"Squeamishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... country proved as disconcerting as unexpected, while to mention the sex of an animal was, in Reginald Sawyer's opinion, to be guilty of unpardonable coarseness. The atmosphere of a Protestant middle-class home clung to him yet, begetting in him a squeamishness, not to say prudery, almost worthy of his hostesses, the Miss Minetts. He shook the culprits again, with a ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... stories of Hale's squeamishness, Lord Campbell tells the following good anecdote of Baron Graham: "The late Baron Graham related to me the following anecdote to show that he had more firmness than Judge Hale:—'There was a baronet of ancient ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... would seem to be inconstant who fails to persevere in what he has proposed to do. Now this is a mark of "incontinency" in pleasurable matters, and of "effeminacy" or "squeamishness" in unpleasant matters, according to Ethic. vii, 1. Therefore inconstancy does not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the end of a month, they were newly varnished and in bright, tasteful frames, and no one would ever have detected that the old gentleman's eyes did not resemble each other closely. Since then I have often heard Josephine declare her gratitude that she did not allow any squeamishness to prevent her from giving the children and people generally the correct impression of a man who was eminent in his day and generation. Indeed, I have heard her call the attention of visitors to the strong similarity about the brow and eyes which our second son David ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... Croix sugar works contradicted it. The kettles, the vats in which the sugar is cooled, the hogsheads in which it is drained, and even the molasses vats under them, are so perfectly neat and clean, that no one who has seen them can feel any squeamishness in eating St. Croix sugar, or molasses either. To look at a vat-full, a foot deep, just chrystalizing over the surface, and perfectly transparent to the bottom, would satisfy the most scrupulous upon this point. There is about twenty-five thousand black, and three thousand ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Cape Kafirs have the same prejudice against fish, comparing its flesh, to that of serpents. In some points their squeamishness resembles that of the Somal: he, for instance, who tastes the Rhinoceros Simus is at once dubbed ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents. He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the profane crowd. And his melancholy scepticism, with its half-humorous assent to the traditional pieties, is at the extremest opposite pole from the "truths" of metaphysical reason. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of us shall furnish these. Depend upon it, if the church do not give them amusement, regulated on a liberal Christian basis, the devil will give them abundance that is unregulated. God forbid that Christian squeamishness should suffer them to turn aside to the house whose gates lead to hell, and to habits which shall make mothers curse the day they gave ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... to marry you to the man you are in love with! Your mother, I remember, whimpered and whined just in the same manner; but it was all over within twenty-four hours after we were married: Mr Blifil is a brisk young man, and will soon put an end to your squeamishness. Come, chear up, chear up; ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... possible importance in his eyes. He shrugged his shoulders at the nervousness of her eyes and hands, at the half-strangled whisper "I had to go out. I could hardly contain myself." That was her affair. He was, with a young man's squeamishness, rather sick of her ferocity. He did not understand it. Men do not accumulate hate against each other in tiny amounts, treasuring every pinch carefully till it grows at last into a monstrous and explosive ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... make an examination without any delay or squeamishness. The result was that he discovered a serious fracture of both bones of the leg. Fortunately the break was some inches above the ankle, and if properly attended to, would not ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... in one day," he at length said, half audibly. "That will do, certainly. I'd be contented with a tenth part of the sum. He's bound to get rich; that's plain. Fifty dollars in a single day! Leonard Jasper, you're a shrewd one. I shall have to lay aside some of my old-fashioned squeamishness, and take a few lessons from so accomplished a teacher. But, he's ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... with three of his women, and his suite in a large canoe, and our people and myself in a smaller one. Adizzetta would gladly have accompanied her husband to the English vessel, for her desire to see it was naturally excessive; but she was forbidden by old Forday, who expressed some squeamishness about the matter, or rather he was jealous that on her return to her father's house in the Eboe country, she would give too high and favourable an opinion of it to her friends, which might in the end produce consequences highly prejudicial to ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Lund's apparent callousness that affected him more than his own squeamishness. He could not regret Carlsen's death. With the doctor alive, his own existence would have been a constant menace. But he was not used to seeing a killing, though, in his water-front detail, he had not been unacquainted with grim ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... rather than at its state, if I must speak plainly. The female mind, trained as it is with us from infancy upwards in the habits and usages of nature, is shocked by any departure from her rules. You will know how to make allowances for the squeamishness of the sex, for I believe it is much alike in this particular, let it come from what quarter of the earth ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... complications if he relaxes in the slightest degree his rules of reserve. Besides which, the Jook was a man of the most morbid and ultra refinement. "Refinement" was the word he preferred, but I should have called it an absurd squeamishness. He could make no allowance for personal or local peculiarities, and eccentricities in our neighbors which delighted Koenigin and me and sent us into fits of laughter excited in his mind only the most profound ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... fixed McKenty steadily, almost innocently; and the latter, following him clearly, felt all the while that he was listening to a strange, able, dark, and very forceful man. There was no beating about the bush here, no squeamishness of spirit, and yet there was subtlety—the kind McKenty liked. While he was amused by Cowperwood's casual reference to the silk stockings who were keeping him out, it appealed to him. He caught the point of view as well as the intention of it. Cowperwood ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of the other she takes the tobacco out of her mouth previous to your saluting her." A European visiting Paraguay for the first time is rather astonished at the conduct of the fair beauty, but such is the force of custom that the squeamishness of the new-comer is soon overcome, when he finds that he has to kiss every lady to whom he is introduced; and the traveler says that "one half of those you meet are really tempting enough to render ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... breakfast in my bed, a thing very uncommon to me, being generally up by cock-craw, except on Sunday mornings whiles, when each one, according to the bidding of the Fourth Commandment, has a license to do as he likes; having a desperate sore head, and a squeamishness at the stomach, occasioned, I jealouse in a great measure, from what Mr Glen and me had discussed at Widow Grassie's, in the shape of warm toddy, over our cracks concerning what is called the agricultural ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... have got the young lady somewhere. I heard a report to that effect. But here you think nothing of a dozen murders. Now, Gundry, let us have no squeamishness. We only want justice, and we can pay for it. Ten thousand dollars I am authorized to offer for a mere act of duty on your part. We have an extradition treaty. If the man had been alive, we must have ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... of the original spin, so that the hub would not be totally in free fall, though the pseudo-gravity of centrifugal force had already fallen to a mere shadow of a shadow of itself, and some of the personnel were feeling the combined squeamishness of the Coriolis effect near the center of the ship, and the lessening of the gravity, pseudo though it had been, that they had had ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... The meaning of the line is, Every petty or trifling offense should not be rigidly scrutinized and censured. Cassius naturally thinks that "the honorable men whose daggers have stabb'd Caesar" should not peril their cause by moral squeamishness. "He reproved Brutus, for that he should show himself so straight and severe, in such a time as was meeter to bear a little than to take things ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... being generally acknowledged, it is almost needless to state, that the faintest indication of seediness will be fatal to your reputation; and as a presentation at the Insolvent Court is equally fashionable with that of St. James, any squeamishness respecting your inability to pay could only be looked upon as a want of moral courage upon your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... committee it was unanimously agreed that a fellow who failed so utterly to keep his temper was of no use at all, even if he were a much better player than Saurin; and this opinion was intimated to him without any squeamishness in the choice of terms. Had Weston lost the match his conduct on the occasion might have resulted in his being sent to Coventry; but success is the parent of magnanimity, and, since his lack of public spirit had not proved fatal, it was condoned. ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... paraphernalia of pleasure, as the China Coast understood the word, left him unmoved. These things had little influence upon him, and the men who liked them overmuch, who chaffed him because of his squeamishness and distaste of them, were not such friends as he needed in his life. However, there were few alternatives. There was almost nothing else for it. Companionship of this kind, or the absolute loneliness of a hotel bedroom were the alternatives ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... was often misunderstood by those who loved me best, a thing that caused me the most poignant heartaches. I remember having been tormented for days merely because in relating something I had not reported it precisely as it had happened. And to such a point did I carry my squeamishness of conscience that when I had finished with my recital or statement I would murmur in a low voice, in the tone of one who tells over his beads, these words: "After all, perhaps I do not remember just exactly how it was." When I think of the thousand remorses and fears which my trifling wrong doings ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... and saying almost nothing; she, talking nervously and trying hard to be slangy about astronomy. Once he looked at her with faint interest—for she was so evidently "trying"! At midnight they all toiled up four flights of stairs from the basement to the garret, where, with proper squeamishness on the part of the ladies, and much gallantry of pushing and pulling on the part of the gentlemen, and all sorts of awkwardnesses and displaying of legs, they climbed a ladder and got out through ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... and tone of the original has been preserved, and whatever could be easily followed has been left to speak for itself. In many plainnesses of speech the old Egyptian resembled the modern Oriental, or our own forefathers, more than ourselves in this age of squeamishness as yet unparalleled in the world. To avoid offence a few little modifications of words have been made; but rather than give a false impression by tampering with any of the narrative, I have omitted the sequel of the last tale and given only an outline ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... observe, that the England of to-day is the unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Roderick Random; and in our refined era, just the same as at that more free-spoken epoch, this singular people has a certain contempt for any fine-strained purity, any special squeamishness, as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous youth. They appear to look upon it as a suspicious phenomenon in the ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... As for the proceedings which you have witnessed today, it was absolutely necessary for me to go through with them in person; my entire relation with the people would be broken if I manifested any squeamishness about participating in the old custom. My predecessor in office, who was not a native of these parts, was ashamed of these regular trips and refused downright to have anything to do with them. What was the result? He got himself into serious difficulties with these rural ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... passed, and I heard nothing more; and, though I often felt a charitable prompting to call at the place and see poor Bartleby, yet a certain squeamishness, of I know not what, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville |
