"Nowadays" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Georgie sat to enjoy the warm comforting glow of envy that surrounded him. Nowadays the meeting place at the Green had insensibly transferred itself to just opposite Old Place, and it was extremely interesting to hear Olga practising as she always did in the morning. Interesting though it was, Riseholme had at first been a little disappointed about it, for ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... been entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist or Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more natural to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but the battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... of it, and plunged more deeply into the pages before her. She was a different girl nowadays from the pale, anxious-faced one who had sat up night after night during the winter, desperately trying to add something to the scanty income by the labor of pen and typewriter. Now she was always happy and sparkling, and performed her household tasks with such a will that her languid ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... know how to dance nowadays," grumbled Major Shirley in response. "I can't stand these American antics. That young Nap Errol fairly ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... in Montreal. I have to report that the Discobolus [Footnote: See Samuel Butler's poem, "Oh God! oh Montreal!" —Ed.] is very well, and, nowadays, looks the whole world in the face, almost quite unabashed. West of Montreal, the country seems to take on a rather more English appearance. There is still a French admixture. But the little houses are not purely Gallic, as they are ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the other day, "Girls are younger nowadays, and they go on being young till they are well through middle life. At sixteen we had to look after other people, but they shirk responsibility, till women of thirty are content to be like birds of the air, just amusing themselves, and feeling ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... dear Mr Heaviside, that I hardly know what to do. Mr Revel, who is very intimate with the theatre people, proposed that they should try their fortune on the stage. He says (and indeed there is some truth in it) that nowadays, the best plan for a man to make himself popular is to be sent to Newgate; and the best chance that a girl has of a coronet, is to become an actress. Well, I did not much like the idea; but at last I consented. Isabel, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the six-fifty-eight for Florida one night in early winter—like one of the idle rich, Sam Pickering said. The new printer, a sour, bald one of middle age, reported bitterly that hand composition was getting to be no good nowadays; you had to learn the linotype, a machine that was taking the bread out of the mouths of honest typesetters. He had beheld one of these heinous mechanisms operated in a city office—by a slip of a girl that wouldn't know how to hold a real stick in her hand—and things had ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... place of him," said Paul, turning to Greta. "A bad wetting troubles him nowadays. Not same as of old, when he'd follow the fells all day long knee-deep in water and soaked to the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... son, with great composure, "let us proceed calmly. Why should we pretend not to see what is perfectly plain? Business nowadays proceeds by credit. Credit is based upon something, or the show of something. It is represented by a bank-bill. Here now—" And he opened his purse leisurely and drew out a five-dollar note of the Bank of New York, "here is a promise to pay five dollars—in gold or silver, of course. Do you suppose ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... be quite respectable. One has never heard his name before in the whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes for a man, nowadays. But Mrs. Allonby is hardly a ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde
... whom the name of PASLEY conveys nothing. I blush still more to reflect that I have myself only just ceased to belong to them. But, quite honestly, if you are at all concerned with the science and policy of arms (as who nowadays is not?), you will find this book of extreme interest. A few chance quotations will be enough to prove that the gallant Captain was a man who knew what he was writing about. In the year 1810, for example, he could look ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... of the great number of estates which, in default of heirs to claim them, annually revert to the government. The treasury derives large sums from this source every year. And this is easily explained, for nowadays family ties are becoming less and less binding. Brothers cease to meet; their children no longer know each other; and the members of the second generation are as perfect strangers as though they were not united by a bond of consanguinity. The young man whom love ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Cliff had been standing in her front yard looking as her best friends would not have liked her to look. There was nothing physically the matter with her, but she was dissatisfied and somewhat disturbed in her mind. Mr. Burke was so busy nowadays that when he stopped in to see her it was only for a few minutes, and Willy Croup had developed a great facility in discovering things which ought to be attended to in various parts of the town, and of going to attend to them with Andrew ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... your lack of occupation," Mr. Parker went on, "I am not the man to blame you for it. There are very few things in life a man can settle down to nowadays. To a person of imagination the ordinary routine of the professions and the ordinary curriculum of business life is a species of slavery. We live in overcivilized times. There seems to be very little room anywhere for a man to ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I'm sure I don't know what folk want with the luggage they carry about with them nowadays— The old folk didn't. Not Saratoga trunks, anyhow. I remember 'swell as if it was yesterday way back in 1880, when Richard's father and mother were married, old Simon Mascarene—he belonged to your mother's lot, the Mascarenes of Virginia— ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Tommy, "we're all too damned businesslike nowadays. We're always saying, 'Will it pay?' The men are bad enough, ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... some one would invent something new for girls!" she exclaimed, although there was no one in the room to hear her. "It seems to me that all girls do nowadays is to imitate boys. We play their games, read their old books and even do their work, when all the time girls are really wanting girl things. I agree with King Solomon: 'The thing that hath been, it is that which, shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... activity, with a stoop and a pointing forefinger. He has a quaint habit, when addressing a bewildered pupil, of prefacing his remarks, be they gracious or damnatory, with the formula: "Ee, bless me, my man." (Nowadays none of us speaks to a schoolfellow without beginning: "Ee, bless me, my man.") "Salome" we call the entertaining creature. This nickname adhered like a barnacle to him, immediately after he had employed, in his exegesis of the Greek narrative of Herodias' daughter, the expression: ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... social feeling, and thereby to experience fully the great dramatic moment in each play, there had to go the effect of innumerable small impulses. And to realize some situations is even beyond the scope of a play's development. It is an acute remark of Mr. G.K. Chesterton's, that many plays nowadays turn on problems of marriage: which subject is one for slow years of adjustment, patience, adaptation, endeavor; while the drama requires quick decisions, bouleversements, etc., and would do wisely ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... replied the culprit, 'the Word of God is become so scarce nowadays, that unless one steals it, they have but a poor chance of coming by it honestly, or hearing it ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... British Guiana, and some other smaller colonies is of lesser importance, though Indians have been deeply moved by stories of ill-treatment inflicted upon them by European planters, and indenture itself is held nowadays to connote a state almost of servitude incompatible with Indian national self-respect. There the Government of India has a remedy in its own hands. It can stop, and is stopping, the export of Indian labour to those colonies. Far graver is the situation that has only ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... tree on which Jesus Christ was crucified was an aspen, and that, thenceforth, all aspens were afflicted with a peculiar shivering. Botanists, scientists, and matter-of-fact people of all sorts pooh-pooh this legend, as, indeed, many people nowadays pooh-pooh the very existence of Christ. But something—you may call it intuition—I prefer to call it my Guardian Spirit—bids me believe both; and I do believe as much in the tradition of the aspen as in the existence of Christ. Moreover, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... corpse might stiffen practically instantaneously: there are dozens of cases noted, particularly in cases of injury to the skull, like this one. On the other hand, the stiffening might not have begun until eight or ten hours after death. You can't hang anybody on rigor mortis nowadays, inspector, much as you may resent the limitation. No; what we can say is this. If he had been shot after the hour at which the world begins to get up and go about its business, it would have been heard and very likely seen, too. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... the two cases from Epidaurus, which are quite typical of the series. We observe that the first is described simply as a case of 'tape-worm' without any justification for the diagnosis. It is not unfrequent nowadays for thin and anxious patients to state, similarly without justification, that they suffer from this condition. They attribute certain common gastric experiences to this cause of which perhaps they have learned from sensational advertisements, and then they ask cure for a condition which ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... another truth which the psychologist nowadays finds very fruitful for his knowledge of the mind; this is the fact that minds vary much in different individuals, or classes of individuals. First, there is the pronounced difference between healthy minds and diseased minds. The differences ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... figure she had cut beside the girl he had brought, and of her fierce resentment at the girl's covert ridicule. She had shocked and disgusted Disston beyond doubt by the manner in which she had retaliated, yet she knew that in similar circumstances she would do the same again, for her first impulse nowadays was to strike back harder than ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... who snarl out suchlike dirges, which any laundryman with a little sense would scoff at, think themselves great theologians ... Not that I want the kind of theology which is customary in the schools nowadays consigned to oblivion; I wish it to be rendered more trustworthy and more correct by the accession of the old, true learning. It will not weaken the authority of the Scriptures or theologians if certain passages hitherto considered corrupt are henceforth read in an emended form, or if ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... Squirrel and Billy Woodchuck, Jimmy said something about Mr. Crow in a low voice. And they laughed loudly. Whereupon Mr. Crow flew away, croaking to himself about the shocking way children are brought up nowadays. You know, Mr. Crow was a great gossip. And everywhere he went that day he spread the news about Jimmy Rabbit's finding a red tail ...
— The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit - Sleepy-TimeTales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... has nothing to do," some people will say, "with Rieka's economical position. We admit that Croatia has the historical right to the town, but we wish to be satisfied that the Croats are not moved by reasons that would cause Rieka's ruin. It may be nowadays, owing to the unholy alliance between Magyars and Italians, that the town, with respect to its trade, is more in the Italian sphere than in that of Yugoslavia." The answer to this is that Italy's share of the value of the imports into Rieka in 1911 was 7.5 per cent. of the total, while her share ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... should be applied very sparingly, and might really be restricted to cases like the "I think" of the second example. Nowadays the tendency is against the pointing of such words as "therefore" ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... HARMFUL?—Traveling has been made so easy and alluring that nowadays long journeys are undertaken with scarcely more concern than was once felt when the people of neighboring towns exchanged visits. Thus modern facilities have introduced a new factor into the problem of the way to live during pregnancy. ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... deal about the snobbishness of people generally. Somebody was always cutting or ignoring him, and then "look at the sort of men that one meets nowadays; fellows whose fathers keep shops and haven't an 'h' in their alphabets." He couldn't understand how people could stand the cads that went about; yet you could go into the Ritz or the Carlton and see the Countess of Daventry and Lady FitzStuart lunching and dining with "bounders ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... comfortable sort of place, isn't it, father?" Fred asked, following his father's look and thought from the Morris chair to the student's lamp, and all those other things which nowadays seem an inevitable part ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... self-surrender. Threatened by her only God, her son, heart-broken at finding herself in a plight so unnatural, she falls desperate. She tries to drown all her memories in sleep. At length comes an issue for which neither of them can fairly account, an issue such as nowadays will often happen in the poorer quarters of large towns, where some poor woman is forced, frightened, perhaps beaten, into bearing every outrage. Thus conquered, and, spite of her scruples, far too resigned, she endured thenceforth a pitiable bondage; a life of shame and sorrow, and abundant ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... before, I would call this God. But I feel that there is a great danger in doing this sort of thing unguardedly. Many people would be glad for rather trivial and unworthy reasons that I should confess a faith in God, and few would take offence. But the run of people even nowadays mean something more and something different when they say "God." They intend a personality exterior to them and limited, and they will instantly conclude I mean the same thing. To permit that misconception ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... yours." This last gentleman went on to say that unfortunately, as yet, perhaps, privacy was not quite so easily obtained in America as might be desired; still, he continued, you could generally get it by paying for it; in fact, you could get everything in America nowadays by paying for it. American life was certainly growing a great deal more private; it was growing very much like England. Everything at Newport, for instance, was thoroughly private; Lord Lambeth would probably be struck with that. It was also represented to the strangers ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... rotten and white and streaky on the palings. He spoke to the bailiff about this, and hauled him out to look at it. The bailiff rubbed the varnish with his finger, smelt it, and said that it had perished. He also said there was no such thing as good varnish nowadays, and he added there wasn't any varnish, not the very best, but wouldn't go like that with rain and all. Mr. Hermann-Postlethwaite grumbled a good deal, but he supposed the bailiff knew best; so he told him to see what could be done, and for several ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... not misbehaved," Korableva said of Vasilieff, biting off a piece of sugar with her strong teeth. "He only sided with a comrade. Fighting, you know, is not allowed nowadays." ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... me say that no miller should undertake to build a gradual reduction mill, or to change over his mill to the gradual reduction system, until he has consulted with some good milling engineer (the term millwright means very little nowadays), and obtained from him a programme which shall fit the size of the mill, the stock upon which it has to work, and the grade of flour which it is to make. This programme is to the miller what a chart is to the sailor. It shows him the course he must pursue, how the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... was ordered to "watch over youths of disorderly carriage, and see they behave themselves comelie, and use such raps and blows as is in his discretion meet." In Durham any misbehaving boy was punished publicly after the service was over. We would nowadays scarcely seat twenty or thirty active boys together in church if we wished them to be models of attention and dignified behavior; but after the boys' seats were removed from the pulpit stairs they were all turned in together in a "boys' pew" in the gallery. There was a boys' pew in Windsor, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... be confessed, is neither very inviting, nor very rewarding to ordinary readers nowadays. And that big book will only be persevered in to the end by those readers to whom everything that Sir Thomas Browne has written is of a rare interest and profit. The full title of this now completely antiquated and wholly forgotten treatise is this, 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... a novel and an extravagant idea," Mrs. Goddard assented; "but, of course, nobody minds that in a play—the more extravagant and unreal, the better it suits the public nowadays. Well, the parents and friends of the couple naturally object to this arrangement, but they finally carry their point. Everything is arranged, and the wedding-day arrives. Only the parents and a few friends are supposed to be present, and, at the appointed hour, the bridal ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... and chopping their neighbors, and using their heads in conventional patterns on the tops of gate-posts, did devote their leisure intervals to rearing fortresses like this. Edinburgh Castle could not be conceived, much less built, nowadays, when all our energy is consumed in bettering the condition of the "submerged tenth"! What did they care about the "masses," that "regal race that is now no more," when they were hewing those blocks of ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... compare the raw material in the fields, with the finished articles in the windows of some lady's outfitting shop. It requires many diligent hands and high class technical guidance, to transfer Nature's present of raw cotton into the manifold articles, which the people, nowadays, ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer
... goldfields there," said Bob, putting his finger on a tailor's advertisement. "I wish you'd—why—read it to me, Isley; I can't see the small print they uses nowadays." ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... domestic service; but on what conditions, think you? The girl's father, an honest labouring man, paid the person whose house she entered one shilling a week for her instruction in the duties she wished to undertake. What a grinning stare would come to the face of any labourer nowadays, who should be asked to do the like! I no longer wonder that my housekeeper so little resembles the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... rescued; especially so if public sentiment were rife with malice and rage against him. I fear we would say, It is no use to pray for that man. Nothing short of a miracle can save that man; and miracles are not wrought by prayer nowadays. But the loving hearts gathered together in secret places in Jerusalem thought not so. They "made unceasing prayer ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... that, Aunt William! Why, you're thinking of ages ago, or Ouida, or something. There's no such thing nowadays as a fast young man, as you call it. They're always talking about how ill they are, or how hard up, and how they don't want to ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... mouth and rosy toe Of little baby brother, Until about a month ago Had never met each other; But nowadays the neighbours sweet, In every sort of weather, Half way with rosy fingers meet, To ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... the fairy godmother," answered Guida, trying not to show an interest she felt all too keenly; for nowadays it seemed to her that all news should be about Philip. Besides, she was gaining time and preparing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... personality, the veiled yet vital world of spiritual adventure ... Pain and conflict; powers of evil, of doubt and indecision:—no evading these. But in any imaginative work he essayed, beauty must be the prevailing element—if only as a star in darkness. And nowadays Beauty had become almost suspect. Cleverness, cynicism, sex and sensation—all had their votaries and their vogue. Mere Beauty, like Cinderella, was left sitting among the ashes of the past; and Roy—prince or ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... methods that already are bending downward the curve of our progression until it disappears in the nether-world of failure, as did those of every preceding epoch of equal duration. An example of what I mean is the astute saying, frequently heard nowadays: "The cure ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... that she's liable to be in there now. She don't stay inside nowadays so much. She's been comin' round the ditch, silent-like but friendly. And she'll watch us workin' for a spell, and then she's apt to move off alone into the woods, singin' them Dutch songs of hern that ain't got no toon. I've met her walkin' ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... fault, a meek subserviency to the tyrannic Russell, who domineered over all to our universal terror; and I remember kindly Mr. Churton once affected to tears at the cruelty of his chief. What should we think nowadays of an irate schoolmaster smashing a child's head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose bled, as I once saw? Or, in these milder times when your burglar or garotter is visited with a brief whipping, what shall we judge of the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... tiled roof supported by huge oaken rafters and crowned with many gables,—a building proudly declaring itself as of the days of Elizabeth's yeomen, and bearing about it the honourable marks of age and long stress of weather. No such farmhouses are built nowadays, for life has become with us less than a temporary thing,—a coin to be spent rapidly as soon as gained, too valueless for any interest upon it to be sought or desired. In olden times it was apparently not considered such cheap currency. ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... summer months to shaw gaping fules from Lunnon an' Lard knaws wheer, them roundy-poundies 'pon my land. 'Tis all rot, as every moorman knaws; yet you an' such as you screams if us dares to put a finger to the stone nowadays. Ban't the granite ours under Venwell? You knaw it is; an' because dead-an'-gone folk, half-monkeys belike, fashioned their homes an' holes out of it, be that any cause why it shouldn't be handled to-day? They've had their use of it; now 'tis our turn; an ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... children thus historically present a thoroughly parallel accumulation of survivals or recapitulations of the past in the present. Few types nowadays are pure, that is, keep strictly to their period; we are all more or less mixed and modernised. Still, whether by temporal or spiritual compulsion, whether for the sake of bread or honour, each mainly and practically stands by his order, and acts with the social formation he belongs ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... vines so often alluded to by the early explorers of North America ripened, according to the species, between August and October. They belong to the same genus—Vitis—as that of the grape vines of the Old World, but they were quite distinct in species. Nowadays they are known as the Fox Grapes (Vitis vulpina), the Frost Grape (V. cordifolia), the V. aestivalis, the V. labruska, &c. The fruit of the Fox Grape is dark purple, with a very dusky skin and a musky flavour. The Frost Grape has a very small ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... all the great families in Scotland, the plumed caps and dazzling helmets of courtier and knight, the border of blue bonnets outside, and all the shining array of fair ladies around and behind the throne, would present a more striking picture than the best we could do nowadays. Let us hope the sun shone and warmed the keen clear air, and threw into high relief the towers and bastions against the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... long run. Even Iago had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in LEAR, although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to George Sand's French version of AS YOU LIKE IT (and I think I can promise you will like it but little), you will find Jacques marries Celia just as ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more important nature crowded on them. For—there lay a dead man, who was not to be put in one's pocket, like a will. It was necessary to hide that thing from the light—ever that light. Within a few hours, morning would break, and lonely and deserted as that place was nowadays, some one might pass that way. Out of sight with ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... surface thing—the change goes deeper than that. I called her posee just now. Well, I don't know if that's the right word. Sometimes I think that frozen manner of hers isn't a pose after all, it's natural to her nowadays. She seems to be literally turned to stone by all she's gone through. Where she used to be all sympathy, all ardour, all life, now she's cold, frigid, passionless. The girl's barely twenty-five, but upon my soul she might be a woman of fifty for all the youth there is about ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... you must read them once again with your critical spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... said he, "I got a little story to tell you. It's the gospel truth. Just try to forget that I used to be a crook and that in ordinary times I am one of the most gosh-awful liars on earth. But there's absolutely no pleasure in lying nowadays, and as for working at my regular trade, Mrs. Spofford, you needn't be the least bit nervous. It ain't necessary for you to set on that trunk. Take this chair, please. Now, you remember some time back that A. A. and your friend Landover ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... up his flower garden, too. It was all he could do to shove the lawn-mower around, in the dusk, after the puppies were in bed. Formerly he had found the purr of the twirling blades a soothing stimulus to thought; but nowadays he could not even think consecutively. Perhaps, he thought, the residence of the mind is in the legs, not in the head; for when your legs are thoroughly weary you can't ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... 'What a high idea of Athenian comedy is given by this single line, in which the poet opines "the bringing out of comedy to be the most difficult of all arts."'{1} It would not seem to be a difficult art nowadays, seeing how much new comedy is nightly produced in London, and still more in Paris, which, whatever may be its literary value, amuses its audiences as much as ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... all spirit. She laughed rarely, nowadays. She was paler, too, than usual—paler than was ornamental; and pallor suited her rather fragile features, too. Also she had become curiously considerate of other people's feelings—rather subdued; less ready in her criticisms; ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... thing nowadays, the only really big proposition. And it's going to be a bigger proposition than ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... not belong to this group. Nowadays a hawker is a pedlar, and it has been assumed, without sufficient evidence, that the word is of the same origin as huckster. The Mid. Eng. le haueker or haukere (1273) is quite plainly connected with hawk, and the name may have been applied either to a Falconer, Faulkner, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... truth, our friend Charley was very much out of humor with the storm, because it had kept him all day within doors, and hindered him from making a trial of a splendid sled, which Grandfather had given him for a New-Year's gift. As all sleds, nowadays, must have a name, the one in question had been honored with the title of Grandfather's chair, which was painted in golden letters on each of the sides. Charley greatly admired the construction of the new vehicle, and felt certain that it would outstrip ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... scheme. To the sympathetic ladies who attended the same strictly evangelical church of which he was a pillar, he confided that his only daughter did not care for "a quiet domestic life." It was a grief to him—but, after all, parents are shelved nowadays; every girl wants to "live her own life," and he would be the last man to stand in the way of his child's happiness. The ladies felt very sorry for Major Morton and indignant with the hard-hearted, unfilial ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... He ate his luncheon, having first paid a visit to Ann, who gave him an effusive welcome. Jeffrey waited, and during the meal they had some further talk, and among other things John said to him, "Does my father dress for dinner nowadays?" ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... Previous ages were often, alas, aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; but they were always democratic in philosophy; they appealed to man, not to particular men. And if most men were against an idea, that was so far against it. But nowadays that most men are against a thing is thought to be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to show that some day most men will be for it. If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote the contempt ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... begun talking about the Varietes. Wasn't that cad of a Bordenave going to go off the hooks after all? His nasty diseases kept reappearing and causing him such suffering that you couldn't come within six yards of him nowadays. The day before during rehearsal he had been incessantly yelling at Simonne. There was a fellow whom the theatrical people wouldn't shed many tears over. Nana announced that if he were to ask her to take another part she would ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... to play this organ, just as nowadays we play four-hand music on the piano. The keys went down with such difficulty that the players had to use their elbows or fists on each key; therefore it is easy to see that, at the most, only four keys could be pressed down at ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... sized face, from five to fourteen point. With, however, the attachment referred to, it can now cast for the use of the hand compositor complete fonts of type up to and including thirty-six point in size, so that an entire book, title-page included, nowadays often owes its typographical "dress" to the ingenious machine known as ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... peoples of the South Pacific Ocean. Many years ago missionaries and teachers settled in Samoa and they found the natives to be pretty apt scholars. By nature they were dignified and polite; they also learned quickly the arts of civilized life. Nowadays nearly every native village has its church and school-house. The Samoans are fond of music and one may hear American hymns and melodies in nearly ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Nowadays the world is perpetually on the move, but in the old days people who possessed a country house passed nine months out of the twelve under its sacred roof—sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association; with marriage and children, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Roman writer tells us that in former days noble matrons used to go with bare feet, streaming hair, and pure minds, up the long Capitoline slope, praying to Jupiter for rain. And straightway, he goes on, it rained bucketsful, then or never, and everybody returned dripping like drowned rats. "But nowadays," says he, "we are no longer religious, so the fields ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in disgusted tones. "That's the way it is nowadays. Give a dog a bad name—why,—I suppose this bad name's going to stick to him all his life, now. It ain't right. You know, Carton, as well as I do that if they charged him with just plain fighting and got him before ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... as that?" she queried. "I didn't realize that I was. Nothing serious is the matter, dear—nothing very serious! Only Katie's sister in the old country is ill—and Katie is going home to stay with her. And it's just about impossible to get a good maid, nowadays—it seems as if Katie has been with me for a lifetime. I expect that we'll manage, somehow, but I don't just fancy cooking and sweeping, and running the Settlement ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... is nothing nowadays. It was a very different thing when I was a boy. Take my word for it, Mr. Harkaway, our patient will jump ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... Druidess, who was called Norma for short, she being an orphan, and having "nor par, nor ma." The Ancient Order of Druids, with Arch-Druid Oroveso in the chair, might have had a better brass band. Norma nowadays is not particularly attractive, and the house, when it is given, cannot be expected to be more than normal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... believe how old-fashioned rattle-boxes are,—those noisy things that babies love to shake. Why, they are almost as old-fashioned as some of the very first babies would look nowadays. A few very ancient writers mention these toys, but, instead of calling them, simply, "rattle-boxes," they refer to them as "symbols of eternal agitation, which is ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... nor twenty,' dropping a half-crown as he said it. 'But the captin's a nice young gent—a nice young gent, without any blandishment, I should say; and that's more nor one can say of all young gents nowadays,' said Buckram, looking at Pacey as he spoke, and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... pleasing feature of those times was the close fellowship between the writers and the painters and other artists, as was shown in the devoted affection of Maclise and others to Dickens. There is more of class apart nowadays. Artists and writers are not thus united. The work has gone through many editions; but, after some years the whim seized him to turn it into an official literary history of the period, and he issued it as a "Life and Times," with an abundance of notes and ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... looks like it," replied Mrs. Bunker, taking up a bit of the muslin and rubbing the broad gold band on the third finger of Mercy's left hand. "But yer can't allers tell by that nowadays. There's folks wears 'em that ain't married. This is a real harndsome ring, 's heavy 's ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... nowadays but a few verses of the Greek Testament, and write these miserable leaves of journal. I must save my strength. I am very weak as it is. We have still got nearly forty days of actual travelling to make ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... bales came from the Sea Islands. First one army, then the other, had swept over the Beaufort plantation, trampling its fields into mire. It had been seized, confiscated, retaken, re-confiscated, sold to this person and that. Nobody knew exactly to whom it belonged nowadays; but it was not to little Annie, rightful heiress of all. Stripped of every thing, reduced to utter want, Mrs. Pickens and her daughter took refuge in a lonely village, far up among the Carolina hills, where some former friends, also ruined by the war, offered them the ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... in a small town as in a great city; her acquaintances will say to each other, "I haven't met So-and-so lately. I wonder..." And curiosity will go no further. And in a short time her invisibility will cease to excite any remark, except, "She keeps herself to herself nowadays." To Hilda Miss Gailey appeared no older; her brown hair had very little grey in it, and her skin was fairly smooth and well-preserved. But she seemed curiously smaller, and less significant, this woman who, with ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... at him anxiously. His sister had married a British peer. "But you Americans are quite distinct from the red Indians," she said. "We quite understand that nowadays. To be sure, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... month or longer nowadays has his prints taken a little before he is discharged. These prints, if they are not already in the records of Scotland Yard, are added to them, and a number gives the key to the man's record in the ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... were familiar with nothing higher than the swelling slopes of the Surrey hills. It was wild, little cultivated, save in the emerald green of the bottom, a few fields which lay where a stream ought to have been. Nowadays there are red-roofed houses peeping out at every corner, but at that period fashion had not even heard of Hurrymere, and, save for a farm-house or two, a village alehouse and posting-house at a corner of the high-road, and one or two great houses within the circuit of six or seven ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... think that the dear fellow has no wife to look after this dear little house? It always seems to me such a pity, but still, I always say, at any rate Aylmer's married once, and that's more than most of them do nowadays. It's simply horse's work to get them to do it at all. Sometimes I think it's perfectly disgraceful. And yet I can't help seeing how sensible it is of them too; you know, when you think of it, what with one thing and another, what does ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... with indifference. "As you say, Mr. Smock, all the world writes letters nowadays. Certainly it is natural that from all over the West men should ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... Professor Mathews's views, but unluckily till the Board sees fit to further regulate the Southern areas in which scientific experiments may be conducted, we shall always be exposed to the risk which our correspondent describes. Unfortunately, a chimera bombinating in a vacuum is, nowadays, only too capable of ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... trees and apple trees and plum trees, raspberry vines and gooseberry bushes; with marigolds and four o'clocks and love-in-a-puzzle and hollyhocks and daisies and larkspur, and a great many more sweet and homely growths that nobody makes any account of nowadays. Sunlight just now lay glowing upon it, and made the shade of the verandah doubly pleasant, the verandah being further shaded by honeysuckle and trumpet creeper which wreathed round the pillars and stretched up to the eaves, and ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won't make concessions, or rather, he can't make them; he can't supply the market. I—well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that's a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... gracious to the wife, but he is not tender; and it may be encouraging to country-housewives nowadays to see what service was expected of their mothers in the days of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... happened already? I had been late for dinner and missed the arrivals in the drawing-room. It was Leta's fault. She has got into a way of coming into my room and putting the last touches to my toilet. I let her, for I am doubtful of myself nowadays after many years' dependence on the best of valets. Her taste is generally beyond dispute, but to-day she had indulged in a feminine vagary that provoked me and made me ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... putting forth tales for the holiday numbers that employed every subtle, evasive, indirect and strategic scheme they could invent to disguise the Christmas flavor. So far has this new practice been carried that nowadays when you read a story in a holiday magazine the only way you can tell it is a Christmas story is to look at the footnote which reads: ["The incidents in the above story happened ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... Everyone has, even nowadays, a sneaking regard for the smugglers of that bygone age, an instinct that is based partly on a curious human failing and partly on a keen admiration for men of dash and daring. There is a sympathy, somehow, with a class of men who succeeded not once but hundreds of ...
— King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855 • E. Keble Chatterton
... court, figured in lands, cities, lakes, and rivers. Louisiana bears his own name; Lake Pontchartrain the name of his minister for marine; Fort Duquesne, the name of his famous sailor. There were also the rivers Colbert and Seigneley, better known nowadays as Mississippi and Illinois. One of the Great Lakes had been named after the Duke of Orleans; another, the great Conde, the winner of Rocroy; another after his brother, Prince de Conti; but this last inland sea, as indeed most of the others, soon resumed ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... the first courtyard of Staple Inn. The courtyard is a real backwater out of the rushing traffic. The uneven cobble-stones, the whispering plane-trees, the worn red brick, and the flat sashed windows, of a bygone date all combine to make a picture of old London seldom to be found nowadays. Dr. Johnson wrote parts of "Rasselas" while a ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... are known to the admirable unguentarians of Bond Street, who will impart them to their clients. Our thanks, too, should be given to Science for ridding us of the old danger that was latent in the use of cosmetics. Nowadays they cannot, being purged of any poisonous element, do harm to the skin that they make beautiful. There need be no more sowing the seeds of destruction in the furrows of time, no martyrs to the cause like ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... doesn't really matter. Koskoff knew me as John Smith, and it will pass as well as any other name. Let my past stay buried. I am, or was, a scientist of some ability; but fortune frowned on me, and I was driven out of the world. Money would rehabilitate me—money will do anything nowadays—so I set out to get it. In the course of my experimental work, I had discovered that cold was negative heat and reacted to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... "Those were good times when the tablets with the lists of imposts and taxes of the peasantry used to hang in the church. In those days everything was fixed, and there were never any disagreements, as there are nowadays all too often. Afterwards it was said that the tablets with the hens and eggs and bushels and pecks of grain. interfered with devotion, and they were done away with." With that he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... sometimes have my doubts), it will be found that I have pursued the latest rules of my art, as exemplified in the writings of all the great American historians, and wrought a very large history out of a small subject—which nowadays, is considered one of the great triumphs of historic skill. To proceed, then, with the thread ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... things old-time religious war was the most ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all the world knows. When the English captured a Spanish ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... crosses; but there were many designs of the sun—the sun rising, the sun setting, the sun in full glory, with all his rays embroidered round him in tiny shells, some of them no bigger than a pin's head. "What a waste of time and labor," he mused. "Who would undertake such a thing nowadays? Fancy the patience and delicacy of finger required to fit all these shells in their places! and they are embedded in strong mortar too, as if the work were ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... motion a movement as though throwing aside a turn the conversation had taken. "Well, go on, Marko. Go on talking. I'm not going to let you stop talking yet. I love that about how people get success nowadays. It's jolly true. I never thought of it before. Yes, you're still a terribly thinky person, Marko. Go on. Think ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... me, sir. I complain not of the robbery—-far from it; for, if we do lose the possession of a commodity so valuable, we are at least freed from the responsibility of keeping it. The gentlemen, nowadays, seldom look to us for intellectual gladiatorship; they are content that our weakness should shield us from the war. But, I conceive the reproach of our poverty to come unkindly from those who make us poor. It is of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... different species at a distance of several miles by this means alone, as well as by their forms and colors, and the way they reflected the light. All seemed strong and comfortable, as if really enjoying the storm, while responding to its most enthusiastic greetings. We hear much nowadays concerning the universal struggle for existence, but no struggle in the common meaning of the word was manifest here; no recognition of danger by any tree; no deprecation; but rather an invincible gladness as remote ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir |
