"Trashy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those who have never been near the water, or no nearer than a bath tub. Anyone wishing to be convinced need only make an excursion into the poor tenement district and observe the garbage barrels overflowing with spoiled food—or the trashy goods exposed for sale in the shops and the markets. Those who have had money and have lost it are probably, as a rule, the wisest in thrift. Those who have never had money are almost invariably prodigal—because they are ignorant. When Dorothea Hallowell was a baby the family ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... looked it over, and almost the first thing I saw was that advertisement signed 'Skipper.' It didn't read like the other trashy things in there, and it sounded honest. And all of a sudden it come over me that I'd answer it. I was lonesome and tired and sort of didn't care, and I answered it right off without waitin' another minute. That's all there is to tell. When I come here to be housekeeper ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... interesting to a foreigner—most of the rings and brooches are trashy articles of jade-stone, a greenish stone which resembles agate or cornelian in opaqueness. The armlets are of silver, and of the same substance are the large thin circles worn by the women of Foh-Kien in the ear and resting on the shoulder. Pins for the fantastic pyramid they erect with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... convincing, and logical; nicely arranged, and neatly printed upon good paper. A mistake is often made in sending out trashy-looking circulars, poorly printed upon cheap paper; they repel rather than attract, and do not have the ...
— Practical Pointers for Patentees • Franklin Cresee
... ourselves. We doubt whether crime has diminished in consequence of the legislative clemency; and, in our own humble department, we are now convinced that the mild method is not the best way of bringing singers to repentance. The experiment has been fairly tried, and the numerous trashy publications put forth by the young writers of the day, particularly in the poetical line, convince us that our mercy has been misplaced; and that a little well-timed severity, and a few examples held up in terrorem, might have greatly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... high-flown praise or petty cavils of little men. Does he make a slip in decorum, which Milton declares to be the principal thing? His proud crest and armorial bearings support him: no bend-sinister slurs his poetical escutcheon! Is he dull, or does he put of some trashy production on the public? It is not charged to his account, as a deficiency which he must make good at the peril of his admirers. His Lordship is not answerable for the negligence or extravagances of his Muse. He 'bears a charmed reputation, which must not yield' like ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... and may even temporarily comfort, the body after labor of brain; they do not help it—not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff—or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the few at all eminent, who wrote ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... maintained by this intellectual people. But neither the light reading of the one, nor the heavy artillery of the other, suited my purpose. I always fell asleep at the fourth or fifth page of history or disquisition; and it took me a month's hard reading to wade through a half-bound trashy novel, during which I was pestered with applications to return the volumes, by every half-bred milliner's miss about the place. In short, during the time when all the town besides had something to do, I had nothing for it, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... my husband returned from an evening meeting, which I had not attended, and told me of a woman who had come to him in great distress. She had been an earnest Christian worker, but love for light, trashy fiction had so grown upon her as to work havoc in her Christian life. She had come to Keswick three years in succession, hoping to get victory, but ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... human life by studying somewhat the laws of life and health? There are books—I may say a whole literature of books—written by scientific doctors on these matters, which are, to my mind, far more important to the schoolroom than half the trashy accomplishments, so called, which are expected to be known ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... essentially moral; I am grave, and hate everything trashy, And that is the reason I quarrel ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... and permanently, and he read everything. In the midst of severe labours in India, he read enough classical authors to stock the mind of an ordinary professor. At the same time he framed a criminal code and devoured masses of trashy novels. From the works of the ancient Fathers of the Church to English political pamphlets and to modern street ballads, no printed matter came amiss to his omnivorous appetite. All that he had read could be reproduced at a moment's ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... coalition itself, Russia only furnished 100,000 men, while Austria furnished 300,000. It is my intention that he should only speak of the Russians to humiliate them, to enfeeble their forces, to prove how their trashy reputation in military matters, and the praises of their armies, are without foundation." And the same day to Talleyrand: "It is my intention that the political articles in the Moniteur should be guided by the foreign relations. And after seeing how they are done for a month, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... society in the world. But these accomplished legislators, though quite as ignorant as the mob of Montreuil, proved much less docile, and cried out that they did not want to go to school to the English. Their debates consisted of endless successions of trashy pamphlets, all beginning with something about the original compact of society, man in the hunting state, and other such foolery. They sometimes diversified and enlivened these long readings by a little rioting. They bawled; they hooted; they shook their fists. They kept ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with its beginning; and I say that the beginning of any literary thing is hard, and that this hardness is difficult to explain. And I say more than this—I say that an interminable discussion of the difficulty of beginning a book is the worst omen for going on with it, and a trashy subterfuge at the best. In the name of all decent, common, and homely things, why not begin and have done ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... every article printed in a newspaper should bear not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaures had known that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his country has ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... hundred and forty-five pounds of his employers' money a Newcastle office-boy was stated to have been reading trashy novels. It was thought to be only fair to the financial papers that the public should know where he got ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... affection of one not too refined to censure her own deficiencies of education, what more could he ask for his sister, as he pictured her to himself, with her hair hanging over her ears, and her mind running into seed over some trashy novel. But before he could reply, Violante's father came to add his own philosophical consolations to the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fool thing. Yeh jus' went crazy readin' trashy papers, an' yeh run away widdout tellin' a soul, 'cause yeh knew they wouldn't let yeh ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... obliged, with her talent, to climb all those stairs, to hang about in the waiting-room, she, Lily Clifton! And it reeked of vice, stunk with the trashy scent of the "not-up-to-muches:" merely to look at them suggested faces seen in Piccadilly at night ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... public, as I should be to offer brass money in a payment; for though it should be taken, (as it is too often on the stage) yet it would be found in the second telling; and a judicious reader will discover, in his closet, that trashy stuff, whose glittering deceived him in the action. I have often heard the stationer sighing in his shop, and wishing for those hands to take off his melancholy bargain, which clapped its performance on the stage. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... certainly verified in the publication of GOLDEN DAYS, by James Elverson, Philadelphia. This admirable weekly for the youth of this great land is now well established, and has an increasingly large and well-deserved patronage. Its readers are not treated with trashy matter, but with pictures and puzzles and stories of thrilling adventure and useful knowledge. GOLDEN DAYS is supplanting a poisonous literature, and performing a wholesome mission in this day, when too much good seed cannot be sown by the friends ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... scolds, ten will laugh. But, mind you, I don't either scold or laugh. I don't feel sure that you could very well have helped doing what you will soon do. You know you were never easy without some medicine to take when you felt ill in body. I'm afraid I've given you trashy stuff sometimes, just to keep you quiet. Now, let me tell you, there is just the same difference in spiritual patients that there is in bodily ones. One set believes in wholesome ways of living, and another must have a great list of specifics for all the soul's complaints. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... commodity will testify, is short of, and insufficient for the demand. From the agricultural labourers you cannot receive any material number of recruits. The land, above all things, must be tilled; and—notwithstanding the trashy assertions of popular slip-slop authors and Cockney sentimentalists, who have favored us with pictures of the Will Ferns of the kingdom, as unlike the reality as may be—the condition of those who cultivate the soil of Britain is superior to that of the peasantry in every other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... lover. I agreed to his proposition, and before we had reached Lgov I had succeeded in learning his whole history. He was a freed house-serf; in his tender youth had been taught music, then served as valet, could read and write, had read—so much I could discover—some few trashy books, and existed now, as many do exist in Russia, without a farthing of ready money; without any regular occupation; fed by manna from heaven, or something hardly less precarious. He expressed himself with extraordinary ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... can't write for the world at large anecdotes of missionary life, and swell the number of the "Gems" and other trashy books. If people who care to know, would think of what their own intuition tells them of human nature, and history tells them of heathenism, they can make out some notion ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for talk, caught Miss Zielinski with her eye. "Hullo, Ziely, what are you deep in?" She put her arm round the other's neck, and unceremoniously laid hold of her book. "You naughty girl, you're at Ouida again! Always got your nose stuck in some trashy novel." ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... passengers were all below. Then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again—a tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy sentimental lilt. It was—in this setting of sea and sky—painful; O'Malley caught himself thinking of a ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... we, and our forefathers, are and have been poisoned by this cursed drench, without taste or flavour — The only genuine and wholesome beveridge in England, is London porter, and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cyder and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species — But what have I to do with the human species? except a very few friends, I care not if the ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... taken by a pirate; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate captain; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my fellow-passengers, in not being ordered to "walk the plank." The story, though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... man who is trying to do something that he isn't fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew into ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... attraction lies (as always in these great musical speculations) in the solo singers. These ever place themselves between you and good music; they choose to sing the music that best shows their powers, no matter how familiar, hackneyed, sentimental, commonplace, and trashy. If you call for "William Tell," for the "Nozzi di Figaro," to say nothing of "Fidelio," or "Oberon," or "Freischtz," they have not the organization for it, have not the chorus, the secondary singers, the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... him but was free to the good he might derive. The sparkling eyes, quick smile, and manly voice, the active limbs and generous heart, seemed at the service of every soul that breathed. Trashy thought and base utterance could not cheat his soul of her integrity; the vileness of Salt Lane had nothing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... radically true. She had taken the life that was given. She had not, in her arrogant conceit, insisted on creating life to fit herself. Her mother was right, profoundly right, and she herself had been false, trashy, conceited. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... function as they could. Under Mr Mullholland's rule the concert had become a very flourishing institution. He aimed at a high standard, and reached it. There was more than a touch of the austere about the music. A glance at the programme was enough to show the lover of airs of the trashy, clashy order that this was no place for him. Most of the items were serious. When it was thought necessary to introduce a lighter touch, some staidly rollicking number was inserted, some song that was saved—in spite of a catchy tune—by a halo of antiquity. ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... don't mean all of that. You'd not have spoke just that way about crowding and staring if you thought well of them that stare. Staring ain't courage; it's trashy curiosity. Now you ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... parent fails, and falls from Fifth avenue to Brooklyn, preparatory to embarking for the land of those who have failed and fallen—wherever that is. Son wears long hair, and believes he looks like the painter who was killed by a baker's daughter, writes trashy verses about a man who was wronged, and went off and howled himself to a long repose, sick of this vale of tears, et cetera. Finally, in the midst of his despair, long hair, bad poetry and painting, an enterprising friend, who sees he has an eye for color, its harmonies and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... morning, while the boat was being got ready, hawkers of light literature flocked on board. Baskets full of trashy novels were continually offered to us. Why should not the same facilities be afforded for obtaining better publications? Truly, "the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." This reproach is not peculiar ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... is divided on fundamentals. I'm no mealy mouth to curse plutocracy in order to please the mob. Plutocracy fills the workman's dinner pail and keeps the mills going and opens the mines and builds the railroads. Mobocracy, your grubby corn cob and trashy roses, that, what does it do? Mouthe and mouthe and try to pull down what is above it! It will have to be fought out! No? It will not be another French Revolution! Our bullets are ballots, nowadays; and the American people get exactly the form of Government which they want. If they want ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... me, because she believed it had something to do with the Papists, but to which, for that very reason, I clung with a tenacity and read with an earnestness which brought at last its own beautiful fruits. Then, there was the "Scottish Chiefs," a treasure-house of delight to me,—two or three trashy novels, given me by Tom Salyers, of which my mother knew nothing,—and (the only poetry I had ever seen) a song-book, which had, scattered among its vulgarisms and puerilities, some gems of Burns and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... happened that Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk's purse became an exceedingly "Iago"-like, "something, nothing, trashy" sort of affair—in other words, that its owner, Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk, was regularly stumped; and as the Amateur Dramatic Theatrical Committee "always go upon the no pay no play system," Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... poem may be scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable Torquato Tasso; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely commonplace. The combination ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... her anything, but let her get to her own room and have a good rest as soon as possible. Haven't you got a trashy novel or two in the house? That's the literature to send her ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to our shame, that not only these swarms of trashy volumes, which penetrate even into the back-slums, and may be seen unfolded in the paper-patched windows of eighteen-penny milliners in the lowest quarters of our metropolis, find a never-failing succession of ravenous ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... of Charlie before his eyes, and with the sound of his voice again in his ears, all his old resolutions and impulses returned that morning. He worked hard, and flung the trashy novel, over which he had been wasting his time the day before, into the fire; he went off to lectures with something like his old eagerness, and discharged his duties in the wards with interest and thoroughness; he refused to allow his mind ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... as sho as you snore, and they better leave Daisy's name outer dis too. I done told her and told her to come straight home from her work. Naw, she had to stop by dat store and skin her gums back wid dem trashy niggers. She better not leave them white [Corrected missing space.] folks today to come praipsin over here scornin her name all up wid dis nigger mess—do, I'll kill her. No daughter of mine ain't going to do as she please ...
— De Turkey and De Law - A Comedy in Three Acts • Zora Neale Hurston |
