"Strait-laced" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... replied, laughing, "you'll find him a very nice boy; just a little too strait-laced for me, but he'll ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... in the first embryo parliament of the Prussian monarchy? And if uncongenial to the generation of Prussians among whom he had grown up, how infinitely greater was the dislike against him of South Germans, more gifted, as a rule, by nature, to whom the name of Prussian is synonymous of all that is strait-laced and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... was a very strait-laced individual, and wont to raise his hands in horror at the mention of fighting, or anything, in fact, that partook of violence. He always gave it as his opinion that football was a brutal game, equal to the bull rights of the Spaniards, and could hardly be induced ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... dull suppression sundry comments on a certain Rhenish law, whereof my author's mind had at one time studiously cogitated a grave and wholesome homily. For our censor of the press, one strait-laced Mr. Better Judgment, has, "with his abhorred shears," clipped off the more eloquent and spirited portion of a trenchant argument concerning—the revealed doctrine of a superior sex, the social evils of female domination, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... this age of rapid deviation from the standard rules that governed feminine deportment and education when I was a girl, many of the precepts and admonitions penned by the authors I have mentioned are derided and repudiated as 'puritanical,' 'old-fashioned,' 'strait-laced,' 'stupid and prudish'; but if these indeed be faults, certainly in the light of modern innovations they appear 'to lean to virtue's side.' In fashionable society, such as you are destined to meet at Mr. Palma's, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... be expected to know that. She is a long-headed woman, Mr. Gwynne. I suspect she is considerably worried about Viola. Your half-sister is being rather assiduously courted by a young man named Lapelle. Mrs. Gwyn does not approve of him. She is strait-laced and—er—puritanical." ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... prudish and particular because she herself is separated from her husband, nobody knows why. The Navarreins, the Lenoncourts, the Blamont-Chauvrys, and the rest of the relations have all rallied round her; the most strait-laced women are seen at her house, and receive her with respect, and the Marquis d'Espard has been put in the wrong. The first call that you pay will make it clear to you that I am right; indeed, knowing Paris as I do, I can tell you beforehand that you ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... wear as a Doctor of Divinity, because it savoured of the "Scarlet Woman." "Dr. Humphrey," said the queen, with the tact alike of a Tudor sovereign and of a true woman, "methinks this gown and habit become you very well, and I marvel that you are so strait-laced on this point—but I come not now to chide." This President complained that his headship was "more payneful than gayneful," a charge not usually ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... Norwegian Church as it then existed. The controversies on the ministry, on predestination, on conversion and synergism, while expressive of deep conviction and loyalty to the Truth, do not form a chapter in our history of which Lutherans can feel proud. When orthodoxy becomes so strict and strait-laced and legalistic, when it stands up so erect as to lean backward, both the interests of the Truth and of the Church are bound to suffer. The cause of unity is harmed, and union or cooperation is rendered impossible." However, if the paramount object of ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry, as Addison, no doubt, was in prose. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced Muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets, and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics were running high in the first decade of the present century, and the favorite bug-bear in New England was President Jefferson, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... an elaborate pinch of snuff. 'You'll forgive me,' he answered. 'But before this about her birth came out, I fancied that you were doing, or going about to do the girl no good. Now, my dear Sir George, I am not strait-laced,' the doctor continued, dusting the snuff from the lappets of his coat, 'and I know very well what your friend, my Lord March, would do in the circumstances. And you have lived much, with him, and think yourself, I dare swear, no better. But you are, my dear sir—you are, though ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... observation of English provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless hardihood; and every one must be glad that ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... impoverish the family or to leave the general affairs of the house of Scroope worse than he found them. Much less than half of that which he understood to be the income coming from the estates would suffice for him. But let his uncle or aunt,—or his strait-laced methodical brother, say what they would to him, nothing should induce him to make himself a slave ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... think about," assented Tucker, "and to think hard about, too—and yet I cut my teeth on the theory that women have no sense of honour. Now, that is pure, foolish, strait-laced ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... doctored two fractures with an invaluable cement. The pecuniary gain may have been half-a-crown. The loss in self-respect she did not seem to estimate. Aunt Theresa would not have done it herself, but she laughed encouragingly. It is difficult to be strait-laced with a lady who had so much old point, and whose silks are so stiff that she can rustle down your remonstrances. Another friend, a young officer whose personal extravagance was a proverb even at a station in India, boasted for a week of having sold a rickety knick-knack shelf to ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... man, bred a soldier," as if the last fact were an excuse for the former, he contributed largely to the furtherance of these pious objects, "spending liberally all his salary and perquisites of office," for which generous trait of character an early and strait-laced historian is obviously of the opinion that General Nicholson should have been suffered to swear in peace and, as it were, in ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... in that suggestion. This was no time for convention, for placid weighing of this consideration against that, for strait-laced repression. The environment encouraged her. Her exulting joy drove ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... learned to know him as a jovial artist, who in the days of his youth very possibly might have given the strait-laced lady cause for anxiety. Even when his locks were white he was ready for any pleasure; but he devoted himself earnestly to art, and I am under obligation to him for being the means of my mother's possessing the friendship of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
