"Seamy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looked incredulous and looked again, and it was so, and at her feet sat he that had so late lashed her; but I ween he had wist where to strike, or woe betide him; and she did now oppress him sore, and made him thread her very needle, the which he did with all humility; so was their comedy turned seamy side without; and Cul de Jatte told me 'twas still so with 'voppers' and their men in camp; they would don their bravery though but for an hour, and with their tinsel, empire, and the man durst not the least gainsay ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Vicomte de The Seamy Side of History The Chouans The Collection of Antiquities (companion ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... conferred on the United States could not be given in apter words than those used by Gallatin, who, as the finance minister during four presidential terms, saw quite enough of the seamy side to sober his opinions, and who, as a prominent member of the war party, shared the disappointed hopes of his colleagues about the conquest of Canada. His opinion is, of course, that of a partisan. But it contains much ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... was born in Kansas, on the twenty-third of August, 1869. The family moved to Illinois the next year. His father was a lawyer, and the child had access to plenty of good books, which he read eagerly. In spite of his preoccupation with the seamy side of human nature, he is in reality a bookish poet, and most of his work—though not the best part of it—smells of the lamp. Fortunately for him he was brought up on the Bible, for even those who attack the Old Book are ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... lightly on Viola's soft hand, experienced a keen, pang of sympathetic pain. "She is so charming! What profanation to develop the seamy side of her nature! What pitiful tomfoolery! She is in the lion's mouth now—and yet how eagerly she seemed to desire it. Weissmann has made anything but the simplest ventriloquistic performance impossible—she cannot lift a hand. To save her from herself, as well as from Clarke, it is necessary ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... of the action of lime as a preservative of lumber. I can cite an instance of a mill in New Hampshire where the basement floor was placed in 1856, the ledge in the cellar having been blasted out for the purpose. The rock was very seamy, and abounded in water issuing from springs or percolating from the canal supplying water to the mill. The rock was blasted away to a grade two feet below the floor, and most of the space filled up again by replacing the small pieces of stone, so ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... The seamy side of Maori life, as of all savage life, was patent to the most unimaginative observer. The traveller found it not easy to dwell on the dignity, poetry and bravery of a race which contemned washing, and lived, for the most part, in noisome hovels. A chief might ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... mysterious manner that it seemed hopeless to search for them. Zaidos had always wanted to join the army, but he had anticipated all the honor and pleasure of graduating from West Point, in America. This was indeed the raw and seamy side of soldiering. He was a philosopher, however, so he shrugged his shoulders, gave the old servants the best instructions he could about closing up and caring for the estates, and threw himself, body and soul, ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... camp-followers. Some account must necessarily be taken of this by those who review Sterne's writings. A child brought up under such conditions is not likely to have a very keen appreciation of the finer phases of life, and must inevitably have a precocious and most unfortunate familiarity with the seamy side of existence. What is commonly called knowledge of the world, which means knowledge of what is worst in the world, as "seeing life" generally means seeing its dirtiest places, undoubtedly Sterne got in plenty, and the future divine was not improved ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the rounded slopes of the Eperquerie; the bold cliffs behind, with their sprawling gray feet in the emerald sea, and their green and gold shoulders humping up into the blue sky; beyond them the black Gouliot rocks and foaming Race, and the long soft bulk of Brecqhou with its seamy sides and black-mouthed caves. ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy. The Brotherhood of Consolation is also known by the title The Seamy Side of History and is referred to by that title ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Dr. Bourgoin from behind, "but the young gentleman has his fortune to make, and knows better than to look on the seamy ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his head instead of the apple. That is the legend. Whether it be true or false, all boys will agree that the little victim could not have escaped by complaining to the monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side not so seamy of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour among boys. Of course the laws of the secret society might well terrify a puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour is even more strong than fear, and will probably ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... types of life issued from the womb of nature after so long and painful a travail? The annihilation of the unfit is the seamy side, though the most real side, of natural selection. We ignore it, or extenuate it, and turn rather to consider the advances in organisation by which the survivors were enabled to outlive the great ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... was momentarily forgotten, looked at the visitor—a big fellow of a priest, the son of a peasant evidently, and still near to the soil. He had an ungainly, bony figure, huge feet and knotted hands, with a seamy tanned face lighted by extremely keen black eyes. Five and forty and still robust, his chin and cheeks bristling, and his cassock, overlarge, hanging loosely about his big projecting bones, he suggested a bandit in disguise. Still there was nothing base about ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... concealed his smile behind his Daily Telegraph. He had a real liking and respect for the Captain, but the family affection of the Andrews household was a trifle too idyllic to convince a gentleman so well acquainted with the seamy side of life. What about that hunted-looking girl, the Captain's sister? He didn't believe, he never had believed that Mrs. Andrews was quite so much of an angel as she ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... away By swift engulfments of incalculable tides Whereon capricious Commerce rides. [121] Look, thou substantial spirit of content! Across this little vale, thy continent, To where, beyond the mouldering mill, Yon old deserted Georgian hill Bares to the sun his piteous aged crest And seamy breast, By restless-hearted children left to lie Untended there beneath the heedless sky, As barbarous folk expose their old to die. Upon that generous-rounding side, [131] With gullies scarified Where keen Neglect ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... your pardon. I have behaved abominably. Forgive me, Raina. (She bows reservedly.) And you, too, madam. (Catherine bows graciously and sits down. He proceeds solemnly, again addressing Raina.) The glimpses I have had of the seamy side of life during the last few months have made me cynical; but I should not have brought my cynicism here—least of all into your presence, Raina. I—(Here, turning to the others, he is evidently about to begin a long speech when the Major ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... and he missed the familiar taste of blood in his mouth he rose and tottered about through the fog. He could discover no tracks; he began to fear the night would foil him, when at last luck guided his aimless footsteps to a slide of loose rock banked against a seamy ledge. The surface of the bank showed a muddy scar, already half obliterated by the rain; brief search among the near-by boulders uncovered the hiding-place of a ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... was a mere compound of agitated and inflamed senses. The life he had been leading appeared in a vicious development of his previously harmless conceit and egoism. All his characteristics had turned out, as it were, the seamy side; and Nancy with difficulty preserved her patience as he showed point after point of perverted disposition. The result of their talk was a careless promise from Horace that he would come to Grove Lane not seldomer ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... of irregular shape, and were surrounded by reef. The top reef was a loose shale, and had given great trouble from the frequent slips. Below this were strata of trachitic breccia and augite; the formation was then seamy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... to himself, when he had perused this long and grave document, 'how very tolerable would all this sound, and how little should I have thought of connecting it with any ludicrous idea! Well, after all, everything has its fair, as well as its seamy side; and truly I do not see why the Baron's boot-jack may not stand as fair in heraldry as the water-Buckets, waggons, cart-wheels, plough-socks, shuttles, candlesticks, and other ordinaries, conveying ideas of anything save ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... careers of varying success and bitter failure, of hardship and romantic adventure, upon which so many of their kinsmen set out forty years ago. Nevermore and The Sphinx of Eaglehawk give other views of the gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life revealed in The ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... matters of fact that it is perfectly obvious that the very atmosphere is charged with duplicity. The thing is taken as a matter of course. Judges are used to it, and act accordingly, deciding in most cases by a keen observation of the witnesses and an extensive knowlege of the seamy side of nature. But sometimes the very judges are nonplussed, so brazen are the faces of the gentlemen who "have kissed the book" Very often, no doubt, their honors feel inclined to say, like the American judge in directing his jury, "Well, gentlemen, if you believe what ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... until he was taken down into the police court, where his crime was duly presented to the judge and his sentence duly pronounced. Knowing nothing whatever of the seamy side of life, as it is seen inside those dismal houses with barred windows, Johnny thought he was being treated with much severity. As a matter of fact, his offence was being almost forgiven, and the six days' sentence was merely a bit of discipline applied by the judge because ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... there in various respects,—extremely ill off for fuel, among other things. Rugged practical Letters, shadowing out to us, unconsciously oftenest, and like a very mirror, the splendid and the sordid, the seamy side and the smooth, of Life at Cirey, in her experience of it. Published, fourscore years after, under the above title.] For the Ten Commandments are at a singular pass in cultivated France at this epoch. Such illicit-idyllic form of life has been ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... expected from one in his position. Many of those we passed or met during the day were personally known to him, and some, both women as well as men, who were then clothed in purple and fine linen, had histories, and many had at some period of their lives looked on life from the seamy side, having passed through ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... his seamy brown face as blank as ever. He vouchsafed no explanation. Ambrose affected not to notice him. He had long since found it to be the best way of getting what he wanted. The breed squatted on the stones, prepared to wait for the ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... concert with Judge Popinot. Later, at the close of 1825, he became one of the most active aides of Madame de la Chanterie and her charitable association. It was M. Alain who introduced Godefroid into the Brotherhood of the Consolation. [The Seamy Side ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... which he had in common with Verena, and which in her seemed to Olive romantic and touching—her having sprung from the "people," had an acquaintance with poverty, a hand-to-mouth development, and an experience of the seamy side of life—availed in no degree to conciliate Miss Chancellor. I suppose it was because he was a man. She told him that she was much obliged to him for his offer, but that he evidently didn't understand Verena and herself. No, not even Miss Tarrant, in spite of his long acquaintance ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontes. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to her husband. The ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... and peculiar feature of the scene. Nowhere could the lordly eminence be seen to the same advantage as from this point, and Nicholas contemplated it with feelings of rapture, which no familiarity could diminish. The sun shone brightly upon its rounded summit, and upon its seamy sides, revealing all its rifts and ridges; adding depth of tint to its dusky soil, laid bare in places by the winter torrents; lending new beauty to its purple heath, and making its grey sod glow as with fire. So exhilarating was the prospect, that Nicholas felt half tempted ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... is no minister who does not see wonder in the child in the cradle and in the peasant in the field relations with all time behind and before, and all eternity above and beneath. Not but that we see the seamy side too—the depths as well as the heights. We get glimpses of the awful sin of the heart; we are made to feel the force of corrupt nature's mere inert resistance to good influences; we have to feel ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... own age, had served as officers in the Confederate Army. I will designate them simply as Charles and Frank. They were types of a class now, I fear, almost extinct. Born and bred in luxury and knowing nothing of the seamy side of life—except, indeed, what they had learned in the war—well educated, brave, generous, sensitive to points of honor, and of engaging manners, these brothers were by all respected, by many loved and by some ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... winding trail, brown and springy from its thick mat of pine needles, shaded always by the massive, seamy-barked trees, took us over the extremity of Buckskin. Then we faced down into the head of a ravine that ever grew deeper, stonier and rougher. I shifted from side to side, from leg to leg in my saddle, dismounted and hobbled before Satan, mounted again, and rode on. Jones called the dogs ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... that he soon left his wife and family and went to London, it is generally alleged that the marriage was a hasty and unhappy one; but here again the evidence is entirely untrustworthy. In many Miracles as well as in later plays it was customary to depict the seamy side of domestic life for the amusement of the crowd; and Shakespeare may have followed the public taste in this as he did in other things. The references to love and home and quiet joys in Shakespeare's plays are enough, if we take such evidence, to ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... occasional mocking mannerism had to be put up with. Conceivably there were people in the world who might have liked this mild cynical way of Carlisle's, seeing in it, not indeed a good quality, but, so to say, the seamy side of a good quality; the lingering outpost of a good quality that had been routed; at least the headstone over the grave of a good quality that maybe was only buried alive. But of these people, if such there were, Mrs. Heth was ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... section which gravitates towards Dissent, in religion, towards Radicalism in politics, towards Bible Societies, Temperance Movements, "Bands of Hope," and Exeter Hall. If this section of the British community had not remained true to anti-slavery ideas, the country would indeed have been turned "the seamy side without." That we were spared, in the severer crises of the war, the last uglinesses of tergiversation, is owing mainly to people of this class, the cheapest subjects for well-bred sneers and intellectual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an out-and-out—what shall I say?—an out-and-out crook play, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... to explain to her, because we three, in our constant talks and lectures about the rest of the world, had naturally avoided the seamy side; not so much from a desire to deceive, but from wishing to put the best foot foremost for our civilization, in the face of the beauty and comfort of theirs. Also, we really thought some things were right, or at least unavoidable, which we could readily see would be repugnant to them, and ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... a preposterous reply this was for an officer to make. I qualified the assertion by saying I had assisted at the most unfortunate period of the Boer War, during the panic that followed Cronje's capture, and had got to know only the seamy side of warfare: demolished farms, trampled-down fields, no real steady fighting, scarcely any skirmishing even, but just ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... and partly excusable because it also supplies warmth and richness of tone—but was entirely at the service of the mind in following the dramatic action of the play. The setting being a reality, there was no need for mechanism to conceal a seamy side; and the colour-effects were produced by the actors themselves: whose draperies made a superb colour-scheme of strong hues perfectly harmonized, of gleaming white, of glittering golden embroideries—which constantly was rearranged by the shifting of the ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... a strange and discreditable incident. Patriots, revolutionists, who on the whole would serve human progress, have yet, as have we all, dark spots and seamy sides. Bacon's parties of workmen were threatened, hindered, driven from their task by Berkeley's guns. Bacon had a curious, unadmirable idea. He sent horsemen to neighboring loyalist plantations to gather up and bring to camp, not ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... 12 to 18 ft., and the stone was crushed to 2-in. size. Owing to the seamy character of the rock it was broken by blasting into comparatively small pieces requiring very little sledging. The stone was loaded into one-horse dump carts, the driver taking one cart to the crusher while the other was being loaded. The haul was 100 ft. The ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... practice." Then he jocularly let himself loose on transportation, and part payments down, and street improvements "in," and healthful country air for young children. He was very fluent and somewhat cynical, and turned the seamy side of his trade a ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... him sat Poll Fodge—known to the magistracy of her county as Mary Higgins—a one-eyed woman, with a scarred and seamy face, the most notorious rebel in the workhouse, said to have once thrown her broth over the master's coat-tails, and who, in spite of nature's apparent safeguards against that contingency, had contributed to the perpetuation of the Fodge characteristics in the person ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... spirit of the Papacy has intruded into every place; into the councils of kings, into the laws of nations, into the births, marriages, and deaths of the people. Between ruler and subject, between husband and wife, between parent and child, comes the priest, gliding in like water through seamy walls, sapping their foundations. Into the inmost heart of maid, wife, mother, creeps the confessional, tainting, souring, defiling society in its springs,—a leaven of malice and wickedness, a leaven at once of Pharisee and Sadducee, a superstition ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... also autumnal; perhaps because when I became a working man I saw only the seamy side of the life of our town, and every day made fresh discoveries which brought me to despair. My fellow townsmen, both those of whom I had had a low opinion before, and those whom I had thought ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth, cherished what her son calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early way, "and thought that archduchesses were sweet." But she was certainly a valiant and indefatigable woman,—"of ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... her amid associations which were all too apparent in the hotel section of the town. The parasites and camp-followers of society, attracted by the easy money that might be wrung in devious ways from the inflowing tide of farmers, were already represented in force, and flaunted brazenly the seamy side of the civilization which was ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier The Chouans The Seamy Side of History The Gondreville Mystery Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Lily of the Valley Colonel Chabert The ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... German warships, and ordered that all available aeroplanes and seaplanes should be in the air for the daylight patrol of Thursday, the 19th of November. But even war, as the philosopher remarked, has its seamy side, and the enemy did ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... as, in "Waverley," Scott wrote the romance, of Scotland about the time of the Forty-Five. With such a predecessor and rival, Mr. Stevenson wisely leaves the pomps and battles of the Forty-Five, its chivalry and gallantry, alone. He shows us the seamy side: the intrigues, domestic and political; the needy Irish adventurer with the Prince, a person whom Scott had not studied. The book, if completely successful, would be Mr. Stevenson's "Bride of Lammermoor." To be frank, I do not think ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... bitterness of his struggle with the world, and, secondarily, to the complaints which that struggle engendered. One capital consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign travel—a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's skill to the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The rubs, the rods, the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be presented to us more graphically or magisterially than they are ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... cheerful inflection of tone, as if the fact designated was one that would please her; and his swarthy, seamy face expanded into a good-humored, meaning smile. Then without any particular rudeness he pushed her back from the door, into the cabin, and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... detective's face to have been the bull. He also turned up his cuff to show a larger scar. This was another testimonial from the burglar world. A Kensington practitioner had had the bad taste to bite off a piece of that part of the detective. In short, Barrett enlarged his knowledge of the seamy side of things considerably in the mile of road which had to be traversed before St Austin's appeared in sight. The two parted at the big gates, Barrett going in the direction of Philpott's, the detective wheeling his machine ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... of my convalescence she would talk to me of her nursing experiences. I have sometimes thought I would put down in writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading. The majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of human nature, and God knows there is little need for us to point that out to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work worth doing. A few of them were sweet, but I think they were the ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... Great Saffron Hill and Little Saffron Hill that existed before the construction of the Holborn Viaduct. In the pages of Thackeray and George Meredith he would have studied the West-End of Victorian days. Certain seamy aspects of London life of the last years of the nineteenth century would have been revealed in the novels of George Gissing; and the books of a score of scribes, whose permanent place in letters is still a matter of conjecture, would have flashed glimpses of the city's streets, foibles, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... who were indolent and shiftless and unreliable and vicious were retarding the upward struggles of the industrious and self-respecting majority and how they were perpetuating the prejudice against the whole race. And as he pictured this seamy side of the situation one could see the glow of pride gradually wilt from the myriads of swarthy ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... lot of houses there are here," Mr. Fetherbee remarked to his next neighbor, a seamy old reprobate with an ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... been passed in eminently pleasant places. The seamy side of existence had always been carefully hidden from his eyes. He therefore did not recognise this strange sense which had leapt into his being—the sense ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... seamy, half an ounce of cinamon, and beat them in a mortar very fine with a little vinegar, and honey, make a perfect paste of it, and make it into little cakes or loaves, dry them in the sun or in an oven, and when you would use them, dissolve half a loaf or ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... unfairly, as dwelling mainly on the seamy side of peasant and village life, such passages as the above are not to ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God! I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you—the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness—which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination—I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... well for a Chinaman. But that's his American education. Now, it won't do a bit of good to warn Spurlock. He carries with him something that will mark him anywhere—the girl. Say, that girl fooled me at first glance. You see, we guys bump up against so much of the seamy side that we look upon everybody as guilty until proved innocent, which is hind-side-to. The second look ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... accompaniment of perpetual dripping on the verandah - and very much inclined for a chat. The exact subject I do not know! It will be bitter at least, and that is strange, for my attitude is essentially NOT bitter, but I have come into these days when a man sees above all the seamy side, and I have dwelt some time in a small place where he has an opportunity of reading little motives that he would miss in the great world, and indeed, to-day, I am almost ready to call the world an error. Because? Because I have not drugged myself with successful work, and ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social station than that to which he had been born. His contact with the world of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook, though it was often the seamy side of life that he saw, and his own early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of existence. Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active and inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... 1919 have numbered not less than 150,000; and banks, cooeperative societies, and race newspapers flourished. There were also abundant social problems awakened by the saloons and gambling dens, and by the seamy side of politics. Those who had been longest in the city, however, rallied to the needs of the newcomers, and in their homes, their churches, and their places of work endeavored to get them adjusted in their environment. The ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... together they laughed at hardship; they made the most of their meager possessions; they helped each other as one family—and they trusted to Providence for the future. And Providence, albeit she shows a seamy side to poverty, still loves the man who laughs at hard luck. The seasons following were not unkind. The late summer rains, the long autumn, and the mild winter were blessings. But withal, there ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... that Ethel closed and locked her steamer trunk. Leaving Miss Arthur to grapple alone with the cabin bags, the girl went out on deck. Regardless of the glaring sunshine of New Year morning, groups of people were dotted along the rail, staring up at the flat top and seamy face of cloud-capped Table Mountain. In the very midst of a knot of eager, excited men, Weldon was leaning on the rail, talking so earnestly to Carew that he was quite unconscious of the girl, twenty paces behind him. She hesitated ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... you. It is hard for people who have led uneventful lives and seen little of the seamy side of human nature to believe that under the veneer of civilization and the mask of convention, hatreds are still as fierce, men still as revengeful as ever they were in olden times.... I hope I did not make a mistake ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... of it was in the papers. I remember feeling sick and giddy all over when I saw our name in the police court news. 'The Seamy Side' they called it. When I got home my brother and my mother were having it out. He didn't care. It was all over for him, he admitted. Better let him start afresh somewhere else. My mother wanted to send him to Canada, where she had relatives, but he said he'd be damned if he went to Canada. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... and general distress of the year 1848 nearly provoked another rising, and in his novel entitled Yeast Kingsley pictures the 'condition of England' question as it appeared to one who knew it from the seamy side. Especially did he blame the Church, which, he said, offered a religion for "Jacob, the smooth man," and was not suited for "poor Esau." This was indeed most true as regards the agricultural classes, where the want was felt of a real religion which should gain a hold ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... all right, Joe," answered Jim. "As he grows older and sees more of the seamy side of life, he'll get some of that nonsense ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... Moodily he walked along the side of the steep ravine to which the little structure clung. Below him lay the ripped-open slope where the little stream had been diverted. Below again lay the bared bed of the exploited water course, floored with bowlders set in deep gravel, at times with seamy dams of flat rock lying under and across the gravel stretches; the bed rock, ages old, holding in its hidden fingers the ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... we had the seamy side of glorious war so well depicted.... The action of the story throughout is splendid, and all aglow with color, movement, and vim. The style is as keen and bright as a sword-blade, and a Kipling has done nothing better ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... conversation concerning the "losels, mighty beggars and vagabonds, the michers, hedge-creepers, fylloks and luskes" that "ask lodging for Our Lord's sake". Thereupon is drawn a vivid and vigorous picture of the seamy side of the social life of the times. All grades of "vagrom men," with their frauds and shifts, are passed in review, and when Copland asks about their "bousy" speech, the porter ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... waiting-room. He seized Carl's hand with his plowman's paw, and, "Good-by, boy," he growled. There was nothing gallant about his appearance—his blue-flannel shirt dusty with white fuzz, his wrinkled brick-red neck, the oyster-like ear at which he kept fumbling with a seamy finger-nail of his left hand. But Carl's salute was a salute to the ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... the Son of Man and in that look caught a conception of humanity in its fairest beauty,—how can he be in love with men and see, as he must see, their meanness and wrong-doing? The lawyer and the preacher, it is said, see the seamy side of life, and there is no need for wonder if, as has been reported, the lawyer often becomes a cynic. The wonder is if the preacher do not become a cynic too. Seeing what he must see, knowing what he must know, how is he ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... The Atheist's Mass Cousin Pons Lost Illusions The Government Clerks Pierrette A Bachelor's Establishment The Seamy Side of History Modeste Mignon Scenes from a ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac |
