"Tawdriness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walls; a few temples in varying stages of magnificence, tawdriness and decay; the remains of sewers which, built of solid blocks of stone and large enough to admit a donkey, show that formerly a scheme of drainage and sanitation existed although to-day there is nothing of the kind; an insignificant ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... were many of Madame's methods which might be improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preminently designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement. The tawdriness she particularly disliked—the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... his desk, and those of the audience who had left their places returned. Stephen Linton slipped into his chair; his wife took up her lorgnette as the first jingle of the tambourines was heard, and the curtain rose upon the picturesque tawdriness of the company assembled at the Senor Lois Pastia's place ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... others are a wonderful gold; some of the doorways are set in frames of carved wood gilded all over. We see columns encrusted with little bits of many-coloured looking-glass, like those we saw in Rangoon. The halls are very dim in contrast with the brilliant light outside, and there is a kind of tawdriness in the decoration which makes one feel how different in nature these people must be from the ancient Egyptians who built so solidly. Here all is gay, but you feel it is gimcrack—it won't last. Look at that balustrade, gleaming deep green; examine it—do you ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... Moors, the Eastern architect inlaid his ceilings with an extraordinary incrustation of glass, usually silvered on the back, but also frequently coloured, and giving a strange effect of mother-o'-pearl inlay, bordering on tawdriness when examined ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne |
