"Veneer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 he is ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... timber size and 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 is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... the grain of the giant fennel, this part of the wood being preferred from its being dotted and wavy." Chap. 84—"The wood, too, of the beech is easily worked, although it is brittle and soft. Cut into thin layers of veneer it is very flexible, but is only used for the construction of boxes and desks. The wood, too, of the holm oak is cut into veneers of remarkable thinness, the colour of which is far from unsightly; but it is more particularly where it is exposed to friction that this wood is valued, as being ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... there is every reason to fear true merit would not have had the exquisite privilege of basking in the smiles of that young Bostonian. But perhaps her chief delusion was the belief that she was an artist. She had learned all that Boston could teach of drawing, and this thin veneer had received a beautiful foreign polish abroad. Her friends pronounced her sketches really wonderful. Perhaps if Miss Sommerton's entire capital had been something less than her half-yearly income, she ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... education can do is to inhibit under ordinary conditions certain undesirable tendencies and instincts and to strengthen through exercise those that are desirable; and even then when a crisis comes, the old, hereditary instinct is apt to break through its thin veneer and actually frighten the individual at the unexpected strength it reveals. Slap any man in the face and see what chance his life-long education has against the old barbarous instinct for fighting. But notwithstanding the strength and tenacity of instincts, ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with dead soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs on its back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with clotted drops, covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in its arms that it has only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of a circle, has been stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are laid bare. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... back to grow in their natural environment they are transformed to their original Alpine forms. May we not then entertain as a possibility that woman's modern character, with all its acknowledged faults—all its separation from the human qualities of man—is a veneer imposed by an unnatural environment on succeeding generations of women? If the larger social virtues are wanting in her, may it not be because they have not been called for in a parasitic life? How splendid a hope for women rests here! There is a biological truth, not usually suspected by those ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... she asked suddenly, as later in the afternoon Mrs. Everidge sat beside her hammock. "Is Louis right? Is it just the veneer of education and travel ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... industries of Rye is the production of an ingenious variety of pottery achieved by affixing to ordinary vessels of earthenware a veneer of broken pieces of china—usually fragments of cups and saucers—in definite patterns that sometimes reach a magnificence almost Persian. For the most part the result is not perhaps beautiful, but it is always gay, and the Rye potter who practises the art deserves encouragement. I saw last ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... 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 ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... seems paganism, or rather barbarism, with a moral veneer. It seems barbarism, because it brings us back to the good old days when mere might was right. Bernhardi, speaking of the right of conquest of new territory inherent in a growing people, tells us that in such cases 'might is at once the supreme right, and ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... morning Scaife gave his 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 meal the talk ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... 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
... told him before the last one came that she was not equal to it.... After that she was an invalid for seventeen years until she died. And there was loss of children to bear between them, and sickness, and creeping age, but this bit of furniture held firm to the last. Gentlemen, it was mad solid, no veneer, a good ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... of something of which I always have been reasonably sure, and that is that American men make the best husbands in the world, and that women who cannot get along with Americans, and who think men of another race, who have more polish, more finesse, more veneer, would suit them better, could not manage to live ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... nations; yet unless continual intermarriage takes place each race will soon recast and vitiate the common inheritance. The fall of the Roman Empire offered such a spectacle, when various types of barbarism, with a more or less classic veneer, re-established themselves everywhere. Perhaps modern cosmopolitanism, if not maintained by commerce or by permanent conquest, may break apart in the same way and yield to local civilisations no less diverse ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... mad. The earth and the sky dissolved in many floating specks and then went red—red like that heap yonder. The veneer of civilisation peeled, fell from her like snow from a shaken garment. The primal beast woke and flicked aside the centuries' work. She was the Cave-woman who had seen the death of her mate—the brute who had ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... prepared to annihilate Lorimer hip and thigh, for he was now convinced that his blank astonishment at the mention of The Dark Horse during their previous interview had been, in the words of the bard, a mere veneer, a wile of guile. Since the morning he had seen Mr Lawrie again, and had with his own eyes compared the two poems, the printed and the written, the author by special request having hunted up a copy of that valuable work, The Dark Horse, from the depths ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... possible to endure another day's existence. Betty thrilled with a strange new feeling of awe and responsibility. The hidden strength of her nature, which had come to her as the result of being brought up to womanhood in a household dedicated to God and His Christ, broke through the veneer of youthful folly, and came ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... fine-grained delicacy. Her pictured lips were silently arguing for the life he had found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old—a thin veneer over a century of feudalism—and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... freshening the fancy. Another individual who was much exercised by our journey was Khwjeh Konstantin, a Syrian-Greek trader, son of the old agent of the convent, whose blue goggles and comparatively tight pantaloons denoted a certain varnish and veneer. It is his practice to visit El-Muwaylah once every six months; when he takes, in exchange for cheap tobacco, second-hand clothes, and poor cloth, the coral, the pearls fished for in April, the gold dust, the finds ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... of the Renaissance had migrated across the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directed to the suppression of heresies and to the re-establishment of spiritual supremacy over the intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society in Rome returned to mediaeval barbarism. The veneer of classical refinement and humanistic urbanity, which for a time had hidden the natural savagery of the Roman nobles, wore away. The Holy City became a den of bandits; the territory of the Church supplied a battle-ground ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... 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 in the 'Nights'—to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... simulating the grain of walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked out contemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of hens or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. He paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers, and wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... 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 ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... veneer of civilization is quite thin. Scratch most people, and very near the surface you come on the savage. This is specially true when they are sick. They at once want charms and miracles to restore them to health, and come to the doctor or 'medicine ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... down instead of opening outwards.... The walls are covered with rifles, pistols, sabres and whips. The chest of drawers and the window-sills are littered with cartridges, instruments for mending rifles, tins of gunpowder, and bags of shot. The furniture is lame and the veneer is coming off it. I have to sleep on a consumptive sofa, very hard, and not upholstered ... Ash-trays and all such luxuries are not to be found within a radius of ten versts.... The first necessaries ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... 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, it wears to ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... just the 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 French I had ever known deserted me; ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... butcher, the ice-saw, and all the work with ice, The work and tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker, Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colors, brushes, brush-making, glazier's implements, The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner's ornaments, the decanter and glasses, the shears and flat-iron, The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the counter and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal, the making ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... all, that slow and alluring smile, appealed to the husband of the wilful Pat rather as evidences of Oriental, half-effeminate devilry than as passports to decent society. Oxford had veneered him, but scratch the veneer and one found the sandal-wood of the East, perfumed, seductive, appealing, but something to be shunned as ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the butcher, the ice- saw, and all the work with ice, The implements for daguerreotyping—the tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker, Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colours, brushes, brush-making, glaziers' implements, The veneer and glue-pot, the confectioner's ornaments, the decanter and glasses, the shears and flat-iron, The awl and knee-strap, the pint measure and quart measure, the counter and stool, the writing-pen of quill or metal—the making of all sorts of edged tools, The brewery, brewing, the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... lessons bestowed on the latter, 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 quiet retreats of the Green Park; and one morning, as they ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... the tops until they found the tree by the figure of the wood. It had been cut two months and the wood was entirely dry. Mr. Bixby sent me two very tiny grafts. The tree sawed out something over 60,000 feet of veneer that sold from 16 to 18 cents per square foot; quite a large tree. It sawed out five logs and the stump sawed out 500 feet. Several thousand dollars for the tree. I saw several pieces of the tree last year. The most beautiful thing I ever saw. Most highly ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... 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 limb of some prehistoric creature. ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... off the thin veneer hood of the airplane, and disclosed a very small four-cylindered rotary pneumatic engine of bewitching simplicity and lightness, which a baby could have held ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... timber; duramen, heartwood; 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
... his side; but now his blood 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, ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... radio cabinets, caskets, interior finish, sewing machines, and gun stocks. It is used either in the form of solid wood cut from lumber or in the form of plywood made by gluing sheets of plain or figured veneer to both sides of a core. Black walnut veneer is made by the slicing method and to a limited extent by the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... a chair that I had dusted," she replied, "one of the feet touched the sofa lightly, when off dropped that veneer like a loose flake. I've been examining the sofa since, and find that it is a very bad piece of work. ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... schoolmates, who had become one of the foremost merchants 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. How else can they be judged? Does not the great public involuntarily ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... big and the colors used so virulent; but to paint a snuff-box perfectly you must love the labor for its own sake, and pursue it without even an underthought of the performance's ultimate appraisement. People do not often consider the simple fact that it is enough to bait, and quite superfluous to veneer, a trap; indeed, those generally acclaimed the best of persons insist this world is but an antechamber, full of gins and pitfalls, which must be scurried through with shut eyes. And the more fools they, as all we poets know! for to enjoy a sunset, or a glass of wine, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... took to herself a king in the person of Leopold I. It is, however, highly significant that directly the Dutch menace was removed from Belgium the internal cleavage of nationality began to be felt. "In 1815 the differences between Flemish and Walloon were to a large extent concealed beneath a veneer of French culture and French manners. Among the upper and commercial classes no language but French was ever spoken; and in their dislike of Dutch supremacy the Flemish Belgians took a sort of patriotic pride in their borrowed speech, and for ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... made of thin wood veneer with a light wood binding at the top and bottom. The cover is of wood and is usually fastened on with staples. The handle is either of wood or of wire. When well made, the baskets are firm and symmetrical, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... synonym for 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
... 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 procured. Whom can ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... to his feet. There was no anger in his face—only a huge amusement. Rose-Marie, watching his expression, knew all at once that nothing she said would have the slightest effect upon him. His sensibilities were too well concealed, beneath a tough veneer of conceit, to be wounded. His soul seemed too well hidden to ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... Already his mind was busy with plans for advancement, and each move that he made was with an eye to the future. But one thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral tinhorn that Nature had ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... more, it shattered at one stroke the brittle casing of self-command with which centuries of civilization had sought to veneer the Slav. In a trice a woman whose existence neither of them had suspected was revealed, a fury incarnate flew at the dismayed prince, clawing, tearing, raining blows upon his face and bosom. Overcome by surprise, blinded, dazed, staggered, he gave ground, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... appearing to recognize him. Babington's blood began to resume its normal position again, though he felt that this seeming ignorance of his identity might be a mere veneer, a wile of guile, as the bard puts it. He remembered, with a pang, a story in some magazine where a prisoner was subjected to what the light-hearted inquisitors called the torture of hope. He was allowed to escape from prison, and pass guards and sentries apparently without ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... instant, Olive paused, astonished at the change which had come over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Tarzan of the Apes sloughed the thin veneer of his civilization and with it the hampering apparel that was its badge. In a moment the polished English gentleman reverted to ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... and self-control. The veneer of civilization was torn away to the last shred; and men, turned brute again, gave themselves up to the ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... this punctilious politeness had never extended to the major, and since an occurrence connected with this very bag, to be related shortly, it had ceased altogether. Whether it was that Jefferson had always seen through the peculiar varnish that made bright the major's veneer, or whether in an unguarded moment, on a previous visit, the major gave way to some such outburst as he would have inflicted upon the domestics of his own establishment, forgetting for the time the superior position to ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... under German command, and the German, whenever he is confident that he is on the winning side, exhibited all the brutality and cruelty of his Hunnish ancestors. Attila was a scourge; his modern descendants are simply imitators who, having the thin veneer of civilisation, combine science with bestial brutality in their methods ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... his and her family for centuries, both being of the old stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal, according to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... that is often met with in recent years. The Japanese themselves deplore the changes that have taken place. They testify that the older forms of politeness were an integral element of the feudal system and were too often a thin veneer of manner by no means expressive of heart interest. None can be so absolutely rude as they who are masters of the forms of politeness, but have not the kindly heart. The theory of "impersonality" does not satisfactorily account for ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... invisible Rome rather than the fumum et opes strepitumque, it was the city of pristine ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises' pageant of heroes. When he walked through the Forum he saw not only the glistening monuments in their new marble veneer, but beyond these, in the far distant past, the straw hut of Romulus and the sacred grove on the Capitoline where the spirit of Jove had guarded a folk of simpler piety.[2] And down the centuries he beheld the heroes, the ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... the veneer of refinement cracked under the strain of the man's rage, showing the brutality ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... we mean by vocational education something more than this, just as we mean by cultural education something more than a veneer of language, history, pure science, and the fine arts. In the former case, the practical problems of life are to be lifted to the plane of fundamental principles; in the latter case, fundamental principles are to be brought down to the plane of present, everyday life. I can see ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... you!" he shouted, his face empurpled. "You're fired!" All of his polish stripped from him like peeling veneer, he ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the working people are different from us, not only in their habits ... that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're as different from working people as ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... time of the Civil War, however, the city has suffered a decline in this department of art. Opera seasons have not been regular, and in spite of occasional attempts to revive the old-time spirit, the ancient Opera House, with its brave columned front, its cracking veneer of stucco, and its surrounding of little vari-colored one story cafes and shops (which are themselves like bits of operatic scenery), does not so much suggest to the imagination a home of modern opera, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... a selection of many such incidents which show that the national brutishness was appearing through the veneer. In the light of such events where, on German soil, Germans murderously attacked their fellow-countrymen on such ridiculous pretexts, it requires little imagination to explain the outburst of brutality against Belgians who dared to defend ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... without being aware that she was guilty of a grievous sin. Every taste possessed by them was antagonistic to her. Their amusements, their literature, their clothes, their manners,—especially in regard to men,—their gestures and color, were distasteful to her. "They hide their dirt with a thin veneer of cheap finery," said Dolly to her father. He had replied by telling her that she was nasty. "No; but, unfortunately, I cannot but see nastiness." Dolly herself was clean to fastidiousness. Take off her coarse frock, and there the well-dressed lady began. "Look at the ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... 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 ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... over and do it again for tea," he said, and as I was perfectly cool, sober and in my right mind at the moment he spoke, I had to concede that his voice was the most wonderful I had ever heard, and something in me made me resent it as well as the curious veneer that had spread over my friends at his entry upon the scene. There they stood and sat, six perfectly rational, fairly moral, representative free and equal citizens, cowed by the representative of something that they neither understood nor cared about, and it made ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... delicately nurtured, and it seemed strange that 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
... together for a sufficient period of time, and utterly dependent on one another for daily intercourse, fall into the places allotted to each by temperament and heredity. Each little community would own a wit and a butt; the sentimentalist and the cynic. The churl by nature would appear through some veneer of manner, if only to bring into relief the finer qualities of his fellows; lastly, and most surely, one other would jingle a merciful cap and bells, and mingle motley with ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... 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 ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the other, in an airy tone, 'not at all, sir. I'm merely a civilized being with the veneer off. I am not hidden under an artificial coat of manner. No, I laugh—ha! ha! I skip, ha! ha!' with a light trip on one foot. 'I cry,' in a dismal tone. 'In fact, I am a man in his natural state—civilized ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... only my fancy, as I'm extremely sensitive on such points, for she received me courteously enough, pressing the welcoming cup of coffee and hospitable muffin in an adjoining ante-room on my notice; but, I thought I could perceive, below the veneer of social civility, a sort of "how-tiresome-of-you-to-come-before-anybody-else" look in her eyes, which made me extremely small in ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Northland, frosty and grim and menacing, men stripped off the sloth of the south and gave battle greatly. And they stripped likewise much of the veneer of civilization—all of its follies, most of its foibles, and perhaps a few of its virtues. Maybe so; but they reserved the great traditions and at least lived frankly, laughed honestly, and looked one another ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... simple little soul under her casing of Parisian veneer, and was often innocently surprised at the potency of her own charm. That men, big men and wise men, were inclined to take her artful artlessness at its surface value was a continual revelation to her. Like Rachael, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... farming 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. They hand me a little pocket change. It ...
— 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
... a mean thing that Sydney had done, and he was not so hardened as to have done it without a blush. Yet so admirably does our veneer of civilization conceal the knots and flaws beneath it that he went to sleep in the genuine belief that he had saved his sister from a terrible danger, and the name of Campion from ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... 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, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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 ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to-day but thwart the grand-children of that generation, even 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
... Sara's physical condition that civilized man is supposed to feel for the cripple. Far within him was the loathing of the savage for something abnormal; the loathing that once left the physically unfit to die. Yet superimposed on this loathing was the veneer of civilization, that forces kindness and gentleness and self-denial toward the fit that the unfit may ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... daemons, and 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 in the dim past, we are all possessed of a devil great or ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... trenches could be excavated only by the use of dynamite, and when a charge was made the troops had to carry sandbags to build temporary cover from machine-gun fire. This method of warfare, in fact, was general throughout the whole mountain front, where the hard rock carried a mere veneer of earth, and sandbags had to serve for defense until the engineers could blast trenches and galleries in the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... don't doubt it. But, 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 except taking ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... should 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 ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... crept plausible Jesuit professors, following the light of learning like its shadow, mimicking the accent of the gods like parrots, and mocking their gestures like apes. Their adroit admixture of falsehood with truth in all departments of knowledge, their substitution of veneer for solid timber, and of pinchbeck for sterling metal, was more profitable to the end they had in view than the torture-chamber of the Inquisition or the quarantine of the Index. Mediocrities and respectabilities of every description—that ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and sordid when stripped of the elaborate courtesy and sham politeness that marks their dealings with the outside world. Their courtesy, what is it? This thin veneer of politeness is like their polished lacquer that covers the crumbling wood within. But we have a proverb, "Even a monkey falls"; and some distant day the Western world that thinks so highly of Japan will ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... imagine so. But I am sure the daughter is. Not that veneer which passes for it, but that deep inner culture, which gives a deft, artistic touch to the hand, softens the voice, gives elegance to the carriage, with a heart and mind nicely balanced. Judge for yourself, when you see her. If there is any rare knickknack in the house, it will have been ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... morning that the veneer of the Ritz began to wear off for Henry. He had pulled a bath and found it cold; they were conserving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the hotels of Paris excepting Friday and Saturday nights. The English, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... good Scotch granite, with a human heart beneath. The veneer of gentility had underneath it the pure gold of character. She seized the helm of the family ship with a heroic hand. She sailed steadily through a sea of troubles that often threatened to overwhelm her; the unaccustomed task ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... deep chair with his hands behind his head. "It's not too hard to imagine Marthasa's great-great-grandfather running down vessels in space and pillaging helpless cities on other planets. The veneer of civilization on ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... 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
... Sagan, the present Count, inherited in an unmodified degree the more predatory and uncivilized instincts of his forefathers. Illiterate, brutal, and cunning, the thin veneer laid by the nineteenth century upon his coarse-grained nature was apt to rub off on the very slightest friction, bringing the ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... at me, please. When you came into my life, or rather when you went out of it—yes, I am Irish—I saw that money and station are the mere veneer of life: the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... elemental. Beneath the veneer of civilisation 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 ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... 'the dominant idea' and rude hypnotism, 'the sleep of the shadow,' could do, would be done, as witch trials show. All these elements in folklore, magic and belief would endure, in the peasant class, under the veneer of civilisation. Now and again these elements of superstition would break through the veneer, would come to the surface among the educated classes, and would 'carry silly women captive,' and silly men. They, too, though ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... she asked, and for the first time I heard her voice sobered, without the coquetry, which must after all have been a very thin veneer. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... of varnish should be given to the under side of the deck after the pieces have been glued on, and when dry the deck can be fitted, 3/8-inch veneer pins being used for fixing on, and care being taken to get it true to position. A center line is drawn down the under side of the deck, and marks made to correspond at the stern and transom ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... camp-fire to seize their 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 is just the same ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... to Senator Corson's. We have been invited to meet Mr. Daunt at lunch," said Despeaux; a thin veneer of suavity suited his ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... places than the grave!" he said, beginning to leer savagely. His eyes glittered. He could scarcely find patience for argument. The thin veneer of his first ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... gives the secret of this spirit hand as follows: The hand is prepared by concealing in the wrist a few soft iron plates, the wrist being afterwards bound with black velvet as shown in Fig. 1. The board is hollow, the top being made of thin veneer (Fig. 2). A small magnet, A, is connected to a small flat pocket lamp battery, B. The board is suspended by four lengths of picture-frame wire one of which, ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... think wood as good as ivory; and that in this case, it might add to the improvement of the young gentlemen, that they should make the figures themselves. Being furnished by a workman with a piece of veneer, no other tool than a penknife and a wooden rule, would be necessary. Perhaps pasteboards, or common cards, might be still more convenient. The difficulty is, how to reconcile figures which must have a ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... Brigit studied this simple woman who was to be her mother-in-law. Madame Joyselle was, socially speaking, absolutely unpresentable, for she had remained in every respect except that of age what she had been born—a Norman peasant. She had acquired no veneer of any kind, and looked, as she stood with her plump hands folded contentedly on her apron-band, much less a lady than Mrs. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... brickwork. This is greatly aggravated by the disparity in height, and the ponderous cornices. As to construction, the prevailing type is a flimsy pile of brick and timber, 'put up,' apparently, by mutual connivance of the contractor and the coroner, and screened off from the street by a thin veneer of 'architecture.' Now there is a certain merit, sui generis, in a clever deception, but those in vogue here are too utterly transparent to claim even this. The telltale wall of brick cheats you out ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... and viewed the dead, cumbrous furniture; the two cabinets bright with brass and veneer. He stood at the window staring. It was raining. The yellow of the falling leaves was hidden in grey mist. 'This weather will keep many away; so much the better; there will be too many as it is. I wonder who this ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... example. During this time he became aware of many negative emotions associated with childhood, of young adult frustrations and disappointments. He was really very angry about many things in his life, even though he had for many years maintained an invariably pleasant social veneer. But now he began expressing some of these feelings to me and to ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... potash is useful to darken oak, walnut, beech, or mahogany, but if applied to ash it renders it of a greenish cast. If a sappy piece of walnut should be used either in the solid or veneer, darken it to match the ground colour, and then fill in the dark markings with a feather and the black stain (see pp. 10, 11). The carbonate solutions are generally used for dark surfaces, such as rosewood represents, and a still darker ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... usually fairly well educated, for not infrequently he started out to study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity. A few have come into the field from journalism. As a result, the British labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more impressive front than the American. For example, Britain has produced Ramsey MacDonald, who writes books and makes speeches with a rare grace; John Burns, who quotes Shakespeare or recites history ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... that he was beneath his thin veneer of pretentiousness—"when we know how the British Government kicked you out of its Secret Service as soon as it had no further use for you, we can understand and sympathise with your natural reaction to such treatment at ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of appearing before a Court of Justice is eagerly sought, and imaginary claims or grievances are constantly invented in order to satisfy the ambition for publicity. A modest and retiring temperament forms no part of native equipment, and the slight veneer of Christianity, in the crudest phase of Dutch Protestantism, increases the aggressive tendency. The missionary agencies of Calvinistic Holland seem incapable of practical sympathy with the island people; but half a loaf is better than no bread, and in any form of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... 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
... 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 ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... an air of 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
... 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 ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... on one side, three or four stories on the other, seeming to set their claws into the cliffs and cling there for dear life, I thought of houses in Capri and Amalfi, and in some towns in France; and again there were low cottages built of blocks of shale covered with a thin veneer of white plaster showing the outlines of the stones beneath, which, squatting down amid their trees and flowers, resembled peasant cottages in Normandy or ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... old beliefs covered with a veneer of European ideas. The Visayan still holds to many of the old superstitions, not because he has reasoned them out for himself, but because his ancestors believed them and transmitted them to him in such ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... was certainly an enigma. Iris wrinkled her pretty forehead in the effort to place him in a fitting category. His words and accent were those of an educated gentleman, yet his actions and manners were studiously uncouth when he thought she was observing him. The veneer of roughness puzzled her. That he was naturally of refined temperament she knew quite well, not alone by perception but by the plain evidence of his earlier dealings with her. Then why this affectation of coarseness, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... the mountain regions on the west. It was the logical meeting point for buyers and drovers; and while the town of that day has passed into history as "wicked Dodge," it had many redeeming features. The veneer of civilization may have fallen, to a certain extent, from the wayfaring man who tarried in this cow town, yet his word was a bond, and he reverenced the pure in womanhood, though to insult ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... impossible and he had to use his suit motor. This caused some concern over his meager fuel supply since his plan called for some flat-out jetting later on. In the frantic flurry of bending, twisting, over and under—controlling, the veneer of aplomb began to wear. Johnny was sweating freely by the time he had the cylinder stabilized as best he could judge and had gingerly worked himself into the open end as far as he could against the cushioning mass ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor |
