"Tawdry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enjoy a little the boy's inarticulate devotion, had indulged herself. With artistry that would have called down from Hamilton even hotter sarcasm, she had let Perry glimpse her soul; not the cheap and tawdry thing which unsympathetic persons were likely to think it, but her real one, a little saddened, ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... in a dirty lane, furnished with a tawdry affectation of finery, with some old family pictures hanging on walls which their own cobwebs would better have suited. I was struck with a secret dread at entering, nor was it lessened by the appearance of ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say, I have success—this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it." He had a walnut in his big hand. "If that was my success," he said, and crushed it, and held it ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the low whine of the wolf, and upon turning discovered him fondling around the captive Chief, who seemed equally pleased with him; at the same time be caught the ill-omened look of Black Snake, distorting his face with rage, jealousy and revenge, as it glowed from beneath his tawdry plume of many colors. Hastening his daughter along, who was quickly followed by the wolf as she gave a peculiar call, they passed silently out ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... of life beats on, not pausing while we battle out our days, not waiting while we decide how we shall live. We are possessed by a sentiment, an ideal, a religion; old Time makes no comment, but moves quietly on; we fling the thing aside as tawdry, insufficient; the ideal is tarnished, experience of the world converts us—and still unmoved, he paces on. We are off on another chase; another conception of things possesses us; and still the beat of his ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... fresh millinery upon her changeless head. We hang around her robes of woven words. Only the promise of her ample breasts we cannot altogether hide, shocking us not a little; only that remains to tell us that beneath the tawdry tissues still stands the changeless statue God ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... all in Thebes of the Hundred Gates is at fall of night, when the shadows cast a seemly cloak over the vulgarity of the modern buildings, and give an air of romance even to the glittering lights of the appalling esplanade, which flaunts its tawdry modernity cheek by jowl with the quay, built by one of the Ptolemies, and in use ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... excess; keep the quality of the recruit down to the low mental level, and see that the best of all the agricultural science available is in the hands of the elders, and there you have a first-class engine for pioneer work. The tawdry mysticism and the borrowing from Freemasonry serve the low caste Swede and Dane, the Welshman and the Cornish cotter, just as well as a highly ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... come under the big bandstand, and the priest was looking up at it with a curiosity that had something rather odd about it, his head a little on one side, like a bird's. It was the conventional, rather tawdry kind of erection for its purpose: a flattened dome or canopy, gilt here and there, and lifted on six slender pillars of painted wood, the whole being raised about five feet above the parade on a round wooden platform like a drum. But there was something ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... was the customary obraz, or image, which is to be found in almost every house in Russia. These obrazye are made of different patterns, but generally take the form of a picture of saints or of the Trinity. They are executed in silver-gilt or brass relief, and adorned with tawdry fringe or other gewgaws. The repeated bows and crosses made by the peasantry before these idols is very surprising to an Englishman, who may have been told that there is little difference between the Greek religion and his own; but if this is the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... plain style, sometimes even to a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... again to-day. Called at the houses of a couple of the princes, in which I found everything dirty, with an attempt at tawdry finery. A black houri was set to fan me. We were served with rose syrup. Walked to the prince's garden—a beautiful wilderness of cocoa and betel nuts, sweet orange and mango, with heterogeneous patches of rice, sweet potatoes and beans, and here and there a cotton plant. Two or ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... you it has made it very difficult for me to go on with Alessandra. All the other plays are in line of a national drama. Alessandra is a bitter and ironical concession. The Morning makes its splendor almost tawdry. It hurt me to go to rehearsal to-day. Westervelt's presence was a gloating presence, and I hated him. Hugh's report of the exultant 'I told you so's' of the dramatic critics sickened me—" Her letter ended abruptly, almost at ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... will prove an arrant coward; we assume that he will run at the first smell of smoke. But we are wrong—he stuck; and when the flag was carried down in the rush, he rescued it and bore it bravely so far to the front that when he came back he brought another—the tawdry, red flag ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... some charming French vignettes!" cried Opportunity, running up to a table where lay some inferior coloured engravings, that were intended to represent the cardinal virtues, under the forms of tawdry female beauties. The workmanship was French, as were the inscriptions. Now, Opportunity knew just enough French to translate these inscriptions, simple and school-girl as they were, as wrong as they could possibly be translated, under ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar's crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes,—at the point when, according to the libretto, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... father he might look for some one else to run his house for him. He said he had already done so. He made no inquiry where she was going. He would not offer her money, though he secretly wanted her to ask for it. But it was past that with her. The miserable, bitter drama—the tawdry tragedy, whose most desperate accent was its shameful approach to farce—wore ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... test, not of his mere capacity for being drilled, but of his capacity for genuine ratiocination. No man, I take it, save one consciously inferior and hen-pecked, would consult his wife about hiring a clerk, or about extending credit to some paltry customer, or about some routine piece of tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his business, or about standing for public office, or about combating unfair ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... deep oven-like hearths that warmed it without the play of firelight. But when the company had assembled it was evident that the velvet jackets, gold lace, silver buttons, and red sashes of the entertainers not only lost their tawdry and theatrical appearance in the half decorous and thoughtful gloom, but actually seemed more in harmony with it than the modern dresses of the guests. It was the Excelsior party who looked strange and bizarre in these surroundings; to the sensitive fancy of Miss Keene, Mrs. ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... she marries in Europe, she is apt to "settle down" and become an altogether admirable example of American-European womanhood, because she is sound fruit at heart—merely wrapped in tawdry gilt paper trimming by her adoring but ignorantly unwise parents who, in their effort to show her off, disguise the very qualities ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... uncovered her eyes and felt a sudden exhilaration in the blaze of light. It reminded her of the bending Christ in the picture of San Giorgio. Awe and beauty flowed in upon her, in spite of the poor music and the tawdry church. What if she tried religion?—recalled what she had been taught in the convent?—gave herself up to ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... through the church. We thought he was a verger, and Stephen wished to purchase every holy relic in it. Then we tipped him a few coppers, and tapers were accordingly lit and planted in a basin of sand. All the Greek churches we have seen are very ornate and tawdry, with a multitude of pictures and tall candlesticks. The pulpit towered till it almost touched the low ceiling. The centre of the churches is always vacant, and round this space there is always a row of high-backed seats. I fancy the difference between the Greek ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... hookah,—both evidently dedicated to company occasions. These were all that I could see in the two rooms to which I was admitted, and these were no doubt the very splendors of Karlee's establishment. If he had been a rich Anglicized baboo, he would have had a profusion of hot, tawdry chairs, and a vulgar-gorgeous cramming of gilt-edged tables, sweaty red sofas, coarse pictures in overdone frames, Bowery mirrors, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... of that, Bristles?" asked Fred, upon hearing his chum make such an astonishing assertion with regard to that tawdry breastpin ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... be the great thing to see. But by nine o'clock there seemed to be everything else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long booths and shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, glassware, ironware, boots and shoes, china and crockery, women's tawdry finery, children's toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one another indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with an incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, slim, young London policemen sauntered, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... surfaces of the rock slabs or even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour, the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing; and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... trembling as they held the cards; he saw the delicate little shoulders and the poor frail neck and chest bedizened with tawdry mock jewelry and spangles; he saw the innocent young face, whose pure beauty no soil of stage paint could disfigure, with the smile still on the parted lips, but with a patient forlornness in the sad blue ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... The theme of the room was violet and silver, and to this everything conformed. The toilet service was of dull silver and violet enamel. The mirrors and some of the pictures had dull silver frames, There was nothing tawdry or glittering. The bed itself, which I thought resembled a bed of state, was of the same dull silver, with a coverlet of delicate violet I hue. But Madame's decollete robe was trimmed with white fur, so that her hair, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... seemed that every lady, with a house of her own, had also her own carriage. These carriages were always open, and the law of the land imperatively demands that the occupants shall cover their knees with a worked worsted apron of brilliant colors. These aprons at first I confess seemed tawdry; but the eye soon becomes used to bright colors, in carriage aprons as well as in architecture, and I ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... nor any adventure. The day before we sailed I had conned my image in the mirror in my dressing-room and had comforted myself with the decision that no human creature could conceivably suspect of being a Roman this full-bearded, longhaired, long- nailed, frizzed, curled, oiled, perfumed, gaudy, tawdry, bedizened, bejeweled, powdered, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... village, even to the quaint, tawdry chapel, with its impossible blues and rusted gilt, and noon found them eager to investigate the contents of their lunch-basket. Taking a random path up the hill, they came at last to a spring of cool ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... way held to be good form; but it was hard to think that custom's tyranny should lay its foul hand on Irene Derwent. Perhaps her future husband meant no such thing, and would arrange it all with quiet becomingness. Certainly her father would not favour the tawdry and the vulgar. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... untidy appearance of her dress. Her gown and mantle were of rich stuff, but torn and stained in many places; and her gloves and boots were shabby to the very last degree, while her bonnet, of cheap and tawdry materials, had at any rate the one merit of being fresh and new. Altogether she was an odd figure to be seen in a country place; and Janetta wondered greatly whence she came, and what her errand was at ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... hat and drove off, leaving her alone in the long empty street. She wandered away westward, toward strange thoroughfares, where she was not likely to meet acquaintances. The feeling of aimlessness had returned. Once she found herself in the afternoon torrent of Broadway, swept past tawdry shops and flaming theatrical posters, with a succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... extravagant contrast; an effect, too, of luxury, though in truth it was furnished for the most part with stuffs and objects picked up at no very great expense in San Francisco shops. Nevertheless, there was nothing tawdry and, here and there, something really precious. Draperies on the walls, furniture made by Wen Ho and Prosper, lacquered in black and red, brass and copper, bright pewter, gay china, some fur rugs, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Flaunting, tawdry and grim, From cloud to cloud along her beat, Leering her battered and inveterate leer, She signals where he prowls in the dark alone, Her horrible old man, Mumbling old oaths and warming His villainous old bones with villainous talk— The secrets of their grisly housekeeping Since they went ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... black man from Manyuema I have seen this native cloth converted into elegantly made damirs (Arabic)—short jackets. These countries are also very rich in ivory. The fever for going to Manyuema to exchange tawdry beads for its precious tusks is of the same kind as that which impelled men to go to the gulches and placers of California, Colorado, Montana, and Idaho; after nuggets to Australia, and diamonds to Cape ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... wore colored goggles. They marched solemnly around the plaza, playing on bamboo flageolets, their plaintive tunes drowned in the din of big bass drums and blatant trumpets. In an eddy in the seething crowd was a placid-faced Aymara, bedecked in the most tawdry manner with gewgaws from Birmingham or Manchester, sedately playing a melancholy tune on a rustic syrinx or Pan's pipe, charmingly made from little tubes of bamboo from ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... was a palace in comparison. The prison was crowded with colored people of all complexions, and almost every form of human vice and misery was huddled together there with the poor victims of misfortune. Thieves, murderers, and shameless girls, decked out with tawdry bits of finery, were mixed up with modest-looking, heart-broken wives, and mothers mourning for the children that had been torn from their arms in the recent sale. Some were laughing, and singing lewd songs. Others sat still, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... out the programme of the coming Promenade Concert season? I would give anything to hear Wagner and Beethoven once more. My allegiance to these giants, as to Shakespeare and Milton, grows stronger every day. The appalling tawdry trash that passes for music nowadays, and the degradation of art and literature which seems to be the feature of the twentieth century, intensify my loyalty to great musicians and noble writers. What is the cause of this decadence? ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... People in different stations in England entertain different ideas of what is genteel, {314} but it must be something gorgeous, glittering, or tawdry, to be considered genteel by any of them. The beau-ideal of the English aristocracy, of course with some exceptions, is some young fellow with an imperial title, a military personage of course, for what is military is so particularly ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... A villainous young brute he looked: his clothes were dirty, and he had lost the spring of the morning. Touching the walls, frowning, talking to himself at times, he slouched disconsolately northwards; no wonder that some tawdry girls screamed at him, or that matrons averted their eyes as they hurried to afternoon church. He wandered from one suburb to another, till he was among people more villainous than himself, who bought his tobacco from him and sold ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... of small oddments: bits of cloth, quack medicines, cheap fairings, a clothful of atta—greyish, rough-ground native flour—twists of down-country tobacco, tawdry pipe-stems, and a packet of curry-stuff, all wrapped in a quilt. Kim turned it over with the air of a wise warlock, ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... large room, the first impression of which, on some minds, would have been that of terror. In the centre stood a handsome billiard-table, over which were two dirty lamps with reflectors; the walls were papered in tawdry French taste, the ceiling black with smoke, and the whole room but indifferently lighted with a disproportionate and dusty window: the door, too, seemed planned for security, having a large lock and two bolts inside, but exhibited marks of recent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... said calmly, "I do not for a moment believe that we should so far have forgotten ourselves. I don't know how you are feeling, but the atmosphere of this place is most distasteful to me. These tawdry decorations are positively vicious. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had never spent, Mrs. Linton felt; and now the fan was hanging down among the brocaded flowers of her dress, making them look tawdry as she left the box, and noticed how at least two men were lying in wait for her party. There was, however, a frankness in Herbert Courtland's strategy which George Holland's did not possess. Mr. Courtland was looking directly at her; Mr. Holland was pretending to be engrossed ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... minutes later, Mr Poulter entered the room, wearing evening dress, dancing pumps, and a tawdry-looking insignia in ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... a persistent idea had been creeping into his thoughts. The world was to know him as one of its mightiest rulers—so mighty that for him a crown would be too tawdry a toy—but some day he must die. Who then, demanded his sublimely arrogant self-appraisement, would carry on the work that had called him on to conquest from hills where the burned stumps stood up stark and black in the forest? It is the hallucination ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of which dazzles him to contemptible silence. If statistics were at hand we should doubtless learn that no man has ever talked to himself save by way of demonstrating his own godlike superiority, and the tawdry impotence of all obstacles and opponents. Percival talked to himself and mentally lived the next five years in a style that reduced Uncle Peter to grudging but imperative awe for his superb gifts of administration. He bathed in this imaginary future ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... and dismal and tawdry everything seemed to her. Her little white dress, the dress in which she had lain by her mother's side, was soiled and tumbled, and the wreath of roses looked crushed and faded, as Rosalie took it from ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I wrote. Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was not unaffected. Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural. One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired of excelling the two great masters of oratory, Cicero and Livy, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... of the gloom—for the ladies sat with their backs to the door—I began to dream again, I began to sink again into folly, that was half-pleasure, half-pain. The fury of the gaming-house and the riot of Zaton's seemed far away. The triumphs of the fencing-room—even they grew cheap and tawdry. I thought of existence as one outside it, I balanced this against that, and wondered whether, after all, the red soutane were so much better than the homely jerkin, or the fame of a ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... Jarvis muttered, Bambi's words coming back to him. The tawdry little girl stirred, saw him, spoke to him, her hand upon ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... fragments, in which they have contrived either to select their examples with the most curious infelicity, or to blunder them into bombast. But nothing can be more childish than to suppose, that Pitt would have given his praise to tawdry metaphor, that Burke would have done honour to feeble truisms, that Fox should have been unable to distinguish between logic and looseness of reasoning, or that the whole assembly, who had been in the habit of hearing those pre-eminent orators, should have been tricked by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... limited, but I could just make out the girl I had followed sitting upon a bed; while leaning against the wall, a dirty clay pipe in her mouth, was the vilest old woman I have ever in my life set eyes on. She was very small, with a pinched-up nut-cracker face, dressed in an old bit of tawdry finery, more than three sizes too large for her. Her hair fell upon her shoulders in a tangled mass, and from under it her eyes gleamed out like those of a wicked little Scotch terrier ready to bite. As I bent down to ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... this softer art their bliss supplies, It gives their follies also room to rise; For praise too dearly loved, or warmly sought, Enfeebles all internal strength of thought, 270 And the weak soul, within itself unblest, Leans for all pleasure on another's breast. Hence ostentation here, with tawdry art, Pants for the vulgar praise which fools impart; Here vanity assumes her pert grimace, 275 And trims her robes of frieze[32] with copper lace; Here beggar pride defrauds her daily cheer, To boast one splendid banquet once a year; The mind still turns where shifting fashion draws, Nor weighs ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... By ridding his mind of all desires and attachments, by concentrating on pure abstractions, the ascetic 'obtained insight which no words could express. Gradually plumbing the cosmic mystery, his soul entered realms far beyond the comparatively tawdry heavens where the great gods dwelt in light and splendour. Going "from darkness to darkness deeper yet," he solved the mystery beyond all mysteries; he understood, fully and finally, the nature of the universe and of himself and he reached a realm of truth and bliss, beyond ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... surged ahead toward the street curb. Against her will, Miss Theodosia surged, too. Loud cries filled her ears—ecstatic cries of little children. Down the usually quiet street marched, in all its brilliancy of color and tinsel and tawdry splendor, the street parade. Horses curvetted, elephants patiently plodded, huge cars of mystery swung by; clowns smirked, to the riotous joy of ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... made for tawdry accessories and repeated coats of shiny oleaginous paint—very disagreeable where it has peeled off and almost more so where it has not. What work could stand against such treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures have had to put up with? Take the Venus of Milo; ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... this over Rossetti's poem "Cloud Confines." It is made out of a little lump of tawdry material which says nothing, is, indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is wrought with so marvellous a technique that we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices that were heard when the morning stars sang together, and it clings tremulously to the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... reflection of the full moon glittered on the water up to the steps of the big black landing-stage. The glamour of the eastern night and the moonlight combined to lend enchantment to a scene that by day is blatant and tawdry, and the countless coloured lamps twinkling along the sea wall and dotted over the Bluff transformed the Japanese ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... truth the condition of poverty of Joseph and his espoused, and the like poor condition of the shepherds who were now shortly to be used of the Lord, was the only fitting way that we should expect the Lord would have it. All the pomp and glory of earthly preparation would have been but tawdry tinsel, detracting from the glorious things that were shortly to follow. Each one of the earthly players whom Jehovah had assigned to perform a part upon this stage was humble, meek, and possessed of faith in the promises ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... pride of coming from Chicago and knowing about motors did not prevent his feeling feeble at the knees as he tried to stalk by the grinning motored aristocracy. He would return to the show-tent, to hate the few tawdry drops and flats—the patch of green spattered with dirty white which variously simulated a daisy-field, a mountainside, and that part of Central Park directly opposite the Fifth Avenue residence of the millionaire counterfeiter, who, you remember, always comes out into ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... of the life here I looked upon as only an incident. The gay tawdry had faded; I realized how much more enduring were the rough, uncouth but genuine products like my friend Mr. Jenks and those of that ilk, who spoke me well instead of merely fair. Health of mind and body should be ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... not order the food for himself. While it was being brought he sat down in the very chair that he had used so often—for he had been ushered into his old parlor—and gazed about him. There were the same tawdry ornaments on the mantel-piece, and the same books on the dusty shelf. Nothing was altered except the tenant of that room; but how great a change had taken place in him! What a face the dingy mirror ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the priest opened the door of the little sitting-room. Hyacinth knew it well. There was the dark mahogany table with the marks burnt into it where hot dishes were set down, the shabby arm-chair, the worn cocoanut-matting on the floor, the dozen or so books in the hanging shelf, the tawdry sacred pictures round the wall. He had known it all, and it all seemed unchanged since ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... that were not primarily intended for picnic going. But they could sing, and they did sing, with their voices, their bodies, their souls. They threw themselves into it because they enjoyed and felt what they were doing, and they gave almost a semblance of dignity to the tawdry ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... them then. Your hair has the gloss and brownness of ripe nuts, and your face is always pale. Your lips have a trick of falling apart in a half-smile when you listen. They told me before I knew you that you were pretty. Pretty! The word is cheap and tawdry. You are beautiful, with the beauty of a pearl or a star ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... admittance; and, throwing open the valves, we entered the chapel and were struck by the justness of its proportions, the simple majesty of the arched roof, and the mild solemn light, equally diffused over every part of the edifice. No tawdry ornaments, no glaring pictures, disgraced the sanctity of the place. The high altar, standing distinct from the walls, which were hung with a rich velvet, was the only object on which many ornaments were lavished, and even there the elegance of the workmanship concealed the glare of ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... throughout our travels in Scandinavia, I often recognised in the orchestra of the different theatres I visited, officers whom I had met in the streets during the day. The interior decorations of the house were tawdry, and could not for an instant bear comparison with the simple adornment of the Haymarket theatre. The body of the theatre was not illuminated as in Southern Europe; but large green tin shades cover the lights toward the audience, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... thrill of annoyance that a country which has boasted in so loud-mouthed a way to Europe of having begun its national life by a wholesome scorn of all class distinction, should contain citizens cursed by a spirit of such tawdry pride. At least the aristocracies of other lands, vicious and reprehensible as they have always been, are yet an evil with a certain malign consistency for their support. Like those monarchies of which they have formed a piteous adjunct, they have always been the outgrowths ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... pocket-handkerchief, at the best, is but a menial appliance, and it is bad taste to make it an object of attraction. FINE, it may be, for that conveys an idea of delicacy in its owner; but ornamented beyond reason, never. Look what a tawdry and vulgar thing an embroidered slipper is on ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... cooking and washing, were stowed away out of reach of defilement. Above his bed the simple-hearted soldier had nailed a crude coloured print of the Kaiser-i-Hind in robes and crown; and on the opposing wall hung a tawdry looking-glass, almost as dear ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... tendency. Moreover, there are sham Metaphors, which overhanging that same Thought's-Body (best naked), and deceptively bedizening, or bolstering it out, may be called its false stuffings, superfluous show-cloaks (Putz-Mantel), and tawdry woollen rags: whereof he that runs and reads may ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... marble over the entrances. It possesses not less than thirteen churches, of which the collegiate and cathedral church of St. Peter is the only one worth notice,—a large and lofty building of a mixture of styles, with some tawdry ornaments, but a handsome high altar and well carved oak stalls in the choir. The foundation consists of a dean and twelve canons, with eighteen other inferior clergy. Since 1839 it has ranked as a cathedral, Tempio having been erected into a see united with those of Cività and Ampurias, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... her face. She watched it herself with dim half consciousness as it changed before her in the tawdry mirror above the mantelpiece, half longing that he might look up and see it, ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Russians will ever provide a theatre sufficiently attractive to tempt a stranger out of doors after nightfall. In summer it is less dismal; there are gardens and restaurants, dancing gipsies and Hungarian Tziganes, but even then the entertainment is generally so poor, and the surroundings so tawdry, that one is glad to leave them at an early hour ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... could have no other aim or interest in life. Perhaps it was that he wished to overpower the din of contending thoughts. Then a happy thought came to him. He rummaged out Peter's ballad. He would write a song on the model of that, as Peter had recommended—something tawdry and sentimental, with a cheap accompaniment. He placed the ballad on the rest and started going through it to get himself in the vein. But to-night the air seemed to breathe an ineffable melancholy, the words—no longer mawkish—had ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... October was beautiful, bright and warm, and the afternoons at the exposition were delightful at the end of the day, when the crowd had dispersed a little and the last rays of the setting sun lingered on the Meudon Hills and the river. The buildings and costumes lost their tawdry look, and one saw only a mass of moving colour, which seemed to soften and lose itself in the evening shadows. There were various closing entertainments. The marshal gave a splendid fete at Versailles. We drove out and had some difficulty in making our way ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... death of the Duke of Wellington, as indeed it was a far finer subject. May I inquire the name of the writer? Mr. Everett's speech also is superb, and how very much I prefer the Marshfield funeral in its sublime simplicity to the tawdry pageantry here! I have had fifty letters from persons who saw the funeral in St. Paul's, and seen as many who saw that or the procession, and it is strange that the papers have omitted alike the great successes and the great failures. My young neighbor, a ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... constant creature breathing; am come back only a thousand times more pleased with my own. I have been at mass, at church, and at the presbyterian meeting: an idea struck me at the last, in regard to the drapery of them all; that the Romish religion is like an over-dressed, tawdry, rich citizen's wife; the presbyterian like a rude aukward country girl; the church of England like an elegant well-dressed woman of quality, "plain in her neatness" (to quote Horace, who is my favorite author). There is a noble, graceful simplicity both in the worship and the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... for a moment and glancing round, my impression was not so much disillusionment concerning all things theatrical as realisation of my worst forebodings. In that one moment all glamour connected with the stage fell from me, nor has it since ever returned to me. From the tawdry decorations of the auditorium to the childish make-belief littered around on the stage, I saw the Theatre a painted thing of shreds and patches—the grown child's doll's-house. The Drama may improve us, elevate us, interest and teach us. I am sure ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... can swim," as we say at sea; we were well armed, had plenty of ammunition, mustered a crew of twenty-six prime seamen, the pick of the Barracouta's crew—men who would go anywhere, and face anything—we carried an ample supply of blankets, beads, brass wire, old muskets, and tawdry finery of various descriptions, priceless in the eyes of savages, for the purpose of peaceable ransom, if such could be accomplished; but we lacked an interpreter, a man acquainted with the barbaric language ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... which seems full of the lively impression of delightful things recently seen. Genuine poetry, it is true, is always naturally sympathetic with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But with how many poets would not this constant intrusion of material ornament have produced a tawdry effect! The metal would all be tarnished and the edges blurred. And this is because it is not always that the products of even exquisite tectonics can excite or refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is probable that the objects of oriental art, the imitations of it at home, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... lights the entire set sparkled with a tawdry garishness apt to fool those uninitiated into the secrets of photography. On the screen, colors which now seemed dull and flat would take on a soft richness and a delicacy characteristic of the society ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... cheeks, and her eyes took on a twinkle of amusement. She was watching the visitor as if she were a passing Punch-and-Judy show come in to play for a moment for her entertainment. She lay and regarded her and her tawdry display of finery with a quiet, disinterested aloofness that was beginning to ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... elbow-holding are studied, and affectation, formality, hypocrisy, and pride are acquired; and where children the most promising are presently transformed into vain, pert misses, who imagine that to perk up their heads, turn out their toes, and exhibit the ostentatious opulence of their relations, in a tawdry ball night dress, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... instinct with beauty and grace." A dim idea came upon her that when this happy time should arrive, no one would claim her necklace from her, and that the man at the stables would not be so disagreeably punctual in sending in his bill. "'All-beautiful in naked purity!'" What a tawdry world was this, in which clothes and food and houses are necessary! How perfectly that boy-poet had understood it all! "'Immortal amid ruin!'" She liked the idea of the ruin almost as well as that of ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... seen, the most agreeable Shape, the finest Neck and Bosom, in a Word, the whole Person of a Woman exquisitely Beautiful. She affected to allure me with a forced Wantonness in her Look and Air; but I saw it checked with Hunger and Cold: Her Eyes were wan and eager, her Dress thin and tawdry, her Mein genteel and childish. This strange Figure gave me much Anguish of Heart, and to avoid being seen with her I went away, but could not forbear giving her a Crown. The poor thing sighed, curtisied, and with a Blessing, expressed with the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... flashing at the sight of the helpless Imperial quarry, as he pointed out on the map of Piedmont and Lombardy the features which would favour a dashing invader and carry him to the very gates of Vienna. The splendours of the Imperial Court at the Tuileries seem tawdry and insipid when compared with the intellectual grandeur which lit up that humble lodging at Nice with the first rays that heralded the dawn of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Reason protested, their Imagination was subjugated. I cannot say the same. Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the Confucian tablets, are now closed, and their courts are overgrown with weeds. The Buddhist temples are hideous, both outside and inside, built of a crumbling red brick, with very dirty brick floors, and the idols are frightful and tawdry. We went to several which have large monasteries attached to them, with great untidy gardens, with ponds for sacred fish and sacred tortoises, and houses for sacred pigs, whose sacredness is shown by their monstrous obesity. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... morrow, and eating hunter's stew, scout style, patent applied for. And notwithstanding the slurs which Roy had cast at the sky it was pleasant to see that vast bespangled blackness over head. In the solemn night the neighboring shacks were divested of their tawdry cheapness, the loose and flapping strips of tar-paper and the broken windows were not visible, and the buildings seemed clothed in a kind of sombre dignity—silent memorials of the boys who had made those old boards and rafters ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... address me in such a fashion? Here, here, without any further compliments, there is your bow of tawdry lace, and your narrow ribbon; it shall not have the honour of being on my ear ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... to go on,—on with this cheery, brave little bit of humanity in the next cabin, without a word in self-extenuation, without a hint to break the lack of estimation in which she held him, without a plea in his own defense. And some way, Houston felt that such a plea now would be cheap and tawdry; they were in a world where there were bigger things than human aims and human frailties. Besides, he had locked his lips at the command of a grief-ridden woman. To open them in self-extenuation would mean that she ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... cheek by jowl with the royalties; the M.-A. was quite jubilant when she heard we had had such "good places." Hundreds of gondolas swarmed round; many of them in the old Carpaccio rig-outs, very gorgeous though a little tawdry when taken out of the canvas. Hut the rush and the collisions, and the sound of many waters walloping under the bellies of the gondolas, and the blows of fighting oars—regular underwater wrestling matches—made it as vivid and amusing as a prolonged Oxford ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... aristocracy, a love of distinction, among the lowest dregs of society, as there is also a love of plush and other insignificant tawdry among our more wealthy republicans. Few would have thought of one inebriate affecting superiority over another, (the vote-cribber was an inebriate, as we shall show,) but so ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... first inclination carried, that even the hellish yoke of slavery cannot stifle the savage desire of admiration which the black heroes inherit from both their parents, for all the hardly-earned savings of a slave are commonly expended in a little tawdry finery. And I have seldom known a good male or female servant that was not particularly fond of dress. Their clothes were their riches; and I argue from analogy, that the fondness for dress, so extravagant in females, arises from the same cause—want of cultivation of mind. When ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Venus of old, with your queenly derision, How you would disdain the belle's tawdry array! Free footsteps untrammelled, cool hand of decision, Sweet laugh like bells pealing, were yours in the day When you reigned over men by the might of your beauty; No fetters were o'er you in body or brain; The world would bow down in the gladness of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was—a tawdry summer home, ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man of ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rough, coarse, distasteful, harsh, inharmonious, rude, deformed, fulsome, hideous, meretricious, rugged, disgusting, gaudy, horrid, offensive, tawdry. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... not," said Grace. "I think it is an imposture. This man was not a clergyman when he brought me the certificate; he was a man of business, a plain tradesman, a man of the world; he had a colored necktie, and some rather tawdry chains." ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... sarcophagi of the Corsini family, and in presence of a marble Pieta very beautifully sculptured. On the other side of the church we looked into the Torlonia Chapel, very rich and rather profusely gilded, but, as it seemed to me, not tawdry, though the white newness of the marble is not perfectly agreeable after being accustomed to the milder tint which time bestows on sculpture. The tombs and statues appeared like shapes and images of new-fallen snow. The most interesting thing which we saw in ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... across the piazza and mounted the church steps behind the crowd where they could look across obliquely to the little stage. A clown was dancing to the music of a hurdy-gurdy, while a woman in a tawdry pink satin evening gown beat an accompaniment on a drum. It was a very poor play with very poor players, and yet it represented to these people of Grotta del Monte something of life, of the big outside world which they ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... gasping, staring, sick at heart. All my vinous joy was gone, leaving me a haggard, weary wretch of a man, disenchanted and miserable to the verge of—what? I shuddered. The lights seemed to have gone blurred and dim. The hall was tawdry, cheap and vulgar. The women, who but a moment before had seemed creatures of grace and charm, were now nothing more than painted, posturing harridans, their seductive smiles the leers ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... squalor and luxury in one story of what had once been a glorious roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have such fun...." That was the best of Peggy. Always and everywhere she had such fun. She added, "Give my sisterly regards to ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... the court was empty—a singular little theatre of pale varnish and tawdry hangings, still rather snug and homely in the heat and light of its obsolete gas, and with as little to remind one of the play as any other theatre when the curtain is down and the house empty. But there was clamor in the corridors, and hooting already in the street. Nor was ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... in the blackened lattice was opened, and a young girl, with kohl-tinted eyelids, and a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her coarse black hair, leaned out, held a short parley, and vanished, drawing the shutter to behind her. The mist crept about the tawdry flags, a heavy door creaked, whined on its hinges, and from the house of the girl there came an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In a moment I was free of the ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... papers of a stranger, the toil of a life, perhaps—to open, and to read them. And what have we to do with books? The Herr Doctor might perhaps be asked for his advice; but we have no index expurgatorius in Gruenewald. Had we but that, we should be the most absolute parody and farce upon this tawdry earth." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her. This woman is Marie Louise, Empress of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and archduchess of imperial Austria. When the most brilliant figure in all history, after his overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on the petty island of Elba, the empress was already about to become a mother; and the father of her unborn child was not Napoleon, but another man. This is almost all that is usually remembered of her—that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, that she abandoned him in the hour ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of the interior. The dome is enriched by boldly recessed panels, and these were formerly covered with bronze ornaments, which have been removed for the sake of the metal. The marble enrichments of the attic have also disappeared, and their place has been taken by common and tawdry decorations more adapted to the stage of a theatre. But notwithstanding everything that has been done to detract from the imposing effect of the building by the alteration of its details, there is still, taking it as a whole, a ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... of previous preparation having passed,] down would come rustling and bustling the tawdry and awkward Bella, disordering more her native disorderliness at the sight of her serene sister, by her sullen envy, to see herself so much surpassed with such little pains, and in a sixth ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf jug, or at their tawdry coloured prints of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... eighty-eight stalls, hung with the cast-off garments of both sexes, and of every age, condition and clime, presents the appearance of a miniature city. Men's apparel, women's apparel, garments for children of all sizes, boots and shoes, hats and bonnets, tawdry finery of every description, sheets and blankets, carpets, tattered and stained, military accouterments, swords and belts, harness, old pots and kettles, and innumerable other articles, attract attention in the different stalls. There, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... right of kings. No common man should have been given such a glimpse of empire; but, in justice to the magic of such glances which come once from the eyes of every good woman, for some good man, in each lifetime, it must be acknowledged that their potent wizardry turns the commonplace, even the tawdry surroundings of a thousand million every-day lives, into dazzling ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... are considered more essentially feminine. As I did so I had a picture before me, in which I saw Priscilla crowned with love, the support and blessing of her three little sisters. The picture was a very bright one, Maggie, and your crown of bay looks quite tawdry beside the other crown which I hope to see on ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Rose Tracy, still calling her Fairy Carrie. Of the wonderful clothes her mother laid out to put upon her the night of her departure, in place of aunt Corinne's over-grown things, and the show woman's tawdry additions. They wondered about her home and the colored people who waited on her, and if she would be quite well and cured of her stupor by the time she reached Baltimore. Grandma Padgett told them Baltimore was an old city down in Maryland, ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the discreet John very busy in his shirt-sleeves, I saw no one about. I was glad to reach my room unobserved. I knew that my feeling was unreasonable, but entering that sedate house, under the blaze of the morning sun, I was ashamed of my tawdry dress. A sense of dissipation and revelry seemed to hang about ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... after throng of maskers, of the unmasked, of peering into the cartsful of singing minstrels, into carriages of revellers, hoping for a glimpse of Pierre the devout. The allegorical carts rumbling by with their important red-clothed horses were beginning to lose charm, the disguises showed tawdry, even the gay-hued flags fluttered ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... street through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came face to face with a cage of steel bars, and behind it was a little gray man on a bunk. He sat up and peered at them from beneath bushy brows, a thin-faced ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... inferiority to such a one as Ferdinand Lopez was proved. He could take no pride in his rejected love. He would rid himself of it at a moment's notice if he knew the way. He would throw himself at the feet of some second-rate, tawdry, well-born, well-known beauty of the day,—only that there was not now left to him strength to pretend the feeling that would be necessary. Then he heard steps, and jumping up from his seat, stood just in the way of Emily Wharton and her cousin Mary. "Ain't you going to dress for dinner, young ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... no way of regarding the case can any excuse be found for persons who steal and stick into their discourses tawdry little bits of bombast, purple patches of thought or sentiment, which cannot be supposed to do any good to anybody, which stand merely instead of a little stolen gilding for the gingerbread which is probably stolen ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... for us. That thought is not a subject to be decorated with tawdry finery of eloquence, or to be dealt with as if it were a sentimental prettiness very fit to be spoken of, but impossible to be practised. It is the duty of every Christian man and woman, and they have not done their duty unless they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... competition; it begins to realise newer and wider sympathies, possibilities of an amalgamation of interests and community of aim that is utterly beyond the habits of the old oligarchy to conceive, beyond the scope of that tawdry word ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... with lees, and void of art, The grateful folly vented from a cart; And as his tawdry actors drove about, The sight was new, and charm'd the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... getting ready at Dresden, and thither Wagner went in April, 1842. The opera was produced in October, with enormous success, and the name of Wagner became famous throughout Germany. Nowadays so much of the music appears so very cheap and tawdry that it is only after a severe mental struggle one can understand the enthusiasm the work aroused. We must put away all thought of the later Wagner; we must forget that when Rienzi was produced the Dutchman had already been ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman |
