"Crudeness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may be regarded as a cross, or a compromise, between "Anatol" and "A Piece of Fiction." The crudeness of speech marking the latter play has given room to a very incisive dialogue, that carries the action forward with unfailing precision. Some of the temporarily dropped charm has been recovered, and the gain in ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... point of view, I halted, not only behind the ideal, but behind the possible. Hence, after the delivery of the Address, I went over it with the desire, not to revoke its principles, but to improve it verbally, and above all to remove any word which might give colour to the notion of 'crudeness, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... until he was universally accepted, the crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the Keatses of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the reason that the noble thoughts of the ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... on the scene of splendor, he felt lost, lonely, and for a moment homesick. Here all was formal, stiff repressed; that gayety was real, that merriment was sincere. With all their crudeness, those people in that condition were all human, hearty, strong, real. He wondered if refinement and elegance meant necessarily a suppression of all these. There, men came not only to enjoy but to make others enjoy as well. No stranger could have stood a moment ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... her into the background of her thoughts. All day long it had been pressing forward in spite of her. It seemed to be burning her brain, and now she could not ignore it any longer. Sitting there exhausted in mind and body, she had to face it in all its crudeness. She had to meet and somehow to conquer the sickening sensation of revolt that had come ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... on May the 24th, Rev. Thomas Dixon, one of the Baptist clergymen of New York City, said: The heresy trial is a record of barbarism, a relic of savagery. It belongs to the crudeness, and ignorance, and superstition of barbaric times. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... edited by William Dowdell, contains but one credential, yet doubtless paves the way for a resumption of the enterprise so ably conducted by Miss Hoffman last year. "Melancholy," a poem by I. T. Valentine, shows traces of the beginner's crudeness, yet has about it a quality which promises much for the future of the poet. "Lock-Step Pete," by Miss von der Heide, is an unusual poem with a thoughtful suggestion embodied in ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... Codd. [Symbol: Aleph]BL[Symbol: Xi] l g^{1} Cyr^{luc}[564], two MSS. of the Bohairic (d 3, d 2), the Lewis, and two cursives (71, 157) are literally the only authority, ancient or modern, for so exhibiting the text [in all its bare crudeness]. Against them are arrayed the whole body of MSS. uncial and cursive, including ACD; every known lectionary; all the Latin, the Syriac (Cur. om. Clause 1), and indeed every other known version: besides seven good Greek ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... pursed their lips when the Wrest was mentioned would have sneered or prayed. A young English nobleman who was there that day did not sneer. He was filled instead with something like awe at the vigor of this nation which was sprung from the loins of his own. Crudeness he saw, vulgarity he heard, but Force he felt, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... began to shake off this wearisomely intimate crowd; the fact that there were two of us, and that I was not alone in this situation was very comforting. However, in the course of the next few years I became accustomed to this treatment, though I never again met it in such crudeness. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... The crudeness of this question took away Drumtochty's breath, and suggested that something must have been left out in the creation of that advocate. Our men were not bigoted abstainers, but I never heard any word ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... embodying it in images which do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the last sanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world, because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to us. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... wondrous adventures and hairbreadth escapes so dear to the small boy of all time. The thrilling incidents were further enlivened, moreover, by cuts called by the printer "curious" in the sense of very fine: and curious they are to-day because of the crudeness of their execution and the coarseness of their design. Nevertheless, the grotesque character of the illustrations was altogether effective in impressing upon the reader the doughty deeds of his old friend, Tom Thumb. The book itself shows marks of its popularity, and of the hard usage to ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... earlier compositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they make plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness, personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he seemed to have left behind him when he wrote ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... nevertheless, he secretly glorified. But now for so long had he mourned his loveless estate, that, since of all the subjects of his brush woman was most congenial to him, he had gradually come to lay every fault of his work, crudeness of coloring, hardness of line, harshness of texture, finally, his very conventionality of conception, to the door of his ignorance of the grand passion, in which he expected to attain to his final development. In the end, as might have been expected, Fate, wearying of his everlasting complaint, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the "American Plan." It seemed to her cheap and horrible; she did not want to stay in this room, and Martin, tipping the boy and asking for ice-water, seemed somehow a part of this new strangeness and crudeness. She began to be afraid that he would think she was silly, presently, if she said her ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... the crudeness of the allusion. "I didn't suppose David ever condescended to be spoony," he said, and at the same instant, to his absolute amazement, she caught his arm and pulled his hand ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... allows. Then none can steal or deface, nor any reverse of fortune force a sale; sunshine and tempest warm and ventilate the gallery for nothing, and—in spite of all that has been said of her crudeness—Nature is not altogether a bad frame-maker. The knowledge that you may never live to see an especial treasure twice teaches the eyes to see quickly while the light lasts; and the possession of such a gallery ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Despite its relative crudeness, a fleet possesses, more fully than any other fruit of man's endeavor, the characteristics of an organism, defined by Webster as "an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of parts or organs ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... it so, and the bright sunshine and the fine colour of the houses might well compensate for some draw-backs. The houses of this regular town are white, and pale yellow, and fine worn-out pink, with narrow green painted verandahs which soon lose crudeness in the intense light. The windows of the larger blocks are numerous and set in long regular lines; the streets if narrow run into open squares blazing with white unsoiled monuments. All day long the ways are full of people who are fairly but unostentatiously polite. They do not stare one out of ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... because so little personal feeling remained in it. His real detachment from her had taken place, not at the lurid moment of disenchantment, but now, in the sober after-light of discrimination, where he saw her definitely divided from him by the crudeness of a choice which seemed to deny the very differences he felt in her. It was before him again in its completeness—the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... holds good of their sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive feelings of children are constantly injured by lack of consideration on the part of grown people, their easily stimulated aversions are constantly being brought out. But the sufferings of children through the crudeness of their elders belong to an unwritten chapter of child psychology. Just as there are few better methods of training than to ask children, when they have behaved unjustly to others, to consider whether it would be pleasant for them to be treated in that way, so there is no better corrective ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... wonderful art which takes a rugged, knotted block of marble, standing upon a coarse wooden bench, and cuts out of its uncomely crudeness—as I saw it done—the face of my father, with its every feature illumined with prophetic light, so true to life that I felt that to my ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... he never knew. How it had been formulated in his brain remained a riddle that he was never able to solve. But there it was, plain and decided. There was no shirking it. It was out in all its naked crudeness. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... The crudeness of some epitaphs gives them a grotesque touch of realism. Here is one just south of the squared-in ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... unnatural, if these juvenile productions did not often reflect the opinions of favorite instructors and the style of popular authors. A freshman's first essay is like the short gallop of a colt on trial; its promise is what we care for, more than its performance. If it had not something of crudeness and imitation, we should suspect the youth, and be disposed to examine him as the British turfmen have been examining the American colt Umpire, first favorite for the next Derby. But three or four years' study and practice teach the young man his paces, so that many Bachelors of Arts have formed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... now been put in such juxtaposition that the husband has a change of heart. The patients recover and the landlord endows a great sanitarium for the tuberculous. One may easily criticize the crudeness of the plot and the improbabilities with which it bristles. But it sets forth love and death and conversion and an appeal to rescue those who suffer from the great white plague: and this was sufficient for the crowd, ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... London (1593), the Rose and the adjacent Bear Garden are correctly placed with respect to each other, but are crudely drawn (see page 147). The representation of both as circular—the Bear Garden, we know, was polygonal—was due merely to this crudeness; yet the Rose seems to have been indeed circular in shape, "the Bankside's round-house" referred to in Tom Tell Troth's Message. The building is so pictured in the Hondius map of 1610 (see page 149), and in the inset maps on the title-pages ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... fragmentary in detail but synthetic in range, of a young man of high impulses but weak determination. In its over-emphasis upon errors of judgment, as well as upon real if exaggerated misdeeds, it has all the crudeness of youth. An almost fantastic self-consciousness is the central motive: it is a matter of question if this be absolutely vicarious. To me it seems that the author himself was at the time confused by the complicated flashing of the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... away from mine. "Oh, your conditions, and your Atlantis! You carry a crudeness in these colonial manners of yours, Deucalion, that palls on one after the first blunt flavour has worn away. Am I to do all the wooing? Is there no thrill of love under ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... Nigel Anstruthers, and, being an American child, did not hesitate to express herself with force, if with some crudeness. "He's a hateful thing," she said, "I loathe him. He's stuck up and he thinks you are afraid of him and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary skill than Charlotte Bronte, less originality, but none of her crudeness. She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... him on his little excursions when Abe Hightower was otherwise engaged. Naturally enough, too, Chichester saw a great deal of Babe. He was interested in her because she was young and beautiful, and because of her quaint individuality. She was not only unconventional, but charmingly so. Her crudeness and her ignorance seemed to be merely phases ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... be met, but these are merely isolated survivors of a once widespread family. The Americans that one meets to-day in Europe, both those who travel and those who reside there, are of a different conformation and belong to a different type. The crudeness which so shocked Europeans in their predecessors they have, with characteristic adaptability, readily and gracefully outgrown. But whether they have improved in other respects, and whether, on other grounds, we have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the little finger-tips in every task! The hands, how smooth and delicate to lull and soothe! And the strange music of her lips! The very crudeness of their speech made chaster yet the childish thought her guileless utterance had caught from spirit-depths beyond our reach. And so her homely name grew fair and sweet and beautiful to hear, blent with the echoes pealing clear ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... movement has results which are unavoidable in a period of transition, and probably only temporary. The education of woman and the development of her powers hold the greatest promise for the regeneration of society. But this development, yet in its infancy, and pursued with much crudeness and misconception of the end, is not enough. Woman would not only be equal with man, but would be like him; that is, perform in society the functions he now performs. Here, again, the notion of equality is pushed towards uniformity. The ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... now had the benefit of my opinion of her, which may in part account for the crudeness of her present condition. Now she has sent a competent emissary to us, who will return and faithfully report my sentiments, and if he does his work well, you may be prepared for revolutions beyond the Atlantic in decades to come. To begin ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... range of poetry in this age, Tennyson's earlier poems and his later dramas may well be omitted. Opinions vary about both; but the general judgment seems to be that the earlier poems show too much of Byron's influence, and their crudeness suffers by comparison with the exquisitely finished work of Tennyson's middle life. Of dramatic works he wrote seven, his great ambition being to present a large part of the history of England in a series ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... magnifying-glass and through it the clumsy forgery stood out in all its crudeness, showing plainly where other names had been erased ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... but the fine chemistry of Nature is constantly clearing away all its impurities before our eyes, and yet so delicately that we never suspect the process. The most exquisite work of literary art exhibits a certain crudeness and coarseness, when we turn to it from Nature,—as the smallest cambric needle appears rough and jagged, when compared through the magnifier with the tapering fineness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... his success, Lutostanski issued a few years later, in 1879, another libellous work in two volumes, under the title "The Talmud and the Jews," which exhibits the same crudeness in style and content as his previous achievement—a typical specimen of a degraded back-yard literature. The editor of the Hebrew journal ha-Melitz, Alexander Zederbaum, demonstrated clearly that Lutostanski had forged his quotations, and summoned him to a public disputation, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... material. But, unfortunately for us, the effort that we put forth does not always bring results that we can see and weigh and measure. The hopefulness of our material is overshadowed not infrequently by its crudeness. We take each generation as it comes to us. We strive to lift it to the plane that civilized society has reached. We do our best and pass it on, mindful of the many inadequacies, perhaps of the many failures, in our work. We turn to the new generation that takes its place. We hope for better materials, ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... and the Lieutenant had their weapons. Come to see them at his bungalow, if we'd time? Interesting lot of trophies, most unique collection. Quite unequalled. Homemade spears, forged and hammered, stuck on bamboo poles. Homemade swords, good blades, too, for all their crudeness. Must have taken months to make them, fashioned slyly, on the quiet. Killing weapons, meant to kill. Swords like the Crusaders, only cased in bamboo scabbards. Funny lot—come to see them if we'd time. Nothing like it, a unique collection. And the flag—red cotton flag, all blood stained, ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... They are vivid and admirably worked. "Here," says Johnson of the Eloisa to Abelard, the most important of the two, "is particularly observable the curiosa felicitas, a fruitful soil and careful cultivation. Here is no crudeness of sense, nor asperity of language." So far there can be no dispute. The style has the highest degree of technical perfection, and it is generally added that the poems are as pathetic as they are exquisitely ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... professional theatrical engagements. It was a most disturbing experience. The mere color and odor of the stuffy offices, the gauche, material attendants, the impossible aspirants and participants in this make-believe world! The crudeness! The effrontery! The materiality! The sensuality! It came to her as a sickening breath and for the moment frightened her. What would become of refinement there? What of delicacy? How could one rise and sustain an individual ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... have no meaning save as they lulled Mr. and Mrs. Hilbery into the belief that nothing unusual had taken place. It chanced that Mrs. Hilbery was depressed without visible cause, unless a certain crudeness verging upon coarseness in the temper of her favorite Elizabethans could be held responsible for the mood. At any rate, she had shut up "The Duchess of Malfi" with a sigh, and wished to know, so she told Rodney at dinner, whether there wasn't some ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... His pointed beard suddenly bristled—a menacing movement that expressed the prick of a lover's fancy. As he loaded his brush, he muttered between his teeth, "These paints are only fit to fling out of the window, together with the fellow who ground them, their crudeness and falseness are disgusting! How ...
— The Unknown Masterpiece - 1845 • Honore De Balzac
... sake that we would have had him practice self-denial in the matter; he greatly plumed himself upon Emerson's endorsement, and was guilty of the very bad taste of printing a sentence from the letter upon the cover of the next edition of his book. Grant that it showed a certain crudeness, unripeness, in one side of the man; later in life, he could not have erred in this way. Ruskin is reported saying that he never in his life wrote a letter to any human being that he would not be willing should be posted up ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... their poverty with which to defray a funeral. The residents of Hull-House were then comparatively new in the neighborhood and did not realize that they were really shocking a genuine moral sentiment of the community. In their crudeness they instanced the care and tenderness which had been expended upon the little creature while it was alive; that it had had every attention from a skilled physician and a trained nurse, and even intimated that the excited members of the group had not ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... himself as he went along. The rough jottings in the sketch-books were later on developed with the utmost care, being written out again and again, with fresh alterations and additions each time, until every trace of crudeness had disappeared, and the finished work stood out with such clearness and precision as to suggest that it had been but that moment created. Nothing, indeed, has struck those who have followed the gradual development of his work ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... poster-bedecked billboards-verily, the average American town is not a thing of beauty. Matthew Arnold's judgment is corroborated by every traveler. "Evidently," he wrote, "this is that civilization's weak side. There is little to nourish and delight the sense of beauty there." A certain crudeness is inevitable in a new country, and will be outgrown; age is a great artist. Man usually mars with his first strokes; and it is only when he has met his practical needs that he will dally with aesthetic considerations. ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... based on fallacious reasoning or superstitious whim were those that were furnished by the clumsiness of the ships and the crudeness of the appliances for navigation. As already observed, the Spanish and Portuguese caravels of the fifteenth century were less swift and manageable craft than the Norwegian "dragons" of the tenth. Mere yachts in size we should call them, but far from yachtlike ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... same way yarns which are too brilliant can often be made soft and effective by twisting them together with a paler tint. Minute particles of colour brought together in this way are brilliant without crudeness. It is, in fact, the very principle upon which impressionist painters work, giving pure colour instead of mixed, but in such minute and broken bits that the eye confounds them with surrounding colour, getting at the same ...
— How to make rugs • Candace Wheeler
... were artistic; of those of to-day this statement cannot be truthfully made. The wool is still fine and silky, but there is an element of crudeness of design and a defiance of the laws governing color. A pronounced medallion in the centre is usually seen. This is set in a solid field of a strong contrasting color. Sometimes the field is of a bright ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... it higher forms. They soon awoke to the perception that beauty itself is the true principle of fascination. Reducing their new theory to practise, the Greek artists turned their attention to perfecting the details of the art they had borrowed. To works originally repellant from their very crudeness, they supplied finish and perfection of the parts. The ideal was still before them; the grotesque monsters might fascinate the beholder, but, however skilfully executed, however perfected in finish, the impression produced was but transitory, and ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... respects them, be met by a demand for some other panacea of immediate and guaranteed efficiency? And so with the body politic. I here to-day am merely attempting a diagnosis, pointing out the disorders, and exposing as best I can the utter crudeness and insufficiency of the market-place remedies proposed. Have you a right, then, to turn on me, and call for some other prescription, warranted to cure, in place of the nostrums so loudly advertised by the sciolists and the dabblers of the day, and by me so contemptuously ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... ground. But habit was too strong to be controlled, and, when LAFAANG set his hand to the task, he fell to chopping at the tree. But though he chopped with might and main he made no impression, and his gentle spouse was horrified to see the crudeness of his methods. On the next day he was told to watch PALAI at work felling the trees. Squatting in the jungle he saw how the great trees fell when PALAI merely laid the blade of the axe at the foot of each one. This spectacle filled LAFAANG with terror and he would have ran away, but that his wife ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... passing over the wild oats, with glittering disturbances here and there in the depressions like the sparkling of green foam; the horizon line was sharply defined against the hard, steel-blue sky; everywhere the brand-new morning was shining with almost painted brilliancy; the vigor, spirit, and even crudeness of youth were over all. The young girl was dazzled and bewildered. Suddenly, as if blown out of the waving grain, or an incarnation of the vivid morning, the bright and striking figure of a youthful horseman flashed before the grille. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... she would remain placid and indifferent. So Jack worked it out, and he resented, for Imogen and for himself, such tact and such evasion. He wished that they had been more crude, more inappropriate. Thank heaven for crudeness if morality as opposed to manners made one crude. He entrenched himself in that morality now, open-eyed to its seeming priggishness, to say, "And it's a bigger question than that of her pleasures and yours, Imogen. It's a question ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... earliest entries and the crudeness of the language, together with occasional picturesque force, indicate that many of them were drawn from current song or tradition. The style and fullness of the entries differ greatly throughout, as might be expected, since the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... be patient now, if I give you a crude instance of what I mean? It is one among many others, but I choose it because its very crudeness makes ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... Jalisco State, of which this is the capital, has been called the Andalusia of Mexico, and the city is indeed a Seville of the West, though lacking in her spontaneity of life, for this cruder people is much more tempered with a constant fear of betraying their crudeness and in consequence much weighed down by "propriety." But its bright, central plaza has no equal to the north. Here as the band plays amid the orange trees heavy with ripening fruit, the more haughty of the population ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... He was a superstitious man even for a sailor, and his weakness was so well known that he had become a sympathetic receptacle for every ghost story which, by reason of its crudeness or lack of corroboration, had been rejected by other experts. He was a perfect reference library for omens, and his interpretations of dreams had gained for him a ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... only level with the tiled roof. The Kyrie Eleisons rang quiveringly through that sort of whitewashed stable with flat ceiling and bedaubed beams. On either side three lofty windows of plain glass, most of them cracked or smashed, let in a raw light of chalky crudeness. ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... specimen of the group was "The Lure." It would be absurd to face this production from any aesthetic point of view. It would be unthinkable that a work of such crudeness could satisfy a metropolitan public, even if some of the most marked faults of construction were acknowledged as the results of the forceful expurgation of the police. Nevertheless, the only significance of the play lies ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... tranquil. Is there any reason to bear ill will simply because we each stand on an opposite side of a question of ethics? If you had only been to the wars, how differently you would see it. There hundreds of men stab each other with the best will in the world, none of the crudeness of personal animosity, only the best of good nature. In a little time now we shall part, never, if I can help it, to meet again. You have seen me as a dangerous, reckless man, without any principles worth mentioning. Indeed, I have so few that I shall have recourse to violence, ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... lighted Gothic arches of the palace. This is the magical mellow hour to be sought by lovers of the picturesque in all the towns of Italy, the hour which, by its tender blendings of sallow western lights with glimmering lamps, casts the veil of half-shadow over any crudeness and restores the injuries of time; the hour when all the tints of these old buildings are intensified, etherealized, and harmonized by one pervasive glow. When I last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all day; and ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... tale of base ingratitude—of a girl he had helped, had indeed saved from starvation and who had betrayed him at every turn. Thornton Lyne was a poet. He was also a picturesque liar. The lie came as easily as the truth, and easier, since there was a certain crudeness about truth which revolted his artistic soul. And as the tale was unfolded of Odette Rider's perfidy, Sam's eyes narrowed. There was nothing too bad for such a creature as this. She was wholly ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... they miss it. They miss the coarse tang. They must realise that indulgence in the tang means the sure and total loss of sensitiveness—sensitiveness even to the tang itself. They cannot have crudeness and fineness together. They must choose, remembering that while crudeness kills pleasure, fineness ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... class of novels, based on what may be called the centrifugal forces of wedlock, "Christian's Mistake" perhaps belongs. Its clear and practised style is refreshing, after the comparative crudeness of some other recent treatises on the same theme; the characters are human, not wooden, and the whole treatment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May be, if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... induce a vulgar reader to consider them trite, while they are the expression of a genius so refined as to be all essence of spirit. In Gray, excellent as he is, we continually encounter the marks of labour and effort, and occasional crudeness, which shows that effort had not always succeeded, such as "iron hand and torturing hour;" but nothing of this kind occurs in the principal poems of Collins. There is a fire of mind which supersedes ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... hand and have worked as manual laborers, generally in charge of the machinery or devices which they have improved. When new processes have been invented, these also have usually suggested themselves to the able workmen as they experienced the crudeness of existing methods. Indeed, few important inventions have come from those who have not been thus employed. It is with inventors as with poets; few have been born to the purple or with silver spoons in their ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... while to look for others. It should be mentioned, however, that this inequality of style is partly the effect of a desire to keep as close as possible in his narrative to the original Greek, so that it is the crudeness of translation we sometimes encounter. We raise no quarrel with him ourselves on this point; his language, in general, is all that is requisite; but a critic disposed to be severe on the minor delinquencies of style, might justify his censure by extracting ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games and outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy dispersal next day."(3) The intensities of the forest survived in hard drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest passion for storytelling had ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... at her task of rising, and brushing her hair, and pulling on her boots; and it appeared her former sufferings were as naught compared with the pangs of this morning. How she hated the cold, the bleak, denuded forest land, the emptiness, the roughness, the crudeness! If this sort of feeling grew any worse she thought she would hate Glenn. Yet she was nonetheless set upon going on, and seeing the sheep-dip, and riding that fiendish mustang until the ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... carry it as a working principle into so lofty a region may appear impracticable. Difficulties lie on the threshold which may seem, at first sight, insurmountable. But obstacles to a true method only test its validity. And he who honestly faces the task may find relief in feeling that whatever else of crudeness and imperfection mar it, the attempt is at least in harmony with the thought and ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... less of Sophocles or Racine. The phrase itself is as offensively out of date as the First Commandment." The bold, incisive criticism had a singular fascination for his hearers, who were too young to remark in it the crudeness that usually attaches ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... whom I must present you,—the subtlest intellect under the quietest manner. Once he said to me, 'Would you throughout life be up to the height of your century,—always in the prime of man's reason, without crudeness and without decline,—live habitually while young with persons older, and when old with ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it is hard to understand the lack of all reverence for sacred places which could admit such a scene as the scrambling for live fowls and pigs in honour of the twelve Apostles, a pious exercise which is perhaps paralleled, though assuredly not equalled, in crudeness, by the old Highland custom of smoking tobacco in kirk ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Carol Clay, his favorite star, just what the quality of the magic was, but somehow he could not get it into words. It wasn't exactly wordable perhaps. It was something that rendered negligible the occasionally creaking mechanism and crudeness of stage business and rendition; something compounded of dew and sun and wind, such as could only be found in a veritable Forest of Arden; something elusive, exquisite, iridescent; something he had supposed ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... notions of style and rhetoric. He would meet with laws which are probably nothing more than reminiscences of bygone schooldays, vestiges of impositions for Latin prose, and results perhaps of choice readings from French novelists, over whose incredible crudeness every decently educated Frenchman would have the right to laugh. But no conscientious native of Germany seems to have given a thought to these extraordinary notions under the yoke of which almost every ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... mountain and gorge. To me this wayward diversity of spontaneous plant life bespeaks an unconfined, ungauged potentiality of resource; it unveils an ideographic prophecy, painted by Nature in her Impressionist mood, to be deciphered aright only by those willing to discern through the crudeness of dawn a promise of majestic day. Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the Aboriginal ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... appeared to consist of two tents, with opening in front and door between. The table was a plank resting upon two barrels, and another plank, resting upon kegs, served as a seat. There was a smoking lamp that flickered. The Mexican's tableware was of a crudeness befitting his house, but it was clean and he could cook—two facts that Joan appreciated after her long experience of Bate Wood. She and Jim were the only customers of the Mexican, who spoke English rather well and was friendly. Evidently it pleased him to see the meal enjoyed. Both the food ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... boy had become the man, the student had developed into the artist and thorough musician. He was the boonest of boon companions, and his jokes were so broad that they often reminded one, in their crudeness and their rudeness, of certain passages in Mozart's early letters. To say that he spoke French with a German accent a la Svengali would be putting it very mildly; Teutonic gutturals would most unceremoniously invade the sister language; d's and t's, b's and p's would ever ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... could thus in his poetry give to the age the basis of a natural mode of feeling, thought, and life, upon which Art prospers in its purest form. In many respects the age itself was in this favourable to the Poet. It maintained a happy medium between crudeness and a vitiated taste: life was not insipid and colourless, as it is nowadays: men still ventured to appear what they were; there was still poetry in reality. Our German poets, in an age of rouge and powder, of hoops and wigs, of stiff manners, rigid proprieties, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... to the rest of the noise, if he strove to do so, and hear nothing but that harmonious moaning of the strings, steady and clear, like the aspirations of a man divorced from the facts of his weakness and his crudeness ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... herself with rage at these candid insults, flung at her with all Craig's young energy and in his most effective manner; for his crudeness disappeared when he spoke thus, as the blackness and roughness of the coal vanish in the furnace heat, transforming it into beauty and grace ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... took flight from earth altogether; even Poe sought refuge in a land of fantasy. It was only the frank second-raters—e.g., Whittier and Lowell—who ventured to turn to the life around them, and the banality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness of the current taste, and the mean position assigned to the art of letters. This was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the Sunday-school book. Literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as a hand-maiden to politics or religion. ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... power to thrill her. She was comfortably content that things should be as they were, that was all. Yet her very lack of emotion added to her charm for him. He disliked emotional women. Excess of affection would have bored him. It smacked of crudeness, and he had an ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... chiselling and adjustment. They are told uncomfortable things how quickly! At the club, in the university, in the market, the ploughing-field, the counting-room, they rub up against each other, and no mercy is shown by man to man until primary signs of crudeness are worn off. Let a conceited professor get in a college chair! Watch a hundred students begin their delightful and salutary process of "taking him down" by the sort of mirth in which college boys excel! Their unkindness is not right, but the result is, they ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... ladies: he would have shone more brightly in Peter Van Degen's set than in his wife's. But neither Clare nor Mrs. Fairford had expected a man of conventional cut, and Moffatt's loud easiness was obviously less disturbing to them than to their hostess. Undine felt only his crudeness, and the tacit criticism passed on it by the mere presence of such men as her husband and Bowen; but Mrs. Fairford' seemed to enjoy provoking him to fresh excesses of slang and hyperbole. Gradually she drew him into talking of the Driscoll campaign, and he became recklessly ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... natural aptitude, have developed great strength and accuracy of wrist, and with this the power of composition and design, purity and accuracy of outline, and good chiaroscuro. But the whole race is deficient in a sense of color. Its work is marked by crudeness and harshness, or at the best reticence—splendor without softness or inoffensiveness without charm. In cases where much is attempted in color—as in what is undoubtedly one of the best of contemporary paintings, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... made by interlacing branchlets of white mangrove until the mass was sufficient to support his weight. With a double ended paddle rudely shaped from the thin buttress roots of the red mangrove, and comic in the crudeness and disproportion of its parts, he felt himself safe miles out to sea. When he approached a passing vessel he presented the illusion, not of walking, but of sitting on the water, for the float was almost completely submerged. If it became necessary for his wife to attend him ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the cocksure critic in his crudeness Pops you the question while his back he pats, "What have you done?" you'll find at last, thank ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... shows an art so different in its characteristics from that of Sweden that she might be at the other end of the earth. Where the Swedish artists show boldness, sometimes almost to the point of crudeness, the Dutch are intent on some degree of finish. Modernity of color is apparent, and while there are few strokes that indicate timidity, there are fine touches of the poetic in which the Hollander's heart shows its love of home and gardens. Those great tulip beds ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... letters, but of the saint." It is admitted that Mrs. Stowe was not a woman of letters in the common acceptation of that term, and it is plain that in the French tribunal, where form is of the substance of the achievement, and which reluctantly overlooked the crudeness of Walter Scott, in France where the best English novel seems a violation of established canons, Uncle Tom would seem to belong where some modern critics place it, with works of the heart, and not of the head. The reviewer is, however, candid: "For a long time we ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... these works in such a manner, that they ever have about them a loveliness and a charm which attract not only those who are versed in that calling, but also many others who do not belong to the profession. And this springs from facility in the production of the good, which presents no crudeness or harshness to the eye, such as is often shown by works wrought with labour and difficulty; and this grace and simplicity, which give universal pleasure and are recognized by all, are seen in all ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... then at the downright fashion in which the thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... meet the needs of these widely different grades of individuals, widely different manners, customs, and institutions are indispensable. Culture, delicacy, and intelligence have their own attractions, which are wholly diverse from those of crudeness, coarseness, and simplicity. The surroundings which would bring happiness to the lover of art or the man of large mental endowment, would render miserable the peasant who still lacked the development to appreciate the elegancies of refinement; while the tidy cottage and plain comforts which might ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... sounded behind her. He had started from his dejection when he saw her fleeing; he followed her in a frenzy of fear. Concha foresaw that she was going to know the truth; a cruel truth with all the crudeness of a discovery in broad daylight. She stopped, scowling with a mental effort before that portrait which seemed to dominate the studio, occupying the best easel, in the most advantageous position, in spite of the solitary gray of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... very just quotation, in his handwriting: 'Multa venust'e, multa tenuiter multa cuni bile.' Mr. Pinkerton himself, in his 'Walpoliana,' admits that Heron's Letters was 'a book written in early youth, and contained many juvenile crude ideas long since abandoned by its author.' Would that the crudeness of many of the ideas were the worst that was to be said of it! but we shall find, in the course of this correspondence, far heavier and not less just complaints. The name of Heron, here assumed by Mr. Pinkerton, was ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... understanding and acceptance of a girl like Alice. While he was fully aware of her beauty, freshness, vivacity and grace, this Amazonian strength of hers, this boldness of spirit, this curious mixture of frontier crudeness and a certain adumbration—so to call it—of patrician sensibilities and aspirations, affected him both pleasantly and unpleasantly. He did not sympathize promptly with her semi-barbaric costume; she seemed not gently feminine, as compared with the girls of Virginia and Maryland. He resented ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... crudenesses that gave the old jar its real beauty. In short, objects that depend on form and fine workmanship for their beauty may be successfully reproduced, but objects that depend on imperfections of workmanship, on the crudeness of primitive fabrics, on the fading of vegetable dyes, on the bloom that age alone can give, should not be imitated. We may introduce a reproduction of a fine bust into our rooms, but an imitation of a Persian tile or a Venetian vase is absurd ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... deadening hand laid upon the self-expression of the democratic spirit through beauty. Its enemies are of its own household; those who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... tone down the crudeness of Hungerford's language. It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will certainly be seen in his acts;—he was sound at heart ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which I find fault, nor is it his talents I feel inclined to disparage; to speak truth, it is his manner of treating Mirabeau's errors that offends—then, I think, he is neither wise nor right—there, I think, he betrays a little of crudeness, a little of presumption, not a little ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... peculiar interest belong more to the earlier stages of the introduction of postage stamps. Local attempts at engraving in some of our own early colonial settlements were of the crudest possible description, and yet they are, because of their very crudeness, far more interesting than the finished product supplied by firms at home, for the local effort truly represented the country of its issue in the art of stamp production. The amusingly crude attempts which the engravers of Victoria have made from time to time, during the last fifty years, ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... West. Father owned several big ranches. She says that explains her crudeness. Her crude? I should say not! They don't grow better manners right here in New York. And she's pretty, and clever, and utterly naive about everything in New York. Though I must say," Dick added, "that I'm not so keen about ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... excellent for the young artist. The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think of ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... construction, was exceedingly sensitive to the player's touch. The early hammer-clavier, or pianoforte, invented in 1711, by the Italian Cristofori, who derived the hammer idea from the dulcimer, did not attract him because of its extreme crudeness. Nevertheless, it was destined to develop into the musical instrument essential to the perfect interpretation of ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... periodical writing can by no means be termed misspent, yet such a career presents in the retrospect but a multitude of disconnected essays on all conceivable themes, and such as too often prove their hurried composition by crudeness and imperfections.' The consideration of such a state of things 'may furnish a salutary lesson to the many among the young at this day, who, possessing some literary taste, imagine that the engagements of common life alone stand ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... "slavocracy," as he called the political aristocracy of the South. Like many other American leaders he was proud of his humble origin, but unlike many others he never sloughed off his backwoods crudeness. He continually boasted of himself and vilified the aristocrats, who in return treated him badly. His dislike of them was so marked that Isham G. Harris, a rival politician, remarked that "if Johnson ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... Dante in the chapel of the Podesta is proved by Dante's exile, in 1302, to have been painted before Giotto was six and twenty; yet we remember no head in any of his works which can be compared with it for carefulness of finish and truth of drawing; the crudeness of the material vanquished by dexterous hatching; the color not only pure, but deep—a rare virtue with Giotto; the eye soft and thoughtful, the brow nobly modeled. In the fresco of the Death of the Baptist, in Santa Croce, which we agree ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... curiosity by an act so bromidic as to be ridiculous. Were they rank amateurs, doing their simple best, or were they clever artists, simulating the awkward crudeness of country girls? That was the question. In a word, ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... murmured, "you move me to despair. How can an alliance between nations with such contrary ideals be possible? You would desert a beautiful scene like this to gain by vulgar exercise an appetite that you may eat. Can't you realize the crudeness of it? Yet I must remember that you are my guest," he added, striking the bell by his side. "Antoine shall prepare my linen clothes, and I will give you a lesson. Antoine," he added, half turning to the man-servant who stood by his elbow, ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the Muncy Historical Society contains examples of these early farm implements and offers vivid evidence of their crudeness. ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... commonplace they turned with a frequency which to-day appears astonishing to the devices of abstract personification and veiled meanings. No doubt this tendency was due in part to an idealizing dissatisfaction with the crudeness of their actual life (as well as to frequent inability to enter into the realm of deeper and finer thought without the aid of somewhat mechanical imagery); and no doubt it was greatly furthered also by the medieval passion for translating into elaborate and fantastic ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... covered with brocade of scarlet and gold. The curtains draped over the inlaid cedar-wood shutters of the windows were of the same brocade, and the beautiful old rugs from Turkey and Persia could not soften its crudeness. The larger reception room from which this opened had still more violent decorations, for there the scarlet mingled with vivid blue, and there were curiosities enough to stock a museum—presents ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in a measure, to develop so extended a field of research, in so few pages, has led to much crudeness in the presentation. For this a reasonable indulgence ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... beside her; there was a moment of backing and wrenching before they glided out smoothly on the white driveway. "What I meant to say was this," he added, suddenly, with a sidewise glance from his wheel. "I—I want you to realize that I appreciate the injustice—the crudeness of my rushing to you in New Jersey that Christmas Day. I realize that we all have imposed on you—we've taken you too much for granted! I was in trouble, and I couldn't think of any other way out of it. But for any man to put a proposition like that ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... its crudeness, the administration of seigneurial justice in New France was satisfactory enough. The habitants, as far as the records show, made no complaint. Justice was prompt and inexpensive. It discouraged chicane ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... attraction of the size is added the contrasted charm of the blue cover and the gilt stamp and edges. That a Blue and Gold edition, in the absence of its name qualities, becomes something far inferior may be seen from a copy that has lost them in rebinding. In spite of the hardness of their blue and the crudeness of their stamped designs, these little volumes attract every reader and never remain long on the shelves of the second-hand bookstores. We should not expect a publisher to succeed were he now to put them ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... another guise, but I must find imperishable harmony somewhere. The apathy of the mass oppresses me into a hopeless helplessness which may account for my stagnation, my ineffectiveness, my impotence, my stupidity, my crudeness, and my despair. I have always felt lop-sided, physically, especially in youth. My awkwardness became, too, a state of mind at the mercy of any spark of suggestion. My subjectively big head I tried to compress into a little hat, my objectively large hands concealed themselves in subjective pockets, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... that it is difficult to maintain their ideals in regard to women, in the face of such selfishness, crudeness, bad manners, and jealousies as exist between young girls of this sort. Of course, they who have become belles by reason of their lovely faces never know that the thinking class of young men criticise them adversely, and they would ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... are not accustomed to psychological laboratory research are easily misled. They fancy that such an experiment can be carried out in a mere mechanical way without careful study of all the conditions and accompanying circumstances. Thereby a certain crudeness of procedure may enter which is not at all suggested by the test method itself. The psychological layman too seldom recognizes how many other psychical functions may play a role in the result of the experiment beside the one which is interesting ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... York the epistolary style of Winona had maintained its old leisurely elegance, but early in the year of 1918 it suffered severely under the strain of active service and became blunt to the point of crudeness. The morale of her nice phrases had been shattered seemingly ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him. Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt there was a nature quite different, of which he never got so much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when she sang. It was toward this hidden creature that he was trying, for his own pleasure, to find his way. In short, Harsanyi looked ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the Ramblin' Kid not caring what any one thought of him. He was supersensitive of his roughness, his lack of education and conscious crudeness, and the words of Carolyn June were still in his mind. When Skinny and the girl were going toward their horses the Ramblin' Kid turned and entered the gate. Sing Pete was still ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,—a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... toward women and the call of sex was not of course settled by the fight in the house in Lake Street. He was a man who, even in the days of his great crudeness, appealed strongly to the mating instinct in women and more than once his purpose was to be shaken and his mind disturbed by the forms, the faces and ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... away one's own flesh.' D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, ed. 1834, iii. 129. D'Israeli 'had heard that after a successful work he usually precipitated the publication of another, relying on its crudeness being passed over by the public curiosity excited by its better brother. He called this getting double pay, for thus he secured the sale of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... It was Saturday, and many of their wives had come with them to the camp. These stood near, huddled into a listless group, with their faces half hidden in check bonnets of various colors. A barbaric love of color was apparent in bonnet, shawl, and gown, and surprisingly in contrast with such crudeness of taste was a face when fully seen, so modest was it. The features were always delicately wrought, and softened sometimes by a look of patient ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... her lips to impart something, but remembered her father's distastes and refrained. Rodney, civilised, sensitive and progressive, had no patience with his children's unsophisticated leaning to a primitive crudeness. He told them they were young savages. So Gerda kept her news till later, when she and Neville and Kay were lying on rugs on the lawn after Neville had beaten Kay in a set ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... response that if there was any firster family than his own in all creation, he couldn't find its name in the social register. Indeed the old gentleman was rather inclined to be very snobbish on this point, and when any of his descendants chose to take him to task for the crudeness of his manners he was accustomed to look them coldly over and retort that things had come to a pretty pass when comparatively new people ventured to instruct the oldest of the old settlers as to what was or was not good form. ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... everything new was right. It recognized crudely the differences between one age and another, but it had a way of looking down upon all ages except the present. This intolerance shown toward the past was indeed a measure of the crudeness with which it was comprehended. Because Mohammed, if he had done what he did, in France and in the eighteenth century, would have been called an impostor, Voltaire, the great mouthpiece and representative of this style of criticism, portrays him as an impostor. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... contortions of his spirit, it is impossible not to perceive a strain of naivete in Mr. Gladstone. He adhered to some of his principles that of the value of representative institutions, for instance with a faith which was singularly literal; his views upon religion were uncritical to crudeness; he had no sense of humour. Compared with Disraeli's, his attitude towards life strikes one as that of an ingenuous child. His very egoism was simple-minded; through all the labyrinth of his passions there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the thread might lead ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... only a trifling portion of the whole explanation, but if they are added to the constant protests raised by the disciples of the Masters of the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, against those who said that their instructors taught metempsychosis in all its crudeness, they assume considerable importance, and show that, although the restrictions of esoteric teaching travestied by the ignorance of the masses may have caused it to be believed that the contrary was the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... and retained it for further reflection. A second reading confirmed his first impression. Thereupon, taking his pen, the frontier lawyer, in a careful revision of the whole despatch, so amended and changed the work of the trained and experienced statesman, as entirely to eliminate its offensive crudeness, and bring it within all the dignity and reserve of the most studied diplomatic courtesy. If, after Mr. Seward's remarkable memorandum of April 1, the Secretary of State had needed any further experience to convince ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... to identify herself suddenly with the customs of a strange rank. She was early trained in the habits of a simple household, but from what I see there can have been nothing wanting of essential refinement in Mrs. Carnegie. There is a crudeness in Miss Fairfax yet—she is very young—but she will ripen sound and sweet to the core, or I am much mistaken in the quality of the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... now led was a curious one. She still visited her husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and sometimes, when M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in the apartments which she shared with Jules Sandeau. He had accepted the situation, and with his crudeness and lack of feeling he seemed to think it, if not natural, at least diverting. At any rate, so long as he could retain her half-million francs, he was not the man to make trouble about his ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... won't. Howland doesn't take to him. Says he's crude—frightfully crude. And you know how Howland hates crudeness." ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... Groceries And round she wheels, hot on the track and Millinery, Of Giles the grocer, and from there To Emilie the milliner, There to be tempted by the sight Of hats and blouses fiercely bright. (O guard Miss Thompson, Powers that Be, From Crudeness ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... but no such demonstration was shown through it all as when old Deacon Swift himself arose to address the assembly. He put Moses Jackson in the chair, and then as he walked forward to the front of the platform a great, white-haired, rugged, black figure, he was heroic in his very crudeness. He wore a long, old Prince Albert coat, which swept carelessly about his thin legs. His turndown collar was disputing territory with his tie and his waistcoat. His head was down, and he glanced out of the lower part of his eyes over the congregation, ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... crudeness. He had, though he did not say so, anticipated some assistance from Doom in identifying the object of his search; but now that this was out of the question, he meant, it appeared, to seek the earliest and most plausible excuse for removal into the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the simplicity of his heart, and the crudeness of his experience, Lenny Fairfield had conceived it probable that Mr. Stirn would address to him some words in approbation of his gallantly, and in sympathy for his bruises, he soon found himself wofully mistaken. That truly great ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... design having arrived at this pitch, both before and during the time that the Lombards ruled Italy, they subsequently grew worse and worse, until at length they reached the lowest depths of baseness. An instance of their utter tastelessness and crudeness may be seen in some figures over the door in the portico of S. Peter's at Rome, in memory of some holy fathers who had disputed for Holy Church in certain councils. Further evidence is supplied by a number ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... building, and with brick that from the first is mellow in tint and harmonizes with its setting, assimilate at once with their neighbours to right and left, and fail to offend the eye by any patchy appearance or crudeness. Hardly a single street in Bruges is thus without old-world charm; but the architectural heart of the city must be sought in its two market-places, called respectively the Grande Place and the Place du Bourg. In the former are the brick Halles, with their famous ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... bounded largely by the weakness of her father and the crudeness of men like Henry Bittinger, Atwood Jones and others of their kind. She didn't consider Tommy at all. He was a nice boy and a faithful friend. His mother, too, was a faithful friend. She classed ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... and discuss standards with others, else he will be eternally making discoveries that are stale and unprofitable to the rest of the world; he will seek to reach men's souls through channels long dammed up, and his achievements will be marred by naive triteness and primitive crudeness. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... that while affectation is odious, crudeness must be overcome. A low voice is always pleasing, not whispered or murmured, but low in pitch. Do not talk at the top of your head, nor at the top of your lungs. Do not slur whole sentences together; on the other hand, do not pronounce ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... never been intended to be worn; until this cast-off poetic apparel, stretched on the freer moral limbs of natural folk, faded and stained by weather and earth into new and richer tints, had lost all its original fashionable stiffness, and crudeness of colour, and niminy-piminy fit, and had acquired instead I know not what grace of unexpectedness, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee |
