"Tawdry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... once walking down Broadway late at night, after an evening at some tiresome play and supper at some yet more tiresome and tawdry restaurant. I had been having what is popularly supposed to be a "good time," and I was bored. There had been a recent deep fall of snow. The night was clear and cold. Below Herald Square I met comparatively few pedestrians, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... calico frock. She was quite startled. She had never seen herself in any glass before, though a cheap, square, wooden-framed mirror hung on the wall of the bar-room, with a dirty clothes-brush on a hook underneath, and there were swing toilet-glasses in the tawdry bedrooms at the inn. Something stirred in her, whispering in the grimy little ear, "It is good to be clean," and with the awakening of the maidenly instinct ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... see minutely. First walk, if you please, into an antechamber paved with red hexagon tiles (dirty enough, to be sure), and the saloon also, into which you next enter through a pair of folding doors. This saloon is in the genuine tawdry French style—gold and silver carving work and dirt are the component features. It is about 20 feet square, plenty of chairs, sofas of velvet, and so forth, but only one wretched rickety table in the centre. ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... language is exuberant but not exact, and to whom we should never think of referring for precise information or for well-digested thought and experience. His argument continually slides into wholesale assertion and vague declamation, and in his love of ornament he frequently becomes tawdry. For example, he tells us ("Apoc. Sketches," p. 265) that "Botany weaves around the cross her amaranthine garlands; and Newton comes from his starry home—Linnaeus from his flowery resting-place—and Werner and Hutton from their subterranean graves ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... will prove an arrant coward; we assume that he will run at the first smell of smoke. But we are wrong—he stuck; and when the flag was carried down in the rush, he rescued it and bore it bravely so far to the front that when he came back he brought another—the tawdry, red flag ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... supper-room it was quite deserted. It had that woebegone, forsaken, tawdry appearance, which reminds one so much of a ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... with a sudden and overwhelming rush, will call into being memories the tenderest, the deepest, the saddest? It may be a worthless little book, a withered flower ghastly in its brown grave clothes, a cheap, tawdry trinket; it may be something as intangible as a few bars of a hackneyed song ground out on a wheezy, asthmatic hand organ. But just so surely as one has lived—and therefore loved—one knows the inherent power to sting and wound ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... second thought, conclude that 'it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.' It has, indeed, a bottom of good sense; and so had Malvolio. It is filled from end to beginning with wit, or with what passed for wit among many readers of that day. Often the wit is of a tawdry and spectacular sort,—mere verbal wit, the use of a given word not because it is the best word, the most fitting word, but because the author wants a word beginning with the letter G, or the letter M, or the letter F, as the case may be. On the second page of Greene's ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... the Ark. Coats and trousers, equipped for their last adventure with mysterious darns and patches, cheated the eye like a painted beauty at a ball. Women's finery lay in disordered heaps—silk blouses covered with tawdry lace, skirts heavy with gaudy trimming—the draggled plumage of fine birds that had come to grief. But here buyer and seller met on level terms, for each knew to a hair the value of the sorry garments; and they chaffered with crafty ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... not use such words unguardedly. She smiled, disclosing beautiful teeth, and, as I observed, has the peculiar grace of one whose eyes smile in harmony with her lips. Nothing could be more obliging than her manners, and I could scarce think it possible that the tawdry, noisy Mrs Wickham could be her sister. Her eyes are dark and animated, with long eyelashes which soften their somewhat alarming ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... freshness of her complexion; hard lines are perceptible in her very soul, and crowsfeet contract her very fancy. No longer pure and fair as the statue of alabaster, her beauty, like that of some painted waxen effigy, is tawdry and meretricious. It is not alone the rouge upon the cheek and the false tresses adorning the forehead, which repel the ardour of admiration; it is the artificiality of mind with which such efforts are connected that breaks the spell ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... proceeds the ranks of the congregation kneel, stand, fall prostrate, and press the brow upon the ground with a rhythm so reverential and so dignified that the watcher forgets for a time the torn or tawdry raiment, the grime of the factory, the dust of the streets, and feels that each fresh attitude of devotion is indeed the true posture of prayer. It is as a sea troubled by the breath of some unseen spirit,—wave upon wave rising, bending, ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... expected to see; it is a Basque rather than a French church, has a very high chancel and altar and no transepts, and the altar is marked by a striking profusion of color and of gilding, which does not degenerate into the tawdry and which lights up vividly under the entering noon light. The chapels at the sides are similarly decorated. Dark oaken balconies, elaborately carved, run in three tiers along the upper part of the nave. The ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... out brush and comb and a towel, Yeva ran quickly and procured a mirror—a small cheap affair with tawdry tinsel ornaments. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... out the programme of the coming Promenade Concert season? I would give anything to hear Wagner and Beethoven once more. My allegiance to these giants, as to Shakespeare and Milton, grows stronger every day. The appalling tawdry trash that passes for music nowadays, and the degradation of art and literature which seems to be the feature of the twentieth century, intensify my loyalty to great musicians and noble writers. What is the cause of this decadence? There ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... awakened to the commercial advantages of being a locale, had not yet stretched between itself and the rest of New York that gauzy and iridescent curtain of sprightly impropriety and sparkling intellectual naughtiness, since faded to a lather tawdry pattern. An early pioneer of the Villager type, emancipated of thought and speech, chancing upon No. 11 Grove, would have despised it for its lack of atmosphere and its patent conservatism. It did not go out into the highways and byways, seeking prospective lodgers. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... cast-off garments of both sexes, and of every age, condition and clime, presents the appearance of a miniature city. Men's apparel, women's apparel, garments for children of all sizes, boots and shoes, hats and bonnets, tawdry finery of every description, sheets and blankets, carpets, tattered and stained, military accouterments, swords and belts, harness, old pots and kettles, and innumerable other articles, attract attention in the different stalls. There, on every side, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I wrote. Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was not unaffected. Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural. One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired of excelling the two great masters of oratory, Cicero and Livy, in their own manner, ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Ras y Rodriguez, the ex-Governor, and last of all and most imposing, Monsignor Francisco Saenz de Urturi, the Archbishop, in his robes, purple cap and gold chain, followed by his suite. Him, General Shafter, came forward to meet, and the two shook hands under the tawdry chandelier. It was a strange enough sight. By many and devious and bloody ways had the priest and the soldier come to meet each other on ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... the steps she paused and filled her lungs. It was a still, moonless night, and the stars hung low down, like diamonds on a canopy of black velvet. They made the flaring lights of the terrace of the Hotel and Cafe de Paris look tawdry and meretricious. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... in a dress rather tawdry and rumpled, here drew her veil well down and rose; but, marking every eye upon her, thought it advisable, upon the whole, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... well armed, had plenty of ammunition, mustered a crew of twenty-six prime seamen, the pick of the Barracouta's crew—men who would go anywhere, and face anything—we carried an ample supply of blankets, beads, brass wire, old muskets, and tawdry finery of various descriptions, priceless in the eyes of savages, for the purpose of peaceable ransom, if such could be accomplished; but we lacked an interpreter, a man acquainted with the barbaric language of the up-river natives, through whom we should be ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... hear no more of the bread and cheese and onions, pot-house scores, and low company, with which you have so unceremoniously taxed our lordship. You will drive your jumped-up coach, with your awkward wives and dowdy daughters, and your tawdry liveries, all the way from Russell Square to the Green Park, to catch the chance of a glimpse of our lordship. You find out from our lordship's footman that our lordship wears a particular collar to his coat, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... food for himself. While it was being brought he sat down in the very chair that he had used so often—for he had been ushered into his old parlor—and gazed about him. There were the same tawdry ornaments on the mantel-piece, and the same books on the dusty shelf. Nothing was altered except the tenant of that room; but how great a change had taken place in him! What a face the dingy mirror offered him in place of that which it had shown him ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... such a leap since my departure, that I must continually inquire my way; and the very cemetery was brand new. Death, however, had been active; the graves were already numerous, and I must pick my way in the rain, among the tawdry sepulchres of millionnaires, and past the plain black crosses of Hungarian labourers, till chance or instinct led me to the place that was my father's. The stone had been erected (I knew already) "by admiring friends"; I could ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... here and there with food and wine. My lantern-bearer told me that the street was not quite awake; it was waiting for the outpourings from the taverns and mug-houses. I bade him hurry me to the "Red Slipper" as soon as possible, for never have I had any stomach for these tawdry evils, fit as they are only for ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... presently became aware of a current of air passing across the room in the direction of the open door. It came from a window before which a tawdry red curtain had been draped. Either the window behind the curtain was wide open, which is alien to Chinese habits, or it was shattered. While I was wondering if Harley intended ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... which had disfigured its mighty beams and solid panelling, had been removed; and the freshly polished oak shone forth in its noble age, shorn of all tawdry disguise. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... Taste gustumi. Taste gusto. Tasty (palatable) bongusta. Tatter cxifonajxo. Tattle babilajxo, babilado. Tattoo tatui. Taunt sarkasmo. Taut strecxa. Tautology ripetado, tauxtologio. Tavern drinkejo. Taw felpreparadi. Tawdry falsluksa. Tawny dubeflava. Tax taksi. Tax takso, imposto. Tea teo. Tea canister teujo. Tea caddy teujo. Tea plant tearbeto. Teapot tekrucxo. Teach instrui. Teacher instruisto. Teaching instruo—ado. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... remembered that the early San Francisco pioneers in the first flush of their wealth had imported directly from France, and which for years after gave an unexpected foreign flavor to the western domesticity and a tawdry gilt equality to saloons and drawing-rooms, public and private. But he was observant of a corresponding change in Harcourt, when a moment later he entered the room. That individuality which had kept ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... toys, and articles of dress, made the museum quite gay with their tawdry ornaments of beads and feathers. It is a pleasant lounging place, and the old man forms one of its ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Merle, heading his valiant little band of thinkers, would light a pure white flame to flush America's spiritual darkness. He would be a vital influence, teaching men and women to cultivate life for its own sake. For the cheap and tawdry extravagance of our national boasting he would substitute a chastening knowledge of our spiritual inferiority to the older nations. America was uncreative; he would release and nurse its raw creative intelligence till it should be free to function, breaking new intellectual paths, setting ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Scythian wilds afar Our blood to spill? Wear they the livery of the Czar? They do his will. Nor tasselled silk, nor epaulette, Nor plume, nor torse— No splendour gilds, all sternly met, Our foot and horse. But, dark and still, we inly glow, Condensed in ire! Strike, tawdry slaves, and ye shall know Our gloom is fire. In vain your pomp, ye evil powers, Insults the land; Wrongs, vengeance, and the cause are ours, And God's right hand! Madmen! they trample into snakes The ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... thought this a most sleep-inspiring exhibition. It has been so often described that I need not trouble my readers with it. The women are gaily dressed in brocades and gauzy textures, and glitter with spangles and tawdry ornaments. The musical accompaniment of clanging zither, asthmatic fiddle, timber-toned drum, clanging cymbal, and harsh metallic triangle, is a sore affliction, and when the dusky prima donna throws back her head, extends her chest, gets up to her high note, with her hand behind her ear, ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... predecessors were of a kind to which his mind had a deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain style, sometimes even to a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... forth from themselves" and are stirred and thoroughly interested. They quite simply adopt as their own, and imitate as best they can, all that they see there. In moments of genuine grief and excitement the words and the gestures they employ are those copied from the stage, and the tawdry expression often conflicts hideously with the fine and genuine emotion of which it is the inadequate ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... Handel's life, wrote in November: "The concerts begin next Saturday at the Haymarket. Carestini sings, Pescetti composes; the house is made up into little boxes, like the playhouses abroad." Dr. Burney gives a comic account of the undertaking. "The opera, a tawdry, expensive and meretricious lady, who had been accustomed to high keeping, was now reduced to a very humble state. Her establishment was not only diminished, but her servants reduced to half-pay. Pescetti seems to have been her prime ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... &c. 855; meretricious; extravagant, monstrous, horrid; shocking &c. (painful) 830. gaudy, tawdry, overornamented, baroque, rococo; bedizened, tricked out, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... ordinary appearance of modern places of amusement for the people. It was brilliant with false richness and tawdry splendor. There were paintings there, and tables at which wine was sold, gilded chandeliers and glasses that held a quartern of brandy, velvet hangings and wooden benches, the shabbiness and rusticity of an ale-house with the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... down, and all its old ornaments stript and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "That would be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... of the sentence need not occupy us long. Belshazzar so little realised the facts, that he issued his order to deck out Daniel in the tawdry pomp he had promised him, as if a man with such a message would be delighted with purple robes and gold chains, and made him third ruler of the kingdom which he had just declared was numbered and ended by God. The force of folly could no further go. No wonder that the hardy invaders ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... them, but turned my own eyes away. And again I saw the menacing negro faces and the burning sunlight and the strange flag that tossed and whimpered in the air above my head, the strange flag of unknown, tawdry colors, like the painted face of a woman in the street, but a flag at which I cheered and shouted as though it were my own, as though I loved it; a flag for which I ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... times his consciousness of distinction among men betrays something of that childlike, delighted vanity, half unwitting, which was afterward forced into exuberant growth and distasteful prominence, by the tawdry flatteries of Lady Hamilton and the Court of Naples. Now, expressed to one who had a right to all his confidence and to share all his honors, it challenges rather the sympathy than the criticism of the reader. "I will relate another anecdote, all vanity to myself, but you will partake ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... thee, Dear Swift, those spotless leaves I send; Small is the present, but sincere the friend. Think not so poor a book below thy care; Who knows the price that thou canst make it bear? Tho' tawdry now, and like Tyralla's face, The spacious front shines out with borrow'd grace; Tho' pasteboards, glitt'ring like a tinsell'd coat, A rasa tabula within denote; Yet if a venal and corrupted age, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... does it mean? Does it mean that the European Powers have in the past been entirely wise and honest, have never intrigued with the Turk the one against the other, have always kept good faith, have never been inspired by false political theories and tawdry and shoddy ideals, have, in short, no responsibility for the abominations that have gone on in the Balkan peninsula for a century? No one outside a lunatic asylum would urge it. But, then, that means that diplomacy has not done all it might to prevent this war. ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... on the bed was breathing heavily, his lips moving at every breath in a way to form a grimace. He made in this condition the whole room as tawdry as a tavern tap. And at the feet of this thing he was tossing his meager store ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... whose name, shortened into St. Audrey, was given to a certain kind of lace, whence "tawdry"; she took refuge from the married state in the monastery of St. Abb's Head, and afterwards founded a monastery in the Isle ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... procession of her hopeless sisters who had traveled the road from which he was rescuing her, saw them first as sweet and merry children bubbling with joy, and again, after the world had misused them for its pleasure, haggard and tawdry, with dragging steps trailing toward the oblivion that awaited them. He wondered if life must always be so terribly wasted, made a bruised and broken thing instead of the fine, brave adventure for ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... brownness of ripe nuts, and your face is always pale. Your lips have a trick of falling apart in a half-smile when you listen. They told me before I knew you that you were pretty. Pretty! The word is cheap and tawdry. You are beautiful, with the beauty of a pearl or a star or a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... his literary reputation; and in this, perhaps, the great Congreve was not far wrong. A touch of Steele's tenderness is worth all his finery; a flash of Swift's lightning, a beam of Addison's pure sunshine, and his tawdry playhouse taper is invisible. But the ladies loved him, and he ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... lowering, militant expression, the smouldering fire in her eyes proclaimed it. Her long, rather narrow face was gripped between her hands; her elbows rested upon the brick parapet. She gazed at that world of blood-red mists, of unshapely, grotesque buildings, of strange, tawdry colors; she listened to the medley of sounds—crude, shrill, insistent, something like the groaning of a world stripped naked—and she had all the time the air of one who hates the thing ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... reeking with rank smoke and the fumes of stale beer. The floor was strewn with sawdust, streaked and circled by shuffling feet; the mirror backing the bar was covered with soiled gauze dotted with tawdry roses, and an indescribable dinginess seemed to have laid its sordid fingers on ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... lawlessness. A neat station stood where had been the rough contractor's buildings. At a new "Windsor" (or was it "Brunswick"?) the performance of the kitchen contrasted sadly (alas! how common is such contrast in these regions) with the promise of the menu. There was a tawdry theatre yclept "Academy of Music," and there was not much to choose in the way of ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... two-story house had struck her aghast. She had done naught but wonder and stare. The trip had been a great delight, but she had never desired to linger or to dwell there. Certain sordid effects came over her; reminiscences of the muddy streets, the tawdry shops, the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... me!" she said sorrowfully, without a bit of anger, so that I was softened in a trice. "But the ladies of New York, even, are no such tawdry make-believes as this.—Heaven knows, I would give ten years of life for a sight of ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... royalty's mandate. He was convinced of this later in the day, when he once more fancied that a disappearing pair of broad shoulders belonged to the European. This time he laughed at the idea. The surroundings made the supposition ludicrous. It was among the tawdry shops of ship chandlers in the East Side, where he himself had gone in search of certain able seamen in the company of the sailing-master of the Isis. Von Ritz would hardly be consorting with the fo'castle men who frequent the water front below ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... and to read them. And what have we to do with books? The Herr Doctor might perhaps be asked for his advice; but we have no index expurgatorius in Gruenewald. Had we but that, we should be the most absolute parody and farce upon this tawdry earth." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... day a cheap, tawdry and unimposing procession wended its way through the back streets of Paris, its leader seeking to escape even the edges of the mob, lest the people should fall upon the somber little pageant and rend it into fragments. This was the funeral ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... people crowded the pavements. The exquisite weather had drawn them out. Belles with their ringlets and sun-shades, and beaux with canes and curled moustaches. Irish women in tawdry finery, and ladies of color with every variety of ornament, and ridiculous imitation of fashion. Now and then a respectable-looking negro would pass, turning out of the way, ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... guardians and the workhouse; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small-pox marked, hollow eyed, emaciated, her only bed clothes the skirt of a large handsome new riding-habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were stitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor. The old woman took no notice of us as we entered; but one of the girls looked up, and, with a pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... picture, and, kneeling down beside me, I know prayed with all his honest heart that the truth might shine down upon me too; but I saw no glimpse of heaven at all. I saw but a poor picture, an altar with blinking candles, a church hung with tawdry strips of red and white calico. The good, kind W—— went away, humbly saying 'that such might have happened again if heaven so willed it.' I could not but feel a kindness and admiration for the good man. I know his works are made to square with ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you. But I must confess to you it has made it very difficult for me to go on with Alessandra. All the other plays are in line of a national drama. Alessandra is a bitter and ironical concession. The Morning makes its splendor almost tawdry. It hurt me to go to rehearsal to-day. Westervelt's presence was a gloating presence, and I hated him. Hugh's report of the exultant 'I told you so's' of the dramatic critics sickened me—" Her letter ended abruptly, almost at ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... times more pleased with my own. I have been at mass, at church, and at the presbyterian meeting: an idea struck me at the last, in regard to the drapery of them all; that the Romish religion is like an over-dressed, tawdry, rich citizen's wife; the presbyterian like a rude aukward country girl; the church of England like an elegant well-dressed woman of quality, "plain in her neatness" (to quote Horace, who is my favorite ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... seated in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. I looked out from behind the curtain, and surveyed the house. It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding cake. The gallery and pit were fairy full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what I ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... mantle and flowing plumes, in his tribute to Gloriana, The Faery Queen, who is none other than Elizabeth herself. Literature partakes of the fierce polemic and religious enthusiasm which mark the troublous times of the Civil War; it becomes tawdry, tinselled, and licentious at the Restoration, and develops into numerous classes and more serious instruction, under the constitutional reigns of the house of Hanover, in which the kings were bad, but the nation prosperous because the rights of the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... renowned English painter of his age, was scarcely competent to such a work, what must be said of his proposed coadjutors? 'I confess,' said Dean Milman, 'I shudder at the idea of our walls covered with the audacious designs and tawdry colouring of West, Barry, Cipriani, Dance, and Angelica Kauffman.'[936] Such criticism would be very exaggerated if it were understood as a general condemnation of painters, whose merits in their own province of art were great. But it will universally ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... his cigar; a woman came sidling up and spoke to him. He perceived her to be one of those made by men into mediums for their pleasure, to feel sympathy with whom was sentimental. Her face was flushed, her whisper hoarse; she had no attractions but the curves of a tawdry figure. Shelton was repelled by her proprietary tone, by her blowzy face, and by the scent of patchouli. Her touch on his arm startled him, sending a shiver through his marrow; he almost leaped aside, and walked the faster. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the least hurt, you cannot refrain from a thrill of annoyance that a country which has boasted in so loud-mouthed a way to Europe of having begun its national life by a wholesome scorn of all class distinction, should contain citizens cursed by a spirit of such tawdry pride. At least the aristocracies of other lands, vicious and reprehensible as they have always been, are yet an evil with a certain malign consistency for their support. Like those monarchies of which they have formed a piteous adjunct, they have always been the outgrowths of a perfectly ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... who was not a vain man, purchased a tawdry sheriff's carriage, soon after he took his house in Leicester Fields, and desired his sister to ride about in it, in order that people might ask, 'Whose it was?' and the answer would be, 'It belongs to ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... prison—constructively—and he leaped from squalor into fussy opulence. He wrote for the rabble, and he who writes for the rabble has a ticket to Limbus one way. The Rossettis made their appeal to the Elect Few. Dickens was sired by Wilkins Micawber and dammed by Mrs. Nickleby. He wallowed in the cheap and tawdry, and the gospel of sterling simplicity was absolutely outside his orbit. Dickens knew no more about art than did the prosperous beefeater, who, being partial to the hard sound of the letter, asked Rossetti for a copy of "The Gurm," and thus supplied the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... offend the taste in the accompaniments of this funeral. It was an inconsistent attempt at show, a tawdry imitation of more expensive funeral observances. About the wasted face of the once beautiful girl were arranged, not the delicate white blossoms with which affection sometimes loves to surround what was lovely in life, but ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... feeling of contempt for herself for the swift dreams of something different aroused by the day's events. Optimism had come to be synonymous with weakness to Kate. Now, as she stared indifferently at a display of tawdry blouses, she was asking herself if she had not yet learned her lesson, but that upon the strength of a little ephemeral happiness she must needs begin and build air ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... sufficiently amusing to see ten thousand people resign themselves to the same task, and affect to be unconcerned about the green and red figures which were to divide the "profits." I tried to make out who were as anxious to get out of that tawdry den as I was. Four o'clock struck, and the distribution was not done. I began to be very impatient. What if Fausta fell into trouble? I knew, or hoped I knew, that she would struggle to the Astor Library, as to her only place of rescue and refuge,—her asylum. What if I failed her there? I who had ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... the affair too seriously. It was evidently more than half a joke. Anti-Smith was more good-humouredly in evidence than the winning party. Just this touch of buffoonery completed our sense of the farce-comedy character of the situation. The town was tawdry in its preparations—and knew it; but half sincere in its enthusiasm—and knew it. If the crowd had been composed of Americans, we should have anticipated an unhappy time for Smith; but good, loyal Canadians, by ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... in the glass, I was no doubt, too natural, too artless, to hide my childish joy at the change: a change, in the real truth, for much the worse, since I must have much better become the neat easy simplicity of my rustic dress than the awkward, untoward, tawdry finery that I could not ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... as moved as her companion. The blue of the gulf was of an extreme intensity in the parts not reflected by the sun; the coast appeared of ochre; although the houses had tawdry facades, all these discordant elements were now blended and interfused in subdued and exquisite harmony. The shrubbery was trembling rhythmically under the breeze. The very air was musical, as though in its waves were vibrating the strings ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say, I have success—this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it." He had a walnut in his big hand. "If that was my success," he said, and crushed it, and held it out for ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... one from my dear little sister, the first I have had from her since I left London. She is a little jewel, and it will be a sin if she is marred in the cutting and polishing, or if she is set in tawdry French pinchbeck, instead of fine, strong, sterling gold. I am sorry to say that the lady Mrs. Jameson recommended as her governess has not been thought sufficiently accomplished to undertake the charge. I regret ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... at his hotel. There were about twenty people present, nearly all men; Joan wondered where they had been collected from, and she did not quite like the look of any of them. Fanny was making a great deal of noise, and how funny and tawdry their faces looked under the bright light. After supper there was a dance, the table was pushed aside, and someone—Joan saw with surprise that it was Daddy Brown—pounded away at a one-step on the piano. Everyone danced, the men, since there ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... moments which clung to her like a legend. Romance and mystery were in her smile; and yet what had life held for her, she mused now, except the frustrated hope, the blighted fruit, the painted lily? Her beauty had brought her nothing that was not tawdry, nothing that was not a gaudy imitation of happiness. She had given herself for what? For the shadow of reality, for the tinted shreds of a damaged illusion. The past, in spite of her many triumphs, had been worse than tragic; it had been comic—since it ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... Since then, a long succession of tenants had scented the dark, badly lighted corridors with a variety of garlicky odors, and the rentals had been lowered until only the most necessary repairs could be afforded to keep the building in order. So there the block stood, making a tawdry front with small, and often-remodeled stores, as it waited for one of the numerous small fires which were always starting ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... afternoons at the exposition were delightful at the end of the day, when the crowd had dispersed a little and the last rays of the setting sun lingered on the Meudon Hills and the river. The buildings and costumes lost their tawdry look, and one saw only a mass of moving colour, which seemed to soften and lose itself in the evening shadows. There were various closing entertainments. The marshal gave a splendid fete at Versailles. We drove out and had some difficulty in making our way through ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... "Tawdry little cheap things and makeshifts," she said. "If Linda feels that she has been so terribly defrauded, she can help ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... priests moved to and fro. An old priest with long white hair was standing behind a desk close to me, and reading a long prayer in an unswerving monotonous voice. There was the scent of candles and cold stone and hot human breath in the little place. The tawdry gilt of the Ikons glittered in the candle-light, and an echo of the cold wind creeping up the long dark aisle blew the light about so that the gilt was like flashing piercing eyes. I wrapped my Shuba closely about me, and stood there lost in a ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... In vain they shouted; their voices were lost in the echoless air. They examined one by one the few thatched huts: they were open, contained one or two rude articles of furniture—a bed, a bench, and table—were scrupulously clean—and empty. They next inspected the chapel; it was tawdry and barbaric in ornament, but the candlesticks and crucifix and the basin for holy water were of heavily beaten silver. The same thought crossed their minds—the abandoned ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... before the foremost reached the ford—a scout in worn and tawdry buckskin, wearied and impassive. He gave his despatch to the care of the first officer to accost him and took the way to the store, briefly saying in reply to questions, that he was "too dry to speak ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... disguise her shape. Each season we fix fresh millinery upon her changeless head. We hang around her robes of woven words. Only the promise of her ample breasts we cannot altogether hide, shocking us not a little; only that remains to tell us that beneath the tawdry tissues still stands the changeless statue God carved ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... mad woman makes Aurengezebe curious to know, whether others who are in their senses can guess at his quality. For which reason the whole convent is examined one by one. The matron marches in with a tawdry country girl: "Pray, Winifred," says she, "who do you think that fine man with those jewels and pearls is?" "I believe," says Winifred, "it is our landlord. It must be the squire himself." The ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... "Portland Fancy," and "Lady of the Lake." Now he quavers into the "Chorus Jig;" but no one here knows enough to dance that, so he comes back to the simpler airs again. And as he plays, the whole tawdry, glaring scene drops away from the old man's eyes, and instead of vulgar gaslight he sees the soft glow of the afternoon sun on the country road, and the graceful elms bending in an arch overhead, as if to watch the child Melody as she dances. The slender figure swaying hither ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... to herself, "then you know I don't like you, and you'll use me in one way, if you can't in another. Very well!" But she found the girl's trust touching somehow, though the sentimentality of her appeal seemed as tawdry as ever. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... see her face. She watched it herself with dim half consciousness as it changed before her in the tawdry mirror above the mantelpiece, half longing that he might look up and see it, ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... ponderous motion. It was enough to make a brain dizzy with the clanging thunder of the engines, the whizzing spindles of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over all. The looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls of fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of the coal-diggers. There was a breathless odor of copperas. As he went from one room to another up through the ascending stories, he had a vague sensation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... the tawdry arts she tries, The tint of cheek, the gold of hair, To mimic nature for the eyes Of those who scorn her paltry care, And spurn those charms—if aught abide Within her beauty's narrowed scope— Now touched with less a wanton's pride Than ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... a lord and lady who wore ridiculous imitations of fashionable dress, and made ludicrous attempts to imitate elegant manners. Mad Moll and her husband were another pair who flourished in tawdry, gay-colored rags, and tatters, he brandishing a sweep's broom and she a ladle. Jim Crow and a fancifully bedizened ballet-dancer in white muslin, often swelled the ranks, and the rest of the party rigged out in a profusion of gilt paper, flowers, tinsel and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... room, with mat half-hung, The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!— Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love; Or just as gay, at council, in a ring Of mimic'd ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... consequence which his position gave him, he exercised a mischievous influence on the governor's measures. Almagro's poverty-stricken followers were the objects of his open ridicule, and he revenged the insult now offered him by riding before their young leader's residence, displaying a tawdry magnificence in his dress, sparkling with gold and silver, and with the inscription, "For the Men of Chili," set in his bonnet. It was a foolish taunt; but the poor cavaliers who were the object of it, made morbidly sensitive ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, Macpherson's Ossian, carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise Macpherson's Ossian here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson's Ossian she may have stolen from that vetus et major Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection. But there ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... of feature is enhanced by the rippling dark masses of hair crowning her lovely brows. In the silky waves of her coronal, shines one diamond star of surpassing richness. In all the pride and freshness of youth her loveliness is unmarred by the tawdry arts of cosmetic and make-up. Unabashed by the admiration she compels, she calmly pursues her exciting calling. The new-comer is well worthy the rank, by general acclaim, of "Queen of the El Dorado." In no way does she notice the eager crowd. She is ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... and gilding, and marbling, and blind-tooling, the booksellers and binders put upon Pen's bookshelves. He had a very fair taste in matters of art, and a keen relish for prints of a high school—none of your French Opera Dancers, or tawdry Racing Prints, such as had delighted the simple eyes of Mr. Spicer, his predecessor—but your Stranges, and Rembrandt etchings, and Wilkies before the letter, with which his apartments were furnished presently in the most perfect good taste, as was allowed in the university, where this ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... language. He becomes more and more liable to strike harder than he knows or intends. He may put on his boxing gloves, and yet forget that the older they grow, the more plainly may the knuckles inside be felt. Moreover, in the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters through the dust of the ring which obscures Truth's ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... though but a small part of the sixty works can be called good, the inferior work is not discreditable: it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Venus of old, with your queenly derision, How you would disdain the belle's tawdry array! Free footsteps untrammelled, cool hand of decision, Sweet laugh like bells pealing, were yours in the day When you reigned over men by the might of your beauty; No fetters were o'er you in body or brain; The world would bow down in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... man would want to squeeze such a ragbag o' tawdry finery and milliners' tinsel," said ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... in his life had seen anything so unshapely as that huge wen at the back of her head. "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens!" He could not help quoting the words to himself. She was dressed with some attempt at being smart, but her ribbons were soiled, and her lace was tawdry, and the fabric of her dress was old and dowdy. He was quite sure that he would feel no pride in calling her Mrs. Gibson, no pleasure in having her all to himself at his own hearth. "I hope we shall escape the bitterness of Miss Stanbury's ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Scotch ear best; and the new an Italianised one. There is a third, and what Oswald calls the old "Highland laddie," which pleases me more than either of them. It is sometimes called "Ginglin Johnnie;" it being the air of an old humorous tawdry song of that name. You will find it in the Museum, "I hae been at Crookieden," &c. I would advise you, in the musical quandary, to offer up your prayers to the muses for inspiring direction; and in the meantime, waiting for this direction, bestow a libation to Bacchus; and there is not ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham |
