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Ready-made   /rˈɛdi-meɪd/   Listen
Ready-made

noun
1.
A manufactured artifact (as a garment or piece of furniture) that is made in advance and available for purchase.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Ready-made" Quotes from Famous Books



... as breakfast was over, the girls took Myrtle out with them to some of the shops, fitting her to shoes and gloves and having her try on some ready-made gowns so that they might be quickly altered for her use. Patsy also bought her a set of soft and pretty furs, thinking she might need them on the journey if the weather continued cool, and this seemed to cap ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne

... that in the highest things we depend upon the key-note of the soul. Knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the Mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it him ready-made! The Mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the necessary ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... in the glass. He wore no longer the well-cut clothes of Mr. Douglas Romilly's Saville Row tailor, but a ready-made suit of Schmitt & Mayer's business reach-me-downs, an American ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... to the lawn looking his most spruce; he had evidently tried to tidy himself, having shaved and put on a clean collar of extraordinarily antiquated make. His clothes might have had "American ready-made" written upon them. He advanced towards them slowly, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... it was even necessary to clear the face of the earth of it, in order to save our faith in God. At the same time Dr. Gordon said frankly that he had no other as complete and finished system to put in place of it. Was he justified in telling the truth about Calvinism because he has not a ready-made scheme to substitute ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... was not the founder of "Sinn Fein," nor was he the originator of the Labour Movement in Ireland: he found both ready-made and used them to serve his own ideals for the future of Ireland and thus can ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... best, these things help him little with us, because his imagination was cold. It loved nothing, it lost itself in nothing, its efforts never gave it the heartache. It went about trying this and that, concocting cold pictures after cold receipts, dealing in the second-hand, in the ready-made, and putting into its performances a little of everything but itself. When you see so many things in a composition you might suppose that among them all some charm might be born; yet they're really but the hundred mouths through which you may hear the unhappy ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... he had moved it for. He thought of his experience as a gambler, since the boys had talked about gambling. He thought of the time he went to a State fair, when he was a boy, right fresh off the farm, with his white shirt his mother had sat up the night before to iron for him, his ready-made black frock-coat that the sun had faded out on the shoulders, the old brown slouch hat he had traded another one for with a lightning rod peddler, his shoes blacked with stove blacking, instead of being greased, as usual. He thought ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck

... Saddletree, in high dudgeon, "that ye ken naething about these matters. In Sir William Wallace's days there was nae man pinned down to sic a slavish wark as a saddler's, for they got ony leather graith that they had use for ready-made out of Holland." ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... be quite as many casualties,' quoth Tom, indulging in some of the current ready-made wit on the dangers of volunteering, for the pure purpose of teasing; but he was vigorously fallen upon by Harry and Ethel, and Averil brightened as she heard him put to the rout. The shots were already heard, when two more black figures ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... out of a leather case to another and very youthful gentleman with a yellow goatee, and a pair of lovers debating some fine shade (in the other). But the centre-piece and great attraction was a little old man, in a black, ready-made surtout, which was obviously a recent purchase. On the marble table in front of him, beside a sandwich and a glass of beer, there lay a battered forage cap. His hand fluttered abroad with oratorical gestures; his voice, naturally shrill, was plainly ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... the New Testament we find, as we might expect, a much clearer testimony to the reality of the conscience. The word came into the hands of the New Testament writers ready-made, but they gave to it a richer meaning, so that it is to them we must go if we would understand the nature and the supremacy of the conscience. The term occurs thirty-one times in the New Testament, but it does not appear ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... different from his usual self as he looked. A good part of his identity as a poor, discontented and somewhat lazy young lawyer was hanging in the closet with his ready-made business suit. He took a long and noisy drink from the pitcher on the wash-stand, picked up his shot-gun and slipped cautiously out of the ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... obvious, had been purchased by them "ready-made," and had been designed, originally, for the sons of a less stalwart community. The young men were especially pinched as to their expansive chests, the broadcloth coming much too short at this point, and shrugging up oddly enough ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... reason. This thing is good and that is evil, because it is good and because it is evil, and not because of what has been said or written. It is the opposite of traditional bidding. There is no tradition of the good. Wealth and power must be earned, not taken ready-made; the idea of what is just or right must be reconstructed on every occasion and not be ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... "Why should we accept ready-made standards?" Edgar said. "None of the great governing forces of life can fit into a ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... luckily did no more than turn the handle; or she never could have escaped bouncing in upon the lovers' interview, and thereby occasioning a chaos of confusion. For, be it whispered, the step-dame was not a little jealous of her ready-made daughter's beauty, persisted in calling her a child, and treated her any thing but kindly and sisterly, as her full-formed woman's loveliness might properly have looked for. Only imagine, if the Hecate had ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... still sitting when there was a knock, which Mr. Pyecroft answered. The cabinet-maker entered. He wore a slouching, ready-made suit and a celluloid collar with ready-made bow tie snapped by an elastic over his collar-button—the conventional garb of the artisan who aspires for the air of gentlemanliness while at work. His face, though fresh-shaven, was dark with the sub-cutaneous stubble of ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott

... it, but never made much of it till a few months back, when the old man an' the boy came suddenly on some rich ground, where the silver was shovelled up in buckets. In course I don't rightly know what like silver is when first got hold on. It ain't in ready-made dollars, I dare say, but anyhow, they say this Conrad'll be as rich as a nabob; an' he's got a pretty darter too, as has bin lost the most of her life, and just turned up at the same time wi' the silver. I don't rightly know if they dug her up in the mine, but there she is, an' she's goin' up ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne

... so has everybody else. I once knew a fellow who wrote very good poetry; but few of us understood it. That man lost his labour. It is nature that makes poetry; the poet has merely found out the art of stirring it in the hearts of men, where it lies ready-made, like the perfume of a flower. A poet who is not understood only makes a noise; and he is the greatest poet who makes the greatest number of human hearts to leap and tingle. But the fellow I mean piqued himself on not being understood. Like the Yankee Noodle, he cut capers that had no intelligible ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... mine clustered exclusively about the practice of the arts, the life of Latin Quarter students, and the world of Paris as depicted by that grimy wizard, the author of the Comedie Humaine. I was not disappointed—I could not have been; for I did not see the facts, I brought them with me ready-made. Z. Marcas lived next door to me in my ungainly, ill-smelling hotel of the Rue Racine; I dined at my villainous restaurant with Lousteau and with Rastignac: if a curricle nearly ran me down at a street-crossing, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... or Niger-basin, has a population estimated at forty millions, ready, if a market be opened, to flock to it with agricultural and industrial products, including iron, copper, and gold. Meanwhile the Joliba (Black Water), with the Benuwe and other tributaries, offers a ready-made waterway for thousands of miles. Sierra Leone lies only 400 miles, less than half, from the Niger; but what would the Colonial Office say if a similar military line were proposed? Nor can we console ourselves by the feeble excuse that Senegal ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... doubted that the permeation of a great mass of the German people by the socialistic conceptions which in their bearing on women have been rendered so familiar by Bebel's exposition has furnished, as it were, a ready-made sounding-board which has given resonance and effect to voices which might otherwise have ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... is not exactly new. You can't possibly mistake a man who means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an introductory lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I found all its erudition was taken ready-made from D'Israeli. If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way. But one can generally tell these wholesale thieves easily enough, and they are not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... some three score of years ago when the Micmacs first settled in this bay. The next oldest person is John Bernard, who is about eighty. Few of them were even fairly well clothed; the majority were in rags. A few wore home-made deer-skin boots, but most of them had purchased ready-made boots or shoes. They make deer-skin boots by scraping caribou skin, and tanning it in a decoction of spruce bark. Such boots are, they state, worn through in a few days. The women can spin wool, and knit stockings. Their food consists chiefly of flour, ...
— Report by the Governor on a Visit to the Micmac Indians at Bay d'Espoir - Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous. No. 54. Newfoundland • William MacGregor

... two holes in the sides to admit the arms, and the body being passed into it, it is worn in time of rain. Hence the saying of the old missionaries, that in the "forests of America garments were found ready-made on ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... old-fashioned in his attire, with just a dash of bonhomie. This implies that he wore a wrinkled frock coat and low-cut waistcoat. But he had discarded the black string tie that goes with it for a white ready-made bow as being more suitable to the role of philanthropist. The bonhomie he supplied by not buttoning the two ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass

... rest of France. I have not put my foot in the place since 1825, in order to testify the abhorrence with which it inspires me. You are an educated, sensible young man, and, I trust, a good Frenchman. Very well! Is it right, I ask, that Paris shall every morning send out to us our ideas ready-made, and that all France shall become a mere humble, servile faubourg to the capital? Do me the favor, I pray ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... don't mean by this that I want you to be one of those fellows who swell out like a ready-made shirt and brag that they "never borrow and never lend." They always think that this shows that they are sound, conservative business men, but, as a matter of fact, it simply stamps them as mighty ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... equipped factory. One by one, many of the housewife's tasks also have been taken from the home. To-day the processes of cloth making are practically unknown outside the factory. Knitting has become largely a machine industry. Ready-made clothing has largely reduced the sewing done in the home. In the matter of food, the housekeeper may, if she chooses, have a large part of her work performed by the baker, the canner, and the delicatessen shopkeeper. Even the care of ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson

... phrases in the splendour of their dramatic context in Macbeth and Hamlet casts shame upon their daily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither the time to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, so he borrows his sentences ready-made, and applies them in rough haste to purposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought in the material that has been woven into consistency by ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh

... absence, he was but dimly conscious of the difference. He was still fighting a battle in which a susceptible heart and a reasonable mind had locked horns in a well-nigh hopeless conflict. Reason, common-sense, the instinctive ready-made judgments of his training and environment,—the deep-seated prejudices of race and caste,—commanded him to dismiss Rena from his thoughts. His stubborn heart simply would not ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... say just now that we looked at the shops, and that I made a purchase in the town? A boy's ready-made suit—not at all a bad fit for Kitty! Mrs. Linley put on the suit, and tucked up the child's hair under a straw hat, in an empty yard—no idlers about in that bad weather. We said good-by, and parted, with grievous ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey

... small thing then, that what was left of him now was very poor and rather ridiculous. Outside his former trade and his family life he knew nothing, and wished to know nothing. On every subject he had ideas ready-made, dating from his youth. He pretended to some knowledge of the arts, but he clung to certain hallowed names of men, about whom he was forever reiterating his emphatic formulae: everything else was naught and had never been. When modern interests were mentioned he would ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. It is strange. Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one. It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting, it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone. It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... freedom loving Nature had conspired to aid the Americans by shaping the field of battle. Huge boulders had been left by the glacier, the potent rays of the April sun made dense masses of verdure in willows, which thus became an ally of the pine. Stone fences and haystacks became ready-made fortifications, and every rising spot was filled with irate hostile yeoman who harried them with aim true and deadly. They soon began to run and leave their wounded behind, and in place of a retreat their disorderly ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... Milt—— Claire didn't make him so nervous that he thought of his clothes, but the maid did. He was certain that she knew that he had blacked his own shoes, knew how old were his clothes. He was urging himself, "Must get new suit tomorrow—ready-made—mustn't forget, now—be sure—get suit tomorrow." He wanted to apologize to the maid for existing.... He wouldn't dare to fall in love with the maid.... And he'd kill the man who said he could be fool enough to fall in ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... the Cook; but she never did any cooking, because the dinner had been bought ready-made, in a box ...
— The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter • Beatrix Potter

... the store of ready-made balloons, but by a week later the first of those being specially manufactured was ready, and conveyed in safety from the city no less a personage ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... has been the subject of so much controversy that he is the one American writer whom high-school pupils (not to mention teachers) are likely to approach with ready-made prejudices. It is impossible to treat such a subject in quite the ordinary matter-of-course way. Furthermore, his writings are so highly subjective, and so intimately connected with his strongly ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... Ray Lankester has sought to express in the simplest terms the implications of the increase in size of the cerebrum. "In what," he asks, "does the advantage of a larger cerebral mass consist?" "Man," he replies "is born with fewer ready-made tricks of the nerve-centres—these performances of an inherited nervous mechanism so often called by the ill-defined term 'instincts'—than are the monkeys or any other animal. Correlated with the absence of inherited ready-made mechanism, man has a greater capacity of developing in the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... Mississippi; the Missouri and Ohio, which fall into the Mississippi near St. Louis; the Platte and Kansas Rivers, tributaries of the Missouri; the Illinois, and the Wisconsin. All these are open to steamers, and all of them traverse regions rich in corn, in coal, in metals, or in timber. These ready-made highways of the world center, as it were, at St. Louis, and make it the depot of the carrying trade of all that vast country. Minnesota is 1500 miles above New Orleans, but the wheat of Minnesota can be brought down the whole distance without change of the vessel in which it is first deposited. ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... length, the carriage stopped at a place I have since ascertained to be near Hatton Garden, on Holborn Hill. We alighted, and walked into a house, between two motionless pages, excessively well dressed. At first, they startled me, but I soon discovered they were immense waxen dolls. It was a ready-made clothes warehouse into which we had entered. We went upstairs, and I was soon equipped with three excellent suits. My grief had now settled down into a sullen resentment, agreeably relieved, at ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... taken to get the credit of it, is fully revealed by the proviso, which was framed in such a way as to nullify the law, for the express accommodation of slaveholding gentlemen murdering their slaves. All such find in this proviso a convenient accomplice before the fact, and a packed jury, with a ready-made verdict of 'not guilty,' both gratuitously furnished by the government! The preceding law and proviso are to be found in Haywood's Manual, 530; also in Laws of Tennessee, Act of October 23, 1791; ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... to ready-made clothes, and other furnishings, for seamen, by Maydman, in 1691. In Chaucer's time, sloppe meant a sort of breeches. In a MS. account of the wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth, is an order to John Fortescue for the delivery of some Naples ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... against the bill—every other political subject was left in abeyance. The measure once passed, and the Compromise repealed, the first natural impulse was to combine, organize, and agitate for its restoration. This was the ready-made, common ground ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... air, tasting the glass of sweetened water, and settling himself in his place; then he started a babble of words without sense, with the nauseous facility of the bar; misusing vague ideas, abstract terms, and words in ly and ion, stereotyped words, and ready-made phrases. A flattering murmur greeted the end of his exordium; for the French people in general, and the political world in particular, manifest a depraved taste for that sort of eloquence. Encouraged, the fine speaker entered the heart of his subject, and cynically sang his recantation. ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... place, are things by no means unparalleled even in the most manufacturing town in England. But that his butcher and baker should strike against their customer was a new experience hardly to be explained on any ready-made theory. I confess that I was so much astonished that I preferred waiting for facts before committing myself to any explanation. At this moment I have no hesitation in stating that the tradespeople of ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... organisation like the Y.M.C.A. has control of concert parties and lecturers who are sent round to various huts, thus greatly lightening the labour of the local workers. The camp canteen had no organisation behind it, and could command no ready-made entertainments. In the sweat of our brows we earned such concerts as we had, and any one who has ever got up a concert, even at home, knows how much sweating such activities involve. In the end, moved by pity at our plight, ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... terms are known only to you and me; hence when the time comes, I shall repeat them, and my son will recognise his father." Signed: "Your Unknown Benefactor." (He hums it over twice and replaces it. Then, fingering the gold.) Gold! The yellow enchantress, happiness ready-made and laughing in my face! Gold: what is gold? The world; the term of ills; the empery of all; the multitudinous babble of the 'Change, the sailing from all ports of freighted argosies; music, wine, a palace; the doors of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson

... appearance, he had gold rings in his ears, and he wore a great, heavy gold chain across his waistcoat, and was dressed in a new suit of blue serge, somewhat large for him, that he had evidently purchased at a ready-made-clothing shop, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher

... too, eh?" Men who I knew had never been in the army in their lives, all had furloughs. Where so many men ever got furloughs from I never knew; but I know now. They were like the old bachelor who married the widow with ten children—he married a "ready-made" family. They had ready-made furloughs. But I have said enough on the furlough question; it enthralled me—let it pass; don't want any more furloughs. But while on my furlough, I got with Captain G. M. V. Kinzer, a fine-dressed and handsome cavalry captain, whom all the ladies (as they do at ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins

... still another police surprise during these swivel-chair days. I discovered there was on the Zone a yellow tailor who made Beau Brummel uniforms at $7.50, compared with which the $5 ready-made ones were mere clothes. All my life long I had been laboring under the delusion that a uniform is merely a uniform. ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... Riverside Drive. There they would sit speechless, she in a faded blue serge skirt with a crisp, washed-out shirtwaist, and an old sailor hat— dark and pretty, in spite of her troubled face; he in a ready-made black serge suit, yet very much the gentleman—pale and listless. Their eyes would seek out any steamer in the river below, or anything else that reminded them of other conditions. He would hum a bit from an opera. They needed no words; their faces were ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... care the flower woke into loveliness, how without weaving these leaves were woven, how without toiling these complex tissues spun themselves, and how without any effort or friction the whole slowly came ready-made from the loom of God in its more than Solomon-like glory. "So," He says, making the application beyond dispute, "you care-worn, anxious men must grow. You, too, need take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or what ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... slumber! By and by comes along the State, God's vicar. Does she say, 'My poor, forlorn foster-child! Behold here a force which I will make dig and plant and build for me'? Not so, but, 'Here is a recruit ready-made to my hand, a piece of destroying energy lying unprofitably idle.' So she claps an ugly gray suit on him, puts a musket in his grasp, and sends him off, with Gubernatorial and other godspeeds, to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... impersonated, then real, true and original talent will be revealed, new ideas will be discovered which will no longer be guided by the author and stage manager and theatrical director, but which will be free, untrammelled, and no longer ready-made emotions." ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and "hems," smiled, smirked and went brazenly through ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In fact, those will be halcyon days. ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky

... near destruction or deposition of a prince who was opposing God and Heaven. The soil was manured by treason, and the sowers made haste to use their opportunity. Thus especially was there danger in those wandering encampments of "outlandish people," whose habits rendered them the ready-made missionaries of sedition; whose swarthy features might hide a Spanish heart, and who in telling fortunes might readily dictate policy.[306] Under the disguise of gipsies, the emissaries of the emperor or the pope might pass unsuspected from the Land's End to Berwick-upon-Tweed, penetrating the secrets ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... in the old days would have found little beauty in our grouping. I have our two photographs at hand in this bureau as I write, and they show me a gawky youth in ill-fitting ready-made clothing, and Nettie—Indeed Nettie is badly dressed, and her attitude is more than a little stiff; but I can see her through the picture, and her living brightness and something of that mystery of charm she had for me, comes back again to my mind. Her face ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... mean. There is a shop of ready-made clothing at the Needle Woman's Aid, corner of the next square. I can get out there and ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... She wore a cheap, ready-made blouse, with absurd little bows tacked on down the front, which Ethel longed to abolish with one sweep, and her skirt, which had shrunk considerably in front, sagged ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... better have waited till you made her acquaintance. You can't pick and choose in a hurry, when you must have a ready-made aunt, my dear sir. Myself, I prefer small women. They are ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... rainless tracts, their piedmont districts regularly develop permanent cultivation. Here periodic rains or melting snows on the ranges fill the drainage streams, whose inundation often converts their alluvial banks into ready-made fields. The reliability of the water supply anchors here the winter villages of the nomads, which become centers of a limited agriculture, while the pasture lands beyond the irrigated strips support his flocks and herds. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... who came next in the path of progress, having a machine ready-made, so to speak, and having nothing to do but to get into it and fly, did not, in many cases, exercise this saving grace of caution. And that—at least in my view—is why a good many of what one may call the second flight of ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton

... ready to go into service; a life that has some drawbacks, but should at any rate be wholesome and civilising,—a better preparation for marriage, too, than to sit like a slattern over a machine all day, and buy scraps of expensive ready-made food, because both time and skill are wanting for anything more palatable. In the kitchen I visited there were sixteen children from the poorest families in the neighbourhood, and, assisted by a superintendent and two teachers, they ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... nobody is responsible for what he says. Each is there as in the theater, unknown among the unknown, requiring sensational impressions and strong emotions, a prey to the contagion of the passions around him, borne along in the whirl of sounding phrases, of ready-made news, growing rumors, and other exaggerations by which fanatics keep outdoing each other. There are shouting, tears, applause, stamping and clapping, as at the performance of a tragedy; one or another individual becomes so inflamed and hoarse that he dies on the spot ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... People's Friend was now perfectly delighted. He told us this was exactly what he could most have wished for. "Here is a bob," said he, "for the horizontals and perpendiculars, and there is a capital ready-made cauda for his majesty and his majesty's first-cousin! A Leaphighized Leaplower, more especially if there be a dash of caricature about him, is the very thing in our diplomacy." Finding matters so much to his mind, the judge made out the letter of appointment ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... tides of trade were not yet loosed, and they found a quiet corner of the cafe. Kernan, well dressed, slightly swaggering, self-confident, seated himself opposite the little detective, with his pale, sandy mustache, squinting eyes and ready-made cheviot suit. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... that silence which is far more expressive than words? May it not brighten our eyes and quicken our pulse, though our lips look so neutral and dumb? Does any one doubt it? Anyone at least, whose own keen perceptions have left him above the necessity of falling in with the ready-made judgments and opinions of the ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... pastoral stage man brought animals under subjection and discipline. An animal is a machine, ready-made, that needs only to be trained to obedience; but this training has required and stimulated all sorts of inventions, from the harness with which to equip it, to the chariots, wagons, and roads with which and on which ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... ready-made all the things necessary for the life and happiness of mankind. In order to obtain these things we have to Work. The only rational labour is that which is directed to the creation of those things. Any kind of work which does not help us to attain this object is a ridiculous, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... shopping was a difficult matter. Rose, with her uncommon figure, could hardly find anything ready-made to suit her. I had to hunt about and to contrive with thought, for I would not wait a single day. I was careful to select the quietest and most usual things for her, so as to conceal her rusticity as far as possible. The neat ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc

... Sir George was not so good a maker as cobbler. That he meant honestly by the boy I am sure, and not the less sure for the confession I am forced to make, that on each occasion when he thus failed to fit him, he sold the boots the next day at a fair price to a ready-made shop, and drank the proceeds. A stranger thing still was, that, although Gibbie had never yet worn boot or shoe, his father's conscience was greatly relieved by the knowledge that he spent his Sundays in making boots for him. Had he been an ordinary child, and given him trouble, he would possibly ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... time came we were not clothed so we could comfortably go to church. I earnestly asked our Father to show me, within a week, which was right for us to do: to go in debt for clothes, or stay at home. Within that week, I received a large package of ready-made clothing. The clothing came from a source I never thought ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... have ceased—they have evaporated together with energy amongst the affectations of the boudoir and the cajolements of women. There are fledglings of forty, old doctors of sixty years. The wealthy obtain in Paris ready-made wit and science—formulated opinions which save them the need of having wit, science, or opinion of their own. The irrationality of this world is equaled by its weakness and its licentiousness. It is greedy of time to the point ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... one stately entrance-gate after another; entrances with high Georgian, carved stone gateposts surmounted with vases, probably sent out ready-made from England; Adam entrances, with sphinxes and the stereotyped Adam semi-circular railings, all very imposing, and all alike derelict. Beyond the florid wrought-iron gates the gravel drives disappear under a uniform sea of grass; ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... in his clothes—for they were ready-made—made for the figure of youth, and although he had been in them but a few hours, the padding was bulging at the wrong places; and they were wrinkled where they should be tight. His bony old figure stuck out at the knees, and the shoulders and elbows, and the high collar would ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... of ready-made sailor's clothes, with hat complete, he put them into his basket, hired a vehicle, and drove to Fairham. In the morning at nine o'clock he walked along the main road towards Cosham till he reached the turning to Porchester, went down it a couple of hundred yards, and ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty

... But, look here—a young man, brought up among students, cannot possibly possess, ready-made, all this consideration that a woman's nature requires. He doesn't become a married man in one day, but by degrees. He cannot make a clean sweep of his habits and take up the silken bonds of duty, all in a ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... now, Elsie, but could you not have learned to love him? It is not to be supposed that a girl has a ready-made attachment to be given to the first man who sees fit to ask her; she must take a ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... pages of the "Laokoeon" to the shield of Achilles; to Homer's craft in depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus' hammer: so that we are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of being wearied by a description of the ready-made article; so also (if one may presume to add anything to Lessing) that we are cunningly flattered in a sense that the shield is being made for us. Well, that is one artifice out of many: but if you would gauge at all Homer's resource and subtlety in technique ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... He bought a ready-made suit of blue cloth, not unlike that worn by the district telegraph boys of to-day, which he judged would look more suitable than his ordinary attire for the character he was about to assume of a ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... the back of a chair; "this is good enough for me. No Green Lake in mine! I'll send for my trunk"—he had begun to whistle in the pauses of his thought—"and put up my fight right here. Filmer's good stuff; and there's a job ready-made for me, I bet! This is where I was sent, and ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... which, for the present, has already given excellent results. We can destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent. Without fear of deceiving ourselves, we can restore the child to the environment which entices it, the environment of nature in which he will be in contact with all that he loves, and in which impressions ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... proposed was, to establish a paper that, without supporting any of the old parties in the State, should be as Liberal in its politics as in its Churchmanship. But there was a preliminary point which they also could not get over. All the ready-made editors of the kingdom, if I may so speak, had declared against them; and for want of an editor, their meeting had succeeded in originating, not the intended newspaper, but merely a formal recognition, in a few resolutions, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... on my mettle. I knew that I was right, and that they were simply stealing the public domain. Then, as I hung on, it became apparent that there was a man's work cut out for somebody up here. I've taken the ready-made job." ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith. It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen. But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was plainly dressed. His clothing was of the cheap, ready-made variety, worn nearly to shabbiness and matched by a gray flannel shirt with a flowing black tie, knotted at the throat, and a soft gray hat that was a bit weatherstained. His shoes were shabby and unshined. His whole appearance was out of keeping with ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum

... anew accustomed to the strangeness of the apparition. Before the visit was over, wee Davie would be playing with the dangles of his pipes, and laying his ear to the bag out of which he thought the music came ready-made. And Willie was particularly fond of Davie, and tried to make himself agreeable to him after a hundred grotesque fashions. The awe, however, was constantly renewed in his absence, partly by the threats of the Kelpie, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... by herself and two daughters, who were her assistants. Mrs. Griffing opened three industrial schools, where the women were taught to sew;[26] a price was set on their labors, and they were paid in ready-made garments. The Secretary aided in the purchase of suitable cloth, and with that sent from the North, such outfits were ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... haven't fretted over it, though when I think of the millions and millions of stitches I've taken in twenty years, I wonder I haven't turned into a sewing-machine. But I've got to the stopping-point now. It's more'n likely I'll buy my own clothes ready-made, after this." ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... to obtain. On her side Montalais was no miser with stories. By her means Malicorne learnt all that passed at Blois, in the family of the dowager Madame; and he related to Manicamp tales that made him ready to die with laughing, which the latter, out of idleness, took ready-made to M. de Guiche, who carried ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... army means, for Roland, going into every possible temptation and expense—that would not do. But he ought to be away from this little town. He will be making mischief if he cannot find it ready-made." ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... several times mentions[319] Matri-cakras, that is circles sacred to the Mothers or tantric goddesses. In Nepal and Tibet tantric Buddhism is fully developed but these countries have received so much from India that they exhibit not a parallel growth, but late Indian Tantrism as imported ready-made from Bengal. It is here that we come nearest to the origins of Tantrism, for though the same beliefs may have flourished in Udyana and Kashmir they did not spread much in the Panjab or Hindustan, where their ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... to him in the form of a drenching rain, and he shivered a little under the thin, ready-made overcoat he had bought from a ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... form all the arguments of Haeckel, because they are those which are repeated—in varying tones, and with expressions which differ from his only to lose precision and eloquence—by those opponents of socialism who love to appear scientific, and who, for polemical convenience, make use of those ready-made or stereotyped phrases which have currency, even in science, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... vestas and dress materials, flannel, hardware and soft goods, canned provisions and patent medicines, cotton for tents, boots, hats, flour, galvanized iron for roofs and water-tanks, barbed wire, kerosene oil, "reach-me-downers" or ready-made tweed suits, moleskins and Crimean shirts, sheath knives, cartridges and firearms, fire and life assurance proposals, postal notes, postage stamps, and money orders, as well as a few other minor details which might from ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... she stood as near to naked truth as it was possible to get. Here were none of the forms of words, none of the explanations, none of the ready-made answers of the catechism. Here were just two men. One was a bad man, a man of evil life. He was dying. In a few moments his soul must go—somewhere. The other was a good man. To-day he had risked his life to save the lives ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... abusing and overworking the word intrigue to-day. Sir Arthur Quillercouch on page 81 of his book "On the Art of Writing" uses it: "We are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of being wearied by a description of the ready-made article." Mrs. Sidgwick in "Salt and Savour," page 232, wrote: "But what intrigued her was Little Mamma's remark at breakfast," From the Parliamentary news, one learns that "Mr. Harcourt intrigued the House of Commons by his ...
— Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases • Grenville Kleiser

... who consents to be loved—should seek occupation among those worthy firms who warrant a fit in ready-made ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... a suit of ready-made sailor's clothes, with hat complete, he put them into his basket, hired a vehicle, and drove to Fairham. In the morning at nine o'clock he walked along the main road towards Cosham till he reached the turning to Porchester, went down it a couple of hundred yards, and sat on a grassy ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty

... the Scarborough folk used Oliver's Mount, the isolated hill at the back of the town, as a ready-made barometer, for they ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home

... in frontier life had made her self-reliant, lent me some patterns, and I bought some of John Smith's calico and went to work to make gowns suited to the hot weather. This was in 1877, and every one will remember that the ready-made house-gowns were not to be had in those days in the excellence and profusion in which they can to-day be found, in all parts of ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... obvious enough. The fellow's behaviour is detestable; he looks at you from head to foot as if you were applying for a place in his stable. Whenever I want an example of a contemptible aristocrat, there's Eldon ready-made. Contemptible, because he's such a sham; as if everybody didn't know his history ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... upper leather to keep the cold air from coming in; and also porous enough to let the perspiration out. Your feet are not exactly like those of any one else; and yet you expect to find at any shoe store a comfortable shoe ready-made. You expect that shoe to come close to your foot, and yet allow you to move it with perfect freedom. You expect all these good qualities, and what is more remarkable, it does not seem difficult for most people to get them. There is an old saying, "To ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan

... have kissed Mr. Boltay's boots again, but the worthy man escaped from the sentimental creature in time, and employed the half-hour during which he was absent from her in scouring about the slop-shops and collecting all sorts of ready-made garments, and returned home with a complete suit, which Mrs. Meyer, despite her lady-like squeamishness, was obliged to put on instead of ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... attitude," he rejoined with amusement. "So long as you don't bring over a ready-made standard to measure our shortcomings by, we'll explain all we can. In fact, it's a thing we're fond of doing." Then his tone grew grave. "But I haven't seen your father since this morning. Is he at ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... man the beautiful and sublime. But here again he is better served at second-hand. He prefers to have them ready-made in art rather than seek them painfully in nature. This instinct for imitation in art has the advantage of being able to make those points essential that nature has made secondary. While nature suffers violence in the organic world, or exercises violence, working with power upon man, though ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... and an impromptu indignation meeting. Stanning had gone to work scientifically. From the moment that, ducking under the guard of a sturdy town youth, he had caught sight of Sheen retreating from the fray, he had grasped the fact that here, ready-made, was his chance of working off his grudge against him. All he had to do was to spread the news abroad, and the school would do the rest. On his return from the town he had mentioned the facts of the ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse

... existence which the older writers had ignored. He showed with wonderful force that the mere common details of everyday life were filled with drama, that, to him who had eyes to see, there might be significance in a ready-made suit of clothes, and passion in the furniture of a boarding-house. Money in particular gave him an unending theme. There is hardly a character in the whole vast range of his creation of whose income we are not exactly ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... was, however, rather an agreeable mystery, and she saw him feature by feature, without appearing to lift her eyes. It was too bad that he had been foolish enough to discard his becoming costume of the morning for a conventional suit of clothes, which, it was painfully certain, he must have bought ready-made. The things did not fit too well, though they had probably cost a good deal, and they were astonishingly like advertisements of men's clothes which Angela had seen in American magazines on shipboard. They did their best to give him his money's worth, by spoiling his splendid looks and turning ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... evening's rice, and, accompanied by a small boy, his son by a former marriage, he went to seek for fish in one of the swamps at the back of the village. These marshy places, which are to be found in the neighbourhood of many Malay Kampongs, are ready-made rice fields, but since the cultivation of a padi swamp requires more exacting labour than most Malays are prepared to bestow upon it, they are often left to lie fallow, while crops are grown in clearings on the neighbouring hills. In dry weather the cracked, parched earth, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... shipbuilding yard, or a locomotive shop. He could find the strain at any part of an iron frame building by the differential and integral calculus to the millionth of an ounce, but the everyday technical routine work with volumes of ready-made tables was unfamiliar and uncongenial to him; he would rather have calculated the tables themselves. The true science of mathematics is the most imaginative and creative of all sciences, but the mere application ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford

... came—a serious young man with a ready-made necktie, who had escaped the city's brand of frivolity—an electrician earning 30 dollars per week who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and thought her embroidered waist a web in which any fly should delight to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... different strips of land that remain uncovered in the midst of the flood, or attempt to force their way through the waters until they perish from fatigue. Along the banks of the river the inhabitants have rafts ready-made, on which they remove themselves, their cattle, and their provisions, and which they then fasten with ropes or grape-vines to the larger trees, while they contemplate the melancholy spectacle presented by the current, as it carries off their houses and wood-yards piece by piece. ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous

... that her figure would be one of her chief assets as a player. And ready-made clothes fitted her with very slight alterations—showing that she had a model figure. The advertisements she had cut out were for cloak models. Within an hour after she left Forty-fourth Street, she found at Jeffries and Jonas, in Broadway a few doors below Houston, a vacancy ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... last," replied the new-comer heartily. "You and I've had a friendship switched on for us ready-made, so to speak. I liked your letters awfully. Glad ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... Cuffs and a ready-made Tie, he had a Rating, so a certain Promoter with an Office in Broad Street found it advisable to ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade

... dealt with simply enough. There is just so much cloth to be had and just so many young and two-legged persons to be covered with it—and that is the end of it. The growing child walks down the years—turns every corner of life—with Vistas of Ready-Made Clothing hanging before him, closing behind him. Unless he shall fit himself to these clothes—he is given to understand—down the pitying, staring world he shall go, naked, all his days, like a ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... grumbles, old-fashioned villagers will say, "Ah, they misses the poor man, ye see!" But the idea is too abstract to be followed to its logical conclusion. The people do not see the multitudes at work for them in other counties, making their boots and ready-made clothes, getting their coal, importing their cheap provisions; but they do see, and know by name, the well-to-do of the neighbourhood, who have new houses built and new gardens laid out; and they naturally enough infer ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt

... slops, darling, but ready-made clothing to which reference is made. But you are right. Let us hear ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... ready-made clothes' shop, the owner of which had a large rural connection. As the crook had absorbed most of Gabriel's money, he attempted, and carried out, an exchange of his overcoat ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... depends. A whim or a word will do it. Some one will cry 'Down with Conde!' and there is your revolution ready-made. The man who is starving does not stop to reason. The cry may be 'Down with the Nobles!'—no one knows as yet, and ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens

... think one of the greatest bores of companionship is, not merely that people wish to fit tastes and notions on you just as they might the first pair of ready-made shoes they meet with, a process amusing enough to the bystander, but exquisitely uncomfortable to the person being ready-shod: but that they bore you with never-ending talk about their pursuits, even when they know that you do not work in the same groove with ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps

... was not materials that Perrine wished to see; she wanted a ready-made dress. Something that she could put on at once, or at least something that would be ready for her to wear the next day when she went out with ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot

... streets, and soon reach the house of that generous woman. A minister of the gospel awaits his coming; the good man's words are consoling, but he cannot remodel the past for the advantage of the dead. Soon the body is placed in a "ready-made coffin," and the good man offers up the last funeral rites; he can do no more than invoke the great protector to receive ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... looked at him more closely. She had sat opposite him at the unesthetic boarding-house dining-table for the past six weeks now. He ate enormously,—but in cultured wise,—never said anything, was something over six feet tall, wore ready-made, dust-colored clothes, and was utterly inconspicuous. "Like a big gray wall." Just now it was the expression of his face, intangibly different—or had she never taken the trouble to notice ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various



Words linked to "Ready-made" :   custom-made, ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf, off-the-rack, prefab, made, ready-to-eat, off-the-peg, cliched, artifact, factory-made, artefact, unoriginal



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