"Fastidiousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not thought about this so much as I have, or you would not say so. Any fastidiousness I shall have to get rid of, and I shall be better without; but any true refinement I am sure I shall find of use; for don't you think that every power we have may be made to help us in any right work, whatever that is? Would you not rather be nursed by ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... little difficult to define, but I certainly don't mean pernicketty. Of course, there is a fastidiousness which makes one shrink from unpleasant things, but Harry's is the other kind. It impels him to do them every now ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... enough of the seal-hunt it took him all the next day to cleanse the clothes he had worn from the smell of the fat, and he felt himself to be effeminate in the fastidiousness that ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... impressed with the stamp of true genius, their quality, not their extent, is what we value: a dull man may spend his lifetime writing little; better so than writing much; but a man of powerful mind is liable to no such danger. Of all our authors, Gray is perhaps the only one that from fastidiousness of taste has written less than he should have done: there are thousands that have erred the other way. What would a Spanish reader give, had Lope de Vega composed a hundred times as little, and that little a ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... that Peter bit makes one wish now that one could have many a meal that one has given to the dog at home. When one is hungry, fastidiousness goes to the winds and one is only too glad to eat up any scraps regardless of their antecedents. One is almost ashamed to write of all the titbits one has picked up here, but it is enough to say that when ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... received standard of right for other reasons than being an infidel or an opposer of religion. A ready return of cordial feeling was the result; and as Mr. James found himself treated with respect and confidence, he began to feel, notwithstanding his fastidiousness, that there were strong points of congeniality between all real and warm-hearted Christians, however different might be their intellectual culture, and in all simplicity united himself with the little church of Camden. A year from ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... were for reforming the reformation. In their attempt at more than human purity, they obtained the nickname of Puritans; and from their fastidiousness about very small matters, Precisians; these Drayton characterises as persons that for a painted glass window would pull down the whole church. At that early period these nicknames were soon used in an odious sense; for Warner, a poet in the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... stood on the edge of the road and pointed with mingled mischief and fastidiousness to the depths of impalpable red dust that lay between him and the horseman. Steptoe saw that he was very smartly attired in holiday guise, with white duck trousers and patent leather shoes, and, after the Spanish fashion, wore ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... company with other aspirants to histrionic honours and wages, gossiping, listening to stage talk, professional patter, and theatrical scandal until her pretty ears were buzzing with everything that ought not to concern her and her moral fastidiousness gradually became less delicate. Repetition is the great leveller, the great persuader. The greatest power on earth, for good or evil, is ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... not even when her fame spread among near-dwelling Indian tribes who gave her a name signifying Water on which the Sun is Shining. Admiration was her portion, then, with all the suitors the vicinity held. But from fastidiousness or ambition she refused every proposal made to her father for her. She walked aloof and alone, until another sort of wooer came to the gate of the ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life. A dainty eater, he found that his mates, finishing first, robbed him of his unfinished ration. There was no defending it. While he was fighting off two or three, it was disappearing down the throats of the others. To remedy this, ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... was a good citizen, of an honest, gentle nature, as are commonly fat and burly men: for so was he: But to speake truly of thim? full of ambitious vanity and remisse niceness. [Footnote: Ineffectual fastidiousness.] And I know not well how to excuse him, in that he deemed his Poesie worthy to be published. It is no great imperfection to make bad verses, but it is an imperfection in him that he never perceived how unworthy they were of the glorie of his name. Concerning his eloquence, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... after seeing one another—I will not tell you how few times, lest you should laugh. Do you remember how you used to talk to me about choosing a wife? Well, I think that my choice would justify even your fastidiousness...I think you will understand how happy her love ought to and does make me. I fear that in this respect indeed the advantage is on my side, for my present wandering life and uncertain position must necessarily give her many ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... however moderately he may have returned Madame de Sagan's preference, he was fully aware of its existence. In those days on the frontier he had, rather from fastidiousness than principle perhaps, avoided her and her invitations whenever possible. But that was one thing; it was another to hear the matter coolly alluded to by the girl beside him. Involuntarily he drew a little ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... as to clothes has already been described. One would be startled to see him with a bright tie, a loud checked suit, or a fancy waistcoat, and yet there is a curious sense of fastidiousness about the plain things he delights in. Perhaps he is not wholly responsible personally for this state of affairs. In conversation Edison is direct, courteous, ready to discuss a topic with anybody worth talking to, and, in spite of his sore deafness, an excellent listener. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Edward Everett did more than this: he laid on that altar not only his time, talents, and culture, but his pride of opinion, his long-cherished views of policy, his personal and political predilections and prejudices, his constitutional fastidiousness of conservatism, and the carefully elaborated symmetry of his public reputation. With a rare and noble magnanimity, he met, without hesitation, the demand of the great occasion. Breaking away from all the besetments of custom and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... gin bottle with its candle on the floor, and appropriated the chair. He might, from his tone, have been thanking her for some priceless boon. He wore a boutonniere. His clothes fitted him like gloves. He exuded a certain studied, almost languid fastidiousness—that was wholly out of keeping with the quick, daring, agile wit that he had exhibited the night before. She found her hand toying unconsciously with the weapon in her pocket. She was aware that she was fencing with unbuttoned foils. How much ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... experience with the tender passion was not extensive. Circumstance, shyness and fastidiousness had caused him to ignore most of the rather frequent opportunities to philander that his good looks and lively imagination created, and upon the rare occasions when he had paused, it was because of curiosity—a curiosity ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... admire fastidiousness," I answered; "I do not like to have defects pointed out to me, which my own ignorance does not discover. There is more pleasure in imagining beauties ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... loathsome sometimes to go to the office; things reached such a point that I often came home ill. But all at once, A PROPOS of nothing, there would come a phase of scepticism and indifference (everything happened in phases to me), and I would laugh myself at my intolerance and fastidiousness, I would reproach myself with being ROMANTIC. At one time I was unwilling to speak to anyone, while at other times I would not only talk, but go to the length of contemplating making friends with them. All my fastidiousness would suddenly, for no rhyme or ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... redeeming the hopeless experiment that she sought to brace the doomed and tottering structure with fictitious props. To be an "unimpeachable" wife was not to her thinking a sufficient meeting of her problem. Her own fastidiousness and cleanness of character would have made that less a duty to her husband than to herself. The more difficult requirement was to close, and keep closed the port of her thoughts against those dreams and yearnings that stole in like blockade-runners, but these buccaneer thoughts ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Virginio proposed writing an account of his illustrious father's life; but unfortunately, he never pursued his design beyond the commencement, and a few memorandums are all that have come down to us. From these, however, we learn the singular fastidiousness of Ariosto in his horticultural amusements, and some other traits of his character, which render him not the less an object of our veneration, by showing us the simplicity as well as power of his mind. 'In gardening,' says Virginio, 'he pursued the same plan as with his verses, never leaving any ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... viewing. Why, then, it was asked, should aug not be referred to the same source as the German Auge, and why should not both be traced back to the same root that yielded the Latin oc-ulus? As long as we trust to our ears, or to what is complacently called common sense, it would seem mere fastidiousness to reject so evident an etymology. But as soon as we know the real chemistry of vowels and consonants, we shrink instinctly from such combinations. If a German word has the same sound as a Greek word, the two words cannot ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... laughed. "I suppose I have no conscience, but at least, I can lay claim to a certain fastidiousness. I am very wicked,"—he smiled, without mirth or bitterness,—"I have sinned notably as the world accounts it; indeed, I think, my repute is as abominable as that of any man living. And I am tired,—alas, I am damnably tired! I have found ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the morning spicing of pine and hay and a stronger balm that seemed to fill his breast with sunshine. He walked toward the nearest shade—a cluster of young buckeyes—and having with a certain civic fastidiousness flicked the dust from a stump with his handkerchief he sat down. It was very quiet and calm. The life and animation of early morning had already vanished from the hill, or seemed to be suspended with the sun in the sky. He could see the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... civilization alone, vain symbol as this is of civilization, precarious external arrangement ill-fitted to replace the intimate union and consent of souls. We would wage war also on bad morals, whether in public or in private life; on luxury, fastidiousness, and over-refinement, on all that tends to increase the painful, immoral, and anti-social multiplications of our wants; on all that excites envy and dislike in the soul of the common people, and confirms the notion that the chief end of life is freedom to enjoy. We would preach by our example ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the aristocracy. But "Pen" will make it a matter of necessity, by and by, for all ranks to agree with him, in vindication of their own wit and common sense; and when once this necessity is felt, and fastidiousness shall find out that it will be considered "absurd" to lag behind in the career of knowledge and the common good, the cause of the ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... reasonably be suspected that Ashley's confusion and the ingenious use which he made of it had been carefully premeditated. His speech, however, made a great impression, and probably raised expectations which were not fulfilled. His health was delicate; his taste was refined even to fastidiousness; he soon left politics to men whose bodies and minds were of coarser texture than his own, gave himself up to mere intellectual luxury, lost himself in the mazes of the old Academic philosophy, and aspired to the glory of reviving the old Academic eloquence. His diction, affected ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... his flow of colloquial eloquence, it did not impede, or at all lessen, the force of that conciser quality, wit. Of satiric wit he possessed a very peculiar species. It was neither the dead-doing broadside of Dr. Johnson's satire, nor the aurora borealis of Gray ... whose arch yet coy and quiet fastidiousness of taste and feeling, as recorded by Mason, glanced bright and cold through his conversation, while it seemed difficult to define its nature; and while its effects were rather perceived than felt, exciting ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... gifts but the correlative of great work? We are not born for ourselves, but for our kind, for our neighbours, for our country: it is but selfishness, indolence, a perverse fastidiousness, an unmanliness, and no virtue or praise, to bury our talent in a ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... there are many of my hearers who are likely to commit overt breaches of the law. But there are a great many of us who are apt to neglect the obligations of citizenship. In a community like ours, laziness, fastidiousness, absorption in our own occupations, and a number of other more or less reputable reasons, tempt many to stand aloof from the plain imperative obligations of every citizen in a free country. Every man who thus neglects to do his part for the common weal does his part ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... sitting-room. That, at all events, must not wear so mean and dingy a look as one usually has to put up with when the rent is only ten shillings a week; and beyond that sum they were determined not to go. The reason of this fastidiousness about a sitting- room presently appeared. Fan was told the secret of the engagement with Merton Chance; also that Merton was now for the first time about to be informed of the step Constance had taken without first consulting him, and asked to visit her ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... that the horse, feeling an unaccustomed jerk on his mouth, became alarmed and restive. She steadied him and herself. A kiss was nothing —yet she had always denied it to Francis Sales. She could not blame him, for she saw how her own fastidiousness had endangered his. He needed material evidence of love. She ought, she supposed, to have sacrificed her scruples for his sake; mentally she had already done it, and the physical refusal was perhaps no more than pride which salved her conscience and might ruin his, but it existed firmly like ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... religious opinions of the day."—"Freethinking is the Secular sphere; drawing its line of demarcation between time and eternity, it works for the welfare of man in this world"—"The Secularist is the larger and more comprehensive designation of the Atheist."[253] With all this coyness and fastidiousness about names, there can be no doubt that the character of the system is essentially atheistic: "We refuse to employ the term God, not having any definite idea of it which we can explain to others,—not knowing any theory of such an existence as will enable ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... four letters I have received from my son is one which contains an amusing story of one of the officers of the Indiana. The officer in question is well known throughout the navy for his fastidiousness regarding apparel, and even on board his ship, is always the best-dressed man. He considers it his imperative duty to appear 'just so,' on ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... slowly in amidst the maze of masts, of sampans and junks, which latter lay with their sterns pointing grotesquely upward, resembling nothing so closely as great brown hawks which had flown down from a Brobdingnagian heaven, to select with greater convenience and fastidiousness what prey might fall ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... rigidly to the truth—this will be bona fide an autobiography—and, as the public like novelty, an autobiography without an iota of fiction in the whole of it, will be the greatest novelty yet offered to its fastidiousness. As many of the events which will be my province to record, are singular and even startling, I may be permitted to sport a little moral philosophy, drawn from the kennel in Lower Thames Street, which may teach my readers to hesitate ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... deals with religion, is a very unsafe guide. The great American mystic, whose beautiful character was as noble a gift to humanity as his writings, is more liable than any of those whom we have described to the reproach of having turned his back on the dark side of life. Partly from a fastidiousness which could not bear even to hear of bodily ailments, partly from the natural optimism of the dweller in a new country, and partly because he made a principle of maintaining an unruffled cheerfulness and serenity, he shut his eyes to pain, death, and sin, even more resolutely than did Goethe. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Ibsen's inherent fastidiousness, a quality which urged him to spend hours shining his shoes, was revealed by his choice of the Cafe Luitpold, for of all the cafes in Munich the Luitpold is undoubtedly the most elegant. Its walls ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and street ballads; ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... performance, but they were no better pleased. Falling completely into the snare, the would-be critics were going on to condemn the likeness, when the relaxing features and hearty laughter of the supposed portrait, speedily and sufficiently avenged the painter of their fastidiousness. ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... tread, light and graceful as she passed through the garden seeking another seat. Her features were not regular but they had a piquant fascination—a true Parisian face. Everything that had been invented for the embellishment of feminine charm was used about her person with the most exquisite fastidiousness. She had always lived for herself. Only a few months before had she abdicated a part of this sweet selfishness, sacrificing reunions, teas, and calls in order to give Desnoyers some of the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... instinctive line of the comme il faut between the too much and the too little." But Chopin's letters written from Nohant in 1839 to Fontana have afforded the reader sufficient opportunities to make himself acquainted with the master's fastidiousness and good taste in matters of furniture and room decoration, above all, his horror ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that seemed kind and natural enough: Grandcourt's fastidiousness enhanced the kindness. And when they reached the door, his way of opening it for her was the perfection of easy homage. Really, she thought, he was likely to be the least disagreeable ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... normal English sensitiveness where ideals were concerned and more than the normal English instinct for a protective literalness. He didn't intend that anybody should lay their hand on his heart and tell him of lofty aims that it would have made him feel awkward to look at by himself; his fastidiousness was far from commonplace, and so were his disdains; they made cheap successes and cheap ambitions impossible to him. He would never make a fortune out of the law; yet already he was distinguished among the younger men at the bar. With nothing of the air of a paladin he brought ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to do with that hoss, that's as certain as my name is Anders," the groom declared; and Erik, knowing that persuasion would be useless, had henceforth to be his own groom. The fact was he could not help sympathizing with that fastidiousness of Lady Clare which made her object to be handled by coarse fingers and roughly curried, combed, and washed like a common plebeian nag. One does not commence life associating with a princess for nothing. ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... communities, as well as individuals. If fastidiousness, selfishness, pride, and sensuality, conspire to cloud, with imaginary woes, the enjoyments of those whom others deem happy and prosperous; faction, discontent, a querulous appetite for freedom, and an ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... employment of whatever powers we possess. There are men, indeed, in whom an over-sensitive conscience is even a paralysing thing, which by suggesting constant petty and ingenious scruples holds them back from useful action. It is a moral infirmity corresponding to that exaggerated intellectual fastidiousness which so often makes an intellectual life almost wholly barren, or to that excessive tendency to look on all sides of a question and to realise the dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments of difficulty paralyses the actions of public men. Sometimes, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... lieutenant should introduce a uniform and well-explained system of discipline on board, especially as regards cleanliness and neatness of appearance, which are best effected by frequent and regular musterings, without too much fastidiousness in the first instance, as this might only teaze the men, and prevent the effectual establishment of those observances which it is the chief purpose of good discipline to render habitual. Great efforts should always be made to give to Sunday its true character ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... freedom from all tendency to plaything-sentiments and trivial romances, his youth had been unlike the youth of other men. Being man and young, he had known temptation, but had disdained it; being also proud and perhaps haughty in his fastidiousness, and being strong, he had thrust base and light things aside. He had held in his brain a fancy from his boyhood, and singularly enough it had but grown stronger and become more fully formed with his own strength and increase of years. 'Twas ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... extinguished diligence; and where character for intelligence, practical capacity, and public effect, were evidently overlooked in the calculation of professional claims, it is only in the natural course of things that their exercise should be abandoned, in fastidiousness or in contempt, in disgust or in despair. The church was never in a more ineffective condition than at the close of the last century; and if the sin was to be laid at the right threshold, it must have been laid at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... There is infinite fastidiousness shown by savages in selecting beads, which, indeed, are their jewellery; so that valuable beads, taken at hap-hazard, are much more likely to prove failures than not. It would always be well to take abundance (40 or 50 lbs. weight goes but a little way) of the following cheap beads, as ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... seemed right. With the strange feeling of the end of things, of finality, that his defeat and despondency had brought to him, her decision fitted well. She would not come to him, but the ideal of her rested beautiful in the delicate pride and fastidiousness of her scruples and her purity. The sort of life he must lead, no less than that he had led, must needs have soiled the image and stained its spotless white. He was conscious that his reception of what she said was half the outcome of the moment ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... and earth to induce him to break with Germany and enter the war, they withheld from him the existence of their secret treaties. Possibly it may not be thought fair to apply the test of ethical fastidiousness to their method of bringing the United States to their side and to their unwillingness to run the risk of alienating the President. But it appears that until the close of hostility the secret was ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... would have taken a philosopher to decide upon the values of the theories held by the two friends. Lou, lacking that certain pride and fastidiousness that keeps stores and desks filled with girls working for the barest living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the point of comfort; so that her dress profited until sometimes she cast a sidelong glance of impatience at the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... her fastidiousness and timidity to be real and not affected, and withal feeling bound to be guided by her wishes, called a carriage and put her ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of hot-house grapes, thankful, but feeling that a few more would have turned satisfaction into nausea. Yet you feel, too, that perhaps his selection of small themes, and the consequent curbing of his powers, have sprung from his fastidiousness in the matter of versification. The sermons, the satires, the speeches, the odes, and the didactic poems of the fastidious are generally short, and do not, therefore, fully mirror the amplitude, or express ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the handsome and prosperous Roland Sefton, ran no risk of recognition, more especially as Roland Sefton had been reckoned among the dead and buried for many a long year. The lineaments of the dead die with them, however ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... so hungry that I would gladly have drunk the milk left since morning. I tasted it, and found it spoiled by the heat, for the day had been warm. In disgust I threw it away, but when all that night had gone and part of the next day, I regretted my fastidiousness. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Mr. Hoape's fastidiousness should tolerate in his home a woman with a tiny baby was remarkable; it was as astounding perhaps as any phenomenon of the war, and a sublime proof that Mr. Hoape realised that the Empire was fighting for its life. It arose from the fact that both G.J. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... anything definite yet, but we ought to find out if we can make a case of it. We can always stop in time if we can't get what we want, but it's worth while to try. It is not merely the money—the less you dwell on that the better. Seriously, I think it would be very wrong that, through any fastidiousness of yours, David's memory should not be cleared if it is possible to ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... as well deprecate a little in talking about fastidiousness, not told by way of evincing superior knowledge of the world, but just to show you, gentle or simple reader, whichever you may be, that, in a sentimental journey through Canada, you must accommodate yourself a little to the manners and ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... girlhood; fenced in between the impenetrable hedge of scrub-oaks on the one side, and the lifting green walls of breakers tipped with chevaux de frise of white foam on the other, she had known a perfect security for her sports and fancies that had captivated her town-bred instincts and native fastidiousness. A few white-winged sea-birds, as proud, reserved, and maiden-like as herself, had been her only companions. And it was now the custodian of her secret,—a secret as innocent and childlike as her previous youthful fancies,—but still a secret known ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... fain feast his eyes and heart, but compelled to an incessant watchfulness, a despairing strain, in watching and guiding his refractory, his spiteful steeds. The control he had never forfeited wholly. Perhaps his sensitiveness, his solitariness, his fastidiousness, had tended to keep his sensuous ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... be the frailty of such men, was fastidiousness. The same sensitive consciousness which is said to have all but lost us the Aeneid, and which certainly all but lost us the Apologia, dominated his otherwise vigorous soul. It is more than forty years since his first verse, written just upon ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... distinct and unmistakable personalities, marked by individual peculiarities of manner, speech, motive, character, living persons in natural attitudes. The reader becomes interested in a shrewd study of human nature, of a section of life, with its various refinement, coarseness, fastidiousness and vulgarity, its humor and pathos. As he goes on he discovers that every character has been perfectly visualized, accurately limned from the first; that a type has been created which remains consistent, which is never deflected from its integrity by any exigencies of plot. This ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the door of communication which led into the further suite of offices, but it was too late to think of escape. Sybil had already entered, bringing into the room a delicious odor of violets, herself almost bewilderingly beautiful. She was dressed with extreme simplicity, but with a delicate fastidiousness which Mary at any rate was quick to appreciate. Her lips were slightly parted in a natural and perfectly dazzling smile. She came across to Brooks with outstretched hand and ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hold her glance steady and deny the truth. A scaring sense of desperate powers in Lucy that were carrying her outside the familiar and established, seized her friend. It was all different from her expectations. Her personal repugnance and fastidiousness were swept aside in the menace of larger things. She leaned forward and clasped ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... these contradictory feelings of Mr. Dodge, and of the fastidiousness of Sir George Templemore, the interest her two admirers took in Eve, the devotion of Mr. Monday to sherry and champaigne, and the decision of Mr. Effingham, these persons therefore remained the sole occupants of the cabins of the Montauk. Of the oi polloi who had left ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... boredom; on the other hand, every one in the house, with the exception of his mother, looked upon him with unfriendly eyes. His father did not like his habits of the capital; his dress-suits, frilled shirts, books, his flute, his cleanliness, in which, not without reason, they scented his fastidiousness; he was constantly complaining and grumbling at his son.—"Nothing here suits him," he was wont to say: "at table he is dainty, he does not eat, he cannot endure the odour of the servants, the stifling atmosphere; the sight of drunken ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... it fared with my second work as it did with my first; I flung it aside and, in order to forget it, I began a third, on which I am now occupied; but the difficulty of writing it is immense, my extreme desire to be original sadly cramping the powers of my mind; my fastidiousness being so great that I invariably reject whatever ideas I do not think to be legitimately my own. But there is one circumstance to which I cannot help alluding here, as it serves to show what miseries ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... which English fashion countenanced—nay, on which fashion insisted—I had no part in them, and brooked much banter from the gay world in consequence. It was not merely lack of money, nor yet a certain fastidiousness implanted, nor yet the inherent shrinking of my English blood from pleasure forbidden, for my Renault blood was hot enough, God wot! It was, I think, all of these reasons that kept me untainted, and another, the vague idea of a woman, ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... the growing fastidiousness of his audience, and nearly fifty years later, the same charge against the public is repeated by Davenant, in the Prologue to his "Unfortunate Lovers." He tells the spectators that they expect to have in two hours ten times more wit ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... marched into the drawing-room. Yet he enjoyed the company of his equals, and never withdrew, no matter how many callers—whom he recognized as of his society—might come into the drawing-room. Calvin was fond of company, but he wanted to choose it; and I have no doubt that his was an aristocratic fastidiousness rather than one of faith. It is so ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... thing! of happiness and excitement—of the over-greatness of Heaven's boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and death had tenderly embalmed a sentiment to which life might possibly have been less kind. Since then he had lived in music, letters, and society, refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to enter politics, but welcomed and considered, wherever he went, tall, good-looking, distinguished, one of the most agreeable and courted of men, and perhaps the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... distinguished by their close adherence to nature and the delicacy and technical perfection of their execution. His technical skill is proved by the fact that several copies he made after Correggio have been taken to be duplicates by Correggio himself. His extreme fastidiousness limited his power of production, though the number of his works is not so small as is sometimes asserted. Several specimens are to be seen at Florence and elsewhere. The finest of all his works is his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... engaged that he never once saw me. I had a good look at him. He was a small, thin man with straight gray hair; above his collar I could see the weather-brown wrinkles of his neck. His coat was of black, of a noticeably neat appearance, and I observed, as a further evidence of fastidiousness rare upon the Road, that he was saving his trousers by kneeling on a bit of carpet. What he could be doing there so intently by the roadside I could not imagine. So I climbed the fence, making some little intentional noise as I did so. He arose immediately. Then I saw at his side on ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... psalms, hymns, anthems, and cantatas; several beautiful trios and other specimens of chamber-music; and the lovely "Songs without Words," which are to be found upon almost every piano, the beauty and freshness of which time has not impaired. Mendelssohn never wrote a grand opera, owing to his fastidiousness as to a libretto; though he finally obtained one from Geibel, on the subject of the "Loreley," which suited him. He had begun to write it, and had finished the finale to the first act, when death interrupted his work, Nov. 4, 1847. Mendelssohn was a man of remarkable ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... is effeminate and petulant from a sense of weakness, as his friendship was tender from a sense of gratitude. I do not like, for instance, his character of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousness makes others fastidious. But his compliments are divine; they are equal in value to a house or an estate. Take the following. In addressing Lord Mansfield, he speaks of the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... by his correspondent, Mr George Thomson, for his collection, and the others he expected would find a publisher in the famous bookselling firm of Constable & Co. The failure of both these schemes—for Constable's hands were full, and Thomson exhibited his wonted "fastidiousness"—preyed deeply on the mind of the sensitive bard. A temporary relief to his disappointed expectations was occasioned by a visit which, in the spring of 1810, he received from James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who made a journey to Paisley expressly ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... whom she reverenced above all things human or divine, and whose exalted ideal of feminine perfection soared as far above her as the angels in Lebrun's "Stoning of St. Stephen" soared above the sinning multitude below them—that the man whose fastidiousness concerning womanly character and deportment seemed exaggerated and almost morbid, could admire or defend, much less love that gray-haired widow, whom the world pronounced either a lunatic, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... version of Tasso by Fairfax, and the very stanzas extracted by T. N. The translator could not please himself with the outset of his undertaking, and hence the recorded substitution; but it is not known that he carried his fastidiousness so far as to furnish a third version of the first stanza, as well as of the "Argument" of the introductory canto, differing from both the others. In the instance pointed out by T. N. the substitution ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... he said, 'all's well that ends well. Your fastidiousness in choice has arrived at a happy termination. And now you will perhaps tell me why you rejected so many suitors, to whom you had in turn accorded a hearing. In the first place, what was your objection to the Honourable Escor A'Cass?{1} He was a fine, handsome, dashing fellow. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... side of Thorne's nature was cultured to the extreme of fastidiousness; ugly, repulsive, even disagreeable things repelled him more than they do most men. He disliked intensely any thing that grated, any thing that was discordant. If "taste is morality," Thorne had claims to be considered ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland |
