"Squalor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sez Elder Wessel in his most dictorial way, all of Arvilly's talk havin' slipped offen him like rain water offen a brass horn, "the poor man, after he has worked hard all day, and has nothing to go home to but a room full of cryin' children, discomfort, squalor and a complaining wife, is justified in my opinion to go to the only bright, happy place he knows ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... to the smaller towns of the land, is in all respects the most attractive sight in America, and one of the most remarkable places in the world, ranking next to London and Paris in the extent and variety of its attractions. Its magnificence is remarkable, its squalor appalling. Nowhere else in the New World are seen such lavish displays of wealth, and such hideous depths of poverty. It is rich in historical associations and in treasures of art. It presents a wonderful ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... are spread over a considerable portion of Luzon, principally from N. lat. 16 deg. 30' to 18 deg.. They are, in general, a fine race of people, physically considered, but semi-barbarous and living in squalor. They wear their hair long. At the back it hangs down to the shoulders, whilst in front it is cut shorter and allowed to cover the forehead half-way like a long fringe. Some of them, settled in the districts of Lepanto and El Abra, have a little hair on the chin and ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... practice deference, often amounting to servility. Such in time will become the established relation between the employer and the employed, the rich and the poor. If want be accompanied with sordidness and squalor, though it be pitied, the pity will be mixed with some degree of contempt. If it lead to misery, and misery to vice, there will ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... night. These are known as the back slums. But nowhere is there any sign of poverty or anything at all resembling Stepney or the lower parts of an European city, The Chinese quarter is the nearest approach thereto, but it is quite sui generis, and squalor is ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... unsightliness of it could not be borne. (However, the glimpse of a barmaid at an upper window interested him pleasantly for a moment.) And the Redcliffe Arms was the true gate to the stucco and areas of Redcliffe Gardens. He looked down into the areas and saw therein the furtive existence of squalor behind barred windows. All the obscene apparatus of London life was there. And as he raised his eyes to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could discover nothing that was not ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... he found their diet consisted wholly of fish and camels' flesh. But in the town of Makdasbu, there was an attempt at comfort and civilization, presenting a most agreeable contrast with the surrounding squalor. The inhabitants were very fat, each of them, to use Ibn's own expression, "eating enough to feed a convent;" they were very fond of delicacies, such as plantains boiled in milk, preserved citrons, pods of fresh pepper, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... integrity had till then endured;" the city "crushed down in spirit by the desolation of her ruin and the hopelessness of her future;" one recalls these words when passing through the unspeakable gloom and horror and desolation and squalor of ancient Rome. In these surroundings one's cab stops at "No. 44," and ringing the bell the door is open, whether by super-normal agency or by some invisible terrestrial manipulation one is unable to determine; but in the semi-darkness of the narrow hall he discerns before him a flight of steep ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... purged by curve of the rake-tooth, Never a pruner's hook thins out the shade of the tree-tufts, 41 Never a bull up-plows broad glebe with bend of the coulter, 40 Over whose point unuse displays the squalor of rust-stain. But in the homestead's heart, where'er that opulent palace Hides a retreat, all shines with splendour of gold and of silver. Ivory blanches the seats, bright gleam the flagons a-table, 45 All of the mansion joys in royal riches ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... midst of The Desert, far from the shores of the Mediterranean. No poor are seen begging about the streets, and all the people look well dressed today. They had put on their holiday clothes, which is usual on the arrival of a large caravan. What a contrast was this to the squalor and filth of Tripoli, with its miserable beggars choking up all the thoroughfares! No women were seen about but the half-castes, mostly slaves, but plenty of children playing here and there. I heard amongst them the whisper of "The ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... among the Western tribes of Bedouins whose locale is the Desert of the Seven Dials, I must confess to considerable strangeness when first I penetrated the wilderness of Bethnal Green. Not only was it utterly terra incognita to me, but, with their manifold features in common, the want and squalor of the East have traits distinct from those of the West. I had but the name of one Bethnal Green parish and of one lady—Miss Macpherson—and with these slender data I proceeded to my work, the results of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the houses—such is the picture of the motley life in the inland villages. Strange was the contrast between human poverty and natural wealth. We were on the borders of a virgin forest, and the overpowering beauty of the vegetation soon erased all memory of the squalor and lifelessness of La Mona. Our road—a mere path, suddenly entered this seemingly impenetrable forest, where the branches crossed overhead, producing a delightful shade. The curious forms of tropical life were all ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... Avaunt! ye sallow teetotalers, ye manufacturers of lemonade, ye cocoa-drinkers! You only see the sodden wretch who hangs about the public-house door in filthy slums, blinking his eyes in the glaze of electric light, shivering in his scanty rags—and you do not know the squalor and the terrible despair of hunger which he strives to forget.... But above all, you do not know the glorious ale of the country, the golden brown ale, with its scent of green hops, its broad scents of the country; its foam is whiter than snow and lighter than the almond blossoms; and it is cold, ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's love comes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... streets of his capital the interior of the houses and the occupations and amusements of his subjects were revealed to him. In some houses he saw feasting and merriment, in some mourning and death. In the dwellings of the rich there was to be seen fine clothes and jewellery, in the hovels of the poor squalor and rags. And so constantly varied and animated were the scenes which by virtue of the ointment he was enabled to observe, that he walked on for more than an hour without ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... had spoken of her power, and gave him to understand that she did not require money; the squalor of her room made this seem rather enigmatical to the sick man, but he knew such people were sometimes eccentric in their mode of living, and this might possibly account for his surroundings. However, ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... Ireland, we may rejoice to say that there is less of it now than there was twenty years since. Things are mending there. But though such excuses may be truly made—although an Englishman, when he sees this squalor and poverty on the quays at Queenstown, consoles himself with reflecting that the evil has been unavoidable, but will perhaps soon be avoided—nevertheless he cannot but remember that there is no such squalor and no such poverty in the land from which he has returned. I claim no credit ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... last, to a few wretched fishermen's huts. The moon had now risen, and revealed the squalor of poverty-stricken ruinous hovels; a couple of boats moored to the shore, a moaning, fretful sea; and at a distance a vessel, with lights on board, lying perfectly still at anchor in a sheltered curve of the bold rude shore. The ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mud-built cottages, looking more like bee-hives than human habitations. They had also every one of them a group of date-palms, overhanging a cluster of mean bare houses; and they all alike had a picturesque and even imposing air from a distance, but faded away into indescribable squalor as one got abreast of them. Our progress was monotonous. At twelve, noon, we would pass Aboo-Teeg, with its mosque, its palms, its mud-huts, and its camels; then for a couple of hours we would go on through the midst of a green field on either side, studded ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... very rapidly, until he is the degraded creature you saw yesterday. His cronies have very appropriately given him the sobriquet of 'Whiskey Jemmie.' I understand his wife and children are existing in utter poverty—brought, by his abuse, to be abject specimens of squalor and rags." ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... sound, the level of comfort will be high. It does not follow: there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, the whole enterprise to be financially sound—a vaulting supposition—and all the inhabitants ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gilds that grimy occupation with the spirit of romance. The mind is really occupied, not with the wriggling red creatures in the lumps of earth, but with the stout fish which each worm may capture, just as a saint might rejoice in the squalor of this world as a preparation for the glories of the world to come. Nor do any two experienced fishermen hold quite the same theory as to the best mode of baiting the hook. There are a hundred ways, each of them good. As to the best hook for worm-fishing, ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... took its dimensions, twenty-nine buildings in all,—one coal shute, one water tank, the station, one store, two eating-houses, one billiard hall, two tool-houses, one feed stable, and twelve others that for one reason and another I shall not name. Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... broke out against the Jews, these merchants were oppressed and robbed, and saved themselves from destruction only by living a squalid life outside and a princely life in hidden quarters. It has been said: "You might follow an old merchant, spotted and stained with all the squalor of beggary upon him, through byways foul to the feet and offensive to every sense, and through some narrow lane enter what looks like the entrance of an ill-kept stable. Thence opens out a squalid hall of noisome odors. But ascending the steps you come to ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... this. Her imagination dwelt on the picture of the lonely old woman in the alms-house. She had been several times to see Mrs. Jacobs, and had been much moved by a certain grim stoicism which gave almost dignity to her squalor ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... The squalor and wretchedness which often fall upon people come from their not having exercised a little thought in the use of their money. A little self-denial would have saved them, and those depending on them, from many sorrows. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked the serene ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... them, for the human eye sees most! What do we see? Squalor, vice, misery, dementia, feeble minds and feeble bodies. Old women on the verge of the grave eating scraps of food gathered from the City dustbins. Dirty and repulsive food, dirty and repulsive women! who have begged during ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... that which God permits us to suffer is as nothing to that which those others endure. But the reason why these things affect us so little is, because the eye of our heart is not clear enough to see how great is the squalor and wretchedness of a man lying in sin; that is, separated from God, and in the possession of the devil. For who is there so hard of heart that he must not sicken at the spectacle of those miserable forms lying ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... the giant, in wretchedness and squalor! He who had once boasted of his cleanliness, and expected the like in others, lay there, dirty and unshaven, under dirty bed clothes, in linen so ragged and filthy that no workman on the estate ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical. A torch flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the head of a squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels of betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... regiment, the Stonewalls, are plunged into one of the big "pushes" of the British Army, and their achievements in one form or another are thick on every page of the book. The author has reduced the description of a modern battle to a fine art. No one can describe more vividly the noise, the squalor, the terror, the high courage, the self-sacrifice and again the nerve-shattering noise, that go to make up the fierce confusion of trench-fighting. How anyone succeeds in surviving when so many instruments are used for his destruction is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 14, 1917 • Various
... His trampish squalor seemed to him suddenly appalling. "There, don't do that," he protested—her arm had found its way into his. "My ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... instanced. They have both written, as became them, quite brilliantly and vigorously, about the aborigines of the soil. But how marvellously they differ! Dr. Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... time that the session of this assembly drew near its close the ground-swell began to be felt of that tempest of popular wrath which eventually swept over France, and which the Jacobins rode and directed until it dashed even them upon the rocks. Squalor came forth and consorted with cleanliness; vice crept from its dens and sat down by the side of purity in high places; atheism took its stand at the altar, and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the nucleus that his ancestor Caleb Parish had founded in revolutionary times, and it marked a contrast with its less provident neighbours. Many cabins scattered along these slopes were dismal and makeshift abodes which appeared to proclaim the despair and squalor of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... coming in when I happened to look out of the window. A girl was coming down the street, looking at the numbers of the houses. She stopped here. Intuition told me she was Miss Goodwin. While she was ringing the bell I did all I could to increase the shabby squalor of your room. She was shown in here, and I introduced myself as your friend. We chatted. I drew an agonising picture of your struggle for existence. You were brave, talented, and unsuccessful. Though you went often hungry, you had a plucky smile upon your lips. It ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his own time. He might ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... we drop from the illumination of the heavens to the shadowed plain of this low earth. It is as if a man, looking up into the violet sky, with all its shining orbs, should then turn to some reeking alley, with its tumult and its squalor. Just because man is greater than the stars, man 'fails,' whilst they shine on unwearied. For what the prophet has in view as the clinging curse that cleaves to our greatness, is not merely the bodily fatigue ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with the mud of recent rain. Not even the inhabitants were attractive. They were not garbed as Serbs, but wore ungainly costumes that might have passed unnoticed in the Bowery. He was irresistibly reminded of the stage, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the denser with snaky roots—not merely twisting about one's feet, but dropping from the boughs in nooses and festoons for one's neck; air-plants too, like birds' nests, further choking up the meshes, and hanging moss, like rotting carpets, adding still more to the murk and curious squalor of a foul fertility where beauty, like humanity, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... to the boys' feet. There were queer balconies on every hand, the stores were mere shops, all of them now closed, and many windows were nailed up. Rust and decay were on all sides, and yet there was something impressive in the almost Oriental squalor of the place. ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... bed and lavender-scented sheets, and of his beloved peacock and ivory room and its pictures and exquisite furniture and the great fire roaring up the chimney, and devise intricate tortures for the Kaiser who had dragged him down to this squalor. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... square, dull face before her with its big mouth and its suggestion of a frown. His shock of hair, always rebellious, was now in utter disorder. He was barefoot and his clothes were in that condition which only the neglect and squalor of a German prison camp can produce. But in his gaunt face there shone a look of determination and a something which seemed to encourage the girl ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... extravagance. But a bank account—and a check book—soon dissipated that nervousness. A few charge accounts, a little practice in the simple easy gesture of drawing a check, and she was almost at her ease. With people who have known only squalor or with those who have earned their better fortune by privation and slow accumulation, the spreading out process is usually slow—not so slow as it used to be when our merchants had not learned the art of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... they would soon return. As fast as possible, without attracting undue attention, he retraced his way; passed in and out of tortuous thoroughfares; by shops from whence came the smell of frying fish; down alleys where squalor lurked. Although he had by this time, perhaps, eluded the occupants of the cab, he knew there were others keenly alert for his capture whom he might at any moment encounter. To his fancy every corner teemed with peril; he did not underestimate ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... room. His astonishment was so great that he half stopped, for the apartment was furnished in almost regal style; richly-upholstered furniture and oil paintings contrasted so vividly with the squalor and misery of the lower part of the house that the audacious detective ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... close observations pictured them. "The altered position of the poor," says Mr. Courthope, "has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the reality they once possessed." I do not believe it. The closely packed towns, the herding together of families, the squalor are still to be found in our midst. Crabbe has his message for our time as well as for his own. How he tore the veil from the conventional language of his day, the picture of the ideal village where the happy peasantry passed through ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... contributed to Rome's adornment; plunder and trade goods drifted through in spite of distances. The city had become the vortex of the energy, virility and vice of east and west—a glory of marble and gilded cornices, of domes and spires, of costumes, habits, faces, languages—of gorgeousness and squalor—license, privilege and rigid formalism—extravagance—and ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... more subtly necessary was it to her happiness. The more she won of it, the more she treasured it. She was alone in the world, and it saved her from any moment of regret that she had neither home nor friends. For her the streets that lay around her had no squalor, since she paced them always in the gold nimbus of her fascinations. Her bedroom seemed not mean nor lonely to her, since the little square of glass, nailed above the wash-stand, was ever there to reflect her face. Thereinto, indeed, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... read, in the chronicles of those days, that amid all this suffering and squalor there was drawn a strict line between "the quality" and those who had no claim to be patricians. "The quality" was made up of such emigrants as came from the more civilized East, or who had slaves, or who dragged with them some rickety vehicle with carriage-horses—however ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... conqueror, cast out from Rome, Lay hid in marshy ooze, at thy behest, O Fortune! by the yielding soil concealed And waving rushes; but ere long the chains Of prison wore his weak and aged frame, And lengthened squalor: thus he paid for crime His punishment beforehand; doomed to die Consul in triumph over wasted Rome. Death oft refused him; and the very foe, In act to murder, shuddered in the stroke And dropped the weapon from his nerveless hand. For through the prison gloom a flame of light He ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... pigeons rose, wheeling quickly upward into the brilliant blue sky. She threw back her head, pressed her muff closer to her chin, and watched them with a smile of amazement and delight. So they still rose, out of all that dirt and noise and squalor, fleet and silvery, just as they used to rise that summer when she was twenty and went up in ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... tender and comprehending and patient. The only indulgence he accorded to his senses was in the forms and ceremonies of his ritual, the vestments and furniture of his church. His vicar was able to give him a free hand in the obscure squalor of Lima Street; the ecclesiastical battles he himself had to fight with bishops who were pained or with retired military men who were disgusted by his own conduct of the services at St. Simon's were not waged within the hearing of Lima Street. There, year in, year out for six ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... pioneer of the later school who aim also at preventing those evils. Those who went before him sought to assist the poor and helpless, but while he endeavoured to do this with all his heart, he also strove to destroy the causes of pauperism. He perceived that physical squalor inevitably produces spiritual squalor, and that if we are to make men think and live cleanly we must enable them to possess ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... plain sloping very gently seawards—practically a dead level, and in one of the hottest districts of Italy. Yet, for some obscure reason, there is no street along the sea itself; the cross-roads end in abrupt squalor at the shore. One wonders what considerations—political, aesthetic or hygienic—prevented the designers of the town from carrying out its general principles of construction and building a decent ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the streets, waiting and making holiday. All eyes were turned, watching for the procession, for was it not Galloping Hermit who came, the notorious wearer of the brown mask, the hero of wealth and squalor alike, the man whose deeds had already passed into legend? No one thought of him as Gentleman Jack, not even his companions of the "Punch-Bowl" who were in the crowd to see him pass; not the landlady, who ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... Barbel for some years, and I had supposed him still floating on the sun-sparkling stream of prosperity where I had last seen him. It was a great shock to me to find him in such a condition of poverty and squalor, and to see a man who had originated the "Conundrum of the Anvil" reduced to the soul-depressing occupation of grinding pin-points. As I walked and thought, the dreadful picture of a totally eclipsed future arose before my mind. ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... badly managed, and badly built; every thing done there was badly and meanly done. It was white- washed from the topmost point of every chimney down to the lowest edge of the basement. A whited sepulchre. For there was foulness there, in the air, in the surroundings, in every thing. Squalor and dirt reigned. His heart grew sick as those hideous walls rose ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... the Pit was merely the cramped and narrow quarters of the poor, where many nationalities crowded together in cosmopolitan confusion, and lived as best they could, amid much dirt and squalor. It was still early evening when the boys passed through on their way to the sailorman's shanty, and no mishap befell them, though some of the Pit boys stared at them savagely and hurled a taunting remark ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... fed his sight gladly with her loveliness, thankful that she, who once had looked upon him kindly, did not now turn to see his squalor. The blaze was thawing his chilled limbs and fast warming him, the brass pot was singing merrily. He kept his hands gratefully near it, and as, from time to time, the girl held up her arms admiringly to let the firelight shine upon her ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... dribbled into the river a little above the bridge. Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by firs, and a line of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the shadow of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, the dreariness, the gloom, the squalor ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The influence of Sal Rawlins' old life, however, was very strong on her, and she devoted herself to the task of saving her fallen sisters. Knowing as she did, all the intricacies of the slums, she was enabled to do an immense amount of good, and many an unhappy woman was saved from the squalor and hardship of a gutter life by the kind ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... of each number were given over either to philosophical articles no more "anarchistic" than Emerson's essays, not so much so as Carlyle's, or to plain accounts of the current stealing by the politicians of Remsen City, of the squalor and disease—danger in the tenements, of the outrages by the gas and water and street car companies. There was much that was terrible, much that was sad, much that was calculated to make an honest heart burn with indignation against those who ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... The poor man had no ambition or hope; his wife was a slave; his children were precocious demons, whose prattle was the cry for bread, whose laughter was the howl of pandemonium, whose sports were the tricks of premature iniquity, whose beauty was the squalor of disease and filth; he fled from a wife in whom he had no trust, from children in whom he had no hope, from brothers for whom he felt no sympathy, from parents for whom he felt no reverence; the circus ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... said the old man, with a triumphant look, which for the moment effaced the squalor of his aspect. "I was coming out of Smith & Dawkins's with the money in my pocket, when I saw you opposite, just going into a shop. You could ha' knocked me down easy, I warrant ye. Didn't expect to come on yer tracks as fast as all that. But there you were, and when you came out ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with you. Justice isn't squalor. It's—it's justice. As for your 'poor woman,' listen to this." And he read out the Bathurst advertisement with terrible emphasis on the words "Handsome reward offered." "Do you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... hastily away. There were some bargaining at the markets for withered or decaying vegetables, and others purchasing, at a diminished price, stale bread from dirty bakeries, and many a one loitering along in his filth and squalor, with no object nor aim save to dawdle away the time that hung too wearily upon him. It was a sad and loathsome sight, so near the gorgeous thoroughfare of this mighty city, to see the pitiable objects of unmitigated want; but there they ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... tour on which my uncle took me after leaving the University, and I went even farther afield than that,—to Palestine and Egypt. You would like Egypt even better than Turkey, Miss Joan, for there, thanks to our rule, you have picturesqueness without squalor, whereas Turkey does not stand a close inspection. We were thankful to leave Constantinople after a very few days, but were sad indeed to turn our backs on fascinating Cairo. If I had the seven-leagued boots, I should be a frequent ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... man, taking his time, found the place at last, one in an interminable row of tenement-houses, all identical in structure and squalor, bearing the mark of corporation niggardliness in their cheap lumber and ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose and broken in places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and goddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... that he could neither speak nor be spoken to, perhaps the old hope of becoming after all a real king, had turned the Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. Or, perhaps, weary of the life of melancholy solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral pig-stye in which he had been rotting so many years, the idea of decency, of dignity, of society, of a wife and children and friends, may have made him capable of a strong resolution. Perhaps, also, the unfamiliar, wonderful presence of a beautiful and refined young ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... appeared too didactic and restrictive. I suggested Souls in Khaki, but this admirable title had already been appropriated. Lastly, we decided on The Glory of the Trenches, as the most expressive of his aim. He felt that a great deal too much had been said about the squalor, filth, discomfort and suffering of the trenches. He pointed out that a very popular war-book which we were then reading had six paragraphs in the first sixty pages which described in unpleasant detail the verminous condition ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... with legal interest; if not, according to the legal terms of the agreement (forty acres and two mules), then in its just equivalents, either by pensioning the survivors of the slave system—many who are to-day in abject squalor and want—or by a liberal grant of money to the schools of the land charged with the educational development of their much ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... for the nightly conclave. She is a Mahomedan." You look again at the dark-eyed child smiling in the corner and you wonder what horror, what ill-treatment or what grief brought her to this pass. Peradventure it is a mercy that her mind has gone and cannot therefore revolt against the squalor of her surroundings. It is useless to ask her of herself; she can only smile in her scanty boyish garb. It is the saddest sight in this valley of the abyss, where men purchase draughts of nepenthe to fortify themselves against the cares that the day brings. The opium-club kills religion, kills ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... a long way into the poorer quarter of the city, where there was much squalor and suffering. He was aroused by the cries of women and children driven from their squalid homes by a band of Nero's condottieri, who then set fire ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In Anyuta, the medical student and his mistress live in a room disgusting in its squalor: ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... light. The sooner we get the ideal, fanciful, and romantic side of a vagrant's and vagabond's life removed from our vision, and see things as they really are, the better it will be for us. For the life of me I cannot see anything romantic in dirt, squalor, ignorance, and misery. Ministers and missionaries have completely failed in the work, for the simple reason that they have never begun it in earnest; consequently, the schoolmaster and School-board officer must begin to do their part in reclaiming these wandering tribes, and this can only be ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... it was just physical fatigue; he felt wide awake mentally. Earth life, for all its squalor and brutality, was tremendously exciting compared with shipboard existence. It was with a momentary pang of something close to disappointment that he remembered he would have to report back to the Valhalla in several days; there were so many fascinating aspects of Earth life he still ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable, but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured, and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life, who need no guiding ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... do, and was cast into prison. "Are these then my judges?" he exclaimed when he was returning from the presence of the Inquisitors, whose ignorance astonished him. There he remained for five long years; until at length, wearied by his confinement, the squalor of the prison, and by his increasing years, he consented to recant his "heresy," and regained his liberty. The old man lost his sight at seventy-four years of age, and died four years later in 1642. In addition to the work which caused him so great misfortunes he published ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Buddhists and polyandrists, while the Baltis farther down the valley are Mussulmen and polygamists. The Baltis, with their plurality of wives and numerous children, are wretchedly poor and live in squalor on the verge of starvation; but as the elevation of their valley ranges only from 4000 to 8500 feet, they are inured to heat, and therefore emigrate in large numbers to the neighboring Mohammedan province of the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of the principal actors of the Revolution were singularly hideous in appearance,—from the colossal ugliness of Mirabeau and Danton, or the villanous ferocity in the countenances of David and Simon, to the filthy squalor of Marat, the sinister and bilious meanness of the Dictator's features. But Robespierre, who was said to resemble a cat, had also a cat's cleanness; and his prim and dainty dress, his shaven smoothness, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is the squalor and the wretchedness of these homes of India's poor. The clothing of a whole family is not worth one American dollar, while about ten cents in our money will feed a family of four. The houses have ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... excitement, became desperately pale, and confessed to a headache. He found his customary drugs, and took them. But to Sally this headache was a new and emphatic indication of Gaga's troublesome temperament. Ugliness and squalor she knew; but sickliness was new to her. In face of a groaning and prostrate man, she turned away. Her heart sank a little. Then, with a shrug, she turned to the advertisements of flats to let in London which she found in various newspapers; and made notes of the addresses ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from his ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... of captivity exceeds all possibility of description; the profusion of stinks which they raised, the grease of their venerable garments and faces, the horrible messes cooked in the filthy pots, and devoured with the nasty fingers, the squalor of mats, pots, old bedding, and foul carpets of our Hebrew friends, could hardly be painted by Swift in his dirtiest mood, and cannot be, of course, attempted by my timid and genteel pen. What would they say in Baker Street to some sights with which ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... capetes[69] of them. This was the College de Pouillerye denounced by Rabelais and notorious to students as the College des Haricots, because they were fed there chiefly on beans. Erasmus was a poor boursier there, disgusted at its mean fare and squalor, and Calvin, known as the "accusative," from his austere piety. Desmoulins, the inaugurator of the Revolution, and St. Just, its fiery and immaculate apostle, sat on its benches. To obtain admission to the college of Cluny (1269) the scholar must pass ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... to my leg would 'bring me up short,' often, in my early forgetfulness of it, throwing me prone upon my face. After a little I learned to move with a halting gait, striding out with the free limb and pausing to pull my burden after me with the other. This habit, learned in the squalor and darkness of the dungeon hells of Ceuta, I have never been able ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... where a British fleet was lying in the roads, to take off the English merchants, who in consequence of the revolutionary movements going on, sought shelter under their own flag. Here Mr. Seton, reduced to the last stage of destitution and squalor, boldly applied to Captain Bentham, the commander of the squadron, who, finding him to be a gentleman, offered him every needful assistance, gave him a berth in his own cabin, and finally landed him safely on the Island of Jamaica, whence he, too, found ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... The first thing that struck us was the gloom and darkness. In each corner of the room was a bed, with a smaller one pushed underneath, and two sick people suffering from slow fever. It is no wonder, for eleven people occupied this one room, about twelve feet square. Need we wonder that misery and squalor are seen all around? An old soap box from the grocery formed a corner cupboard. Two old chairs which perhaps belonged to their great-grandmother, all frame and no seat, an empty box, and a bucket of water with a tin scoop, formed the whole furniture ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 2, February, 1889 • Various
... beautiful appearance when approached from the water, rising, as she does, in terraces which overlook the noble Tagus, and are in turn overlooked by the Sierras, ending in the Peak of Lisbon, at its mouth. Arriving thus, one does not see the filth and squalor, the tumble-down buildings, unpaved streets, or many poor mean houses tucked in among the grander ones. Lisbon has sometimes been called "The Sultana of the West," and the comparison is apt enough, for like many a sultana her first appearance is ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... hazards of life made her thoughtful. She, to whom Maggie had always seemed an old woman, was a widow, but Maggie's husband survived as a lusty invalid. And she guessed that Maggie, vilely struggling in squalor and poverty, was somehow happy in her ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings. Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry's "The Defeat of the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... and outhouses were odorously barbaric in squalor. They were in strange contrast to any of the rooms in the rabbit warren of attached dwelling-places within the Khalifa's private compound. Around the Mahdi's tomb were great splashes of human blood. On the previous ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... submittere, nec, nisi hoste caeso, exuere votivum obligatumque virtuti oris habitum. Super sanguinem et spolia revelant frontem, seque tum demum pretia nascendi retulisse, dignosque patria ac parentibus ferunt. Ignavis et imbellibus manet squalor. Fortissimus quisque ferreum insuper annulum (ignominiosum id genti) velut vinculum gestat, donec se caede hostis absolvat. Plurimis Chattorum hic placet habitus. Jamque canent insignes, et hostibus simul suisque ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... off the moment she had ascertained that her friends were aware of her presence and situation. What to her had been the kindness of her clerical friend, or the stories brought to her from her early home, or the dirt and squalor of the life which she was leading? The moment that there was a question of bringing her back to the decencies of the world, she escaped from her friends and hurried back to the pollution which, no doubt, had charms for her. He had allowed himself ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... vividly. There is the death of the cobbler's baby which starves at the starving mother's breast which the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his art is not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the whole tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of fact, but he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna, in the allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he begins to teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them hear him gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but none intelligently. He ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... much so that in many cases the doors cannot be opened at all. There is an air of decay and sadness in many of these quarters, for these half ruinous houses, once the palaces of the Memluks, are now the habitations of the lowest of the people, and poverty and squalor reign where once had been gaiety and the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... earth—a Utopia such as More never dreamed of, nor Plato, nor Bellamy, nor Campanella in his City of the Sun. Each hand would be at its own work; each eye would be upon its own task; each foot would be in the right path. All the fear, the weariness, the squalor, and the unrest of life would be done away. The life of each man would be a life of contentment, and of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... at first. He arrived in inclement weather, and it was some weeks before he became accustomed to the climatic conditions—so different from any northern atmosphere. He hated the filth of the much-neglected city, the squalor of its lower classes, the narrowness of its streets, and the peculiar pavement, which, as he says makes walking in Rome a penitential pilgrimage. He goes to the carnival, and his penetrating glance proves it to be a ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... expectations of Alexandria from books of travels, which describe it as one of the most wretched places imaginable, I was agreeably disappointed by the reality. My own experience of Mohammedan cities had taught me to anticipate much more of squalor and dilapidation than I saw; though I confess, that both were sufficiently developed to strike an European eye. We wended our way through avenues ancle-deep in sand, and flanked on either side with various descriptions of native houses, some mere sheds, and others of more lofty and solid ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... death of shame and anguish, perhaps an eternity of horrible despair. Learn something of the days they are forced to spend, that they may pander to the worst instincts of your degraded nature; days of squalor and drunkenness, disease and dirt; gin at morning, noon, and night; eating infection, horrible madness, and sudden death at the end. Can you ever hope for salvation and the light of God's presence, while the cry of the souls of which you have been the murderer—yes, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... rentals. Close by she built Columbia Market, costing over a million dollars, intended for the convenience of small dealers and people in that locality, where clean, healthful food could be procured. She opened a museum and reading-room for the neighborhood, and brought order and taste out of squalor ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... each! What, then, must become of clumsy and inferior work-women? Think of it long and patiently, till you come to see, as she bids you, the true relation between the idleness of women and money in the Fifth Avenue and the hunted squalor of women without money at the Five Points. Women of Boston, the parallel stands good for you. Listen, and you may hear the dull murmur of your own "Black Sea," as it ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... element is not noticeable in the home life of the common people, as they are rapt in their work, very industrious and get their pleasure talking to their ever present babies, or tending some little plants, even if squalor surrounds them. But the word of the ones higher up is absolute law to them. Discipline is supreme from the time the small boy is taught the "Goose Step," preparatory to his military training, until he obediently marries the girl his parents have selected for him. He does what he is told without ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... English-like parks and fine chteaux of rich manufacturers; but contrasted with these nothing like abject poverty. The houses of working-folk are clean, each with its flower-garden, the children are neatly dressed, no squalor or look of discontent to be seen anywhere. Every hamlet has its beautiful spire, whilst the country is the fairest, richest conceivable; in the woods is seen every variety of fir and pine, mingled with the lighter foliage of chestnut and acacia, whilst every orchard has its walnut and ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... covers: there was a quality in the writer's mind like that fervid, all-vivifying sunshine which so illumines the cities of the desert, so steeps the pavements, so soaks through the pores of solids, so sharpens angles and softens curves, as Fromentin tells us, that even squalor borrows brilliant dyes, and rags and filth lighten into picturesque and burnished glory. And this is well for the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and sights abound in everything; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... population of Virginia was at least 4000, the tobacco fields were flourishing and lucrative, durable houses had been built and made comfortable with furniture brought from England, and the old squalor was everywhere giving way to thrift. The area of colonization was pushed up the James ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... foretold us that erelong With faith in God unshaken Shall all our nation stand in song, And church, home, school, awaken, In Norway's song, In gladness' song, In glory of the Lord's own song, From life's low squalor taken. ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... to follow on into the grandeurs of Louis XIV, if one hopes to find an advance there in truth-telling architecture. At the end of that splendid official success the squalor of Versailles was unspeakable, its stenches unbearable. In spite of its size the Palace was known as the most comfortless house in Europe. After the death of its owner society, in a fit of madness, plunged into the rocaille. When the restlessness of ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... yonder, who wondered at their patient toiling, but who, like them, had his Yesterday, To-day and To-morrow. There they were, perched high up on the bleak mountain sides, with their joys and sorrows, their pains and penalties, struggling along in domestic squalor, and rearing young ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Shame': one enterprising author even thought of going to law about it as a question of copyright. Owners of noisome lanes in the East End trembled in their shoes, and sent their agents to inquire into the precise degree of squalor to be found in the filthy courts and alleys where they didn't care to trust their own sensitive aristocratic noses. It even seemed as if a little real good was going to come at last out of Ernest Le Breton's impassioned pleading—as if the sensation were going to fall not quite flat at the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... room, tenanted by the first fairy day-dreams of his genius, the day-school, where the master had already formed a good opinion of his parts, giving him Goldsmith's "Bee" as a keepsake. This pleasant land he left for a dingy house in a dingy London suburb, with squalor for companionship, no teaching but the teaching of the streets, and all around and above him the depressing hideous atmosphere of debt. With what inimitable humour and pathos has he told the story of these darkest days! Substitute John Dickens for ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps, wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating, turning beauty into ashes, and worse! That divine mechanics should thus, through selfishness and avarice, be leagued with filth and squalor and ugliness! When one looks upon Raglan, indignation rises—not at the storm of iron which battered its walls to powder, hardly even at the decree to level them with the dust, but at the later destroyer who could desecrate the beauty yet left by wrath and fear, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... until he stood again in his own home that Kittrell felt the physical effects which the spiritual squalor of such a scene was certain to produce in a nature ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... relief to be out in the purring night sounds. He had passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled occasionally ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... manner. In a moment poor Jessie's eyes and brain were as wide awake and alert as fear could force them. That dreaded voice would rouse her from the sleep of death almost, she thought. Shaking with cold and dread, she followed him along the lighted platform, and out into the gloom and squalor ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... gentleman of that day advises him to wash his hands every day and his face almost as often! In the monasteries bathing was permitted only to invalids and the very old. Perfume was used copiously, and filth and squalor abounded. This even in royal circles. Among the common ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... grimy houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the Opera House, where that same port-hole gave me a view of quite another soft ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... naturally and perhaps inevitably in an age where national life has degenerated into materialism and squalor, and the artist feels himself a stranger in a world of Philistines, we need not here pause to examine and criticise. It has been mentioned merely to illustrate by contrast the Greek view, which was diametrically ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... princes goes for an afternoon into the slums in East London, everybody says, and says deservedly, 'right!' and 'princely!' This prince has learned pity in 'the huts where poor men lie,' and knows by experience all their squalor and misery. The Man Jesus is the sympathetic Priest. The Rabbis, who did not usually see very far into the depth of things, yet caught a wonderful glimpse when they said: 'Messias will be found sitting outside the gate of the city amongst the lepers.' That is where He sits; and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... corn laws that did it, one could stand it, but to think that such a state of things always goes on is something fearful. You know I'm a country-bred man myself, and ain't used to the town, or to such awful sights of squalor. It almost made me weep, I do assure you. One room that I looked into had a mother and two children in it, and I declare to you that the little boy was going about stark naked, and his sister was only ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... of one who was bound upon some especial errand. Clerks looked idly at her from open shop doors, and from windows above; and when she entered the marine region of Water Street, the heavy stores and large houses, which here and there were covered with a dull grime, as if the squalor within had exuded through the dingy red bricks, seemed to glare at her unkindly, and sullenly ask why youth, and beauty, and cleanly modesty should insult with sweet contrast that ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... before the search was concluded. The detectives, accustomed as they were to visit the worst slums of London, were horrified at the crowding, the squalor, and the misery of ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney's Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, and his home ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... she said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied—or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... anxiety. As Colonel Carmichael expressed it, it would have been safer to have stirred up a hornet's nest than to attempt any vital reform in the native quarters; and he was firmly convinced that the inhabitants of the Bazaar would cling to their dirt and squalor with the same tenacity with which they clung to their religion. When the first batch of native workers, under the direction of a European overseer, set out on the task of constructing new and sanitary quarters half a mile outside Marut, he announced that it was no more than the calm before the ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... back along Market Street his heart danced within him. Neither mud nor darkness, neither the squalor of the streets, nor the penetrating damp of the air, affected him at all. The crowd, the rush of life about him, the gas in the shops, the wares on which it shone, the endless faces passing him, the sense of hurry, of business, of quick living—he ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... vigorous and indignant minds who find in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of Oscar Wilde's writings shows that ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... window, in the street called Cossitollah, flows all the motliness of a Calcutta thoroughfare in two counter-setting currents;— one Chowriagee-ward, in the direction of Nabob magnificence and grace; the other toward the Cooly squalor and deformity of the Radda Bazaar;— and as, in the glare of the early forenoon sun, the shadows of the hither or thither passing throngs fall straight across the way, from the Parsee's godown, over against me, to the gate of the pucca house wherein my look-out is, I watch with interest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... as I might. We come to things slowly here in Washington. We are conservative, and we have no great industrial problems, no strikes and unions and things like that. Grace says that there is plenty here to reform, but the squalor doesn't stick right out before your eyes as it does in some of the dreadful tenements in the bigger cities. So we forget—and I have forgotten. Until your letter came about that boy in ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... changed her mind and gave freer scope to her natural good taste and love of what was becoming. And the result showed the wisdom of the change, for the children and inmates of the dens she visited, accustomed only to the squalor and ugliness of their surroundings, hailed her more rapturously than they had done before, and were never weary of talking of the beautiful woman who was not afraid to wear her pretty clothes into their wretched houses, which, lest she should soil and ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... the doors from which the Pope would issue, when he rose from his siesta to take the cool of evening in those airy colonnades. How impossible it is to realise that scene amid this solitude! The palazzo still belongs to the Piccolomini family. But it has fallen into something worse than ruin—the squalor of half-starved existence, shorn of all that justified its grand proportions. Partition-walls have been run up across its halls to meet the requirements of our contracted modern customs. Nothing remains of the original decorations ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald head with a red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of the dog, the squalor of that fly-blown cuddy which was the only shrine of his memory, threw a veil of inexpressibly mean pathos over Brierly's remembered figure, the posthumous revenge of fate for that belief in his own splendour which had almost cheated his life of its legitimate terrors. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... him, open your eyes in wonder at that secret self which smoulders in him, sometimes under the everyday respectability and tranquillity of a man like me—sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am—but judge us not! In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice—the long luxury of your own freedom has made you incapable of doing us ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... fiery-hearted presence everywhere. Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things, Sends the same silver dews Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies On some poor collier-hamlet—(mound on mound Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk Sullenly smoking over a row Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings Of hurtling, tipping trams) - As on the amorous nightingales ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... men. Similarly you have it that all triangles are equal, if that is a proposition of any value. But men as individuals are not all equal. One is stronger in body, another more able in mind: one predisposed to virtue, another to vice: one born in affluence and honour, another in squalor. Not men in the abstract, but living men, start at different points of vantage, and the distance between them widens as they run the race of life. We may lay it down as an axiom, in diametric opposition to Rousseau, that inequalities are ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... expressing our enthusiasm in a court where the living green combined with age to glorify the buildings. We did not see the dilapidation, we did not smell the dirt, we did not feel the squalor. A woman was lighting a fire in a brazier on her doorstep. She looked hostilely at us. We beamed in counteraction. She looked more hostilely. As the Artist wanted to sketch her house, some words seemed necessary. I detailed our emotions. Was not her lot, ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... noblest and most beautiful living creatures have been ruthlessly pressed; a world where nothing great has been or can be; a world doomed by its mere physical conditions to eternal poverty, discomfort, and squalor. For green fields he has snow and reindeer moss: for singing birds and flowers, the ptarmigan and the tundra. How can he ever form any fitting conception of the glory of life—of the means by which animal ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... her. He was very old indeed. His time-ravaged features were lean and ascetic. His clay-matted hair was streaked with white; his black eyes were deep-sunk and his temples were hollow. But there was a fine sort of dignity about the old medicine-man, despite his squalor. He gazed on Rhoda in silence for some time. Alchise and Cesca sat on the floor, and little by little they were joined by a dozen other Indians who formed a circle about the girl. The firelight flickered on the dark, intent faces and on Rhoda's delicate beauty as she ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... on her breast, her eyes half closed, muttering between her teeth something resembling a prayer. She paid no attention to us, and after a moment we went out. We entered two or three other huts and found the same poverty and squalor. The men did not follow us about, but the women—the whole tribe, I think—marched step by step behind us, touching our dresses, our capuches, our jewelry, and asking for everything; and I felt well content ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... sensation." All I can say is, that having escaped a "dhrouning" in the river when in Galway in 1873, I have visited many countries and seen much filth and misery, but I have seen nothing approaching the sad squalor of the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent institution all possible credit for a spirit of improvement manifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation. I have tramped the Eighth Ward ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... so much as our journey yesterday. Getting clear at last of the smells, smoke, noise, and squalor of Greenock, to plunge into the very heart of the Highland hills, robed as they were in the sunshine of a beautiful summer day, was enough to make one beside oneself with delight, and the Icelander enjoyed ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great city, fails to grasp or comprehend ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Middle Class potentates; and this portion is naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there is that vast portion of the Working Class which, raw and undeveloped, has long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born right of doing as he likes. To this vast residuum we give the name of 'Populace.'" In thus dividing the nation, he is careful ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... Franklin Street, in apartments not altogether sumptuous, yet sufficiently so for my purposes,—to wit, to sit in and to sleep in; and inasmuch as I took my meals amid the gilded splendors of the big saloon on the corner of Broadway, I was not disposed to reproach myself with squalor. Yet the articles of furniture in my room were so far removed, separately or in the aggregate, from anything like the superfluous, that when I calmly deliberated what to part with, there was nothing which struck me as a luxury ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature—namely, its ineffectiveness. But though she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her book leaves the impression of confident familiarity with this kind of life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... we stood in the street in the midst of a mighty crowd, The sound of its mingled murmur in the heavens above was loud, And earth was foul with its squalor—that stream of every day, The hurrying feet of labour, the faces worn and grey, Were a sore and grievous sight, and enough and to spare had I seen Of hard and pinching want midst our quiet fields and green; But all was nothing to this, the London ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris |
