"Hand to mouth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... living on from hand to mouth, flashing out in his old brilliancy and power, and forcing himself to take the lead in whatever company he might be; but utterly lonely and depressed when by himself—reading feverishly in secret, in a desperate effort to retrieve all by high honors and a fellowship. As Tom said to his neighbor, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... follow war. The Australasian colonist lives from hand to mouth, carries on his trade with borrowed money, and pays his way by the prompt disposal of his produce. Hence it is that the smallest frown of tight money sends a swift shock, vibrating and thrilling, all through the Australasian communities. War would at once hamper their transactions. It would ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... although his punishments are barbarous and his sense of justice not greatly developed. He eats human flesh but not the diseased livers of geese and he prefers his meat decomposing as some like their game. He takes no more thought for the morrow than many civilised people who live from hand to mouth without considering the future and finally he sees the world from his point of view and has little desire to discuss that of others. Mr. Van Luttens the Chef du Poste kindly meets us and places a house at our disposal. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... a man has to be bed-rocked in honesty or he's gone. Think of it. A country lawyer comes here who has never seen five thousand dollars in a lump sum, and they shove fifteen thousand at him for his vote. He is poor, ambitious, struggling along from hand to mouth. I reckon we ain't in a position to judge that poor devil of a harassed fellow. Mebbe he's always been on the square, came here to do what was right, we'll say, but he sees corruption all round him. How can he help getting a warped notion of things? He sees his friends ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... employment for the sake of raising themselves and their children in the social scale, and to accumulate property. They are not merely free, but are becoming independent. Still the number of those who live from hand to mouth, in the indolent and useless possession of freedom, is very great. In Mr. Trollope's opinion, little is to be expected from the blacks. "To lie in the sun and eat bread-fruit and yams is the negro's idea of being free. Such freedom as that has not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... carriages, are much fairer, and indeed the ladies are often as pale as if they had just left the cloister or were ready for the bier. Boys run begging after the carriage, and poor mothers with small infants in their arms beseech only a small coin. There are many in Rome who live from hand to mouth. But all are cheerful, all ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... up arms. I will bid them send hither strong working parties, but to make no show in arms until Easter, at which time I will again spread the Golden Dragon to the winds. The treasure you speak of will be right welcome, for all are so impoverished by the Danes that they live but from hand to mouth, and we must at least buy provisions to maintain the parties working here. Arms, too, must be made, for although many have hidden their weapons, the Danes have seized vast quantities, having issued an order that any Saxon found with arms shall be at once ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... were not to be regularly depended upon however. They were likewise not to be had without paying a heavy price for them, and the Prince had no money in his coffer. He lived from hand to mouth, and was obliged to borrow from every private individual who had anything to lend. Merchants, nobles, official personages, were all obliged to assist in eking out the scanty pittance ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor, apothecary's assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of his essays and his Citizen of the World (1760-1761) brought him to the attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty and then by his genius, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... say that all people who commit suicide are sane, no more than I say that all people who do not commit suicide are sane. Insecurity of food and shelter, by the way, is a great cause of insanity among the living. Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a class of workers who live from hand to mouth more than those of any other class, form the highest percentage of those in the lunatic asylums. Among the males each year, 26.9 per 10,000 go insane, and among the women, 36.9. On the other hand, of soldiers, who are at least sure of food and shelter, 13 per ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... intentions to inform him of. They were merely acting from hand to mouth to avert the parliamentary censure with which they were threatened. They had no plan, they had no intentions to carry out. If they could have known their intentions, a great hero would have been saved to the British army, a great disgrace would not have fallen on the English government. ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... I knew it was hand to mouth with Dudley: he had no cash to call on but the mine output, and immediate payments had to be made on the machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up on the Caraquet road,—after I'd once been ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... asked Mrs. Brown, our hostess; the other day, if she did not envy me my four little pets; she smiled, said they were the best children she ever saw, and that it was well to have a family if you have means to start them in the world; for her part, she lived from, hand to mouth as it was, and was sure she could never stand the worry and care of a house full ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... and wanderers were not new to Jack; for nowadays one may never know what manner of man is inside a faultless dress-suit. It is an age of disappearing, via Charing Cross station in a first-class carriage, to a life of backwooding, living from hand to mouth, starving in desert, prairie, pampas or Arctic wild, with, all the while, a big balance at Cox's. And most of us come back again and put on the dress-suit and the white tie with a certain sense ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the lady ardently, but by no means passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did not respond to his feeling, and that presently she left London and went to Paris, for her family was well-to-do, while Dickens was living from hand to mouth. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... train for the ministry. B—— said the ministry was poorly paid. He felt that A—— was needlessly committing himself to a life of sacrifice. He shuddered at the prospect of a poor preacher's hand to mouth existence. As for him, he would sell his talents in the world market, where brains and training counted for something and brought a large price. Not for him the narrow life in a small corner, when a young man of ambition and push could live and have a good time in ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... and more indolent. These thirty years of combat did not, however, bring him to ruin. At each annual stock-taking they managed to make both ends meet fairly well; if they suffered any loss during one season, they recouped themselves the next. However, it was precisely this living from hand to mouth which exasperated Felicite. She would, by far, have preferred a big failure. They would then, perhaps, have been able to commence life over again, instead of obstinately persisting in their petty business, working ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... of elaborate treachery. Neither the great world nor the world of journalists laid any deep schemes; definite plans are not made by either; their Machiavelism lives from hand to mouth, so to speak, and consists, for the most part, in being always on the spot, always on the alert to turn everything to account, always on the watch for the moment when a man's ruling passion shall deliver him into the hands of his enemies. The young Duke had seen ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... as that a man cannot do more than live from hand to mouth. Rasmus Berg, who is a scholar, can do our family more good, with his brain, in an hour than the other in ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... were allowed to remain must have been wild and strange, alternating between the populous alacrity of the fishing season and the hand to mouth struggle of the long winter months. Perhaps the amenities of life were not missed because they can hardly have been known; but the restrictions on building and the absence of local authority must early have given rise to bitterness and discontent. Certainly we must ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... we are like men saved from shipwreck, who are for the moment thankful and content, not giving thought whether they are landed on a hospitable shore, or on a barren rock, or on an island of cannibals. It is not of course intended that this "hand to mouth" immortality is sufficient for the many thoughtful minds whose activity gives life and progress to the movement, but that it affords the relief which most people feel when in an age of doubt they make the discovery that they are undoubtedly to live again. ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... is a patroness of Art going to patronize you, unless you're a poor and struggling young artist, living from hand to mouth by arduous pot-boiling? You won't have to play a part as far as the pot-boiling goes," added his monitress viciously. "Only, don't let her know that the rewards of your shame run to high-powered cars and high-class apartments. Remember, you're poor but honest. Perhaps she'll ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... eyes turned to Muggs. His pockets were crammed with pop-corn and candy. One arm was quite as full of toys as he could pack it—the other had begun the day's conveyance of food from hand to mouth, but he was regarding a very small, warm suit of clothes and substantial boots with dangerously quivering lips. Nor could one misinterpret his disapproval. For a moment the startled Doctor fancied he heard Mike hiss the astonishing ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... than these for the drinking of wine, went never from hand to mouth. Capacious as pitchers, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... as far as it went, but Carl was sensible that he was making no progress in his plan of earning a living. He was simply living from hand to mouth, and but for good luck he would have had to go hungry, and perhaps have been obliged to sleep out doors. What he wanted ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... gifts of land and sea, then must follow and ensue a dreadfull scarsity of victuals, whereupon the inhabitants are sometimes vexed with grieuous famine. And therefore it is likely that they amongst vs which vsed to liue from hand to mouth, and had not some prouision of former yeeres remaining, haue beene driuen to great extremities, so often as need hath enforced them thereunto. But whether this thing ought woorthily to minister ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... were almost agreed on it, and that fortune would one day come, like sleep, without thinking of it; that he had set aside for his sister a part of the money left by their father; that their mother was opposed to it, but that he would insist on it; that a young man can live from hand to mouth, but that the fate of a young girl is fixed on the day of her marriage. Thus, little by little, he expressed what was in his heart, and I watched Brigitte listening to him. Then, when he arose to leave us, I accompanied him to the door, ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... a swirl of "ifs" and "ands." The Commander who enters upon it possessed by some just and clear principle is like a sailing ship entering a typhoon on the right tack. After that he lives from hand to mouth. How far will wise saws cut ice? How much nearer do you get to shooting a snipe by being told how not to take your aim? Well thought out plans and preparations deserve to win; order and punctuality on ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... he had thrown up the sponge altogether and "gone yellow"; was living from hand to mouth among the Chinese. At the end of August a ship touched at that Far Eastern port, picking up volunteers for the Western Front. The port contributed a goodly number, but there remained one berth vacant. The long-suffering Consul had a stroke of inspiration. Here was a means of at once ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... dependence upon the judgment of the world, joyfulness and despondency, are more decisive contrasts for the budget of happiness than the difference between fifteen dollars a week and fifteen dollars a minute. Some of my best friends have to live from hand to mouth, and some are multimillionaires. I have found them on the whole equally happy and equally satisfied with their position in life. If there was a difference at all, I discovered that those who ate from ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... suppose, three times more than we could eat; and one of them, with an empty laugh, threw what was left into the fire, which blazed and roared again over this unusual fuel. I never in my life saw men so careless of the morrow; hand to mouth is the only word that can describe their way of doing; and what with wasted food and sleeping sentries, though they were bold enough for a brush and be done with it, I could see their entire unfitness for ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about this poorer population of Rome. They must have lived from hand to mouth. Since their votes controlled elections, [16] they were courted by candidates for office and kept from grumbling by being fed and amused. Such poor citizens, too lazy for steady work, too intelligent to starve, formed, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... capture or the murder of the proscribed outlaw in concert, and in the event of his being produced alive, a sum of money down. Osio, apparently, spent some years in exile, changing place, and name, and dress, living as he could from hand to mouth, until the rumor spread abroad that he was dead. He then returned to his country, and begged for sanctuary from an old friend. That friend betrayed him, had his throat cut in a cellar, and exposed his head upon the public ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... have a fortune until now. And I must tell you the reason of that, too. A man without a fortune does very well by himself. He can knock about, and live from hand to mouth. But when he wants to live for somebody else,—even if he has only a very faint hope of getting the opportunity of doing it,—then he must have some settled means of livelihood to justify him. So I say I am in a difficult ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... lived on a single Mole, unearthed quite by chance; then a Gopher, stalked from behind the big legs of Shag, saved him from utter collapse. Of a verity he was living from hand to mouth; such abject poverty he had never known, not even in the Southland by ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... there is a numerous class of 'roughs' known as the kullah-numdah (felt-caps; they wear a brown hard-felt low hat without a brim), excitable and reckless, and always ready for disturbance. They are the 'casuals', who live from hand to mouth, those to whom an appeal can be made by the careful working class when the price of bread is run up to famine figure, owing to the 'cornering' of wheat, which of late years has been much practised in Persia. The baker used to be the first victim of popular fury in a bread ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... ghastly"—her thoughts exclaimed as the shouts went on. The longer sustained notes presently reminded her of something. It was like something she had heard—in the interval between the verses—while the sounds echoed in the mind she remembered the cry, hand to mouth, of a ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... you are of treason"—as the Commandante gave a loud exclamation of horror—"I merely illustrate and emphasize. My sands are nearly run, Excellency; it is to the estimable mind and strong paternal hand of my friend that this miserable colony must look before long, would she continue even this hand to mouth existence—a fact well known to our king and natural lord. When he hears of ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... mother who habitually ranks physical vigor first, in rearing her daughters, and intellectual culture only second; indeed, they are commonly satisfied with a merely negative condition of health. The girl is considered to be well, if she is not too ill to go to school; and she therefore lives from hand to mouth, as respects her constitution, and lays up nothing for emergencies. From this negative condition proceeds her inability to endure accidents which to an active boy would be trivial. Who ever hears of a boy's incurring a lame ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... settle questions by the widest principles he could bring to bear upon them—which one may notice in passing is the very opposite to the method that has been in favour with many Church teachers and guides since, who have preferred to live from hand to mouth, and to dispose of difficulties by the narrowest considerations that would avail to quiet them. In our text the question in hand is settled on a ground which covers a great deal more than the existing dispute. Circumcision is regarded as one of a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Shakespeare needed the environment of "the light people," the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers' tales, the seamen's ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... Elbow. Here we struggled and starved for perhaps a year. Finally, in utter desperation, Walcott married the daughter of a Mexican gambler, who ran an eating house and a poker joint. With them we lived from hand to mouth in a wild God-forsaken way for several years. After a time the woman began to take a strange fancy to me. Walcott finally noticed it, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... to act wisely in these emergencies and in her general course of management, than one who had not. There would be more chance of her taking pains to consider. She would not work so blindly, so aimlessly, so "from hand to mouth," as do some ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... looking out for a new engagement Plenty were to be had, but he aimed at something better than had satisfied him hitherto. He must get a "permanency"; at his age it was time he settled into a life of respect able routine. But for his foolish habit of living from hand to mouth, now in this business, now in that, indulging his taste for variety, Mrs. Clover would never, he felt sure, have "put her foot down" in that astonishing way. The best thing he could do was to show himself in ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... patient, watchful, tender; careful of his children's lives, and mindful always of their joys and sorrows; then send him back to Parliament, and Pulpit, and to Quarter Sessions, and when he hears fine talk of the depravity of those who live from hand to mouth, and labour hard to do it, let him speak up, as one who knows, and tell those holders forth that they, by parallel with such a class, should be High Angels in their daily lives, and lay but humble ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... understand him very well, and Millet was not too fond of his painting, so after two years he and a friend withdrew from that studio and set up one for themselves. Thus eight years passed, the friends living from hand to mouth, doing all sorts of things: sign-painting, advertisements, and the like; and Millet, in the midst of his ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... understand what is happening around us. More than two-thirds of Europe is in a state of ferment, and everywhere there prevails a vague sense of uneasiness, ill-calculated to encourage important collective works. We live, as the saying is, "from hand to mouth." ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... then you have lived from hand to mouth, with those others." And here Francis Markrute's voice took on a new shade: there was ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... generous one. The demand came after the Saladin taxes, the drain for the Crusade, for the king's ransom, and during the building of the cathedral. It came to a man who gave a third of his money in alms and who lived from hand to mouth, often borrowing on his revenues before he got them. He proposed to meet this new huge call by retiring to Witham and devoting the whole emoluments of the See to redeeming this fictitious mantel. But the clergy, who knew by experience both order and chaos, ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... business-like obstructions of this kind. He had been able a score of times to demonstrate to the House of Commons how silly it was to consider probabilities. In fact, he was opposed heart and soul to prophetic legislation; he would live, legislatively, from hand to mouth. ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... fit to housekeep for a cat. The pie she took to the pie supper at the church was so tough that even Deacon Dyer couldn't eat it; and the boys got holt of her doughnuts, and declared they was goin' fishin' next day 'n' use 'em for sinkers. She lives from hand to mouth Eunice Emery does. She's about as much of a doshy as Rube is. She'll make tea that's strong enough to bear up an egg, most, and eat her doughnuts with it three times a day rather than take the trouble to walk out to the meat or the fish cart. I know for ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... refusal to enter either of the learned professions of law or medicine, was set adrift by his father,—who hoped that a little hardship would bring him to reason,—and found himself in Paris with no resource but the precarious one of letters. Diderot lived from hand to mouth for a time, sleeping sometimes in a garret of his own, sometimes on the floor of a friend's room. Once he got a place of tutor to the children of a financier, but could not bear the life of confinement, and soon threw up his appointment and returned ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... inevitably came to a stop—the circulation of produce was checked, and capital concealed itself. The master—the employer—had nothing to fear at such times, he fattened on his dividends, if indeed he did not speculate on the wretchedness around; but the wage-earner was reduced to live from hand to mouth. Want knocked at ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... speaking, in peace. He had of late adopted the habit of doing his scraping and saving at the outset of each quarter, so as to get the money due to Ocock put by betimes. His illness had naturally made a hole in this; and now the living from hand to mouth must begin anew. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... to drink when he is thirsty, because he sees a little mud at the bottom of the bucket. I suppose you prefer theft on a small scale, stealing by driblets. And where will your system lead you? To the poor-house or the police-station. You prefer living from hand to mouth, supported by Mme. Fauvel, having small sums doled out to you to pay your ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... men life is actually a struggle for bread for themselves and their dependants. We had almost said that it is a constant escape from ever threatening evils. The question of food and raiment is full for them of the direst probabilities. Many a man listens to the preacher whose life is, indeed, from hand to mouth. Fierce competition seeks at every turn to rob him of his little opportunity of bread winning. Such a man had rather be told of a providing God than of the newest discoveries in Biblical criticism. If we forget his need and suffer him to go from the Sanctuary ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... resolution, and to the end was faithful to his oath. Not another sixpence did he take from her. And how much the better was he for all that he had taken already? Poor Michael had not time to enquire and answer the question. He could not employ his precious moments in retrospection. He lived from hand to mouth; struggled every hour to meet the exigencies of the hour that followed. He was absorbed in the agitated present, and dared not look an inch away from it. Now, thanks to the efforts of her people, England is a Christian country; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... these blessings in almost any degree, they have little inducement, on the average, to wish to abandon their second and better country. Hence, in the former case, the colonists consider themselves as mere strangers, sojourners, birds of passage, and shift to live from hand to mouth, with little regard to lasting improvement of the place of their temporary commerce; whilst, in the latter case, men feel attached to a community to which they are individually indebted for otherwise unattainable benefits, and for the ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... right time to speak, for in the mornings he was a-bed, and in the evenings over his bottle, where no gentleman chooses to be disturbed. Things in a twelvemonth or so came to such a pass there was no making a shift to go on any longer, though we were all of us well enough used to live from hand to mouth at Castle Rackrent. One day, I remember, when there was a power of company, all sitting after dinner in the dusk, not to say dark, in the drawing-room, my lady having rung five times for candles, and none to go up, the housekeeper sent up the footman, who went to my mistress, ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... to gamble, and was getting a bad name. Afterwards he began drinking, and he took to gambling harder than ever. Presently his money all went and he had to work; but his bad habits had fastened on him, and now he lives from hand to mouth, sometimes working for a month, sometimes idle for months. There's something sinister about him, there's some mystery; for poverty or drink even—and he doesn't drink much now—couldn't make him what he is. He doesn't seek company, and he walks sometimes endless miles talking to himself, going ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... dream of starvelings to whom black bread suffices in their present state; but when love really comes, they grow fastidious and end by craving the luxuries of gastronomy. Love holds toil and poverty in horror. It would rather die than merely live on from hand to mouth. ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... the lower Danube, had been living, as wild men and mercenaries live, recklessly from hand to mouth, drinking and gambling till their families were in want. They send to the Amal. 'While thou art revelling at Roman banquets, we are starving—come back ere we ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... When Garcia Moreno made a park of the dusty Plaza Mayor, he was ridiculed, even threatened. To plant a fruit or shade tree (a thing of foresight and forethought for others) in a land where people live for self, and from hand to mouth, is considered downright folly in theory and practice. A large portion of the valley, left treeless, is ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... hoarding, developing no new and higher wants, no clearly defined aims, will still be almost as helpless as the most thriftless. But no one is more helpless against the encroachments of employers than the man who lives from hand to mouth, whose necessities press ever hard upon him, crippling him and crippling those {110} with whom he competes in the open market. Then again, successful cooperation is impossible to the thriftless. The lack of self-control, the lack ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... died that left no one to work but mama and I tell you time brought about a change. A house full of little children—we lived from hand to mouth. Not enough corn to feed one mule. No syrup, no hogs, no cows. Oh! we had a hard time. I remember hearing my mama many a night ask God to help her through the struggle with her children. The more my mama prayed the harder ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... grant such as had been made to his ancestors. It was offensive to him that any one contested his title to a tax, without which his state could not be kept up. In the assembled Privy Council he declared that a temporary grant was derogatory to his honour. He said that he would no longer live from hand to mouth: he had as little disposition to suffer from want, or to allow the privileges of his crown to be wrested from him, as he had had thought of infringing the liberties of his people.[491] Secretary Coke, a member of the House, brought in the requisite bill without delay, and proposed ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... hastened to a small restaurant in a neighboring street, and magnificently disbursed the sum of thirty-nine sous. Such extravagance was unusual on his part, for he had lived very frugally since he had taken a vow to become rich. Formerly, when he lived from hand to mouth—to use his own expression—he indulged in cigars and in absinthe; but now he contented himself with the fare of an anchorite, drank nothing but water, and only smoked when some one gave him a cigar. Nor was this any great privation to him, since he gained a penny by it—and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... answer. He had refused instinctively from fear that he would be a bother, and he had a natural bashfulness of accepting favours. He knew besides that the Athelnys lived from hand to mouth, and with their large family had neither space nor money to ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... sent in this way is rather the fault of the wretched government than of the rayahs or agricultural laborers. They are ground to the very earth by iniquitous taxation, and only manage to live from hand to mouth in what should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... States women are guaranteed equal rights to property; but of what avail is that right to the mass of women without property, the thousands of wage workers, who live from hand to mouth? That equal suffrage did not, and cannot, affect their condition is admitted even by Dr. Sumner, who certainly is in a position to know. As an ardent suffragist, and having been sent to Colorado by the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... that they have not powerfully contributed to generate that carelessness and want of frugality observable among the poor, so contrary to the disposition frequently to be remarked among petty tradesmen and small farmers. The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... them will be married to poor men. In the kitchen, the laundry, and the sewing-room, they are acquiring a knowledge and habits of industry that will save their husbands' pennies, and thus keep them from living from hand to mouth, making an everlasting struggle to save their nose from the grindstone. In the schoolroom, they are gathering up those intellectual treasures, which will make them in a double sense ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Maurer, the president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, speaks for labor and the title of his subject is, "Has the Church Betrayed Labor?" Mr. Maurer's opinion follows: "A worker living from hand to mouth, and lucky if he is not hopelessly in debt besides, working at trip-hammer speed when he has work, with no security against enforced idleness, sickness, and old age, can hardly be expected to become deeply interested ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... with her and in which she hides the workings of her big heart and brain, I was ignorant of the adventures of the two battle-cruisers and of Dawson's encounter with the War Committee, and of his triumph over the revolting workmen of the north. I have therefore written, as it were, from hand to mouth, more as one who keeps a vagabond diary than as one who consciously plans a work of art. It is as a diary of personal experiences that this book should be regarded. It has no merit of constructive skill, for I have never known what the future would ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... lust, and cunning, this greater than Cloten, who, after strangling an innocent woman, can say:[16] "Oh, come! Let's go and play in the pond." Most attractive characters are the five[17] conspirators, men whose home is "east of Suez and the ten commandments." They live from hand to mouth, ready at any moment to steal a gem-casket or to take part in a revolution, and preserving through it all their character as gentlemen and their irresistible conceit. And side by side with them moves the hero Charudatta, the Buddhist ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... near a year. I was pretty diligent, but spent with Ralph a good deal of my earnings in going to plays and other places of amusement. We had together consumed all my pistoles, and now just rubbed on from hand to mouth. He seem'd quite to forget his wife and child, and I, by degrees, my engagements with Miss Read, to whom I never wrote more than one letter, and that was to let her know I was not likely soon to return. This was another of the great ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... nothing. Every city, town, and village in the land is filled to overflowing with young men who are idle—hunting clerkships, or some place where they hope to obtain a living without work. Numbers are hanging around, living from hand to mouth, living upon some friend, waiting for a vacancy in some overcrowded store; and, when a vacancy occurs, offering to work for a salary that would cause a shrewd business man to suspect their honesty; and when remonstrated ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... my foes— Why yoke me in your minds with sense desires? Know me as her who fled the life of sense, Shorn of her hair, wrapt in her yellow robe. The food from hand to mouth, glean'd here and there, The patchwork robe—these things are meet for me, The base and groundwork ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... different from other work. Bel knows places where I could get two dollars a week just for a little helping round; or I could even afford to pay board, and buy a little time for resting. I shall have clothes to make, and fix over. It always took all I could earn, before, to keep me from hand to mouth. I never saw six months' wages all together, in my life. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the million people who make up this great city, probably six hundred thousand are already plunged deep in the abyss where lurk Want and Crime, or trembling on its verge, and the number who thus "live from hand to mouth," who feel that they have "no stake in the country,"—that God and man are against them— is ever on the increase. That verdant, sunkissed crust upon which Arnolds complacently saunter and Talmages proudly strut, grows ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... one fine day without saying good-bye, and married the clown, with whom she had serious thoughts of setting up a select show on her own account. The roomy, comfortable caravan was sold, and an old lumbering machine hired each summer instead; while in winter the party lived from hand to mouth on their wits, putting up here, there, and anyhow. The animals had all died or been disposed of except the horses—a pair of broken-down yet intelligent piebalds—Puck, and Bruno, the bear that Bambo had trained from a cub, and tamed until he was as gentle as a lamb with every one ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... conciliate no attachment, command no esteem and respect, and have no following. Althorp is liked, Stanley admired, but people devote themselves to neither; every man is thinking of what he shall say to his constituents, and how his vote will be taken, and everything goes on (as it were) from hand to mouth; by fits and starts the House of Commons seems rational and moderate, and then they appear one day subservient to the Ministers, another riotous, unruly, and fierce, ready to abolish the Bishops and crush the House of Lords, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... hundredths and more are but printed echoes: and it is the rarest of pleasures to say, Here is a distinct record of impressions at first hand. We commonplace beings are hurried along in the crowd, living from hand to mouth on such slices of material and spiritual food as happen to drift in our direction, with little more power of taking an independent course, or of forming any general theory, than the polyps which are carried ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... bent head; one is tempted to hail him and toss him a shilling. To-morrow, all powdered, curled, in a good coat, he marches about with head erect and open mien, and you would almost take him for a decent worthy creature. He lives from day to day, from hand to mouth, downcast or sad, just as things may go. His first care of a morning when he gets up is to know where he will dine; after dinner, he begins to think where he may pick up a supper. Night brings disquiets of its own. Either he climbs to a shabby garret ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... sum I have been wishing for, sufficient to enable me to break the invisible but magic circle which petty debts of myself and others have traced round me. With common prudence I need no longer go from hand to mouth, or what is worse, anticipate my means. I may also pay off some small shop debts, etc., belonging to the Trust, clear off all Anne's embarrassment, and even make some foundation of a purse for her. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... secure the proper resumption of the provincial remittances. Fresh loans became more and more sought after; by means of forced domestic issues a certain amount of cash was obtained, but the country lived from hand to mouth and everybody was unhappy. Added to this by March the formidable insurrection of the "White Wolf" bandits in Central China—under the legendary leadership of a man who was said to be invulnerable—necessitated ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... love of gain, seems as far removed from a condition of rude nature as does a walled city or a cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other hand, the "burly, dozing bumblebee," affects one more like the rude, untutored savage. He has learned nothing from experience. He lives from hand to mouth. He luxuriates in time of plenty, and he starves in time of scarcity. He lives in a rude nest, or in a hole in the ground, and in small communities; he builds a few deep cells or sacks in which he stores a little honey and bee-bread for his young, but as a worker in wax he is of the most ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... forward into an unfamiliar country, with a declared enemy in front of him and a doubtful friend behind: he was now at the entrance to the mountains, and as his army had no store of provisions and only lived from hand to mouth, a forced delay, however short, would mean famine. In front of him was Fivizzano, nothing, it is true, but a village surrounded by walls, but beyond Fivizzano lay Sarzano and Pietra Santa, both of them considered impregnable fortresses; ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... went on living from hand to mouth, my father never getting so far ahead of the wolf as to be able to pause and choose his way. But I was very happy, and would have been no whit less happy if he had explained our circumstances, for that would have conveyed to me no hint of danger. Neither has any of the suffering I have ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that's so unnatural for a boy." What was so unnatural ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... but none could contest that he was a potential figure. If to know him the rising demagogue of the time dressed him in such terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of the voracious hordes which live from hand to mouth, without intervention of a banker and property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone under a different aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve their perplexity, had the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific devastator swinging the sanguinary stick ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... settled on the rich furniture ordered years ago with such pride to make a fitting nest for his bride; rust gnawed the mute strings of his daughter's piano; the conservatory had been abandoned; the garden was neglected. Henry Denvil had never been an epicure; now he lived from hand to mouth. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... confidence of great statesmen from DIZZY downward, tells me Mr. G.'s homeward flight was hastened by curious dream. Dreamt all his sheep were straying from fold; some going one way, others another; each bent on his own particular business. In vain Mr. G. leaping up and taking crook in hand, put hand to mouth and halloed them back to Home-Rule fold. They went their way, some even making for Unionist encampment, where Mr. G., moving heavily in his slumber, distinctly saw one sheep ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... quickly had the whole story out—the lodgings in Birmingham, the intrigue, the ultimatum, Charles's catastrophic collapse and inertia, years of poverty in London going from studio to studio, lodging to lodging: his flight—with another woman: her struggles, her present hand to mouth existence on the outskirts ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... man, I began to get the peculiar sort of practice I wanted. Notwithstanding all my efforts, I found myself, at the close of three years, with all my means spent, and just able to live meagerly from hand to mouth, which by no means suited a ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... a bit of a brigand, and a great deal of a knave. One is always conscious of the poor prince of industry, who lived from hand to mouth in England; his present prosperity, his triumph, his empire, and his inflation amount to nothing; the purple mantle trails over shoes down at heel. Napoleon the Little, nothing more, nothing less. The title of ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... gentle he was a strong Calvinist, and by his zeal and energy in preaching such doctrines, injured himself in a worldly point of view. He was always poor, and often gave away all the little he had, and lived from hand to mouth. He was very much admired and beloved by ladies, which perhaps prevented his marrying. He was very happy and useful among the sailors, and died at his sister's, Mrs. Jackson, at Woolwich. She, as Elizabeth Terrot, had ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... convict me from my own words, and bring against me what I had said or written elsewhere. You may act in that manner with those who dispute by established rules: we live from hand to mouth, and say anything that strikes our mind with probability, so that we are the only people who are really at liberty. But, since I just now spoke of consistency, I do not think the inquiry in this place is, if ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... passed since the accidental encounter with Martin outside of the Academy of Music. Rufus began to hope that he had gone out of the city, though he hardly expected it. Such men as Martin prefer to live from hand to mouth in a great city, rather than go to the country, where they would have less difficulty in earning an honest living. At any rate he had successfully baffled Martin's attempts to learn where Rose and he were boarding. But he knew his step-father too well ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... town," replied Fenton; "but I have resided here from hand to mouth long enough to know almost every individual ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... again began to bud forth, to spread further, to gather wealth, which they rather profusely spent (as gotten with ease) than providently husbanded, or aimed at any public good; or to make a country for posterity; but from hand to mouth, and for a present being; neglecting discoveries, planting orchards, providing for the winter preservation of their stocks, or thinking of anything stable or firm; and whilst tobacco, the only commodity they ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... the occupation which the necessities of his situation demanded of him. Many a boy, wrecked as he had been, with no one but a weak and timid girl to support him, would have done nothing but repine at his hard lot; would have lived "from hand to mouth" during those two months, and made every day a day of misery. Noddy had worked hard; but what had he won? Was his labor, now that he was to abandon the house, the cisterns, the stores, and the garden,—was ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and bearing its own name, is ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dissipated. And now he had received a much larger sum from his cousin, with an assurance, however, that the family property would not become his when he succeeded to the family title. He was so penniless at the time, so prone to live from hand to mouth, so little given to consideration of the future, that it may be doubted whether the sum given to him was not compensation in full for all that was to be ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... of this one in favour of those which seem to be of more pressing and immediate importance. And you have the other temptation, common to us all, but especially attending you as young people, of living without any plan of life at all. The sin and the misery of half the world are that they live from hand to mouth, knowing why they do each single action at the moment, but never looking a dozen inches beyond their noses to see where all the actions taken together tend; and so being just like weathercocks, whirled round by every wind of temptation that comes to them. If they are good or pure they are so by ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... presented her with pieces of beautiful linen and cotton and cambric, and bade her begin to make garments which should be in dozens, to be laid by, in reserve, as she completed them, until she had a well-filled bureau that should defend her from the necessity of what she called a "wretched living from hand to mouth,—always having underclothing to make up, in the midst of all else that she would find to do and ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Hugh over his Daily News. "In relation to debts and so on? Modern side you sent me to, Daddy. I live at hand to mouth in etymology. Mors and crematorium—do we burn our bills instead ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... I know Punsonby's—I've had the best accountants in London working out your position, and I know you live from hand to mouth and that the margin between your business and bankruptcy is as near as the margin between ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... the belief in God. The truth being that man—the average man—only seeks for an explanation of immediate happenings. Once the immediate thing before him is explained his curiosity is allayed. The average man lives mentally from hand to mouth, and troubles as little about ultimate explanations as he does about the exhaustion of ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... the little household at Granton had got along about as usual. They lived from hand to mouth. It required sharp financiering to provide food and ...
— Bound to Rise • Horatio Alger
... each visit to Aunt Eliza I was in the habit of dwelling on the contrast between her way of living and ours. We lived from "hand to mouth." Every thing about her wore a hereditary air; for she lived in my grandfather's house, and it was the same as in his day. If I was at home when these contrasts occurred to me I should have felt angry; as it was, I felt them as in ...
— Lemorne Versus Huell • Elizabeth Drew Stoddard |
