"Shabbiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shawls, of wool, silk, or cotton. They have very short petticoats, and shew very neat legs and ankles, but covered only with coarse cotton stockings, seldom very white; often with black worsted stockings. I have not seen one handsomely dressed woman as yet in France; the best had always an air of shabbiness about her, which no milliner's daughter at home would shew. They are said to dress much more gaily in the evening. When we mix a little more in French society, we shall be able ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... as much as might be supposed by the lessons the world has to offer to young spirits. At these parties, which were indeed set down in the ledger to the credit of the house, they wore dresses the shabbiness of which made them blush. Their style of dancing was not in any way remarkable, and their mother's surveillance did not allow of their holding any conversation with their partners beyond Yes and No. Also, the law of the ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number of establishments of ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dingy, and the feathers in her hat wet and limp, they were still very effective, and she looked like a young queen who had strayed away from her realm; the freshness and radiant beauty of her face more than made up for the shabbiness of her dress, and de Sigognac was fairly dazzled ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... a difference. The very expression of the face changes when one has passed from shabbiness into elegance. After Buttons had dressed himself in his gay attire his next thought was what to ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... were very small, the little light-colored lines radiated across very large blue irises. There was something baleful and compelling in their glare, so that even Hallowell, cool customer as he was, forgot immediately all about the man's littleness and shabbiness and bent figure, and was conscious only of the cruel, clever, watchful, unrelenting, hostile spirit. As Jack dragged him forward, the others could see that one foot shambled along ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... what Godfrey would think of them all. There had been such an air of charm and gaiety about the place nine years ago. Now, beautiful in a sense as was the stately Georgian house, lovely as was the garden, thanks to Janet's cleverness and hard work, there was an air of shabbiness over everything though Betty only fully realised it on the very rare occasions when she got away for a few days for a change ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... infidelity; faithlessness &c adj.; Judas kiss, betrayal. breach of promise, breach of trust, breach of faith; prodition^, disloyalty, treason, high treason; apostasy &c (tergiversation) 607; nonobservance &c 773. shabbiness &c adj.; villainy, villany^; baseness &c adj.; abjection, debasement, turpitude, moral turpitude, laxity, trimming, shuffling. perfidy; perfidiousness &c adj.; treachery, double dealing; unfairness &c adj.; knavery, roguery, rascality, foul play; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... That which, to the doer of it, is only righteous indignation, to the onlooker is passionate anger. That which, in the practiser of it, is no more than a due regard for the interests of his own family and himself in the future, is, to the envious lookers-on, shabbiness and meanness in money matters. That which, to the liar, is only prudent diplomatic reticence, to the listener is falsehood. That which, in the man that judges his own conduct, is but 'a choleric word,' is, in his friend, when he judges him, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... an indefinite number of apartments of as many degrees of shabbiness and general undesirableness, Shirley's spirits and chin fell steadily. David's heart, ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... in the chintz-covered chair, and looked around him. The whole place seemed to him, as he would have expressed it, pokey; there was a certain—he could not tell exactly what—air of shabbiness, or rather of making two ends meet, about everything. As far as he could see, not a single piece of furniture was worth a five-pound note. The walls, distempered rather a long time ago, were decorated with water-colour sketches; across the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the portions of the city on either side of it. At London Bridge we got aboard of a Woolwich steamer, and went farther down the river, passing the Custom-House and the Tower, the only prominent objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches along ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was another wedding in the great metropolis to which we would draw the reader's attention. Not that it was a great one or a splendid one; on the contrary, if it was marked by any unusual peculiarities, these were shabbiness and poverty. The wedding party consisted of only two, besides the bride and bridegroom, and everything was conducted with such quietness, and gravity, and absence of excitement, that it might almost have been mistaken for a funeral ...
— Life in the Red Brigade - London Fire Brigade • R.M. Ballantyne
... bravery of cloth-of-gold, yak-tails, silver chains, and strings of shells; behind are troopers in a burlesque of English uniform; and altogether in the rear is a mob of caitiffs on skeleton chargers, masquerading in every degree of shabbiness and rags, down to nakedness and a sword. The cavalcade passes through the city. The inhabitants pour out of every door and bend to the ground. Red cloths and white veils flutter at the casements overhead. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... Dunster's voice; the latter spoke with a provincial twang which grated on his employer's sensitive ear. He was annoyed at a certain green coat which his new clerk brought with him, and he watched its increasing shabbiness with a sort of childish pleasure. But by-and-by Mr. Wilkins found out that, from some perversity of taste, Mr. Dunster always had his coats, Sunday and working- day, made of this obnoxious colour; and this knowledge did not diminish his secret irritation. The worst of all, perhaps, was, ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... underlies the surface harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though No. 54 Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the chemist retiring from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord with the rest of his premises. In all its shabbiness it stands between the other big dazzling shops as ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... had been ashamed of the shabbiness of the bag and had planned to buy a new one, but now there was an affinity between ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for every stranger. "Perhaps," said I, "we might walk down the street. I'm unfortunately prevented—" My gesture explained the sentence before I ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... and then he would feel badly. Mary had told them once that ministers were always short of money, and found it "awful hard" to make ends meet. Since then Faith and Una would have gone in rags rather than ask their father for anything if they could help it. They did not worry a great deal over their shabbiness; but it was rather trying to see Mary Vance coming out in such style and putting on such airs about it, too. The new squirrel muff was really the last straw. Neither Faith nor Una had ever had a ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that John Ringo's face was sullen and his eyes were somber; the depth of his unpleasant expression had grown this afternoon as the shabbiness of his luck increased. ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... staggering this way, in the tallest posting-chaise ever seen, so that he looks out of the front window as if he were peeping over a garden wall; while the postilion, concentrated essence of all the shabbiness of Italy, pauses for a moment in his animated conversation, to touch his hat to a blunt-nosed little Virgin, hardly less shabby than himself, enshrined in a plaster ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... got. Square up those shoulders a little bit, do, my lad! That form won't put in a slommocking shot. Their fumbling style and contemptible flabbiness Clings to you yet. Ah! thanks be, you've changed hands. They'd crab our swim, but the Old Scuttler's shabbiness BULL understands. ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... had not recognized him. His close cropped hair, his large beard hiding half his face, and a pair of spectacles which he had assumed, were a sufficient disguise. Besides, the great change from his former "dandy" appearance to the extreme of shabbiness; his clothes being evidently worn as long as they could possibly hold together, and his generally depressed air, giving the effect of one who had gone down in the world, made him, even without the misleading "John Smith," most unlikely to ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... she said to herself, "for the whole place shows neglect and shabbiness; but there's something besides lack of money ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... old man, bent and feeble, approached. He carried a watering-pot wherewith he was about to minister to some straggling flowers in the windows fronting the Grand Canal. A thin cat rubbed itself against his legs. As he stood in his shabbiness under the high, carved door, the only permanent denizen of the building, he seemed an embodiment of the old shrunken Venetian life, still haunting a city it was no ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the carriage of Henry IV. and plunged his dagger into him. As we went down the Rue St. Honore, it grew more and more thronged, and with a meaner class of people. The houses still were high, and without the shabbiness of exterior that distinguishes the old part of London, being of light-colored stone; but I never saw anything that so much came up to my idea of a swarming city as this ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... always looks lovelier than anybody," I said quickly; for I didn't think I could bear to have even Tony, when I know what a great love he has for her, criticize Roxanne's shabbiness. They don't any of them know what a heroine she is, and ...
— Phyllis • Maria Thompson Daviess
... These weapons were formidable enough once: they are not without force still. But in its mildest form—personal disqualification or proscription—it is a disturbance which only war justifies. It may, of course, make itself odious by its modes of proceeding, by meanness and shabbiness and violence, by underhand and ignoble methods of misrepresentation and slander, or by cruelty and plain injustice; and then the odium of these things fairly falls upon it. But it is very hard to draw the line between conscientious repression, feeling itself ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church |
