"Workaday" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had seen other women hurrying to change their workaday dress for visitors, and he imagined Helen hastily putting on her shoes and smoothing her hair. He was distinctly less in awe of her by reason of this girlish action—it made her seem more of his own rough-and-ready world, and he dismounted at her door almost at his ease, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... shrubs, the sun and stars, the lightning and rain,—for these to him are animate creatures. Even more than that, they are deified, therefore are revered and propitiated, since upon them man must depend for his well-being. To the workaday man of our own race the life of the Indian is just as incomprehensible as are the complexities of civilization to the mind of ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... great love of music and little time for the joy of it; but occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories. There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... In this workaday world we may still easily possess ourselves, as Gibbon says the subjects of the Byzantine Throne, even in their lowest servitude and depression, were still possessed, 'of a golden key that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of the skeletons, the restorations of the animals and their supposed environment, it yet remains to him somewhat of a fairy-tale, a fanciful imaginative world peopled with ogres and dragons and belonging to the unreal "once upon a time" which has no connection with the ever present workaday world in which we live. Birds and squirrels, rabbits and foxes belong to this real world because he has seen them in his walks through the woods; even elephants and rhinoceroses, though his acquaintance be limited to menagerie specimens, ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... were methodical enough; a shower, a thorough rub-down, and then into his workaday clothes. He packed his trunk and hand-luggage, overlooked nothing that was his, and went down into the living-room where he knew he would find Killigrew with the morning papers. He felt oddly light-headed; but he had no time to ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... her," mused Koosje, rather blankly. If she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of osteology and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this workaday world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his fossilised wisdom to the ignorance of a ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... before any public. As an artist, he should not afford this public merely a cheap amusement, but should acquaint it with the most perfect embodiments of that art whose sole task properly is to ennoble the taste of mankind, and to bestow happiness; to raise it above the miseries of this workaday world, withdraw it from them, to idealize even the hateful things in human nature which it may have to ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann
... fearful sea of the subtle Ulysses' wanderings, agitated by the wrath of Olympian gods, harbouring on its isles the fury of strange monsters and the wiles of strange women; the highway of heroes and sages, of warriors, pirates, and saints; the workaday sea of Carthaginian merchants and the pleasure lake of the Roman Caesars, claims the veneration of every seaman as the historical home of that spirit of open defiance against the great waters of the earth ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... early in the morning, We proceed to light the fire, Then our Majesty adorning In its workaday attire, We embark without delay On the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... ransacked, the chair broken, the lock of the door forced and broken, one door panel slightly scorched and perforated by shot, and the window wide open. None of Mr. Polly's clothes were to be seen, but some garments which had apparently once formed part of a stoker's workaday outfit, two brownish yellow halves of a shirt, and an unsound pair of boots were scattered on the floor. A faint smell of gunpowder still hung in the air, and two or three books Mr. Polly had recently acquired had been shied with some ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... was like wine to the Madigans. The smell of escaping gas in the dark was, in itself, enough to transport them by association of ideas out of the workaday world; and emotion due to a dramatic situation was the one evidence ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Jocelyn's sudden death was as though a cloud- burst had broken over the village, dealing utter and hopeless destruction. To the little community of simple workaday folk living round Briar Farm it was a greater catastrophe than the death of any king. Nothing else was talked of. Nothing was done. Men stood idly about, looking at each other in a kind of stupefied consternation,—women ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... and to suppose all the vices of humanity concentrated in private ownership, and all the virtues of humanity concentrated in the community, but indeed that clear and striking contrast will not stand the rough-and-tumble of the workaday world. A little examination of the matter will make it clear that the contrast lies between private owners and public officials—you must have officials, because you can't settle a railway time-table or make a bridge by public acclamation—and even there you will find it is not ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... interesting evening. The whole of the village, without distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced (and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the leader of local Society to ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... was alive and during the month following his death, could see the changes which the month had wrought. She saw the little wrinkles about the eyes and the lines of care about the mouth, the tired look of the whole plucky, workaday New England figure. She ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... eighteen, utterly alone in the world, I was a stranger in a strange city which I had not yet so much as seen by daylight. I was a waif and a stray in the mighty city of New York. Here I had come to live and to toil—out of the placid monotony of a country town into the storm and stress of the wide, wide, workaday world. Very wide awake now, I jumped out of bed upon the cold oil-cloth and touched a match to the pile of paper and kindling-wood in the small stove. There was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip in ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him in endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder the bony ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... would give such pleasure to his father and mother, such happiness to Mary. If he could make a little return for all her goodness, was he not bound to do so? He smiled with bitter scorn at his dead, lofty ideals. The workaday world was not fit for them; it was much safer and easier to conform oneself to its terrestrial standard. And the amusing part of it was that these new opinions which seemed to him a falling away, to others meant precisely the reverse. They thought it purer and more ethereal ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... this "Garden of the East," with its varied landscape of alternating mountains and plains, its wealth of trees in myriad forms, its shrubs which in their luxuriance seem tree-like, and its tangle of vines and blossoming flowers. But it appeared to me as if this holiday side of nature and the workaday aspect of the life in Java did not harmonize, and I wondered if this condition was caused by Dutch thrift being grafted on to the native Javanese temperament, which in its incipiency was simple and disinclined to much exertion. Certain it is that the women of Java, while apparently contented, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... have been the bathing-machines, or the gasometer beyond the railway station, or the flag above the Royal Hotel. The curtains of the night fell suddenly away from him. The workaday world came knocking at ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) so theology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages, might provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that lies in the dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations and mysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore be suffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with any clear fact or natural duty. They might continue ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana |
