"Nastiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pavement to protect us from the carriages, and to keep our feet dry, we have to encounter the mass of filth and dirt, which the nastiness of the inhabitants deposits, and which the police suffers to remain. The state of Edinburgh in its worst days, as described by our English neighbours, was never worse than what you meet with in France. The danger ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... banishment. There is not unfrequently a display of one of the proprietor's children in a part requiring "infant innocence;" and as our ideas of that angelic state are associated principally with pudding heads and dirty faces, the performance is generally got through with a nastiness approaching to nicety. But it is time to make our escape from the Bower, and we therefore leave them to get through the "Chough and Crow"—which is often the wind-up, because it admits of a good deal of growling—in our absence. We cannot be tempted to remain even to witness the pleasing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to the teapot. He knew that for his wife the earthly paradise was a hydropathic, where she put on her afternoon dress and every jewel she possessed when she rose in the morning, ate large meals of which the novelty atoned for the nastiness, and collected an immense casual acquaintance, with whom she discussed ailments, ministers, sudden deaths, and the intricate genealogies of her class. For his part he rancorously hated hydropathics, having once spent a black ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... love by comparison with a house whose walls glitter outwardly like sea shells, or like transparent stones, called selenites, of a gold color; whereas in the apartments within the walls, are all kinds of filth and nastiness: but the delights of conjugial love may be compared to a house, the walls of which are refulgent as with sterling gold, and the apartments within are resplendent as with cabinets full ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... all the kinds of talk which I have singled out as undesirable, please understand, that except in speaking of wickedness (or worse still nastiness), which is always a sin and needs your penitent confession and God's absolution, all these things are wrong, only in the wrong place and wrong way and ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... was a "bad man" who surpassed the rest of his fellows in using foul language. Roosevelt, who loathed obscenity as he did any other form of filth, tired of this bad man's talk and told him very calmly that he liked him but not his nastiness. Instead of drawing his gun, as the bystanders thought he would do, Jim looked sheepish, acknowledging the charge, and changed his tone. He remained a loyal friend of his corrector. Cattle-thieves and horse-thieves infested the West of those days. To steal a ranchman's horse ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Smugglers or ruffling Highwaymen were sometimes lodged, at a guinea a day for their accommodation, was only so much better from the common room in so far as the prisoner had bed and board to himself; but for nastiness and creeping things—which I wonder, so numerous were they, did not crawl away with the whole prison bodily: but 'tis hard to find those that are unanimous, even vermin.—For all that made the Gaol most thoroughly hateful and dreadful, there was not a pin to choose ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... asks very little. Society only asks you to wash the outside of your cup and platter: inside you may keep any kind of nastiness that you like: only wash the outside. Do wash the outside, says Society; and it would be a churl or an ass indeed who would ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... nauseous disagreeable flavour, it tastes quite pleasantly. It frequents the whole of the north-eastern coast of Australia, and when the qualities of the oil first became known, it was eagerly sought after by invalids who could not overcome their repugnance to the cod-liver nastiness. The fishermen, however, spoilt their own market, for greed induced them to adulterate the new medicine with shark oil, and all kinds of other abominations, so that the faculty were never quite certain what they were pouring ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... gets to be subtly interwoven with his worship of me, then does my blood dance, indeed, and the barriers of my hesitation totter. His talks about Art and Sex, his distinctions between Real and Unreal, had but clogged my attempts at response with some revolting nastiness. This, however, now burst again into a glow before which my repugnance faded away. I felt that my resplendent womanhood made me indeed a goddess. Why should not its glory flash from my forehead with visible brilliance? Why does ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... and nastiness of these cartoons and others that followed. Luther is supposed to have furnished the rhymes and descriptive matter which accompanied them. Lather is also cited as uttering most repulsive and scurrilous sentiments about ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... see my young master, or my young mistress, poring over one of their spiders' insides with a magnifying-glass; or you meet one of their frogs walking downstairs without his head—and when you wonder what this cruel nastiness means, you are told that it means a taste in my young master or my young mistress for natural history. Sometimes, again, you see them occupied for hours together in spoiling a pretty flower with pointed instruments, out of a stupid curiosity to know what the flower ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... was just hateful to you!" said Ingred sorrowfully. "I know I was a perfect beast! I was ashamed of myself all the time, only I wouldn't confess it. Lispeth used to slate me sometimes for my nastiness. She called me 'a jealous blighter,' and so I was! The girl of your fancy is a great deal nicer than I am, or ever can be, but I'll try to live up to her as well as I can, Bess, if ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... dum fish again as long as I live) to the effluvia arising from decomposed heaps of sea-wood, which had been gathered for manure, and was in the act of removal to the fields. No words can describe this, and I leave it to your imagination, Squire, to form an idea of a new perfume in nastiness that has never yet been appreciated but by ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... from eight to twelve and fourteen years, were in the habit of collecting together in barns and other secluded places, and in a state of nudity imitating the "Black Crook" with all possible additional nastiness. Horrified at such a monstrous evil, he hastened to inform the parents of the corruption in their midst. Imagine his astonishment when he was met with an indifferent laugh and the response, "Pooh! it's only natural; perfectly harmless; just like little pigs!" As though pigs were models ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... slop-bucket of Walt Whitman. A belief in the preciousness of filth. Entirely bestial. Nastiness and animal insensibility to shame. Noxious weeds. Impious and obscene. Disgusting burlesque. Broken out of Bedlam. Libidinousness and swell of self-applause. Defilement. Crazy outbreak of conceit and vulgarity. Ithyphallic audacity. Gross indecency. Sunken sensualist. ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... and exgurgitates, black and noisome, at the slightest provocation—nay, at none whatever, but with the delight of the past master and artist in verbal nastiness, anxious to display his erudition. It is a corruption of thought and expression so foul and concentrated, and withal so limited in its vocabulary and scope, that it fastens itself in the ear by a damnable iteration which no diverting of the attention ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... Person who shall ease himself any where in Camp but in the Privies: And he remarks, that when the Camp begins to turn unhealthy, that often the only Means that will preserve the Health of the Men, is to change the Ground, and to leave behind all the Filth and Nastiness which gave Rise to ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... 66. Qu. Whether nastiness and beggary do not, on the contrary, extinguish all such ambition, making men listless, hopeless, ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... recalling those nights of hopeless misery with the policeman's periodic 'Get up there! move on!' reinforced by a prod of his club or the toe of his boot. I slept there, or tried to when crowded out of the tenements in the Bend by their utter nastiness. Cold and wet weather had set in, and a linen duster was all that covered my back. There was a woolen blanket in my trunk which I had from home—the one, my mother had told me, in which I was wrapped when I was born; but the trunk was in the 'hotel' as security for money I owed for board, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... shillings a year of our present money for his house in Channel Row;[*] yet labor and provisons, and consequently houses, were only about a third of the present price. Erasmus ascribes the frequent plagues in England to the nastiness, and dirt, and slovenly habits among the people. "The floors," says he, "are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, under which lies unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrements of dogs and cats, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in "Pot-Bouille"—in Nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"—then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated. What is the fact? The fact is that Dreiser's attitude ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... library! There is no moral or ethical law against such a practice; but the aesthetic conscience of humanity instinctively condemns it. When I examine the literature which has inspired and attracted the minds of humanity, whether trained or untrained, I find that they avoid this hideous intrusion of nastiness; and I am inclined to infer that writers who introduce such episodes, and readers who like them, have some other impulse in view, which is neither the sense of beauty nor the perception of art. But if Whitman, or anyone ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. It was plain, too, in the days that followed; never an hour did she give herself up to thought; she was easy and natural as ever, unalterably shallow and foolish, unalterably a servant-girl. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... amidst our filth and vermin, like the Spaniard and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other nations,—England and France especially. We hug our lousy cloak around us, take another chaw of tub-backer, float the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons, where they happen not to be rusty, and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton |
