"Threadbare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... make her money last her till the end of the month. The slightest expenditure had to be debated; the very butter had to be spread thinly on the children's bread; and they had to continue wearing their blouses till they were well-nigh threadbare. To increase the embarrassment they grew every year, and cost more money. It had been necessary to send the three boys to a little school at Janville, which was as yet but a small expense. But would it not be necessary to send them the following ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the rich molding of the Jacobean mantel had fallen away, and patches of the key pattern bordering the panels beneath it had broken off, though he decided that a clever cabinet-maker could have repaired the damage in a day. There were one or two choice rugs on the floor, but they were threadbare; the heavy hangings about the inner doors were dingy and moth-eaten; and, though all this was in harmony with the drowsy quietness and the faint smell of ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... adores and cultivates, especially during the carnival. The man in whom poor Agathe thought she recognized her son was astride the last two classes of poverty. She saw the ragged neck-cloth, the scurfy hat, the broken and patched boots, the threadbare coat, whose buttons had shed their mould, leaving the empty shrivelled pod dangling in congruity with the torn pockets and the dirty collar. Scraps of flue were in the creases of the coat, which showed plainly the dust that filled it. The man drew from the pockets of his seam-rent ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... widow had sold her mortgaged place and moved to the Pacific Coast. She had invested the few hundreds left her in some river-bottom lots at Verden and had later discovered that an unscrupulous real estate dealer had unloaded upon her worthless property. The patched and threadbare clothes of the boy told him that from a worldly point of view the affairs of the Farnums were at ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... life,— people with whom the loss of a mere article of wearing apparel is more important than a national difficulty—people who devote all their faculties to social schemes of self-aggrandisement—people who discuss trifles till discussion is worn threadbare, and ears are tired and brain is weary—people who, assuming to be religious and regular church-goers, yet do the meanest things, and have no scruple in playing the part of tale-bearer and mischief-maker, setting themselves deliberately to break ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... he loathed the goings on at Havana, how hateful he found the Spaniards, and how villainous the American hotel-keepers. His superlatives of censure were in such constant employment that they began to have a threadbare sound before he left us; and as he has it in prospective to run the gantlet of all the inn-keepers on the continent of Europe, to say nothing of farther lands, where inn-keepers would be a relief, there is no knowing what exhaustion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... she, in some way which he could not exactly define, made him feel that he must defer the thing to him so important, and talk on other subjects. There was one theme on which she was always eager to talk and to get him to talk, and to her it never grew stale or threadbare. It was about what he and she had learned or could remember of the book of heaven, and the good ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... another hour or more," answered Roger, a sturdy blue-eyed boy, apparently a year or two younger than Stephen Battiscombe, and of the same station in life; but his dress, though of gayer colours and less precise cut than that of his friend, was somewhat threadbare, and put on as if he had not troubled himself much about the matter. "See, I have been studying the art of navigation, and begin to hope that I shall be able to sail a ship through distant seas as well as Drake or Cavendish, or Sir Martin Frobisher, or Sir Richard Grenville, ...
— Roger Willoughby - A Story of the Times of Benbow • William H. G. Kingston
... downstairs again, clean-shaven and wearing his Sunday suit of threadbare sea-cloth, he found the Penhaligon children seated at the board, already plying their spoons in bowls of bread-and-milk. As a rule, like other healthy children, they ate first and talked afterwards. But to-day, with War in the air, they chattered, stirring the sop around and ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... would bear to hear an advocate introducing himself with a tedious preface about the infirmities of his constitution? Yet that is the threadbare exordium of Corvinus. We have five books against Verres [a]. Who can endure that vast redundance? Who can listen to those endless arguments upon points of form, and cavilling exceptions [b], which we find in the orations of the same celebrated advocate for ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least distrusted in this connection. This, however, must surely be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... judges: "You know," said they, "Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who is the admiration of all Greece. In what a condition do you think his family is in at his house, when you see him appear in public in such a threadbare cloak? Is it not probable that one who, out of doors, goes thus exposed to the cold, must want food and other necessaries at home? Callias, the wealthiest of the Athenians, does nothing to relieve either him or his wife and children in their poverty, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... began to look threadbare at the seams; his shirt front was hidden underneath a large tie, his trousers were frayed. It was an undeniable fact that the porters at the office looked down on him on account of ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... their stage curtain consists of a large piece of threadbare sackcloth pasted over with tricolored paper on which they have painted the national coat of arms. Their wardrobe too is of the very simplest description. When they play a piece in which kings and queens appear, they borrow the gold bespangled dresses of the rich Servian women of ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... brow, pregnant with brain, his bushy eyebrows and deep blue-grey eyes, his aquiline nose and flowing beard, gave an Olympian cast to his noble head. Withal, I could not help noticing that his countenance was lined with care, his black coat seamed and threadbare, his hands rough and horny, like those of a workman. If he appeared a god, it was a god in exile or disgrace; a Saturn rather than ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... whiteness of his features. His clothes were of the fashion of those good people called 'Friends,' and had served long as his 'Sunday best' before being degraded to daily duty. They were of plain brown, and, though not shabby, were worn and threadbare, and of decidedly economical appearance. Everything about him, indeed, wore an economical look. His scant coat tails, narrow pants, and short waistcoat showed that the cost of each inch of material had been counted, while his thin hair, brushed carefully over his bald head, had not a lock to spare; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... restless weight of him all those many nights through which he had lain wakeful, in impotent mutiny against the outrageous circumstances that made him a prisoner there. Its walls had muted the sighs in which the desires of youth had been spent. Its floor matting was worn threadbare with the impatient pacings of his feet (four strides from door to window: swing and repeat ad libitum). Its solitary gas-jet had, with begrudged illumination, sicklied o'er the pages of those innumerable borrowed books with which he had sought to ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... confessed to himself that, latterly, he had a little dreaded her return as an interruption; he had shivered at the thought that their relations would become what was so terribly called an "intrigue" or "affair." There would be all the threadbare and common stratagems, the vulgarity of secret assignations, and an atmosphere suggesting the period of Mr. Thomas Moore and Lord Byron an "segars." Lucian had been afraid of all this; he had feared lest love itself should ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... taken her old threadbare clothes away with her in the box, when the angry landlady had insisted on his leaving the house. "I want to look at them sometimes," the poor girl had said, "and think how much better off I am now." In those miserable rags she had fled from ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... the floor between two tiger-skins where the matting was a little threadbare. Messengers, orderlies or servants always stood on that spot. After a moment, however, Kirby's servant brought ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... remarkable of these men in dress and appearance, resembled the merchant or shopkeeper of the period. His jerkin, hose, and cloak were of a dark uniform colour, but worn so threadbare that the acute young Scot conceived that the wearer must be either very rich or very poor, probably the former. The fashion of the dress was close and short, a kind of garment which was not then held decorous among gentry, or even the superior class of citizens, ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... gray-green water—in constant expectation that she would come to him. His imperial regalia had been discarded, for the stick and cap had never gone down into the depths with him, and the paper stars had of course been dissolved by the water. He sat there now in his old threadbare coat with two empty hands. But there was no longer anything pretentious or ludicrous about him; now he was only ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... wandered over desolate moors and on lonely ridges. They suffered hunger, weariness, sickness, exposure. The rains of summer drenched them and the snows of winter stiffened them. They were clothed with plaids, shawls, and threadbare garments. They hastened from place to place to elude pursuers, and wherever they went they carried their Bibles. The Bible to them in their desolation was meat, drink, light, shelter, fellowship,—everything the ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... a vigorous and pleasing style, and his facile pen has obviously been made expert by much use. In dealing with some of the more threadbare problems, such as the drink question and the sporting mania, he brings considerable novelty and freshness to their treatment, and when fairly roused he hits out at social abuses with a vigour and indignant sincerity which are very refreshing to the jaded reader ...He has ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... are we coming?" she gasped between breaths, clasping her hands and glancing heavenward. "Do such dresses grow upon bushes that they are so easily obtained? Doubtless," she concluded with withering sarcasm, "when they are worn threadbare as they soon will be owing to such constant usage, you will purchase others with those golden pesos which you earned ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in. I WAS angry,—not because I was to have been cheated, for I been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared attempt on me such a threadbare, ragged, shoddy trick as that. Do I LOOK like a rough-hewn, unseasoned backwoodsman? Have I the air of never having read a newspaper? Is there a patent innocence of eye-teeth in my demeanor? O Jeru! Jeru! Somewhere in your virtuous ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... be the old fellow, the warm-hearted old man himself come to fetch her! She entered the big ugly room, with its dingy wall-paper and threadbare carpet, its oleographs in tarnished frames, its ancient centre ottoman, its elderly piano and unsafe, uncertain chairs. How she hated this room, where of evenings the 'paying guests' ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare—and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... which, he explained to his hosts, was not so much a luxury as a necessity owing to his having to address at three o'clock precisely a committee of ladies who were meeting in Portman Square to discuss the dreadful condition of the London streets, he laid a fatherly arm on the Missioner's threadbare cassock. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... be Orsino speaking? 'Tis some court minion sure, some tool of office, Some threadbare muse pensioned to praise the throne; This cannot be the man whose burning ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... little room with a threadbare carpet, yet it wore an air of adventure somehow. The lamp shade had a daring tilt to it; the blind had been run up askew; and the red table cover had been pushed back to make room for a mound of books. Harry's bed looked as though he had been having a pillow fight. Surely ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... then picked up the tatters of his threadbare comic speech. Speed, munching a stale sandwich, came strolling over to where I stood sponging out my horse's ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... like the professionally comic man all the world over, these individuals are popularly supposed to be invariably amusing, and a loud guffaw goes up whenever they open their mouths, no matter what the words that issue from them. Most of his hearers had heard his threadbare old jokes any time these twenty years, but the ready laughter greeted each of them in turn, as though they were newly born into the world. A Malay does not understand that a joke may pall from repetition, and is otherwise liable to be driven into the ground. He will ask for ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... black, or rather grey cure's frock, which fell from his shoulders down to his heels, and was fastened round his body with a black belt—this garment was much the worse for wear, for Father Jerome had now been deprived of his income for some twelve months; but he was no whit ashamed of his threadbare coat, he rather gloried in it, and could not be induced by the liberal offers of his more wealthy friends to ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... hall, the dean of studies was in the act of escaping from the student with whom he had been conversing. He stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding his head ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... his venison when he had it—his present saveloy was equally at your service. He must have been remarkably attached to facetious elderly poultry of the masculine gender, as his invariable salute to the tenants of his "heart's core" was, "How are you, my jolly old cock?" Coats became threadbare, and defunct trousers vanished; waistcoats were never replaced; gossamers floated down the tide of Time; boots, deprived of all hope of future renovation by the loss of their soles, mouldered in obscurity; but the clear voice and chuckling salute were changeless ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... attended, to present myself to the Emperor. They made me wait in his saloon on the ground floor. The striped silk hangings were half worn out and faded; the carpet was threadbare, and patched in several places; a few shabby arm chairs completed the furniture of the apartment. I thought upon the splendour of the imperial palaces, and I drew a deep and melancholy sigh. The Emperor arrived: he had assumed a degree of calmness in his manner, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... of the series, however, 'Retirement,' showed that Cowper had a more characteristic and solacing message to mankind than a mere rehearsal of the threadbare denunciations of luxury. The 'Task' revealed his genuine power. There appeared those admirable delineations of country scenery and country thoughts which Sainte-Beuve detaches so lovingly from the mass of serious speculation in which they are embedded. What ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... strain. There were even times when she felt a breakdown to be inevitable, and only the thought of her step-mother's triumph warded it off. Once down, and she knew she would be a slave, broken beyond redemption to the most pitiless tyranny. And so, though her strength was worn threadbare through perpetual strain, she clung to it still. If only—oh, if only—Guy would write! If he should be ill—if he should fail her—she felt that it would be the end of everything. For nothing ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... Passy," as Strindberg's own chronicle of those times reads. There he took his walks in the deserted arcades of the empty Trocadero Palace, back of which he lived; went to the Theatre Francais, where he saw the great success of the day, and was startled that "an undramatic bagatelle with threadbare scenery, stale intrigues and superannuated theatrical tricks, could be playing on the foremost stage of the world;" saw at the Palais de l'Industrie the triennial exhibition of art works, "the creme de la creme of three salons, and found not one work of consequence." After ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... perplexing contradictions. For the most part it spoke of unmistakable though decent poverty. It was nearly bare of furniture, and what little there was was of the cheapest—a small kitchen table and three Windsor chairs (two of them with arms); a threadbare string carpet on the floor, and a cheap cotton cloth on the table; these, with a set of bookshelves, frankly constructed of grocer's boxes, formed the entire suite. And yet, despite its poverty, the place exhaled an air of homely if ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... that had covered many a limb besides their own; others, slops and galligaskins; while the poorer sort were robed in rusty gowns of tuft-mockado or taffeta, once guarded with velvet or lined with skins, but now tattered and threadbare. Their caps and bonnets were as varied as their apparel,—some being high-crowned, some trencher-shaped, and some few wide in the leaf and looped at the side. Moreover, there was every variety of villainous aspect; the savage scowl of the desperado, the cunning ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... splitter—with a brood of ten children to grow fat or go hungry on the venture—labouring without sleep and by the light of a flaring torch, had stabbed his right hand with a fish bone. The old, old story—now so sadly threadbare to me—of ignorance and uncleanliness! The hand was swollen to a wonderful size and grown wonderful angry—the man gone mad of pain—the crew contemplating forcible amputation with an axe. Wonderful sad the mail-boat doctor wasn't nowhere near! Wonderful sad if Bill Sparks must lose ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... as he had known it from childhood; a hard brass bed, white painted chest-of-drawers and wash-hand-stand, threadbare green carpet, flowered and festooned pink-and-white wall-paper. (It must have been renewed in twenty-five years, but the pattern was the same.) There was an oak-framed "Light of the World" over the bed, supplemented ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... uniqueness of the solitary position which the Serbian awarded her by singling her out for a sympathetic response? Could it be that a vague pity had stirred him, too? Had things reached a point where her loneliness showed through the threadbare indifference of her glance? In short, had both men been won to gallantry by her distress? In one case, at least, she decided that there was a reasonable chance to doubt. And that doubt quickened her pulse like ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... dilemma there was but one escape. Behind the evicted tenantry were the sheep-walks; before them was the open sea. Few herrings came to the net; the bannock meal was low; the tartan threadbare. In their utter hopelessness they listened to the good news which came of a land beyond the {14} Atlantic where there was plenty and to spare. It is small wonder that as the ships moved westward they carried with them the destitute Highlander, ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... headgear, in caps flat or pointed like the small end of a watermelon, and with ears protected by black woolen shawls ungracefully pinned. Serviceable man's boots do more than peep out from beneath the short, rusty-black skirts. Each monk and nun holds a small pad of threadbare black velvet, whereon a cross of tarnished gold braid, and a stray copper or two, by way of bait, explain the eleemosynary significance of the bearers' "broad" crosses, dizzy "reverences to the girdle," and muttered entreaty, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... over and over the subject, until to Helen it seemed threadbare, and they sat now in the dusky library, with long stretches of ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... for a moment. Her great, dark eyes were fixed upon the threadbare carpet. What he told her was disconcerting, yet, knowing instinctively, as she did, how passionately Walter loved her, she could not bring herself to believe that he was ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... doctor at least a dozen times. Although held in great respect by the settlers, Critchel was what might be called a shabby-looking little man, for his raiment consisted of a brown coat, which he had worn threadbare, a pair of greasy pantaloons that were in shreds at the bottom, a spotted vest, and a Spitlesfield neckerchief. Indeed, he was as antique in his dress as in his ideas of the science of medicine. ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... am sure that she had no head for figures; you have only got to read Chaucer's description of her to know that she was not a mathematician. Besides the nuns were exaggerating: their clothes were not in holes, only just a little threadbare. Madame Eglentyne was far too fastidious to allow ragged clothes about her; and as to the roof of the church, she had meant to save enough money to have some tiles put on to it, but it really was very hard to make two ends meet ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... to be living amid such squalor?" said he, and he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier bereft of its gilding, the threadbare carpet, the very rags of wealth which made the large room, with its red, white, and gold, look like a corpse ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... fatigue-dress, and the musket between his legs was one of those pieces that government furnishes to the troops of the line. The man in the middle of the boat could no more be mistaken than he in its bows. Each might be said to be in uniform—the well-worn, nay, almost threadbare black coat of the "minister," as much denoting him to be a man of peace, as the fatigue-jacket into "batteries"; to all of which innovations, bad as they may be, and useless and uncalled for, and wanton ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... bracken wildernesses in which the does lurked with the young fawns, and a hollow, shallow and wide, with the turf greatly attacked by rabbits, and exceptionally threadbare, where a stricken oak, lightning-stripped, spread out its ghastly arms above contorted rotting branches and the mysterious skeletons of I should think five several deer. In the evening-time the woods behind this ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... At first the planters foreboded universal ruin; but soon they resolved that the act should recoil on England, and began to be proud of frugality; articles of luxury of English manufacture were banished, and threadbare coats were most in fashion. A large and embarrassing provincial debt enforced the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... whole weight of his influence against the amendment, lest it might hurt the Republican party; just as Mr. Choate did in this one, lest it might hurt the party and himself. Significant answers to the threadbare assertion that ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of the waking hours, the passing and repassing of market-gardeners' wagons, omnibuses, drays loaded with old iron, soon chop it and rend it and scatter it. Each passer-by carries away a little of it on a threadbare coat, a worn muffler, or coarse gloves rubbing against each other. It drenches the shivering blouses, the waterproofs thrown over working dresses; it blends with all the breaths, hot with insomnia or alcohol, buries itself in the depths of empty stomachs, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... ask you, O men of the time, bent upon pleasure, who attend the balls and the opera and who, upon retiring this night, will seek slumber with the aid of some threadbare blasphemy of old Voltaire, some sensible satire by Paul Louis Courier, or some essay on economics, you who dally with the cold substance of that monstrous water-lily that Reason has planted in the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... lady loves a rainy day? She loves a rainy day who sweeps the hearth, And threads the busy needle, or applies The scissors to the torn or threadbare sleeve; And blesses God that she has ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... from miles around to see the novelty. The audiences were cold but respectful and, as a rule, she was treated decently by the county papers. Occasionally a smart editor would get off the joke about her relationship to Mark Antony, which even then had become threadbare, and invariably the articles would begin, "While we do not agree with the theories which the lady advocates." Most of them, however, paid high tribute to her ability as a speaker and to the clearness, logic and force of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... his meager resources to the least strain possible, Dennis at last succeeded in securing, in one of the more pretentious stores on Baxter Street, a contrivance for the relief of penury and threadbare gentility known at that time by the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... this that a middle-aged man, of somewhat threadbare appearance and restricted travelling conveniences, was seen carefully tying his horse at the outer enclosure of an elegant mansion in the town of ——, in one of our Western States; which being done, he eyed the house rather inquisitively, as people ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... enjoyed opposing their exclusive pretensions while he himself reclined on the "soft pillow of doubt." But only intelligent minds could delight in doubt or surrender to it; the masses wanted certainties. There was nothing to revive confidence in the power of a decrepit and threadbare science. No great discovery transformed the conception of the universe. Nature no longer betrayed her secrets, the earth remained unexplored and the past inscrutable. Every branch of knowledge was forgotten. The world cursed with sterility, could but repeat ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... of medium height, and apparently over sixty years old. His beard and mustache were gray. He wore a black slouch-hat and a Prince Albert coat, threadbare and shiny, but neatly brushed. He stepped briskly ashore, with shoulders well set back. His dark eyes carried a suggestion of melancholy, and his face ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... running across, when examined closely, were some dark fibres so long and fine that surely they must have come from the tail of Solomon's favourite black stallion itself. But the strangest thing about that carpet was its pattern. It was threadbare enough to all conscience in places, yet the design still lived in solemn, age-wasted hues, and, as I dragged it to my stove-front and spread it out, it seemed to me that it was as much like a star map done by a scribe who had lately ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... not a feminist theory but a financial condition that confronted us. My done-over trousseau would not last forever, nor would Carl's present intellectual wardrobe, which was becoming threadbare. Travel abroad and foreign study are just as necessary for an American scholar as foreign buying is for an ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... "The Skipper and his Boy," etc. These are all beautiful in their way, but with repetition pall upon one somewhat, while your jovial song seems ever fresh, and will stand singing many times before it becomes threadbare. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... conclusion to which you would probably have come if you had entered his sitting-room, where the bare tables, the large old-fashioned horse-hair chairs, and the threadbare Turkey carpet perpetually fumigated with tobacco, seemed to tell a story of wifeless existence that was contradicted by no portrait, no piece of embroidery, no faded bit of pretty triviality, hinting of taper-fingers ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to the periodic physical examination of teachers that will give timely warning of attention needed. Until there is some system for giving this right to all teachers in private, parochial, charitable, and public schools, we shall produce many nervous, acrid, and physically threadbare teachers, where we should have only teachers who inspire their pupils with a passion for health by the example of a good complexion, sprightly step, bounding vitality, and forceful ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... little old piano? And the carved mahogany davenport? And the sewing-table, ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, that stood always by the south window? And the quaint old engravings and colored prints? All these were gone. Instead of the threadbare Brussels carpet patterned with huge bouquets of flowers, there was a striped rag carpet. There were a few rush-bottomed chairs, a box draped with red calico on which stood a water-bucket and a wash-pan, a cook-stove before the fireplace, and in the ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... in thy threadbare Farce shall Beauties show, Shall praise thy ribald Mirth, and maudlin Woe; Praise ev'n thy imitating Chaucer's Tales, And call that merry [1] Temple, Fame's Versailles: Thy [2] Shepherd-Song with Rapture they shall see, ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... this Coat can't be very old, however long I may have worn it. I'll rub on in it still; and your Mother and you will have the more Money for copper-coloured Clokes. But don't, at any Time, let your Father get shabby, Children. I would never be threadbare nor unclean. Let my Habitt be neat and spotless, my Bands well washed and uncrumpled, as becometh a Gentleman. As for my Sword in the Corner, your Mother may send that after my Medal as soon as she will. The Cid parted ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... me most a week to git this chance to see ye, Billy," the hide-out began in a faint, husky voice weakened by exposure. He glanced about him nervously, his thin body shivering under the patchwork of skins and threadbare rags that covered him. Holcomb, without a ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... office sit KNUT BROVIK and his son RAGNAR, occupied with plans and calculations. At the desk in the outer office stands KAIA FOSLI, writing in the ledger. KNUT BROVICK is a spare old man with white hair and beard. He wears a rather threadbare but well-brushed black coat, with spectacles, and a somewhat discoloured white neckcloth. RAGNAR BROVIK is a well-dressed, light-haired man in his thirties, with a slight stoop. KAIA FOSLI is a slightly built girl, a little over ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... he nice and respectable himself?" Jess inquired. "You know some of these writers are horribly poor and go about with threadbare clothes. He might not be the right sort of man for us to ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... Strongest Element in His Nature Take Advice with Candid Readiness Taking Care to Cut His Expressions Close Thought of Their Mind—articulated in His Tongue Too Silly to Require Any Sort of Notice Uncommon Power of Clear and Compact Statement Voice Shrill and Piercing Wear the Sweetest Idea Threadbare Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy They First Make Mad Widow v.s. Gen. Adams You Work and Toil and Earn ...
— Widger's Quotations from Abraham Lincoln's Writings • David Widger
... Cousin was seated within a few feet of them, at their backs, and discovered them when Margaret turned round and screamed at the boar. But he forbore to speak to them, for municipal reasons. Margaret was very plainly dressed, and Peter inclined to threadbare. So ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of the moon his dark face seemed even darker; his long, crisp, curly hair, his hat pressed down over his eyes, his black beard and moustache, his strongly aquiline nose, all proclaimed his gypsy origin. He wore a threadbare blue doublet, braided with cords, which were buttoned here and there at random, and over this was fastened some tattered ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... wood; the window-curtains were of coarse green worsted, and encrusted with dust so ancient and irremovable, that it presented almost a lava-like appearance; the carpet that had once been bright and showy, was entirely threadbare, and had become grey with age. There were several heavy mahogany arm-chairs in the room, a Pembroke table, and an immense unwieldy sideboard, garnished with a few wine-glasses of a deep blue colour. Over the lofty ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... comes in unexpected manner. We find ourselves neglected for some new-comer, thin of stuff, to-morrow threadbare; we, who are conscious all the time of a newness too well hidden, alas! a newness utterly unsuspected by our friend, and far surpassing the newness of the new one! Poetic justice too lamentable to dwell upon. But short of it, far short, our old friendships, with their safe traditions ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... soliloquizing, she had not noticed the approach of a little old man, in a faded, threadbare suit, and with a care-worn, wrinkled countenance. He stopped short when he saw that she was weeping, and in an abrupt, yet ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... precise courtliness which contrasted oddly with his boyish face (I guessed his age at nineteen or twenty), and still more oddly with his clothes, which were threadbare and patched in many places, yet with a deftness which told of a woman's care. We introduced ourselves by name, and thanked him, with some expressions of regret at inconveniencing (as I put it, at hazard) the ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Lane and came to the house. He rapped at the front door, which was opened by a tall man, with a pleasant but resolute countenance, whose clothes were plain and getting threadbare. His hair was beginning to be gray about the temples, and he wore a gray ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... specially suited to their condition, and called, by their masters, "thrift" and "industry." For this latter supposition there was no foundation: indeed, the poor wretches who were thrown out of work by the triumphant march of commerce had perforce worn thrift threadbare, and could hardly better their exploits in THAT direction; while as to those who worked in the factories, or who formed the fringe of labour elsewhere, industry was no new gospel to them, since they already worked as long as they ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... progress is the late introduction of the grape and silk-worm; and these give so much promise of success that the threadbare nobility have already begun to count their coming fortunes. Husbandry is more pastoral than agricultural. Thousands of cattle are raised on the paramos, but almost wholly for beef. "A dislike to milk (observes Humboldt), or at least the absence of its ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... eyes had taken in all the dainty details of gloves, tiny chatelaine watch, and neat school satchel out of which protruded green and brown books. With a fierce little gesture the Other Girl had slid her own hands under her threadbare jacket. They ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... dying away in the offing, while the sea-breeze had not yet set in, consequently, when the approaching craft arrived within about two miles of the river's mouth they entered a streak of glassy calm, and lay there, rolling heavily, with their sun- bleached canvas napping itself threadbare against their masts and rigging, thus affording us an excellent opportunity to get breakfast at leisure, and fortify ourselves generally against the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... century table stood a polychrome statue of Saint George treading Moors beneath his charger; and beyond was the bed, the imposing bed, a venerable family monument. Antique chairs with curved arms, the red velvet so worn and threadbare as to disclose the white woof, jostled against modern cane-bottomed chairs and the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... speaking of him as 'a deep ocean of learning and wisdom.' Even in travelling he carries nothing with him but his staff, that he might the quicker flee, or put to flight, the vulgar curious. He puts on a few extra robes, when he is going on a journey, and in time, becoming threadbare, sheds them off as the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... which made Irving's reputation was his Knickerbocker's History of New York, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a certain German scholar named ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... public life when Jimmy Grayson was a mere boy, and they could not understand how he had passed them; it was a chance, they said and believed—mere luck, not merit. Others, in a tone of patronage, told stories of the days when he was a threadbare and penniless young attorney, and they named at least five other men of his age who had been more promising. Then they depreciated his gifts, and in the same breath disclaimed all intention of doing so, believing, too, that the disclaimer was genuine. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... we Should pay—if possible—their bribes and fee. Search—as thou canst—the old and modern store Of Rome and ours, in all the witty score Thou shalt not find a rich one; take each clime, And run o'er all the pilgrimage of time, Thou'lt meet them poor, and ev'rywhere descry A threadbare, goldless genealogy. Nature—it seems—when she meant us for earth Spent so much of her treasure in the birth As ever after niggards her, and she, Thus stor'd within, beggars us outwardly. Woful profusion! at how dear a rate Are we made up! all hope of thrift and state Lost ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... than that of the poet. He requires various mechanical means and appliances for his full success. His works must be performed in order to be felt. He cannot be read, like the poet, in the closet, or in the cottage, or on the street-stall, where the threadbare student steals from day to day, as he lingers at the spot, new draughts of delicious refreshment. Few can sit down and peruse a musical composition even for its melody; and very few, indeed, can gather from the silent notes the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... threadbare poverty, and blind, Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God; High-heartedness to long repulse resign'd, Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trod The sunless skyless streets he could not see; By those faint feet ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... saint: Her soul superior flies formality; So gay her air, her conduct is so free, Some might suspect the nymph not over good— Nor would they be mistaken, if they should. Unmarried Abra puts on formal airs; Her cushion's threadbare with her constant prayers. Her only grief is, that she cannot be At once engag'd in prayer and charity. And this, to do her justice, must be said, "Who would not think that Abra was a maid?" Some ladies are too beauteous to be wed; For where's the man that's ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... settlement of evil upon enemies, and in the final expression of contempt. For to compare some worthless thing to a farthing, to a penny, or to tuppence, has no vigour left in it, and it has long been thought ridiculous even among provincials; a threadbare, worn, and worthless sort of sneer; but the thruppenny bit has a sound about it very valuable to one who would insist upon his superiority. Thus were some rebel or some demagogue of Athens (for example) to venture upon the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... mostly in a hurry, evidently with business on their hands. There were, however, a few saunterers, and they were either almost naked black aborigines, with lank hair, hideous countenances, and thin legs, or men with their hands in their pockets, in threadbare coats and uncleaned shoes, their countenances pale and dejected, and mostly marked by intemperance. Many of them were young, but there were some of all ages—broken-down gentlemen, unprepared for colonial life, without ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... perfumes make threadbare coats and rags to smell sweet, while the body of Anchises sent forth a fetid discharge, "distilling from his back on to his linen robe," so every kind of life with virtue is painless and pleasurable, whereas vice if infused into it makes ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... girl has the fortune to rouse up sentiment and to be fed. Their faces disfigured with eruptions, their thin shoulders, their dry, disordered hair—hair never looks nice unless soft with its natural oil—their dingy complexions, their threadbare shawls, tempt no one. They cannot please, therefore they ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Well, when we went on into the church, and I knelt there for a while, so struck down with joy that I couldn't stand on my feet, all those wild bursts of excitement, and incredulity and happiness, that kept surging up and drenching me . . . I had a queer feeling, that awfully threadbare feeling of having been there before, or felt that before; that it was familiar, although it was so new. Then it came to me, 'Why, I have it, what I used to pray for. Now at last I am the urn too full!' And it was true, I could feel, just as I dreamed, the upsurging of the feeling, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... told it was three miles. Being very cold, he asked permission to enter and warm himself. Assent was given very grudgingly, and both went into the kitchen. The wife looked daggers at this untimely intrusion, for the stranger had on cowhide boots, an old hat, and a threadbare, but neatly patched coat. At length she gave him a chair beside the Dutch oven which was baking nice cakes for the presiding elder, who was momentarily expected, as he was to preach the next day at the church ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... charlatans who place their services at the public disposal, whether they be Spanish Figaros or French perruqiers. At the bottom the same self-possession, the same knowledge of human weakness, the same description of threadbare witticisms, the same amusing dexterity, and, on the part of the natives, the same wide-mouth astonishment, the same curiosity, the same credulity as the simple folk of ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... for on going gaily away he had volunteered to bring a fat young pig from one of the wild herds of Hinchinbrook, and he came back empty-handed. He talks of the pig—how fat and very young it was—even to this day. He came with his life—that was all, and a threadbare sort of life it ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... of the subject has been worn threadbare, and it is useless to enter further into it here, save to remark that since the automobile is bringing about so many reforms and improvements perhaps the abolition of this species of swindling on the part of the British hotel-keeper will disappear along with ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... with what is commonly denominated a "slight stoop." His trousers were none too long for his thin legs, his tightly fitting frock coat, threadbare, shiny, and unduly creased, was hardly of a fit for his slender body and his long arms. It was his face, however, that mostly individualized ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the gray whiskers was obviously an inveterate adherent of serfdom and a devoted agriculturist, who had lived all his life in the country. Levin saw proofs of this in his dress, in the old-fashioned threadbare coat, obviously not his everyday attire, in his shrewd, deep-set eyes, in his idiomatic, fluent Russian, in the imperious tone that had become habitual from long use, and in the resolute gestures of his large, red, sunburnt hands, with an old betrothal ring on ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... Fairfax; you are one of the doubtful doctors; you love to catch credulity upon your hook. I hear fat laughter gurgling in your throat, and out bolts your threadbare simile—'Before the battle's won the Brentford hero sings Te Deum.'—But don't be wasteful of the little wit you have. Do I not tell you it is decreed? When was I posted for a vapouring Hector? What but the recollections of my ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... schoolboys playing truant, and then they disappeared under the doorway of a dilapidated house, whilst I was left wondering how two such elegant gentlemen dared be abroad in Lyons these days, seeing that every man, woman and child who was dressed in anything but threadbare clothes was sure to be insulted in the streets for an aristocrat, and as often as not summarily arrested ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy |
