"Veneer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... part an accumulation begun with the wedding gifts; though some of it was older, two large patent rocking-chairs and a footstool having belonged to Mrs. Adams's mother in the days of hard brown plush and veneer. For decoration there were pictures and vases. Mrs. Adams had always been fond of vases, she said, and every year her husband's Christmas present to her was a vase of one sort or another—whatever the clerk showed him, marked at about twelve or fourteen dollars. The pictures ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... that civilized man is supposed to feel for the cripple. Far within him was the loathing of the savage for something abnormal; the loathing that once left the physically unfit to die. Yet superimposed on this loathing was the veneer of civilization, that forces kindness and gentleness and self-denial toward the fit that the ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... which you and I know, to which you belong? Of another race, another blood, she must ever remain an alien, a thing apart from yourself; there can never be a true affinity between you. She is a savage—an aborigine sprung from the soil. The tinsel and veneer of civilization which she has acquired doesn't change her and can't endure. She is still a savage in spite of it, the product of savage ancestry living close to the soil. The simplicity and glamour and freedom of this life casts a spell over one and ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... prepares himself. He is usually fairly well educated, for not infrequently he started out to study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity. A few have come into the field from journalism. As a result, the British labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more impressive front than the American. For example, Britain has produced Ramsey MacDonald, who writes books and makes speeches with a rare grace; John Burns, who quotes Shakespeare or recites history with wonderful fluency; Keir Hardie, a miner from the ranks, who was ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... filled with those whose emotions lie next to the surface and whose pores have not been closed over with a water-tight veneer, burst into its cheers and ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... are coarse and sordid when stripped of the elaborate courtesy and sham politeness that marks their dealings with the outside world. Their courtesy, what is it? This thin veneer of politeness is like their polished lacquer that covers the crumbling wood within. But we have a proverb, "Even a monkey falls"; and some distant day the Western world that thinks so highly of Japan will see beneath the surface and will leave her, and ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... were in their saddles. "Four bells!" they cried and swept away around the ring, their gay laughter flung behind them to where their companion's horses were fidgeting and chafing under Dawson's highly conventional restraint, while that disconcerted man whose veneer had so promptly been penetrated by Peggy's keen vision, forgot himself so far as to ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... cushion secrete the horn tubules forming the wall, and the papillae of the perioplic ring secrete the varnish-like veneer of thin horn covering the outside surface of ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... mean thing that Sydney had done, and he was not so hardened as to have done it without a blush. Yet so admirably does our veneer of civilization conceal the knots and flaws beneath it that he went to sleep in the genuine belief that he had saved his sister from a terrible danger, and the name of Campion from the degradation which ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... descends 55 ft. and the velocity is enormous. The basin of the Falls has a depth of from 100 to 192 ft. During cold winters the spray covers the grass and trees in the park along the cliff with a delicate veneer of ice, while below the Falls it is tossed up and frozen into a solid arch. Adjoining the left (Canadian) bank is the greater division, Horseshoe Fall, 155 ft. high and curving to a breadth of 2,600 ft. The American Fall, adjoining the right bank, is 162 ft. high and about 1,400 ft. ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... warmth of the car he had just left appeared temptingly homelike and luxurious. All the way down from the city he had sneered inwardly at a one-horse railroad which ran no Pullmans on its Cape branch in winter time. Now he forgot his longing for mahogany veneer and individual chairs and would gladly have boarded a freight car, provided there were in it a lamp ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... works are subtle poison. The plots of some of the most popular novels turn on the sexual relation and the violation in some form of the seventh commandment. They kindle evil passions; they varnish and veneer vice; they deride connubial purity; they uncover what ought to be hid, and paint in attractive hues what never ought to be seen by any pure eye or named by any modest tongue. Another objection to many of the most advertised works of fiction is that they deal with the sacred themes of ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the gentleman who pleased his clients by ingeniously simulating the grain of walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked out contemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of hens or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. He paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers, and wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... with that burden he fell into the little habits and manners of his early life that were in reality more a part of him than the thin veneer of civilization that the past three years of his association with the white men of the outer world had spread lightly over him—a veneer that only hid the crudities of the beast that Tarzan of the Apes ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... language and in the lack of poetic imagery, but it is free from the coarseness and vulgar and grotesque humor of the latter. It approaches the courtly epic in its introduction of the pomp of courtly ceremonial, but this veneer of chivalry is very thin, and beneath the outward polish of form the heart beats as passionately and wildly as in the days of Herman, the Cheruscan chief. There are perhaps greater poems in literature than the "Nibelungenlied", but few so majestic in ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... besides. The ladies specially found delicate euphemisms, charming subtleties of expression to say the most shocking things. A stranger would have understood nothing, so well were the precautions of language observed. But as the thin veneer of pudor[*], with which every Society woman is provided, covers only the surface, they showed their real selves in this wretched adventure, and were as a matter of fact enjoying themselves immensely, feeling themselves ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... and one had them together. Obsequiousness ran out of the first like wine out of a bottle, sullenness congested in the second. Obsequiousness was all smiles; he ran to catch your eye, he loved to gabble; and he had about a dozen words of beach English, and an eighth-of-an-inch veneer of Christianity. Sullens was industrious; a big down-looking bee. When he was spoken to, he answered with a black look and a shrug of one shoulder, but the thing would be done. I don't give him to you for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... proud bully, possessing neither pity nor remorse, an average specimen of the high Russian official, a hide-bound bureaucrat, a slave to etiquette and possessing a veneer of polish. But beneath it all I saw that he was a coward in deadly fear of assassination—a coward who dreaded lest some secret should be revealed. That concealed door in the paneling with the armed guard lurking behind was sufficiently plain evidence that he was not the ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... this opinion "Rag" tottered and wavered. Rumors rapidly spread among the onlookers that Carson had failed to put "Rag" through; that the consolidated companies would fall asunder on the morrow, like badly glued veneer; that Porter "had gone back on Carson" and was selling the stock. The quotations fell: common stock 60, 59, 56, 50, 45, 48, 50, 52, 45, 40—so ran the dazzling line of figures across the blackboard, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the life of a tree. Like Topsy "it growed;" it was not planted by man. Those vast pine forests, extending for miles and miles, actual mines of wealth, are a mere veneer to granite rocks. That is the wonderful part of it all, granite is the basis, granite distinctly showing the progress of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... a twist of a grin, like it always was. Sure. But even as he grinned and his lips shaped a joke, Jason felt them like a veneer on the outside. Something plastered on with a life of its own. Inside he was numb and immovable. His body was stiff as his eyes still watched that arch of alien flesh descend and smother the one-armed Pyrran ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... rather simple little soul under her casing of Parisian veneer, and was often innocently surprised at the potency of her own charm. That men, big men and wise men, were inclined to take her artful artlessness at its surface value was a continual revelation to her. Like Rachael, she had gone to bed the night before in a profoundly thoughtful frame of mind, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... gentler way of poisoning his liquor? What's the difference between poisoning the enemy's drinking water and poisoning the enemy's air with the new-fangled French explosive—Turpinite? It's all hot air talking of the enemy's barbarism—scratch the veneer off any of us and we're back into the stone age. If I had a free leg or free wing, I'd drop arsenic in every reservoir in Germany. Why, we're even prevented dropping 'coughs' on those long strings of trains we see every day, crawling ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... little better will find that they have great delicacy of feeling, and will be struck by the politeness they show a stranger, and by the kind and obliging way in which they treat each other. It must be admitted that this is often enough only a veneer, under which all sorts of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness are hidden, just as among civilized people; still, the manners of the crudest savages are far superior to those of most of ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... lying wounded in a hospital, where his fiancee, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational cliche. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on leaving America, where he has become engaged to a wealthy Chicagan's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... every time, dollars an' cents, an' not soft soap. Yes, it's dollars an'—cents—and not so-ft soa-p." Suddenly the dress-maker, borne high on a wave of hysteria, disclosing the innate coarseness which underlay all her veneer of harmless gentility and fine manners, raised a loud, shrill laugh, ending in a multitude of reverberations like a bell. There was about this unnatural metallic laughter something fairly blood-curdling in its disclosure of overstrained emotion. She laughed and laughed, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to be but one of our own rough crofters who had acquired so thin a veneer of civilization that it scarcely concealed the reality beneath. With a somewhat boisterous geniality he made instant friends with all of his former class in the neighborhood. With Val and myself he was not altogether at his ease. An abrupt awkwardness of manner, which we put down to shyness, characterized ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... in this department of art. Opera seasons have not been regular, and in spite of occasional attempts to revive the old-time spirit, the ancient Opera House, with its brave columned front, its cracking veneer of stucco, and its surrounding of little vari-colored one story cafes and shops (which are themselves like bits of operatic scenery), does not so much suggest to the imagination a home of modern opera, as a mournful mortuary chapel haunted by the ghosts of old half-forgotten composers: ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Monday parties, at the races, at first nights, at ambassadors' balls, and their names always in the newspapers, with remarks as to Madame's fine toilets and Monsieur's amazing chic. Well! all that is nothing but flim-flam, veneer, outside show, and if the marquis needed a hundred sous, no one would loan them to him on his worldly possessions. The furniture is hired by the fortnight from Fitily, the cocottes' upholsterer. The curiosities, the pictures, belong to old Schwalbach, who sends his ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Crambus arborum.—Yellow satin veneer. They receive their name from the streaks on their wings. They are chiefly found on grasses in flower, and always settled with ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... you about them, I know," he said. "I dare say she has been definite enough to explain that I consider Osborn altogether undesirable. Under the veneer of his knowledge of decent customs he is a cad. I am obliged to behave civilly to the man, but I dislike him. If he had been born in a low class of life, he would have been ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... love—and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved—have an instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind—"The doctor is perhaps the better man, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... done. We have against us in the monastery of Monnonstein no fat- headed Abbot, but one who was a warrior before he turned a monk. 'Tis but a few years since, that the Abbot Ambrose stood at the right hand of the Emperor as Baron von Stern, and it is known that the Abbot's robes are but a thin veneer over the iron knight within. His hand, grasping the cross, still itches for the sword. The fighting Archbishop of Treves has sent him to Monnonstein for no other purpose than to leave behind him the ruins of ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... look for work. A discussion arose in our compartment as to what constituted politeness. One gentleman defined it as ceremonious manners, the result of early training; while another objected that that was only the veneer of manners, as all true politeness arose from the heart. I listened awhile and then spoke across the seat to a decent, dejected looking man with a little bundle beside him tied up in a blue and white check handkerchief. ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... subtlety and its fine-grained delicacy. Her pictured lips were silently arguing for the life he had found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson's civilization was two years old—a thin veneer over a century of feudalism—and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent injury and injustice. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... and viewed the dead, cumbrous furniture; the two cabinets bright with brass and veneer. He stood at the window staring. It was raining. The yellow of the falling leaves was hidden in grey mist. 'This weather will keep many away; so much the better; there will be too many as it is. I wonder who this can be.' A melancholy brougham passed ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... brilliant coloring. In this cabinet an observer will still find traces of that taste for gilding which Catherine brought with her from Italy; for the princesses of her house loved, in the words of the author already quoted, to veneer the castles of France with the gold earned by their ancestors in commerce, and to hang out their wealth on the ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... supersensitive about what you consider your lack of advantages and polish—though Heaven knows you don't need to be!" he added, glancing with satisfaction at the handsome, well-groomed figure stretched out before him. "I never saw any one pick up the veneer of good society, so called, as rapidly as you have. It shows that real good breeding was back of it all ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... or manners. She was convent-bred, accomplished, refined, gentle, worthless and wicked. The good Sisters of the Society of the Broken Heart had polished the exterior of the Eurasian orphan very highly—but the polish was a thin veneer on very cheap and ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... polish. The majority of the guests—who were somewhat empty-headed, after all, in spite of their aristocratic bearing—never guessed, in their self-satisfied composure, that much of their superiority was mere veneer, which indeed they had adopted unconsciously and ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... heart and spirit were deeply stirred. For all Nevil's skill in editing the tale of Roy's championship, she had read his hidden thoughts as unerringly as she had divined Mrs Bradley's curiosity and faint hostility beneath the veneer of good manners, not yet imparted ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald, notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings. These little wooden houses, of such marvelous cleanly whiteness inside, are black outside, time-worn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks closely, this grimace is to be found ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... personages simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected about the errors of notorieties and crowned heads running counter to morality such as the Cornwall case a number of years before under their veneer in a way scarcely intended by nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy, as the law stands, was terribly down on though not for the reason they thought they were probably whatever it was except women chiefly who were always fiddling more or less at one another it being ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to that which is used; and hence circular saws, having a very thin blade, have been employed for such purposes. In order to economize still further the more valuable woods, Mr Brunel contrived a machine which, by a system of blades, cut off the veneer in a continuous shaving, thus rendering the whole of ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... writing a lyric drama than in any other country. So in the present instance there is no need to conceal the fact that there are outbreaks of eroticism and offences against the German language which are none the less flagrant and censurable because they are, to some extent, concealed under the thin veneer of the allegory and symbolism which every reader must have recognized as running through the play. This is, in a manner, Wagnerian, as so much of the music is Wagnerian—especially that of the second act, which because it calls up scenes from the "Meistersinger" must ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... my life. I was a section hand much as six months in all my life. I work at the veneer mills but they never run no more. I am having a hard time. I have high blood pressure. I can't pick cotton. I can't even get a mess of turnip greens. The Social Welfare helps me a little and I am janitor up town in two offices. They hand me a ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... have all the time there is. It will all come out right. You fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others of us think them over quietly by our fires. That is the whole difference. Scratch off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... a selection of many such incidents which show that the national brutishness was appearing through the veneer. In the light of such events where, on German soil, Germans murderously attacked their fellow-countrymen on such ridiculous pretexts, it requires little imagination to explain the outburst of brutality against Belgians who dared to defend ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... say of consolation—that I had attained to during my wanderings, I could not help recognizing what a cruel, fatal part is played in the lives of all of us by irony. It is, with Frenchmen, a kind of veneer, worn even by the most unpretentious in place of whatever may be real in them; and where this outward seeming is absent, they are completely at ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... of years this land of hard trails, this far out place where man met man without veneer, where nature's breasts lay stripped of covering and naked, where life was the old life of things elemental, where primal laws were good laws, where there was room enough for the strong and scant room for the ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... had gone with the breakfast things and the money, Kent recalled a number of his species. And he knew that under their veneer of apparent servility was a thing of courage and daring which needed only the right kind of incentive to rouse it. And when roused, it was peculiarly efficient in a secretive, artful-dodger sort of way. It would ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... Jimmie Dale's brain—a sense of some deadly, remorseless thing that seemed to be constantly creeping closer to him, clutching at him—to smother him, to choke him. There was something absolutely fiendish, terrifying, in the veneer of ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... smiled up at him reproachfully. "What! after I have been with you so long, Daddy? But it's true there was a time—before Tom taught me that men cannot be judged by mere polish and veneer, or the ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... therefore, suited to days when few gentlemen could read, and no forks were used for meals. We call ourselves civilised now, yet some who consider themselves such, seem to entertain a desire to return to barbarism. Human nature, in truth, is the same in all ages, and what is called culture is only a thin veneer. Nothing but to be made partaker of the Divine nature will implant the ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... of the professional politician, all this that the voter sees is a mask, the patriotic veneer to hide the machine, that complex hierarchy of committees ranging from Washington to every cross-roads in the Republic. The committee system, described in a former chapter, was perfected by the Republican party during the days of the Civil War, under the stress of national necessity. ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... seven miles through the woods, some on horseback, some in the carriage, to the little church in a heavy pine forest. The next day proved stormy, and the driving sleet froze upon the trees and bound their limbs and boughs together with an icy veneer. My host, Mr. McMillan, kindly urged me to tarry. During my stay with him I ascertained that he devoted his attention to raising ground-peas, or peanuts. Along the coast of this part of North Carolina this nut is the chief product, and is raised ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... commercial integrity and stability. If anything, there seemed to be more business in Fenchurch Street and more luxury at the residence at Eccleston Square than in former days. Only the stern-faced and silent senior partner knew how thin the veneer was which shone so ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... point," said the condemned; "that was where my lack of specialisation told so fatally against me. The dead Salvationist, whose identity I had so lightly and so disastrously adopted, had possessed a veneer of cheap modern education. It should have been easy to demonstrate that my learning was on altogether another plane to his, but in my nervousness I bungled miserably over test after test that was put to me. The little French I had ever known deserted me; I could not render ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... duramen, heartwood; alburnum, sapwood; kindling, fuel. Associated Words: kyanize, fissile, fissility, lignification, lignify, ligniferous, lignescent, lignite, lignivorous, xylopyrography, pyrography, veneer, cord. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... were the only indications that much was at stake; social veneer concealed the real anxiety of the players, but a hush of nervous tension pervaded the room. It was a relief when the last hand was concluded. Everyone crowded around the table where the beautiful prizes were displayed and where the scores ...
— Mrs. Christy's Bridge Party • Sara Ware Bassett
... way he expressed himself which delighted Priscilla. He had reverted to the phraseology of an undignified schoolboy of the lower fifth. The veneer of grown manhood, even the polish of a prefect, had, as it were, peeled off ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the forging of mighty peoples. Were I required to give a reason for this fact I would say it is because man is not altogether a machine—because he is not content to eat and sleep and propagate his kind like the lower animals. Despite his thick veneer of selfishness, man is at heart a creature of sentiment, and religion is the poetry of the common people. Crude it may be, but its tendency is toward the stars, while all else in man is animalistic and of the earth. Strike the religion, the poetry, out of a people, and you reduce ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... frosty and grim and menacing, men stripped off the sloth of the south and gave battle greatly. And they stripped likewise much of the veneer of civilization—all of its follies, most of its foibles, and perhaps a few of its virtues. Maybe so; but they reserved the great traditions and at least lived frankly, laughed honestly, and looked one another ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... the onward march of years. It has a cramping effect; it closes the pores, intensifying one line of activity at the expense of all the others; often enough it encrusts the individual with a kind of shell, a veneer of something akin to hypocrisy. Your ordinary adult is an egoist in matters of the affections; a specialist in his own insignificant pursuit; a dull dog. Dimly aware of these defects, he confines himself to generalities or, grown confidential, tells you of his little fads, his little ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... easy-going, devil-may-care macaronies was a follower or sympathizer with Lord North's policy. But what I heard was a revelation indeed. I have dignified it by calling it politics. All was frankness here amongst friends. There was no attempt made to gloss over ugly transactions with a veneer of morality. For this much I honoured them. But irresistibly there came into my mind the grand and simple characters of our own public men in America, and it made me shudder to think that, while they strove honestly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the first time, I was seized with sorrow for her. "God knows, madam," I cried, "God knows I am not so hard as I appear; on this dreadful night who can veneer his words? But I am a friend to all who ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The calm way in which he sometimes alluded to his present circumstances, without a trace of bitterness or fretfulness, amazed her. In old days she would have put it down to "good breeding—good manners," some superficial veneer of good society of which she thoroughly approved; but she had seen too much of the seamy side of "good society" now to be able to accept this explanation of his calmness. It was not want of sensitiveness, she was sure of that: he was by no means obtuse: it was simply that ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... had changed, but I knew he was not a whit less dangerous because the veneer of suave mockery masked ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... first of all I must remark that Love has come to grip you late In life, but, passing over that, I've certain things to stipulate: You must exhibit interest, as even Goth or Vandal would, In curios and bric-a-brac, in ivories and sandalwood; And you must cope with cameo, veneer, relief and lacquer (Ah! And, parenthetically, pay my debts at bridge and baccarat). I dote on Futurism, and so a mate would give me little ease Whose views were strictly orthodox on MYRON and PRAXITELES. You do not understand," she sneered, "so gross is your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... desert, who in his person unites the great virtues of his people, magnanimity and bravery, with the gift of poetic speech. Its tone is elevated; its coarseness has as its origin the outspokenness of unvarnished man; it does not peep through the thin veneer of licentious suggestiveness. It is never trivial, even in its long and wearisome descriptions, in its ever-recurring outbursts of love. Its language suits its thought: choice and educated, and not descending—as in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... women. But he had seen their weaknesses and their frailties as perhaps no other man had ever seen them, and he had written of them as no other man had ever written. This had brought him the condemnation of the host, the admiration of the few. His own personal veneer of antagonism against woman was purely artificial, and yet only a few had guessed it. He had built it up about him as a sort of protection. He called himself "an adventurer in the mysteries of feminism," and to be this successfully he had argued ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... farewell "brekker"[39] at the Creameries; a banquet of the Olympians to which John received an invitation. He accepted because Desmond made a point of his so doing; but he was quite aware that beneath the veneer of the Demon's genial smile lay implacable hatred and resentment. The breakfast in itself struck John as ostentatious. Scaife's father sent quails, a la Lucullus, and other delicacies. Throughout the meal the talk was of the coming war. At that ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... of grafting were employed, of which the common cleft and the veneer or side graft were perhaps the most satisfactory. In most instances it was only necessary to bind the parts together snugly with bass or raffia. In some soft wooded plants, like coleus, a covering of common grafting wax over the bandage was an advantage, probably because it prevented ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... may at once pull his hat lower over his eyes and concern himself only with his immediate business. The joys of Nature are not for such as he; the love of the wild which exists in every one of us is, in him, too thickly "sicklied o'er" with the veneer of convention and civilisation. ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... so, I am obliged to add. One was red-faced and obese; the other was tall, thin, and wiry, and showed as many seams in his face as a blighted apple. Neither of the two had anything to recommend him either in appearance or address, save a certain veneer of polite assumption as transparent as it was offensive. As I listened to the forced sallies of the one and the hollow laugh of the other, I was glad that I was large of frame and strong of arm, and used to all kinds of ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the trader to be seen in his true light. Here was emergency, when all veneer fell from him as the green coat of summer falls from the trees at the first breath of winter. His haste was not the swift movements of a man whose nerve is steady. He knew that he had at least twelve hours before any one of the three men were likely to awaken from their drunken stupor. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... swept his face again, twisting his lips nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long contact with those who had ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... gambler, a professional gambler, with all that that implies; your life is, of necessity, passed among the most vicious and degrading elements of mining camps, and you do not hesitate even to take human life when in your judgment it seems necessary to preserve your own. Under this veneer of lawlessness you may, indeed, possess a warm heart, Mr. Hampton; you may be a good fellow, but you are certainly not a model character, even according to the liberal code of ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... as to their state, she entered the drawing-room. There is little in this room; no pictures relieve the widths of grey colourless wall paper, and the sombre oak floor is spaced with a few pieces of furniture—heavy furniture enshrouded in grey linen cloths. Three French cabinets, gaudy with vile veneer and bright brass, are nailed against the walls, and the empty room is reflected dismally in the great gold mirror which faces the vivid green of the sward and the duller green of the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her family for centuries, both being of the old stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal, according to the precedent ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... uphold Wrong. The high-minded descendants of the proudest and most stubborn peoples of Europe had to bend the knee before a Government which united a commercial policy of crying injustice with a veneer of simulated philanthropy. ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... tricks of life, its varnish and veneer, Its stucco-fronts of character flake off and disappear, We 've learned that oft the brownest hands will heap the biggest pile, And met with many a "perfect brick" beneath ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... always been a bear, as her little ladyship had stated, but the last five years had certainly scraped off whatever social veneer had adhered to his manners. The power of facial self-control, the common tact that would have carried things off with a laugh and a jest, were his no longer, if he had ever possessed them. He got upon his feet ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... love. Breed allers tells. You may be low-born and nothing will 'ide it—not all the dress and not all the, by way of, fine manners. It's jest like veneer—it peels off at a minute's notice. But breed's true to the core; it wears. Alison, it ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... question that suited the Nationalists, namely, to cause the death of the head of the family, and to get the rest out of the country. It did not say much for the civilisation of the nineteenth century, but after the brutalities of the spring of 1871 in Paris, there can be no doubt how thin is the veneer over the barbarity of even the most civilised; those deeds were perpetrated in the heart of the European capital specially devoted to amusement: what I describe took place in the most distant portion of Europe, where Nature is lovely ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... territory on the Russian frontier belonging to Count Georges Mniszech and his father. He was anxious that M. Surville should undertake the matter, as, after abstruse and careful calculations—which have the puzzling veneer of practicality always observable in Balzac's mad schemes—he considered that 1,200,000 francs might be made out of the affair, and that of course the engineer who arranged the transport would reap some of the benefit. The blocks of wood would be fifteen inches in diameter ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... embellishment as well as to fulfill the practical requirements of daily use. Inasmuch as rubble used in this manner becomes merely an aggregate in a concrete wall, the consistent thing to do is to consider it as such and give the wall an outside finish or veneer of rough plaster. This fact was recognized and often acted upon by the early Philadelphia builders wherever the stone readily available did not make an attractive wall. A few of the best examples extant serve ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... other, to argue, to grow heated and naturally from that to become angry. It seems a fatality of campers along a wild trail, like explorers in an unknown land, to be prone to fight. If there is an explanation of this singular fact, it must be that men at such time lose their poise and veneer of civilization; in brief, they go back. At all events we had it hot and heavy, with the center of attack gradually focusing on Jones, and as he was always losing something, naturally we united in ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... propose Whitman's problems to himself, or understand or appreciate them at all. The "Leaves" are perhaps of supreme interest only to men of deepest culture, because they contain in such ample measure that without which all culture is mere varnish or veneer. They are indirectly a tremendous criticism of American life and civilization, and they imply that breadth of view and that liberation of spirit—that complete disillusioning—which is the best result of culture, and which all great souls have reached, no matter who or what ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... but the music of the Wedding March. He was glad that his original contempt for Sir Asher had been exchanged for sincere respect, and that the bluff Briton was a mere veneer. It was to the Palestinian patriarch that he would pour out his hopes and ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... poverty and was about to be "developed" was made manifest in Blake City by the modern building which the railroad was erecting on the main street. Eventually the division officials were to be installed in office suites of mahogany veneer, with ground glass doors lettered in gold leaf. For the present, as from the beginning, they occupied an upper floor of a freight warehouse. Bannon came in about eleven o'clock, looked briefly about, and seeing that one corner ...
— Calumet "K" • Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster
... vaunted skill in organisation, scientific management and method before the world at large. As a matter of fact it is only when one secures a position behind the scenes in Germany, to come into close contact with the Hun as he really is, when he has been stripped of the mask and veneer which he assumes for parade and to impress his visitors, that the hollowness of the Teuton pretensions is laid bare in all ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... continued through all time, nor could we account for the gross impoliteness that is often met with in recent years. The Japanese themselves deplore the changes that have taken place. They testify that the older forms of politeness were an integral element of the feudal system and were too often a thin veneer of manner by no means expressive of heart interest. None can be so absolutely rude as they who are masters of the forms of politeness, but have not the kindly heart. The theory of "impersonality" does not satisfactorily account for the old-time ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... was much exercised by our journey was Khwajeh Konstantin, a Syrian-Greek trader, son of the old agent of the convent, whose blue goggles and comparatively tight pantaloons denoted a certain varnish and veneer. It is his practice to visit El-Muwaylah once every six months; when he takes, in exchange for cheap tobacco, second-hand clothes, and poor cloth, the coral, the pearls fished for in April, the gold dust, the finds of coin, and whatever else will bring money. Such is the course and custom of these ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... themselves. God! Had not their mothers wept enough? It was a good town. There was no veil of hypocrisy here, but a wickedness, frank, ungilded, and open. To be sure, there were things sometimes to reveal the basic savagery and thin veneer. Once, for instance, a man was lynched for brawling on the public square of the county seat; once a mayor who sought to "clean up" was publicly assassinated; always there was theft and rumors of theft, until St. Clair County was a hissing ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... last one came that she was not equal to it.... After that she was an invalid for seventeen years until she died. And there was loss of children to bear between them, and sickness, and creeping age, but this bit of furniture held firm to the last. Gentlemen, it was mad solid, no veneer, a good job all the ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... thus there was manifested the habit of servile obedience, of arbitrary power and violence, which had been taking root for several centuries; under a thin veneer of revolution one finds the servile and violent man ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women, the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had triumphed over the frightened directors ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... daemons, and the thousand powers of darkness abide with us still, though to-day they go by different names, for there is no man in this smug, complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our civilization, and behold! there stands the Primal Man in all his old, wild savagery, and with the devil leering upon his shoulder. Indeed, to-day as surely ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... unlooked-for tastes in the man they belonged to troubled her. It was an unexpected glimpse into the personality of the Arab that had captured her was vaguely disquieting, for it suggested possibilities that would not have existed in a raw native, or one only superficially coated with a veneer of civilisation. He seemed to become infinitely more sinister, infinitely more horrible. She looked at her watch with sudden apprehension. The day was wearing away quickly. Soon he would come. Her breath came quick and short and the tears welled up ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... astonished at the change which had come over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as Dolph ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... reality had, for her, ceased to exist. Suddenly she felt an upflaming of resentment against the generosity of her Napoleonic brother. In exchange for life's golden chance of romance she had been given a wonderful veneer of hard brilliancy—and she hated it! After a few moments of rebellious introspection she shook her head and rose from her seat, slipping behind the tall marble urn that rose from the end of the bench into the enveloping shadows. She was seeking a refuge where she might ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... one of pity; an Englishwoman alone in this wilderness—two days' drive from even a railway station—and at the mercy of Kossowski! But the next minute I reversed my judgment. Probably she adored her rufous lord, took his veneer of courtesy—a veneer of the most exquisite polish, I grant you, but perilously thin—for the very perfection of chivalry. Or perchance it was his inner savageness itself that charmed her; the most refined women often amaze one by the fascination which the preponderance of the brute ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... authority, as of one used to being obeyed. He was dressed roughly enough in corduroy and miner's half-leg boots, but these were of the most expensive material and cut. His cold gray eye and thin lips denied the manner of superficial heartiness he habitually carried. If one scratched the veneer of good nature it was to find a hard selfishness ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... keeping them snugly put away in mines below ground. A sheet of snow, and bitter white rain driving still. A huge building looming black, its many eyes staring into the dark—lidless, bilious, vacant. This is a hospital. Or is it a factory, disguised with a veneer of the Puginesque? Or an aesthetic barrack? Or an artistic workhouse? Visible yet, under falling snow which has not had time to cover them, are flower-beds, shrub-plots, meandering walks. Too genteel ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... fathers; and both were succeeded by pagan sons. London and the East Saxon province or kingdom—let us say Middlesex and Essex, with perhaps Herts—seem to have been ruled by the three sons of Sabert in commission, who, disregarding whatever thin veneer of Christianity they had found it convenient to adopt during their father's lifetime, boldly apostatised, and the East Saxons readily followed. Entering St. Paul's, as the bishop was celebrating, the three scoffed and mocked, "We will not enter into that laver, because we do not ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... heart. But a man can judge a man best, and every instinct of my nature warned me against this fellow. The very first sound of his voice had prejudiced me, and when I saw him I knew I was right—with him manliness was but veneer. And Billie! The name sounded soft, sweet, womanly now and I longed to speak it in her presence. Billie! I said it over and over again reverently, her face floating before me in memory, and then my lips closed in sudden determination: ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... with anger. He was of the fair type of Frenchman, with deep-set eyes, and a straight, cruel mouth only partly concealed by his golden mustache. Just now, notwithstanding the veneer of his too perfect clothes and civilized air, the beast had leaped out. His face was like the face ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... studied this simple woman who was to be her mother-in-law. Madame Joyselle was, socially speaking, absolutely unpresentable, for she had remained in every respect except that of age what she had been born—a Norman peasant. She had acquired no veneer of any kind, and looked, as she stood with her plump hands folded contentedly on her apron-band, much less a lady than Mrs. Champion, the housekeeper ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... young,—supple, successful in his way, rich if you wanted to put it in that word. And no heart for life; listless. It was wrong.... All he could think of doing was to be intimate with an easy woman. No zest for her great noble frame, her surge of flaxen hair. The veneer of conventional good manners, conventional good taste, only made the actuality of it more appalling ... she with the gifts of life and grace, he with his, and all they could do was be physically intimate.... And she took money with a little smile, contemptuous of herself, contemptuous of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... civilisation of the country—is on Western lines, though until 1853 foreigners were excluded; a civil war in 1867-68 effected the change from the old feudalism, and the amazing success of Japan in the war against China in 1894 has proved that the new civilisation is no mere veneer; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... "Pitiable, yes; perhaps you are right. After all, we are pitiful creatures, and, under the thin veneer, like enough to the beasts." Then she changed the subject abruptly, and began to talk ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... comrade, an equal, and she could not help noticing the difference in his tone toward her and that he had adopted towards the others, nor could she help being flattered by the implied compliment. She was exempt from his raillery. All along he inferred that she understood him, and accepted his veneer of jocosity and insincerity ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... lessons bestowed on the latter, whether by Miss Fossett or visiting masters), was taken away by Mrs. Lyndsay on a visit to the old Marchioness of Montfort. Matilda, who was to come out the next year, was thus almost exclusively with Arabella, who redoubled all her pains to veneer the white deal, and protect with ormolu its feeble edges—so that, when it "came out," all should admire that thoroughly fashionable piece of furniture. It was the habit of Miss Fossett and her pupil to take a morning walk in the quiet retreats of the Green ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... been a magnificent spectacle. Many clouds have rested on Mount Eryx since 1752 and we do not now expose our bedrock of paganism quite so openly. This, indeed, but for the slight veneer of Christianity, might have passed for a ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... The veneer of our vaunted civilization is, at the best, thin, and every man, in whose veins runs red blood, has within him pent-up volcanic forces which require but little awakening to produce a soul-shattering upheaval. Donald knew that his being shouted aloud for battle—why, he ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men. Men's passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a veneer. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... in the deep chair with his hands behind his head. "It's not too hard to imagine Marthasa's great-great-grandfather running down vessels in space and pillaging helpless cities on other planets. The veneer of civilization on him doesn't look ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... and resources to secondary at the expense of primary education. The result has certainly been to widen the gulf which divides the different classes of Indian society and to give to those who have acquired some veneer, however superficial, of Western education the only articulate voice, often quite out of proportion to their importance, as the interpreters of Indian interests and desires. One million is a liberal estimate of the number of Indians who have acquired and retained some knowledge of English; ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Tarzan of the Apes sloughed the thin veneer of his civilization and with it the hampering apparel that was its badge. In a moment the polished English gentleman reverted to the ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... charivari when Red Martin handed the boys twenty dollars—the largest sum ever contributed to a similar purpose in the town's history—he and the Princess began to slump. The sloughing off of the veneer of civilisation was not rapid, but it was sure. The first pair of shoes that Red bought after his wedding were not patent leather, and, though the porter of his gambling place blacked them every morning, still they were common leather, and the boy noticed it. Likewise, the ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White |
