"Dirty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been roughing it; and though some parts of the letter may be neither very comprehensible nor very interesting to you, I think that perhaps it might amuse Willie Traquair, who delights in all such dirty jobs. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'why there's no picture of Father Christmas's dog in the book.' For at the old man's heels in the lane there crept a little brown and white spaniel looking very dirty in the snow. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... think you would find Coblentz, where we were obliged to take up our night's lodging, much to your taste. 'Tis a mean, dirty assemblage of plastered houses, striped with paint, and set off with wooden galleries, in the beautiful taste of St. Giles's. Above, on a rock, stands the palace of the Elector, which seems to be remarkable ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Two laborers, gross, tanned, dirty, were fighting. They had swung side-on as the hole opened, and her glance focused itself upon the smaller of the two. He was an old man, quite gray; and down his scalp ran a stream of bright blood which trickled ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... this magic matto die soon, rejoicing. Before the last breath comes, it is said their bodies turn into a handful of silver dust—poof!—like that." He snapped his dirty fingers. "Then the life that leaves them ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... together, rising and falling in masses under the influence of other person's conduct, with no possibility of tracing the death of this particular baby to the dirty hands of that particular milker of far-off cows. It wasn't murder—he never saw the baby. You can't hang a man for not washing his hands. We see babies die, look in vain for the soul that sinneth, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... water what it had to say: "I agree with the other two" said the water: "to return evil for good is the justice of mankind, it is by drinking water that your very lives are preserved; yet you spit into it and wash dirty things in it; shall not the snake return you evil for good?" So judgment was delivered, and the snake wanted to eat the prince; but the prince asked the tree and the cow and the water to listen while he made one prayer; he told them how he had been married when ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... remembered the three faces asleep on their pillows at home, and as she looked at this tear-stained, dirty little gypsy, she said to the organist, "I will take care of him to-night." So, under the stars, the Christmas stars, gleaming so brightly, she led ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the money for a cow, we must cut expenses somehow. Perhaps you could stop stuffing your nostrils with that dirty snuff? And you ought at any rate to be able to sell that fancy fox skin you play with ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... must be because old goody Liu had drunk out of it that she considered it too dirty to keep. He then saw Miao Y produce two other cups. The one had an ear on the side. On the bowl itself were engraved in three characters: 'calabash cup,' in the plain 'square' writing. After these, followed a row of small characters in the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... would be thought that this could be no great cause for exaltation; we were about to go to pass the rest of our lives in bondage; but all misery is comparative, and sooner than have remained another night in that dreadful hole, I would have welcomed any change. About an hour afterwards a guard of dirty-looking soldiers came in; we were all handcuffed to a long chain, at about two feet apart, one on each side, so that we walked in pairs, and as soon as the first chain was full—and I was handcuffed to it—we were ordered out into the square ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... been on my feet at the time instead of sailing slowly along in a dirty canal-boat, I should often have paused to contemplate the diversified panorama along the banks of the canal. Sometimes the scene was a forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away occasionally and receding from ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for explanations, especially of things which cannot possibly be explained in public. Do not attempt this pose unless your figure is mignon and your complexion pink. Do not be too realistic; never be sticky or dirty—men do not care ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... "put in with a dirty finger," and varying with every mood. Gooseberry eyes may disguise more soul, but they get no credit for it. Humour seemed to dance in that soft, blue fire; poetry dreamed in their clear depths; love—but that we have not come to yet; they were more eloquent than her tongue, for she ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... court-martial for drunkenness or disobedience. If a battalion misbehaves itself, it is immediately gibbeted in the order of the day. The newspapers cry out against this. They say that Clement Thomas forgets that the National Guards are his children, and that dirty linen ought to be washed at home. "If this goes on, posterity," they complain, "will say that we were little more than a mob of undisciplined drunkards." I am afraid that Clement Thomas will not have time to carry out his reforms; had they been ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... usual rewards to school-children, and often made very tedious affairs by the enormous quantity of talk inflicted on them. However, Mr Wilson managed better. To the first, many of the boys came dirty and untidy; the second shewed a great improvement; the third, one still greater; until now, most of the factory-boys assemble to chapel, and other places where they ought to be decent, in plain ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... careful prudence gone with the advent of the piano and the oil painting? While wearing the dress of a lady, the wife cannot tuck up her sleeves and see to the butter, or even feed the poultry, which are down at the pen across 'a nasty dirty field.' It is easy to say that farming is gone to the dogs, that corn is low, and stock uncertain, and rents high, and so forth. All that is true, but difficulties are nothing new; nor must too much be expected ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... 3 P. M., when they were pounced upon by a quarter score of stalwart policemen and landed inside a rough luggage conveyance. Baxter Street was a Garden of Eden compared to the slums to which they were driven, and they were finally sheltered in a dirty tenement that arose in a series of rickety stories to a dizzy height. Their fastidious taste would not permit them to indulge in sleep amid such commonplace surroundings, where the only furniture of their ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... Millie, who helped out her subsistence by selling favorable winds to mariners. Her dwelling and appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions: her house, which was on the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and, for exposure, might have been the abode of Aeolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A clay-colored kerchief, folded round her head, corresponded in color ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... toppling over to shatter the smooth, green mirror below. Some of its sturdy exposed roots reached down from the bank into the water, where they caught and held the drift from upstream,—reeds and twigs and matted grass,—a dirty, sickly mass that swished lazily on the flank of ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... tones and bits of colour freely about the walls and ceilings, with a high-backed chair here, a spindle-legged sofa there, and a claw-footed table in the centre, until her eye was caught by a very dirty deal desk, on which stood an open book, with an inkstand and some pens. On the leaf she read the last entry: "Eli M. Grow and lady, Thermopyle Centre." Not even the graves outside had brought the ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... In a dirty hair-lace She leads on a brace Of black boar-cats to attend her: Who scratch at the moon, And threaten at noon Of night from heaven for ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... and it makes me miserable. I met a child on the Common yesterday, with hair your colour that fell back in thick curls from a forehead almost as white as yours. Need I say that I kissed her? Poor mite, she had such dirty clothes! She told me where she lives; I must make inquiries about her mother. I might be able to help. The existence of poverty is just beginning to dawn upon me. It is strange how long one can live with one's ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... whom I found hard and unimpressible as his own anvil, dark as his forge, and as unpitying as its flames. The thin examiner held the high office of deacon of the church. Whether it was the particularly dirty face of his friend that set him off to such advantage, or whether he had inherent claims to my respect, I cannot tell; well I know, throughout the scrutiny that soon took place, many times I should have fallen beneath the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... on his breast—upon which they showed like two thick lumps of raw flesh—he prowled about from side to side of the half-poop. On his bare feet he wore a pair of straw sandals, and his head was protected by an enormous pith hat—once white but now very dirty—which gave to the whole man the aspect of a phenomenal and animated mushroom. At times he would interrupt his uneasy shuffle athwart the break of the poop, and stand motionless with a vague gaze fixed on the ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... all Clogg'd with gross rigid Salts, which by their long lying in the Butt or other Vessel, so tinctures the Beer as to make it partake of all their raw Natures: For such is the Feed, such is the Body, as may be perceived by Eels taken out of dirty Bottoms, that are sure to have a muddy taste, when the Silver sort that are catched in Gravelly or Sandy clear Rivers Eat sweet and fine: Nor can this ill property be a little in those Starting (as they call it in ...
— The London and Country Brewer • Anonymous
... picturesque, and does it in pontificalibus, resolved that Domina Grundy shall think all the better of him. Rousseau cries, "I will bare my heart to you!" and, throwing open his waistcoat, makes us the confidants of his dirty linen. Montaigne, indeed, reports of himself with the impartiality of a naturalist, and Boswell, in his letters to Temple, shows a maudlin irretentiveness; but is not old Samuel Pepys, after all, the only man who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... The commercial section of the city occupies a long, narrow beach between the water-line and bluffs, and contains the arsenal, exchange, custom-house, post-office, railway station, market and principal business houses. It has narrow streets badly paved and drained, and made still more dirty and offensive by the surface drainage of the upper town. Communication with the upper town is effected by means of two elevators, a circular tramway, and steep zigzag roads. The upper town is built on the western slope of a low ridge, the backbone of the peninsula, and rises ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... is an ugly looking, dirty brown-coloured substance, very hard and rigid until softened by water and a very lengthened process of cookery, after which it ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... time to say 'Allow me'—in fact, there was no time for anything—and in my hurry I lost my balance and fell in the mud, and the wagon came tearing over me. It was an unpleasant sensation, but I wasn't hurt, you know; neither the wheels nor the horses touched me. I got very dirty, though, and I have no doubt I looked as ridiculous as I felt, and for that I expected to be tenderly dealt with; but when I went to ask after the child, a few days later, a neighbour told me that its mother was out, and it was a good thing ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... and shoulders were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath to a yellow that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in it. The white of the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes was dirty because of the persistent and ineradicable brown, while the eyes themselves were ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... in the universe,' and describes the nastiness of the talk of French women of the first rank. Ib. p. 435. Mrs. Piozzi, nearly twenty years later, places among 'the contradictions one meets with every moment' at Paris, 'A Countess in a morning, her hair dressed, with diamonds too perhaps, and a dirty black handkerchief about her neck.' Piozzi's Journey, i. 17. See ante, ii. 403, and post, under Aug. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To him, the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... on those rubber boots and get into your oil-clothes. You'll see before long why they're useful. Trawling's a cold, wet, dirty business, and you want to be well prepared for it. And don't forget those nippers! They'll protect your hands from the chafe of ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... affairs," Marsh declared. "They are flat of nose, their lips are pierced, and they are very—well, dirty." ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... the Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue in Young Children.—In young infants, abscesses are not infrequently met with scattered over the trunk and limbs, and are probably the result of infection of the sebaceous glands from dirty underclothing. The abscesses should be opened, and the further spread of infection prevented by cleansing of the skin and by the use of clean under-linen. Similar abscesses are met with on the scalp in association with ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... feet supported upon the opposite seat, blue wisps of the best Egyptian tobacco smoke trailing over the hood behind, they set off. Scanning the Oriental life surging round them, criticizing Arab methods of dressing sheep, amused by the scribes and money-changers—dirty though prosperous-looking sharpers—and so on and so forth, they passed slowly down the long Sharia-Mahommed Ali, between the frowning walls of two great Mosques, where the cannon balls of Napoleon are still fast in the stone, ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... with the condition of the cell, as shown by the curves in fig. 17. It may be unduly increased by long or narrow lugs, and especially by dirty joints between the lugs. It is interesting to note that it increases at the end of both ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... D'Artagnan, "to this decrepitude is probably added poverty, for he must have neglected the little that he had, and the dirty scoundrel, Grimaud, more taciturn than ever and still more drunken than his master—stay, Planchet, it breaks my heart to merely ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... their wits' end. It was long past their dinner-time, and they were getting hungry; their clothes were all muddy, and Diddie's dress almost torn off of her; the blood was trickling down from the gash in her forehead, and Chris was all scratched and dirty, and her eyes smarted from the sand in them. So it was a disconsolate little group that sat huddled together on top of the lumber, while Old Billy stood guard over Dilsey, but with one eye on the pile, ready to make a dash at anybody who should ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... and fairly wide, but dirty and ill-kept. The sidewalks are of wood, and at night we need to take our steps carefully, for only a few dim lights break the darkness. Beyond the walls of the city we see suburbs ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... with grass and flowers at their feet, and a clear sky overhead, can have no real idea of the charm that country sights and sounds have for those whose home is in a dirty, busy, manufacturing town—just such a town, in fact, as I lived in when I was a boy, which is more ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... world is smashed. I have traversed the ruins; and my feet are still dirty with mud and blood. But I can tell you what is going to come out of that welter of ruin. There will come a sane and righteous hatred of militarism. What will be surely destroyed is Caesarism. Prophecy? This is not prophecy; I am stating ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... respect their parents, wives look at their husbands almost as gods, and at the tent door elders administer what they imagine justice, stroking their long white beards, and as impressed with their judicial functions as if their dirty turbans or ropes of camels' hair bound round their heads, were horse-hair wigs, and the torn mat on which they sit a woolsack or a judge's bench, with a carved wooden canopy above it, decked with the ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... at it for a dozen years or so, you'll wake up some morning and discover that your appearances haven't deceived any one but yourself. A man who tries that game is a good deal like the fellow who puts on a fancy vest over a dirty shirt—he's the only person in the world who can't see the egg-spots under his chin. Of course, there isn't any real danger of your family's wearing a false front while I'm alive, because I believe Helen's got too much sense to stand for ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... sustained the hardships of war. When the Romans marched through the flat and flooded country, their sovereign, on foot, at the head of his legions, shared their fatigues and animated their diligence. In every useful labor, the hand of Julian was prompt and strenuous; and the Imperial purple was wet and dirty as the coarse garment of the meanest soldier. The two sieges allowed him some remarkable opportunities of signalizing his personal valor, which, in the improved state of the military art, can seldom be exerted by a prudent general. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... come up in the last day or two," he mused. "I'd like to be foot-loose, so I could work it out without any string attached to me. But there are only two ways I could get out of the Force, and neither is open. I might desert, which would be a dirty way to sneak out of a thing I went into deliberately; or, if they were minded to allow me, I could buy my discharge—and I haven't the price. Besides, I like the game and I don't know that I want to quit it. The life isn't so bad. It's your rabidly independent ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated quarters—women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... mumbled, and sometimes they called names. Eric didn't mind stuff like "dirty Naturalist." That he could understand—once upon a time, way back, everybody who was against the Leff Law was called a Naturalist. And before that it had still another meaning, or so he'd been told. Today, of course, it just meant anyone who ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... is mixed in a test tube with its own volume of nitric acid, spec. gr. 1.30, and shaken violently for one minute. At the expiration of this time the oils will have acquired the following colors: Olive oil, pale green; cotton seed oil, yellowish brown; sesame, white; sun flower, dirty white; peanut, rape, and castor oils, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... eat and then spend the long evenings at the corner saloons or fishing in the upper bay, or sometimes taking the car down to St. Marys, and walking about surveying the comfortable old houses and carefully kept lawns. And of Ironville, St. Marys did not think very much, save that it was dirty and unattractive and, unfortunately, quite a ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... were only lent them for the day, and the children felt very fine in them. But there were two long rows without any aprons. These were little ones who had been picked up along the streets. Each ragged scholar had permission to bring all the children he could find. And, oh, how ragged and dirty these ...
— The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children • Various
... now belongs to children. The church is at one end, bizarre buildings are on either side, the Dante statue is in the middle, and harsh gravel covers the ground. Everywhere are children, all dirty, and all rather squalid and mostly bow-legged, showing that they were of the wrong age to take their first steps on Holy Saturday at noon. The long brown building on the right, as we face S. Croce, is a seventeenth-century palazzo. For the rest, ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... you may well say that. No one knows what it is but she who has the trial. The greatest trouble is with your domestics. As a class, they are, with few exceptions, dirty, careless, and impudent. I sometimes think it gives them pleasure to interfere with your household arrangements and throw all into disorder. This seems especially to be the spirit of my present cook. My husband is particular about having his meals at the ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... firm, warm, dirty and somewhat calloused boy's hand that was unquestionably flesh, ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... clue to the mode in which payment was made. "My uncle," writes Sterne, describing their subsequent rupture, "quarrelled with me because I would not write paragraphs in the newspapers; though he was a party-man, I was not, and detested such dirty work, thinking it beneath me. From that time he became my bitterest enemy." The date of this quarrel cannot be precisely fixed; but we gather from an autograph letter (now in the British Museum) from Sterne to Archdeacon Blackburne that by the year 1750 the two men had for some time ceased to be ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... looking round the room, there was little enough to steal. It was a large room, with several truckle beds standing against the walls. In the center was a table, upon which were some mugs, horns, and empty bottles, with some dirty cards scattered about. The place smelled strongly of tobacco, and benches lying on the ground showed that the party of the night before had ended in a broil, further evidence to which was given by stains of blood on one of the beds, and by a rag saturated ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... tap at the window behind him. He unfastened the pane, and a spectral hand came through with a coin. Mr. Crows took it, the hand disappeared, to be replaced by another, more dirty than spectral, with a coin in the outstretched palm, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... indignantly. "Poor Bob and Frank. To have their airplane damaged just because that scoundrel thought we were prying into his dirty secrets. I wish I had my ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... are fresh gathered, cut off the dirty ends, break them small in your hands, put them in a stone-bowl with a handful or two of salt, and let them stand all night; if you don't get mushrooms enough at once, with a little salt they will keep a day or two whilst you get ...
— English Housewifery Exemplified - In above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts Giving Directions - for most Parts of Cookery • Elizabeth Moxon
... filled water-casks; but on July 21, the day after the anchorage, a storm-wind began whistling through the rigging. The rollers came washing down from the ice wall of the coast and the far offing showed the dirty fog that portended storm. Only half the water-casks had been filled; but there was a brisk seaward breeze. Without warning, contrary to his custom of consulting the other officers, Bering appeared on deck pallid and ashen from disease, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... hour, etc.) bore more in the travelling way than I have managed with impunity since I broke down. I came by the late express, got to Glasgow between 8 and 9 p.m., and had rather a hustle to to get a cab, etc. A nice old porter (as dirty and hairy as a Simian!) secured one at last with a cabby who jabbered in a tongue that at last I utterly lost the running of, and when he suddenly (and as it appeared indignantly!) remounted his box, whipped up, and drove off, leaving me and my boxes, I felt inclined to cry(!), and said ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... done now, but there ain't no one I'd give such dirty work to. What you're going to do is stand right here and show us you know how to sing a decent song in a decent way. That there song of yours didn't leave nothin' sacred untouched, from parsons and jails to women and the gallows. ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... of Dollysweet. I never neglected her or let her get dirty and untidy, though in time, of course, her pink-and-white complexion faded into pallid yellow, and her bright hair grew dull, and, worst of all—after that I never could bear to look at her—one of her sky-blue eyes dropped, not out, but into ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... to recognize therefrom a primary token of the important place which is assigned to the community of human interests, and this is now affirmed with an emphasis never before displayed. Microbes multiply chiefly in damp and dirty places; underfed people are more prone to illness than others, and so are those who are overtired. Therefore illness and early death must be the heritage of the poor who, underfed and overtired, live in damp and ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... an extensive belly the dirty old witch has got! I suppose they couldn't put that superb portal on the house till after they had ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... Never speak ill of the beast you bestraddle! Therefore requiescat Boston! may her ribs lie light on soft sand when she goes to pieces! may her engines be cut up into bracelets for the arms of the patriotic fair! good-bye to her, dear old, close, dirty, slow coach! She served her country well in a moment of trial. Who knows but she saved it? It was a race to see who should first get to Washington,—and we and the Virginia mob, in alliance with the District mob, were perhaps nip and tuck for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... wicker chair, before a little table, covered with a dirty dinner-napkin. Pyotr Ilyitch sat down opposite, and the champagne soon appeared, and oysters were suggested to the gentlemen. "First-class oysters, the last ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... thousandfold every day over the waves; your relations with Europe are not only commercial as with Asia, they are also social, moral, spiritual, intellectual; you take Europe every day by the hand. How then could you believe, that if that hand of Europe, which you grasp every day, remains dirty, you can escape from soiling your own hands? The cleaner they are, all the more will the filth of old Europe stick to them. There is no possible means to escape from being soiled, than to help us, Europeans, to wash the hands ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... itself was, at that period, dirty and ill-paved; and the opening of all the sewers, in order to purify the place and stop the ravages of the pestilence, rendered the public thoroughfares almost impassable, and loaded the air with intolerable effluvia, more likely to produce than stay the course of the plague, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... at once." I read and hid the paper in my pocket. Without staring about me too much, I watched the Vicomte make his way towards a door half hidden by a dirty curtain—another to that by which we had entered. Thither I followed him after a decent interval—no one molesting me. One of the patriots on the platform seemed to watch me with understanding, and when I reached the curtained doorway, my glance ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... He picked from the dirty floor two or three tail feathers of a tiny yellow bird which he had saved from the jaws of a cat, though not until it had received it's death wound; and which after a fashion of his own he ...
— Bertie and the Gardeners - or, The Way to be Happy • Madeline Leslie
... ardent and respectful zeal which animated him in all that regarded churches or altars, or all the things which were used for the Sacrifice of the Mass, and for the divine service. As he could not bear anything dirty or slovenly, in the country churches, he took the trouble of cleaning everything himself; and lest they should want altar breads for Masses, he made them himself in iron forms, which were made in a very workmanlike manner; he took them into the poor parishes: some ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... day that the tramp came into our kitchen, and frightened the cook? Uncle Harry was just strolling along the driveway. He walked into the kitchen, took the dirty tramp by the collar and marched him right out to the street," and Flossie's cheeks glowed with pride for her dear ...
— Dorothy Dainty's Gay Times • Amy Brooks
... echoed Singleton. "My dear fellow, 'enjoy' is not the word, I should simply revel in it; all the more because my sympathies are wholly with the Cubans, while I—or rather my firm, have an old grudge against the Spaniards, who once played us a very dirty trick, of which, however, I need say nothing just now. No, it ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... grumbling through his beard. He was not of the class of triumphant sinners, whatever wickedness he might be capable of. To tell the truth, he had long, long ago fallen out of the butterfly stage of dissipation, and had now to be the doer of dirty work, despised and hustled about by such men as Jack Wentworth. The wages of sin had long been bitter enough, though he had neither any hope of freeing himself, nor any wish to do so; but he took up ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... and other opprobrious names that I will not mention. This bird eats everything that is filthy and unclean. The natural consequence is that it looks untidy and disreputable. It is, without exception, the ugliest bird in the world. It is about the size of a kite. The plumage is a dirty white, except the edges of the wing feathers, which are shabby black. The naked face is of a pale mustard colour, as are the bill and legs. The feathers on the back of the head project like the back hairs of an untidy schoolboy. Its walk is an ungainly waddle. Nevertheless—so great is the ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Kalmucks who entered France in 1815; if they ever sparkled it was only under the influence of a covetous thought. His broad pug nose was flattened at the base. Thick lips, in keeping with a repulsive double chin, the beard of which, rarely cleaned more than once a week, was encircled with a dirty silk handkerchief twisted to a cord; a short neck, rolling in fat, and heavy cheeks completed the characteristics of brute force which sculptors give to their caryatids. Minoret-Levrault was like those statues, with this difference, that whereas they supported an edifice, ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... a counter-attraction drew the white company back into the house. An old French priest with sandalled feet and a dirty face had arrived. There was a moment of handshaking with the good father, then a moment of palpitation and holding of the breath, and then—you would have known it by the turning away of two or three ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... poor beggar girls, ragged, dirty, and starving—two little tots bent under the burden of their beggar's packs, which ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... anger of Lonegon was allayed, and he seated himself growling at the table, and wiped the blood from his torn wrist on his sleeve, and drawing forth a dirty and tattered red kerchief, bound it round the bruised and wounded joint. The man, Bideabout, did not concern himself with the wrath or the anguish of the man. He rubbed his hands together, and clapped a palm on ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... it: A light that falls down from on high, For spiritual trades to cozen by An Ignis Fatuus, that bewitches And leads men into pools and ditches, 510 To make them dip themselves, and sound For Christendom in dirty pond To dive like wild-fowl for salvation, And fish to catch regeneration. This light inspires and plays upon 515 The nose of Saint like bag-pipe drone, And speaks through hollow empty soul, As through ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... somebody with a bomb? Or was it stiletto work?" asked Bobbie, as he threw away the core of the apple, to observe it greedily captured by a small, dirty-faced urchin by ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... in the milk," and she brought an old shirt, very much soiled. Looking at it in dismay the inspector said, "Could you not, at least, use a clean shirt?" At this the woman's patience gave way and she declared, "Well, you needn't expect me to use a clean shirt to strain dirty milk!" ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... Central Africa was akin to the Bushman-Hottentot type of negro. Rounded stones with a hole through the centre, similar to those which are used by the Bushmen in the south for weighting their digging-sticks (the graaf stock of the Boers), have been found at the south end of Lake Tanganyika." The dirty yellow colour of the Bushmen, their slightly slanting eyes and prominent cheek-bones had induced early anthropologists to dwell on their resemblance to the Mongolian races. This similarity has been now ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to wash my hands. I better go out to the pump and clean 'em so I don't get my new dresses dirty right aways." ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... paterrollin'. It was always some low-down white men, dat never owned a nigger in deir life, doin' de patarollin' and a strippin' de clothes off men, lak pappy, right befo' de wives and chillun and beatin' de blood out of him. No, sir, good white men never dirty deir hands and souls in sich work of de ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... dirty fingers the damp hairs of the brush, which the half-caste held by the handle, Rodin wetted his thumb and forefinger, and, according to custom, traced the sign of the cross upon his forehead. Then, opening the door of the chapel, he ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... long as it is contented, then crime does not matter as long as it is unscrupulous. The truth is that it is only then that it does matter most desperately. Many persons are more comfortable when they are dirty than when they are clean; but that does not recommend ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... as usual, and held out their foreheads for the old woman to stick the charms upon them; and it was not till now that we learned from Iligliuk the efficacy of this very useful custom. As soon as this dirty operation was at an end, during which the numerous by-standers amused themselves in chewing the intestines of the seal, the strangers retired to their own huts, each bearing a small portion of the ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... part, shopkeepers, second-hand furniture dealers and the lower classes generally. There being little competition in summer when town was empty, the dealers rushed in, sure of obtaining costly articles for next to nothing. A vile odour permeated the hot air exhaled by the crowd of dirty and perspiring people. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... papers, show, from a date but little later than that of his institution as archdeacon, a quarterly payment of L25 to J. L. Nothing could have been made of this, had it stood by itself. But I connect with it a very dirty and ill-written letter, which, like another that I have quoted, was in a pocket in the cover of a diary. Of date or postmark there is no vestige, and the decipherment was not easy. It ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... give it the appearance of antiquity, which changed the colour of the ink, and made the parchment appear black and contracted. Another person declares, that he saw him rub a piece of parchment in several places in streaks with yellow ochre, and then rub it on the ground which was dirty, and afterwards crumple it in his hand. Having concluded the operation, he said it would do pretty well, but he could do it better at home. The first part of the Battle of Hastings, he confessed to Mr. Barrett, that he ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... in a voice rendered husky by much shouting in dirty weather that the fog-banks would be drifting in from the sea before nightfall. And now he had that mournful satisfaction which is the special privilege of the pessimistic. These fog-banks, the pest of the east coast, are the materials that form the light fleecy ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... of knowing your habits, my dear Watson," said he. "When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... arms, and holding his rags as if to keep them from slipping off his shoulders. He wore a dismally battered cocked hat which was a size too large for him, and came down to his ears over his closely cropped hair. His shirt was dirty and ragged, and his breeches and shoes were of the most dilapidated character, the latter showing, through the gaping orifices in ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... indeed, nor so widely spoken of as some of its manufacturing leviathan brethren in the north, but which is, nevertheless, very dear to those who know it well. Its green pastures, its waving wheat, its deep and shady and—let us add—dirty lanes, its paths and stiles, its tawny-coloured, well-built rural churches, its avenues of beeches, and frequent Tudor mansions, its constant county hunt, its social graces, and the general air of clanship which pervades it, ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... to his country. And whether the defamers of them are arrayed in robes of scarlet or sable, whether they lurk and skulk in an insurance office, whether they assume the venerable character of a priest, the sly one of a scrivener, or the dirty, infamous, abandoned one of an informer, they are all the creatures and tools of ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... partial change took place in its vegetation. We stopped at an early hour, to examine some cliffs, which rising perpendicularly from the water, were different in character and substance from any we had as yet seen. They approached a dirty yellow-ochre in colour, that became brighter in hue as it rose, and, instead of being perforated, were compact and hard. The waters of the river had, however, made horizontal lines upon their fronts, which distinctly marked the rise and fall of the river, as the strength ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... crone is potent," interrupted the student Anselmus, "though she is but of mean descent; for her father was nothing but a ragged wing-feather, and her mother a dirty parsnip; but the most of her power she owes to all sorts of baneful creatures, poisonous vermin which ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Mollie answered. "I sent a telegram by one of the boys who took that dirty Spaniard to the station. And, oh, girls," she leaned forward suddenly while the tears overflowed and slowly trickled down her face, "if she does as I begged her to, she will be here to-morrow. Darling ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... sheep, they may be driven into the narrow theological fold which Mr. Booth patronizes. If they refuse to enter, for all their moral cleanliness, they will have to take their place among the goats as sinners, only less dirty than the rest. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... that?" asked Denoisel, pointing to a little worn-out pocket-book stuffed full of papers, the dirty crumpled edges of which could ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... that their builders appreciated the fact that there was no need for crowding. Between each building was space, suggestive of the unending plains that surrounded the town. Willets sat, serene in its space and solitude, unhurried, uncramped, sprawling over a stretch of grass level—a dingy, dirty, inglorious Willets, shamed by its fringe of tin cans, empty bottles, and other refuse—and by the clean sweep of sand and sage and grass that stretched to its very ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... headquarters tents and baggage were transferred to her, and we took leave of the good ship "Atlantic." By the time this transfer was made, the tide was too low to let us pass in over the bar, and we had to pass the night on the dirty propeller, lying outside till eight o'clock of Friday the 10th, when we ran in at high tide, and after the second transfer resumed our character of land forces on the sandy shore of North Carolina. All the saddle horses of the command ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Ragged, dirty, and unkempt; untrained in all the pretty graces of refinement; deprived of all the fostering care of the home, how can the children of the street afford the artist any subjects for his canvas? Because, in spite of deprivation and poverty, they possess ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... dress it could be called—was simple as it was savage. It consisted of what might have once been a hunting-shirt, but which now looked more like a leathern bag with the bottom ripped open, and sleeves sewed into the sides. It was of a dirty-brown colour, wrinkled at the hollow of the arms, patched round the armpits, and greasy all over; it was fairly "caked" with dirt. There was no attempt at either ornament or fringe. There had been a cape, but this had evidently been drawn upon from ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... attention of all interested. 'The notable statue of Chac-Mool, which was received in the capital of Yucatan with so great demonstrations of jubilee, and with unaccustomed pomp, has remained in our city since its arrival, some days ago, abandoned in a small square, afar off and dirty, where the small boys of the neighborhood amuse themselves by pelting it. If Sr. Dn. Augustin del Rio had known the little value that would have been placed upon his gift, it is certain that he would have ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... Wessel vehemently. "I knew you for a dog, but when I hear even the half of a tale like this, I know you for such a dirty cur that I am ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sometimes he stopped and stood still in the sun, whose heat he did not seem to feel, though a perspiration bathed his pale face and stood in drops on his forehead under the shadow of his nicchio. Some little dirty children of the poor, with which this region swarms, looked at him from the sloping shore of the Campo di Giustizia, where the executions used to take place, and a small boy began to mock his movements and pauses, but was arrested by one of the girls, who shook him ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... new rites, for instance. Thus in P[a]rask. Grih. S. 3. 7 a silly and dirty rite 'prevents a slave from running away'; and there is an ordeal for girls before ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... to talk, but could think of nothing to say. Then the servant returned, ushering in a dwarfish Arab in a dirty white turban, and the shabby black galabeah worn only by the poor who cannot afford good materials and the bright colours ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... but treated that as a matter of no moment. "He wants a wife, my dear," she said, "and you may pick him up to-morrow by putting out your hand." When I remarked that his mind seemed to be intent on low things, and specially named the muck, she only laughed at me. "Money's never dirty," she said, "nor yet what makes money." She talks of taking lodgings in Norwich for the winter, saying that in her widowed state she will be as well there as anywhere else, and she wants me to stay with ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... none either." At the king's death the loans amounted to more than two milliards and a half, the deficit was getting worse and worse every day, there was no more money to be had, and the income from property went on diminishing. "I have only some dirty acres which are turning to stones instead of being bread," wrote Madame de Sevigne. Trade was languishing, the manufactures founded by Colbert were dropping away one after another; the revocation of the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... It admitted the danger, and yet provided no security for Protestants. He would not have condescended to stultify himself by the composition of such a bill. The folly and contradictions be upon the heads of those who drew it. They might have turned him out of office; but he would not be made such a dirty tool as to draw that bill. "Let who would, he would no-t defile pen, or waste paper, by such an act of folly, and forfeit his character for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... laughed the small black figure, nowise impressed and cramming her stumpy fingers up to her mouth to keep the laugh in as she saw her young mistress' displeasure. "It's an awful old dirty muss, an' I wish I could do it," she added ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... should become as dirty as the Chinese, and as unprogressive as the Central Americans, agnostics like the Japanese, and revolutionary like the Peruvians. And, by a parity of reasoning, the gold standard will make us as fanatical as the Turks, as superstitious as the Spaniards, and as hot-tempered and revengeful ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... mother who discovered the whereabouts of a cure. Hook's Kurepain was the thing to do it! Who could deny the virtues of that "healing balm"? They were set forth in print, in type both large and small, on a creased and dirty remnant of the Montreal Weekly Globe and Family Messenger, which had providentially strayed into that far port of the Labrador. Who could dispute the works of "the invaluable discovery"? Was it not a positive cure for bruises, sprains, chilblains, cracked hands, ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... night to fly in the meadows. But Grimes was not wondering at all. Without a word, he got off his donkey, and clambered over the low road wall, and knelt down, and began dipping his ugly head into the spring— and very dirty ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... would be hateful to me before a month was past. All women in love are like Magna Wellmann. I shudder when I think of the big ugly room where he lives and works; the bare deal table, the dusty books, the trunk covered with a travelling rug, the dirty curtains and unpolished floor. ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... of novels at present are, in fact, experiments in the science of this central field of human action, experiments in the "way of looking at" various cases and situations. They may be very misleading experiments, it is true, done with adulterated substances, dangerous chemicals, dirty flasks and unsound balances; but that is a question of their quality and not of their nature, they are experiments for all that. A good novel may become a very potent and convincing experiment indeed. Books in these matters are often so much quieter ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... what disposed of him. It was with the suddenness of the lightning stroke, and, flinging back the dirty blanket that had enshrouded his form, the scout pointed his revolvers at the others, fired three shots, accompanied by a screech loud enough to wake the dead. Then, springing toward his mustang, he vaulted upon his back, wheeled about, and thundered away, ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... must have been built in the days of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, for nothing remained of the maritime prosperity which had originally bestowed the name upon the building. It was of rough stone, coloured a dirty white, with two queer circular windows high up in the wall on one side, the other side resting on a little, round-shouldered hill. It was built facing away from the sea like the beach-stone cottages, from which it was separated by a patch of common. From the rear of the inn ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... wash it, every time I think of it," said the mother; "for it stands to reason your face is dirty, Ianu, whether I ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... children, kept them there until the health of each one failed in turn, and they were permanently injured by their privations. The food, which would perhaps have been wholesome enough if properly cooked, was ruined by a dirty and careless woman, who served it up in such disgusting messes that many a time the fastidious little Brontes could not eat a mouthful, though faint with hunger. There was always the most delicate cleanliness in the frugal Bronte household, and the children had early learned to be dainty in such ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... himself," retorted Dane. "I tell you, sir, Denham wanted what he called a secretary and what I called a tool. He found such a one in me. I don't deny that I did all his dirty work, but I had some feeling of gratitude because he ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... sons whom he had with him, assuring him that the washerman could effect his escape. The King did so, giving up his second son aged twelve years, for the washerman did not dare take the eldest, who was eighteen years old. He handed over the boy, and put him in amongst the dirty clothes, warning him to have no fear and not to cry out even if he felt any pain. In order more safely to pass the guards, the washerman placed on top of all some very foul clothes, such as every one would avoid; and went out crying 'TALLA! TALLA!' which means 'Keep at a distance! keep at a distance!' ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... my preliminary observations, I found Constantinople to be a city of sharp contrasts. The quarters inhabited by your true Ottoman are characteristically clean and comfortable. The remainder of the city except foreign quarters is intolerably dirty. With true Oriental tolerance, the Turk lets things gang their ain gait. The casual observer and traveler always confounds the Turk with the rest of the nondescript mass of humanity that swarms in Constantinople. That is ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... to the audiences. Ben Jonson, in the Induction to his Bartholomew Fair, acted at the Hope in October, 1614, remarks: "And though the Fair be not kept in the same region that some here perhaps would have it, yet think that therein the author hath observed a special decorum, the place being as dirty as Smithfield, and ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... of 1873, as a model, in the warming and ventilation of which much care had been bestowed, was visited in December, 1873. He reports as follows: "I visited several of the rooms, and found the air in all, offensive to the smell, the odor being such as one would imagine old boots, dirty clothes, and perspiration would make if boiled down together;" again, in the new model school-house the hot air enters at two registers in the floor on one side, and makes (or is supposed to make) its exit by a ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... he afterward found out, was very common, if not universal about him. That it was morally reprehensible he had not at that time the ghost of a notion; he considered that it belonged to the category of the 'dirty' only. His father quite neglected this development, believing, I suppose, in the superstition of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
