"Riff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the fun. So you go into the square to watch also. You see little groups of revolutionaries looking sullen and laboriously class-hating. You see a lot of soldiers looking very ordinary but trying not to. The riff-raff scowl at the soldiers, who are ordered out to shoot at them. The soldiers scowl at the riff-raff at whom they are ordered not to shoot. And, for some reason which the experts have not yet fathomed, it always pours ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... they happened in the west. I very much wish you could have been with us on Easter Monday, when we passed the day at Greenwich, and were at the renowned Greenwich Fair, which lasts for three days. The scene of revelry takes place in the Park, a royal one, and really a noble one. Here all the riff-raff and bobtail of London repair in their finery, and have a time. You can form no notion of the affair; it cannot be described. The upper part of the Park, towards the Royal Observatory, is very steep, and down this boys and girls, men and women, have a roll. Such scenes as are ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... riff-raff of many ports they were; and now with them it was every man for himself. This feeling without proper knowledge worked their undoing. The ropes were released, one before the other, and the loaded boat bumped down the side of the ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... time, and yet very many lingered to see the last of this drama of lost fortunes. A few of the riff-raff, who invariably attend these public scenes, were now rather the worse for drink, from the indifferent liquor provided by the auctioneer, and they were inclined to horseplay and coarse chaff. More ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with human debris and lit with fifty candles. The candles were popish and the drinkers were pagan, so he turned on Biddy and told her more or less what he thought of her. He pointed with disgust to a couple of drinkers who lay snoring on a sofa under the window. "All the riff-raff of the country!" he said. Biddy flared up. "Riff-raff, is it? Sure it's his own sons and mine who do be after paying respect to their own father, and him ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... divided into a series of sheep stations. When the season came for shearing the wool and despatching it to the markets in the cities on the coast hundreds of miles away, the population was fairly respectable in point of numbers, though with the riff-raff which formed the army of camp followers moving in the track of the shearers and teamsters, respectability was not otherwise manifest. But at other periods of the year, there were few men and fewer women scattered over the area marked on the map as Waroona, and including as many ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... another, in hopes of getting this other's place for service in Canada. But in vain. France had parasites at court, plenty of them. But the French troops who went out were patriots almost to a man. The only exception was in the case we have noticed before, when 400 riff-raff were sent out to take the places of the 400 good men whom Boscawen had captured in the Gulf ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood |
