"Trashy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stimulus; their reasoning powers become weaker and weaker, their memory more treacherous. The mind is ruined for healthy intellectual food. They have no taste for history or biography, or anything but cheap, trashy, sensational novels. ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... us. If it were possible to have anything handsome in the boot line, except, perhaps, a tiny, fur-lined lady's slipper, it was us. We were sewed with substantial rosen-end, the division between the inseam and soles was filled up with real leather skivings, and not the trashy "jump" which makes up the bulk of the soles of football boots nowadays. The more, in fact, I think of it, the more I am convinced that the present make of football boots is a new-fangled device in the shoemaking trade, for are they not now got up of American ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... Pao-yue's nurse, he addressed himself to him. "You people," he said, "remain waiting upon him the whole day long at school, but what books has he after all read? Books indeed! why, he has read and filled his brains with a lot of trashy words and nonsensical phrases, and learnt some ingenious way of waywardness. Wait till I have a little leisure, and I'll set to work, first and foremost, and flay your skin off, and then settle accounts with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... that I wish folks in general would keep their eyes a little more open when they travel by rail. When I see young people rolling along in a luxurious carriage, their eyes and their brains absorbed probably in a trashy shilling novel, and never lifted up to look out of the window, unconscious of all that they are passing—of the reverend antiquities, the admirable agriculture, the rich and peaceful scenery, the ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... the teacher, stand by the fire a few minutes to warm and then return to the same cold corner. I have sat in an old log school house with no chinking between the logs until my heels were frost-bitten and cracked open. Sometimes we had a poor white trashy skunk that would sit in the school room and call us "niggers" or "darkeys." If the little Negro got his lesson at all, he got it; if not, it was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune's warrant."—"I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of schools and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be torn from his laurel, it were better that all which these men, and that I, as one of their ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... proposed a press law that might have saved him. It was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaures had known that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have thrown ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... debating society in the world. But these accomplished legislators, though quite as ignorant as the mob of Montreuil, proved much less docile, and cried out that they did not want to go to school to the English. Their debates consisted of endless successions of trashy pamphlets, all beginning with something about the original compact of society, man in the hunting state, and other such foolery. They sometimes diversified and enlivened these long readings by a little rioting. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are not generally great readers of the trashy newspapers of the day; and in this respect they show their good sense, or at least have happened on good luck: it is therefore our duty to supply them with cheap and amusing literature, to entertain ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Just as sho as you snore. An' they better leave Daisy's name outa dis, too. I done told her and told her to come straight home from her work. Naw, she had to stop by dat store and skin her gums back wid dem trashy niggers. She better not leave them white folks today to come traipsin' over here scornin' her name all up wid dis nigger mess. Do, I'll kill her. No daughter of mine ain't goin' to do as she please, long as she live under de sound of my voice. (She ...
— The Mule-Bone: - A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts • Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes
... he, "you have got all these romantic notions out of trashy novels. How can you love the woman when you ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... The aim of all the institutions and literature in a modern state is to please him. His aim is to get out of them what suits him. The yellow newspapers thrive and displace all the others because he likes them. The trashy novels pay well because his wife and daughters like them. The advertisements in the popular magazines are addressed to him. They show what he wants. The "funny items" are adjusted to his sense of humor. Hence all ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... heard. As he listened to all this Don Quixote was in a state of breathless amazement, for immediately the countless adventures like this, with windows, gratings, gardens, serenades, lovemakings, and languishings, that he had read of in his trashy books of chivalry, came to his mind. He at once concluded that some damsel of the duchess's was in love with him, and that her modesty forced her to keep her passion secret. He trembled lest he should fall, and made an inward resolution ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Art-Union for April, describes the opposition to the institution of which it is the organ, as directed by "envy, malice, and uncharitableness," and intimates that it is occasioned by the inability or unwillingness of the committee to purchase the trashy productions of incompetent painters constantly offered to them. We submit to the gentlemen connected with the Art-Union, that they should not suffer the hirelings they may sometimes employ upon the Bulletin, thus to refer to such artists and such men as Durand, Wier, Kellogg, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... have become acquainted with scores of similar situations in the small number of exciting romances which belong to literature, and in the greater number which do not. Still, even to-day, a reader, with his taste jaded by trashy novels, will be conscious of Smollett's power, and of several thrills, likewise, as he reads about Fathom's experience in the loft in which the beldame locks him to pass ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... times as much as the worst, and one fourth as much as solid silver. We saw the other day three large salvers, which, at a distance of six feet, looked very nearly alike. All of them bore a most brilliant polish, and all were elaborately decorated. One of them was a trashy article, made of an alloy of lead and tin, covered with a "blush" of silver. It had been stamped out and shaped at one blow by a stamping-machine, and left in the silver solution subject to the action of the battery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... buying books; not trashy books which will only bear one reading; but good books for a library. I have my eye on all the bookstalls; and I shall no longer suffer you, when we walk together in London, to drag me past them as you used to do. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... which still, as the advancing price of that great commodity will testify, is short of, and insufficient for the demand. From the agricultural labourers you cannot receive any material number of recruits. The land, above all things, must be tilled; and—notwithstanding the trashy assertions of popular slip-slop authors and Cockney sentimentalists, who have favored us with pictures of the Will Ferns of the kingdom, as unlike the reality as may be—the condition of those who cultivate the soil of Britain is superior to that of the peasantry in every other country of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... to Oxford or stop in London, I've made up my mind that you shan't do another stroke of work as long as you live. Look here, dear old Daddy, I'm getting to be a perfect millionaire, I assure you. Do you see this fiver? well, I got that for knocking out that last trashy little song for Fradelli; and it cost me no more trouble to compose it than to sit down and write the score out on a sheet of ruled paper. I'm as rich as Croesus—made a hundred and eighty pounds last year, and expect to make over two hundred this one. Now, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Dolores thought so too, although she did listen to his trashy conversation, because when we were saying "good-night"—hastily under one of the big palms on the terrace—oh! if he could have seen us—she told me with her two dear arms round my neck that she only loved me, and I was not to look ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... of it. You need not fear death—you are not an old woman on the oven. Live fearlessly and do what you were appointed to do. Man is appointed for the organisation of life on earth. Man is capital—like a rouble, he is made up of trashy copper groshes and copecks. From the dust of the earth, as it is said; and even as he has intercourse with the world, he absorbs grease and oil, sweat and tears—a soul and a mind form themselves in him. And from this he starts to grow upward and downward. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... her salt, she'll be glad to know you're out hustling, making some money to furnish the home-nest, instead of doing the lovey-dovey. The kind of fellow that kicks about working overtime, that wants to spend his evenings reading trashy novels or spooning and exchanging a lot of nonsense and foolishness with some girl, he ain't the kind of upstanding, energetic young man, with a future—and with Vision!—that we want here. How about it? What's your Ideal, anyway? Do you want to make ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... vision of Charlie before his eyes, and with the sound of his voice again in his ears, all his old resolutions and impulses returned that morning. He worked hard, and flung the trashy novel, over which he had been wasting his time the day before, into the fire; he went off to lectures with something like his old eagerness, and discharged his duties in the wards with interest and thoroughness; he refused to allow his mind to be distracted by the proceedings of his fellow-students, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk's purse became an exceedingly "Iago"-like, "something, nothing, trashy" sort of affair—in other words, that its owner, Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk, was regularly stumped; and as the Amateur Dramatic Theatrical Committee "always go upon the no pay no play system," Mr. Horatio Fitzharding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... shame, that not only these swarms of trashy volumes, which penetrate even into the back-slums, and may be seen unfolded in the paper-patched windows of eighteen-penny milliners in the lowest quarters of our metropolis, find a never-failing succession of ravenous readers, but that newspapers—Sunday newspapers, forsooth—devoted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... prognostication of a fate that was not his. Little we dreamed, as we lisped out the verses, that the 'gentleman who roamed in a' not velvet but 'plum-coloured suit,' according to Lady Hester Stanhope, was the illustrious George Brummell, The Beau wrote these trashy little rhymes—pretty in their way—and, since I was once a child, and learnt them off by heart, I will not cast a stone at them. Brummell indulged in such trifling poetizing, but never went further. It is a pity he did not write his memoirs; they would have ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... all these short stories and picaresque novels the emphasis was laid not so much on life and character as on the adventures of the hero; and the interest consisted largely in wondering what would happen next, and how the plot would end. The same method is employed in all trashy novels and it is especially the bane of many modern story-writers. This excessive interest in adventures or incidents for their own sake, and not for their effect on character, is what distinguishes the modern adventure story from the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preminently designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement. The tawdriness she particularly disliked—the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... substantive thought, esp. legal] boilerplate, clich. V. mean nothing; be unmeaning &c adj.; twaddle, quibble, scrabble. Adj. unmeaning; meaningless, senseless; nonsensical; void of sense &c 516. inexpressive, unexpressive; vacant; not significant &c 516; insignificant. trashy, washy, trumpery, trivial, fiddle-faddle, twaddling, quibbling. unmeant, not expressed; tacit &c (latent) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... should be to offer brass money in a payment; for though it should be taken, (as it is too often on the stage) yet it would be found in the second telling; and a judicious reader will discover, in his closet, that trashy stuff, whose glittering deceived him in the action. I have often heard the stationer sighing in his shop, and wishing for those hands to take off his melancholy bargain, which clapped its performance on the stage. In a playhouse, every thing contributes ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... contain very little interesting to a foreigner—most of the rings and brooches are trashy articles of jade-stone, a greenish stone which resembles agate or cornelian in opaqueness. The armlets are of silver, and of the same substance are the large thin circles worn by the women of Foh-Kien in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and forty-five pounds of his employers' money a Newcastle office-boy was stated to have been reading trashy novels. It was thought to be only fair to the financial papers that the public should know where he got the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... DAYS, Ninth And Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, is a handsome weekly publication of the healthiest kind of reading matter for boys and girls. It furnishes quite a relief from the usual trashy productions which are placed in reach of the youthful reader. The pictorial features are far in advance of similar journals, and one worthy feature which should recommend it to parents is that it contains only the purest of reading. Nothing ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... don't mean all of that. You'd not have spoke just that way about crowding and staring if you thought well of them that stare. Staring ain't courage; it's trashy curiosity. Now you did ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... trashy books, which we find everywhere, not excepting the Sunday-school libraries, be not actually exciting and immoral in tone and sentiment, they are so vapid, so utterly without purpose or object, so devoid of any healthy vigor and life, that they are simply dissipating ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Such of us as were very poor and had no mahogany pretended to have mahogany; and the proper hepatite tint was got by veneering. That makes one incline to think it was the colour that pleased people. In those days there was a word "trashy," now almost lost to the world. My dear Aunt Charlotte used that epithet when, in her feminine way, she swore at people she did not like. "Trashy" and "paltry" and "Brummagem" was the very worst she could say of them. And she had, I ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... had something to do with the Papists, but to which, for that very reason, I clung with a tenacity and read with an earnestness which brought at last its own beautiful fruits. Then, there was the "Scottish Chiefs," a treasure-house of delight to me,—two or three trashy novels, given me by Tom Salyers, of which my mother knew nothing,—and (the only poetry I had ever seen) a song-book, which had, scattered among its vulgarisms and puerilities, some gems of Burns and Moore. These my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Sunday that Agnes passed under the roof of Mr. Fairland, was enough to convince her that the Sabbath day with them was passed much like all other days. She was shocked to see novels, and other light and trashy works, in the Lands of the Misses Fairland on this holy day, and to hear them howling snatches of opera tunes, as they ran up and down the stairs. These young ladies sometimes went to church in the morning, to be sure, especially ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... But come, stir yerseff; we want ter gwo 'long,' replied Jim, with a manifest lack of courtesy that showed he regarded the white man as altogether too 'trashy' to be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her bed. During his leisure hours Willibald had to read to her, either from the newspapers or from trashy novels. When she was alone she lay perfectly quiet and stared at ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... 'Pilgrim's Progress,' illustrated. I knew you wouldn't like the trashy books they write nowadays, so ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... know, Fan, I can't write for the world at large anecdotes of missionary life, and swell the number of the "Gems" and other trashy books. If people who care to know, would think of what their own intuition tells them of human nature, and history tells them of heathenism, they can make out some notion ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... call her anything, but let her get to her own room and have a good rest as soon as possible. Haven't you got a trashy novel or two in the house? That's the literature ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... different. This girl will always have to work, I suppose, and would get on well enough without learning to read. I know mamma was always complaining that our servants were reading trashy novels, that filled their heads with nonsense and made ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... studying somewhat the laws of life and health? There are books—I may say a whole literature of books—written by scientific doctors on these matters, which are in my mind far more important to the schoolroom than half the trashy accomplishments, so-called, which are expected to be known by governesses. But are they bought? Are they even to be bought, from most country booksellers? Ah, for a little knowledge of the laws to the neglect of which is owing so much fearful disease, which, if it does not produce immediate death, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... are languages. What they will need when they come to be children. And have to talk to all the animals. And magic. Which is deep. And they hate it. And say it is rot. They are full of tricks. One catches them reading trashy novels. Under the desk. All about love. Which is wasting their children's money. And God knows it is hard enough to earn. But the children are not angry with them. Remembering how they felt themselves. When they were grown up. ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... to be ashamed of yourself," said Hondo Bill to the mail- carrier in solemn tones, "to be packing around such a lot of old, trashy paper as this. What d'you mean by it, anyhow? Where do you ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world: I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a poisonous literature. A highly intelligent lady, who has examined many of the novels printed during the last decade, said to me: "The main purpose of many of these books is to knock away the underpinning of the marriage relation or of the Bible." If parents give house room to trashy or corrupt books, they cannot be surprised if their children give heart-room to "the world, the flesh, and the evil one." When interesting and profitable books are so abundant and so cheap, this increasing rage for novels is to me one of the ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... ammunition; and the missionaries, who have declined to traffic in these articles, have often scarcely been able to procure a single pig by the most tempting price they could offer in another shape. Although the arms which they have obtained in this way have generally been of the most trashy description, they have been sufficient to secure to the tribes that have been most plentifully provided with them a decided superiority over the rest; and the consequence has been that the people of the Bay of Islands, who have hitherto had most intercourse with ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... to you what I say, or what I go through with. I've stood more than I rightly ought, more than I'm going to—you must give me one thought in a day. You just act low. Father was self-headed, but he was never real trashy. He never got into fights at those common ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... trigonometry and morning-prayers; mercantile parent fails, and falls from Fifth avenue to Brooklyn, preparatory to embarking for the land of those who have failed and fallen—wherever that is. Son wears long hair, and believes he looks like the painter who was killed by a baker's daughter, writes trashy verses about a man who was wronged, and went off and howled himself to a long repose, sick of this vale of tears, et cetera. Finally, in the midst of his despair, long hair, bad poetry and painting, an enterprising friend, who sees he has an eye for color, its harmonies ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the evening I went out shopping. I wish you would tell me what you like to eat. It would give shopping an interest. Then I went to the library and got a trashy novel for mother to read, as I am still keeping her in bed. For myself, I wanted to read something about love, as hitherto I have not taken much interest in it and have read practically nothing ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the latter was the mistress of the family, and a notable housewife, and a most industrious old lady she was. If she did not understand the art of making jellies, jams, custard, tea-cakes, and such like trashy affairs, she was profoundly skilled in the mysteries of preparing 'amar', 'poee-poee', and 'kokoo', ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... attributed the advertisements to the necessity Harpers felt through the rivalry of the Ledger. This sort of enterprise cost, but it convinced people that respectable journals advertised as did the Ledger. People said it was 'cheap, trashy ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... the turnip roots And assists at frequent shoots, Really I have seldom heard Of a more precocious bird; Possibly his landlord's not What you'd call a first-rate shot, And his pals, though jolly chaps, Are not quite so good perhaps; Still, he thinks their aim so trashy That, I fear, he's getting rash. He Even perches on the end Of the gun my poor old friend Bill employs for killing game. True he's very blind and lame, And he's well beyond the span Meted out to mortal man, And his gout is getting ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... he has uttered an absurdity or a clever thing. Shtchitov was especially dreaded by those self-conscious, dreamy, and not particularly gifted youths who spend whole days in painfully hatching a dozen trashy lines of verse and reading them in sing-song to their 'friends,' and who despise every sort of positive science. One such he simply drove out of Moscow, by continually repeating to him two of his own lines. Yet all the while Shtchitov ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... nothing. There is a fine library connected with the Academy from which cadets can get books to read in their quarters. I devoted more time to these, than to books relating to the course of studies. Much of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those of a trashy sort. I read all of Bulwer's then published, Cooper's, Marryat's, Scott's, Washington Irving's works, Lever's, and many others that I do not now remember. Mathematics was very easy to me, so that when January came, I passed the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... mental dissipation follows in the steps of progress, and demands aliment from our public libraries. In the selection of books there is a wide range, from the trashy productions of the fifth-rate novelist, to stately history and exact science. It is, however, to be assumed that libraries will not be established until they are wanted, and that the want will not be pressing until there is a taste for reading somewhat general. Where this taste exists, it ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... my one or two specialties, and these collections I make as perfect as I can. Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only on the history of pin-heads. I don't mean that I buy all the trashy compilations on my special subjects, but I try to have all the works of any real importance relating to them, old as well as new. In the following compartment you will find the great authors in all the languages I have mastered, from Homer and ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 'Tis all brain-sickness, I'll lay. I doan't want no doctor's traade in my 'ouse if us can keep it outside. The Lard's my doctor. Keep your sawl clean, an' the Lard'll watch your body. 'E's said as much. 'E knaws we'm poor trashy worms an' even a breath o' foul air'll take our lives onless 'E be by to filter it. Faith's the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... thing is hard, and that this hardness is difficult to explain. And I say more than this—I say that an interminable discussion of the difficulty of beginning a book is the worst omen for going on with it, and a trashy subterfuge at the best. In the name of all decent, common, and homely things, why not begin ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... that no sensible man would have anything to say to. How a young man like you, who know how to conduct yourself in some things, and have, I don't deny, many good qualities, can give in to come to an ending like a trashy novel, is more than I can understand. You are fit to be put in a book of the Good-child series, Frank, as an illustration of the reward of virtue," said the strong-minded woman, with a little snort of scorn; "and, of course, you are going to ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the room for fresh food for talk, caught Miss Zielinski with her eye. "Hullo, Ziely, what are you deep in?" She put her arm round the other's neck, and unceremoniously laid hold of her book. "You naughty girl, you're at Ouida again! Always got your nose stuck in some trashy novel." ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... bibliographical introduction to Mr. O'Connor Morris's short history of the French Revolution. This I did with much care, for it seemed to me that this period in history, giving most interesting material for study and thought, had been much obscured by ideas drawn from trashy books instead of from ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... being in a ship taken by a pirate; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate captain; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my fellow-passengers, in not being ordered to "walk the plank." The story, though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... it, there was the queerest imaginable portrait of myself,—so very queer that we could not but buy it. The shilling edition of "The Scarlet Letter" and "Seven Gables" are at all the book-stalls and shop-windows; but so is "The Lamplighter," and still more trashy books. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lamp was her special aversion. She attacked it with merciless raillery—what a trashy thing it was, such as some little work-girl with no furniture of her own might have dreamt of! Why, lamps in the same style could be bought at all the bazaars at seven francs ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... part of their ordinary stock in trade; while from the hebdomadals, 'Thrilling Tales,' 'Awful Disclosures,' and 'Startling Discoveries,' succeed each other with truly fearful rapidity. Thus he who wastes the midnight kerosene, and spoils his weary eyes in poring over the pages of trashy productions, so well designed to murder sleep, may truly say with Macbeth, 'I have ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Medicines. Trashy, worthless medicines. In The Emperor of The Moon, Act iii, 2, 'Guzman' is used as a term of abuse to signify a rascal. The first English translation (by James Mabbe) of Aleman's famous romance, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... moderate success. They had all their own way of going, and would not go her way. She piped to them, but they would not dance. She offered to them good honest household cake, made of currants and flour and eggs and sweetmeat; but they would feed themselves on trashy wafers from the shop of the Barchester pastry-cook, on chalk and gum and adulterated sugar. Poor Miss Thorne! yours is not the first honest soul that has vainly striven to recall the glories of happy days gone by! If fashion suggests to a Lady De Courcy that when ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... printing establishment in Leadenhall Street, London, which about a century ago issued a set of trashy, extremely sentimental novels with complicated plots, in which hero and heroine were involved before they could ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... stamped upon his mind instantaneously and permanently, and he read everything. In the midst of severe labours in India, he read enough classical authors to stock the mind of an ordinary professor. At the same time he framed a criminal code and devoured masses of trashy novels. From the works of the ancient Fathers of the Church to English political pamphlets and to modern street ballads, no printed matter came amiss to his omnivorous appetite. All that he had read could be reproduced at a moment's notice. Every fool, he said, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen |
