"Sordidness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... because of the strength and courage which you managed to infuse into my youthful aspirations; but now that I have seen you, will you permit me to say that you have been quite unknowingly a help to me again? A week ago I was half-disheartened of my life because of the apparent sordidness of its daily duties, and now that I have seen you giving your life to perform small and unassuming services for others, my own duties have appeared more sacred. I can't tell you how much I admire your unselfish devotion to these children. Don't think me rude because ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... these cases compensation to be claimed by the injured partner for the harm suffered, and, though no one can uphold these breach of promise cases (which have increased so unfortunately in the war-period) it should be possible to avoid a similar sordidness. The establishment of right to compensation is not a new thing in divorce; used in the way I suggest it would serve as a safeguard against a too hasty escape from marriage, as well as being an act of justice for ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... deeper than anything else could have done—a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very boyhood. And without—the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... says, "my dear sir, your career, for it is an honorable one. The world, bad as it is, has been much worse than now for authors; and through the great reading public, there are many generous souls, whose views are not confined to sordidness and self. May all your laudable exertions be crowned with ample success—with pleasure and profit to ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Queen Bess rented rooms and sold drinks according to the easy-going ideas of that day. But there was something untouched by the sordidness of her calling about this ample Rabelaisian woman. There was a noise about Queen Bess lacking in her ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the serious affairs of life are met as conscientiously by the man or woman who has the real spirit of the Village, nevertheless each of them assuredly shows less of that sordidness and mad desire for money so ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... before him as if it were a charm against the sordidness about him. He had a way of peering at the people we passed as if he were looking for someone he had lost in the crowd. At Sixteenth Street we turned into the small park at the right of the avenue, which with its neighbor on the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... men's minds. There was abundance of controversy with those without, but within all was still. There was nothing to encourage self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice is essential to promote a healthy spiritual life. The Church partook of the general sordidness of the age; it was an age of great material prosperity, but of moral and spiritual poverty, such as hardly finds a parallel in our history. Mercenary motives were too predominant everywhere, in the Church as ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... New York, must seem to originate and to grow in his own brain; she would seem to be merely assenting. Also, it was a delicate matter because the basic reason for the change was money; and it was her cue as a lady, refined and sensitive and wholly free from sordidness, so to act that he would think her loftily indifferent to money. She had learned from dealing with her grandmother that the way to get the most money was by seeming ignorant of money values, a cover behind which she could shame ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips |
