"Ne'er-do-well" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his eyes upon him gratefully. He might be a ne'er-do-well, and a genuine nuisance around the town on the river where he had grown up, but to the generous-hearted lads from the North he was only a poor hungry human being, and fortune had been very good ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... unpleasant information of the misbehaviour of her eldest son, who was an assistant in a draper's shop in a neighbouring town. She was full of indignation against want of steadiness, though not willing to direct her indignation against the right object—her ne'er-do-well darling. While she was thus charged with anger (for her brother justly defended her son's master and companions from her attacks), she saw Ruth standing with a lover, far away from home, at such a time in the evening, and she boiled over with ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... died was a thing as light as air to me, but at the talk about the treasure my heart turned to it, and I thought of what I might do in the old country with it, and how my folk would stare when they saw their ne'er-do-well coming back with his pockets full of gold moidores. I had, therefore, already made up my mind. Abdullah Khan, however, thinking that I hesitated, pressed ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal vigilance on her part and by nothing else—an instant's sleepiness, and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well. She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... knee and talked to him, until the whole face of the earth seemed changed to him. Besides his great love for the little Madaline, he became interested in the story of Margaret Dornham's life—in her love for the handsome, reckless ne'er-do-well who had given up work as a failure—in her wonderful patience, for she never complained—in her sublime heroism, for she bore all as a martyr. He heard how Henry Dornham was often seen intoxicated—heard that he was abusive, violent. He went afterward to the cottage, and ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... him. He had forgiven his mother from the first. What she did must have been done with the best intentions. The poverty of her son and the dire distress of his father had tempted her to obtain possession of money by forgery. The bank had at once suspected the ne'er-do-well son. The son had been proclaimed dead, and the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... as a mechanic as well? Was I unfit for anything? The other fellows at the shop had a definite foothold in life, while I was a waif, a ne'er-do-well, nearly two years in America with ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... tried to do so) to do nothing quite like other people, not from perversity as some readily declared, or a desire to "be different," but from inability to acquire the point of view from which the most ordinary actions are done. She took no money on Sunday, and this becoming known to her ne'er-do-well neighbours, they made a point of forgetting to come for ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... Quoth the Lackpenny, "Thou liest, O accursed son of a cuckold!" Whereupon the Cook cried out and laying hold of his debtor's collar, said, "O Moslems, this fellow is my first customer[FN14] this day and he hath eaten my food and given me naught." So the folk gathered about them and blamed the Ne'er-do-well and said to him, "Give him the price of that which thou hast eaten." Quoth he, "I gave him a dirham before I entered the shop;" and quoth the Cook, "Be everything I sell this day forbidden to me, if he gave me so much as the name of a coin! By Allah, he gave me naught but ate my food and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... an out-o'-the-way place like this; we didn't never suit his style, ye see; so poor Ann Kenton— whose misfortun' made her Mrs. Ned Joselyn—cried an' wailed fer a day er two an' then crep' back to the city like a whipped dog. Funny how women'll care fer a wuthless, ne'er-do-well chap that happens to ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... history, began with the assassination of a single man. This man was Gregory Novikh, known throughout the world under the name of Rasputin. A Siberian peasant by birth, immoral, filthy in person, untrained in mind, he had early received the nickname of Rasputin, which means "ne'er-do-well," on account of his habits. A drunkard, and a libertine always, he posed as a sort of saint and miracle worker, let his hair grow long, and tramped about the ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... the plunge, an' slung the game. I've parted wiv them joys I 'eld most dear; I've sent the leery bloke that bore me name Clean to the pack wivout one pearly tear; An' frum the ashes of a ne'er-do-well A bloomin' farmer's ...
— The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke • C. J. Dennis
... preparing a further instalment, including clanking chains, gongs that sounded unseen in the air, hands that gripped the passengers and tried to pull them from their seats—all the wild tales of Souter Gowans, the village cobbler, and of ne'er-do-well farm lads, idle and reckless, whose word would never have been taken in any ordinary affair of life. Jo had not time, however, for Agnes Anne had a strong imagination, coupled with a highly nervous organization. She laughed out suddenly, in the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... very good editorial work," she said mendaciously, "but, after all, you are only playing at journalism. The real journalist—as I know him—is a Bohemian; a font of cleverness running to waste; a reckless, tender-hearted, jolly, careless ne'er-do-well who works like a Trojan and plays like a child. He is very sophisticated at his desk and very artless when he dives into the underworld for rest and recreation. He lives at high tension, scintillates, burns his red fire without ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... an ambitious self-made soapmaker. The first—with Sue, the pretty waitress—is thwarted by a very persistent and unpleasant clerk; the second—with Virginia, a girl of birth and breeding—is threatened by the intrusion of the girl's cousin, a queerly morbid ne'er-do-well. There is no action to speak of, so one can't speak of it. I can only say that the interest of the shrewd analysis held me, and that if my guess as to the sex of the writer be sound it is noteworthy that more pains and skill are bestowed upon the characters of ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... running away from my husband, after liking a Swedish ne'er-do-well and expressing immoral opinions, just as in a romantic story. And my own son reproves me because I haven't given him religious instruction. But the story doesn't go right. I'm neither groaning nor being dramatically saved. I keep on running away, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... states or in Canada. Richard Carey evidently believes the story, though from his actions I'm inclined to think him utterly mad. He's going to desperate lengths to search for the treasure. His conduct is tinged a good deal with resentment because Isabel has repeatedly refused to marry him. He's a ne'er-do-well, a blacksheep and ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... again next evening Lestrade was furnished with much information concerning our prisoner. His name, it appeared, was Beppo, second name unknown. He was a well-known ne'er-do-well among the Italian colony. He had once been a skilful sculptor and had earned an honest living, but he had taken to evil courses and had twice already been in gaol—once for a petty theft and once, as we had already heard, for stabbing a fellow-countryman. He could talk English ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not been she who had meant to steal my gold; and no matter how she had known some one meant to get at me, with wolves or anything else. It had been just Collins—and the sheer gall of it jammed my teeth—Collins and Dunn, two ne'er-do-well brats in our own mine. I had realized already that they had been missing from La Chance quite early enough for me to thank them for the boulder on my good road, and Collins——But I hastily revised my conviction that it was Collins I had heard the wolves chop in the bush as ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... a good man, but a ne'er-do-well financially, had loaned his best clothes, watch and pocketbook to a friend to enable him to call on his best girl in captivating style, and said friend expressed his gratitude by eloping with the girl and all ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... Front. The port contributed a goodly number, but there remained one berth vacant. The long-suffering Consul had a stroke of inspiration. Here was a means of at once swelling the man-power of his country and ridding himself of a pestilent ne'er-do-well. His boys, searching far and wide, discovered John Fanshawe in the back premises of a Malay go-down, oblivious to all things, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... change, prosperity, and excitement in her life. She had had seven children, only three of whom were living: Mary, a prosperous, big matron whose husband, Joe Cunningham, had some exalted position on the Brooklyn police force; Ralph, who was a priest in California; and George, the youngest, a handsome ne'er-do-well of about twenty-five, who was a "heart scald." George floated about his own and neighbouring cities, only coming to see his mother ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... to King George. I have always been a ne'er-do-well, despised and scouted by a hard father and a villainous brother or two, and life with these good fellows here is, after all, to my mind. There's independence in it, and I prefer to be independent; and danger, and I like danger. ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... libel suits mushroomed into view in as many days, provoked, as it were, out of conscious nothing; unimportant but harassing: one, brought by a ne'er-do-well who had broken a leg while engaged in a drunken prank months before, the other the outcome of a paragraph ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... comes before us, this Poor Traveller. Christian name, Eichard, better known as Dick, his own surname dropped upon the road, he assumes that of Doubledick—being thenceforth spoken of all through the tale, even to the very end of it, by his new name, as Eichard Doubledick. A scapegrace, a ne'er-do-well, an incorrigible, hopeless of himself, despaired of by others, he has "gone wrong and run wild." His heart, still in the right place, has been sealed up. "Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... her head absently. "Then there was Mr. Evringham's younger son, a regular roving ne'er-do-well. He didn't like Wall Street and he went West to Chicago. He was a rolling stone, first in one position and then in another; then he got married, and after a few years he rolled away altogether. All Mr. Evringham knows ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... ruins, his slaves freed and his fields mortgaged. He had pulled himself together for another start, and had practiced law in the little town where his family had lived for generations. Of his two sons, one was a ne'er-do-well. He was one of those brilliant fellows of whom much is expected that never develops. He had a taste for low company, married beneath him, and, after a career that was a continual mortification and humiliation to his father, ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... supposed to be in love with the daughter of the rector, Miriam Ainsley. I thought it was going to be a match, but they were both poor, and the girl suddenly married a young nobleman, a man I disliked very much, a wastrel and a ne'er-do-well. But there were stories about this other young man who was supposed to be in love with her, and perhaps they came to her ears, and drove her to the other man, though it was a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire. The young engineer left the place suddenly, and disappeared, and everybody ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... of Oliver having died, as before truthfully stated, first prophesying that his son would grow up a ne'er-do-well, this son took his new-found wife up to the Fen Country to live with his mother and sister. That he would be Lord Protector of the Farm seems quite the proper thing to say, but that he was dutiful, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... basilisk, urchin; tiger|!, monster; devil &c. (demon) 980; devil incarnate; demon in human shape, Nana Sahib; hellhound, hellcat; rakehell[obs3]. bad woman, jade, Jezebel. scamp, scapegrace, rip, runagate, ne'er-do-well, reprobate, scalawag, scallawag. rou[French], rake; Sadist; skeesicks*[obs3], skeezix* [obs3][U.S.]; limb; one who has sold himself to the devil, fallen angel, ame damnee[Fr], vaurien[obs3], mauvais sujet[Fr], loose fish, sad dog; rounder*; lost sheep, black sheep; castaway, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... he said, "You know that what I hunger for is impossible. There are so many little things, like common-sense, to be considered. For this is just a matter which concerns you and Paul Vanderhoffen—a literary hack, a stuttering squeak-voiced ne'er-do-well, with an acquired knack for scribbling verses that are feeble-minded enough for Annuals and Keepsake Books, and so fetch him an occasional guinea. For, my dear, the verses I write of my own accord are not sufficiently genteel to be vended in Paternoster ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... revolutionists of the crusading type, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Brown, or Mazzini. When a man abandons his business or job and complacently leaves the clothing of his children to wife or neighbors in order to drink flip and talk politics, ordinary folk are content to call him a lazy lout, ne'er-do-well, worthless fellow, or scamp. Samuel Adams was not a scamp. He might have been no more than a ne'er-do-well, perhaps, if cosmic forces had not opportunely provided him with an occupation which his contemporaries and posterity could regard as a high service to humanity. ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... at some time in their lives have not wondered at the vagaries of girlish complaisance: the foolish, the ne'er-do-well, the bully, the careless, the cruel,—it is to these often that a ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... naturalist was in business at Louisville, early in the century; but in 1812, he failed in this venture, and moved to Henderson, where his neighbors thought him a trifle daft,—and certainly he was a ne'er-do-well, wandering around the woods, with hair hanging down on his shoulders, a far-away look in his eyes, and communing with the birds. In 1818, the botanist Rafinesque, on the first of his several tramps down the Ohio valley,—he had a favorite saying, that ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... and hurry and rushed out by the door, when behold, the husband came bringing with him two of his familiars. So the wife met him at the entrance and said to him, "O Man, O miserablest of men, O thou disappointed, O thou dissatisfied,[FN487] thou hast brought to me a fellow which was a thief, a ne'er-do-well like unto thyself." "How so?" asked he, and she answered, "The man stole the two geese and stole away." Thereupon the husband went out and catching sight of the guest running off shouted to him, "Come back! Come back! even although thou bring only one with thee and take the other." Cried the man ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... not like you. You're unkind and you're harsh. Her husband is the sort of man—well, he's his own worst enemy. A weakling, a ne'er-do-well—he's spent all his money and hers too. She has a child. Do you think you can condemn her for leaving him? As a matter of fact she didn't leave ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... ("Marty" everybody called the gangling, grinning, idle ne'er-do-well of fourteen), Janice was inclined to be utterly hopeless about him from the start. If he was a specimen of the Poketown boys, she told herself, she had no desire to meet any ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... who I am? My name will tell you nothing. In the sum total of humanity I am merely a pawn which is given a certain number upon entrance into this world and retains the same at the time of its exit. I am a cell of feeling long ago registered and classified by my fellow-beings as a 'ne'er-do-well,'" he said, smiling. ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... a stone round his neck which will drag him down deeper in a new land than he would have fallen at home. You know that remittance men are regarded with such contempt in the bush that a man seldom admits he is one, save when he's drunk and reckless and wants money or credit. When a ne'er-do-well lands in Melbourne or Sydney without a penny he will probably buck-up and do something for himself. When he lands with money he will probably spend it all in the first few months and then straighten up, because ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... to do needlework, or whenever, at any time, you romp and laugh together, find them all most obliging; but there's one thing that causes me very much concern. I have here one, who is the very root of retribution, the incarnation of all mischief, one who is a ne'er-do-well, a prince of malignant spirits in this family. He is gone to-day to pay his vows in the temple, and is not back yet, but you will see him in the evening, when you will readily be able to judge for yourself. One thing you must do, and that is, from this time forth, not to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... daughter when she married your father. Both her parents died, years ago. They only had a lease of the place they lived in, and I really cannot tell you anything whatever about them. There was a son, who would, I suppose, succeed to any property his father left; but he was a ne'er-do-well, and was seldom at home, and I have never seen or ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... white man. He did not, however, make his appearance during our visit, and I imagine he must have been one of those individuals called 'beach-combers,' referred to in so many of the books that treat of the South Sea Islands,—a sort of ne'er-do-well Englishman or American, rather afraid of meeting any of his own countrymen, but very clever at making a bargain between a ship's crew and the natives, with considerable profit ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... western woods lies in wait for his foe with a rifle; sharp practice in the east becomes highway robbery in the west; but at the same time negative good-nature becomes active self-sacrifice, and a general belief in virtue is translated into a prompt and determined war upon vice. The ne'er-do-well of a family who in one place has his debts paid a couple of times and is then forced to resign from his clubs and lead a cloudy but innocuous existence on a small pension, in the other abruptly finishes his career by ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... not be here," said Evan Lamotte, bitterly. "Evan, the ne'er-do-well, does not seek his friends when the sun shines. Eh, Conny? Don't go in," laying one hand upon her arm, as she was about to turn toward the house, "I—I came to talk ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... four room building, combined dwelling and shop of Mrs. Olive Edwards, widow of "Bill Edwards," once a promising young man, later town drunkard and ne'er-do-well, dead these five years, luckily for himself and luckier—in a way—for the wife who had stuck by him while he wasted her inheritance in a losing battle with John Barleycorn. At his death the fine old Seabury place had dwindled ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... is Master Franois Villon, Master of Arts, rhymer at his best, vagabond at his worst, ne'er-do-well at all seasons, and scapegrace ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... to Montreal I was confronted by that stupid superstition of the Canadians, that every young Englishman who has had a better education than themselves, and is possessed of a private income from the old country, must be a remittance-man and a ne'er-do-well—that he's been sent out because he wasn't wanted by his family. I tried to get employment; not that I needed it, but because I wanted to work. The moment I opened my lips and didn't speak dialect or slang, and displayed hands which were not workman's hands, I ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... pallor was spreading beneath the glow on the younger Fenley's perspiring face. He was obviously shocked beyond measure. Grief and horror had imparted a certain strength to somewhat sullen features. He might be a ne'er-do-well, a loose liver, a good deal of a fool, perhaps, but he was learning one of life's sharpest lessons; in time, it might bring out what was best in his character. The detectives understood now why the butler, who knew the boy even better than his own father, deemed it impossible that ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... with his tail between his legs. When the ogre saw him, he guessed at once what had happened. He gave Antonio a good scolding, and said, 'I don't know what prevents me smashing your head in, you useless ne'er-do-well! You blurt everything out, and your long tongue never ceases wagging for a moment. If you had remained silent in the inn this misfortune would never have overtaken you, so you have only yourself to ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various |
