"Veneer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you see, you have got the world about you to reckon with—and the world has invented a religion of its own. There's no use looking for it in this book of yours. It's a religion with the pride of property at the bottom of it, and a veneer of benevolent sentiment at the top. It will be very sorry for you, and very charitable towards you: in short, it will do everything for you ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... accorded him, dashed away—not in the direction whence he had come but straight over the top of the windfall. Ignorant of the pitfalls concealed by the mantel of creepers he hurried on his course, only to break through the thin veneer and plunge headlong into a black abyss; then he realized the treacherous nature ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... through the woods, some on horseback, some in the carriage, to the little church in a heavy pine forest. The next day proved stormy, and the driving sleet froze upon the trees and bound their limbs and boughs together with an icy veneer. My host, Mr. McMillan, kindly urged me to tarry. During my stay with him I ascertained that he devoted his attention to raising ground-peas, or peanuts. Along the coast of this part of North Carolina this nut is the chief product, and is raised in immense quantities. The latter ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... the way he expressed himself which delighted Priscilla. He had reverted to the phraseology of an undignified schoolboy of the lower fifth. The veneer of grown manhood, even the polish of a prefect, had, as it were, peeled off him during ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... expression of their faces: the girl's turned toward her companion's like an empty plate held up to be filled, while the man lounging at her side already betrayed the encroaching boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of his smile. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... end of the violin has a perceptible curve instead of being nearly straight, the nut should be made to follow the course of the purfling, this will require some care in the cutting and finishing of it. For this a piece of almost any veneer cut to the exact flow or drawing of the line may be used as a guide or template. The block from which the nut is to be made having been cut quite level, the line can be traced with a fine pointed pencil, or better, a fine pointed ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... we would really understand ourselves, and not to the twentieth, which, though so insignificant in reality, is spread all over the other nineteen, making them appear quite different from what they really are, as the blacking does a boot, or the veneer a table. It is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions that we fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial twentieth. Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted. Warfare ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... In life, but, passing over that, I've certain things to stipulate: You must exhibit interest, as even Goth or Vandal would, In curios and bric-a-brac, in ivories and sandalwood; And you must cope with cameo, veneer, relief and lacquer (Ah! And, parenthetically, pay my debts at bridge and baccarat). I dote on Futurism, and so a mate would give me little ease Whose views were strictly orthodox on MYRON and PRAXITELES. You do not understand," she sneered, "so gross ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... the cause—life, the onward march of years. It has a cramping effect; it closes the pores, intensifying one line of activity at the expense of all the others; often enough it encrusts the individual with a kind of shell, a veneer of something akin to hypocrisy. Your ordinary adult is an egoist in matters of the affections; a specialist in his own insignificant pursuit; a dull dog. Dimly aware of these defects, he confines himself to generalities or, grown confidential, tells you of his little fads, his little ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... with indecision in her voice. "But there is that other—the one that ran away from us—there's something I don't like about her. Perhaps it's a slight veneer of hypocrisy." ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... prey. Men have something of the same instinctive apprehension. How soon the nerves are disturbed by the smell of anything burning in the house. Raise the cry of "Fire!" in a crowded building, and at once the old savage bursts through the veneer of civilisation. It is helter-skelter, the Devil take the hindmost. The strong trample upon the weak. Men and women turn to devils. Even if the cry of "Fire!" be raised in a church—where a believer might wish to die, and where he might feel himself booked through to glory—there ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... perfect outline of the old man's features and form, and in the tottering, gait bent shoulders, and soiled senility a straight, handsome youth, fastidious in his dress and perfect in his form. Such the old man was once, and all the elements of his broken youth are clearly visible under the hapless veneer of time for the one who has an eye to see. This is but one illustration of many that might be offered. A poor shop girl may have the bearing of a princess. Among New York illustrators the typical model for a society girl is a young woman of the most ordinary ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... proud bully, possessing neither pity nor remorse, an average specimen of the high Russian official, a hide-bound bureaucrat, a slave to etiquette and possessing a veneer of polish. But beneath it all I saw that he was a coward in deadly fear of assassination—a coward who dreaded lest some secret should be revealed. That concealed door in the paneling with the armed guard lurking behind was sufficiently plain evidence that he was not the fearless Governor-General ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... of the first like wine out of a bottle, sullenness congested in the second. Obsequiousness was all smiles; he ran to catch your eye, he loved to gabble; and he had about a dozen words of beach English, and an eighth-of-an-inch veneer of Christianity. Sullens was industrious; a big down-looking bee. When he was spoken to, he answered with a black look and a shrug of one shoulder, but the thing would be done. I don't give him to you for a model of manners; there was ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... super-amphitheater, filled with those whose emotions lie next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... seemed so strange, possibly because automobiling has its own point of view, and certainly people have their own and widely varying views of automobiling. In the presence of the machine people everywhere become for the time-being childlike and naive, curious and enthusiastic; they lose the veneer of sophistication, and are as approachable and companionable as children. Automobiling is therefore doubly delightful in these early days of the sport. By and by, when the people become accustomed to the machine, they will resume their habit of indifference, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... to slap him for his suddenly acquired society veneer which had such power to irritate her, and a desire to weep the bitterest and most scalding tears for the completeness of his defection. She could not help wondering, sometimes, if he had, by any most uncanny ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... had raised my hand against the one American I had met who was at all times vogue. And not only this: For I now recalled a certain phrase I had flung out as I stood over him, ranting indeed no better than an anarchist, a phrase which showed my poor culture to be the flimsiest veneer. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is good to eat. Civilization (which is part of the circle of his imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Laura laughed, as she dropped the buttons into a little drawer of her bureau. It was an ugly, cheap, old bureau, its veneer loosened and peeling, the mirror small and flawed—a piece of furniture in keeping with the room, which was small, plain and hot, its only ornamental adjunct being a silver-framed photograph of Mrs. Madison, with Cora, as a ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... felt sorry for her, she was so agitated. All the veneer knowledge of grammar had left her, and she spoke ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... but it was easy to see that the veneer of foreign ritual had made little impression on the Indian mind. He feared all the devils of the Christian hell, and most of the gods of the pagan pantheon. A policy of propitiation towards all the unseen ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... has comparatively little criticism, are more vitiated at heart, more cold-blooded and deliberate in their evil. One may form a base character, but maintain an outward respectability; but let him not be very complacent over the decorous and conventional veneer which masks him from the world. If one imagines that he can corrupt his own soul and make it the abiding-place of foul thoughts, mean impulses, and shrivelling selfishness, and yet go forward very far in God's universe without meeting ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... found a railway to the Profile House, and another to Bethlehem. In the interval of waiting for his train he visited Bethlehem Street, with its mile of caravansaries, big boarding-houses, shops, and city veneer, and although he was delighted, as an American, with the "improvements" and with the air of refinement, he felt that if he wanted retirement and rural life, he might as well be with the hordes in the depths of the Adirondack wilderness. But in his impatience ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that the American is always conscious of this idealism; often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce has so well said, through ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... of millions smiled up at him reproachfully. "What! after I have been with you so long, Daddy? But it's true there was a time—before Tom taught me that men cannot be judged by mere polish and veneer, or the lack of polish ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... of each year he would be rather worse off than before, descending a step annually. He must nibble like a frost-driven mouse to merely exist. So poor was the soil, that the clay came to the surface, and in wet weather a slip of the foot exposed it—the heel cut through the veneer of turf into the cold, dead, moist clay. Nothing grew but rushes. Every time a horse moved over the marshy land his hoof left deep holes which never again filled up, but remained the year through, now puddles, full of rain ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... commercial integrity and stability. If anything, there seemed to be more business in Fenchurch Street and more luxury at the residence at Eccleston Square than in former days. Only the stern-faced and silent senior partner knew how thin the veneer was which shone so ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stride, a stride which was more like the spring of a maddened bull, towards Philip. The veneer of a spurious civilisation seemed to have fallen from him. He was the great and splendid animal, transformed with an overmastering passion. There was murder in his eyes. His great right arm, with its long, hairy fingers and its single massive ring, was like the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The veneer of our vaunted civilization is, at the best, thin, and every man, in whose veins runs red blood, has within him pent-up volcanic forces which require but little awakening to produce a soul-shattering upheaval. Donald knew that his being ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... all my life. I was a section hand much as six months in all my life. I work at the veneer mills but they never run no more. I am having a hard time. I have high blood pressure. I can't pick cotton. I can't even get a mess of turnip greens. The Social Welfare helps me a little and I am janitor up town in two offices. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... farewell "brekker"[39] at the Creameries; a banquet of the Olympians to which John received an invitation. He accepted because Desmond made a point of his so doing; but he was quite aware that beneath the veneer of the Demon's genial smile lay implacable hatred and resentment. The breakfast in itself struck John as ostentatious. Scaife's father sent quails, a la Lucullus, and other delicacies. Throughout ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... this latest evidence of his enemy's activity had swept Simon Varr beyond self-control, beyond reasoning and beyond decency. He launched upon the stolid committee a rushing torrent of insult and invective. The veneer of dignity that had come to him with wealth and position slipped from him, as the old skin slips from a snake, and he went back to the vocabulary of his youth for terms sufficiently blasphemous and obscene to express his opinion of the strike, the strikers, the committee ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... ironically styled education, "What do you intend to be, and what do you intend to do? Do you purpose to play at living, or do you purpose to live?—to be a memory, a word-cistern, a feeble prater on illustrious themes, one of the world's thousand chatterers, or a will, a power, a man?" No varnish and veneer of scholarship, no command of the tricks of logic and rhetoric, can ever make you a positive force in the world. Look around you in the community of educated men, and see how many, who started on their career with minds as bright and eager and hearts as hopeful as yours, have been mysteriously ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... breath in with a low gasp of amazement. The room was a gem of exquisite beauty. The parquet floor was inlaid with rare hardwoods from a hundred different worlds. Parthian marble veneer covered with lacy Van tapestries from Santos formed the walls. Delicate ceramics, sculpture, and bronzes reflected the art of a score of different civilizations. A circular pool, festooned with lacelike Halsite ferns, stood in the center of the room, surrounding a polished black granite pedestal ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... preposterous in literature. But there undoubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang "faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the composition is pastiche; a dozen other metaphors—of stucco, veneer, glueing-up—suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment, symptom, and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... present instance there is no need to conceal the fact that there are outbreaks of eroticism and offences against the German language which are none the less flagrant and censurable because they are, to some extent, concealed under the thin veneer of the allegory and symbolism which every reader must have recognized as running through the play. This is, in a manner, Wagnerian, as so much of the music is Wagnerian—especially that of the second act, which because ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... can insert annular and veneer shield buds rapidly and well with nothing but an ordinary budding knife. In general, however, a budding knife having two blades, placed parallel with a space of three-quarters of an inch or an inch apart, is best. A very satisfactory knife may be made by fastening the blades ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... alburnum, sapwood; kindling, fuel. Associated Words: kyanize, fissile, fissility, lignification, lignify, ligniferous, lignescent, lignite, lignivorous, xylopyrography, pyrography, veneer, cord. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... who spring from a fierce untamed stock. Despite the training of Laharpe, Alexander at times showed the passions and finesse of a Boyar. And who shall say that the early Jacobinism and later culture of Napoleon was more than a veneer spread all too thinly over an Italian condottiere of the Renaissance age? These men were too expert at wiles really to trust to the pompous assurances of Tilsit and Erfurt. De Maistre tells us that Napoleon never partook ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... authority, as of one used to being obeyed. He was dressed roughly enough in corduroy and miner's half-leg boots, but these were of the most expensive material and cut. His cold gray eye and thin lips denied the manner of superficial heartiness he habitually carried. If one scratched the veneer of good nature it was to find a hard selfishness that ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... quality. The other trees are removed over a period of several years, so that you finally have only the 200 high quality crop trees left. The reason I suggest starting the pruning when the trees are six inches in diameter, is that that is the size of the veneer core left after the veneer manufacturer has turned the log for the thin sheet of furniture veneer. Remove the limbs and improve the quality so you get a 16-foot log free of limbs and knots. That is what the buyer ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... with him, love. Breed allers tells. You may be low-born and nothing will 'ide it—not all the dress and not all the, by way of, fine manners. It's jest like veneer—it peels off at a minute's notice. But breed's true to the core; it wears. Alison, ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... he sat there, the sudden feeling came over him that eyes were watching from behind, and the old instinct of the wild beast broke through the thin veneer of civilization, so that Tarzan wheeled about so quickly that the eyes of the young woman who had been surreptitiously regarding him had not even time to drop before the gray eyes of the ape-man shot an inquiring look straight into them. Then, as they fell, Tarzan saw a faint ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... English agricultural labourer and the French peasant proprietor is irrelevant and inconclusive. In the cottage of a small owner at Osse, for instance, we may discover features to shock us, often a total absence of the neatness and veneer of the Sussex ploughman's home. Our disgust is trifling compared with that of the humblest, most hard-working owner of the soil, when he learns under what conditions lives his English compeer. To till another's ground for ten or eleven shillings a week, inhabit a house from which ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... concealed his dismay not only at Barzil's wrecked being but at the dismal aspect of the interior, the worn rugs with their pieces of once bright material frayed and loose, the splitting veneer of an old chest of drawers and blistered mirror above a dusty iron grate. "You have got in among the rocks!" he exclaimed. "Still they tell me you've weathered the worst. Copper bound and oak ribs. Don't build ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... they should find an interest in such gruesome proceedings. Yet, with a kind of reversion to the savage instincts of former days, they had gathered with the rest. After all, civilisation is only a veneer, and the old, elementary, savage feelings lie dormant in ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... of witnesses he tackled with the same uncompromising lack of veneer which had characterised his remarks on the money question. "Witnesses to character and so forth must be found," he said, "the more authentic and reputable the better, but at all costs they must be ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... might be inaugurated would be to veneer the cheese with building paper or clapboards, instead of the time-honored piece of towel. I never saw cheese cut that I didn't think that the cloth around it had seen service as a bandage on some other patient. But ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... against Jackson, he found him essentially "a knightly personage—prejudiced, narrow, mistaken on many points, it might be, but vigorously a gentleman in his high sense of honor, and in the natural, straightforward courtesies which are easily distinguished from the veneer of policy." Sitting erect on his horse, a thin, stiff type of military strength, he carried with him in the streets a bearing of such dignity that staid old Bostonians, who had refused even to look upon him from their windows, would finally be coaxed into taking one peep, and would then ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... a man of an alert Yankee type, with waxed blond mustache and eye-glasses; he was evidently to be classed among those who have exchanged their country honesty for a veneer of city knowingness. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... crucial point," said the condemned; "that was where my lack of specialisation told so fatally against me. The dead Salvationist, whose identity I had so lightly and so disastrously adopted, had possessed a veneer of cheap modern education. It should have been easy to demonstrate that my learning was on altogether another plane to his, but in my nervousness I bungled miserably over test after test that was put to me. The little ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... great part an accumulation begun with the wedding gifts; though some of it was older, two large patent rocking-chairs and a footstool having belonged to Mrs. Adams's mother in the days of hard brown plush and veneer. For decoration there were pictures and vases. Mrs. Adams had always been fond of vases, she said, and every year her husband's Christmas present to her was a vase of one sort or another—whatever the clerk showed him, marked at about twelve or fourteen dollars. The ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... thus there was manifested the habit of servile obedience, of arbitrary power and violence, which had been taking root for several centuries; under a thin veneer of revolution one finds the servile and violent ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... been much in the East, Principino, and you have learned to love the desert; but you would not have loved it as you do were it not for the spirit of romance which keeps you old-fashioned under a very thin veneer of what is modern. I saw this in you when you were a boy and my pupil; and I must say it made me love you the better. It is perhaps the secret which draws the love of others toward you, without their knowing why, though ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... buy the papers, he replied that he wanted to keep them in order to learn and practice these things himself—thus showing how thin was the veneer of Christianity, in his case at least. On representing to him that in a few years the new conditions would render such knowledge valueless with the younger generation, and that even if he retained the papers he would need some one else to explain them to ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... supplies of hardwoods and softwoods are used for general building purposes, for farm repairs, for railroad ties, in the furniture and veneer industry, in the handle industry, and in the vehicle and agricultural implement industries. On the average each American farmer uses about 2,000 board feet of lumber each year. New farm building decreased in the several years following the World War, due to the high price of lumber and labor. ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack
... was up and he had no time to reassure even the one beloved woman. Something strange, unexpected, had happened to him. Suddenly he too was primitive man, even as these desert men were magnificently primitive. Gone was all the veneer of civilization, the humanity which bids a man respect a fellow-creature's life. He was no longer the educated, travelled man of the world, who earned his living in honourable and decorous ways. He was the cave-dweller, the man of another ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... by the lawyer's behaviour. No sooner did Ocock espy him than up he rushed, brandishing the note that had been got to him early that morning—and now his eyes looked like little dabs of pitch in his chalk-white face, and his manner, stripped of its veneer, let the real ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the exploits of this black son of the desert, who in his person unites the great virtues of his people, magnanimity and bravery, with the gift of poetic speech. Its tone is elevated; its coarseness has as its origin the outspokenness of unvarnished man; it does not peep through the thin veneer of licentious suggestiveness. It is never trivial, even in its long and wearisome descriptions, in its ever-recurring outbursts of love. Its language suits its thought: choice and educated, and not descending—as ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with wine and with furious jealousy, had reviled him in the coarsest terms, had struck him in the face and had spat out foul and vindictive words of abuse. That woman—ah, that woman was his wife—had been for many years to him the type of what women must always be when stripped of the veneer of society's restraints. Janetta had of late shaken his conviction on this point; it was reserved for Margaret Adair to ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... immediately, as he almost felt inclined to do, in order to forestall Chaldea's story. As Hearne, the millionaire's wild instincts would be uppermost, and he would probably not listen to reason, whereas if the meeting took place in London, Pine would resume to a certain extent his veneer of civilization and would be more willing ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... easily understand how he could find way to a girl's heart. But a man can judge a man best, and every instinct of my nature warned me against this fellow. The very first sound of his voice had prejudiced me, and when I saw him I knew I was right—with him manliness was but veneer. And Billie! The name sounded soft, sweet, womanly now and I longed to speak it in her presence. Billie! I said it over and over again reverently, her face floating before me in memory, and then my lips closed in sudden determination: not without a fight, a hard fight, was this gray-jacket going ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... The general use in the Augustan period of marble for a decorative lining or wainscot in interiors led in time to the objectionable practice of coating buildings of concrete with an apparel of sham marble masonry, by carving false joints upon an external veneer of thin slabs of that material. Ordinary concrete walls were frequently faced with small blocks of tufa, called, according to the manner of its application, opus reticulatum, opus incertum, opus spicatum, etc. (Fig. 48). In most cases, however, ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... nor the time to undertake a more thorough investigation. The popularity of certain speculative views is due entirely to the easy food which they provide for our curiosity. They save us much long and often irksome study; they impart a veneer of general knowledge. There is nothing that achieves such immediate success as an explanation of the riddle of the universe in a word or two. The thinker does not travel so fast: content to know little so that he may know something, he limits his field of search and is satisfied ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... of decency that is due to any woman. But the veneer of civilisation is very thin. From beneath it, the potential troglodyte, that lurks in us all, is ready enough to erupt. Ready and eager then, he was visible in Lennox' menacing eyes, manifest in ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... to a large extent organized empire over very much of this space. But at its stablest time, this union was no more than a political union, the spreading of a thin layer of Latin-speaking officials, of a thin network of roads and a very thin veneer indeed of customs and refinements, over the scarcely touched national masses. It checked, perhaps, but it nowhere succeeded in stopping the slow but inevitable differentiation of province from province and nation from nation. The forces ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... look upon. All the latent recklessness which might have made of him a good soldier or a great scoundrel was roused in him. He was passing the boundary which divides the old Adam, which is in every man, from the veneer of early training. He was mutely—unconsciously—calling to his aid the savage instincts which the best of men are not without. His face expressed something of what was passing within his active brain, and the girl ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures. The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald, notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings. These little wooden houses, of such marvellous cleanly whiteness inside, are black outside, timeworn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous masks laughing in the shop-fronts ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... threshold? Didn't she know that as the golden pheasants fled further and further into the thicket of unreality, the more active was his need of her? He wondered where she had gone, and what had kept her so late. Was this a precedent, and had the first veneer of their companionability worn ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... I am elemental. Beneath the veneer of civilization I am a savage. To wake up with the war-cry of the enemy in my ears, to sleep with the—er—barking of the crocodile in my dreams, that ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... just as much of a peasant as she deep within himself; beneath the smooth veneer of the civilized and educated man seethed a primitive unbridled energy and the desire for a wife—a woman to rule him. This young Hercules, who, when he felt like it, could fling unaided into the wagon two-hundred pound sacks of wheat, and who often had to toil like a common ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... true. No one knows better than a doctor what is beneath the veneer of social convention and ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... time Bud's homestead was popular. A real piano, fifty miles from a settlement, was something worth riding far to see. But respect for the shining veneer of the case was not long-lived. In a moment of inspiration, a cowboy pulled out his jackknife and carved his home brand on the shining case. Bud could have said more than he did when he discovered it. Later another contingent, not to be outdone, ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... the Spring of youth. Here and there you will even see venerable greybeards suffering from rheumy coughs who ought to be at home; and though occasionally there is a lithe youngster in European clothes with the veneer he acquired abroad not yet completely rubbed off, the total impression is that of oldish men who have reached years of maturity and who are as representative of the country and as good as the country is in a position to-day to provide. ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... veneer. Crambus arborum.—Yellow satin veneer. They receive their name from the streaks on their wings. They are chiefly found on grasses in flower, and always settled with their ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... it be otherwise? Why should she have stayed? Why should he compliment himself by believing that there was aught about him visible through the veneer acquired in a score and odd years of purposeless existence, to attract a young and pretty ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... ridicule or sarcasm, for people look beneath the veneer nowadays. They remember and repeat the axiom, "there's many a true ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... glazed pots are too artificial to be associated with flowers. They suggest veneer, and I don't like veneer," Amy replied. Then she asked Webb: "Are you ready for a fire of questions? Any one with your ability should be able to talk and work at the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... thin upon us all is the veneer of civilization; very, very swift is the reversion to the primitive when opportunity presents. Only twelve short months and this man, end product of civilization, doer of nothing practical, dreamer of dreams and recorder of fancies, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... went slowly downstairs. He had lost his smile, and his face was contracted with worry. The girl's story had impressed him more than he had cared to own, and there was much of the human in him, in spite of the diplomat's veneer. Then the name "Atheson" sounded insistently in his ears and, momentarily, he felt that he was almost grasping the clue as ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... patience was ever exhibited by him toward those of his countrymen—the most repulsive characters in his stories are such—who would make of themselves mere apes and mimes, decorating themselves with a veneer of questionable alien characteristics, but with no personality or stability of their own, presenting at best a spectacle to make devils laugh and angels weep, lacking even the hothouse product's virtue of being good to ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... his adversary's stomach. Rapidly was Es-sat weakening and with the knowledge of impending death there came, as there comes to every coward and bully under similar circumstances, a crumbling of the veneer of bravado which had long masqueraded as courage and with it crumbled his code of ethics. Now was Es-sat no longer chief of Kor-ul-ja—instead he was a whimpering craven battling for life. Clutching at Om-at, clutching at the ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... entirely of their own sex. If we divide humanity into classes according to type, in each division will be found the male with his complementary female. Side by side with the old harlot at the street corner anxious to sell herself, stands the old aboriginal male, whether covered or not with a veneer of civilisation, eager and desiring to buy. Side by side with the parasitic woman, seeking only increased pleasure and luxury from her relations with man, stands the male seeking only pleasure and self-indulgence from his relations ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... glad to have lived those few short days. I learned to know men—big, strong men in action—what they will do—and what they will not do. The Texan with his devil-may-care ways that masked the real character of him. And you, darling—the real you—who had always remained hidden beneath the veneer of your culture and refinement. Then suddenly the veneer was knocked off and for the first time in your life the fine fibre of you—the real stuff you are made of, got the chance to assert itself. You stood ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... of use to the State, and to train others to be of use to the State (and not only of use to themselves), should be, and indeed is, the aim of every truly civilized man. Unless it be so, his civilization is a mere veneer, ready to wear off at the first rub, and he himself a ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... in the main building, is turned on. The logs remain in this box from three to four hours, when they are ready for use. This steaming not only removes the bark, but moistens and softens the entire log. From the steam box the log goes to the veneer lathe. It is here raised, grasped at each end by the lathe centers, and firmly held in position, beginning to slowly revolve. Every turn brings it in contact with the knife, which is gauged to a required thickness. As the log revolves the inequalities of its surface ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... the plane is a scraper which can be inserted in the same stock and inclined at any required angle. This plane-stock prevents the scraper from unduly lowering some portions of the surface. See also veneer-scraper, p. 91. ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... tried to simulate an interest in some news note. He hated to display sentiment, yet the fates had given him a double burden of it. As a matter of honest fact, he was as sentimental as a woman, and was forever trying to hide the fact behind a thin veneer of nonchalance ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... lap of our voyage, perhaps the less said the better. As always is the case when monotony begins to wear away the veneer of civilization, character quirks came to the surface, cliques formed among the passengers, and gossip and personalities ...
— The Long Voyage • Carl Richard Jacobi
... laughed the Violet, in return, using her Maggie Murphy form of speech with telling effect, as she often did. "He left a thousand apologies for you," she added, slipping back into her veneer of the—for Maggie—upper world. "And you've had your race down for ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... couldn't make any vital difference," Karl added, with a debonair manner, a thin veneer ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... sharply that a little more and like a sling the fragile vehicle would have sent everybody in it flying far away. At this, furious with one of those plebeian rages which in women of her kind shatter all the veneer of their luxury, she dealt the Nabob two stinging lashes with her whip, which left little trace on his tanned and hardened face, but which brought there a ferocious expression, accentuated by the short nose which had turned white and was ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... chain from the warping mill or the linking machine is now taken to the beaming frame, and after the threads, or rather the small groups of threads, in the pin lease have been disposed in a kind of coarse comb or reed, termed an veneer or radial, and arranged to occupy the desired width in the veneer, they are attached in some suitable way to the weaver's beam. The chain is held taut, and weights applied to the presser on the beam while the latter is rotated. In this way a solid compact beam of yarn is ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... society is its brutality. The little incidents which take place when supper is announced give one some idea—to compare small things with great—of what a popular rising might be. Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness. I imagined society very different. Women count for little in it; that may perhaps be a survival of ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... also created a suspicion which he could not minutely define. The truth was, when a man loved, every other man became his enemy, not excepting her father: the primordial instinct has survived all the applications of veneer. So, Abbott was not at all pleased to see his friend ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... which, without it, will be only a veneer. I have had an opportunity to know well a large class of girls selected from the most highly cultivated families in one of our cities. Comparing them with other sets of less highly cultivated girls, I think, on the whole, the standard of truth is higher among the ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... her lamp again and looked round on the appointments of the room, as if she wished Westover to note them, too: the drab wallpaper, the stiff chairs, the long, hard sofa in haircloth, the high bureau of mahogany veneer. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... could wish to see it. "We only want what is fair," he had told Nellie; "we're not going in for anything wild. So long as we get a pound a hundred and rations at a fair figure we're satisfied." And Nellie had shown him things which had struck him dumb and broken through the veneer of satisfaction that of late had covered over his old doubts ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... he kind of lectured about how man had ought to break away from the vile cities and seek the solace of great Mother Nature, where his bruised spirit could be healed and the veneer of civilization cast aside and the soul come into its own, and things like that. And he went on to say that out in the open the perspective of life is broadened and one is a laughing philosopher as long as the blue sky is overhead and the green grass underfoot. 'To lie,' says he, ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... whether by Miss Fossett or visiting masters), was taken away by Mrs. Lyndsay on a visit to the old Marchioness of Montfort. Matilda, who was to come out the next year, was thus almost exclusively with Arabella, who redoubled all her pains to veneer the white deal, and protect with ormolu its feeble edges—so that, when it "came out," all should admire that thoroughly fashionable piece of furniture. It was the habit of Miss Fossett and her pupil to take a morning walk in the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Rochefide by snubbing her; all the women followed her example, shunning the mistress of Calyste du Guenic. [Beatrix.] In short the Marquise d'Espard was one of the most snobbish people of her day. Her disposition was sour and malevolent, despite its elegant veneer. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... amusements prisoners have is in watching the important fellows, the men whose friends could do so much for them if they would only let them know where they are. Sometimes a chap who has perhaps been a body servant or something of the kind, who has picked up the kind of veneer he could catch by aping his master, will furnish food for smiles to every one he comes in contact with during his stay. He never receives a letter without explaining confidentially to every one that another aunt whose favorite he ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... and operators in New York, and was already talked of for mayor. This success was the sort that fulfilled the rural idea of getting on in the world, whereas Philip's accomplishments, seen through the veneer of conceit which they had occasioned him to take on, did not commend themselves as anything worth while. Accomplishments rarely do unless they are translated into visible position or into the currency of the realm. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... father. Nature's titanic and fanciful frescoing and cameo-cutting had strongly wrought upon her impressionable mind, and the old legends and superstitions of paganism had been by no means effaced by the very slight veneer of Christianity which she had received ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... every night in the more expensive and less-respectable cafe. These young men are all free-thinkers, great dancers, singers, players of the guitar. They are immoral and slightly cynical. Their leader is the young shopkeeper, who has lived in Vienna, who is a bit of a bounder, with a veneer of sneering irony on an original good nature. He is well-to-do, and gives dances to which only the looser women go, with these reckless young men. He also gets up parties of pleasure, and is chiefly responsible for the coming of ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... at the life of a tree. Like Topsy "it growed;" it was not planted by man. Those vast pine forests, extending for miles and miles, actual mines of wealth, are a mere veneer to granite rocks. That is the wonderful part of it all, granite is the basis, granite distinctly showing the progress of glaciers ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... now a week old, but something of the original fury came back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that is swept up by trailing skirts? And the ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... in a small matter, and mark their rancour. How bitter! how relentless! The Catholic spirit of half a century ago was not operated on by the literature of a nation that is daily losing even the veneer ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... better man in the composite, in the grand total of manhood? Measured by all the standards by which men are measured, stripping off the superficialities of surface culture and clothes, the thin veneer of education which in his case, as in the cases of the great majority of young men who have been graduated from this or that university, had imparted only a sort of finish, a neat, gleaming polish, and ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... schooled and "finished" until humanity and its wonderful reality had, for her, ceased to exist. Suddenly she felt an upflaming of resentment against the generosity of her Napoleonic brother. In exchange for life's golden chance of romance she had been given a wonderful veneer of hard brilliancy—and she hated it! After a few moments of rebellious introspection she shook her head and rose from her seat, slipping behind the tall marble urn that rose from the end of the bench ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... some extent the heirs, albeit hybrid heirs, to Greek civilisation. They spoke Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the conquerors something of their own Greek veneer. In the second century of our era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain, where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its cradle; and, according to one tradition, he carried off from Pataliputra a famous Buddhist saint, who converted him to ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... ready to her hand. A peculiarity of the East, which is democratic in most ways under the veneer of swaggering autocracy, that servants of the very lowest caste may speak, and argue on occasion, with men who would shudder at the prospect of defilement from their touch. There was nothing in the least outrageous in the proposition that the ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... between socially noble and ignoble traits, between social and educational veneer and sterling ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... to look for work. A discussion arose in our compartment as to what constituted politeness. One gentleman defined it as ceremonious manners, the result of early training; while another objected that that was only the veneer of manners, as all true politeness arose from the heart. I listened awhile and then spoke across the seat to a decent, dejected looking man with a little bundle beside him tied up in a blue and white check handkerchief. "Yes, he was going to England to look ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... swept his face again, twisting his lips nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long contact with those who had been born ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... men as equal in this sense, a condition which is far from existing in the Anglo-Saxon Republic of the United States, where brusque assertion of even the meanest authority is evident, in the present development of that country. Nor is it to be supposed that Mexican politeness is a mere veneer, or mask, to be put on and off as occasion dictates, for it arises from native kindliness—a species of Quixotism of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... turned—swiftly, Houston thought—and mounted her horse. A moment later, she trotted past him, and again he greeted her, to be answered by a nod and a slight movement of the lips. But the eyes had been averted. Barry could see that the thinnest veneer of politeness had shielded something else as she spoke to him,—an expression of ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Catholic Priest is of his conduct at High Mass. To the newly-joined Subaltern, Guest Night conveyed the holy impression of a religious rite. But here was a comic demonstration of the fact that the strictest training is only, after all, a veneer. Two Senior Officers were actually squabbling about a quarter-pound tin of marmalade! The Subaltern could not help smiling. The incident merely showed how raw and jagged the Great Retreat had left the nerves ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... the thousand powers of darkness abide with us still, though to-day they go by different names, for there is no man in this smug, complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our civilization, and behold! there stands the Primal Man in all his old, wild savagery, and with the devil leering upon his shoulder. Indeed, to-day as surely as ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... how unrestrained we were getting. The thin veneer of civilization (thinner than ever when Henry is hungry) was fast wearing into holes. There was a pause, and then I coldly remarked: 'You didn't kiss me when ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... add. One was red-faced and obese; the other was tall, thin, and wiry, and showed as many seams in his face as a blighted apple. Neither of the two had anything to recommend him either in appearance or address, save a certain veneer of polite assumption as transparent as it was offensive. As I listened to the forced sallies of the one and the hollow laugh of the other, I was glad that I was large of frame and strong of arm, and used to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... pious orgies. Stately Spanish Jews, grave blue-blooded Portuguese, hitherto smacking of the Castilian hidalgo, noble seigniors like Manuel Texeira, the friend of a Queen of Sweden, erudite physicians like Bendito de Castro, president of the congregation, shed their occidental veneer and might have been seen in the synagogue skipping like harts upon the mountains, dancing wild dances with the Holy Scroll ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the agony in his heart rose in his throat, and he felt that he was stifling in the open air of the pasture. His nature, large, impulsive, scornful of small complexities, was stripped bare of the veneer of culture by which its simplicity had been overlaid. At the instant he was closer to the soil beneath his feet than ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... lovely pair of old duffers. We talk about Bohemia, Munson, and think we've got it, but we haven't. Our kind is a cheap veneer glued to commonplace pine. Their kind is old mahogany, solid all the way through—fine grain, high polish and no knots. I only wish ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith |
