"Secondhand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... father—it seems that he is quite rich—and father has given me to him and I am to be married within a fortnight. Curse them! curse them all, I say! Oh! I wish I had the pluck to run away, or to kill myself or do something—but I am such an abominable coward—and I shall loathe to live in Arad in a tiny secondhand clothes shop, with that hideous monster for a husband—pointed at by everyone as the girl with a disgraceful story to her credit and sold to a creature whom no one else would have—in order to cover up ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... a livid passion—altogether too near home to enjoy taking secondhand orders from an Indian in the dark. She was still less amused when she discovered that Grim knew ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... niggers Bibles—engravings which they obviously didn't like, since here and there were little home-made pictures made out of quite good plates torn from art magazines, but which they had kept because no secondhand dealers would give any money for them, and the walls had to be covered somehow. And there was nothing ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Who wore it out with sensual drudgery Before it came to me? What warped its valves? It has been used; my heart is secondhand. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... afford to buy a bit of tea and sugar and a quart loaf when a friend drops in," said Pauline, "but the meanness isn't any less disgusting. He'll want her to sell her cast-off dresses to the secondhand dealers, ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... at end of First Act, when prancing steeds, with secondhand park-hack saddles, at quite half-a-crown an hour, are brought in, and, on a striking tableau of bold but impecunious warriors refusing to mount, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... cried Nan, "you couldn't find Miss Pompret's things here—in a store like this. They only sell new china, and hers would be secondhand!" ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... telescope, mounted in a little observatory, on a rocky peak of ground which rose up a hundred feet or more in the immediate neighbourhood of the house, that itself stood high. This instrument, which its owner had acquired secondhand at some sale, of course was not of the largest size. Still, it was powerful enough for all ordinary observations, and to show many hundreds of the heavenly bodies that are invisible to the naked eye, even in ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... which, after the second edition, was dropped. The four small volumes of these early editions, with their large type, their ample spacing, their charming flavour of antiquity, delicacy, and rest—may be met with often enough in secluded corners of secondhand bookshops, or on some neglected shelf in the library of a country house. For their own generation, they represented a distinguished title to fame. Mrs. Inchbald—to use the expression of her biographer—"was ascertained to ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... not dissociate the matter and manner of any of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire, whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is the vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be compelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter from the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of the maxim confounded? Or is Swinburne's a "single ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... scaffold on which his father and mother had perished, an idea can be formed of the terrible chief of the assassins of Avignon, who had for his lieutenants, Farges the silk-weaver, Roquefort the porter, Naudaud the baker, and Magnan the secondhand clothes dealer. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... very funny for you to say those things," admitted Beverly, "even though they come secondhand. You were ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... easily got a place at the table, but did not find it heaven; for a number of secondhand carpets were in the sale, and these, brimful of dust, were all shown on the table, and the dirt choked, and poisoned our fair friends. Brokers pestered them, until at last Rosa, smarting under her late exposure, addressed the auctioneer quietly, in her silvery tones: "Sir, these gentlemen are annoying ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... hobby to the old man. The secondhand dealers never made any objection to his reading books upon the shelves. His purchases were perhaps two books a week, at ten or even five cents each. Now and again he would find one of his own "Irving's ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... be found there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular secondhand books, hand-painted missals ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... mental debility and incapable of grappling even with a short shilling novel, a brief and easy form of reading may be recommended. They may study catalogues; they may peruse the lists of their wares which secondhand booksellers and dealers in all kinds of curiosities circulate gratis. This is the only kind of circular which should not go straight to its long home in the waste-paper basket. A catalogue is full of information. It is so exceedingly ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... these examples as authorities, not as false syntax. The errors which I thus quote at secondhand from other grammarians, and mark with double references, are in general such as the first quoters have allowed, and made themselves responsible for; but this is not the case in every instance. Such credit has sometimes, though rarely, been given, where the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... shop so well, that he seemed little more than an animated bundle of secondhand goods. His cowhide boots were the fellows of those that dangled from the fourth beam. His gayly checked flannel shirt harmonized delightfully with the carriage robes in the corner, and the soft brown-felt ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... which Mr. Conant had purchased for her in New York had been placed in the den, where she could select the volumes as she chose, and the chair-girl found the titles so alluring that she promised herself many hours of enjoyment while delving among them. They were all old and secondhand—perhaps fourth-hand or fifth-hand—as the lawyer had stated, and the covers were many of them worn to tatters; but "books is books," said Irene cheerily, and she believed they would not prove the less interesting in contents because of their condition. Mostly they were old romances, ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... get down to Galveston," Cappy interrupted triumphantly, "I'll have Mike Murphy buy a nice, staunch little secondhand motor cruiser, thirty-eight or forty feet long, with plenty of power and comfortable living accommodations for half a dozen people. Mike will arrange for extra oil and gasoline tankage, and we'll swing this cruiser in ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... the promise of being back for luncheon. I picked up a London morning paper and glanced at the personal column. I have read it every day since when I could get hold of the London Times. All of human nature and the ups and downs of man are there, from secondhand lace to the mortgaged jewels of broken-down nobility, from sporting games and tickets for sale to relatives wanted, and those mysterious, suggestive, unsigned messages from home or to home. I read the news of the war. We in America did not ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... lecture at 3:30, then to dinner for University of Chicago students. To-morrow will be an open day for me and the little secretary will take me shopping. The big department store is the fashionable place where all the noble and rich buy their kimonos, and I may supplement my secondhand attempts with a new one. When I get to Kyoto I hope to find a real old one, as the new style of weave are infected with foreign influence. The other evening with Y—— we found a little shop for antiques which is a ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey |
