"Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... move. But, at the corner, 'Toinette, who never had seen the street before, took the wrong turn; and, although she ran as fast as she could, every step now led her farther from home, and deeper into the squalid by-streets and alleys, ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... tread Pride's golden palaces, Through Penury's roofless huts and squalid cells Will I descend, where'er in abjectness Woman with some vile slave her tyrant dwells, There with the music of thine own sweet spells 1040 Will disenchant the captives, and will pour For the despairing, from the crystal wells Of thy deep spirit, reason's mighty lore, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... country retreat in which the author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... receive the carpenter's Son if he should stop at their gate some afternoon while they wuz givin' a garden party to nobility. If Jesus should enter there with his chosen companions, the fishermen and the poor, all dusty from weary walks and barefooted; if he should look through their luxury to the squalid homes beyend with reproach and sorrow in his divine face, how ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... a people that understood the decorum of life as well as we do) considered a person accused to stand in such a doubtful situation that from the moment of accusation he assumed either a mourning or some squalid garb, although, by the nature of their constitution, accusations were brought forward by one of their lowest magistrates. The spirit of that decent usage has continued from the time of the Romans till this very day. No man was ever brought before your Lordships that did not carry the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... giving some practical help to the deserving poor. My district was such an one as would furnish him with the opportunities to satisfy him in that particular, and I was therefore asked to allow Col. Gordon to accompany me to its squalid scenes, to my Ragged School, cottage and open-air services, and to the sick and suffering, of which I had many on my list. This request was gladly complied with; for the first sight of the stranger made me love and ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... The room was squalid and dirty, and bespoke mean and slovenly habits; but it did not bespeak penury and want, it had even an air of filthy comfort of its own,—the comfort of the swine in its warm sty. The occupant of the chamber was in keeping ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... form this week-end at cricket and tennis, and croquet and billiards, and all the other jolly games I mean to play. Look at those children trying to play cricket in that dirty backyard. Poor little beggars! Fancy living in one of those horrible squalid houses. But you cannot spoil to- day for me, little backyards. On Tuesday perhaps, when I am coming again to the ugly town, your misery will make me miserable; I shall ask myself hopelessly what it all means; but just now I am too happy for pity. After all, why should I assume ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... to remember, had no pathos which was not concerned with the fact that Robert had amazingly and unnaturally failed her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid bills. This truth indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally squalid, as she brought forth one detail after another. There were bills which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... population was mixed and varied. Busy men of business and of wealth, porters and wagoners, clerks and warehousemen, rubbed shoulders with poor squalid creatures, men and women, whose business or calling no one knew and few cared to know except the policeman on the beat, who, with stern suspicious glances, looked upon them as objects of special regard, and as enemies; except, also, the earnest-faced man in seedy black ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... seemed to grow suddenly cold, and the faces of all the inmates became pale; they looked more squalid than ever—the threadbare curtains, the rheumatic chairs, the ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... thousand; and though he sometimes raised it as high as three hundred thousand, it never fell beneath the smaller number. It may be hoped, and, for the honour of human nature, we are inclined to believe, there was a touch of insanity in this unnatural strain of ferocity; and the wild and squalid features of the wretch appear to have intimated a degree of alienation of mind. Marat was, like Robespierre, a coward. Repeatedly denounced in the Assembly, he skulked instead of defending himself, and lay concealed in some obscure garret or ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... an audible soliloquy, "is Irish life?" And then he answered the question himself as she remained silent. "A tragedy, a squalid tragedy!" But she looked at him cold, irresponsive, defiant, and he rushed away before the old man ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... sheltered the Grub-writers of half a century ago, so Drury Lane and its immediate vicinity was their recognised locality in the earlier part of the last century. It is impossible to associate respectability, to say nothing of fashion, with this evil-smelling, squalid thoroughfare. And yet there can be no question about its having been at one time an aristocratic quarter. Until within the last few years, the Lane itself, and its numerous tributaries, contained many second-hand bookshops. The most celebrated, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... of the whiskeys and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself remains midway ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... supererogatory task as a description of Paris. I wish only to give briefly the impressions which that wonderful city made upon me. It impressed me as the perfect and perfectly beautiful city; and even after I had been there for some time, and seen not only its avenues and palaces, but its most squalid alleys and hovels, this impression was not weakened. Paris became for me a charmed spot, and whenever I have returned there, I have fallen under the spell, a spell which compels admiration for all of its ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... and pure and beautiful everything is!" said Paula. "Do you remember, Lisita, how only yesterday we remarked how squalid and dirty the whole village looked? And now, what a lovely change!" She hesitated a moment, and then continued in ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... tiny chain bridge. Opposite, upon the right bank of the Rhone, stretched the handsome facades of tile-roofed buildings, giving one an idea of the ancient quarter which a closer inspection dispels; for the streets are crooked and steep, and the houses, except those lining the quays, squalid. It was not there, however, that the eye would have lingered. Far away, seen an incredible distance in the transparent evening atmosphere, Mont Blanc and its massed group of snowy satellites lifted themselves ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a student at Trinity College, Dublin, where Oliver Goldsmith was also a student at the same time. But the serious pupil of Abraham Shackleton would not be likely to see much of the wild and squalid sizar. Henry Flood, who was two years younger than Burke, had gone to complete his education at Oxford. Burke, like Goldsmith, achieved no academic distinction. His character was never at any time of the academic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... "suspected" of misappropriating funds, or "alleged" to have made the assault, or "said by the police" to have entered the house. And in order to present an unbiased story, the side of the supposed malefactor should be given. In the intense excitement resulting from a newly committed crime, or in the squalid surroundings of a prison cell, an accused person does not appear to his best advantage, and it is easy for the reporter to let prejudice sway him, perhaps causing irreparable injury to innocent persons. The race riot in Atlanta, in 1905, in which numbers of ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... country, there is an incessant flux and reflux of public opinion. Questions which in their day assumed a most threatening aspect have now nearly gone from the memory of men. They are "volcanoes burnt out, and on the lava and ashes and squalid scoria of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine, and the sustaining corn." Such, in my opinion, will prove to be the fate of the present sectional excitement should those who wisely seek to apply the remedy continue ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fishmonger's boy That his tricycle's mean and squalid; O well for the butcher lad That the tyres of his wheel ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... today for us in clear light, their fabulous distance lessens, and we hail these kingly ideals with as intense a trust and with more joy, perhaps, than they did who were born in those purple hours, because we are emerging from centuries indescribably meagre and squalid in their thought, and every new revelation has for us the sweetness of sunlight to one after the tears and sorrow of a prison-house. The well at Ballykeele is, perhaps, a humble starting-point for the contemplation of such mighty mysteries; ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Mr. C. pointed out the residences of a number of poor white families, whom he described as the most degraded, vicious, and abandoned people in the island—"very far below the negroes." They live promiscuously, are drunken, licentious, and poverty-stricken,—a body of most squalid and miserable human beings. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and almost told himself that he hated all whom it contained. How miserable was his lot, that he should have bound himself in the opening of his splendour, in the first days of a career that might have been so splendid, to misfortune that was squalid and mean as this. To him, to one placed by circumstances as he was placed, it was squalid and mean. By a few soft words spoken to a poor girl whom he had chanced to find among the rocks he had so bound himself with vile manacles, had so crippled, ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were situated in ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... country-houses, inhabited for some months of the year by a rich aristocracy. All about it is gay and pretty, and everywhere are those signs of affluence which the Russian nobles love to see around them. Nothing offends the eye; nothing touches the heart; there are no poor, no squalid huts, no indication of the wretchedness of poverty. It is a terrestrial Elysium, where great ladies and princes, courtiers and generals, look out upon none but agreeable images, selected from all that ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... could have been kindled without falling into the middle of the room. He recalls that racking head-ache, that scorching thirst, and those pains in all the bones of a wan, wasted figure lying under a patchwork quilt on a squalid bed. A figure, independent of, and dissevered from himself, yet in some degree identified with his thoughts, his sufferings, and his memories. Somebody nursed the figure, too—he is sure of that—bringing it water, medicines, food, and leeches for its aching temples; smoothing its pillow and arranging ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... the great Basilica of St. Denis—the only church in Paris, and I think in France, called by that ancient name, which carries us back at once to the days of the Roman Empire, and in itself bears evidence to the antiquity of the spot as a place of worship. Around it, a squalid modern industrial town has slowly grown up; but the nucleus of the whole place, as the name itself shows, is the body and shrine of the martyred bishop, St. Denis. Among the numerous variants of his legend, the most ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of the bell-rope, as she would any little dairy-maid who had heard only the chime of cow-bells all the days of her life. Then she sailed out of the room, serene and majestic, like a seventy-four man-of-war, while I, a squalid, salt-hay gundalow, (Venetian blind-ed into gondola,) first sank down in confusion, and then rose up in fury and brushed all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ridicule upon the belief in witches, but rather it is evident that he laid hands upon everything that could give colour to their sinister reputation. On the other hand, he has treated the whole subject with an imaginative touch which relieves us of all tragic or moral apprehension, removes all the squalid and unblessed surroundings into the region of romantic art, and makes it impossible to regard the characters as less idealized than those of the shepherds and huntsmen. I cannot myself but regard the elements of witchcraft and fairy employed by Jonson as far more in harmony ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... reed hovels (some propped in aqueduct arches), hovels also in caves, and squalid osterias, into whose side are built escutcheoned mediaeval capitals. A few mounted drovers ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... Mustapha took charge of them, and they set out down the narrow street, accompanied by a little crowd. They crossed the glaring market-place, with its booths of red meat made black by flies, its heaps of refuse, its rows of small and squalid hutches, in which sat serious men surrounded by their goods. The noise here was terrific. Everyone seemed shouting, and the uproar of the various trades, the clamour of hammers on sheets of iron, the dry tap of the shoemaker's ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Buckhorn, for supplies. And as I drove down the main street of that squalid little western town I must have looked like something the crows had been roosting on. But just as I was swinging out of Syd Woodward's store-yard I caught sight of Lady Allie in her big new car, drawn up in front of the modestly denominated "New York Emporium." What made ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... burnt out; on the lava and ashes and squalid scoriae of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine, and the sustaining corn. Such was the first, such the second condition of Vesuvius. But when a now fire bursts out, a face of desolations ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is nothing here which impresses one more than its squalid filth, and the abject degradation of the people which crowd its streets. The temples are extremely dirty. There is not one of imposing size or of decent attractiveness. There stands the monkey-temple, where scores of mangy, tricky brutes are daily sumptuously fed by devout pilgrims. On one ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... life are not sufficient to stifle any sentimental follies she may be nursing just now, I will not rest till I find other means. Adelaide's future is arranged. I will set myself to make Isobel's equally brilliant. I will make her the beauty of Europe. She shall forget in a month the squalid days of her life with you and ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Pease's new "House of Industry" and the "Brewery Mission" building. The angelic host over the hills of Bethlehem did not make a more welcome revelation to them "who had sat in darkness and the shadow of death." In these days the squalid regions of our great cities are being explored and improved by various methods of systematic beneficence. "Christian Settlements" are established; Bureaus of Charity are formed and Associations for the relief of the poor are organized. A noble work; but, after all, the most effective ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the country, City Bushman, where you went, For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent; And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push, Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush; But we lately heard you singing of the 'plains where shade is not', And you mentioned it was dusty — 'all was dry and ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... squalid dens frequented by touts and betting-men and medical students, where people sang and fought and laid the odds and got very drunk—and where Barty's performances as a vocalist, comic and sentimental (especially the latter), raised enthusiasm that seems almost incredible among ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... requirements, had in the course of years become overcrowded; how hut had been built against hut and story erected upon story, until the lack of room deprived many a dwelling of light and air. He led the surprised Governor through the squalid lanes near the river and demonstrated how difficult it would be to master an epidemic when once it had taken root there, and how the welfare of the entire town of Kief depended upon the sanitary condition of each ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... to meet — Were their faces sour and saddened like the 'faces in the street', And the 'shy selector children' — were they better now or worse Than the little city urchins who would greet you with a curse? Is not such a life much better than the squalid street and square Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric glare, Where the sempstress plies her sewing till her eyes are sore and red In a filthy, dirty attic toiling on for daily bread? Did you hear no sweeter voices in the music of the bush Than the roar of trams and ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... squalid sort of thing banked by mountains so grand in their rugged strength that I never got used to the dirty, dusty little half-civilized town there on the plateau. Even as a child I felt the intolerable difference between the place and ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... at ornament in the front, had probably been once a gentleman's house; but now the light which streamed from its enlarged front windows made clear the interior of the splendidly fitted-up room, with its painted walls, its pillared recesses, its gilded and gorgeous fittings-up, its miserable squalid inmates. ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Shall every lingering wrong assail; All chains from limb and spirit strike, Uplift the black and white alike; Scatter before their swift advance The darkness and the ignorance, The pride, the lust, the squalid sloth, Which nurtured Treason's monstrous growth, Made murder pastime, and the hell Of prison-torture possible; The cruel lie of caste refute, Old forms remould, and substitute For Slavery's lash the freeman's will, For blind ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there by small creek valleys) made up its surface, which, broadly considered, was only the vast, treeless, slowly-rising eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. At long distances, on the flat, sandy river, groups of squat and squalid ranch buildings huddled as if to escape the wind. For years it has been a superb range for cattle, and up till the coming of the first settlements on the Cannon Ball, it had been parceled out among a few big firms, who cut Government timber, dug Government stone, and pastured on Government ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the shock: in that wild place that you couldn't find on a map, and more squalid than the most poverty-stricken Malay settlement had a right to be, this European woman coming swishing out of the long grass in a fanciful tea-gown thing, dingy pink satin, with a long train and frayed lace trimmings; her eyes like black ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... Winnie. Mustn't be nervous! 'Bus all right," he answered in a brusque, slurring stammer partaking of the timorousness of a child and the resolution of a man. He advanced fearlessly with the woman on his arm, but his lower lip dropped. Nevertheless, on the pavement of the squalid and wide thoroughfare, whose poverty in all the amenities of life stood foolishly exposed by a mad profusion of gas-lights, their resemblance to each other was so pronounced as ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... windows, its glistening panes, its tall chimney losing itself in the depths of the sky, and nearer at hand the lovely little garden against the ancient wall of the former mansion. All about were gloomy, miserable roofs and squalid streets. Suddenly she started. Yonder, in the darkest, the ugliest of all those attics crowding so closely together, leaning against one another, as if overweighted with misery, a fifth-floor window stood wide ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in peace, for none came to search for the costly and beautiful Pearl-Maiden in those squalid courts, occupied by working folk of the meaner sort. By day they laboured, and at night they rested, ministering and ministered to in the community of Christian brotherhood, and, notwithstanding their fears and anxieties for themselves and ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Where the squalid town of Dae Irks the comfortable sea, Spreading webs to gather fish, As for wealth we set a wish, Dwelt a king by right divine, Sprung from Adam's royal line, Town of Dae by the sea, Divers ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... great enterprises, which must have been so absorbing of time and energy, this busy man found opportunity and strength to search out the squalid back streets of New York, and to go from house to house of its wretched inhabitants, giving sympathy, speaking words of Christian love and instruction, and where they would receive them leaving the word of ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... expeditions from Kentucky had pushed most of the tribes northward to the headwaters of the Miami, Scioto, and Wabash; and the Treaty of 1785 was supposed to keep them there. But it was futile to expect such an arrangement to prove lasting unless steadily backed up with force. In their squalid villages in the swampy forests of northern Ohio and Indiana the redskins grew sullen and vindictive. As they saw their favorite hunting-grounds slipping from their grasp, those who had taken part in the cession repented their ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... of a squalid home, situated mayhaps upon a somewhat decent spot in a marsh or upon the very poorest of soil, the poor white man of the South, prior to his emancipation by the Civil War, looked out upon a world whose honors and emoluments cast no ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow-Street officer lived over the way. Many, many times has ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... passed from the affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled occasionally ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... himself from the city, and avoided all public assemblies. Much about the eighth year after his condemnation, Marcus Claudius Marcellus and Marcus Valerius Laevinus, the consuls, had brought him back into the city; but he appeared in a squalid dress, his hair and beard allowed to grow, and exhibiting in his countenance and attire the deep impression of the disgrace he had sustained. Lucius Veturius and Publius Licinius, the censors, compelled him to have his beard and hair trimmed, to lay aside his squalid garb, to ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... bold when in the neighborhood of buffalo, they would approach quite near to look at me, gazing intently with their great round eyes, then suddenly leap aside, and stretch lightly away over the prairie, as swiftly as a racehorse. Squalid, ruffianlike wolves sneaked through the hollows and sandy ravines. Several times I passed through villages of prairie dogs, who sat, each at the mouth of his burrow, holding his paws before him in a supplicating ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... one of the first of those dividend-built and dividend-building terminals that were to spring up quickly and palatially the country over, rose with a peculiarly American trick out of one of the most squalid sections of the city. Fifteen railroads threaded into it, a gaseous shed de luxe, picking up St. Louis like a gigantic bead upon the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... two men tried by the same poverty. It beats the one down, makes him squalid, querulous, faithless, irreligious, drives him to drink, crushes him; and the other man it steadies and quiets and hardens, and teaches him to look beyond the things seen and temporal to the exceeding riches at God's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an eye only for the sadder conditions of life, and gives pain rather than excites sympathy in the reader. Our meaning will be best illustrated by a comparison of The Village of Crabbe with The Deserted Village of Goldsmith, and the pleasure with which we pass from the squalid scenes of the former to the gentler sorrows ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... with inexplicable hopes and longings for an ideal that seemed possible of realization, if only the Church in heaven should be as far removed above the actual of the Church on earth, as the glories of the Church on earth were removed above the squalid life of the common workday world. All this in witness that the great Abbey was, first and foremost, a religious foundation, raised in the first instance to the glory of God, and meant to help forward the worship of God, and make the worship ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... father and mother? To this Diotima replies that he is the son of Plenty and Poverty, and partakes of the nature of both, and is full and starved by turns. Like his mother he is poor and squalid, lying on mats at doors (compare the speech of Pausanias); like his father he is bold and strong, and full of arts and resources. Further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge:—in this he resembles the philosopher who is also in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. Such ...
— Symposium • Plato
... accumulation of rust were disturbed. The interior was essentially suggestive of the half-breed, and his guess at its purpose had been a shrewd one. Part storehouse for forage, part bedroom, and part stable, it presented a squalid appearance. The portion devoted to stable-room was far in the back; the curious apparatus which constituted the bed was ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... She stood at the foot of the stairs, barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her threatening attitude, her grey dishevelled hair and all the squalid ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect the woman at ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... stream. The trunk line from Germany into Belgium crosses the Meuse at Liege. For the most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value. Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... reached their station, and their journey was over; but in all the years to come, never, never again would Kitty Trenire pass the long, ugly rows of squalid backs of houses just outside the station, and dull depressing streets, never again would she enter that station itself, without living through once more and tasting again the misery, the strangeness, the forlornness which filled her heart that afternoon. She might ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... pirates lived in squalid splendour. They had numbers of slaves to wait upon them, the finest wines and foods, the richest dress and jewels, spoils of their travels. And when they had drunk and rioted in idleness to their heart's content they would once more set sail, and roam ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... his proud charger plunged into the ford, and the heavy wagons groaned after him, was welcomed to the shore by the shouts, not only of the soldiers which had followed Maxwell and Kirkpatrick, but by the people who came in crowds to hail their preserver. The squalid hue of famine had left every face, and each smiling countenance, beaming with health, security, and gratitude, told Wallace more emphatically than a thousand tongues, the wisdom of the means he had used to regenerate ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... dingy precincts, and by dint of a handful of Italian, picked up in a Roman winter's sojourn to be oddly practised on a local washerwoman sousing gay garments in the amber fluid of the Erie Canal, he singled out the Hinchey hovel from the squalid score it resembled. Before the sagging threshold tumbled a many-complexioned brood of children,—they seemed a very dozen,—and in the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the alley, suppressing such ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... our street was part of a squalid little suburb known as the Sands. It was inhabited by Gentiles exclusively. Sometimes, when a Jew chanced to visit it some of its boys would descend upon him with shouts of "Damned Jew!" "Christ-killer!" and sick their dogs at him. As we had no dogs to defend us, orthodox ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... inherit nothing else, they'll have lots of that for indemnification. It's a good system, Ned; it enables a young fellow like me to get through the best years of his life—which I take to be his youth—without that squalid poverty bothering him. You can make presents, and wear a pin or a ring, if it takes your eye. You look well, and you make yourself agreeable; and I see nothing to complain of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... look at the matter, we have not much to say for ourselves, unless it be in that dawning of good intentions which I have alluded to before. There is to be found in our metropolis, in our great towns, and even in our rural districts, an extent of squalid misery such as we are almost afraid to give heed to, and which we are glad to forget as soon as we have read or heard of it. It may be that our ancestors endured, it may be that many savage tribes still endure, far more privation ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... squalid savage,—what to me were sun or clime? I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the mother might not yield her. Still without a specific object, I followed the pair, and passed with them into the most ancient and least reputable quarter of the city. They trudged from street to street, through squalid courts and lanes, until I questioned the propriety of proceeding, and the likelihood of my ever getting home again. At length, however, they stopped. It was a close, narrow, densely peopled lane in which they halted. The road was thick ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... to the door, a throng of mendicants and squalid peasants came forth. Their faces had a cadaverous hue, which could not but be remarked. Their eyes, too, seemed heavy, and deep set in the head; while many had their throats bandaged, from the effects of glandular swellings, brought ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... From the cheap, squalid section of town known as "railroad end," Cable's rising influence carried him to the well-earned luxury. The lines of care and toil mellowed in the face of his pretty wife, as the years rolled by; her comely figure shed the cheap raiment of "hard, old days," and took ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... gate in the walls they entered the town, which afforded a pleasant contrast to the squalid misery of Callao. The city, however, could not be called imposing; the houses were low and irregular, fantastically painted in squares or stripes, and almost all had great balconies shut ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... take Disease first," she said, "as it is a near relative of Crime. You look surprised. You have known life-long and incurable invalids who were not criminals. But go to the squalid portion of any of your large cities, where Poverty and Disease go hand in hand, where the child receives its life and its first nourishment from a haggard and discontented mother. Starvation is her ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... intellectual disease. His parsimony degenerated into sordid avarice. His taste for military pomp and order became a mania, like that of a Dutch burgomaster for tulips, or that of a member of the Roxburghe Club for Caxtons. While the envoys of the Court of Berlin were in a state of such squalid poverty as moved the laughter of foreign capitals, while the food placed before the princes and princesses of the blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty to appease hunger, and so bad that even hunger ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... commercial capitals, there is no metropolis in the world where the general average of comfort and luxury stands higher through all the social grades. It is further to be recollected that health and the chief comforts of life are correlative,—that the squalid family is the unhealthy family, and that, as we import our squalor, so also we import the materials and conditions of our disease. This a priori view is amply sustained by the statistics of our charitable institutions. Dr. Alanson S. Jones, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight. It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... could have been white; shattered doors whose proper colour none could tell, and which, standing ajar, seemed to lead to nothing but darkness; weird women and gaunt children imparting a dismal life to the rows of ungainly dwellings;—all these made up a picture of squalid woe such as might well have appalled a stouter heart than poor Lady Oldfield's. And was she to find her delicately-nurtured son in such a place as this? They turned down one street, under the wondering eyes of old and young, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... the language, manners, and customs of the people were concerned, were going into a foreign land. The language of the entire population was French, or a patois, as the European French term it—a provincialism which a Parisian finds it difficult to understand. The ignorance and squalid poverty of these people put their society entirely out of the question, even if their language had been comprehensible. They were amiable, kind, law-abiding, virtuous, and honest, beyond any population of ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... in books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental pabulum, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... speed. They were running between black masses of squalid houses. As the special thumped over the bridge across the river, Mr. Crook gathered up his paints and brushes and photographs and arranged them neatly in his ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... house which was the object of their search. The houses on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked along. A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed, and mouldering away; only the upper rooms being inhabited. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... sir, is it, what folks are tellin' about your father?" was a question put to him more than once, when he entered some squalid home, in the hope of giving counsel, or help, or comfort. There was something highly welcome and agreeable to these people, themselves thieves or bordering on thievedom, in the idea that this fine, handsome, gentlemanly young clergyman, who had set ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the streets in rags and filth, and railed sardonically at all the world, mingling flattery of the crowd with abuse of the great, and of all the restrictions of society. These were the street preachers of cynicism, who found their trade by no means an unprofitable one. Often, after a few years of squalid abstinence and quack philosophy, they had picked up enough to enable them to shave their beards, don the robes of good society, and end their days in the vicious self-indulgence which was the original inspirer of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... born on May 7, 1812, in Southampton Street, Camberwell, London, a suburb on the southern side of the river. One hundred years later, as I traversed the length of this street, it looked squalid in the rain, and is indeed sufficiently unlovely. But in 1812 it was a good residential locality, and not far away were fresh woods and pastures.... The good health of Browning's father may be inferred from the fact that he lived to be eighty-four, "without a day's ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... They walked and walked along the path, and at last they saw a large cottage standing before them. It was night; there was nowhere else to go to. "Look here," they say, "let's go into that cottage." In they went. There was nobody there. All looked bare and squalid. They sat down, and remained sitting there some time. Presently in came a tall woman, lank, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. The very air was charged with a healthier life, and here amid the opulence one could forget the near presence of the squalid alley. So it had become a habit of mine always to begin my day with a walk uptown, as a gentle tonic for my body and to give my mind a brief but more cheerful outlook than through the smutted office windows. I never tired of the life which I saw about me. And it was about me and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... enemy. Over blood and spoils they unveil the countenance, and proclaim that they have at length paid the debt of existence, and have proved themselves worthy of their country and parents. The cowardly and effeminate continue in their squalid disguise. The bravest among them wear also an iron ring [171] (a mark of ignominy in that nation) as a kind of chain, till they have released themselves by the slaughter of a foe. Many of the Catti assume this distinction, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... part of the exterior of this remarkable church is closely hidden by a rather squalid collection of buildings. Here and there they have been cleared away, but, like much of the process of restoration, where new fabric is let into the old, the incongruity is quite as objectionably ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... town, bearing no possible resemblance to the "Eternal City," even in its more modern condition, as the residence of the "Triple Prince;" but, on the contrary, having, if one could judge from the habitations, every appearance of squalid poverty. Fifteen miles further on, we passed the Little Falls. It was night when we came to them, but it being moonlight, we had an opportunity of seeing them to advantage. The crags are here stupendous—irregular and massive piles of rocks, from which spring the lofty pine and cedar, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... the exercise is not limited in its application to the young. For if an adult were first told, that the squalid beggar before him, though once respectable and rich, had made himself wretched by a course of idleness and dissipation, and were then asked, "What does that teach you?" he would instantly perceive the lesson, and would be stimulated ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... and was sound asleep; but he lay awake, as men sometimes will on a change of bed, and having many things on his mind. He was lying with his face towards the wall, but observing a light and some little stir in the room, he turned round in his bed, and saw the figure of a woman, squalid, and ragged in dress; her figure rather low and broad; as well as I recollect, she had something—either a cloak or shawl—on, and wore a bonnet. Her back was turned, and she appeared to be searching or rummaging ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the advantage of individuals to be thought poor, so it was best for villages to appear squalid. The Marquis of Argenson writes in his journal: "An officer of the election has come into the village where my country-house is, and has said that the taille of the parish would be much raised this year; he had noticed that the peasants looked fatter ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... elsewhere, and they gradually cleared away the rubbish until the original beauty of the temple was visible again. Even now, high up on all sides, you can see the depth of the earth surrounding it like cliffs, and on the top are squalid huts with dirty children and fluffy impudent goats and shrill-voiced, black-clad women, living their daily lives and ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... gallantly stormed the muddy slopes of Passchendaele; to the wonderful engineers that conquered the squalid quagmires of Langemarck and Zonnebeke; to the gunners that stuck to their guns under a rain of bombs and shells, and to the transport drivers that fed them. It is a tale of wonderful gallantry and heroic endeavour. But when ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
