"Indelicacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have done things—I have scorned all restraint, all laws except those of my desires, and so, perhaps, I am a vandal. Make sure of this, however—I shall not injure you. Christ is no more sacred to me than you, my heart's treasure. You accuse me of indelicacy because I lack the strength to smother my admiration. I adore you; my being dissolves, my veins are afire with longing for you; I am mad with the knowledge that you are mine. Mad? Caramba! I am insane; my mind totters; I grope my way like a man blinded ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... saying, "Pay, pay, every body pays for this." Nothing they got from me; and the wife of the Marabout came afterwards, imploring me to say nothing to her husband. It is thus these rude women will act for money, as many who are better taught, in the streets of London. But acts of indelicacy are nevertheless very rare amongst the mountain tribes. I have seen Arab women at other occasions, on a cold day, standing athwart a smoking fire, with all the smoke ascending under their clothes. This may be expected, and is characteristic of the filthy habits of these wretched ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Oswald, asked if he might give any answer to Franklin about the paper, or rather observed that he supposed he could not then have any answer to it. Under these circumstances, the difficulty with regard to the Canada paper, of which I have no copy, lies more possibly in the indelicacy and perhaps bad policy of bringing forward Franklin where he wished so much not to appear, than in the quoting it from me. I do not wish to be quoted, if there exists the least doubt whether I should. But I cannot more exactly explain to you the whole extent of that doubt, than by showing you that ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... the robe and seizing the card: "Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this is impudence. It's not only impudence, it's indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the very embodiment of refinement, and I've gone about saying so. Now I shall have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send you a bath-robe? Don't prevaricate! Remember that the ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... that dreadful day of blood, to that when the schooner fell into the hands of the savages, few words had passed between them, and these had reference merely to the position in which they found themselves, and whenever Sir Everard felt he could, without indelicacy or intrusion, render himself in the slightest way serviceable to her. The very circumstances under which they had met, conduced to the suppression, if not utter extinction, of all of passion attached to the sentiment with which he had been inspired. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... frailty, refinement, fastidiousness, discrimination, sensitiveness; dainty, tidbit, junket. Antonyms: indelicacy, coarseness, indiscrimination. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... she went on, modestly and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what must actually have been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been so charming), I, who knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked, as though at some indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the excessive recognition bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality. It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote all their generosity, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... feelings perfectly." She looked pointedly at her husband as she spoke, it being one of her late habits to openly refer to their ante-nuptial acquaintance as a natural reaction from the martyrdom of her first marriage, with a quiet indifference that seemed almost an indelicacy. But her husband only said: "As you like, dear," vaguely remembering Dona Rosita as the alleged heroine of a forgotten romance with some earlier American adventurer who had disappeared, and trying vainly to reconcile his wife's sentimental description of ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... deeply moved by this frank, artless confession. He knew there was not a grain of indelicacy or boldness in it; it was simply a truthful expression of a pure and noble nature, the spontaneous outburst of a holy affection responding to the sacred love of his own heart, and the avowal aroused a profound ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the indelicacy comes in. She went out riding with me, which was entirely her own suggestion, and as we were coming home through some meadows she made a quite unnecessary attempt to see if her pony would jump a rather ...
— Reginald • Saki
... dance went on he grew furious with her lack of reserve, her indelicacy. Her good-natured laughter with the men who crowded about her familiarly was a kind of disloyalty. She seemed at times to be exchanging doubtful jests with them; and at last, to protect her from the results of her own fatuity, he danced with her himself—danced almost incessantly, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... his sensitive nature made him tremblingly alive to one risk. He shrank from giving us any inducement to lay bare our own religious emotions. To him and to our mother the needless revelation of the deeper feelings seemed to be a kind of spiritual indelicacy. To encourage children to use the conventional phrases could only stimulate to unreality or actual hypocrisy. He recognised, indeed, the duty of impressing upon us his own convictions, but he spoke only when speaking was a duty. He read ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the office will not cause the ill-results announced by the managers, who regard the existence of the Censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the indelicacy of his ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Yes, it was really a scream, an explosion, too, if the indelicacy may be excused. But the opportunity for a come-back struck her so keenly, so swiftly, that she just could not contain her eagerness to beat somebody ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part, and well dressed. She was incapable of stating the deeps of character; and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something of an indecency—or worse, an indelicacy. She would, in fact, have preferred to deny the deeps. She sets her sitter ever in the drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between the drawing-room and the inner boudoir ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... Such an exhortation was nothing less than a reproach; and such a reproach was a bad return for the gold and the blood which England had lavished in order to make and to keep him a great sovereign. There was a sharp debate, in which Seymour took part. With characteristic indelicacy and want of feeling he harangued the Commons as he had harangued the Court of King's Bench, about his son's death, and about the necessity of curbing the insolence of military men. There were loud complaints that the events of the preceding ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... expect the storm to last more than a day or so. They seldom did, at this time of the year. He had drawn the gloomy picture merely in an attempt to force Miss Wharton to realize the indelicacy of her position. He had thought she would have exhibited perturbation. Instead, she was ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... permitted to doubt; and, in contrasting the book with Fielding's work, it should not be forgotten that, irreproachable though it seemed to the author's admirers, good Dr. Watts complained (and with reason) of the indelicacy ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... Armistice, they took away all these arms; but could they have had the indelicacy to leave some behind in order to be able to justify the impious and sacrilegious robbery they were meditating. This would be odious but not impossible in ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... point. I could not commit the gross indelicacy of saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or words to that effect. Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition that a living second husband—stretching the imagination to the hypothesis of her ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable, and is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy and unscrupulousness in the pursuit of science or sordid gain are not such as to make many eager to be preserved for a similar disposition when the present shall have become a similarly ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... is intolerable; and by indispensably softening down the incidents, he has killed the spirit of that humour, gross and farcical, that pervades the original. When the work was first mentioned to me, I protested as strongly as possible against admitting any coarseness and indelicacy, so that my conscience is clear of countenancing aught of that kind. So great is my admiration of Chaucer's genius, and so profound my reverence for him. . . for spreading the light of Literature through his native land, that, notwithstanding ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... of the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty; Bingham admits she was "beautiful for a Polynesian"; and her husband cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beside myself. I accused her of indelicacy. She made the same accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... certain sense of shame has begun to invade the privacy of our brain. We feel that to answer that letter now would be an indelicacy. Better to pretend that we never got it. By and by Bill will write again and then we will answer promptly. We put the letter back in the middle of the heap and think what a fine chap Bill is. But he knows we love him, so it doesn't ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... issue that difficult case in the family of the Sultan of Mingrelia (you will observe that I use a fictitious name). I can assure you, Lord Embleton, that polygamy presents problems almost insoluble; problems of extreme delicacy—or indelicacy.' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... more respectful of property, avoid using another's dwelling until it is abandoned by its proprietor, and no reproach of indelicacy can be addressed to the Gobius minutus, a fish which lives on our coasts at the mouth of rivers. The female lays beneath overturned shells, remains of Oysters, or Cardium shells. The valve is buried ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... his lips of evil towards any human being. The barriers today between the smoking room and the drawing room are shadowy things, and she knew very well that he was held in a somewhat curious respect by men, as a person to whom it was impossible to tell a story in which there was any shadow of indelicacy. The ways of the so-called man of world seemed in his presence as though they must be the ways of some creature of a different and a lower stage of existence. A young man whom he had once corrected had christened him, half jestingly, Sir ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... teeth, which were all that, in the front of his mouth, fate had left him; and then, as if alarmed at the indelicacy of a smile upon such a subject, pushed back his chair, and twitched up ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... out he watched Sally with close and what he fancied was unobtrusive attention while she ate, and though he was sensible of the indelicacy of this, he was once more relieved to find that she did nothing that was actually repugnant to him. After all, there was a certain daintiness about the girl, and her frank appreciation of the good things set before her only amused him. She was certainly much more amusing than Agatha had been ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... now eagerly sought, not only in the United States, where they in later times first proved their capability, but also in foreign countries. Medical universities, the sage faculties of which once frowned with scorn upon "women who would be guilty of the indelicacy of pushing themselves into the medical profession," now gladly open their doors to them; the more candid of the professors admitting that the "indelicacy," not to say indecency, is upon the side of men who would push themselves into ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... everything and everybody, and has to hear misplaced and exaggerated praises of himself, and censures equally inappropriate, which are intolerable when the man is sober, and, besides being intolerable, are published all over the world in all their indelicacy and wearisomeness when ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... that they should all ascend to the banquette. The persons who had the other two seats there would of course be willing to change for the coupe; or at least, since the coupe was considered the best place, there would be no indelicacy in asking them ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... graceful gesture of acknowledgment. He had taken but a few steps, when the thought occurred to me that he must have come from within the perplexing structure by some secret door, and that he could unravel its mystery. I was impelled to follow him, and proceeded hastily to do so, when the indelicacy of my intrusion on one evidently connected with the grief which the monument was designed to commemorate, flashed upon me, and I suddenly paused. He probably observed my rapid footsteps and their pause, for he turned toward me, when in a confused manner ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... you have Philosophy enough to be capable of bearing the Mention of your Faults. Your Papers which regard the fallen Part of the Fair Sex, are, I think, written with an Indelicacy, which makes them unworthy to be inserted in the Writings of a Moralist who knows the World. I cannot allow that you are at Liberty to observe upon the Actions of Mankind with the Freedom which you seem to resolve upon; at ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele |
