisco, with its restless shipping, belching factories, and thundering traffic, did not confuse her; instead, she comprehended swiftly the pitiful sordidness of Twenty Mile and the skin- lodged Toyaat village. And she looked down at the boy that clutched her hand and wondered that she had borne him by such ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... educated, as a detective he would have been a fizzle; his mind would have been concerned with variant lofty thoughts, and the sordid would have repelled him: and all crimes are painted on a background of sordidness. In one thing Haggerty stood among his peers and topped many of them; in his long record there was not one instance of his arresting an ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... time at getting into the stir of actual life, the routine and sordidness soon palled and he began to fret in the harness. This mood kept him from composition till he forced from himself, in 1848, the last of his short stories, including "The Great Stone Face" and "Ethan Brand." Despite the effort, the stories rank well. In 1849 he was dismissed from office by a change ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... a freeman to the free, His errand is of vast concern. Then let us show our loyalty By aiming sordidness to spurn. ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... the epigram that San Francisco has every vice but hypocrisy. Civically, two cross currents cut through the city's life; one of, a high visioned enlightenment which astounds the visiting stranger by its force, its white-fire enthusiasm; the other a black sordidness and soddenness which displays but one redeeming quality—the characteristic San Franciscan candor. That openness is physical as well as spiritual. The city, dropped over its many hills like a great ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... Railroad. From the time you enter the station you are as good as gone. There is no progress between the city's tenements, with untidy bedding airing in some windows and fat old slatterns leaning out from others to survey the sordidness and squalor of the streets below. A swift plunge into darkness, some thundering moments, and your train glides out upon the wide wastes of the New Jersey meadows. The city is gone. You are even in another ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... love frequently; but not oftener than once a year had I encountered a woman who affected me so seriously as Kate Hickey. She was so shrewd, and yet so flippant! When I spoke of art she yawned. When I deplored the sordidness of the world she laughed, and called me "poor fellow!" When I told her what a treasure of beauty and freshness she had she ridiculed me. When I reproached her with her brutality she became angry, and sneered at me for being what she called a fine gentleman. One sunny afternoon we were ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... struck her as a likely place to get an unobstructed view. To reach some height and sit in peace, staring out over far-spreading vistas, contented her. She could put away the unpleasantness of the immediate past, discount the possible sordidness of the future, and lose herself ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and dissatisfied with their meeting. It was full of sordidness and discomfort; it seemed in one hour to have stripped from their lives the romance of youth. But after their little tiff they tried to recover their spirits and succeeded in keeping up a sham kind of gayety. Arrived at Silverthorn's lodging, they completed their business; Vibbard handing over a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... had seen it in that mysterious region which had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the trenches, in the operating, rooms of field hospitals, at outposts between the confronting armies where the sentries walked hand in hand with death. I had seen it in its dirt and horror and sordidness, this thing they were ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Chicago at this time—wards including the business heart, South Clark Street, the water-front, the river-levee, and the like—were two men, Michael (alias Smiling Mike) Tiernan and Patrick (alias Emerald Pat) Kerrigan, who, for picturequeness of character and sordidness of atmosphere, could not be equaled elsewhere in the city, if in the nation at large. "Smiling" Mike Tiernan, proud possessor of four of the largest and filthiest saloons of this area, was a man of large and genial mold—perhaps six feet one inch in height, broad-shouldered ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... death, disgusted by the banality of existence, has given us, under the title, "The Little Demon," a pathetic picture of human baseness and sordidness, which cannot be read ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... upon All Saints' Day, before an audience which could not but be numerous in a populous city, where it is a wonder to see the Archbishop in the pulpit. I began now to think seriously upon my future conduct. I found the archbishopric sunk both in its temporals and spirituals by the sordidness, negligence, and incapacity of my uncle. I foresaw infinite obstacles to its reestablishment, but perceived that the greatest and most insuperable difficulty lay in myself. I considered that the strictest ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... goodness. If gentlemen would regard the virtues of their ancestors, the founders of their quality; that gallant courage, that solid wisdom, that noble courtesy which advanced their families, and severed them from the vulgar; this degenerate wantonness and sordidness of language would return to the dunghill, or rather, which God grant, be quite ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... seeming sordidness of daily life one turns to this as proof incontestable that humanity is at heart infinitely kinder and better and less selfish than it esteems itself. Even other lands and other peoples when the horror of the calamity ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... quaint fancies, tread firmly the American soil of the nineteenth century. But Bunner's realism never concerned itself with the record of trivialities for their own sake. When he portrayed the lower phases of city life, it was the humor of that life he caught, and not its sordidness; its kindliness, and not its brutality. His mind was healthy, and since it was a poet's mind, the point upon which it was so nicely balanced was love: love of the trees and flowers, love of his little brothers in wood and field, love of his country home, love of the vast city in its innumerable ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... not each year renewed, refreshed, glorified by the magnificent honor and fine expectancies of its young men, it would soon become simply fiendish in its sordidness, selfishness, and baseness. Let the world, then, preserve these fine qualities at which it too often idly sneers; not for the young man's sake—no, that is not to be expected—but ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Christianity—no benevolence; nothing but the spirit of the extortioner is here manifested. There is no feeling of sorrow shown at her unfortunate position, no disposition evinced to shield the helpless mother and her babes. No! we find his actions narrowed down to the sordidness of the miser, the avariciousness of the extortioner. A feeling of surprise at such conduct may flit across your bosoms, gentlemen, and you may perchance doubt that I can show a man of this city, so bereft of charity, so utterly oblivious ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very boyhood. And without—the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time. It was cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house. His mind went back ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... and was moved by its swift, tumultuous life; hence, he was able to stir it. No mere reformer or "up-lifter" who sees only ugliness and sordidness can effect very far-reaching changes, and retain his faith. Mr. Nelson succeeded in both. He came to Cincinnati under the high compulsion of a mission, and relinquished his work on the same high plane of faith and vision. To have retained such ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... made irresistible by the apprehension that if not nominated by the Republicans the Democrats would appropriate him, and make him a formidable instrument of mischief. His nomination, however, was only secured by cautious and timely diplomacy, and potent appeals to his sordidness, in the shape of assurances that he should have the office for a second term. But as the nominee of his party, fairly committed to its principles and measures touching the unsettled questions of reconstruction ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... had loved her husband, I have little doubt. Vicious women have few vices, and sordidness is not usually one of them. She had probably married him, borne towards him by one of those waves of passion upon which the souls of animal natures are continually rising and falling. On possession, however, had quickly followed satiety, and from satiety had grown the desire for ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... highest wage in that neighbourhood, made no more than $300 a year; and, with land at sixty to seventy-five dollars per acre, it seemed to him that he would be an old man before he could become the owner of a farm. He was heart sick of the pettiness and sordidness of the farm life, whose horizon seemed to be that of the hundred acres or so that comprised it. Therefore he resolved that to the great West he would go, that great wonderful West with its vast spaces and its vast ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... before it was taken down, its interior space was leased to "Childs," the bankers, as a repository or storage-place for their old ledgers. Thus does the pomp of state make way for the sordidness of trade, and even the wealthy corporation of the City of London was not above turning a penny or ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... was in a mood of high scorn for sordidness—a mood induced by the spectacle of the shameful manners of Conover, Frank, and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... middle ages, 'The feudal aids are the beginning of taxation, of which they for a long time answered the purpose.' (Hallam, Middle Ages, ch. x. pt. 1, p. 189) This fact frees Achilles from the apparent charge of sordidness. Plato, however, (De Rep. vi. 4), says, "We cannot commend Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, as if he spoke correctly, when counselling him to accept of presents and assist the Greeks, but, without presents, not to ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... motive. Already he dreamed of having women in his arms. He looked shyly at the ankles of women crossing the street, and listened eagerly when the crowd about the stove in Wildman's fell to telling smutty stories. He sank to unbelievable depths of triviality in sordidness, looking shyly into dictionaries for words that appealed to the animal lust in his queerly perverted mind and, when he came across it, lost entirely the beauty of the old Bible tale of Ruth in the suggestion of intimacy between man and woman that it brought to him. And yet Sam McPherson was ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... ending his days in want, and is more anxious for the morrow than the poorest of the poor. The only redeeming point in his character is his self-denial—a truly noble characteristic when associated with a generous disposition—which, however, in his case, loses its value through the sordidness of its aim. Yes, he is a worldly man, beyond the shadow of a doubt. But this is equally true of the man whose manner of life is the very opposite of this—the spendthrift. He values money only in so far as it enables ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... nor garden dizzy-scented with jasmine. She was young and clean, sweet without being sprinkled with pink sugar; too young to know much about the world's furious struggle; too happy to have realized its inevitable sordidness; yet born a woman who would not always wish to be "protected," and round whom all her circle ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... thoughts. Her fancy pictured gruesome places, foul dens where the child sat—pale and worn and listless. Did they tie her hands? Would they let her run about a little—and play? But she could not play—a child could not play in all the strangeness and sordidness. The mother had watched the dripping rain too long. It seemed to be falling on coffins. She crept back to the fire and held out her hands to a feeble blaze that flickered up, and died out. Why did not Marie come back? It was three o'clock—where was ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... towards others; manifestly moderate and self-denying in themselves. Let them be ashamed of idleness, as they would be of the most acknowledged sin. When Providence blesses them with affluence, let them withdraw from the competition of vanity; and, without sordidness or absurdity, shew by their modest demeanour, and by their retiring from display, that, without affecting singularity, they are not slaves to fashion; that they consider it as their duty to set an example of moderation and sobriety, and to reserve for nobler and more disinterested ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... who was so intelligent—could have allowed herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself, all that she might have had! ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... in their simple home life. To many it would have seemed a narrow and even a sordid life. It could not have been the latter, for all their hard work, their petty economies and plans to increase the hoard in the savings bank were robbed of sordidness by an honest, quiet affection for each other, by mutual sympathy and a common purpose. It undoubtedly was a meager life, which grew narrower with time and habit. There had never been much romance to begin ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... clearly than the sordidness of this horrible existence, a big palace with a terraced front and a mile long drive straight to the park gate, past great trees and turf that is always green; and long rows of stately ladies looking down ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... sentimental relations did undergo an imperceptible development, as subtle as that which led in the first place to their union. This union had its original promptings in a not unromantic chain of circumstances. Of vulgarity or sordidness it had nothing. Had Elodie been free it would never have entered Andrew's head not to marry her, and she would have married him offhand. Lackaday insists on our remembering this vital fact. Sincere affection drew them together. Then the first couple ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... scrunching of the pebbles drawn back by the ebb. He looked along the row of windows, all dark and silent now. A rush of pleasant fancies suddenly chased away the grim depression of the last few minutes. Out of all this sordidness and mystery there remained at least something in life for him to do. A certain aimlessness of purpose which had troubled him during the last few months had disappeared. He had found an ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Elaine was violently angry, though she could not have told why. She marched out of the dining-room and slammed the door. "Delicate, sensitive soul," she said to herself, scornfully. "Wants people to hunt for money he thinks may be hidden in his room, and yet is so far above sordidness that he can't hear it ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... not only felt but acted as he would not have done if he had had a truer foresight. He would not have parted with his ring; for Romola, and others to whom it was a familiar object, would be a little struck with the apparent sordidness of parting with a gem he had professedly cherished, unless he feigned as a reason the desire to make some special gift with the purchase-money; and Tito had at that moment a nauseating weariness of simulation. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Shirt, as we called him—who had once been sated with formal dinners and society, and is now inclined to cry them down. He leans a bit toward socialism and free verse. He was about to praise the country for its freedom from sordidness and artificiality, when Flint, who had ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt, prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in the outward circumstances of ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... horror gradually soaked into him. He saw the horror of the City Road, he realized the ghastly cold sordidness of the tram-car in which he sat. Cold, stark, ashen sterility had him surrounded. Where then was the luminous, wonderful world he belonged to by rights? How did he come to be thrown on this refuse-heap where ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... a higher call to Congress or the governor's chair. Harwood had already described in the "Courier" the attainments of several statesmen who were willing to sacrifice their private interests for the high seat at the state capitol. The pettiness and sordidness of most of the politicians he met struck him humorously, but the tone of his articles ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... rate. I have been told that in their day making a profit by lending money was not considered at all an aristocratic proceeding, and procured for those who indulged in it the name of usurers, a word I do not like; it savours of sordidness. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... dear sir, your career, for it is an honorable one. The world, bad as it is, has been much worse than now for authors; and through the great reading public, there are many generous souls, whose views are not confined to sordidness and self. May all your laudable exertions be crowned with ample success—with pleasure and profit to ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... taken of him, and in a day or two he was able to walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness and unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of spiders' webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so shaggy, grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a perceptible sense of something very ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ago, and its people were country people. Yet there was another side to the picture. The charm of it was a generalized one—I think an impersonal one; for with the thought of individual persons who might illustrate it there comes too often into my memory a touch of sordidness, if not in one connection then in another; so that I suspect myself, not for the first time, of sentimentality. Was the social atmosphere after all anything but a creation of my own dreams? Was ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... laughing boisterously over tragic situations? And yet, if they did not come to laugh, they would not come at all. Mockery is the price he must pay for a hearing. Or has he calculated to a nicety the power of reaction? Does he seek to drive us to aspiration by the portrayal of sordidness, to disinterestedness by the picture of selfishness, to illusion by disillusionment? It is impossible to believe that he is unconscious of the humor of his dramatic situations, yet he stoically gives no sign. He ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... Judas! The dark and evil passions of his soul, His secret plot, and sordidness complete, His hate, his purposing, Christ knew the whole, And still in love he stooped and ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... She feels the sordidness of constantly being obliged to urge the industrial view of life. The benevolent individual of fifty years ago honestly believed that industry and self-denial in youth would result in comfortable possessions for old age. It was, indeed, the method he ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... prejudice against the British officers, founded first on their sordidness, then, secondly, fed by their insolence, was, thirdly and lastly, matured by their cruelty. To see the heads of their first families, without even a charge of crime, dragged from their beds at midnight, and packed off like slaves to St. Augustine; to see one ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... sympathetically, kissing her hand. The gesture atoned somewhat for the sordidness of her situation, and even corrected the faults of her attire. Always afterwards it seemed to her that Chirac was an old and intimate friend; he had successfully passed through the ordeal of seeing 'the wrong side' of ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a look of fatigue, in spite of the superb physical health of his whole appearance. The light fell across her face under the dark brim of her hat, and touched its beauty into something vividly apart from the shadows and sordidness of the place, yet paler ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... by narrow iron balconies, each containing a stool, a chair, a shelf, a bunk. In his effort to show her the chasm that separated him from her he did not spare himself at all. Dryly and in clean-cut strokes he showed her the sordidness of which he had been the victim and left her to judge for herself of its ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life: the meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods must go Home next hot weather. ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... are we free from this fault) the same guilt, the same crime, may be objected against us: for it is through our fault, negligence, and avarice, that so many and such shameful corruptions occur in the church (both the temple and the Deity are offered for sale), that such sordidness is introduced, such impiety committed, such wickedness, such a mad gulf of wretchedness and irregularity—these I say arise from all our faults, but more particularly from ours of the University. We are the nursery in which those ills are bred ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the one lamp that showed the discomfort and sordidness of his abode, and approaching Zenobia held it up, so as to gain the more perfect view of her, from top to toe. So obscure was the chamber, that you could see the reflection of her diamonds thrown upon the dingy wall, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... This worthy couple are said to be worth fifty thousand francs. The wife, a sexagenarian, does all the work of the house besides waiting on her good man, to whom she is devoted, but a married son and daughter-in-law share her duties at night. Here was no touch of sordidness or suggestion of "La Terre," instead a delightful picture of rustic dignity and ease. The housewife sold us half a bushel of pears, these two like their neighbours living by the produce of their ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... held his rose before him as if it were a charm against the sordidness about him. He had a way of peering at the people we passed as if he were looking for someone he had lost in the crowd. At Sixteenth Street we turned into the small park at the right of the avenue, which with its neighbor on the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... themselves have in many cases changed. Above Malebolge, at all events till the usurers are reached, a certain dignity of speech and action is the rule. Now we find flippant expressions and vulgar gestures. Nothing is omitted which can give a notion, not merely of the sinfulness, but of the sordidness of dishonesty. Curiously enough, the one denizen of this region who is thoroughly dignified and even pathetic, is the pagan Ulysses; and to him Dante does not himself speak, leaving the pagan Virgil to hold all communication with him. Besides Ulysses, ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... an attractive town, in spite of its picturesque sordidness, made the more so by the smoke arising from many belching factory chimneys. In fact, one has difficulty in thinking of it as a cathedral town at all; and, as such, it hardly claims more than a brief resume of its important ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... among them men fired by enthusiasm, men fed by fanaticism, men influenced by sordidness; but, as a whole, they are earnest thinkers and stern actors. There is a virtue in their unscrupulousness. They speak, and act, and dare as men. There is a principle in their unprincipledness. Their belief is a harsh ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the witchery of his brush and his needle, has transmuted the confusion and sordidness and filth of this Thames-side into exquisite emotion. The essence of beauty is harmony, but that harmony is not to be reduced to rule and measure. In the very chaos of the Locomotive Works we may feel beauty; in the thrill which they communicate we receive access of power and we are, more ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... through the open windows, hushed and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of man-hate and man-meanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentioned—O'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had been killed in the prize-ring the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... supremely the love of the Father and His longing for the love and allegiance, therefore the complete life and service of His children. It was the beauty of holiness—the beauty of wholeness—the wholeness of life, the saving of the whole life from the sin and sordidness of self and thereby giving supreme satisfaction to God. It was love, not fear. If not, then almost in a moment he changed the entire purpose and content, the entire intent of all his previous life work. This ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine |
