"Tidiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said Joe Wynbrook, settling himself comfortably back in his chair; "it's the family hearth I'm talkin' of. The soothin' influence, ye know—the tidiness of ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and I'll clean house; it needs it badly. Such mud as that boy brings in I never saw, and I'm so lame, too!' Jerry responded, and Arthur recognized Mrs. Crawford, whose tidiness and cleanliness were proverbial, and for the next half hour he watched the little actress as she limped around the room exactly as Mrs. Crawford limped with her rheumatism, sweeping, dusting, and scolding a little, both to Harold and Jerry, the latter of whom ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... a smaller house than Bradmond, less pleasantly situated, and with more confined grounds. The door was opened by a girl who, to judge from her dress and appearance, was a maid-of-all-work, and with whom tidiness was ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... tidy walks and grass;—and what more is needed to make a pretty churchyard? The fuchsias, geraniums, and so forth, are of the nature of luxuries, and they will follow in due time: but grass and gravel are the foundation of rustic neatness and tidiness. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Vita longa, ars brevis—at least, as regards the art of the schoolgirl. It is only like marrying a slightly more complicated barrel-organ. And, for another point, watch the young person you would honour with your hand for the slightest inkling of economy or tidiness. Young men are so full of poetry and emotion that it does not occur to them how widely the sordid vices are distributed in the other sex. If you are a hotel proprietor, or a school proprietor, or a day labourer, such weaknesses become a ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... ancient Chaldean sepulchres of the three first kinds are distinguished by greater care and tidiness. They are not only separated by brick partitions on the sides, and also above and below by a thin layer of brick masonry, but the greatest care was taken to protect them against dampness. The sepulchral mounds are pierced through and through, from ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... sensible persons, Clara was a snob, but a charming little snob. She ordered him to forget that he belonged to the people. She refused to listen when he talked in the dialect. She made him dress with opulence, and even with tidiness; she made him buy a fashionable house and fill it with fine furniture; she made him buy a brougham in which her gentility could pay calls and do shopping (she shopped in Oldcastle, where a decrepit aristocracy of tradesmen sneered at Hanbridge's lack of style); she had her 'day'; ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of the school. Each one does an hour's work a day, having it changed every month, and many do more to help themselves along. The girls have the care of their rooms and generally take great pride in having perfect "reports" for tidiness. Everything is simple and cheap and common, but that does not ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 42, No. 1, January 1888 • Various
... upon the notice of their parents whenever they can. The boy who begins to learn house painting soon expresses the wish to paint his own home; if carpentry, he wishes to build a shed; if joinery, he wishes to make a table; and how often one notices a home where tidiness and order are due to the educated child, and where taste in furnishing is accounted for by the daughter's cultivated aesthetic taste. Children then, so trained as the Sloyd system provides, may contribute enormously to the happiness and brightness ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... seventy years ago, long hair could hardly be kept in respectable trim by busy mothers working in the fields, and with much less power of getting brushes and combs than at present; so that the crops were almost the only means of securing cleanliness and tidiness, and were worn also by all the little daughters of such gentry as did not care for fashion, nor for making them sleep on a ring of lumps as big as walnuts. So that Mrs Carbonel and her sisters really wished for what was wholesome ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ought to be done. Neglect is transitive, negligence is intransitive; we speak of neglect of his books, friends, or duties, in which cases we could not use negligence; negligence in dress implies want of care as to its arrangement, tidiness, etc.; neglect of one's garments would imply leaving them exposed to defacement or injury, as by dust, moths, etc. Neglect has a passive sense which negligence has not; the child was suffering from neglect, i. e., from being ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... housewife, you must remember her upbringing and her devil-may-care kind of theatrical existence. Andrew knew that hers were not the habits of the Far-away One, who like himself would be a tidy soul, bringing into commonplace tidiness an exquisitely harmonious sense of order; but the Far-away One was a mythical being endowed with qualities which it would be absurd to look for in Elodie. Besides, their year being mainly spent in hotels, she had little opportunity of cultivating housewifely qualities. If she neglected the nice ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... lady," he said, "I was tidying the tree. You don't want last year's hats there, do you, any more than last year's leaves? The wind takes off the leaves, but it couldn't manage the hat; that wind, I suppose, has tidied whole forests to-day. Rum idea this is, that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why, tidiness is a toil for giants. You can't tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers. Don't you know that? Haven't you ever ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... generally preserve a little outward tidiness,' said Elizabeth; 'besides, a visit at Merton Hall is very different from every day in shabby old Abbeychurch. No, you must know that when I was twelve years old, I was supposed to be capable of taking care of my own wardrobe; ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the garden. The casement was two-leaved, and one leaf only was part open. The air consequently was close and hot. And if the room was neat, that applies only to its natural and normal condition; for if neatness includes tidiness, it could not be said at present to deserve that praise. There was an indescribable litter everywhere, such as is certain to accumulate in a sick-room if the watchers are not imbued with the spirit of order. Here were one or two spare pillows, on so many chairs; over the back of another chair ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... come without telling us beforehand!" I cry, earnestly. "I mean really: if you hold a vague threat of paying us a visit over our heads, you will keep us in a state of unnatural tidiness for days." ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... nest, indeed. The fire burned merrily,—a little coal, a good deal of bogwood and turf, which is the cleanest fire in the world; there was cleanliness, neatness, tidiness, taste everywhere; the etchings and engravings gave tone to the walls; the piano lay open, as if saying, "Come, touch me"; the books, shining in gold and red and blue and purple, winked in the firelight; and, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... say that it was the absolute necessity of tidiness in the cramped space of the "Beagle" that helped 'to give him his methodical habits of working.' On the "Beagle", too, he would say, that he learned what he considered the golden rule for saving time; i.e., ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... already started across the street, and Macauley was obliged to follow. By the time darkness fell the front yard had been cropped into at least a semblance of tidiness, and Charlotte was offering her thanks to three warm gentlemen, and regretting that she had not been keeping house long enough to have ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... gardens, and families of half-caste children, whose strength and beauty were noted by all who saw them. The whaler's helpmate had to keep herself and children clean, and the home tidy. Cleanliness and neatness were insisted on by her master, partly through the seaman's instinct for tidiness and partly out of a pride and desire to show a contrast to the reeking hovels of the Maori. As a rule she did her best to keep her man sober. Her cottage, thatched with reeds, was perhaps whitewashed with lime made by burning the sea-shells. With its ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... sweep a sprinkle of ashes out of the fender—she was like an old maid in her faddy tidiness—and when she turned, her face was working as if to repress tears. Deb caught her up, a moan bursting ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... rendered all the more offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most, spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey—and this, a journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to Jean and his wife. This was very pleasant for Patsey, as it united the privacy of a separate abode with the cheerfulness of the family home. She had her own servant, whose excellent cooking and, above all, whose scrupulous cleanliness and tidiness, astonished her after the rough meals ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... There was something chilling about the appearance of the interior of the house. Day after day I used to see everything, even the furniture in constant use, always standing in the same place, and this uniform tidiness pervaded the smallest details. Yet there was something very attractive about their household ways. I had been used to the pleasures of variety, to the luxury and stir of life in Paris; it was only when I had overcome my first repugnance ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Gunning's folly, and his bulging portmanteau, packed as brutally as only a man in a passion can pack; when he reached the hall, it also with equal inappropriateness irradiated the short figure and seedy tidiness of the dealer who had been his confederate in the purchase of ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... had no look of desertion. His wife's tidiness was one of the traits which had so much pleased him; his own upbringing had given him a tender sympathy for the delight in orderliness; and when he had seen her instinctive desire to put each thing in its appointed place it had given ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... his injured feet stretched out in front of him. A monkey in the giant tree above us shook down a little shower of twigs and dirt. A trumpet blared. There began much business of closing tents and reducing the camp to superhuman tidiness. ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... He drank the poisonous liquors of those pot-houses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much, of him one summer, he discovered strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to drink after midnight. At Brussels, ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... and the dragoons, hussars and lancers, the beautiful horses, the capital riders, the wonderful wagons and guns, seemed even more theatrical than military. This came, in a great measure, from the freshness and tidiness of their accessories—the brightness and tightness of uniforms, the polish of boots and buckles, the newness of leather and paint. None of these things were the worse for wear: they had the bloom of peace still upon them. As I looked at the show, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... of the time: the sack of Versailles and the "Vicar of Wakefield"; the pastorals of Watteau and the dynamite speeches of Danton. But we shall understand them all better if we once catch sight of the idea of tidying up which ran through the whole period, the quietest people being prouder of their tidiness, civilisation, and sound taste than of any of their virtues; and the wildest people having (and this is the most important point) no love of wildness for its own sake, like Nietzsche or the anarchic poets, but only a readiness to employ it to get rid of ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... better?" she exulted. "We've won the record for tidiness three weeks running, so we're entitled to a special indulgence. I vote we ask to bring tea up here, and have a Valentine party. Don't you think it would be rather scrumptious? I've all sorts ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... business which to us means that we stand before the Past; this gradual perishing of things in neglect and defilement, may very well have formed a necessary part of our ancestors' present. Our own standard and habit of tidiness, decorum, and uniformity may be quite recent developments; barbarism, in the sense of decay and pollution, may have existed together with prosperity. It is quite possible that dead donkeys were left in the streets of Haroun-al-Raschid's ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... other people came in, Min would always, on the evening of my visit, make a rule of turning out her workbox, and arranging its contents over again—"in order," as she told me, although I had thought it the picture of neatness and tidiness ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... in charge of a master and a female assistant, presumably his wife. Much attention was given to training children in good personal habits, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, etc., and to moral training. Great stress was laid on information.... The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, lessons on common objects, geography, singing and religion, and an effort was made to make the work interesting and 'concrete.' To this end ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... hermit crabs scuttled and rustled away before him as he advanced up the beach, but under the palms no pigs rooted and grunted. The cocoanuts lay where they had fallen, and at the copra-sheds there were no signs of curing. Industry and tidiness had vanished. Grass house after grass house he found deserted. Once he came upon an old man, blind, toothless, prodigiously wrinkled, who sat in the shade and babbled with fear when he spoke to him. It was as if the place had been struck with the plague, was Grief's thought, as he finally ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... to which he led me was small, but disfigured with no offensive tidiness. Not a spot of wall was to be seen for books, and yet there were not many books after all. We sat for some minutes enjoying the fragrance of the western incense, without other communion than that of the clouds we were blowing, and what I gathered ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... which stood at some little distance from the road. Great was Bibi's anxiety to do honour to their noble guest, and not less great her delight at the commendations he bestowed, not only on the order and tidiness of her little menage, but also on her three chubby little children, who, notwithstanding divers and sundry private injunctions to the contrary, would occasionally come to the front and gaze open-mouthed and awestruck at so uncommon a visitor. At length ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden, tables and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then you know how scrupulous they were ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... knew. I leave to you table-manners, tidiness (that's a tough one), hand-washing (that's a tougher), reading aloud from Kipling and tucking him up ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... to get it. I felt, when I read your letters, how glad I should be to have you here in our Florida cottage, in the wholly new, wild, woodland life. Though resembling Italy in climate, it is wholly different in the appearance of nature,—the plants, the birds, the animals, all different. The green tidiness and culture of England here gives way to a wild and rugged savageness of beauty. Every tree bursts forth with flowers; wild vines and creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and interweave in interminable labyrinths. Yet here, in the great sandy plains back of our ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... for the first time, observed the wig, the unusual look of tidiness, and, above all, the flower in his hand; she also saw the crucified smile that followed his last remark. "The ridiculous old fool!" thought she,—"what can he mean?" But to him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... for tidiness often forced me, against my nature, to a counteracting negligence. I intentionally disarranged the bookshelves in the library; but he would follow me five minutes afterwards and put everything in ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... Order. It was they who were rallying valiantly at the Bourse round the new tricolour banner and a few gentlemen who wore tricolour brassards or pretty bunches of tricolour riband, and whose general tidiness and freshness contrasted strikingly with the grimy, business-like look of the real soldiers close by. These were streaming into the Place des Victoires, close by, receiving cheers and congratulations from the people about in the square ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... an illiterate hand on a rough scroll of paper: "Gave three of em what for at Elandslaagte. S. Hughs." Some photographs adorned the walls, and two drooping ferns stood on the window-ledge. The room withal had a sort of desperate tidiness; in a large cupboard, slightly open, could be seen stowed all that must not see the light of day. The window of the baby's kingdom was tightly closed; the scent was the scent of walls and washing and red ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the camera takes no note of newness, but much of the cut and fit. And a man should certainly not go and alter his outline into a feminine softness, by pouring oil on his troubled mane and plastering it down with a brush and comb. It is not tidiness, ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly into the spirit of the game—the littleness and childishness of the attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which glinted at him like spectacles. But there ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... filthy mess!" He looked down on the wet tablecloth and the two halves of the vase lying in the bedabbled leaves with an expression of distaste so far out of proportion to its occasion that Ellen remembered uneasily how several times that day she had noticed in him traces of a desperate, nervous tidiness like Marion's. "If you ring for one of the maids she'll soon clear it up," she said soothingly, and moved towards the bell. But he took his bleeding finger away from his lips and waved it at her, crying: "No! no! I don't want either of the servants round till I've found that fool and ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... still rather casual. Tidiness of Natalie's meticulous order would always be beyond her, but after certain frantic searches for what was needed, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... goes, Kind words and chickens, jams and coals; Poultices for corporeal woes, And sympathy for downcast souls: Her currant jelly, her quinine, The lips of fever move to bless; She makes the humble sick-room shine With unaccustomed tidiness. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... her whims and she chooses to spend it in satisfying her aesthetic preferences. Further, the walls have been carefully cared for, showing an interested and capable housekeeperly instinct and traits of extreme orderliness and tidiness. Cleverness, even, for here, you see, is a place, where a bit of the plaster has been defaced by a knock or scratch, and it has been delicately painted over with a little pale green paint which matches exactly. It is not the work of a professional decorator, ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... inspection. Every branch and department of military life has a variety of inspections to undergo at periodical times. The inspections keep the boys in khaki on the alert; cleanliness becoming second nature. Nowhere can a vast body of men live bachelor-like as soldiers do and maintain the degree of tidiness and general sanitary healthfulness, as the thorough arm of camp inspection and discipline maintains in ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... degrees removed from that which Avonlea people used at funerals. "Emily's gone over to Carmody with Rachel Lynde . . . she's struck up a lifelong friendship already with Rachel Lynde. Beats all how contrary women are. Well, Anne, my easy times are over . . . all over. It's neatness and tidiness for me for the rest of my natural life, ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... strangely in love that her gentle body be bruised by the hardness of mine armour; and if this might not be, she to be not wishful that she wear her torn clothing upon her neat suit and so to seem careless and to lack to be dainty in mine eyes; for, indeed, she did be alway to wash herself and to make tidiness; and she to have a way now that she did set the armour-suit upon her, that had it to seem different, and she to have set a little sprig from the trees upon her breast, and in her girdle, and so to seem the more of a maid; and ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... imagined that the burn was of an extremely serious nature, and she hastened to approach him with a view to examine it. Pao-yue, however, screened his face, and, waving his hand, bade her leave the room; for knowing her usual knack for tidiness he did not feel inclined to let her get a glimpse of his face. Tai-yue then gave up the attempt, and confined herself to asking him: ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... prisoner, and one of Captain Evernden's Dragoons to heaven." It was the scene of a narrow escape for Charles II in his flight to Brighton. The poor remnants of the Castle are now an excuse for picnickers who are not always reverent, in point of tidiness, towards what was once a palace of the ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Tidiness of personal appearance is never at a higher premium than at the dining table. Soiled hands, negligee dress, shirt sleeves, and ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... now the benefit of Polly's training. Her gentle, quiet way, her soft voice, her neatness and tidiness, made her an excellent nurse, and she devoted herself to cheer and brighten the sickroom of the woman who had made so kind an adopted mother to her. Her influence kept even the rough boys quiet; and all Varley, which had at first ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... made me feel that I had taken leave of my division for good and all this time. Blenkiron had a private room, where we were to dine; and a more wonderful litter of books and cigar boxes I have never seen, for he hadn't a notion of tidiness. I could hear him grunting at his toilet in the adjacent bedroom, and I noticed that the table was laid for three. I went downstairs to get a paper, and on the way ran ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Voices grew loud and eager in enumerating the stars common to both; and so came bedtime, and the globe stood on the table in danger of being forgotten. Ethel diligently lifted it up; and while Norman exclaimed at her tidiness, Margaret told how a new leaf was to be turned, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... the name of being the neatest and tidiest city in Spain, and neatness and tidiness are such dear homely virtues, I thought I could not do better than hie me thither to see if the tale were true. With a wrench I tore myself from the soft capital of Andalusia, delightful but demoralizing. I was growing lazier every day I spent there; I felt energy oozing ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea |
