"Grubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bath, flanked by an earthen pitcher of water, in his room morning after morning, that a gentleman washed all over every day. At first this bored him considerably, but after one day when the Parson took him down to the cove to bathe, and he had occasion to be ashamed of his grubby little legs and feet beside the other's shining whiteness, that too altered. Yet the Parson had said nothing, hardly given more than a look. In the same way, when he gathered that the Parson trusted him to tell the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... if the children belonged to nice families. She rather knew they had no family at all in the sense her grandmother always used. She did not stop to remember how shocked and horrified her grandmother would be if she could see her racing along trying to overtake the grubby little group of poor children. With Helen close behind, she skimmed around the first curve ...
— The Girl Scouts at Home - or Rosanna's Beautiful Day • Katherine Keene Galt
... man. "Well, now, you'll need heavy stuff for that. I'd say at least three heavy-duty paralo-ray pistols for side arms, and three shock rifles. Then you'll need camping equipment, synthetics, and all the rest." He counted the items off on grubby little fingers. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... wast named Nicholas— There be dull clods who doubt thy magic power To tour the sleeping world in half-an-hour, And pop down all the chimneys as you pass With woolly lambs and dolls of frabjous size For grubby hands and wonder-laden eyes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 26, 1917 • Various
... solemnly. It is well for every one to have a friend or friends with whom he can talk quite unaffectedly about what he cares for and values; and he ought to be able to say to such a friend, "I cannot talk about these things now; I am in a dusty, prosaic, grubby mood, and I want to make mud-pies"; the point is to be natural, and yet to keep a watch upon nature; not to force her into cramped postures, and yet not to indulge her in rude, careless, and vulgar postures. It is a bad sign in friendship, if intimacy ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... often seen Harry dirty—very dirty,—but from the mud on his boots to the marks on his face where he had pushed the hair out of his eyes with earthy fingers, I never saw him quite so grubby before. And if there had been a clean place left in any part of his clothes well away from the ground, that spot must have been soiled by a huge and very dirty sack, under the weight of which his poor little shoulders were bent ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... like to see smoke come out of his ears ... an' he said: 'Put your hand here on me and watch very careful.'" Tony pointed to Jan's chest. "I put my hand there and I watched and watched an' he hurt me with the end of his cigar. There's the mark!" He held out a grubby little hand, back uppermost, for Jan's inspection, and there, sure enough, was the little round ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... towards the Lamb; and he, looking in her eyes, unexpectedly put up a grubby soft paw ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... now glinting blindingly in the late sun, we walked into a grubby little tea shop for a sixpenny pot of tea between us. Out of my pocket I pulled a wage list of well-paying, imagination-stirring jobs in England. There were all sorts of jobs from toy-making at ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... the house which hitherto she had visited in a spirit of kindly condescension, to be revolted by the new aspect which her changed relations with it now gave to its every feature. Ruby, neglected, with a jam-smeared face—the flustered maid, tousled, grubby, her frock gaping—the horrible hall, with its imitation-marble paper and staring linoleum—the prim, trivial, unaired, unused drawing-room, with its pathetic attempts at elegance—Deb inwardly curled up at the sight of these things as things now belonging to the family. When the master ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... that and wrote saying that she would be there, and that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby quarters and practiced such strict economy in ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of periodicals, and an admirably chosen store of books, ranging from the classics to the most utterly modern literature. Few large English towns could show anything as good. Cross the Rockies to Vancouver, and you're back among dirty walls, grubby furniture, and inadequate literature again. There's nothing in Canada to compare with the magnificent libraries little New Zealand can show. But Calgary ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... Bickley, "you imagine that you look like the minister of any religion ancient or modern in a grubby flannel shirt, a battered sun-helmet, a torn green and white umbrella and a pair of ragged duck trousers, you are ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... young girl, and notice that she listens as one who understands. She looks rather superior; her rose-coloured seeley is clean, and two large gold jewels are in each ear; she has a little gold necklet round her throat, and silver bangles and toe rings. All the others are hopelessly grubby and very unenlightened, but they listen just as most people listen in church, with a sort of patient expression. It is ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... the gate into the garden, the American soldier, the children and I together. The little girl, with that wistful confidence that all French children show for men in khaki, slipped her grubby little paw into my hand. I expect Joan was often grubby ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... smallest of them, a three-year-old boy commonly called "'Arry," was their pet. "Look, 'Arry; here's a dear little flow-wer! A little 'arts-ease—look, 'Arry!" "'Ere, 'Arry, have a bite o' this nice apple!" They were certainly attractive children, though formidably grubby as to their faces. I heard them with their father, admiring a litter of young rabbits in the hutch. "O-oh, en't that a dear little thing!" they exclaimed, again and again. Sunday was especially delightful to them because their father was at home ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... and what seemed the general out-of-jointness of the world was entirely due, she decided, to the fact that she had not had a bath and that her hair was all anyhow. She felt suddenly tranquil. If it was merely her grubby and dishevelled condition that made Gerald seem to her so different, all was well. She put her hand on his with a quick gesture ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby's ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... "Hands look grubby. You should wash 'em. I say, what a beastly out-of-the-way place this is. Where's Uncle Dick? I only had a coffee and roll before I left London. Can I have ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... father treats him like a boy; if he talked about marrying, he'd get a cuff on the ear. Oh, I know all about old Lord,' Ada proceeded. 'He's a regular old tyrant. Why, you've only to look at him. And he thinks no small beer of himself, either, for all he lives in that grubby little house; I shouldn't wonder if he thinks us ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... thought hard, nor did he find the process irksome. From the miserable camp pup he glanced at the grubby face of Jamie. Then his eyes passed on to Vada's pretty but equally dirty features. And swift action at once followed his thought. He glanced at the dying fire in the cookstove, and saw the small clothes hanging on the chair in front of it. He ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... explained. "You must ride on one. Torrance has a rather grubby specimen. They're the wildest form of slimpsy-skimpsy flight you ever saw. About forty miles an hour, with just a board and a tremendous sputter between you and the flying rails. It makes your hair curl, yet you look forward to ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... Old Mother Nature. "Now I am going to tell you of one of my little plowmen who also lives in the Far West but prefers the great plains to the high mountains, though he is sometimes found in the latter. He is Grubby the Gopher, a member of the same order the rest of you belong to, but of a family quite his own. He is properly called the Pocket Gopher, and way down in the Southeast, where he is also found, he is called a Salamander, though what for I haven't ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... it, but loses itself in a grubby tangle of smaller streets, thickly set with small houses, densely and untidily populated, the section known at first derisively and later in good faith as Paddy Lane. Through the intricate geography of this quarter ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... include a door-plate, which can easily be removed and sold to somebody else. And if a door-plate, why not a curtain-rod? A curtain-rod is a necessity to the incoming tenant; a door-plate is merely a luxury for the grubby-fingered to help them to keep the paint clean. One might be expected to bring one's own door-plate with one, according to ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... notes wondered that he was indispensable; Geraldine could hardly believe that the clear exquisite proclamation, that came floating as from an angel voice, could really come from the little, slight, grubby, dusty urchin, who stood with clasped hands and uplifted face; and Clement himself—though deferring the communication till Lance was absent, lest it should make him vain— confided to Wilmet that they had no such voice at St Matthew's, and it ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so ugly in their sable hides: So dark, so dingy, like a grubby lot Of sooty sweeps, or colliers, and besides, However the poor elves Might wash themselves, Nobody knew if they were clean or not— On Nature's fairness they were quite a blot! Not to forget more serious complaints That even while they join'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... over the wall, eager for a first sight of her home after all the long time she had been absent from it, saw an old pair of kitchen bellows, numberless scraps of paper, a broken battledore, a shabby straw hat, and three grubby, battered dolls perched up against an old tub, which had once contained flowers, but had long since ceased ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Johannes. We spent the few minutes while the lock was emptied in a farewell talk to Bartels. Karl had hitched their main halyards on to the windlass and was grinding at it in an acharnement of industry, his shock head jerking and his grubby face perspiring. Then the lock gates opened; and so, in a Babel of shouting, whining of blocks, and creaking of spars, our whole company was split out into the dingy bosom of the Elbe. The Johannes gathered way under wind and tide and headed for midstream. A last shake of the hand, and ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... bushel of coal and some kindlings, and milk and meal, and all I wanted. I worked like a beaver for an hour or two, and was so glad I'd been to a cooking-class, for I could make a fire, with Lotty to do the grubby part, and start a nice soup with the cold meat and potatoes, and an onion or so. Soon the room was warm, and full of a nice smell, and out of bed tumbled 'the babies,' to dance round the stove and sniff at the soup, ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... be hanged! I sat beside that youth at dinner; he was just as ecstatic over the roast fowl as over those grubby little weeds. He's pretty enough; that olive colouring is beautiful; but he's not half so picturesque as ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... walking across the lawn, presenting a rather indignant and consciously virtuous back to naughty Peter. Down in his pocket went his hand and before Peter and Polly knew what had happened they found themselves each with a silver dollar clasped in a grubby fist. ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... giving me a very grubby little hand; "only please do look at me as you look at Charley, and don't leave me all to myself again. I do get so tired ...
— Golden Moments - Bright Stories for Young Folks • Anonymous
... same, making no further advances to him, though, as I recalled how I hammered his body and head, and how he must have been pricked by falling into the gooseberry bush, I felt sorry, and if he had offered to shake hands I should have forgotten how grubby his always were, and held ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... little grubby boys with whom she used to lark in the gutter, the son of the stage-door keeper of the theater, got her in to the rehearsal, although it was strictly forbidden. They stole to the very back of the building in the darkness. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand? Beefy face an' grubby 'and— Law! wot do they understand? I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the ...
— Barrack-Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... been justified in taking out a patent in himself as an Englishman, warranted like a dye never to lose colour. To him most foreigners were frogs. In Edward Lyttelton's admirable monograph of his brother, you will read that one day, when Alfred was in the train, sucking an orange, "a small, grubby Italian, leaning on his walking-stick, smoking a cheroot at the station," was looked upon, not only by Alfred but by his biographer, as an "irresistible challenge to fling the juicy, but substantial, fragment full at the unsuspecting foreigner's cheek." At this we are told ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... Press and worked at it until his supply of fine linen and the patience of City Editor Wilbert Devore frazzled out practically together. The episode to which I would here direct attention came to pass in the middle of a particularly hot week in the middle of that particularly hot and grubby summer, at a time when the major was still wearing the last limp survivor of his once adequate stock of frill-bosomed, roll-collared shirts, and when Devore's scanty stock of endurance had already worn perilously near ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... person had taught young Mr. Smeeth to smile, smile, smile while he was singing, but with all the appreciation of a fellow-orator he admired Dr. Drew's sermon. It had the intellectual quality which distinguished the Chatham Road congregation from the grubby ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... the great white coffee jug and some thick cups and set the tray on the oilskin-covered table. Seeing Paragot in his grubby shirt-sleeves, she looked around, with her housewifely instinct of tidiness, for the ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Claude's classmates. She was not as dull as her brother; she could learn a conjugation and recognize the forms when she met with them again. But she was a gushing, silly girl, who found almost everything in their grubby life too good to be true; and she was, unfortunately, sentimental about Claude. Annabelle chanted her lessons over and over to herself while she cooked and scrubbed. She was one of those people who can ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... persuade anyone to put him up ran a risk of remaining there sine die. When he could not induce a native of the Court to do this, he endeavoured to influence the outer public, not without success. For when it came to understand—that public—that the grubby little tenant of Dave's grubby little shirt and trousers was not asking the time nor for a hoyp'ny, but was murmuring shyly:—"I soy, mawster, put me up atop," at the same time slapping the post on either side with ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of paper into a grubby envelope in which he had for some time kept some used French stamps; then, licking down the flap, he left his room and went into his mother's, where he propped up the envelope on the fat pin-cushion ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... rubbish, garbage, dross and the bloody brown carrion of broken machinery, it shot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbroken barriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaring tunnels full of grimy light and grubby air. ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones; Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand, An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand? Beefy face an' grubby 'and — Law! wot do they understand? I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! On the road to Mandalay ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... these times used to be acute. The head printer would send up a relay of small and grubby boys to remind us that "On Your Way" was fifty lines short. At ten o'clock he would come in ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... He looks grubby for a client—but appearances are deceptive, and you offer him a seat, assuring him that he may speak with perfect security—whereupon he proceeds in a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... and complications of the year—the year something or other ahead. I had it all—down to the smallest details—in my dream. I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the fading outline of some queer new development I had imagined still hung about me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that made me thank God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained looking at the woman, and rejoicing—rejoicing that I had come away out of all that tumult and folly and violence before it was too late. After all, I thought, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Mr. Voules with increasing emphasis, and Mr. Polly became aware that he and Miriam were the focus of two crescents of small boys, each with the light of massacre in his eyes and a grubby fist clutching into a paper bag for rice; and that Mr. Voules was warding off probable discharges ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... partly because, her hair being long and falling on the page, owing to her crouched attitude when perusing, it has to be swept back, and each sweep leaves its mark. Considering how they set themselves up to be superior and instruct, books are curiously grubby things. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... woman was ordinary enough—the type of landlady one sees in all back streets—greasy face, straggling hair, dirty blouse, black hands, bitten fingernails, short skirts, prodigious feet, a grubby child clinging on to her dress and every indication of the speedy arrival ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... a roar of laughter, for the poor fellow's face was not only thoroughly grubby, but decorated with two good-sized ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... the charm of a free-swimming existence that divorced him from a vegetarian diet. To be continually sucking in plant sludge was a low grubby business at the best. Besides, he was now furnished with a respectable pair of jaws, not to mention the rudiments of teeth. Daphne was his first victim. Daphne sounds somehow floral, but this Daphne was equipped with one eye and several pairs of legs, ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... too grubby, it's in the slums," said Nancy. "But I really owe you a debt of gratitude, Hugh, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... excitement prevailed over Montricheux. It was the day when the pretty lakeside town celebrated the Fete des Narcisses, and from the smallest street urchin, grabbing a bunch of narcissi in his grubby little hand and trying to induce the good-natured foreigner to purchase his wares, to the usually stolid hoteliers, vying with each other as to which of their caravanserais should blaze out into the most arresting scheme of decoration on the great occasion, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... became of Ballard's guns? Afghans black and grubby Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi; And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword are Hanging in a Marri camp ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... of its institutions and leading citizens. The Pragers have expressed this admiration by naming their finest railway station after President Wilson of the Lost Points, whereas their own President has to be content with a rather grubby old terminus. ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker |
