"Grubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... because he has money and good looks and doesn't work for his living, and likes pretty colour schemes. He probably gets that from having seen so much wonderful art in his travels. Aren't painters just as good as bridge-builders? Rob doesn't think so. She wants every man to get his hands grubby." ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... moment. All of Arethusa's efforts to draw Helen Louise into the conversation failed; she seemed stricken absolutely tongue-tied. Even a reference to her father failed to arouse to animation. Peter sat stiffly erect, also silent, one grubby hand tightly clutching his mother's sleeve as if he feared the catastrophe of losing her through ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... and the patience of City Editor Wilbert Devore frazzled out practically together. The episode to which I would here direct attention came to pass in the middle of a particularly hot week in the middle of that particularly hot and grubby summer, at a time when the major was still wearing the last limp survivor of his once adequate stock of frill-bosomed, roll-collared shirts, and when Devore's scanty stock of endurance had already worn perilously near the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... shirt to a dirty one! and if you allow that I possess the right of selecting my future rulers, I would much rather have those whom birth and education have taught at least toleration, than a parcel of grubby-nailed democrats, innocent of soap-and-water, who wish to choke their one-sided creed, willy-nilly, down my throat, in defiance of my inclinations and better judgment; and whose sole interest in "their fellow man" is centred in the problem—how to line their own pockets ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Earthman? You were an Earthman! Now you're a grubby little specimen of the genus tsith! You're a miserable, whining little speck of matter wriggling toward the final transfixation! In another year you won't even be that. You'll be dead and forgotten. Don't come crawling to me talking about Earthmen!" The voice scraped across Latham's naked nerve-ends. ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... friends with whom he can talk quite unaffectedly about what he cares for and values; and he ought to be able to say to such a friend, "I cannot talk about these things now; I am in a dusty, prosaic, grubby mood, and I want to make mud-pies"; the point is to be natural, and yet to keep a watch upon nature; not to force her into cramped postures, and yet not to indulge her in rude, careless, and vulgar postures. It is a bad sign in friendship, if intimacy seems to a ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the garden, the American soldier, the children and I together. The little girl, with that wistful confidence that all French children show for men in khaki, slipped her grubby little paw into my hand. I expect Joan was ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... at these times used to be acute. The head printer would send up a relay of small and grubby boys to remind us that "On Your Way" was fifty lines short. At ten o'clock he would come in person, ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... grubbing and grubbing at school,' said Bella, looking at her father's hand and lightly slapping it, 'till he's not fit to be seen. O what a grubby child!' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the train did not sneak between hills of slag, cinders, rubbish, garbage, dross and the bloody brown carrion of broken machinery, it shot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbroken barriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaring tunnels full of grimy light and grubby air. ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... So far the quarrel had been familiar and commonplace, like a conversation about the weather, but her neck, hidden under grubby lace, was Ada's ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... suppressed excitement prevailed over Montricheux. It was the day when the pretty lakeside town celebrated the Fete des Narcisses, and from the smallest street urchin, grabbing a bunch of narcissi in his grubby little hand and trying to induce the good-natured foreigner to purchase his wares, to the usually stolid hoteliers, vying with each other as to which of their caravanserais should blaze out into the most arresting scheme of decoration on the great occasion, the whole ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand? Beefy face an' grubby 'and — Law! wot do they understand? I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... very grubby, and all about his dark grey eyes there were the marks made by his dirty fingers where he had rubbed away the tickling tears. The brownish red dust of the Devon lanes had darkened his delicate white skin, and matted ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Aunt Lora! My God! Who is she? Just look at her record. She disgraces the family by marrying a grubby newspaper fellow called Porter. He has the sense to die. I will say that for him. She thrusts herself into public notice by a series of books and speeches on subjects of which a decent woman ought to know nothing. And now she gets hold of you, fills you ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... variety of periodicals, and an admirably chosen store of books, ranging from the classics to the most utterly modern literature. Few large English towns could show anything as good. Cross the Rockies to Vancouver, and you're back among dirty walls, grubby furniture, and inadequate literature again. There's nothing in Canada to compare with the magnificent libraries little New Zealand can show. But ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... zee how I Do pick up all that you do leaeve behind? I'm zorry that your bill should be so snubby." "No," zaid the pig, "methinks that I do zee My bill will do uncommon well vor thee, Vor thine wull peck, an' mine wull grubby." An' just wi' this a-zaid by mister Flick To mister Crow, wold John the farmer's man Come up, a-zwingen in his han' A good long knotty stick, An' laid it on, wi' all his might, The poor pig's vlitches, left an' right; While mister Crow, that talk'd so fine O' ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... room," said the Man Next Door, leaning on his spade. It was Saturday afternoon and the next-door garden was one of the green ones. There were small grubby daffodils in it, and dirty-faced little primroses, and an arbor beside the water-butt, bare at this time of the year, but still a real arbor. And an elder-tree that in the hot weather had flat, white flowers on it big as tea-plates. ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... the youngest Miss Rainham. She stood up, tears raining down her plump cheeks. No one, Cecilia thought, ever cried so easily, so copiously, and so frequently as Queenie. As she stood holding out a very grubby forefinger, on which appeared a minute spot of blood, great tears fell in splashes on the dark green linoleum, while others ran down her face to join them, and others trembled on her lower eyelids, propelled ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... but Lotty did, and I just took her orders; for that wise little woman told me where to buy a bushel of coal and some kindlings, and milk and meal, and all I wanted. I worked like a beaver for an hour or two, and was so glad I'd been to a cooking-class, for I could make a fire, with Lotty to do the grubby part, and start a nice soup with the cold meat and potatoes, and an onion or so. Soon the room was warm, and full of a nice smell, and out of bed tumbled 'the babies,' to dance round the stove and sniff at the soup, and drink milk like hungry kittens, till I could ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... that you look like the minister of any religion ancient or modern in a grubby flannel shirt, a battered sun-helmet, a torn green and white umbrella and a pair of ragged duck trousers, you are mistaken, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... I want my own face again! And my own hands!" she reiterated glibly. "I mean the face with the mortgage in it, and the cinders—and the other human expressions!" she explained. "And the nice grubby country hands that go with that ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... given up to servants' bedrooms, nurseries, and school rooms. Stately staircases become narrower as they mount, and the climber gets glimpses of apartments which are frequently bare, whatsoever their use, and, if not grubby in aspect, are dull ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in one of the most lovely old French chateaux I have ever imagined. Half chateau, half farm, fifteen miles behind the line. We remain here for two or three days. Arrived late last night, tired and grubby. But, O ye gods, when dawn began to reveal this old courtyard with its hens and chickens and pigeons! On one side the old house with its faded shutters. On the other side the old gateway with a square tower and a pigeon-cote above. Along the other sides old barns. The country round we have ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... prosperity and contentment, certain of my brother writers, and his brother illustrators would, in our places, have rent the thin, vaporish veil of apparent corporate kindliness, and found such foul shame, such hideous malignity, such grasping, grubby greed, such despicable soul-destroying despotism, as to shock the simple nature of a chief of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... lot of grubby and unsoothing stretches too, extensive in places, and even in the pleasant streams troubles exist that are invisible to the eye. There is little to be complacent about, for threats are multiplying rather than fading, and some parts of the Potomac river system already need more than ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... makes people so different from each other down there—so many people who are sordid, grubby, quarrelsome, cruel, selfish, spiteful? Only a few who are bold ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson |
