"Nastiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the Gipsy women have gone among the farmers' cattle and rubbed their nostrils with some nastiness to such an extent as to cause the cattle to loathe their food. The Gipsy in the lane—who of course knows all about the affair—goes to the farmer and tells him he can cure his cattle. This is agreed upon. All the Gipsy does is to ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... only talk of savage recklessness, of running over people in the street with his horses, of brutal conduct to a lady of good society with whom he had a liaison and whom he afterwards publicly insulted. There was a callous nastiness about this affair. It was added, too, that he had developed into a regular bully, insulting people for the mere pleasure of insulting them. Varvara Petrovna was greatly agitated and distressed. Stepan Trofimovitch assured ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... respecting cabbages and potatoes, and had asked whether the officers on board a certain ship did not always eat preserved asparagus while the men had not even a bean. I fear that he had been put up to this business by Mr. Quintus Slide, and that he made himself nasty. There was, however, so much nastiness of the kind going, that his little effort made no great difference. The conservative members of the Committee, on whose side of the House the inquiry had originated, did not scruple to lay all manner of charges ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... vices of an old decadent one would be self-destruction. Thus the youthful Rome rejected most of the Etruscan poison, and thus nature purified herself, and Etruria was buried in the pit of her own nastiness. ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... naturally limited, the colonist likes to see on his wine a fine label, one which makes the quality of the wine easily comprehensible to him. Thus the most successful claret sold here is divided according to degrees of nastiness into five ranks, and you ask for So-and-So's No. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, irrespective of vintage or year. 'Bon ordinaire' is of course unobtainable, but you can get 'Chateau Margaux,' duty paid, at from 40s. to 50s. a dozen. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... The unnecessary nastiness of the scrub-water with its fine soot which works into every pore is a great objection to the girl who must work for her living. If she goes to visit her friends, her hands betray her. She can remove the other badges of her toil, her cap and apron; she may go ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... and said: "See here; such nastiness! This is yet another devil. He looks like the father ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... myself, so directed, I cannot clearly imagine. Possibly, I might have got interested in the old iron and wood-shavings; and become an engineer or a carpenter: but for the children of to-day, accustomed, from the instant they are out of their cradles, to the sight of this infinite nastiness, prevailing as a fixed condition of the universe, over the face of nature, and accompanying all the operations of industrious man, what is to be the scholastic issue? unless, indeed, the thrill of scientific vanity in the primary analysis of some unheard-of process of corruption—or ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... live) to the effluvia arising from decomposed heaps of sea-wood, which had been gathered for manure, and was in the act of removal to the fields. No words can describe this, and I leave it to your imagination, Squire, to form an idea of a new perfume in nastiness that has never yet been ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... all; besides these graceful frivolities, our literature is full of simple nastiness and brutality, of arguments which would lead men back in the most refined way to primeval barbarism, to the principles not only of the pagan, but even of the animal life, which we have left behind us five ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... speak of the horrible muddiness, not only of this part of the city, but of all Paris, so far as I have traversed it to-day. My ways, since I came to Europe, have often lain through nastiness, but I never before saw a pavement so universally overspread with mud-padding as that of Paris. It is difficult to imagine where so ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it was such a scene as you seldom see, and never want to. Nastiness beyond account, and chaos run loose in the midst of the nastiness. There were not a great many of the negroes; but by way of making what there were understand that they were free, Vaughan had had ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... it appears that persons attentive to the cleanliness of their bodies and habitations are, in general, more healthy, and less subject to disease, than those who live in filth and nastiness; and it is further remarked, that cleanliness carries with it, throughout all the branches of domestic administration, habits of order and arrangement, which are the chief means and ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... proprietor's children in a part requiring "infant innocence;" and as our ideas of that angelic state are associated principally with pudding heads and dirty faces, the performance is generally got through with a nastiness approaching to nicety. But it is time to make our escape from the Bower, and we therefore leave them to get through the "Chough and Crow"—which is often the wind-up, because it admits of a good deal of growling—in our absence. We cannot be tempted to remain even to witness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... let the devil eat them, for it must have been he who put them there. I dare to dirty your helmet! You have guessed the offender finely! Faith, sir, by the light God gives me, it seems I must have enchanters too, that persecute me as a creature and limb of your worship, and they must have put that nastiness there in order to provoke your patience to anger, and make you baste my ribs as you are wont to do. Well, this time, indeed, they have missed their aim, for I trust to my master's good sense to see that I have got no curds or milk, or anything of the sort; and that if I had ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "It's sheer nastiness on your part, Maude Helm, to try and belittle her! You won't get much glory for yourself by sticking pins in other people; and I can tell you, if you're going to set up in opposition to Gipsy, you've no chance. I'll undertake there's hardly ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... compassion in them that it is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in "Pot-Bouille"—in Nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"—then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated. What is the fact? The fact is that Dreiser's ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... am sure you expect I should say something of the convents; they are of all sorts and sizes, but I am best pleased with that of St Lawrence, where the ease and neatness they seem to live with, appears to be much more edifying than those stricter orders, where perpetual penance and nastiness must breed discontent and wretchedness. The Nuns are all of quality. I think there are to the number of fifty. They have each of them a little cell perfectly clean, the walls of which are covered with pictures more or less fine, according to their quality. A long white stone gallery ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... question why in all great towns men are not simply driven by necessity, but in some peculiar way inclined to live in those parts of the town where there are no gardens nor fountains; where there is most dirt and smell and all sorts of nastiness. Then his own walks through the Hay Market came back to his mind, and for a moment he waked up to reality. "What nonsense!" he thought, "better think of ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy nastiness that looks like dead porridge, if you can take the conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating when he is not keeping baby. Besides which, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into the street, leaving but one solemn tenant in their home. The cold light of a November morning gave to the lane an air, even in their eyes, of squalor and misery. The kennel running down the middle was choked with nastiness, while here and there the upper stories leaned forward so far as to obscure ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... toothsome as a small one. A 'monstrous mushroom,' even to those who like mushrooms, is coarse and less tasty. Now the gleam of hope lies in the circumstance that Mr. Chesterton knows the fine gradations of niceness (or nastiness) that distinguish mushrooms of one size from mushrooms of another. As a rule, if you get to know a thing, you get to like it. Mr. Chesterton is coming to know mushrooms. He will soon be ordering them for breakfast. ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... himself listlessly. "That's the only crowd I know; it's the only set that's open to a Pittsburg furnace-man's son. Those people aren't so bad; I guess they're no worse than the rest. If a person goes looking for nastiness he can find it nearly anywhere. I never did—and I never saw anything very scandalous ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... "it's rather a large question—but I used to think, both at school and at Oxford, that many of the men who were rather disapproved of, that did quite bad things, and tried experiments, and knocked up against nastiness of various kinds, but who were brave in their way and kind, and not mean or spiteful or fault-finding, were more the sort of people that the force—or whatever it is, behind the world—was trying to produce ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... quotation from his Detached Thoughts, Letters, 1898, i. 192, note). There was another point of unlikeness, which he does not mention. Byron, on the passion of love, does not "make for morality," but he eschews nastiness. The loves of Don Juan and Haidee are chaste as snow compared with the unspeakable philanderings of the elderly Jean Jacques and the "mistress of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron |
