"Prudish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... audible. Here you have freedom in love and in morality mocking exquisitely at slavery to them, and interesting you, attracting you, tempting you, inexplicably forcing you to range the hero with his enemy the statue on a transcendant plane, leaving the prudish daughter and her priggish lover on a crockery shelf below to live ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... signify by the expression a woman who is so obliging as to play intermediary in matters of love and love-making. The Latin has several names for her,—as lena, conciliatrix, also internuntia libidinum, ambassadress of naughty desires. These prudish dames perform the best of services; but seeing they busy themselves therein for money, we distrust their disinterestedness. Call yours a procuress, good Father, and have done with it; 't is a word in common use, and has a ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... with Chopin. Without me he could not thrive. Sand knew it and hated me. I was the sturdy oak, Frederic the tender ivy. I poured out my heart's blood for him, poured it into his music. He was a mere girl, I tell you—a sensitive, slender, shrinking, peevish girl, a born prudish spinster, and would shiver if any one looked at him. Liszt always frightened him and he hated Mendelssohn. He called Beethoven a sour old Dutchman, and swore that he did not write piano music. For the man who first brought his name before the public, the big-hearted ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... despair of reproducing these that, at whatever loss of vividness, I mean to narrate the story he told me a little later in my own words. Moreover he was unable to frame a sentence without an oath, though a good-natured one, and his speech, albeit offensive only to prudish ears, in print would seem coarse. He was a mirth-loving man, and perhaps that accounted not a little for his successful amours; since women, for the most part frivolous creatures, are excessively bored by the seriousness with ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... making has been the subject of many hours of the most earnest consideration possible. I am certain that it si due to you and to the confession that you have made of your feelings, that I should in turn confess that I am deeply—what shall I say—INTERESTED in you? No; that is too prim and prudish a term. There is in you for me more than a mere attraction; I feel for you something deeper than even warm friendship. That you would make such a husband as I should cherish and honor, of whom I should be ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... wildly, and Constance put on a prudish air, Morange, in whose voice tears were again rising, spoke these words, fraught with supreme ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... from a false, or a prudish, refinement are these questions kept in the background, but more particularly are they diminished in view in order to confine the contents of this book to a resume of the facts which are the most agreeable. Even in those localities where there is little else but crime ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... a little actress you would make! But now for a display of my histrionic talents. Leave this place, against my will, you can not; and I wish to see your face often, for many days to come. Where you go I must go, too; and why you go, is because of a prudish scruple that has no place in the world you and ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Chatelet, "Mme. d'Espard is the more prudish and particular because she herself is separated from her husband, nobody knows why. The Navarreins, the Lenoncourts, the Blamont-Chauvrys, and the rest of the relations have all rallied round her; the most strait-laced women are seen at ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... ALICIA. Prudish and coarse to the last. Now hush indeed! The stream kisses the lake. We near the shrine. Stir no snapped twig. Let your foot - even yours ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... the churches and public places, even as do the laity with their apparel; and like as with the sweep-net the fisher goeth about to take many fishes in the river at one cast, even so these, wrapping themselves about with the amplest of skirts, study to entangle therein great store of prudish maids and widows and many other silly women and men, and this is their chief concern over any other exercise; wherefore, to speak more plainly, they have not the friar's gown, but only ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... tipsy crew at Bacchus's affected to treat her name with scorn:—"The girl had made much noise about being called a trull, as if many a better than she wasn't one; and, after all, what was the prudish wench? a sort of she-butcher; they had no patience with ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... than any woman in Orange County, yet, who could report anything of her beyond that she was a universal favorite, and danced, walked, possibly flirted with a dozen different cavaliers every day of her life? There were some few among her accusers, demure and most proper—even prudish—women, of whom, were the truth to be told, so little could ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... open-mouthed; nothing to eat, the steam of ham and flesh-pots all the while provoking their appetite; Mynheers very busy with the realities, and smoking as deliberately as if in a solitary lusthuys over the laziest canal in the Netherlands; squeaking chambermaids in the galleries above, and prudish dames below, half inclined to receive the golden solicitations of certain beauties for admittance, but positively refusing them the moment some creditable personage appears; eleven o'clock strikes; half the lights in the fair are extinguished; scruples grow less and less delicate; Mammon prevails, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... if you are too prudish to use my coach, but it shall be got for you at the moment. We won't have your own chairman and links to chatter and betray you before you have played the ghost. Remember you come to my party not as a guest, but as a performer. If they ask why Lady Fareham is ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... believe a word Charles said. She talked a great deal about aristocratic fashions; said she wouldn't be a slave to prudish notions—just as she ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... and "nobodies"; her lady friends must be pretty, piquant, or fashionable, any gentleman admitted into her charmed circle must have genius, wit, or talent to recommend him. Though grave matrons shook their heads and looked prudish when the Countess Rosali was mentioned, yet to belong to her set was to receive the "stamp of fashion." No day passed without some amusement at the villa—picnic, excursion, soiree, dance, or, what its fair mistress preferred, private theatricals ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... canting, insincere. not natural, unnatural; self-conscious; maniere; artificial; overwrought, overdone, overacted; euphuist &c. 577. stiff, starch, formal, prim, smug, demure, tire a quatre epingles, quakerish, puritanical, prudish, pragmatical, priggish, conceited, coxcomical, foppish, dandified; finical, finikin; mincing, simpering, namby-pamby, sentimental. Phr. "conceit in weakest ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... of Mrs. Monte Irvin, in which at this time three distinct groups of investigators became interested—namely, those of Whitehall, Scotland Yard, and Fleet Street—was of a character to have horrified the prudish, but to have excited the compassion ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... had good offers for "Hold Tight, Please!" and he's busy toning it down before it's given in front of the dear old prudish public. He made us laugh one evening by telling us how he met his bishop lately at a Church Congress or something, and the bishop said, "There's a report that you've been seen once or twice lately at the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... stark, impliable, rigorous, unyielding, inductile; strong, violent, forcible, inopposable; pertinacious, obstinate, tenacious, uncompromising, incompliant; constrained, formal, starched, affected, unnatural, precise, prim, ceremonious, prudish, punctilious; cramped, graceless, inelegant; (Slang) high, immoderate, large. Antonyms: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming |
