"Threadbare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and be forgotten, and the world will go on just as if I had never been;—and yet how I have loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!" And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and, still singing, they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... exhibited outrageous combinations of crude colors upon their persons, their husbands availed themselves of the artist's privilege and dressed as they pleased, and curious it was to see the provincial dowdiness of the pair. In their threadbare clothes they looked like the supernumeraries that represent rank and fashion at stage ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... penetrating, but very bright blue eyes; they were fixed now earnestly on his niece. He took a glance round the little parlor where they sat. He was an old Australian, accustomed to bush life, but even he noticed how threadbare was the carpet, how poor and meagre the window curtains. Charlotte herself, too, how thin and worn she was! Could those pale and hollow cheeks ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... tamely stoop to every pedant's rules; For seven long years debarr'd of liberal ease, To plod in college trammels to degrees; Beneath the weight of solemn toys to groan, Sleep over books, and leave mankind unknown; 20 To praise each senior blockhead's threadbare tale, And laugh till reason blush, and spirits fail; Manhood with vile submission to disgrace, And cap the fool, whose merit is his place, Vice-Chancellors, whose knowledge is but small, And Chancellors, who nothing know at all: Ill-brook'd the generous spirit in those days When learning was the ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... parallel spans almost door to door, and never touch. But one evening as Marcia was crossing the square, just after the lights began to glow, a human derelict sidled up to her and accosted her with a mumbled petition for alms. The man was old and his clothes though neatly patched were threadbare and worn. His face, too, was seamed and his breath ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... these long gray shadows many dead Lie waiting: we wait with them. Do you believe That at the last the threadbare soul will give All his shifts over, and stand dishevelled, Naked in truth? Then we shall hear it said, "Ye two have waited long, daring to live Grimly through days tormented; now reprieve Awaiteth you with ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... poet. He requires various mechanical means and appliances for his full success. His works must be performed in order to be felt. He cannot be read, like the poet, in the closet, or in the cottage, or on the street-stall, where the threadbare student steals from day to day, as he lingers at the spot, new draughts of delicious refreshment. Few can sit down and peruse a musical composition even for its melody; and very few, indeed, can gather from the silent notes the full effect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... they are continually labouring under the depression of spirits arising from a sense of the possible depreciation of such a valuable property. Visions of showers of rain, and March dust, perpetually haunt their morbid imaginations. Greasy collars, chalky seams, threadbare cuffs, (three warnings that the time must come when that tunic, for which five pounds ten have been lost to them and their heirs for ever, will be worth no more than a couple of shillings to an old-clothesman in Holywell Street,) fill them, as they walk along the Strand, with apprehensions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... drawers of painted deal to stand back to the wall. A similar washstand and a low bed completed the furniture. The last was immediately behind the door, and there lay the woman, with a bolster heightened by a thin petticoat and threadbare cloak under her head. Hester saw a pale, patient, worn face, with ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... face shone something of the old bright friendliness, but as she looked at the shabby youth, with his unshaved face and threadbare clothes, her fastidious eye disapproved of him just as it had disapproved of him when they met, boy and girl, for the first ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... unknown.—At the head of the diplomatic committee stands Brissot, itinerant journalist, lately traveling about in England and the United States. He is supposed to be competent in the affairs of both worlds; in reality he is one of those presuming, threadbare, talkative fellows, who, living in a garret, lecture foreign cabinets and reconstruct all Europe. Things, to them, seem to be as easily worked out as words and sentences: one day,[2205] to entice the English into an alliance with France, Brissot proposes to place two towns, Dunkirk ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... seated within a few feet of them, at their backs, and discovered them when Margaret turned round and screamed at the boar. But he forbore to speak to them, for municipal reasons. Margaret was very plainly dressed, and Peter inclined to threadbare. So the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... England and in Canada, several of them having risen to the episcopate. "That minds me," answered the minister, intentionally putting on his broad Scotch, "that minds me o' Jockey Strachan, that was Bishop o' Toronto. He met a Kirk man aince, frae Markham, I'm thinkin', that had a threadbare coat. 'Man,' said he till's auld freend, 'yon's a shockin' worn-out coat. Can yer freens i' the Kirk no dae better than that by ye?' 'Toot, toot, Jockey,' said the Kirk man, 'what ails ye at the coat? It's no turned yet.'" The sensible Bishop ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... very old threadbare thoughts; I dare say you think it was not worth your while to come to hear them, nor mine to speak them; but if we would lay them to heart, and realise how true it is about every step of our earthly course ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hid herself, and in came the father, with at least three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limb supported by ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... which might have been anarchical, we lived on the fruits of a long-established order; and it is fair to add that at the end of thirteen months there were no visible symptoms that discipline was wearing threadbare. ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... understood. Freshmen might argue but even the Tennessee Shad wasted no time in producing the coin. There was exactly ten cents in Skippy's pocket after the most painstaking search revealed this last ray of hope in the lining of the threadbare pocket. Only ten cents to stop the deficit in his stomach! The choice was difficult. There was ginger-pop at Bill Appleby's, and jiggers at Al's, pancakes at Conover's, and the aching void within him knew no prejudice or limitations to its hospitality. He hesitated, but the fragrance ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... "Now this was great condescension towards the ladies of Massachusetts Bay in a threadbare lieutenant ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... when it was otherwise—when it was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman should always be the Stoic, with his soul too great to be affected by the small troubles of life. "You look cold, sir," said an English sympathizer to a French emigre. The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat. "Sir," said he, "a gentleman is never cold." One's consideration for others as well as one's own self-respect should check the grumble. This self-suppression, and also the concealment of pain are two of the old noblesse oblige characteristics which are now little more than a tradition. Public ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weak point and, having found it, delivers the attack. Squeaking Henry knew the armour plate to be thinnest on man's sympathetic side, and the hard-luck story which he told Old Man Curry would have melted the heart of a golf club handicapper. The story was overworked and threadbare in spots, but it brought ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... temptations of opportunity; a foregone sequel and a tragic issue:—this material is of the oldest, and could make but slender claim to originality. Submitted to Colman or Garrick as the scenario of a play for Yates and Mrs. Woffington, it would probably have been rejected as pitifully threadbare. Yet combined and developed under the brush of Hogarth, set in an atmosphere that makes it as vivid as nature itself, decorated with surprising fidelity, and enlivened by all the resources of the keenest humour, it passes out ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... worn by him originally, and of that there was scarcely any when found, had been worn threadbare, and he was now dressed in native garments. The chair in which he was reclining was undoubtedly from some wrecked ship, and had been in the possession of the villagers ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... Look thou within thee, ere again ill-using me. Art thou aware Of nothing there Which might abuse thee, as thou art abusing me? A brain that mourns THINE unredeemed rascality? A soul that weeps at THY threadbare morality? Both grieving that THEIR ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... in want and misery, and just kept himself from starvation by making and selling maps. To the common people he seemed a madman, and as he passed through the streets in his worn and threadbare garments children jeered and pointed fingers of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Beaurepaire despised this threadbare excuse too much to notice it at all. She went on as if he had said nothing. "Intimate as you were with us, you must have some reason for deserting ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... look as nice as I could," say I, casting a rueful glance at the tea-board, at the large plum loaf, at the preparations for temperate conviviality. I have sat down on the threadbare blue-and-red hearth-rug, and am shading my face with a pair of cold pink hands, from the clear, quick blaze. "What am I to wear?" I say, gloomily. "None of my frocks are ironed, and there is ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... semi-lachrymose type, as "Tom Bowling," "Half Mast High," "The Skipper and his Boy," etc. These are all beautiful in their way, but with repetition pall upon one somewhat, while your jovial song seems ever fresh, and will stand singing many times before it becomes threadbare. ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival; he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the fragments of a party-colored belcher handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes, covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night; and the trousers,—some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of his neighbors, and in consequence had purchased a small car which it was his delight to use for the benefit of his friends. In fact, he often called it the Maguire jitney, and the joke never became threadbare to his simple mind, for every time he made it he laughed as heartily as if he had never heard it before, and so did everybody else. Therefore no sooner had Mr. Turner proposed his plan than Mat was all ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... brethren, the Jews, would not turn their backs upon him because he had married a Christian. It might be that he would have to begin the world again; but for that, too, he would be prepared. Nina had shown that she could bear poverty. Nina's torn boots and threadbare dress, and the utter absence of any request ever made with regard to her own comfort, had not been lost upon him. He knew how noble she was in bearing—how doubly noble she was in never asking. If only there was nothing of deceit at the ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... examination. Men who are jealous of maintaining the dignity required by this color ought to devote themselves to constant and minute care of their person; but our dear M. Popinot was incapable of forcing himself to the puritanical cleanliness which black demands. His trousers, always threadbare, looked like camlet—the stuff of which attorneys' gowns are made; and his habitual stoop set them, in time, in such innumerable creases, that in places they were traced with lines, whitish, rusty, or shiny, betraying either sordid ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... what I think of Master Clere—he's got no stay in him. I doubt he's but one of your fair-weathered folks, that'll side with Truth when she steps bravely forth in her satin gown and her velvet slippers; but when she comes in a threadbare gown and old clouted shoes, then she's not for their company. There's a ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... stranger. First may be remarked the substantial Dutchman, with his pretty, smiling, round-faced, and particularly well-dressed daughter: then the knot of 'Qui hi's,' sent to the Cape, per doctor's certificate, to husband their threadbare constitutions, and lavish their rupees: next the obsequious, smirking, money-making China-man, with his poking shoulders, and whip-like pig-tail: then the stout, squat Hottentots—who resemble the Dutch in but one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... when K. Le Moyne retired to bed. Wrapped in a paper and securely tied for the morning's disposal, was considerable masculine underclothing, ragged and buttonless. Not for worlds would he have had Sidney discover his threadbare inner condition. "New underwear for yours tomorrow, K. Le Moyne," he said to himself, as he unknotted his cravat. "New underwear, and something besides K. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... glance across the desk, and for the first time saw the whole of him. He was clad in a threadbare, long, brown ulster—long, that is, it would have been upon an ordinary man, but the stranger happening to be remarkably tall, it appeared on him ridiculously short, reaching only to his knees. Round his neck and tucked into his waistcoat, thus completely ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... long howl on Oonalaska's shore' is not in it with that of mine," said George Henry—for since his coat had become threadbare his language had deteriorated, and he too frequently used slang—"but I'm thankful that I alone hear my own. How different the case from what it is when one's dog barks o' nights! Then the owner is the only one ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... witness in the course of the short ramble will "change the spirit of his dream." In Darlaston, as a sample of what he would see, there are hundreds of men and women whose clothes, made of the coarsest materials, are patched, and threadbare, and valueless; hundreds of houses without anything in them deserving the name of furniture; hundreds of beds without clothing, and hundreds of children whose excuses for clothes are barely sufficient, with every contrivance decent poverty can suggest, to cover the body as civilized society demands. ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... twitched, his left hand was clenched, and the other fumbled inside the breast of the threadbare coat as the old man turned ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... with Nan about, many a piece needed repairing often, it was stowed out of sight in the trunk-room, or the cellar, and the carpets, which had been rich and fashionable in their day, were allowed to lie now long after they had become threadbare and faded. Delia kept the handsome paintings veiled in tarlatan winter and summer, and she never removed the slip-covers from the parlor sofas and chairs, whatever the season might be. Nan did not care, because she knew nothing different, and there was no loving, artful hand ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... time in communicating the result of his mission. He transmitted the money, and a letter, by the hand of an inhabitant of Palos, to the physician, Garcia Fernandez, who delivered them to Columbus The latter immediately changed his threadbare garb for one more suited to the sphere of a court, and purchasing a mule, set out again, reanimated by hopes, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... followed by the entire dramatis personae, who ranged themselves on a wooden platform in front of the theatre. They were dressed in character, but wofully shabby, with very dingy and wrinkled white tights, threadbare cotton-velvets, crumpled silks, and crushed muslin, and all the gloss and glory gone out of their aspect and attire, seen thus in the broad daylight and after a long series of performances. They sang a song together, and withdrew into the theatre, whither the public were invited to follow them ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and with his annual report in my hand I asked him how he lived on the pittance which he had received. He said that it took very little when one was careful and that he lived well enough—but his coat was threadbare and his shoes were sadly patched. There was a brightness in his eyes too, and a flush on his cheek that I did not quite like. I asked him of his work and he told me that he was hopeful—told me of the little repairs he had made, of a soul won back, but in the conversation I ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... eclectic thought that seemed to be growing, and with which I largely sympathized, he returned it with richer expressions of disdain than often fell even from his lips: "It's the shabbiest, seediest pretence at a philosophy I ever dreamed of as possible. It's like a man dressed in a black coat so threadbare as to be all shiny. The most poverty-stricken, out-at-elbows thing I ever read. A perfect monument ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and cons upon popish plots, and meal tubs, and exclusion bills, and passive obedience, and addresses of lives and fortunes, and prerogative, and property and liberty of conscience, and letters to a friend: from an understanding and a conscience, threadbare and ragged with perpetual turning; from a head broken in a hundred places by the malignants of the opposite factions; and from a body spent with poxes ill cured, by trusting to bawds and surgeons, who, as it afterwards appeared, were professed ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of the afternoon watch, however, the wind showed signs of failing us, which it did so rapidly that by two bells in the first dog-watch our canvas was thrashing itself threadbare against the masts, and the schooner was rolling gunwale under as she headed all round the compass. The atmosphere was hot and close almost to the point of suffocation; the sky, though perfectly cloudless, was thick and hazy; and the sun, as he drooped ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... people, however, cannot be too fastidious, and a few buyers still remained who were glad to bid for such things, and amongst these people was a respectable-looking widow, in threadbare mourning, with a boy of about thirteen years old by ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... often taken up by writers and speakers, repeated, and again taken up by others, and thus their use enlarges in ever-widening circles until the expressions become threadbare. Drop them before they have reached that state. Function, environment, trend, the masses, to be in touch with, to voice the sentiments of— these are enough to illustrate the kind of ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... his life gone back in some strange way? ... or had he merely DREAMED of a former existence different to this one? He remembered now what Sah-luma had told him respecting Khosrul's "new" theory of a future religion,—a theory that to him had seemed so old, so old! —so utterly exhausted and worn threadbare! In what a cruel problem was he hopelessly involved!—what a useless, perplexed, confused being he had become! ... he who would once to have staked his life on the unflinching strength and capabilities of human reason! After a ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... had taken in all the dainty details of gloves, tiny chatelaine watch, and neat school satchel out of which protruded green and brown books. With a fierce little gesture the Other Girl had slid her own hands under her threadbare jacket. ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... where, if I may venture to say so, you and I are like to like;—for the new gloss of your coat;"—the dean, as it happened, had on at the moment a very old coat, his oldest coat, selected perhaps with some view to this special visit,—"does not obtrude itself in my household, as would be the threadbare texture of mine in yours;—I can open my mouth to you and converse with you at my ease; you are now to me that Frank Arabin who has so comforted me and so often confuted me; whom I may perhaps on an occasion have confuted—and perhaps have comforted. ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... upon enemies, and in the final expression of contempt. For to compare some worthless thing to a farthing, to a penny, or to tuppence, has no vigour left in it, and it has long been thought ridiculous even among provincials; a threadbare, worn, and worthless sort of sneer; but the thruppenny bit has a sound about it very valuable to one who would insist upon his superiority. Thus were some rebel or some demagogue of Athens (for example) to venture upon the criticism of Your Majesty's excursions into philosophy, in order ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him, and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... find in one of the rooms a gentleman dressed in evening clothes, with a hole in his head, through which escape bloody strips of flesh. The man writhes like a worm upon the threadbare carpet. ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to which you would probably have come if you had entered his sitting-room, where the bare tables, the large old-fashioned horse-hair chairs, and the threadbare Turkey carpet perpetually fumigated with tobacco, seemed to tell a story of wifeless existence that was contradicted by no portrait, no piece of embroidery, no faded bit of pretty triviality, hinting of taper-fingers and small ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every threadbare sail, And give her to the god of storms, ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... Square. Here we entered an old house of the past generation. As we passed through the wide hall, I noted the high ceilings, the old-fashioned marble mantels stained by time, the long, narrow rooms and dirty-white woodwork, and the threadbare furniture ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... those of this book do the same. Verse 8 asserts that, on the whole, honour attends goodness, and contempt wickedness. Of course, companions in dissipation extol each other's vices, and launch the old threadbare sneers at goodness. But if wisdom were not set uppermost in men's secret judgment, there would be no hypocrites, and their existence proves the truth ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in which the inhabitants of the Eastern States are usually seen when the mercury goes to ninety. The nights are always cool; although not quite as much so in July as the enthusiasts tell us who have never seen the country later in the season than the month of May, and who weary us with the threadbare tale of never sleeping without ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... to risk the danger of wearying the reader with a long account of the voyage to Constantinople, already worn threadbare by book-making tourists. It was a very interesting one, and, as I am a good sailor, I had not even the temporary horrors of sea-sickness to mar it. The weather, although cold, was fine, and the sea good-humouredly calm, and I enjoyed the voyage amazingly. And as day by day we drew nearer ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... girls do buy titles, but they did not invent that idea; it had been worn threadbare several hundred centuries before America was discovered. European girls still exploit it as briskly as ever; and, when a title is not to be had for the money in hand, they buy the husband without it. They must put up the "dot," ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... half of what His Majesty squandered on concubines and buffoons would gladden the hearts of hundreds of old Cavaliers who, after cutting down their oaks and melting their plate to help his father, now wandered about in threadbare suits, and did not know where to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Japanese aggressiveness in Manchuria, those who excuse or sympathize with her evident purpose to make Manchuria walk the way of Korea, have but one argument for their position—the pitiably abused and threadbare plea that the Japanese have won the country by the blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer to this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty Chinaman just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed they were fighting Russia because she was preparing ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... Ithuel had an affection for a lie—more especially if it served himself, or injured his enemy; finding a mode of reconciling all this to his spirituality that is somewhat peculiar to fanaticism as it begins to grow threadbare. On the present occasion, he was ready to say whatever he thought would most conform to his shipmate's wishes, and luckily he construed the expression of the other's ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... present presentment, is a medium sized man, attired in garments that have once been elegant, but are now frayed, threadbare, travel worn; his feet are encased in boots that have once been jaunty; his hat is as rakish as it is battered; his face wears that dull reddish hue, common to fair complexions that have been long exposed to sun and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... circumstances and throughout all time. Here every thing is art, nakedly, or but awkwardly concealed. No prepossession for the mere antique (and in this case we can imagine no other prepossession) should induce us to dignify with the sacred name of poetry, a series, such as this, of elaborate and threadbare compliments, stitched, apparently, together, without fancy, without plausibility, and without even an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... genius) of the old common-places of Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the poetry of feudal nations. But the time came when not only Provencal and Sicilian, but even Tuscan, poetry was neglected, when the revival of Greek and Latin letters made it impossible to rewrite the threadbare mediaeval prettinesses, or even to write in earnest in the modern tongue, so stiff and thin (as it seemed) and like some grotesque painted saint, when compared with the splendidly fleshed antique languages, turning and twining in graceful or solemn involutions, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... rather inclined to admire the gentleman who, until lately, officiated as his curate—the Rev. E. Lee,—and who, after preaching his last sermon, was next day made the recipient of that most fashionable and threadbare of all things, a presentation. Originally he indulged in odd pranks, said strange things, was laughably eccentric, and did for a period appear to be, in an ecclesiastical sense, what the kangaroo of Artemus Ward ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... greatly embarrassed for want of more scudii. Nothing can be more pitiful, perhaps, than a shabby king waiting till all his retainers have gone away before he dare leave the throne, fearing that his threadbare retreat may not be protected. Henry tried to wring something from Parliament, but without success, even aided by that practical apostle of external piety and internal intrigue, Wolsey. The latter, too, had ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... was distinguished by handsome austerity. The red-tiled floors reflected faintly the lights of antique candelabra, which shed their luster also upon chests quaintly carved, bric-A -brac that museums would have coveted, and chairs adorned with threadbare coats of arms. Beside the mantelpiece hung a small oil-painting, as I thought, of Antonio himself, his black hair reaching to his shoulders, and on his head ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a hungry lean-faced villain, A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, A living-dead man. Comedy of Errors, Act v. Sc. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... when the mail has been worn threadbare and no stirring incidents present themselves, such as the arrival of a new ship of war or a touring foreign prince, and the receptions of Mr. Whampoa and the Maharajah of Johore have grown insipid, that much of local conversation should consist of speculations as ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... who had come from the young University of Oxford, poor, patched, threadbare, with hollow cheeks, mounted on a lean horse, and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... returned home from the station, for the first moment he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law. As soon as her husband had driven out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly brightened up. Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of dirty water and looked up at ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... at best but a flighty visitor, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time, of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other people—their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals—which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times outward things also would ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... them butternut trousers for?" I used to hear Aunt Deel say when he came down-stairs in his first best clothes to go to meeting or "attend" a sociable—those days people just went to meeting but they always "attended" sociables—"You're a wearin' 'em threadbare, ayes! I suppose you've sot yer eyes on some one o' the girls. I can always tell—ayes I can! When you git your long legs in them butternut trousers ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... fountain, with here and there a flake of that tumultuous fire which the Italian sunset sheds. Who shall adequately compare the two pictures? Which shall we prefer—the Close of Salisbury, with its sleepy bells and cushioned ease of immemorial Deans—or this poor threadbare passion of Perugia, where every stone is stained with blood, and where genius in painters and scholars and prophets and ecstatic lovers has throbbed itself away to nothingness? It would be foolish to seek an answer to this question, idle to institute a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough-bass and human nature; and had some extracts to admire, and some new observations of threadbare morality to listen to. Catherine and Lydia had information for them of a different sort. Much had been done and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... been men of luck and broadcloth, nor of legacy and laziness, but men accustomed to hardship; not afraid of threadbare clothes and honest poverty; men who fought their ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... herself upstairs with a sticky hand on the banister, "Well, I don't know where you'd begin, Miss Vail. Everything's threadbare...." ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... Art itself adores and cultivates, especially during the carnival. The man in whom poor Agathe thought she recognized her son was astride the last two classes of poverty. She saw the ragged neck-cloth, the scurfy hat, the broken and patched boots, the threadbare coat, whose buttons had shed their mould, leaving the empty shrivelled pod dangling in congruity with the torn pockets and the dirty collar. Scraps of flue were in the creases of the coat, which showed plainly the dust that filled ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... their daily food, it appeared by no means improbable they would have to resort to the same primitive source for raiment to cover their nakedness. "The few shirts we had with us became so worn and threadbare, that the slightest tension would tear them. To find materials for mending the body, we had to cut off the sleeves; and when these were used, pieces were taken from the lower part of the shirt to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... "we didn't even get a chance to compare notes with you about that great game on Saturday, though Toby and myself have talked the subject threadbare by now." ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... is clearly indicated that this conciliatory attitude will only last so long as the main German fleet continues to skulk behind the defences of Kiel. If there is any aggressive movement, then let it be understood that TSCHAIKOWSKI'S Pathetique Symphony will be worn threadbare by nightly repetition sooner than that we should have any truck with BRAHMS, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... he shook himself free of numbing dread; automatically he had fallen back into the passage from the secretary to the hall door. He saw that he had worn threadbare a narrow strip where his feet had so often pressed. It would be necessary for him to see about a fresh case of cheroots soon, primes, too; they needn't try to put him off with the second quality. He was put off a great deal lately; people pretended to be listening ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with it. To find it in the serious composition of educated persons always raises a question of their refinement. It is the stock in trade of the lazy and the uncultured. It is used to divert attention from poverty of thought and a threadbare vocabulary. It is unnecessary for the complete expression of thought by the scholar and man ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... stockings, whose hat had its brim whimsically turned up, while snow-white tufts of hair like pigeon plumes rose at its sides. A slender queue, thin as a quill, tossed about on the back of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as it could be seen above the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This couple assumed the stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband, who was at least seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier began to gambol. I hastened to pass this living impersonation ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... wild flower, which she had carelessly crushedwith her foot in passing. But he had lost all; for he had lost the quiet of his thoughts; and his agitated soul reflected only broken and distorted images of things. The world laughed at the poor student, who, in his torn and threadbare cassock, dared to lift his eyes to the Lady Hermione; while he sat alone, in his desolate chamber, and suffered in silence. He remembered many things, which he would fain forget; but which, if he had forgotten them, he would wish again to remember. Such ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... hope, he entered the little shop and was received by a pale, soft-eyed, sunken-chested and somewhat threadbare youth of about his own age, who in reply to his inquiry, announced himself ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... only knows in what year of Grace it was fabricated, and how she manages to keep it together. I'm afraid I shall have some difficulty in preventing Aunt Caroline from giving Jane a new dress,—she certainly won't rest till she has done so. As for Gabriel, he was so remarkably dusty and threadbare that I set him at table with his back to the light, in such a manner that his mere silhouette was exposed to Hopkinson's scrutiny. I must allow, however, that he behaved beautifully, and Jane was perfect; she made an excellent impression ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... Threadbare and very dusty were his clothes, his feet swollen and sore, but his chin was pressed well forward, and the light in his eyes was that of a conqueror, when at last, tramp, tramp, tramp, his tired feet came pattering up the stones of the steep old bridge that spans the ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... accounts add, that the friar, on the other hand, wore fine linen under his monkish frock. After the cardinal's death, a little box was found in his apartment, containing the implements with which he used to mend the rents of his threadbare garment, with ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... much graver and quieter set of exiles than those we had known at Paris. They could hardly be poorer than those; indeed, many were less strained, but they did not carry off their poverty in the same gay and lively manner, and if they had only torn lace and soiled threadbare garments, they shut themselves up from all eyes, instead of ruffling gaily as if their rags ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... old man, who muttering, it might be, a benediction, stepped into the hall, and displayed long silver tresses, just as the storm had blown them, ascetic and eager features, and a pair of large light eyes that wandered wildly. He was dressed in threadbare black; a pair of long leather gaiters, buckled high above his knee, protecting his thin shanks through moss and pool; and the singularity of his appearance was heightened by a wide-leafed felt hat, over which he had tied his handkerchief, so as to bring the leaf of it over his ears, and ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... results would be not a matter of conjecture, but of certainty. These figures I have committed to tablets, which I am prepared to give to your mercenary and slow-witted father in return for your incomparable hand, a share of the profits, and the dismissal of the uninventive and morally threadbare ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... subtle charm I wish to indicate. It lies in the refreshing, short-lived pleasure of being able to look at your own land with the eyes of an alien; to see novelty blossoming on the most commonplace and familiar stems; to have the old manner and the threadbare old custom to present themselves to you as absolutely new—or if not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... character have been provided or procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least distrusted in this connection. This, however, must surely be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in education as regards the worker. The ideals of today aim at education ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... the average man's purse to such an extent that some day or other tailors' and dressmakers' bills will become an inevitable item in every schedule in bankruptcy in the land. Clothes will also breed rags, for without clothes to grow threadbare and frayed, it is clear that the raw material of rags and tatters would be lacking, and many a scene of beggary would ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... sealed by neglect that they could not be opened, in which a broken pane served for ventilator. In the middle of it stood a bed, painted and gilt, in the manner of the seventeenth century, with panels of crimson brocade, threadbare but still beautiful, although the pattern of their ornament had faded long since. Gabrielle lighted him to his room, stepping softly along the uncarpeted passage. At the door they surrendered themselves to a ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... days passed on. The country was white with snow. The temperature was near zero, and the troops, their blankets as threadbare as their uniforms, without greatcoats, and in many instances without boots, shivered beneath the rude shelters of their forest bivouacs. Fortunately there was plenty of work. Roads were cut through the woods, and existing tracks improved. The river banks were incessantly patrolled. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... well refuse; but at that time, the world pressed me sore, and I could ill spare it. Two years elapsed, and I saw no more of my blanket; at length I sent a note to the lady, requesting it to be returned. I got a very short answer back, and the blanket, alas! worn threadbare; the borrower stating that she had sent the article, but really she did not know what to do without it, as she wanted it to cover the children's bed. She certainly forgot that I, too, had children, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... still, and on a mild April day, when the poor London trees had black buds on them, Rachel brushed and folded away in the little painted chest of drawers her few threadbare clothes, and put the boots—which the cobbler, whose wife she had nursed, had patched for her—under the shelf which held her few cups and plates and the faithful tin kettle, which had always been a cheerful boiler. And she washed ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... cocks! What tinkling of guitars and blowing of horns come upon the ear! Some, indeed, there be, who can look round upon their well-stored hacienda and easy-rolling carriages, and remember the day, when with threadbare coat, and stake of three modest ounces, they first courted Fortune's favours, and who, being then indigent, and enjoying an indifferent reputation, found themselves, at the conclusion of a few successive San Agustins, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of my Lord Protector and all his Puritans she was looking her best this afternoon: though her kirtle was as threadbare as Master Courage's breeches it was nevertheless just short enough to display to great advantage her neatly turned ankle and well-arched foot on which the thick stockings—well-darned—and shabby shoes sat not ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... good spirits that were his greatest treasure. Coming from the bare life of a camp and the somber scenes of battlefields, he seemed to have plunged into a very whirlwind of gaiety, and his eyes sparkled with appreciation. He did not notice then that his captain's uniform was stained and threadbare enough to make him a most disreputable figure in a drawing-room, however gallant he might appear at the head of ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Poverty is a bad thing, my dear. You are a pretty girl, and ought to marry a man with a handsome fortune. Poor men have no pleasure in this world—they might just as well be dead. I am poor, as you see. You can tell by this threadbare coat'—he looked down at the sleeve from which the nap was worn in places—'I am as ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... for he came back that evening in time to prepare the thin gruel which made his master's supper, with a suit of black,—a little threadbare, but still highly respectable,—two shirt fronts, and two white cravats. But out of all this finery, Jackeymo held the small-clothes in especial veneration; for as they had cost exactly what the medallion had sold for, so it seemed to him that San Giacomo had ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not be deceived, every word that we hear—and, oh dear! how many words we must needs hear-must be pondered in our minds. Now, the mob on the contrary—who think themselves beautifully dressed in a threadbare cloth hanging round their brown loins—are far better off. If one of them says to another of his own class—a naked wretch who wears about him everything he happens to possess—that he is a dog, he answers with a blow of his fist in the other's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
