"Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The thick line of trees that are near Rathnew makes the way intensely dark even on clear nights, and when one is riding quickly, the contrast, when one reaches the lights of Wicklow, is singularly abrupt. The town itself after nightfall is gloomy and squalid. Half-drunken men and women stand about, wrangling and disputing in the dull light from the windows, which is only strong enough to show the wretchedness of the figures which pass continually across them. I did my business quickly and turned back ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... blood, did not appeal to Adrian. Also from childhood he had been a member of the dissenting Church, one of the New Religion. Yet, at heart, he rejected this faith with its humble professors and pastors, its simple, and sometimes squalid rites; its long and earnest prayers offered to the Almighty in the damp of a cellar or ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... after them, but they had already disappeared into that maze of crooked, squalid streets around the Pitti. Fortunately, there was not more than a sovereign in it. I was filled with regret, however, on account of my friend's letter. He had trusted me with some secret. I had accepted ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... du Fouarre, though once a very famous thoroughfare, is to-day perhaps as squalid as any that drains its refuse by a single gutter into the Seine, and the widow had been no beauty even in the days when she followed the 106th of the Line as vivandiere and before she wedded Sergeant Jupille of that regiment. But she and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... For the most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value. Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered region. In its downward ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... chances in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... were followed by some of our guards and other individuals, anxious, we concluded, to watch our proceedings. Our party was but small, for alas! the greater number of the lieutenants were unable from sickness to attend the funeral. We were a melancholy party—pale, haggard, and squalid. We placed the body on the grass. What a fine, handsome young fellow he looked! We began to dig his grave. Without consideration, we began to dig it east and west. When we had proceeded some way in our work, our French masters ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... of power it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways; its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering; of distribution as chance peddling and squalid shopkeeping; it is feverishly seeking efficiency.... In its machinery.... But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... bar near the door, his liquor in his hand, lounging in his careless attitude of abstraction. But there was not a lax fiber in his body; every faculty was alert, every nerve set for any sudden development. The scene before him was disgusting, rather than diverting, in its squalid imitation of the rough-and-ready times which had passed before many of these men were old enough to carry the weight of a gun. It was just a sporadic outburst, a pustule come to a sudden head that would burst before morning and ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... over, those who love to see an army of first-class skaters will find an Oxford day ticket well worth the money—youth, health, strength, grace, and manly beauty, in hundreds, cutting round and round, with less of drawback from the admixture of a squalid mob ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... catapult. The voices of many are threatening and formidable. They are quick to anger, but quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons; nor among them is ever seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in ragged garments. At all ages they are apt for military service. The old man goes forth to the fight with equal strength of breast, with limbs as hardened by cold and assiduous labor, and as contemptuous of all dangers, as the young. Not one of them, as in Italy is often the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... And lengthen out my lays from door to door? Then let thy Fancy aid me—I repair From this tall mansion of our last year's Mayor, Till we the outskirts of the Borough reach, And these half-buried buildings next the beach, Where hang at open doors the net and cork, While squalid sea-dames mend the meshy work; Till comes the hour when fishing through the tide The weary husband throws his freight aside; A living mass which now demands the wife, Th' alternate labours of their humble life. Can scenes like these withdraw thee ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... a home-made marquee formed an excellent mess. After our first difficulty, which was to find the place at all in the utter darkness of relief night, we spent a very happy twelve days in beautiful weather. After coal mines and squalid narrow streets, the woods of Lorette, the little village of Bouvigny, and the open country were delightful, for the scenery to the south was all very pleasing. Games of all descriptions were our programme for the first two days, while our chief amusement was to ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... their horses' heads towards La Mareze. Again and again Hortense recalled the squalid sight which had met their eyes. But Renine, who was in a lively mood and full of attentions to his companion, seemed ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... true-to-life author, depicting the often squalid scenes he encountered with great care and attention to detail. His young readers looked forward eagerly to his next books, and through the 1860s and 1870s there was a flow of books from his pen, sometimes four in a year, all very good reading. The rate of production diminished ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... your brother so loved—the mother of his children—died in this squalid room, and far from her sons, in poverty, in sorrow! died of a broken heart! Was that well, father? Have you in ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... best for them? "Only," I said, "do not call it practical to encourage millions of people to waste hours and hours in mere repetition, and to spend millions and millions in supplying this cold comfort, when next door to the magnificent cathedral there are squalid streets, and squalid houses, and squalid beds to lie and ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... branches remained in the nakhil, or grove. Nothing at all was to be found in the few scrubby fields about the well now choked with masses of the insects. Whoever the people of this squalid settlement had been, all were gone. The place was almost as bare as if the sun's flames, themselves, had flared down and licked the village to dust ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the squalid room. Peterson had begun to pack. A suitcase lay open on the narrow bed. The wrinkled gray-white counterpane was half ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... into which the Arab guide now turned was so narrow that the jutting bays of the houses seemed pushing their faces impudently against their neighbors. A voice in one room could have been heard as clearly in the one over the way. It was a mean little street, squalid and poor and pitiful, but it maintained its stripped dignities of screened windows and isolation. It was better not to wonder what nights were like in those ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... suspected she had used the magic ointment, and could now see them as they were. But it was only with the right eye, the one she had touched with the salve, that she could see thus. When she closed that eye and looked with the other, everything was just as it had been before, and seemed so mean and squalid it was difficult to believe it ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... the only one of his admission to the school, that of clean face and hands, is enforced, and the mother, in order to be relieved of the care of him during the, day, is obliged to have him washed. He then leaves the abode of filth and intemperance, and squalid poverty, and ill-temper, for a clean, airy place, pleasant in summer, warm and dry in winter; and where he sees not a face that is not lighted up with the smile of kindness towards him. His whole day is passed in amusing exercises, or interesting instruction; and he returns at ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... inboard and got out the oars from under the seats. He got the little boat out to mid-stream, and they floated down until a village of squalid huts appeared on the eastern bank. He landed, there, and with much bargaining and a haughty demeanor disposed of the boat to the skipper of a batelao in exchange for passage down-river as far as Corumba. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... tolerably safe to say that the position of women among the Chinese is very generally misunderstood. In the squalid huts of the poor, they are represented as ill-used drudges, drawers of water and grinders of corn, early to rise and late to bed, their path through the vale of tears uncheered by a single ray of happiness or hope, and too often embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... with the pictured idea: 'You hit it:—not what you called the "sublimely milky," and not squalid as you'll see the faces of the gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me—may I beg?—don't clap names on the mountains we've seen. It stamps guide-book on them, English tourist, horrors. We'll moralize over the crowds at the tables ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for it is the most orderly and respectable crowd you ever saw. In fact, such a crowd would be an impossibility in England or any highly-civilized country. There are no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. In fact, our civilization has not yet mounted to effervescence, so we have no dregs. Every white person on the ground was well clad, well fed, and apparently well-to-do. The "lower orders" were represented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... middle spot of Rivas, a town of some two or three thousand inhabitants, where General Walker stood at bay many weary days against the combined Costa Ricans, Guatemalans, and Chamorristas, and was netted at last. But these observations of the squalid plaza were of another date. At present our eyes and thoughts fasten upon the crowd of melancholy, fever-eaten filibusters, who walk with heavy pace up and down the corridors, and along the paths ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... be granted: every day has its separate quantum, its dose (as the doctrinists of rent phrase it) of anxiety, that could not be digested so soon as noon. No man will say it. He, therefore, who dined at noon, was willing to sit down squalid as he was, with his dress unchanged, his cares not washed off. And what follows from that? Why, that to him, to such a canine or cynical specimen of the genus homo, dinner existed only as a physical event, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... was already crowded. Ann Eliza had never before felt so tired. Even Miss Mellins's flow of narrative ran dry, and they sat silent, wedged between a negro woman and a pock-marked man with a bandaged head, while the car rumbled slowly down a squalid avenue to their corner. Evelina and Mr. Ramy sat together in the forward part of the car, and Ann Eliza could catch only an occasional glimpse of the forget-me-not bonnet and the clock-maker's shiny coat-collar; but when the little party got out at their corner the crowd ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... Jeanne's genius was for begging for her poor people. And there is nothing more touching in the world's history than her journey in the milk-cart to the regatta. You see, dear Mother, she was accustomed to beg from door to door among squalid streets, stopping a passer-by, stooping under low doorways, intruding everywhere, daring everything among her own people, but frightened by the fashionable folk en grande toilette bent on amusement. It seems that her courage ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look'd ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... stands no type or title given In all the squalid tales of gore and pelf; Though cowed by crashing thunders from all heaven. Cain never said, 'My ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... to the American army. Being poorly clothed, and more poorly fed, they were not in condition to meet the tried veterans of the English army. It was said of this reinforcement from Gen. Gates' army, that they were men of approved courage, and flushed with recent victory, but squalid in their appearance, from fatigue and want of necessaries. But when Col. Bigelow led his regiment into line with the main army at White Marsh, a small place about fourteen miles from Philadelphia, he was recognized by the commander-in-chief, as the very identical Capt. Bigelow whom he had seen ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey
... squalid and dirty, up one of those mean streets which, by their narrow way and shelving buildings, shut out sun, air, and light from their ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... even that they had to work almost incessantly for fourteen or sixteen hours a day. There was no time for cooling and very little to cook, for they lived principally on bread and margarine and tea. Their homes were squalid, their children half-starved and raggedly clothed in grotesque garments hastily fashioned out of the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... must not hesitate, Endymion. We must never forget the great object for which we two live, for which, I believe, we were born twins—to rebuild our house; to raise it from poverty, and ignominy, and misery and squalid shame, to the rank and position which we demand, and which we believe we deserve. Did I hesitate when an offer of marriage was made to me, and the most unexpected that could have occurred? True it is, I married the best and greatest of men, but I did not know that when I ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... select tone of society could grow up amongst a body so comprehensive and so miscellaneous as the soi-disant nobility of continental states? Could it be expected that 130,000 French "nobles" of 1788, needy and squalid in their habits as many of them were, should be high-bred gentlemen? In Germany, we know that all the watering-places are infested with black-leg gamblers, fortune-hunters, chevaliers d'industrie, through all varieties of this category. Most of these bear ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... conversion, Chinese immigration, nor European conquest has ever taken from them their national dress. Civilization has introduced many articles of clothing; but no matter how many of these are adopted, the Malay, from his Highness the Sultan of Johore, to the poorest fisherman of a squalid kampong on the muddy banks of a mangrove-hidden stream, religiously ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... in my life was so dismayed! The wonderful novelty of everything, the unusual smells, the unaccountable filth (though it is reckoned the cleanest of Italian towns), the disorderly jumbling of dirty houses, one upon the roof of another; the passages more squalid and more close than any in St. Giles's or old Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... From the cheap, squalid section of town known as "railroad end," Cable's rising influence carried him to the well-earned luxury. The lines of care and toil mellowed in the face of his pretty wife, as the years rolled by; her comely figure shed the cheap raiment ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... aged man rushed into the Forum on a market-day, loaded with chains, clothed with a few scanty rags, his hair and beard long and squalid; his whole appearance ghastly, as of one oppressed by long want of food and air. He was recognized as a brave soldier, the old comrade of many who thronged the Forum. He told his story, how that in the late wars the enemy had burned his house and plundered his little farm; that to replace his losses ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... numerous; and as they are always bold when in the neighborhood of buffalo, they would approach quite near to look at me, gazing intently with their great round eyes, then suddenly leap aside, and stretch lightly away over the prairie, as swiftly as a racehorse. Squalid, ruffianlike wolves sneaked through the hollows and sandy ravines. Several times I passed through villages of prairie dogs, who sat, each at the mouth of his burrow, holding his paws before him in a supplicating attitude, and yelping away most vehemently, energetically whisking his little ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... their friends from Diamond X had joined forces with Uncle Sam's troopers and were warm on the trail of the Yaquis, the squalid, degenerate and vicious band that had captured Rosemary and Floyd still retained possession of their captives. Though disheartened and apprehensive, Rosemary and her brother had made up their minds to one thing—they would not be ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... did the phrase make him want to clear his throat? Raw—yes, that was the association—when you opened your mouth and the fog swirled in. Newsboys scampering along a foggy street that was neither elegant nor squalid, but just a street of mixed shops and mixed traffic and barrows lit with a row of flapping lights, and men and women with faces that showed they worked hard to earn a little less than they needed.... Public-houses.... Butchers' shops with great slabs of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... company of devoted women, drawn mainly from the fashionable fringe which skirted his squalid district and banded together as a Sisterhood. For clerical help he depended entirely on the brothers of his society, and the money saved by these voluntary agencies he distributed among the poor, the sick, and the unfortunate. Money of his own he ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... street, but poor and squalid, full of small lodging-houses, and little dingy shops; very few people were about, and in spite of Joshua's warning no one seemed even to ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... black of his calling; no sooner was he beyond sight of his parish than his valise was opened, and he arrayed himself—under the hedge, no doubt—in a suit of jaunty grey. The pleasures for which he sacrificed the lives of others and his own were squalid enough, but they were the best a provincial brain might imagine; and he sinned the sins of a hedge priest with a courage and effrontery which his brethren may well envy. Indeed, the Man in the Grey Suit will be sent down the ages with a grimmer scandal, if with ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... picture of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions of coercive necessity, was the only ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... and off they went at break-neck speed, on! on! on! past rows and rows of houses, past wildernesses of brick and mortar. Far behind them they left churches, hospitals, buildings innumerable, the mansions of the rich and the wretched dwellings of the poor, the squalid habitations of outcast London, on! on! on! Up the great hill of Highgate, where the tender green foliage of early summer and of the great oak trees bordered the roadside, and where the almond blossoms ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... been calling on the government and the legislature to put down so monstrous a nuisance. Yet still, bounded on the west by the great school of English jurisprudence, and on the east by the great mart of English trade, stood this labyrinth of squalid, tottering houses, close packed, every one, from cellar to cockloft, with outcasts whose life was one long war with society. The best part of the population consisted of debtors who were in fear of bailiffs. The rest were attorneys struck off the roll, witnesses who carried straw ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the outward semblance of a man and not of a monster," wandered hither and thither over the face of the earth, setting his mark upon it as no other creature yet had done, leaving behind him innumerable tell-tale remnants of his fierce and squalid existence, yet too scantily endowed with wit to make any written disclosure of his thoughts and deeds. If the physiological annals of that long and weary time could now be unrolled before us, the principal fact which we should ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... what I was when you rescued me from the pitiless stones of the market-place, or you would scarcely ask me such a question. I have confronted the public—not the brilliant throng of the opera-house, but the squalid crowd which gathers before the door of a gin-shop, to listen to a vagrant ballad-singer. I have sung at races, where the rich and the high-born were congregated, and have received their admiration. I know what ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... twilight dust and grime of the Flats, a woman sat on the doorstep of a wretched house. Her rounded shoulders slouched wearily—her tired hands were folded in her lap. She stared with dull, listless eyes at the squalid homes of her neighbors across the street. The Interpreter had described the woman to Helen—"a girl with fine instincts for the best things of life and a capacity for ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... All to no purpose. I was for walking, and was about to command Virginia to accompany me, when who should appear but my gentleman himself, the Cavaliere Aquamorta, inquiring the cause of the uproar. He presented a truly magnificent appearance in that squalid place. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... croquet and billiards, and all the other jolly games I mean to play. Look at those children trying to play cricket in that dirty backyard. Poor little beggars! Fancy living in one of those horrible squalid houses. But you cannot spoil to- day for me, little backyards. On Tuesday perhaps, when I am coming again to the ugly town, your misery will make me miserable; I shall ask myself hopelessly what it all means; but just now I am too happy for pity. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... man—a dreadful drowned image, all soiled and swollen—a squalid tragic form, immovable, never to move more. Nettie did not need to look at the dread, uncovered, upturned face. The moment she saw the vague shape of it rising against the side of the boat, a heap of dead limbs, recognisable ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... means of enjoyment. Those who occupy the first places in this practical competitive examination are the rich and the influential; those who fail, more or less, occupy the lower places, down to the squalid obscurity of the pauper and the criminal. Upon the most liberal estimate, I suppose the former group will not amount to two per cent. of the population. I doubt if the latter exceeds another two per cent.; but let it be supposed, for the sake of ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... is a pretty little place,—comfortable, cosy, bright, and deserving of its name;—in broad day, it is none of these things. A squalid dreariness seems to have settled upon it—it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own—an atmosphere dark, heavy, and strangely flavored with odors of escaping gas and crushed orange-peel. Behind the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... pocket. Oh, no, believe me, there's no health in the People. Ground down under the iron heel of despotism, reduced to a condition of hopeless serfdom, I don't say that they might not develop redeeming virtues. But free, but sovereign, as they are in these days, they're everything that is squalid and sordid and offensive. Besides, they read such ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... and Parish House were not in the mill district itself, a place shoved aside, full of sordid hideousness, ribboned with railroad tracks, squalid with boarding-houses never free from the smell of bad cooking, sinister with pawnshops, miserable with depressingly ugly rows of small houses where the hands herded, and all of it darkened by the grim shadow of the great red brick mills themselves. Instead, our ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... yet in sunny Italy, there is much to do for womankind. Then, as now, the skies were blue, and the sun was bright and warm; then, as now, did the peasants dance and sing all the way from water-ribbed Venice to fair and squalid Naples, but with a difference. Now, there is a measure of freedom to each and all—then, justice was not only blind but went on crutches, and women were made to suffer because they were women and ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... weary from dancing and singing all day in the streets, it would be far pleasanter to drift about on the canal in the evening than to spend it tossing about on the husk mattresses in Giovanni's squalid house, and the children listened with eager ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... nameless—all constitute a chapter of extraordinary importance in the general history of English toleration, extending in its consequences far beyond the pale of the communion immediately concerned. It was a long and painful journey, often unedifying, not seldom squalid, with crooked turns not a few, and before it was over, casting men into strange companionship upon bleak and hazardous shores. Mr. Gladstone, though he probably was not one of those who are as if born by nature tolerant, was soon drawn by circumstance to look with favour upon that ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... him, slipped into the alleyway, and, crouching against the tenement wall, moved noiselessly along to the side entrance. A moment more, and he had negotiated the rickety stairs with practiced, soundless tread, was inside the squalid quarters of Larry the Bat, and the door of the Sanctuary was locked and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... through the door, into the long, narrow "Opera House." It was a dirty, cheerless hole, in spite of the brilliance of many oil lamps, shining among the flimsy decorations. At the end of the tunnel-shaped room was a rude stage, festooned with gaudy, squalid hangings, beneath which a painted siren was singing a song which Simon did not listen to. The floor of the auditorium was filled with chairs and tables in disorderly array, the occupants of which seemed to be paying more attention ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... adopted the theory that he always procured a list of expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned I was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one day at the end of three years I received another visit from his aunt. She was drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs. Brooksmith, had been dead a year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had always looked after her a bit since her troubles; I never knew what her troubles had been—and now she hadn't so much as a petticoat ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... Laeca! The days had been, while Rome was yet but young, when it stood far aloof in the gay green fields, the suburban villa of the proud Porcian house. Time passed, and fashions changed. Low streets and squalid tenements supplanted the rich fields and fruitful orchards, which had once rendered it so pleasant an abode. Its haughty lords abandoned it for a more stately palace nigh the forum, and for long years it had remained tenantless, voiceless, desolate. But dice, and wine, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... down from Pinhel under an escort of Portuguese militia; and, taking leave of them, I was handed over to a company of the 23rd Regiment—hurrying in from one of the outlying hamlets near Celorico—with whom I reached on the 7th of January the squalid village of Boden, in and around which the 52nd lay in face of the doomed fortress across ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... window to ascertain their whereabouts. His vigilance ended in their getting aboard the East Boston ferry-boat in the car, and hardly getting ashore before the boat started. They now gathered up their burdens once more, and walked toward the wharf they were seeking, past those squalid streets which open upon the docks. At the corners they entangled themselves in knots of truck-teams and hucksters' wagons and horse-cars; once they brought the traffic of the neighborhood to a stand-still ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... uncouthly around his waist and shoulders, completed the costume of the man. His wife's was equally scant and rude, but so arranged as to present the idea that even in her breast the sense of fitness, the last feeling of froward womanhood, was not quite extinguished. The squalid rags and matted hair, by a single touch of the hand, a gesture, or a shake of the head, assumed such shape as she fancied would display to greatest advantage what remained of a coarse and masculine beauty. The consciousness that she once possessed such beauty ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... forenoon, walking down the river along the squalid waterside avenues; he found them in sympathy with the squalor in himself which always followed a squabble with his wife. At the end of one of the westward streets he found himself on a pier flanked by vast flotillas of canal-boats. As he passed one ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... northern summer. The aircar lost altitude, and the hot-jet stopped firing. They came gliding in over the suburbs and the yellow-green parks, over the low one-story dwellings and shops, the lofty temples and palaces, the fantastically twisted towers, following a street that became increasingly mean and squalid as it neared the industrial district ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... floored, but only paved with common tiles. In the evening he ate nothing save a piece of bread, with some goat-cheese and figs, and quenched his thirst with a draught of muddy wine which he diluted with water. A squalid old woman brought him this wretched supper, and it cut the duchess to the heart to see him hunt about for coppers enough to pay for it. One day he seemed to have exhausted his store, for he turned his purse upside down and shook it, but not the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... bracing freshness in the air which suggested that she was getting away from where the herds of London slept, into open spaces. For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she turned back. After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon her. She came to a bridge and crossed it into an area of gaunt and darkened ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... drink for himself. Bartley declined to drink again. He was thinking of this squalid tragedy and of its possible outcome. The erstwhile sprightly Cheyenne held a new significance for the Easterner. That a man could ride up and down the trails singing, and yet carry beneath it all the grim intent some day to ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... in which he was seated to-day. They are, however, very rare; but this evening, after he had finished touching the people, a man, dressed like a peasant in a loose brown frock, worsted stockings, and brogues, apparently of the lowest order, dark, ill-looking, and squalid, approached the Confessional to reveal some great crime. The confession was very long, so was the admonition of the Cardinal which followed it. The appearance of the Cardinal is particularly dignified and noble, and, as he bent down his head, joining it to that of this ruffian-like ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... their cloaks over the varied and glittering plunder that lay scattered about on the ground; and strange was the contrast of the sparkling jewellery, the rich stuffs, and embroidered robes, strewed on the beach, with the mean and filthy garments that partially concealed them, and the wild and squalid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of the court, walked along yonder street to the House. The sight of so young a woman, and so great a sovereign, thus leveled by physical necessity with the meanest, excited some of the old enthusiasm with which she used to be greeted: the populace themselves, with their squalid faces, and in their extreme misery, greeted her; but the greatest feeling was aroused among the nobles and gentry who surrounded her, and who seemed to make a point of offering more homage, the less outer circumstances commanded it. There was assembled in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... come, but not in my time—it will not help me.' And so you return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! To toil long hours for another's advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... ruined. The grim castle of the Desmonds, scene of the midnight murder which had brought so many woes on Ireland, still elbowed the grey Templars Cloister, and looked down, as it frowned across the bay, on the crumbling aisles and squalid graves of the Abbey. To Bale, as he scanned the dark pile, it was but a keep—a mere nothing beside Marienburg or Stettin—rising above the hovels of an Irish town. But to the Irishman it stood for many a bitter memory and many a crime, besides that murder of a guest which ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... to call the little town of St. Gilles an "ugly hole," and wonder what St. Louis saw to love in it, when, coming out of a squalid, hilly street through which I had tried to pick my way on foot, alone, suddenly the facade of the wonderful old church burst upon my sight, a vision ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... had remained there ever since, unchanged and unchangeable, steeped in poverty of the most desolate description, and living the narrowest lives possible in this great Republic. They had attracted the attention of the Rev. Arthur Hill, an Episcopalian minister, who conceived an idea that the squalid settlement near Azalia afforded a fine field for missionary labor. Mr. Hill established himself in Azalia, built and furnished a little church in the settlement, and entered on a career of the most earnest and persevering charity. To all appearances his labor was thrown away; but he was possessed ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... blots and scars in our national life; also of giving some practical help to the deserving poor. My district was such an one as would furnish him with the opportunities to satisfy him in that particular, and I was therefore asked to allow Col. Gordon to accompany me to its squalid scenes, to my Ragged School, cottage and open-air services, and to the sick and suffering, of which I had many on my list. This request was gladly complied with; for the first sight of the stranger made ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... a scarcity of bread, a vast multitude from the surrounding country gather around the royal palace at Versailles, their great number, sallow faces and squalid appearance indicating widespread wretchedness and want. Their appeal for royal assistance is plainly written, in "legible hieroglyphics in their winged raggedness." The young king appears on the balcony and they are permitted to see his face. If he does not ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... are newspaper-correspondents, who weave tissues of fiction out of the warp of rumor and the web of prevarication. The site of the United States Treasury, it is the home of everything but affluence. Its public buildings are splendid, its private dwellings generally squalid. The houses are low, the rents high; the streets are broad, the crossings narrow; the hacks are black, the horses white; the squares are triangles, except that of the Capitol, which is oval; and the water is so soft that it is hard to drink it, even with the admixture of alcohol. It has ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... is one of the most ancient streets of Florence. Long, dark, and narrow, it reaches from the extremity of the Ponte Rubaconte to the right of the Ponte Vecchio. Its old houses look decayed and squalid now; but in former days they were magnificent and orderly, full of all the state of those times, being the residences of many of the Florentine nobility. How many struggles of faction, how many scenes of civil war, have these old houses witnessed! for in the period of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... which the author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as curious: but the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... brought nearer the front. 'Rest' was only a comparative term. Brigades were on the move each day in country which was one continual rise and fall, with stony beds of wadis to check progress, without a tree to lend a few moments' grateful relief from a burning sun, and nothing but the rare sight of a squalid native hut to relieve the monotony of a ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... through the heart. Further on lay our own two poor riflemen with their heads smashed like eggshells; and I suppose they had mothers or wives far away at the end of the deep-sea cables. Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... order of things. The State Capitol was a beautiful marble building, but unfinished without and dirty within. Approaching the hall of the House of Representatives, I found the door guarded by a negro, squalid and filthy. He evidently reveled in his new citizenship; his chair was tilted back against the wall, his feet were high in the air, and he was making everything nauseous about him with tobacco; but he soon became obsequious ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... want a drink of milk," said the visitor. In comparison with the dwellings of small farmers in Eastern France or in Southern Italy this Donegal cabin was not only clean but attractive. It was more squalid perhaps, but less dreary than the extemporised and flimsy dwellings of settlers in the extreme Far West of the United States, and I should say decidedly a more wholesome habitation than the hermetically sealed and dismal wooden ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... descended. There she was, in a wild centre of an old, unfinished little mountain town. The facade of a church rose from a small eminence. A white road ran to the right, where a great open valley showed faintly beyond and beneath. Low, squalid sort of buildings stood around—with some high buildings. And there were bare little trees. The stars were in the sky, the air was icy. People stood darkly, excitedly about, women with an odd, shell-pattern head-dress ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... associations. It consists of a series of vaults excavated out of the solid tufa rock, where it slopes down from the Capitoline Hill into the Forum, each lined with massive blocks of red volcanic stone. For a long time these vaults have been used as cellars under a row of tall squalid-looking houses built over them between the Via di Marforio and the Vicolo del Ghettarello; and the sense of smell gives convincing proof that where prisoners of state used to be confined, provisions of wine, cheese, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the memories of past greatness; from the hill of Montmartre the electric lights here and there give suggestive glimpses of the City of Pleasure. In Pekin, looking across the lotus-pond and the marble bridges, all that is squalid in the city is shrouded in a veil of foliage, and above the tops of the trees only what is beautiful emerges, and the city sleeps in the enjoyment of thoroughly Oriental repose; and, like a solidly-built, ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... our story that is grievous or hateful, in reflecting that if any man now deems a day basely passed in which he has given no thought to the hard life of garret and hovel, to the forlorn children and trampled women of wide squalid wildernesses in cities, it was Rousseau who first in our modern time sounded a new trumpet note for one more of the great battles of humanity. He makes the poor very proud, it was truly said. Some of his contemporaries followed the same vein of thought, as we ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... willingly to roam, Lured by a traitor's vainly-trusted vow? Could they, the fond and happy, see me now, Who knew me when life's early summer smiled, They would not know 'twas I, or marvel how The laughing thing, half woman and half child, Could e'er be changed to form so squalid, wan, and wild. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... vanity, and in the majority of towns which they visited, it was the first great care of their chiefs, to impress on their minds an idea of their vast importance, which in many instances was contradicted by their ragged tobes and squalid appearance. Yet, if their own accounts were to be credited, their affluence and power were unbounded. All truth is sacrificed to this feeling of vanity and vain glory; and considering that in most cases they hold truth in great reverence, they ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Kubla Khans decreeing pleasure domes and enlarging upon them in advance of the builders, and never are they so eloquent and unmindful of rain and discomforts as when their listeners are poor and condemned to a squalid London existence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... me forget the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place; To make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady's face, Where even the squalid Siwash now holds me a ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... and to virtue is being added knowledge, and to knowledge is being added brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity; or meanness is being added to selfishness, and greed to meanness, and impurity, malice and hatred become courses in the building. A wretched hovel, a poor, mean, squalid structure, is rising within us; and when the screen of our outward life is taken from us, this is ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... lees of a rather squalid Bohemia, these two boys; a Bohemia the more real because they were unconscious in it. Its components were a cheap furnished room, restaurants like this, adventurous companionship in the underworld which thrust itself to the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... to those that gallantly stormed the muddy slopes of Passchendaele; to the wonderful engineers that conquered the squalid quagmires of Langemarck and Zonnebeke; to the gunners that stuck to their guns under a rain of bombs and shells, and to the transport drivers that fed them. It is a tale of wonderful gallantry and heroic ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... fires through the tree stems away to the left, and we bore down on it, listening to its drum. Viewed through the bars of the tree stems the scene was very picturesque. The village was just a collection of palm mat-built huts, very low and squalid. In its tiny street, an affair of some sixty feet long and twenty wide, were a succession of small fires. The villagers themselves, however, were the striking features in the picture. They were painted vermilion all ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of war in the Peninsula I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country. And what are your remedies? After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specific, the never-failing nostrum ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... lyrics. In spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is the direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture it is, which ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock," and that "she'd bring his pride down"), and the petty indignities this lady could inflict upon him. He bore with the bad food, dirty lodging, and daily round of squalid ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the bed. He wondered about this interestingly. Probably the stage would be locked at night. Still, at a suitable hour, he could descreetly find out. On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed was a cheap thing sparsely covered and in sad disorder. People were working on this set, and he presently identified the play, for Muriel Mercer in a neat black dress entered to bring comfort to the tenement dwellers. But this ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... loud, merry voices. Traffic went on in the crowded mart, and pleasure was pursued in the luxurious halls of the noble. Here, flower-crowned guests reclined at the banquet, listening to sweet music, while yonder the squalid miser counted his gold, and there a fair young mother smiled upon her children. Just the same passions crowded into human hearts that day, just the same delusions were followed, the same pleasures felt, arid the same griefs deplored on that bright ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... their search. The houses on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked along. A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed, and mouldering away; only the upper rooms being inhabited. Some houses which had become insecure from ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... path. It never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land, and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of it. It was beginning to run muddily through a commonplace country, past squalid polluting towns and villages. The hills were long since gone. He turned to row to the shore. And, behold, his oars were gone! He had been trapped ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... lessens, and we hail these kingly ideals with as intense a trust and with more joy, perhaps, than they did who were born in those purple hours, because we are emerging from centuries indescribably meagre and squalid in their thought, and every new revelation has for us the sweetness of sunlight to one after the tears and sorrow of a prison-house. The well at Ballykeele is, perhaps, a humble starting-point for the contemplation of such mighty mysteries; but here where the enchanted ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... most frightful formula for cursing. And here are our friends the Christian Scientists, proclaiming the unreality of all evil, their ability to banish disease by convincing themselves that they are perfect in God—yet tormented by a squalid phobia called "Mental Malpractice", or "Malicious ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Alighting at the squalid little station on the American side, we went to the cheapest hotel our keen eyes could discover, and leaving our valises, we struck out immediately toward the towering white column of mist which could be seen rising like a ghostly banner behind the trees. We were like those who ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... them without whimpering; though of course I'd freely have given every farthing I was worth to have been snugly back in the Congo again. But the thing had got to be seen through, and I intended to keep my end up somehow. I couldn't afford to die like a rat in a squalid hole ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... horse's gallop, 'skimming along within a yard of the ground.' Who shall trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk. But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life. Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of Elsie Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Richard Royson, acknowledge an occult acquaintance with this unknown scene? And what was the fascination which the squalid life of the bazaar had exercised occasionally on men of exalted rank at different periods of the world's history? The mere notion that he might succumb to it—that he should even feel its glamour by the operation ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental pabulum, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... when suddenly a motley concourse appeared wading across the creek toward us. They filed past in rapid succession, men, women, and children; some were on horseback, some on foot, but all were alike squalid and wretched. Old squaws, mounted astride of shaggy, meager little ponies, with perhaps one or two snake-eyed children seated behind them, clinging to their tattered blankets; tall lank young men on foot, with bows and arrows in their hands; and girls whose native ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the evening, a native Theatre Royal. None of my relations or friends seemed interested, so I availed myself of the kind offer of guidance given me by a fellow artist, an amateur painter, but a professional cutter of clothes. I expected something rather picturesque, possibly rather squalid, but found it intensely interesting and characteristic and very clean, a cross-between a little French theatre, say in Monte Parnasse, and one of the lesser London theatres. The acting was French ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... at the old man, but he never moved; then she shivered, and walked faster. It was bitterly cold, a miserable afternoon for Marcus, who was visiting his poor patients in the squalid back streets ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... through the shed, and she followed, to the kitchen, slowly, with the squalid feeling that comes of sleeping in one's day clothes, and there she found the fire low and his cup and plate on the bare table. She could see him through the window. There was the horse, hitched to the staple in the corner of the barn, there was ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... The man into whose hands wealth is given has a great task set him. He has a power denied to others. He can collect and preserve all that is beautiful in art and nature—not for himself, but for those who otherwise would never see anything but what is poor and squalid and commonplace. True, he must also strive to alleviate the sufferings of their bodies, so that their minds may be free to enjoy; but he must not sacrifice the higher for the lower task—that would surely be the work of what you call a Philistine. And his higher task ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... itself has power to hush the soul with noblest emotion, it should be that. Yet there I have seen a company of travelers spend their half-hour in senseless gabble and banter and the laughter of fools. Amid the squalid surroundings of a New York tenement-house, I have seen a poor Irish woman living with such fortitude and faith and generosity that it was a comfort and inspiration to meet her. That brave soul ennobled ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled occasionally ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "Although I come, I stay not; But who art thou that hast become so squalid?" "Thou seest that I am one ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... wretched, lonely little room, where the cracks let the boisterous wind whistle through, and the smoky, grimy walls looked cheerless and unhomelike. A miserable little room in a miserable little cottage in one of the squalid streets of the Third District that nature and the city fathers seemed to ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... twelve o'clock, as I passed through the region of Seven Dials. Here and there stood three or four brutal-looking men, and now and then a squalid woman with a starveling baby in her arms, in the light of the gin-shops. The babies were the saddest to see—nursery-plants already in training for the places these men and women now held, then to fill a pauper's grave, or perhaps ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... for that afternoon. He returned in the evening, Cornelius accompanying him to the station; but he did not read in the train which took him back to the Fountall Theological College, as he had done on the way out. That ineradicable trouble still remained as a squalid spot in the expanse of his life. He sat with the other students in the cathedral choir next day; and the recollection of the trouble obscured the purple splendour thrown by ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... careless respecting my fame and my repose; passed his leisure hours with the most abandoned women, and even my own servants complained of his illicit advances. I remember one, who was plain even to ugliness; she was short, ill-made, squalid, and dirty; once, on my return from a rehearsal, I found that this woman was locked with my husband in my chamber. I also knew that Mr. Robinson continued his connection with a female who lodged in Maiden Lane, and who was only one of the few ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... Any man's country could get on without him Begun to fight with want from their cradles Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts Do not want to know about such squalid lives Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future For most people choice is a curse General worsening of things, ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. The very air was charged with a healthier life, and here amid the opulence one could forget the near presence of the squalid alley. So it had become a habit of mine always to begin my day with a walk uptown, as a gentle tonic for my body and to give my mind a brief but more cheerful outlook than through the smutted office windows. I never tired of the life which I saw about ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... heart-rending vision, and then she sunk again to meet another still more frightful. The wind whistled gloomily through the forest trees; the wild bird screamed his death song; and a spectre rose with sunken eyes and squalid cheek, his wounds distilling blood, and his raven locks clotted with gore. It was her lover—he had left the tree on which he withered like the seared leaf of autumn, and stalked to her widowed couch smiling ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... a large cotton manufacturing town—sometimes called the Manchester of Poland—but now of course all the factories were closed, and many destroyed by shell. I should not think it was a very festive place at the best of times; it looked squalid and grimy, and the large bulk of its population was made up of the most abject ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... yard between the low houses run downhill, that, standing at the top of a worn path like a seam in some old garment, the two Europeans could look over the mud wall. Squalid as were the mud huts and the cattle-yard connecting them, the picture framed in the square enclosure blazed with colour. It was barbaric, and beautiful ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress, Borrow's pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist, dark, squalid, unintelligible. {27b} He ran out his books upon a line directly counter to the literary current of the day, and, naturally enough, the critical billow ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... by trenches and crowned by an elaborate iron structure with two towers. This ground was the scene of the main British attack on Loos two months later, and the building was the famous Tower Bridge. The squalid little town between Houchin and Sailly, at whose busy coal-mine the enemy intermittently threw shells, was Noeux-les-Mines, where Lord French had his forward headquarters during the fighting. But even then there ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... not much upon either side or down the center of long and tortuous Grand Avenue to arouse enthusiasm, nor was Billy particularly enthusiastic about that more or less squalid thoroughfare. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with me to the Rue Mouffetard, where there is a ball frequented solely by the lowest and poorest class of Paris strugglers for bread, such as the ragpickers and the street-sweepers. At first thought it seems improbable that the squalid wretches who can barely earn sous enough to live on, to whom fifty cents a day are fine wages, should have a ball. But all things are possible in Paris in the way of popular amusements. In the Rue Mouffetard, then, near the Rue ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... was completely intrigued by her. Her performance in "The Zingara" had led him to expect a girl of much more poise and finish, and yet with all her rawness she was far from naive. His own experience recognized hers; both had lived in the world's squalid byways; he could have talked to her in their language and she would have understood. But she was not of the women of such places, she had a clean, clear quality like a flame. Daring beyond doubt, wild and elusive, but untouched by ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... In Shelley's powerful drama, in Guerrazzi's tedious novel, and Scolari's digest, the legend of Beatrice Cenci has long appealed to modern sympathy. The real facts, extracted from legal documents and public registers, reduce its poetry of horror to comparatively squalid prose.[196] Yet, shorn of romantic glamour, the bare history speaks significantly to a student of Italian customs. Monsignore Cristoforo Cenci, who died about the year 1562, was in holy orders, yet not a priest. One of the clerks of the Apostolic ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and here and there Welled up and burst across the open flats. As yet they knew not to enkindle fire Against the cold, nor hairy pelts to use And clothe their bodies with the spoils of beasts; But huddled in groves, and mountain-caves, and woods, And 'mongst the thickets hid their squalid backs, When driven to flee the lashings of the winds And the big rains. Nor could they then regard The general good, nor did they know to use In common any customs, any laws: Whatever of booty fortune unto each Had ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... Roman severity and dignity and self-respect. The descendants of Aemilius and Gracchus—even generals and consuls and praetors—mixed familiarly with the lowest canaille of Rome in their vilest and most squalid purlieus of shameless vice. They fought as amateur gladiators in the arena. They drove as competing charioteers on the race-course. They even condescended to appear as actors on the stage. They devoted themselves with such frantic eagerness to the excitement of gambling, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... squalid old house, some nights ago, I saw a light in a ground-floor window; and peeping in,—my name is not Tom, nor was it any Godiva I was espying, but I could not help a sort of curiosity to see what that eleven-o'clock light ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... baskets piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces with a rag, and loosened their clothes to dispose them for the night's sleep. The face of the woman, her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty. Watching her, Theron had felt curiously interested in the performance. In one sense, it was scarcely more human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens, or a cow giving suck to her calf. Yet, in another, was there ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... of a life. She consults the fashion-plate oftener than her Bible; she visits the dry-goods shop and the milliner oftener than the church. She speaks of Fashion oftener than of virtue, and follows it closer than she does her Saviour. She can see squalid misery and low-bred vice without a blush or a twinge of the heart; but a plume out of Fashion, or a table set in old style, would shock her into a hysteric fit. Her example! What is it but a breath of poison to ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... should find Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I am not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have especially in mind are at once more general and more internal. They concern something tawdry, squalid or superstitious about the shrines and those who use them. Now the mistake of critics is not that they criticise the world; it is that they never criticise themselves. They compare the alien with ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... shop, De Vac threaded his way through the dirty lanes and alleys of ancient London, lighted at far intervals by an occasional smoky lantern, until he came to a squalid tenement but a short ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... soft-glove pugilism! Our streets swarm with able-bodied beggars— young men, most of them, whom want may drive into wickedness. Human life is cheap. Men are slain in this alleged Christian land for less silver than led Judas to betray Christ. Young girls are sold to shame, and from squalid attics comes the cry of starving babes. The Goths and Visigoths are once more gathering, imperiling civilization itself, and belief in God is fading slowly but surely from the earth. Want and wretchedness skulk in the shadows of our temples, ignorance and crime stalk ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Poverty and riches are close neighbors in New York. Only a stone's throw back of the most sumptuous parts of Broadway and Fifth avenue, want and suffering, vice and crime, hold their courts. Fine ladies can look down from their high casements upon the squalid dens of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Office and Standard Bank, the thoroughfares of the town offer scarcely any attractions. The Dutch are not an artistic race, and the fact that natives here live not in "locations" but anywhere they choose has covered some portions of the town's area with ugly and squalid houses. Nor, as a matter of fact, does the general tone of thought and feeling in Cape Colony naturally lend itself to aesthetic considerations. Even the churches fail to escape the influence of a spirit which subordinates everything else ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... altogether, and soon also the river banks. Bored by the gloom of his fellow-voyagers and depressed, Mac betook himself to his state-room, and went to sleep. He woke for lunch, went once more to sleep, awoke again in the evening when Luxor was reached, and hastened through the squalid streets to board the saloon car for Cairo. Even in the gale and the fog of sand the skipper had not managed to find a convenient mud-bank on which to ground his steamer, and Mac told him he didn't think he was much of ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... squalid town of Dae Irks the comfortable sea, Spreading webs to gather fish, As for wealth we set a wish, Dwelt a king by right divine, Sprung from Adam's royal line, Town of Dae by the sea, Divers ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... the first of Orcus' jaws, close to the doorway side, The Sorrows and Avenging Griefs have set their beds to bide; There the pale kin of Sickness dwells, and Eld, the woeful thing, And Fear, and squalid-fashioned Lack, and witless Hungering, Shapes terrible to see with eye; and Toil of Men, and Death, And Sleep, Death's brother, and the Lust of Soul that sickeneth: And War, the death-bearer, was set full in the threshold's way, And those Well-willers' ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil |
