"Sordid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sensual indulgence, and lets his own flesh and blood perish if they require of him to budge a hand-breadth from his egoistic standpoint. Foma, who is not built for a merchant, and who, while ambitious of command, is too magnanimous for the sordid business of a tradesman, has to give in. And the children of his triumphant guardian can only escape ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... Decline and Fall of the Empire: "The noble art, which had once been preserved as the sacred inheritance of the patricians, was fallen into the hands of freedmen and plebeians, who, with cunning rather than with skill, exercised a sordid and pernicious trade. Some of them procured admittance into families for the purpose of fomenting differences, of encouraging suits, and of preparing a harvest of gain for themselves or their brethren. Others, recluse in their chambers, maintained the dignity of legal professors, by ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... us to the motives, the sordid motives, which Mr. Froude, oblivious of the responsibility of his high literary status, has permitted himself gratuitously, and we may add scandalously, to impute to the heads of the Reform movement in Trinidad. It was perfectly competent that ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper and more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... creatures, half frozen and half starved, see carriages rolling past with every appliance of wealth and luxury. I suppose what saves us is that they are so accustomed to their lives, the long days of hard work, the wretched, sordid homes, the insufficient meals, the quantities of children clamouring for food and warmth. Their parents and grandparents have lived the same lives, and anything else would seem as unattainable as the moon, or some fairy tale. There has been one enormous change in all the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... of disgust. I once asked him if he thought France, under the present bourgeois regime, likely to return to a healthier taste in literature, and received as answer the assurance that since coarse and sordid realism could go no further than L'Assommoir, a reaction must set in. From the filthiness of low life, I dare say, but how about the elegant fleshliness of the previous school? France will have to undergo a complete turning inside out before ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... All this sordid life so strange and new, drew the attention of the young westerner. Especially did 42 Islington interest him; for this was an historic spot for "Mormonism." From here the early missionaries had sent forth the message of salvation to Great Britain, in fact, to the whole of Europe. ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... upon this sordid question of ways and means. Make Hammond and Mary happy by consenting to their engagement, and trust the rest to Providence, and to me. Take my word for it, Hammond is not a beggar, and he is a ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... anticipations of life. It was a season of Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase, and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of the White Man's Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo-Saxons, the elect ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... were poor emigrants who made their way to the West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that has been wrought into forms of use and beauty, and prepared by fire to endure almost to the end of time. It is most commonly found in plain rectangular blocks, but in accordance with the artistic spirit of the age, brains are now mixed with the sordid earth, and lasting beauty glows upon the rich, warm face of ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... whom I have quoted before was the daughter of a well-known German diplomatist, and she had been used since childhood to the atmosphere of Courts. She was an accomplished well-born woman of the world, but she had not been a week in her sordid London lodgings with the woman she calls Mrs. Quickly, before she blundered in her innocent German way—into the lodging-house kitchen. Figure to yourself the stupefaction and the indignation of Mrs. Quickly, probably engaged, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... were fighting for liberty. If I were going to credit him, there was not one honest man in Honduras, and no one on either side of this revolution was fighting for anything but money. He had made it all seem commercial, sordid, and underhand. I blamed him for having so shaken my faith and poisoned my mind. I scowled at his unconscious figure as he lay sleeping peacefully on his blanket, and I wished heartily that I had ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... custom are invincible in the country regions, where the peasants are left very much to themselves, the town of Issoudun itself has reached a state of complete social stagnation. Obliged to meet the decadence of fortunes by the practice of sordid economy, each family lives to itself. Moreover, society is permanently deprived of that distinction of classes which gives character to manners and customs. There is no opposition of social forces, such as that to which the cities of the Italian ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... patterns of life, while never forgetting that the chief function of a painter is to paint, not to "think," not to rhapsodise, not to be "literary" on canvas. His cool, measuring eye did more than record sordid facts. He had a sort of enraptured vision of the earth as beautiful, the innocence of the eye we encounter in children only. Stevenson rages at those who say that Velasquez was not a colourist—and Beruete is of them, though he quotes with considerable ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... stood on the summit gazing down, And the earth looked sordid and dull and brown, And neutral-tinted and neutral-souled; And all of life seemed a story told, And the only spot that was bright to see Was a patch of green that had bloomed for me Where a garden lived in a spring long fled, When Love stood ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... Defoe, could have drawn of vulgar English life in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplace country town such as Bedford. It is not at all a pleasant picture. The life described, when not gross, is sordid and foul, is mean and commonplace. But as a description of English middle-class life at the epoch of the Restoration and Revolution, it is invaluable for those who wish to put themselves in touch with that period. The anecdotes ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... does not know is what it is talking about. I mean that it is startlingly ignorant of those special things which it is supposed to invoke and keep inviolate. The things that workmen invoke may be uglier, more acrid, more sordid; but they know all about them. They know enough arithmetic to know that prices have risen; the kind Levantine gentleman is always there to make them fully understand the meaning of an interest sum; and the landlord will define Rent as ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... sacrifices and rites and scriptural vows and observances, from motives of low gain and not as a Preparation for Emancipation. Thus even in the Kali age, Vedic rites are not absolutely unknown. The motive, however, from which these are undertaken is connected with some low or sordid gain. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... me, why good Heaven Thou mad'st me what I am, with all the spirit, Aspiring thoughts, and elegant desires That fill the happiest man? ah rather why Didst thou not form me, sordid as my fate, Base minded, dull, and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough to imagine it could prove anything that was not sordid ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... when it be known that it was part of a house standing in a grimy, if not exactly sordid, London thoroughfare, was exceptionally clean and well-cared-for. A casual stranger, more particularly one of a Superior class to their own, on suddenly opening the door of that sitting-room; would have thought that ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... pink mats on the bureau with wondering awe. And then she curled up in the white bed when Abby bade her, as like a kitten as anything could be. "Oh, you are good, good!" cried the child, whom the warmth and comfort and kindness seemed to have lifted into another world from the cold, sordid one in which she had lived so long. She caught the kind hard knotted hand, and kissed it; but Abby snatched it away, and blushed to her eyebrows, feeling that something improper had occurred. "There! there!" she said, half confused, half reproving. "You don't want to do such things as that! I've ...
— Marie • Laura E. Richards
... from the north, shouting among the mountains, winds of the forests, that tore the cries of exultation from our lips and scattered sound into space, winds of my own northland that poured through our veins, cleansing us of sordid care and sad regret and doubt, these were the sorcerers that changed us back to children while the dull roaring of their incantations filled the world. We two alone on earth, and the vast, veiled world spread round, outstretching to the limits of eternity, all ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... man,' Betty," answered Patricia in a hard voice, "is a criminal, a felon, guilty of some dreadful, sordid thing, a gaol-bird reclaimed from the gallows and sent here to pollute the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... the only way out," the Doctor insisted, "and we knowing ones would have to call you 'Sordid Abe.'" ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... cheated by the low? I sometimes resolve to print my book at my own expense, and, like the Sibyl, double the price; and sometimes am tempted, in emulation of Raleigh, to throw it into the fire, and leave this sordid generation to the curses of posterity. Tell me, dear Idler, what I ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... in our greatest need Ireland might well prove our salvation, provided we had not absolutely lost command of the sea, and this advantage a Liberal Government is prepared to jeopardise for reasons, which, compared with the interests at stake, are little less than sordid. ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... the arrival of his client that Buck deduced two things—to wit, that the Mayor had telephoned Henry he was apt to have a client, and that as a result of this miracle, Henry was in no fit state to discuss the sordid subject of fees and retainers. Ergo, Mr. Ogilvy decided to obviate such discussion now or in the future. He handed Henry a check for two hundred and fifty dollars, which he wrote out on the spot, and with his ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... upon the fair fame of the United States by its management of Indian affairs. The contrast so frequently drawn with the course of things in Canada is not wholly just. It was the French who saved the Canadian Indians from the mere sordid extinction which has befallen most of their southern congeners, as it was the Spaniards who kept the California tribes alive. The natives—or rather the French half-breeds—were made trappers and voyageurs before the English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... seems altogether mad to you, my friend, who pass the window as I write these words. You have huckstered away opportunity just upon the edge of indictable knavery; your ambition has been to be well with the wealth and sleek respectability of the day, to make your son begin life the sordid worldling that you end it, to marry your daughter to the richest fool,—and this you call sanity and common sense! Is it not some Devil's subtlety that deludes you? If Man is an immortal soul, to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... sordid. Washing stockings over a tub is the only life for me,—so long as I have you ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... physician's courage even while he abhorred his cowardice. And while the surgeon was busying himself to mend the victim for new tortures, Gabriel da Costa had a shuddering perception of the tragedy of Israel—sublime and sordid. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly attached to her. In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek, a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log farm-houses, the family life that was at least tolerable. The sordid misery described during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a state of by all the recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended about his twelfth year. At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared. Though the life that succeeded was void ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... misused, and that called wealth which is so far from worth the having. But here, where I have brought you, you shall see humanity undwarfed, and you shall see peace and largeness in the life which you once thought small and sordid." ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... for the times in which he lived. He shared with his contemporaries the restless spirit of roving and adventure which resulted from the invention of the mariner's compass and the discovery of the New World; but he was neither so sordid nor so rapacious as many of them, for his boyhood reading of romances had evidently fired him with the conceits of the past chivalric period. This imported into his conduct something inflated and something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, passive to a superb tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to be stirred and strengthened, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... other matters also a man of wisdom, popular in the provinces, and of a mild and courteous disposition. But at the same time, whenever he could find an opportunity, especially in any controversies or lawsuits (which is most shameful and wicked), he was greatly devoted to sordid gain. Not to mention many other instances, this was especially exemplified in the investigations which were made into the death of Theophilus, the governor of Syria, a man of consular rank, who gave information against the Caesar Gallus, and who was torn to ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... that anybody smiled at this. Indeed, the astonishing thing about this business is that these people seem able to impose successfully on one another. But Mr. Cleveland is even better at the other kind, as for example: "Agitators and demagogues," "ruthless agitators," "sordid greed," "inflamed with tales of an ancient crime against their rights," "unfortunate and unreasonable," "restless and turbulent," "reckless creed," "boisterous and passionate campaign," "allied forces of calamity," "encouraged by malign conditions," ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... was by no means a popular man. Folk had the well-defined opinion that he was selfish, miserly, and hard. If he had not been actually bad, he had never been what the world calls a good man. His methods had been of the grinding, sordid order. He had always been scrupulously honest in the payment of his debts, and in keeping his word; but his sense of duty seemed to stop there: Abel's idea of goodness was to owe no man any money. He never ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... continent; and an alderman of London, a relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner. The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire, surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck with the ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... of art and beauty. They liked it. They felt they were hearing something worth while, as indeed they were, and they forgot all about Angelo and the unfortunate Crocedoro in their admiration for Mr. Tutt, who had lifted them out of the dingy sordid courtroom into the sunlight of the Golden Age. And as he led them through Greek and Roman literature, through the early English poets, through Shakespeare and the King James version, down to John Galsworthy ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... standing there in those sordid surroundings! Contrast, the maker of all standards, outlined the tall dark-haired girl in her brilliant red junior cap and definite red sweater, like the central figure in some old time country picture, where urchins and queer men gave her the middle ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... till sank the sun, Briton and Breton wrought, And Great and Little Britain won The noblest fight ere fought. It was a sailors' victory O'er pride and sordid gain. God grant for ever peace at sea Between the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... passion of my life, only deluding myself with a remembrance of my vanished youth? I dismissed the thought impatiently. For, after all, was not Bunsey a hopeless cynic, a fellow without a single emotion of the ennobling sentiment of man toward woman, a sordid story-teller, who created characters for money, wrecked homes, committed literary murders, played unfeelingly on the tenderest sensibilities, and boasted openly that the only angels were those made by a stroke of the pen ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... few occasions in her life when Lorraine was nervous. She did not want Hal to know the sordid facts; and she did not believe she would be able ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... while the ugliness of common things and common usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I am peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception—I am no artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression—but that a certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so proud to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... the lips, and made the eyebrows almost stern, 'Mr. Rogers will do the right thing always—when the right time comes. As a matter of fact'—here he reverted to the former train of thought —'both he and I are misfits in a practical, sordid age. We should ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Sewell, "that I wouldn't have you continue to make verses whenever you have the leisure for it. I think, on the contrary, that it will give a grace to your life which it might otherwise lack. We are all in daily danger of being barbarised by the sordid details of life; the constantly recurring little duties which must be done, but which we must not allow to become the whole of life." Sewell was so much pleased with this thought, when it had taken form in words, that he made a mental note of it for future use. "We ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... leisure class is patterned after what he saw before him in Athens. He conceives those who belong to it to be set free from sordid cares and physical labors, in order that they may devote themselves to the perfecting of their own minds and bodies and to preparation for the serious work of supervising and controlling the state. Their membership in the class defined their duties and prescribed the course ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the house—in the welcoming aspect of its interior, in Rachel's evident excited gladness at seeing him, in her honest and agreeable features, and in her sheer girlishness. A few minutes earlier he had been in the sordid and dreadful office. Now he was in another and a cleaner, prettier world. He yielded instantly and fully to its invitation, for he had the singular faculty of being able to cast off care like a garment. He felt sympathetic towards women, and eager to employ for their contentment all the charm ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... recover, I beg of you to make the most of it. I believed that power was the supreme lever with which to move the world, and that money was but the fulcrum upon which that lever should rest. You gentlemen have shattered this belief, and have shown me that sordid gold is the controlling object of man's life. Still, I prefer to remain in my Utopia, alone if need be, but with your unwilling company so long as my ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... sorrowing saint thinks too much of it: the [1] sordid sinner, or the so-called Christian asleep, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... by a much more faithful energy on the part of Aristocracy and the Church, and a far nobler realization of its responsibilities by the Press, can the ancient spirit of England make itself felt in the sordid lists of Westminster. Till then he who crows loudest ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... knew where he was. He cursed himself very bitterly, as he well might do, for a bungling idiot. The whole thing had been in his hands, he said, with perfect truth—Arthur Benham's whereabouts proved Stewart's responsibility or, at the very least, complicity and the sordid motive therefor. Remained—had Ste. Marie been a sane being instead of an impulsive fool—remained but to face Stewart down in the presence of witnesses, threaten him with exposure, and so, with perfect ease, bring back the lost boy in triumph ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... India, it is a revelation to see the animals in Burma. The village ponies and cattle and dogs in India are enough to make the heart bleed for their sordid misery, but in Burma they are a delight to the eye. They are all fat, every one of them—fat and comfortable and impertinent; even the ownerless dogs are well fed. I suppose the indifference of ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... tears perhaps less moving. I could not decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him, or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal; and I was perturbed by the suspicion that the anguish of love contemned was alloyed in her broken heart with the pangs, sordid to my young mind, of wounded vanity. I had not yet learnt how contradictory is human nature; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, nor how much goodness ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... more noticeable for the foppishness of his dress than was Lord Kenyon for a sordid attire. Whilst he was a leading advocate within the bar, Lord Kenyon's ordinary costume would have disgraced a copying clerk; and during his later years, it was a question amongst barristers whether his breeches were made of velvet or leather. The wits maintained that ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... not endeavored to take the place of the public towards him, and judge of him as I have seen them judge of others: I mean an apparent frigidity of manner which I feared the world would consider as the evidence of a cold and sordid heart. ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... much to say that one of the best things about the Tuskegee Institute is that it wins our young men and women from mean and sordid environment and brings them in contact with teachers whose minds, hearts, and lives have been enlarged and graced by the highest learning in the best educational institutions of the country. The school teaches ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... yesterday, Dave to-day; Beulah without Dick and Dave! The two joys of her life were missing and in their places two unknown babies whose digestive systems were going to need constant watching, according to Dr. Lee. Then she went about with set lips, doing the last sordid things that death brings in its wake; doing them as she had seen her mother do before her. She threw away the husks in Eva's under mattress and put fresh ones in; she emptied the feathers from the feather bed and pillows and aired them in the sun while she washed the ticking; she ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rack with great care, among the elegant bags enveloped with gray cloth, beside which it looked conspicuously sordid. It was studded with yellow flowers ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was not merely a scholar and a schoolmaster. He had fought his way against disadvantages, had gained a moderate independence by the fruits of early exertions and constant but by no means sordid economy; and, while disinterested enough to undervalue abundance, was too wise not to know the value of money. He was an undoubted financialist, and never gave a farthing without doing real good, because he always ascertained ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... has so many excellent properties, scarce to be met with in any other body in the world, that I have often wondered that so little use is made of it, and those onely vile and sordid; certainly, if it were well consider'd, it would ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... a man so great and good, Once more in his home-country stood, Strange that the sordid clowns should show A dull ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in his perceptions, he was able to recognize that here was a pure and imaginative spirit, strongly yearning after ideal strength, beauty, and goodness. Given such a spirit, it was not unnatural that, turning from sordid or unhappy surroundings as a flower turns from shadow to the full face of the sun, she should have taken a memory of valiant deeds, kind words, and a protecting arm, and have created out of these a man after her own heart, endowing ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... seemed to have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the sordid commonplaces of man, for he was standing before a glaringly printed bill one of many that were tacked upon the walls, which set forth in amazing pictures and double-leaded type the wonders that were to be seen daily and nightly at Olympia, where, for a month past, "Van ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... missionary ladies who told us much that was interesting about their work, which they seem to love whole-heartedly. I asked one girl how it compared with work among the poor at home, and she said, "Well, perhaps it is the sunshine, but here it is never sordid." I can't agree. To me the eternal sunshine makes it worse. At home, although the poverty and misery are terrible, still, I comfort myself, the poor have their cosy moments. In winter sometimes, when funds run to a decent ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... rob, to steal roble, encina, oak rodajas de goma, rubber heels (revolving) rogar, to ask, to beg, to require rollo, roll romperse (p. p., roto), to break rosa, rose, pink rotura, breakage ruin, base, sordid rumbo, course (of a ship) rumor, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... of any heroic action is difficult to manage; and the sublime sacrifice of her pride and all the conventional proprieties which Marcia had made in giving herself to Bartley was inevitably tried by the same sordid tests that every married life ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... times persist in shouldering death itself out of a man's thoughts. And meanwhile, there stood the precursor of his end, in the emblematic person of a very brown John the Baptist. The fellow's gorgeous red jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a sordid dirty shirt. He was officer of the guard, and had a curiosity as to how a Gringo about to be shot would act. He waited clumsily, lantern in hand. But he was disappointed. There seemed to be nothing out of the commonplace. Some condemned Mexican, though a monotonously familiar spectacle, would ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... professional readers that the personalities represented in our case histories are entirely fictitious, but that alterations have been made only in such facts as will not impair scientific values. We confess to no particular pleasure in writing up this rather sordid material; the task is undertaken because such studies offer the only way to gain that better understanding which is necessary for adequate treatment of special ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... the wrinkled shrewdness of that sordid visage, and gazed up the valley, where, amid a gathering mist, gilded by the last sunbeams, he could still distinguish those glorious features which had impressed themselves into his soul. Their aspect cheered him. What did the ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... utmost to enforce the measure, which was "so holy a scheme that he would sacrifice for its success his fortune and his life." He refused the archbishopric of Mechlin, but his motives for so doing were entirely sordid. His revenues were for the moment diminished, while his personal distinction was not, in his opinion, increased by the promotion. He refused to accept it because "it was no addition to his dignity, as he was already Cardinal and Bishop of Arras," but in this statement he committed an important ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Reggie was a rather melancholy young man who suffered from elephantiasis of the bank-roll and the other evils that arise from that complaint. Gentle and sentimental by nature, his sensibilities had been much wounded by contact with a sordid world; and the thing that had first endeared Archie to him was the fact that the latter, though chronically hard-up, had never made any attempt to borrow money from him. Reggie would have parted with it on demand, but ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... for causes and reasons, But made us all feeling and voice? When we went with the winds in their blowing, When Nature and we were peers, And we seemed to share in the flowing Of the inexhaustible years? Have we not from the earth drawn juices Too fine for earth's sordid uses? Have I heard, have I seen All I feel and I know? Doth my heart overween? Or could ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... he thought again of his sordid parting with Gertie in the Park—years ago, that afternoon. But the thought had to wait in the anteroom of his mind while he rejoiced over the fact that he was to see his ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... With the least word or hint of blame. Who else shall discommend her choice, I giving it my hearty voice? Wed me? Ah, never near her come The knowledge of the narrow home! Far fly from her dear face, that shows The sunshine lovelier than the rose, The sordid gravity they wear Who poverty's base burthen bear! (And all are poor who come to miss Their custom, though a crown be this.) My hope was, that the wheels of fate, For my exceeding need, might wait, And she, unseen amidst all eyes, Move sightless, till I sought the ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... by the people. It degrades to the purposes of wily craft the plan of rule our fathers established and bequeathed to us as an object of our love and veneration. It perverts the patriotic sentiments of our countrymen and tempts them to pitiful calculation of the sordid gain to be derived from their Government's maintenance. It undermines the self-reliance of our people and substitutes in its place dependence upon governmental favoritism. It stifles the spirit of true Americanism ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Nay, my liege; that were too much. A girl from out that cockatrice's den— Take such a one to wife? I would liefer take A viper to my breast! Nay, nay, you jest, My father, for you hate this low-born crew, Grown gross by huckstering ways and sordid craft— Ay, ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... war, of course, must be stopped: if it were not already too late. It would be a war for markets; for spheres of commercial influence; a sordid war that would degrade the people. War, the supreme test of a nation's worth, must be reserved for great ideals. Besides, she wanted ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... injustice. He came back to his office, boiling, declaring the French were a crazy nation, and that, after all, he could recall meeting one or two fine Germans during the course of a fairly busy career. He summoned Mr. Skinner and Matt Peasley to hear the sordid tale. ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... nature nor art, nor beauty anywhere, weighed upon him like a penal sentence, so that the vileness of the surroundings entered into his soul and made him feel as if the men and women in the place, as well as their works, were all alike, mean, vile, and sordid. Edward Denison wrote these words seventeen years ago. The place in which he lived is still ugly and monotonous, a small cross-street leading from the back of the London Hospital into the Commercial Road, about as far from green fields and parks or gardens as can be found anywhere in London; there ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... upstairs, with its many shuttered windows, had the aspect of a deserted rooming-house. Just before him, over the closed door to the saloon, was the inscription Smatt had spoken of, in plain black letters, "Black Cruiser Saloon, Diego Spulvedo, Prop." It was a sordid and unprepossessing exterior; Martin felt that the Black Cruiser would prove the anti-climax ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... With charnel dust to foul our brightest bays! Let the dead past bury its tainted dead, Lest aliens at our 'heroes' wag the head." "Shocking! wails out the sentimentalist. Believe no tale unpleasant, scorn to list To slanderous charges on the British name! That brutish baseness, or that sordid shame Can touch 'our gallant fellows,' is a thing Incredible. Do not our poets sing, Our pressmen praise in dithyrambic prose, The 'lads' who win our worlds and face our foes? Who never, save to human pity, yield One step in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... stout woman opened a door and Sanselme laid his burden on the bed. It was a sordid room in which he found himself. On the dirty walls hung some colored prints of doubtful propriety. On one was a dark stain, as if a glass of wine had ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... I'd better go and see after my trunk; it's still on the station platform." Mary wondered what her prim aunts would think of her for sitting in Mrs. Clark's kitchen, but it had seemed so much more of a refuge than the sordid streets of the hideous little town, with its droves of men and never a glimpse of a woman that she had been only too glad to avail herself of the invitation of the proprietress to "make herself at ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... moralizing air, as if reflecting upon the sordid love of property which will make a man carry a jewel-case about with him when the next moment he might find himself in the sea. At least, that was my interpretation of the nodding. Then the brother and sister—for such I afterwards discovered they were—left ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... the accident which made her a prisoner, lying on the sofa in the morning-room she had fallen into a deep reverie, which had caused quite a pucker between her eyebrows. Being naturally a romantic, sentimental girl, she mentally resented the sordid necessity so continually urged by her aunts of making a "good match." It was in Gwenda to cast all their prudent manoeuvres to the winds, and to follow the bent of her own inclinations; but it was ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... I think of these things a black shadow stalks over my heart. I hear a voice, "Fool, and do you still think that you are ever to escape from this? Do you not perceive that this sordid shame is your lot? Do you not perceive that you may writhe and twist, struggle and pant, toil and serve, till you foam at the lips? Who will heed you! Who will hear you! Who cares anything about you!—Who wants your Art! Who wants your ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... impressed from infancy with the beauty of antiquity, he obtained access to the charters deposited there, and he read every scrap of ancient literature that came in his way. At 14 he was apprenticed to a solicitor named Lambert, with whom he lived in sordid circumstances, eating in the kitchen and sleeping with the foot-boy, but continuing his favourite studies in every spare moment. In 1768 a new bridge was opened, and C. contributed to a local newspaper what purported to be a contemporary account of the old one which it superseded. This attracted ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... depths of primeval forests, so our judgment is warped. As to Charles's goodness, I heard some story about his offering to marry an Empress of the East while his first wife was still alive, not, it appears, from any ardent devotion to the lady—I do not believe he ever met her—but simply from the sordid motive of adding another empire to his business. However, I am no scandal-monger, and all the parties concerned have ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... relics, living now so quietly on the bounty of a none-too-generous government? What dreams of settlement massacres, of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they may conjure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona Eastern locomotive disperses their visions with the blast of sordid actuality! ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... a shaded path and came out under a green canopy made by four large palms. A man lay underneath, his head pillowed on his arm, his face upturned—a man in the sordid prison gray. Virginia Beverly grew giddy, and, brave as she had been so far, for an instant she feared that she was going to faint like an ordinary, stay-at-home girl. She started, and caught at the arm of the Commandant, who turned ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... their sordid cares And troubles enter here? Love hung about the rooms like smoke, And peace descended as a cloak, Should I allow the vulgar ...
— Poems of West & East • Vita Sackville-West
... life on the full tide of an enthusiasm that did not begin to ebb till near the close of his first semester. He lived in a new world, one removed a million miles from the sordid one through which he had fought his way so many years. All the idealism of his nature went out in awe and veneration for his college. It stood for something he could not phrase, something spiritually fine and intellectually strong. When he thought of the noble motto ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... phrases he exposed the subservience of the Government to the capitalist Ring, and described the inhuman compact that it had entered into with the arch-enemies of national freedom and personal liberty to crush the motherland of the Anglo-Saxon nations, and for the sake of sordid gain to rivet the fetters of oppression upon the limbs of the race which for a thousand years had stood in the forefront of the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... expedite and readier to obey the dictates of the head in a rougher method of opposition, from each of which extremities being carried back to its fountain, it was returned to them from thence, and so backwards and forwards, till the circulation and union were confirmed and completed, the sordid unnatural, offensive parts being in the meantime thrown off as dregs of nature, and nuisances of human society; but of these in so well-tempered a constitution, there were but few; however, when there were any to be found, though they had been of the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... country, home, and friends, Die in a sordid strife — You can count your friends on your finger ends In the critical hours of life. Sacrifice all for the family's sake, Bow to their selfish rule! Slave till your big soft heart they break — The heart of the ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... nominating some one, in an instant a much greater clamour arose; while some denied all knowledge of him, others objected to him at one time on account of flagitious conduct, at another time on account of his humble birth, his sordid circumstances, and the disgraceful nature of his trade and occupation. The same occurred with increased vehemence with respect to the second and third senators, so that it was evident that they were dissatisfied with the senator himself, but had not any one ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... and denied that he ever knew her. Could this be the man she had trusted with her all? Again her doubts and fears and scruples rose—rose instantly in full strength. The new impressions she had lately received of him vanished, and all the subtle suggestions of sordid lightness which the diplomacy of Brassfield, even, had not entirely kept from her mind, came back with multiplied distinctness. These transformations of character, these curious duplicities, and now this lie. ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... and sincerely. They were as little sordid as creatures could be. If deeply questioned, it would have been found that their notion of the position Providence had placed them in (in other words, their father's unmentioned wealth), permitted them to be as lavish as they pleased. Mr. Pole had endowed them with a temperament similar to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... modern tendency to reduce everything to autobiographical reminiscence. These histories of free-thinking young men breaking loose from their father's authority and running amuck among Paris studios and Leicester Square actresses become tedious and banal after a time. Such sordid piling up of meticulous detail, drawn so obviously from the writer's own adventures, throws a kind of grey dust over ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill." There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world of Thackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the sordid aspects of life—to the mother-in-law who threatens to "take away her silver bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies of this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with life, not with you; they ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... seen elegance and beauty since she went away; she had entered into the life of the cultivated, the intellectually great. In spite of her deep affection for Aunt Raby, she came back to the ugliness and the sordid surroundings of home with a pang which she hated herself for feeling. She forgot Aunt Raby's sufferings for a moment in her uncouthness. She longed to shower riches, refinement, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade |
