"Veneer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There was no anger in his face—only a huge amusement. Rose-Marie, watching his expression, knew all at once that nothing she said would have the slightest effect upon him. His sensibilities were too well concealed, beneath a tough veneer of conceit, to be wounded. His soul seemed too well ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... look at the life of a tree. Like Topsy "it growed;" it was not planted by man. Those vast pine forests, extending for miles and miles, actual mines of wealth, are a mere veneer to granite rocks. That is the wonderful part of it all, granite is the basis, granite distinctly showing the progress of glaciers ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... Ruth was angry, and then, all at once, she knew Winfield as if he had always been her friend. Conventionality, years, and the veneer of society were lightly laid upon one who would always be a boy. Some men are old at twenty, but Winfield would ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... period that I can recognise, yet with an air of being old-fashioned, and there are stiff, square shams to hide the pillows and turn down over the top of the sheet, with fluted frills round the edges. There's a thing covered with a veneer of mahogany, which I should call a chest of drawers, if Patty and Ide hadn't mentioned it as a "bureau." A mirror divided into two halves hangs over it, with a white crocheted cover to protect the gilt frame from flies; there's a crocheted pin-cushion, too; and in vases ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... thin upon us all is the veneer of civilization; very, very swift is the reversion to the primitive when opportunity presents. Only twelve short months and this man, end product of civilization, doer of nothing practical, dreamer of dreams and recorder of fancies, had become ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... of an alert Yankee type, with waxed blond mustache and eye-glasses; he was evidently to be classed among those who have exchanged their country honesty for a veneer of ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... out-eat and out-drink everyone at the banquet; strike down flying game unerringly; tame the wildest steed, and ride 120 miles in a day. Twenty-two nations obeyed him, and he could speak the dialect of each. A veneer of Greek refinement was spread thinly over the savage animalism of the man. [Sidenote: Pseudo-civilisation of his court.] He was a virtuoso, and had a wonderful collection of rings. He maintained ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... I am elemental. Beneath the veneer of civilization I am a savage. To wake up with the war-cry of the enemy in my ears, to sleep with the—er—barking of the crocodile in ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... met with in recent years. The Japanese themselves deplore the changes that have taken place. They testify that the older forms of politeness were an integral element of the feudal system and were too often a thin veneer of manner by no means expressive of heart interest. None can be so absolutely rude as they who are masters of the forms of politeness, but have not the kindly heart. The theory of "impersonality" does not satisfactorily account for ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... unsafe than to attempt to judge the actual natures of people by their clothes, houses, religious faith, political affiliations, prejudices, dialect, etiquette or customs. These are only the veneer laid on by upbringing, teachers, preachers, traditions and other forces of suggestion, and it is a veneer so thin ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... designs in black, in the quaintness of which lurks I know not what—something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures. The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald, notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings. These little wooden houses, of such marvellous cleanly whiteness inside, are black outside, timeworn, disjointed and grimacing. When one looks closely, this grimace is to be ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... to reflect on the profoundness of mental quietude—I might say of consolation—that I had attained to during my wanderings, I could not help recognizing what a cruel, fatal part is played in the lives of all of us by irony. It is, with Frenchmen, a kind of veneer, worn even by the most unpretentious in place of whatever may be real in them; and where this outward seeming is absent, they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the deep chair with his hands behind his head. "It's not too hard to imagine Marthasa's great-great-grandfather running down vessels in space and pillaging helpless cities on other planets. The veneer of civilization on him doesn't look ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... evolved a plan for transporting sixty thousand oaks to France, from a territory on the Russian frontier belonging to Count Georges Mniszech and his father. He was anxious that M. Surville should undertake the matter, as, after abstruse and careful calculations—which have the puzzling veneer of practicality always observable in Balzac's mad schemes—he considered that 1,200,000 francs might be made out of the affair, and that of course the engineer who arranged the transport would reap some of the benefit. The blocks of wood would be ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... her horse. A moment later, she trotted past him, and again he greeted her, to be answered by a nod and a slight movement of the lips. But the eyes had been averted. Barry could see that the thinnest veneer of politeness had shielded something else as she spoke to him,—an expression of distaste, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... me,' flared the so-called Davidson, all the veneer of civility gone. 'You got nothing on ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... instance there is no need to conceal the fact that there are outbreaks of eroticism and offences against the German language which are none the less flagrant and censurable because they are, to some extent, concealed under the thin veneer of the allegory and symbolism which every reader must have recognized as running through the play. This is, in a manner, Wagnerian, as so much of the music is Wagnerian—especially that of the second act, which because it calls up scenes from the "Meistersinger" ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Mid-Continent, with its cumbersome counters and partitions done in walnut veneer and its old-fashioned pavement in squares of black and white. I thought too of Johnny McComas's new institution, with so many bright brass handrails and such a spread of tasteful mosaics underfoot. How had ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... more, it shattered at one stroke the brittle casing of self-command with which centuries of civilization had sought to veneer the Slav. In a trice a woman whose existence neither of them had suspected was revealed, a fury incarnate flew at the dismayed prince, clawing, tearing, raining blows upon his face and bosom. Overcome by surprise, blinded, dazed, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... leaf; slice, shive[obs3], cut, rasher, shaving, integument &c. (covering) 223; eschar[obs3]. stratification, scaliness, nest of boxes, coats of an onion. monolayer; bilayer; trilayer[Biochem]. V. slice, shave, pare, peel; delaminate; plate, coat, veneer; cover &c. 223. Adj. lamellar, lamellated[obs3], lamelliform[obs3], layered; laminated, laminiferous[obs3]; micaceous[obs3]; schistose, schistous[obs3]; scaly, filmy, membranous, pellicular, flaky, squamous[Anat]; foliated, foliaceous[obs3]; stratified, stratiform; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... should it be otherwise? Why should she have stayed? Why should he compliment himself by believing that there was aught about him visible through the veneer acquired in a score and odd years of purposeless existence, to attract a young and pretty ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... and again. Odd thoughts spun with the whirl of it. Scientific people tell us that savages give souls to rocks and trees,—and a machine is a thousand times more alive than a rock or a tree. And Azuma-zi was practically a savage still; the veneer of civilisation lay no deeper than his slop suit, his bruises, and the coal grime on his face and hands. His father before him had worshipped a meteoric stone, kindred blood, it may be, had splashed ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the difference in his tone toward her and that he had adopted towards the others, nor could she help being flattered by the implied compliment. She was exempt from his raillery. All along he inferred that she understood him, and accepted his veneer of jocosity and insincerity ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... now a week old, but something of the original fury came back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that is swept up by trailing skirts? And the dust of soggy theatre-chairs? ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... angry when he read this book that he said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. But he must have approved of the picture of the Petersburg group, who under a thin veneer of polished manners are utterly inane and cynically vicious. One of them had "an expression of constant irritability on his face, as though he could not forgive himself for his ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... said, but I knew from the careful repression of his tone that his hardness was a brittle veneer. He was young to carry so bold a front when his heart must be hammering, and I would willingly have talked any doggerel to have afforded him ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... gentlemen could read, and no forks were used for meals. We call ourselves civilised now, yet some who consider themselves such, seem to entertain a desire to return to barbarism. Human nature, in truth, is the same in all ages, and what is called culture is only a thin veneer. Nothing but to be made partaker of the Divine nature ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... with a straight face. "I have to signal. Knocking wouldn't do any good. That's just wood veneer over a three-inch-thick ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the ponderous cornices. As to construction, the prevailing type is a flimsy pile of brick and timber, 'put up,' apparently, by mutual connivance of the contractor and the coroner, and screened off from the street by a thin veneer of 'architecture.' Now there is a certain merit, sui generis, in a clever deception, but those in vogue here are too utterly transparent to claim even this. The telltale wall of brick cheats you out of the pleasure of cheating yourself, no ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Sahib's veneer of English class, mental development, beneath the English shirt he wore the junwa, the three-strand sacred thread, insignia ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... and the faith in goodness which are shown by Browning, are read by us as utterances of a past age. We have grown used to a presentment of human life such as Ibsen's in which the customary morality is regarded as a thin veneer of convention which hardly covers the selfishness in grain, or to the description of life as a tangled mass of animal passions,—a description which, in spite of the genius of Zola, does not fail to weary and disgust,—or perhaps as only a spectacle in which ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... though the genius of the Renaissance had migrated across the Alps. All the powers of the Papacy were directed to the suppression of heresies and to the re-establishment of spiritual supremacy over the intellect of Europe. Meanwhile society in Rome returned to mediaeval barbarism. The veneer of classical refinement and humanistic urbanity, which for a time had hidden the natural savagery of the Roman nobles, wore away. The Holy City became a den of bandits; the territory of the Church supplied a battle-ground ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... time to reassure even the one beloved woman. Something strange, unexpected, had happened to him. Suddenly he too was primitive man, even as these desert men were magnificently primitive. Gone was all the veneer of civilization, the humanity which bids a man respect a fellow-creature's life. He was no longer the educated, travelled man of the world, who earned his living in honourable and decorous ways. He was the cave-dweller, the man of ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... an' cents, an' not soft soap. Yes, it's dollars an'—cents—and not so-ft soa-p." Suddenly the dress-maker, borne high on a wave of hysteria, disclosing the innate coarseness which underlay all her veneer of harmless gentility and fine manners, raised a loud, shrill laugh, ending in a multitude of reverberations like a bell. There was about this unnatural metallic laughter something fairly blood-curdling in its disclosure of overstrained emotion. She laughed and laughed, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... swept his face again, twisting his lips nastily, stamping all his features with something totally bad. The man who had never been whipped by any man, from the day he won his first brawl in the gutter, showed through the veneer that was no thicker than the funereal black and white garb he wore, no deeper than his superficially polished utterance which he had acquired from long contact with those who had ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... Underlying the Western veneer was the fascinating naivete of the Eastern woman, and Miska had all the suave grace, too, which belongs to the women of the Orient, so that many admiring glances followed her charming figure as she crossed the ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... we read: "Do you know what it is that I love in Uhland's imperfect dramas? It is the pure, vital, German-dramatic poetry, which, piercing the tawdry veneer of culture and the prevailingly wretched appearances of our life, strikes fire from the bed-rock of spiritual life itself, and with its divining rod points to the golden veins in the foundations of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... abstracted in his manner. The unhappy man was consumed by a passionate love. It was for Miss Blake that he was striving to qualify as a minister; it was of her that he thought all day and dreamt all night. Into his wild and elemental nature, in which hereditary savagery was simply covered by a thin veneer of civilisation, this strong love for a woman of an alien race had struck its roots deep down, and absorbed all into itself. But instead of the savage element being transmuted into gentleness, his love absorbed into itself ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... voolay veneer avec voo!" And ere the girl could protest, he had dismounted, turning the wall-eyed one's nose southward, and had delivered a resounding whack upon the rump of that ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... them. Let the priest of to-day but thwart the grand-children of that generation, even in a small matter, and mark their rancour. How bitter! how relentless! The Catholic spirit of half a century ago was not operated on by the literature of a nation that is daily losing even the veneer of Christianity. ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... indecision in her voice. "But there is that other—the one that ran away from us—there's something I don't like about her. Perhaps it's a slight veneer of hypocrisy." ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... "Pitiable, yes; perhaps you are right. After all, we are pitiful creatures, and, under the thin veneer, like enough to the beasts." Then she changed the subject abruptly, and began ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... I'll book my passage back at once. I've been over there too long. You see I've been kind of obliged to stay for reasons connected with the firm, but you ladies can take my word for it that when you get through this sort of ridiculous veneer I've picked up you'll find a regular all-wool-and-a-yard-wide city-of-Chicago American, and I'm bound to ask you not to forget it. This English way of talking is a thing that grows on a fellow unconsciously, don't you know. It wears ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... this old world, his stay "over there" has changed his point of view. His whole mental attitude has undergone something of the nature of a revolution in the crucible of war. Up the "line," he saw things stripped to the buff, saw life and death in all their nakedness. The veneer of so-called civilization has been worn off, and the real man shows through. That, to my mind, is why friendships made amid the blood, mud, hunger, and grime of the trenches are friendships that will endure through life. It is there Man meets Man, and admires him. I have met men ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... struck him in the face and had spat out foul and vindictive words of abuse. That woman—ah, that woman was his wife—had been for many years to him the type of what women must always be when stripped of the veneer of society's restraints. Janetta had of late shaken his conviction on this point; it was reserved for Margaret Adair to shatter ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... woman's tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women, the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had triumphed over the frightened ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... agricultural labourer and the French peasant proprietor is irrelevant and inconclusive. In the cottage of a small owner at Osse, for instance, we may discover features to shock us, often a total absence of the neatness and veneer of the Sussex ploughman's home. Our disgust is trifling compared with that of the humblest, most hard-working owner of the soil, when he learns under what conditions lives his English compeer. To ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... version." Bower spoke with brutal frankness. The morning's tribulation had worn away some of the veneer. He fully expected the girl to flare into ill suppressed rage. Then he could deal with her as he liked. He had not earned his repute in the city of London without revealing at times the innate savagery of his nature. ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... alternating his efforts, or rather punctuating them, with vicious blows to the pit of his adversary's stomach. Rapidly was Es-sat weakening and with the knowledge of impending death there came, as there comes to every coward and bully under similar circumstances, a crumbling of the veneer of bravado which had long masqueraded as courage and with it crumbled his code of ethics. Now was Es-sat no longer chief of Kor-ul-ja—instead he was a whimpering craven battling for life. Clutching at Om-at, clutching at the nearest pegs he sought any support that would save him from ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... abide with us still, though to-day they go by different names, for there is no man in this smug, complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our civilization, and behold! there stands the Primal Man in all his old, wild savagery, and with the devil leering upon his shoulder. Indeed, to-day as surely as in the dim past, we ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... mere coincidence! He had an interest, a very personal, vital interest in that article on the front page now, in this combine of those who were frankly of the dregs of the criminal world and those of a blacker breed who hid behind the veneer of respectability ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... of newly-found womanhood can be fitly employed all is well, but remember that most women are, in thought, rebels for romance. Nature, too, runs fullest in the veins of those who live with her naturally, aloof from the veneer of society. Nature is lusty in Nature's lap, and she mothered our Corgarff without let or hindrance, in sun and ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... but the animal, held firmly, reared so sharply that a little more and like a sling the fragile vehicle would have sent everybody in it flying far away. At this, furious with one of those plebeian rages which in women of her kind shatter all the veneer of their luxury, she dealt the Nabob two stinging lashes with her whip, which left little trace on his tanned and hardened face, but which brought there a ferocious expression, accentuated by the short nose which had turned white and was slit ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... and saved until he had two teams, and was working them with hired drivers on excavation contracts. In his summer vacations he went to Topeka and worked his two teams, and by some sharp practice got the title to a third. He was rollicking, noisy, good-natured, but under the boyish veneer was a hard indomitable nature. He was becoming a stickler for his rights ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... arm that was swinging through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with dead soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs on its back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with clotted drops, covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in its arms that it has only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of a circle, has been stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are laid bare. Another, outstretched on the edge of ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... there undoubtedly was, with rare exceptions, a suspicion of what is called in slang "faking" about his work. The wine is not "neat" but doctored; the composition is pastiche; a dozen other metaphors—of stucco, veneer, glueing-up—suggest themselves. And then there suggests itself, in turn, a sort of shame at such imputations on the author of such a mass of work, so various, so interesting, so important as accomplishment, symptom, and pattern ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... temple. For they all pretended to see only the earthly dimensions of material things. But in their hearts they knew the truth. It is the American way to mask the beauty of our nobler selves, or real selves under a gibing deprecation. So we wear the veneer of materialism, and beneath it we are intense idealists. And woe to him who reckons ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... in discovering the entrance he sought. The walls along the hallway were not plastered; they were merely built up with matched boards, which had stood there unpainted for so long a time that they had achieved a veneer of filth and dirt which made them look, in the flare of ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... employed, of which the common cleft and the veneer or side graft were perhaps the most satisfactory. In most instances it was only necessary to bind the parts together snugly with bass or raffia. In some soft wooded plants, like coleus, a covering of common grafting wax over the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... a step annually. He must nibble like a frost-driven mouse to merely exist. So poor was the soil, that the clay came to the surface, and in wet weather a slip of the foot exposed it—the heel cut through the veneer of turf into the cold, dead, moist clay. Nothing grew but rushes. Every time a horse moved over the marshy land his hoof left deep holes which never again filled up, but remained the year through, now puddles, full of rain water, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... Fossett or visiting masters), was taken away by Mrs. Lyndsay on a visit to the old Marchioness of Montfort. Matilda, who was to come out the next year, was thus almost exclusively with Arabella, who redoubled all her pains to veneer the white deal, and protect with ormolu its feeble edges—so that, when it "came out," all should admire that thoroughly fashionable piece of furniture. It was the habit of Miss Fossett and her pupil to ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my life. I was a section hand much as six months in all my life. I work at the veneer mills but they never run no more. I am having a hard time. I have high blood pressure. I can't pick cotton. I can't even get a mess of turnip greens. The Social Welfare helps me a little and I am janitor up town in two offices. They hand ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... professors, following the light of learning like its shadow, mimicking the accent of the gods like parrots, and mocking their gestures like apes. Their adroit admixture of falsehood with truth in all departments of knowledge, their substitution of veneer for solid timber, and of pinchbeck for sterling metal, was more profitable to the end they had in view than the torture-chamber of the Inquisition or the quarantine of the Index. Mediocrities and respectabilities of every description—that is to say, the majority ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... at the hotel with his wife! Then there would be two to one, and once the outer veneer was broken through, there was no saying to what extremes of abuse, of threatening, even of violence itself, they might descend. Cornelia recalled the two faces; the woman's hard, sullen, coarse; the man's mean and crafty, and shuddered ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... fact it was over fifteen, and even then she had bought it secondhanded, and almost unfit for use. The curtains retained but a vague shade of their original color. The veneer was almost entirely off the bedstead. Not a single lock was in order, whether in the bureau or the secretary. The rug had become a nameless rag; and the broken springs of the sofa, cutting through the threadbare stuff, stood up ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... that they have great delicacy of feeling, and will be struck by the politeness they show a stranger, and by the kind and obliging way in which they treat each other. It must be admitted that this is often enough only a veneer, under which all sorts of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness are hidden, just as among civilized people; still, the manners of the crudest savages are far superior to those of most of the whites ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... we see manifested the spirit that has animated official Germany since that date. Not only is the House of Hohenzollern descended from the Robber Knights of old, but the same is true of the military caste of Germany generally. Recent centuries have cast only a thin veneer of modern thought over essentially medieval conceptions ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... would seem very plain; but to one capable of distinguishing the difference, the evidence of mind and taste, instead of mere money, is seen on every side. Simplicity and beauty are united as far as possible. Everything is the best of its kind and devoid of veneer and sham. There is no lavish and vulgar profusion, and there is a harmony of color and decoration that makes every room a picture in itself. Moreover, the house does not grow suddenly shabby after you leave those parts which are seen by visitors. It is all genuine ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... conscious of this idealism; often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce has so well ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... composed of Parian marble, we see the first example in Rome of the use of ornaments in marble upon the outside of a building; an example that was afterwards extensively followed, for all the tombs of a later age on the Appian Way had their exteriors sheathed with a veneer of marble. The beautiful sarcophagus which contained the remains of the noble lady for whom this gigantic pile was erected, and which is now in the Farnese Palace, was also formed of this material. Most beautiful ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the way he expressed himself which delighted Priscilla. He had reverted to the phraseology of an undignified schoolboy of the lower fifth. The veneer of grown manhood, even the polish of a prefect, had, as it were, peeled off him during ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... to enter the atelier of the gentleman who pleased his clients by ingeniously simulating the grain of walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked out contemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of hens or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. He paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers, and wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... merit would not have had the exquisite privilege of basking in the smiles of that young Bostonian. But perhaps her chief delusion was the belief that she was an artist. She had learned all that Boston could teach of drawing, and this thin veneer had received a beautiful foreign polish abroad. Her friends pronounced her sketches really wonderful. Perhaps if Miss Sommerton's entire capital had been something less than her half-yearly income, she might have made a name for herself; but the rich man gets a foretaste of the scriptural ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... poetry, in the terseness and vigor of its language and in the lack of poetic imagery, but it is free from the coarseness and vulgar and grotesque humor of the latter. It approaches the courtly epic in its introduction of the pomp of courtly ceremonial, but this veneer of chivalry is very thin, and beneath the outward polish of form the heart beats as passionately and wildly as in the days of Herman, the Cheruscan chief. There are perhaps greater poems in literature than the "Nibelungenlied", ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... veneer of breeding dropped from her like a cloak and she was again the blacksmith's sister, self-conscious, awed and tongue-tied in the imposing presence of Andy P. Symes. Her prominent knees visible beneath her thin skirt, her flat feet sprawling at an awkward angle, unconsciously ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... has a way, a most clever and convincing way, of cutting through the veneer of snobbishness and bringing real men and women to the surface. He strikes at shams, yet has a wholesome belief in the people behind them, and he forces them to justify his good opinions."—Kansas ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... alone are not a sham. But what has alarmed me most in this fashionable society is its brutality. The little incidents which take place when supper is announced give one some idea—to compare small things with great—of what a popular rising might be. Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness. I imagined society very different. Women count for little in it; that may perhaps be a ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... that might be inaugurated would be to veneer the cheese with building paper or clapboards, instead of the time-honored piece of towel. I never saw cheese cut that I didn't think that the cloth around it had seen service as a bandage on some other patient. But I may have been wrong. Another thing that does not seem ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... "Rag" tottered and wavered. Rumors rapidly spread among the onlookers that Carson had failed to put "Rag" through; that the consolidated companies would fall asunder on the morrow, like badly glued veneer; that Porter "had gone back on Carson" and was selling the stock. The quotations fell: common stock 60, 59, 56, 50, 45, 48, 50, 52, 45, 40—so ran the dazzling line of figures across the blackboard, again ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... or rather barbarism, with a moral veneer. It seems barbarism, because it brings us back to the good old days when mere might was right. Bernhardi, speaking of the right of conquest of new territory inherent in a growing people, tells us that in such cases 'might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... Healths began to be drunk. The conversation took a lively turn; and women went fluttering round the table, visiting their friends, to sip out of their glass, and ask each other how they were getting on. It was not long before the stiff veneer of bourgeoisie which bored me had worn off. The people emerged in their true selves: natural, gentle, sparkling with enjoyment, playful. Playful is, I think, the best word to describe them. They played with infinite grace and innocence, like kittens, from the old men of sixty to the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, the capital was as yet little more than we should call a village. There would, perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education among the best inhabitants of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain graceful veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflected from Copenhagen, would mark the more conservative citizens, male and female. A fierier generation—not hot enough, however, to set the fjord on flame—would celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of the country in numerous ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... a selection of many such incidents which show that the national brutishness was appearing through the veneer. In the light of such events where, on German soil, Germans murderously attacked their fellow-countrymen on such ridiculous pretexts, it requires little imagination to explain the outburst of brutality against Belgians who dared to defend hearth ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... the veneer of refinement cracked under the strain of the man's rage, showing the brutality ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... had to use his suit motor. This caused some concern over his meager fuel supply since his plan called for some flat-out jetting later on. In the frantic flurry of bending, twisting, over and under—controlling, the veneer of aplomb began to wear. Johnny was sweating freely by the time he had the cylinder stabilized as best he could judge and had gingerly worked himself into the open end as far as he could against the cushioning mass of ribbon chute. He took the trigger ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... other, to argue, to grow heated and naturally from that to become angry. It seems a fatality of campers along a wild trail, like explorers in an unknown land, to be prone to fight. If there is an explanation of this singular fact, it must be that men at such time lose their poise and veneer of civilization; in brief, they go back. At all events we had it hot and heavy, with the center of attack gradually focusing on Jones, and as he was always losing something, naturally we united in ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... three minutes which elapsed before Claude came in Charmian and Gillier said nothing. Gillier, who, under the influence of excitement, was losing his veneer of good manners, moved about the room pretending to examine the few bibelots it contained. His face was flushed. He still kept his hands in his pockets. Charmian sat still in her corner, watching him. She was too angry to speak. And what was there to be said now? Although she had a good deal of ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... his consciousness. Whatever hopes he might have had had been swept away in those few short, pithy sentences. His passion checked, the structure erected by his imagination toppled to ruin, his vanity hurt, he stood before her stripped of the veneer that had made him seem, heretofore, nearly the man he professed ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... something of the same instinctive apprehension. How soon the nerves are disturbed by the smell of anything burning in the house. Raise the cry of "Fire!" in a crowded building, and at once the old savage bursts through the veneer of civilisation. It is helter-skelter, the Devil take the hindmost. The strong trample upon the weak. Men and women turn to devils. Even if the cry of "Fire!" be raised in a church—where a believer might wish to die, and where he might feel himself booked through to glory—there ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... man is one thing an' murder is another. Appleton's rich, besides he's a softwood man an' ain't fixed for handlin' veneer, so I might's well get in on the bird's-eye as let you an' Creed an' Lebolt steal it all. But I ain't got to the point where I'd murder a good man to cover up my ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... of the Apes the expedition was in the nature of a holiday outing. His civilization was at best but an outward veneer which he gladly peeled off with his uncomfortable European clothes whenever any reasonable pretext presented itself. It was a woman's love which kept Tarzan even to the semblance of civilization—a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt. He hated the shams and the hypocrisies of it and ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... virulent; but to paint a snuff-box perfectly you must love the labor for its own sake, and pursue it without even an underthought of the performance's ultimate appraisement. People do not often consider the simple fact that it is enough to bait, and quite superfluous to veneer, a trap; indeed, those generally acclaimed the best of persons insist this world is but an antechamber, full of gins and pitfalls, which must be scurried through with shut eyes. And the more fools they, as all we poets know! for to enjoy a sunset, or a glass of wine, or even ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... paused, astonished at the change which had come over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... he could find way to a girl's heart. But a man can judge a man best, and every instinct of my nature warned me against this fellow. The very first sound of his voice had prejudiced me, and when I saw him I knew I was right—with him manliness was but veneer. And Billie! The name sounded soft, sweet, womanly now and I longed to speak it in her presence. Billie! I said it over and over again reverently, her face floating before me in memory, and then my lips closed in sudden determination: not without a fight, a hard fight, was this ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... accorded him, dashed away—not in the direction whence he had come but straight over the top of the windfall. Ignorant of the pitfalls concealed by the mantel of creepers he hurried on his course, only to break through the thin veneer and plunge headlong into a black abyss; then he realized the treacherous ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... would have liked not to answer. But, alas, would she not by degrees have discovered all the pettiness that is ill-concealed under my thin veneer of self-control and determination? I tried to reveal it ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... threshold? Didn't she know that as the golden pheasants fled further and further into the thicket of unreality, the more active was his need of her? He wondered where she had gone, and what had kept her so late. Was this a precedent, and had the first veneer of their companionability ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... the poetry he kind of lectured about how man had ought to break away from the vile cities and seek the solace of great Mother Nature, where his bruised spirit could be healed and the veneer of civilization cast aside and the soul come into its own, and things like that. And he went on to say that out in the open the perspective of life is broadened and one is a laughing philosopher as long as the blue sky is overhead and the green grass underfoot. ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the little tricks of life, its varnish and veneer, Its stucco-fronts of character flake off and disappear, We 've learned that oft the brownest hands will heap the biggest pile, And met with many a "perfect brick" ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... for not infrequently he started out to study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity. A few have come into the field from journalism. As a result, the British labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more impressive front than the American. For example, Britain has produced Ramsey MacDonald, who writes books and makes speeches with a rare grace; John Burns, who quotes Shakespeare or recites history with wonderful fluency; Keir Hardie, a miner from the ranks, ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... provide suitable embellishment as well as to fulfill the practical requirements of daily use. Inasmuch as rubble used in this manner becomes merely an aggregate in a concrete wall, the consistent thing to do is to consider it as such and give the wall an outside finish or veneer of rough plaster. This fact was recognized and often acted upon by the early Philadelphia builders wherever the stone readily available did not make an attractive wall. A few of the best examples extant serve to indicate that houses of this sort ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... the morning Scaife gave his farewell "brekker"[39] at the Creameries; a banquet of the Olympians to which John received an invitation. He accepted because Desmond made a point of his so doing; but he was quite aware that beneath the veneer of the Demon's genial smile lay implacable hatred and resentment. The breakfast in itself struck John as ostentatious. Scaife's father sent quails, a la Lucullus, and other delicacies. Throughout the meal the talk was of the coming ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... will find a good deal to interest him in its practice at Chicago. Indeed, no one can fail to wonder at the marvellous skill of architectural engineering which can run up a building of twenty stories, the walls of which are merely a veneer or curtain. Few will cavil at the handsome and comfortable equipment of the best interiors; but, given the necessity of their existence, the wide-minded lover of art will find something to reward his attention even in their exteriors. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... stage in her development. It is more than likely that the teaching was begun at Sophie's own demand, and by the use she made of the opportunities given her you may measure the strength of her ambition. Here was no rich man's doxy lazily seeking a veneer of culture, enough to gloss the rough patches of speech and idea betraying humble origin. This fisherman's child, workhouse girl, ancilla of the bordels, with the thin smattering of the three R's she had acquired in the poor institution, set herself, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... to each other during what remained of the conversation, far more ceremoniously so than we should have been likely to be had there been any solid liking on either side under the thin veneer of friendliness. ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... to Greek civilisation. They spoke Greek and worshipped at Greek shrines, and as they were in turn subjugated by the forebears of the Kushan Empire, they imparted to the conquerors something of their own Greek veneer. In the second century of our era Kanishka carried his victorious arms down to the Gangetic plain, where Buddhism still held its own in the region which had been its cradle; and, according to one tradition, ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... sufficient period of time, and utterly dependent on one another for daily intercourse, fall into the places allotted to each by temperament and heredity. Each little community would own a wit and a butt; the sentimentalist and the cynic. The churl by nature would appear through some veneer of manner, if only to bring into relief the finer qualities of his fellows; lastly, and most surely, one other would jingle a merciful cap and bells, and mingle motley ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... so easy to come at the man beneath the veneer by expertly chipping at his feelings," said Lydia, laughing. "But I was serious, Lucian. Alice is energetic, ambitious, and stubbornly upright in questions of principle. I believe she would assist you steadily at every step of your career. ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... back a chair that I had dusted," she replied, "one of the feet touched the sofa lightly, when off dropped that veneer like a loose flake. I've been examining the sofa since, and find that it is a very bad piece ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... you!" he shouted, his face empurpled. "You're fired!" All of his polish stripped from him like peeling veneer, he appeared merely ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... no record of the reformation of a Socialist after the habit is once firmly established. But while at first these considerations were all against my putting on my armor, in the end the instinct of eating and fighting, which is as forceful in the modern savage, under the veneer of civilization, as in our unpolished progenitors, overcame all considerations of prudence, and here I am to do battle according to my ability. I promise to strike no foul blows and not to dodge the most portentous ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... concerned, lying wounded in a hospital, where his fiancee, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational cliche. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on leaving America, where he has become engaged to a wealthy Chicagan's daughter, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... into the tops until they found the tree by the figure of the wood. It had been cut two months and the wood was entirely dry. Mr. Bixby sent me two very tiny grafts. The tree sawed out something over 60,000 feet of veneer that sold from 16 to 18 cents per square foot; quite a large tree. It sawed out five logs and the stump sawed out 500 feet. Several thousand dollars for the tree. I saw several pieces of the tree last year. The most beautiful thing I ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... demanded, Tarzan of the Apes sloughed the thin veneer of his civilization and with it the hampering apparel that was its badge. In a moment the polished English gentleman reverted to the naked ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have been a magnificent spectacle. Many clouds have rested on Mount Eryx since 1752 and we do not now expose our bedrock of paganism quite so openly. This, indeed, but for the slight veneer of Christianity, might have passed for a ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... on big words, and very exact language so long, that as yet his association with other boys less particular had failed to rub away any of the veneer. In time, no doubt, he would fall into the customary method among boys of cutting their words short, and saving breath ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... did with him, love. Breed allers tells. You may be low-born and nothing will 'ide it—not all the dress and not all the, by way of, fine manners. It's jest like veneer—it peels off at a minute's notice. But breed's true to the core; it wears. Alison, it wears ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... with bunchy-top disease and was cut in an attempt to eliminate this disease from the premises. It was expected that the trunk would show figured curly grain and plans were made to have at least a part of the log cut into veneer. On cutting the tree, however, and examining the wood, there was no evidence of curly grain detectable either by casual personal observation or from samples sent to the Forest Products Laboratory at Madison, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... adultery; he, who bows all women beneath the same misfortune; he, who buys on credit the horses, jewels, and clothes of all these handsome sons without stomach, without money, without heart. He is the first who has found the livid veneer, the pale complexion of distinguished company which causes all his heroes to be recognized. He has arranged in his fertile brain all the adorable crimes, the masked treasons, the ingenious rapes mental ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... the attic, getting out some whole cloth," answered the girl; and as her father left the room, she leaned forward and rested her burning cheek on the veneer of the spinet for an instant as if to cool it. But the colour deepened rather than lessened, and a moment later she rose, with her lips pressed into a straight line, and her eyes shining very brightly. "I'll ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... strepitumque, it was the city of pristine ideals, of irresistible potency, of Anchises' pageant of heroes. When he walked through the Forum he saw not only the glistening monuments in their new marble veneer, but beyond these, in the far distant past, the straw hut of Romulus and the sacred grove on the Capitoline where the spirit of Jove had guarded a folk of simpler piety.[2] And down the centuries he beheld the heroes, the law-givers, and the rulers, who ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... quickly, "that hardness is simply a light veneer, the result of her education. 'Camille,' who knew nothing of life except through the disillusioned account of her friend in the Convent, would soon become human if 'Perdican' had a less ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... our rulers seem strangely ignorant. To be of use to the State, and to train others to be of use to the State (and not only of use to themselves), should be, and indeed is, the aim of every truly civilized man. Unless it be so, his civilization is a mere veneer, ready to wear off at the first rub, and he himself a parasite ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... small Monday parties, at the races, at first nights, at ambassadors' balls, and their names always in the newspapers, with remarks as to Madame's fine toilets and Monsieur's amazing chic. Well! all that is nothing but flim-flam, veneer, outside show, and if the marquis needed a hundred sous, no one would loan them to him on his worldly possessions. The furniture is hired by the fortnight from Fitily, the cocottes' upholsterer. The curiosities, the pictures, belong to old Schwalbach, who sends his ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... to the others. Mandleco rather surprised him, seeming not so much disturbed as he was engrossed deep in thought; as for Mrs. Carmack, Beardsley saw that the comedy had gone out of it for her, but she tried to keep up the veneer. ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse |
