"Dirtiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at least he wishes to be thought; but from the condition of the abbey, (a small pot-house protruding its vulgar sign from one of the noble entrances, and a skittle-ground being established in the main aisle—desolation, neglect, and dirtiness all around,) we formed no very high estimate of the taste or feeling of Mr Walter Savage Landor. If he had no higher object than merely to keep up the beauty of the building, you might expect that he would have guarded ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... as much as possible, I was constrained to make the passage so small that my body only had space to pass, and I had not room to draw my arm back to my head. The work, too, must all be done naked, otherwise the dirtiness of my shirt must have been remarked; the sand was wet, water being found at the depth of four feet, where the stratum of the gravel began. At length the expedient of sand-bags occurred to me, by which it might be removed out and in more expeditiously. I obtained linen ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... (to me) very satisfactory way against all that was neat and tidy and bigoted and solemn and founded upon the anguish of my fine friends. And my fine friends, being my fine friends, understood. Simultaneously with my arrival at the summit of dirtiness—by the calendar, as I guess, December the twenty-first—came the Black Holster into The Enormous Room and with an excited and ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... soldier lad who, when he caught sight of his first swarm of locusts, wonderingly exclaimed as he noted their peculiar colour, "I'm blest if the butterflies out here haven't put on khaki." Bloemfontein very soon did the same. Khaki of various shades and various degrees of dirtiness saluted me at every point. Khaki men upon khaki men swarmed everywhere. Brigade followed brigade in apparently endless succession; but all clad in the same irrepressible colour, till it became quite depressing. No wonder the townspeople ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... that such a thing could be done. Clearly, he could not plead unavoidable ignorance of the subject-matter, as might the old cook at San Josef, who, the first time her master brought home Wenham Lake ice from Port of Spain, was scandalised at the dirtiness of the 'American water,' washed off the sawdust, and dried the ice in the sun. His was a case of Handy- Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr. Lover's hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe the white gentleman with half a dozen of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... walking-sticks; and then the bolder spirits felt that the time for good, rank, unblushing blackguardism had come. A being stepped up and faced a roaring audience of enthusiasts who knew the quality of his dirtiness; he launched out into an unclean stave, and he reduced his admirers to mere convulsions. He was encored, and he went a trifle further, until he reached a depth of bestiality below which a gaff in Shoreditch could net descend. Ah! Those bonny lads, how they roared with laughter, and how ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... coming he knew not whence." He gave us one of his own large and clean huts to sleep in; and we may take this opportunity of saying that the impression we received, from our first journey on the hills among the villages of Chisunse, of the excessive dirtiness of the Manganja, was erroneous. This trait was confined to the cool highlands. Here crowds of men and women were observed to perform their ablutions daily in the stream that ran past their villages; and this we have observed elsewhere to ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... king. For five troubled years he had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this—or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development. But it did mean this. And every one who apprehended as much was called by that very apprehension to the service of God's kingdom. ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... preparations were going on at Golushkin's to produce a "chic" dinner. (Golushkin, as a man of the highest European culture, kept a French cook, who had formerly been dismissed from a club for dirtiness.) A nasty, greasy fish soup was prepared, various pates chauds and fricasses and, most important of all, several bottles of champagne had been ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... hold my tongue and not draw attention to my dirtiness," said Dawn. "It's a wonder a ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... discovery of his own dirtiness (page 232), comes this: "With a noise as of ten thousand tin kettles tied to ten thousand mad dogs' tails." Humor and pathos are both strengthened by the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... "Hitherto I have felt rather proud of our appearance. As we only got our uniforms when we came up here, and have always had our tents to sleep in, we looked a great deal cleaner than the average. Now we shall be conspicuous for our dirtiness." ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... the Philosopher. "The first person who washed was possibly a person seeking a cheap notoriety. Any fool can wash himself, but every wise man knows that it is an unnecessary labour, for nature will quickly reduce him to a natural and healthy dirtiness again. We should seek, therefore, not how to make ourselves clean, but how to attain a more unique and splendid dirtiness, and perhaps the accumulated layers of matter might, by ordinary geologic compulsion, become ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens |
