"Workaday" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the subtle Ulysses' wanderings, agitated by the wrath of Olympian gods, harbouring on its isles the fury of strange monsters and the wiles of strange women; the highway of heroes and sages, of warriors, pirates, and saints; the workaday sea of Carthaginian merchants and the pleasure lake of the Roman Caesars, claims the veneration of every seaman as the historical home of that spirit of open defiance against the great waters of the earth which is the very soul of his calling. Issuing thence to the west and south, as a youth ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of 'The Nights' serves admirably as a foil to the absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being carried away from trivial and commonplace characters, scenes, and incidents; from the matter-of-fact surroundings of a workaday world, a life of eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting and loving, into a society and a mise-en-scene which we suspect can exist and which we know do not. Every man, at some turn or ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... unpretentious. There is always something, to my eye at least, that suggests opulence in the colour crimson, and the benches of the Upper Chamber are all in crimson leather, and the crimson has all the freshness which comes from rarity of use. In the House of Commons, with all its workaday and industrious life, the deep and dark green has always more or less of a worn and shabby look. In the Upper Chamber the original splendour of the crimson cloth is undimmed; for most of the benches remain void and unoccupied for ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... criticising a fellow craftsman than in any formal aesthetic pronunciamiento. We soon find out the likes and dislikes of Mr. Conrad in this particular essay, and also what might be described as the keelson of his workaday philosophy: "All adventure, all love, every success, is resumed in the supreme energy of renunciation. It is the utmost limit of our power." No wonder his tutor, half in anger, half in sorrow, exclaimed: "You are an incorrigible, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... delight. Her poor, big Danny could sit in it all day long. And from it she herself could watch the setting sun flame over the crest of the hills and the narrow river shake off its workaday dress and go racing into the shadows of the woods. Poor Moira, years of heartbreaking work and worry had not changed her very much from the girl who had liked to lie in the deep sweet grass of her dear Ireland and let her fancy follow the winging birds ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... are sad, because they are at work. Work is serious, yes; it is not sad. Very often the little ones mimic it in fun, and children's games, most times, are copies of their elders' workaday doings. ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... man, this observer of facts seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs and passions. The very courtesy of his manner, the flavour of playfulness in the voice set him apart. He was like a feather floating lightly in the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils. For this reason whenever this looker-on took contact with things he attracted attention. First, it was the Morrison partnership of mystery, then came the great ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... stowed away my emerald in my strong-box. It is built into the wall of my sitting-room, and masked by the lower part of an old carved oak bureau. I put away even the rings I wore habitually, keeping out only an inferior cat's-eye for workaday wear. I had just made all safe when Leta tapped at the door and came in to wish me good night. She looked flushed and harassed and ready to cry. "Uncle Paul," she began, "I want you to go up to town at once, and stay away till ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... and shrubs, the sun and stars, the lightning and rain,—for these to him are animate creatures. Even more than that, they are deified, therefore are revered and propitiated, since upon them man must depend for his well-being. To the workaday man of our own race the life of the Indian is just as incomprehensible as are the complexities of civilization to the ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... the camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different attitude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights would ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a theater was like wine to the Madigans. The smell of escaping gas in the dark was, in itself, enough to transport them by association of ideas out of the workaday world; and emotion due to a dramatic situation was the one evidence of sensibility they ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... the high air, with the sun, his helper, the light, his minister, the blessed soft airs, his journeymen, what time the workaday noise of the city rose and the sound of matins and vespers was in his ears, through the long ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... of dress, for it is fitting that the day of spiritual rest should lay aside the livery of the laborious week. For me, indeed, there is no labour at any time, but nevertheless does Sunday bring me repose. I share in the common tranquillity; my thought escapes the workaday world more completely ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... that; there were no varieties, no graces, no mysteries. His very interests were as meagre as his personality; he had hardly a taste, except the taste for doing his best. Books, music, pictures—all the great world of beauty and intellect that the world of goodness and workaday virtues existed, perhaps, only to make possible—its finer, more ethereal superstructure—only counted for Franklin as recreations, relaxations, things half humorously accepted as one accepts a glass of lemonade on a hot day. Not only was he without charm, but he was unaware ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... by conjecture. It is not alone that the voices of statesmen and of newspapers reach me, and that the voices of foolish and intemperate agitators do not reach me at all. Through many, many channels I have been made aware what the plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking, upon whom the chief terror and suffering of this tragic war fall. They are looking to the great, powerful, famous democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think, in their logical simplicity, that ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... against the rank and file," Messrs Bechhofer and Reckitt can only suggest vigilance committees within the Guilds. In a word, Guild Socialism seems to be a system that might possibly be worked by a set of ideally perfect beings; but as folk are in this workaday world one can only doubt whether it would be conducive either to freedom, efficiency or a pleasant life for ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... dors dans Vombre, O sacre Souvenir." If we could have remembrance now And see, as in the days to come We shall, what's venturous in these hours: The swift, intangible romance of fields at home, The gleams of sun, the showers, Our workaday contentments, or our powers To fare still forward through the uncharted haze Of present days. . . . For, looking back when years shall flow Upon this olden day that's now, We'll see, romantic in dimm'd hours, These ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Bishop. He knew that he was a saint, a man whose life had been of so absolute a purity, a simplicity, an unfaltering faith and courage, that there were no flaws to be found in him anywhere. It was possibly this very simplicity that stirred Brandon's patronage. After all, we were living in a workaday world, and the Bishop's confidence in every man's word and trust in every man's honour had been at times a little ludicrous. Nevertheless, did any one dare to attack the Bishop, he was immediately his most ardent and ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... you please, Mr. Bucket," said he. "The lady will excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room. The back is Guster's bedroom, and in it she's a-carrying on, poor thing, to a ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... one thing in all the room that looked poor, workaday. It was on the small table at the head of the bed, beside the candle-stick and match-safe, a black book, the commonest kind of Bible, such a Bible as is dispensed by those who have to furnish the sacred writings in large numbers—Sunday ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... unhappy, preventing by his very act of existence the happiness of another more equably tempered mortal! Now I believe this is the present case. Drusus, I understand, is leading a spare, joyless, workaday sort of existence, which is, or by every human law should be, to him a burden. So long as he lives, he prevents you from enjoying the means of acquiring pleasure. Now I have Socrates of imperishable memory on my side, when I assert that death ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... dropped her eyes when Clayton took her hands in adieu. "You have made me forget time, and my workaday world," he said. "I have now something to live for—to hear you sing! It seems so hard to meet only to part. I may never see your coming picture; you may never see mine again. But I cannot lose you from my life. It seemed, Fraeulein Irma," he said, earnestly, "when ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... But though fiction is undeniably stranger and more attractive than truth, yet true stories are also rather attractive and strange, now and then. And, after all, we may return once more to Fairyland, after this excursion into the actual workaday world. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... snail-shell, and that, when one reaches the top, it is the very top and end of all things. A tranquillity reigns over the tiny town which even the occasional sight of warders with their loaded rifles does not break; and the workaday world seems to have ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... girls, too, in this school which the freshman is entering. There is the student who errs on the side of leading too workaday a life, and in so doing has lost something of the buoyancy and breadth and "snap" which would make her associations and her work fresher and more vigorous. "The Grind," she has been called, and if she recognize herself in this sketch, let her take care to reach out for a bigger and fuller ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... It seems to me now like a beautiful garment put on for a holiday and worn easily and pleasantly for a time. But I've put it off now, and put on workaday clothes again. It is only a week since I left Dalveigh, but it seems long ago. Listen to the wind, Rob! It is singing of the good days to be for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... something was wrong. It was his manner, his air, that troubled her. What strange people these converts were! There was so much ardor at one time, so much chilliness at another; there was so little of that steady workaday acceptance of religious facts that ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... remains to him somewhat of a fairy-tale, a fanciful imaginative world peopled with ogres and dragons and belonging to the unreal "once upon a time" which has no connection with the ever present workaday world in which we live. Birds and squirrels, rabbits and foxes belong to this real world because he has seen them in his walks through the woods; even elephants and rhinoceroses, though his acquaintance be limited to menagerie specimens, seem fairly real—although one ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... as Parnassus came over the brow of the hill, and I saw the river in the distance once more. How different all this was from my girlhood visions of romance. That has been characteristic of my life all along—it has been full of homely, workaday happenings, and often rather comic in spite of my best resolves to be highbrow and serious. All the same I was something near to tears as I thought of the tragic wreck at Willdon and the grief-laden hearts that must be mourning. I wondered ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... thirds of Bayport would have called "dressed up." That is to say, she was wearing a simple afternoon gown instead of the workaday garb in which he had been accustomed to seeing her. It was becoming, even at the first glance he ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... of dress since 1830 were evident, but for the workaday world shirtsleeves, heavy brogan boots and shoes, and rough wool hats were, of course, the rule. Salt bacon and "greens," with corn bread and thin coffee, composed the common diet, though milk and butter relieved the monotonous ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... themselves. Those women were intellectual amazons whom naught but the writhen bolts of God could humble, whose genius flamed with a white light even through the dun clouds of lechery; but we cannot measure the workaday woman by the few "whose minds might, like the elements, furnish forth creation." A Bernhardt is great, not because of her social sin, but despite thereof. With her art is the all-in-all, sex but an incident. She is strong enough to mount the empyrean despite the lernean serpent-coil which ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... pleasant one. He leaned over the doors of the hansom resting his gloved hand upon his crutched stick. He was struck with the pride we feel when we are dressed for amusement and contemplate those in workaday garb; and in these sensations of pride he leaned forward, proud of his good looks, his shirt front, his shirt cuffs, his glazed shoes; he pleasured in the knowledge that many saw he was going to elegant company, to amusement. He was full of scorn for the women loitering, ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... of music and little time for the joy of it; but occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories. There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of these winter afternoons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... story, here, of course, one would write "Finis." But in the workaday world one never knows the ending till it comes. Had it been otherwise, I doubt I could have found courage to tell you this story of Tommy. It is not all true—at least, I do not suppose so. One drifts unconsciously a little way ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... ordered that my literary output be sent in bulk to him. His action was exasperating, but later I realized that he had done me a great favor when he interposed his judgment between my red-hot mentality and the cool minds of the workaday world. Yet this interference with what I deemed my rights proved to be the first step in the general overruling of them by tactless attendants and, in particular, ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... Orion," said Thirlstone musingly. "I like that idea. Good or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in our daily practice. Every man is always making fancies about himself; but it is never his workaday self, but something else. The bank clerk who pictures himself as a financial Napoleon knows that his own thin little soul is incapable of it; but he knows, too, that it is possible enough for that other bigger thing which is not his soul, but yet in some odd ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... be found in a book by Judith Cladel, the daughter of the novelist (author of Mes Paysans). She named it Auguste Rodin, pris sur la vie, and her pages are filled with surprisingly vital sketches of the workaday Rodin. His conversations are recorded; altogether this little picture has much charm and proves what Rodin asserts—that women understand him better than men. There is a fluid, feminine, disturbing side to his art and nature very appealing to emotional women. Mlle. Cladel's book ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... are so apart from the workaday world that it is impossible to refrain from thinking of them in unwise fashion—even after life has fallen into pleasant channels and the dearly beloved of all the world is by one's side. So strong yet so weak, so tantalizing yet ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... by those who are always at a man's elbow to fill him with forebodings of ill, to look at the failures, which I have just referred to, which make up the history of the attempt to realise ideal commonwealths in this practical workaday world. Now, I have read the history of the many attempts at co-operation that have been made to form communistic settlements in the United States, and am perfectly familiar with the sorrowful fate with which nearly all have been overtaken; but the story of their failures ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... partly due to the region in which the old dramatists generally sought for their tragic situations. We are never quite at home in this fictitious cloudland, where the springs of action are strange, unaccountable, and altogether different from those with which we have to do in the workaday world. A great poet, indeed, weaves a magic mirror out of these dream-like materials, in which he shows us the great passions, love, and jealousy, and ambition, reflected upon a gigantic scale. But, in weaker hands, the characters become eccentric instead of typical: his vision simply distorts ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the dim horizon. Perhaps all the pain and mistakes and misunderstandings of which this workaday world is so full are, after all, only a part of the beautiful tapestry which the patient Fingers of God are weaving—a dark and sombre warp, giving value to the gold and silver and jewelled threads ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... write like Mr. Hall Caine? If Maxim Gorky were invited to lunch by the Czar, would he sit down and dash off a trifle in the vein of Mr. Dooley? Probably great authors have the power of detaching their writing self from their living, workaday self. For my own part, the frame of mind in which I now found myself completely altered the scheme of my novel. I had designed it as a light-comedy effort. Here and there a page or two to steady the reader, and ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... ransacked, the chair broken, the lock of the door forced and broken, one door panel slightly scorched and perforated by shot, and the window wide open. None of Mr. Polly's clothes were to be seen, but some garments which had apparently once formed part of a stoker's workaday outfit, two brownish yellow halves of a shirt, and an unsound pair of boots were scattered on the floor. A faint smell of gunpowder still hung in the air, and two or three books Mr. Polly had recently acquired had been shied with some violence under the bed. Mr. Warspite looked at Mr. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... instances approach the ludicrous? They do. They are meant to do so. But they are no more ludicrous than life itself. And they illustrate in the most workaday fashion how you can test whether your literature fulfils its function of informing ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... notes; then the listener goes home and plays the piece—all the parts! to the family. And the family are glad and proud; glad to listen to the explanations and analyses, glad to learn, glad to be lifted to planes above their dreary workaday lives. Our children's theatre is educating 7,000 children—and their families. When we put on a play of Shakespeare they fall to studying it diligently; so that they may be qualified to enjoy it to the limit when the piece ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ordinary workaday Paris will always centre about some point; so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the nobles and the upper classes converges towards some particular spot. It is a periodically recurrent phenomenon which presents ample matter for reflection to those who are fain to observe ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... been marvellous, to say the least—an event stranger, indeed, than any I had ever before witnessed. In the wild writings of the old romancers the dead have sometimes been resuscitated, but never in this workaday world of ours. There is a finality in ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... very old when we knew them, these dear ladies, and they have been dead many years, but their simple, kindly lives have left a fragrance to sweeten this workaday world even as the mignonette in bygone summers scented their ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... and I are such workaday damsels that we are not accustomed to handling such problems," explained Peggy demurely. "Thou art the only belle in the Social Select Circle, and having been instructed in French, I hear very thoroughly, thou hast waxed proficient in matters ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... "I suppose most people would call this a hard and monotonous life," I mused. "There is an eternal regularity in the succession of amusing and heart-breaking incidents, but it is not monotonous, for I am too close to all the problems that bother this workaday world,—so close that they touch me on every side. No missionary can come so near to these people. I am so close that I can feel the daily throb of their need, and they can feel the throb of my sympathy. Oh! it is work fit for a saviour of men, and ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... As to Mary—even ordinary, workaday politeness frowns on too abrupt a departure from a lady, particularly one whom we have companioned thus distantly from the careless simplicity of girlhood to the equally careless but complex businesses of adolescence. The world ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... face for a moment, then, dismissing from this workaday world the baby, which had got ill in a tempest and had died from too much calm at sea, he asked me with a dental, shark-like smile—if sharks had false teeth—whether I had yet made my little arrangements for the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... dossier. Determined to have nothing whatever to do, save in the last resort, with anything that savours of Radicalism, and inclining naturally towards ideals which have long been abandoned in the workaday world, diplomacy is the instinctive lover of obscurantism and the furtive enemy of progress. Distrusting all those generous movements which spring from the popular desire to benefit by change, it follows from this that the diplomatic brotherhood inclines towards those truly detestable ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... the shop, individually, scarcely interested me, but their collective presence was something of which I never seemed to be quite unconscious. It was as though the workaday atmosphere were scented with the breath of a delicate perfume—a perfume that was tainted with the tang of my yearning ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... friendship men look for peace, and concord, and some measure of content. There are enough battles to fight outside, enough jarring and jostling in the street, enough disputing in the market-place, enough discord in the workaday world, without having to look for contention in the realm of the inner life also. There, if anywhere, we ask for an end of strife. Friendship is the sanctuary of the heart, and the peace of the sanctuary should brood over it. Its chiefest ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... the menace which casts that cloud is far off not only in distance but in time. Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seems to have grown completely oblivious of that nearness; and it is startling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass from such an atmosphere of workaday security to the imminent sense ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... much too large for workaday use, but it was not too large for this purpose. Its very size gave it freedom to pass over the head without the usual twisting and turning. Nor did the horse rebel when it was so placed—a fact which gave ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... hopes, his strength, his weakness; yet one cannot imagine Emerson shaping this material into a novel. But just a little way down the road lived a wizard who could transmute the commonest events of this workaday world to the most beautiful shapes; no one wishes that Hawthorne had written essays. The second principle guiding in the choice of a subject is this: Select a subject which is suited to your peculiar ability ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... according to Cocker, according to Gunter; en regle [Fr], selon les regles[Fr], well regulated, orderly; symmetric &c. 242. conventional &c. (customary) 613; of daily occurrence, of everyday occurrence; in the natural order of things; ordinary, common, habitual, usual, everyday, workaday. in the order of the day; naturalized. typical, normal, nominal, formal; canonical, orthodox, sound, strict, rigid, positive, uncompromising, Procrustean. secundum artem[Lat], shipshape, technical. exempIe[Fr]. illustrative, in point. Adv. conformably &c. adj.; by rule; agreeably to; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... indeed, he wondered now how he could ever have esteemed it formidable. Jack was his half-brother. In noveldom or in a melodrama this discovery would have transformed their mutual dealings; but as a workaday world's fact, Musgrave would not honestly say that it had in any way affected his feelings toward Jack, and it appeared to have left Charteris ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... M, or perhaps N, and sometimes I'm almost sure it was E. It will come to me some day, no doubt, Baron, but till it does I shall have to wander about a nameless man, looking for it. And after all, I am not without the consolations of a certain useful, workaday ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... taking her with an irresistible impulse of admiring affection into my arms; "but if I had, it would have made no difference. I should still have talked about love, and of all it can do to make this weary workaday world sweet ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... Watchman. Beyond the broad window of her room, the hills of Skull Island and God's Warning stand yellow in the sunshine, rivulets dripping from the ragged patches of snow which yet linger in the hollows; and the harbour water ripples under balmy, fragrant winds from the wilderness; and workaday voices, strangely unchanged by the years that are passed, come drifting up the hill from my father's wharves; and, ay, indeed, all the world of sea and land is warm and wakeful and light of heart, just as it used to ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... dialect which caught our ear; the details of our charming gypsy life, ashore and afloat, during which we were conscious of the red blood tingling through our veins, and, alert to the whisperings of Nature, were careless of the workaday world, so far away,—simply glad ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... jealously preserved in cases or shrines; still, when we remember how many precious fruits of the past must have perished, the number of beautiful Irish manuscripts extant goes to prove that books even of this character could not have been extraordinarily rare. "Workaday" copies of books would be made as well, in comparatively large numbers, and would no doubt be used very freely. Besides books properly so called, the religious used waxed tablets of wood, which were sometimes called books. ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... mediaeval hands left them yesterday. And indeed every aspect of this church—which to me has always been romantic and beautiful—can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even the worshippers must have changed but little, for this is the church of the workers, and the Spanish woman's workaday costume bears little mark of any specific century. If Cervantes were to return to this district—perhaps to this district alone—of the city he loved it is hard to see what he would note afresh, save ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired, twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green glass was dreadful. What made her feel worst—and she entertained the thought with a whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity—was that she'd had so much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance because her father ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... unceasing workaday of her life, she was a woman of great mind. She had adamantine opinions upon the situation in Armenia, the condition of women in China, the flirtation between Mrs. Minster of Niagara Avenue and young Griscom, the conflict in the Bible class ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... itself, without loss of time, to manufacturing all that the peasant needs, instead of fashioning geegaws for the wives of rich citizens. Let the sewing machines of Paris be set to work on clothes for the country folk workaday clothes and clothes for Sunday too, instead of costly evening dresses for the English and Russian landlords and the African gold-magnates' wives. Let the factories and foundries turn out agricultural ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... marbles, agate columns, Persian carpets, gold enwoven robes and vestments, ivories, engraven metals, pearls, velvets and silks, and when the object of the painter is to convey a sensation of the beauty of these materials by the luxury and beauty of the workmanship. The common workaday world, with accessories of tin pots and pans, corduroy breeches and clay-pipes, can be only depicted by a series of ellipses through a mystery ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... population, should keep a record of the particular unit's affairs, a, so to speak, 'book of life.' This 'book of life' should be more than a list of the results of the unit's labour; it should also be a living narrative of the workaday activities accomplished by each member of the unit. Eh? And, of course, the record to be compiled without official interference—solely by the town council or district administration, or by a special 'board, of life and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... longer but transformed into a radiant shrine of flowers. Nine feet long it was, and not much less in width, and its solid oaken sides rose some two feet from the floor. It was heaped indeed with the bronze-green fronds and russet-gold stalks of fresh-cut bracken, but this was only the ordinary workaday foundation, and was almost hidden beneath a coverlet of roses—roses of every hue from damask-red to saffron-yellow and purest white, heaped and strewn in richest profusion and filling the room with perfume. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... Mr. Marvin's death, Owen had kept to his cubby-hole room adjoining the financier's small, plain-furnished, workaday office. But recently he had got the habit of doing his work in the library, where the tall, pure statues looked down upon his skulking head and the grand old books that had borne their messages of good from generation to generation, held their high thoughts ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... added a great many new terms to my vocabulary, and in the three weeks I spent at the Fair I took a long leap from the little child's interest in fairy tales and toys to the appreciation of the real and the earnest in the workaday world. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... reality that can teach the imaginative child reality; in the things he learns from books there is no check upon the imagined and the desired—one kind of outcome is as likely and as true as another. But in the experience of the workaday world causes and consequences cannot be so easily altered ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... an unaccustomed appreciation of this larger side of the workaday world, stepped back inside the engine-room, laid his hand on a throttle, and at the signal, as if by magic, there was a whirr of slipping bands, a mighty throb, the renewed fashing of water down ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... were methodical enough; a shower, a thorough rub-down, and then into his workaday clothes. He packed his trunk and hand-luggage, overlooked nothing that was his, and went down into the living-room where he knew he would find Killigrew with the morning papers. He felt oddly light-headed; but he had no time to ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... silver-basket lay on the table in front of the window, placed there by a thoughtful and conscientious Mrs. Tams. On the previous morning Rachel had given very precise orders about the silver (as the workaday electro-plate was called), but owing to the astounding events of the day the orders had not been executed. Mrs. Tams had evidently determined to carry them out ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... of them, was Horieneke, bent also like the others, in her coarse workaday clothes, with a basket of seed-potatoes on her arm; and her red-gold curls now hung, like long corkscrews, wet against her face; and every now and then she would draw herself up, tossing her head back to keep them out ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... occupied much of his attention. Of course, he, in common with the rest of young mankind, thought that some day he would love some girl and make her his wife; but it was always as a far-away dream to him, connected with an angelic perfection which he always found missing in the workaday world. His wife must be a pure, perfect creature. Marriage was a sacred thing—one of the great events in a person's life. Not that these views had now changed altogether, for Miss Virginia Wilton came nearer his ideal than anyone he had yet met. Still, there was considerable of the tangible present ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... to principles of justice, so a Utopia, however magnificent, fades from the mind of the believer when he ceases to revise it by comparison with facts, when it is no longer a reply to the problems suggested by workaday experience. Life and theory being once divorced, the theorist becomes a vendor of commonplaces, and the plain man is fortified in his conviction that he must take life ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... student, both in their underclothes and barefooted, were angrily and impatiently explaining to a peasant who was standing before them bare-headed, with his whip in his hand, apparently not understanding them. Both faces looked preoccupied with workaday cares. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... secure his discharge. This was soon brought about, and doubtless much to Coleridge's relief. Erelong he found himself back at Cambridge—a little subdued, and a trifle more discreet, for his rough contact with the workaday world. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Bromfield was a catch even in New York. He was rich, of a good family, assured social position, good-looking, and manifestly in love with her. Like gravitates to like the land over. Miracles no longer happen in this workaday world. She would marry the man a hundred other girls would have given all they had to win, and perhaps in the long years ahead she might look back with a little sigh for the wild colt of the desert who had shared some perfect moments with her once ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... time Howard recalled that there was a man named Roberts, a teamster in Sanchia's Town; and that on the Desert Valley ranch there were mules which should be sold; and that, though there was a golden paradise here in Bear Valley, there remained a workaday world outside the charmed confines where time was of the essence. He made Helen understand that if he were to make good in his acquisition of the cattle range he must be down there among his men and his herds during ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory |
