"Shiftless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his exhausted patience, and that of poor overworked Mistress Wynter, at that fat soggy thing, that lag-last, so shiftless and useless about the house, lazing from rath to latte, and then to complete their exasperation, miching off into the woods to shirk her work so that the whole company had to turn out with a mort of trouble to hunt for the leg-trape. We cannot marvel at the beating, but simply ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... thirty cabbages destroyed by that scamp of a cow," she exclaimed in a tone bordering on despair. "I wish I'd a hit her. If I'd broken my broom over her back I wouldn't a cared so much. And it's all Mudge's fault. He's the most shiftless man I ever see. I'll give him a dressing down, see if ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... acute instinct, that this must be the end of the journey and hastening to have it over with. As they broke through a screen of brush and came out to the edge of what had been a clearing back of a huge log bunk-house, the man who had shouted came rapidly forward to meet them. There was a certain shiftless, sullen, yet authoritative air about him ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... used. How could this need have been conceived slowly? In a keen mind it should have leapt and burnt: What I have done would have been better done When my sad mother lived and could feel joy. This striking without thought is better than hunting; She showed more terror than an animal, She was more shiftless ... A little blood is lightly washed away, A common stain that need not be remembered; And a hot spasm of rightness quickly born Can guide me to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... coldly. "Why should I? You're shiftless. You won't work. When you do find a little gold you squander it. You have nothing but a gun. You can't do anything ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... with Mr. Holley, one of the inspectors, settled the whole thing. It proved that this Dennis Shea was a harmless, amiable fellow, of the class known as shiftless, who had sealed his fate by marrying a dumb wife, who was at that moment ironing in the laundry. Before I left Stafford, I had hired both for five years. We had applied to Judge Pynchon, then the probate judge at Springfield, to change the name of Dennis Shea to Frederic ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... of the cheapest of the suites we were directed. It was almost bare of furniture and in a peculiarly shiftless state of disorder. A half-finished picture stood in the centre of the room, and several completed ones were leaning against the wall. They were of the wildest character imaginable. Even the conceptions of the futurists looked ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... one detail of pueblo construction are the careless and shiftless modern methods so conspicuous as in the stone steps of the upper terraces of Tusayan. Here are seen many awkward makeshifts by means of which the builders have tried to compensate for their lack of foresight in planning. The absence of a definite plan for a house cluster of many rooms, already ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... enough for a white man; that he could help, and the white man be helped, just as people were being and doing all the time, and no one would think a thought about it. But, sir," I said, "everybody says we can do nothing alone; that we're a poor, shiftless set; and it will be just one of the master race helping a nigger to climb and to stand where he couldn't climb or stand alone, and I'd ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... a shiftless, unbusiness-like set of women: they can look after themselves as well as after the poor and forlorn: many of them, were they in the world, would be called strong-minded, blue-stockinged women. At Montreal there is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the means of bringing an illustrious son into the world. He seems to have been weak, foolish, shiftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren Hastings. Pynaston married again, entered the Church, when he was ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in Mrs. Dunn's eyes as she thanked Marjorie and the other girls over and over for their thoughtful kindness. The Dunns were often accounted shiftless, but the poor woman found it difficult to take care of her growing family and by her ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... had he been without his comrades. He had faced primeval nature too often and he knew it too well to be overcome or to be depressed by any of its dangers. Yet his heart would have leaped had he beheld the shiftless and the silent ones, making their way among the trees, the needed ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... kind-hearted people; as witness how they assist the sick and give hospitality. Such virtues must ultimately gain for them the grace of conversion. The greatest obstacle in their way is the low cunning of the unprincipled parsons, who, from being peddlers, and poor, shiftless mechanics, without any proper discipline or preparation, take to the less laborious trade of preaching. Pray for ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. There is a civil governor, appointed by the King of Portugal, and also a military governor, who can assume supreme control and suspend the civil government at his pleasure. The islands contain a population of about 200,000, almost entirely Portuguese. Everything ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pockets, or by looking meek, or, likely as not, peering into the shop-door after me with great staring eyes and parted lips; and this is the most provoking of all. If there is anything vulgar, slipshod, and shiftless, it is a man lounging about with his hands in his pockets. If you have paws, stow them away; but if you are endowed with hands, learn to carry them properly, or else cut them off. Nor can I abide a man's looking as if he were under control. I want him to be submissive, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... over a great part of the south and east, at least, of England,—though never so well off, for several generations, as they are now—are growing up thriftless, shiftless; inferior, it seems to me, to their grandfathers in everything, save that they can usually read and write, and their grandfathers could not; and that they wear smart cheap cloth clothes, instead ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... human body are just as shiftless as the one that owns 'em. The systems o' these fair ladies couldn't do their own work. The physician an' the surgeon were added to the list o' their servants, an' became as necessary as the cook an' the chambermaid. But they were keeping up with Lizzie. Poor things! They weren't so ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... knowing which was the guilty privateer; but, after brief deliberation, he determined to adopt strategy. The rigging of his vessel was slackened, the yards slewed round, and every attempt made to transform the trim man-o'-war into a shiftless merchantman. Then the helmsman was instructed to carefully avoid running near the suspected schooners. The ruse succeeded admirably. The lookouts in the tops of the schooners reported an American merchantman in sight, but making attempts ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... was a shiftless and merry Iowan to whose name was added by courtesy the prefix "Dr." He had a small farm in the outskirts. Gates hung from a single hinge and nothing was kept in repair. He preferred to use his time ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... and worked near him; and once again, as I was leaving the building on a rainy night, I came upon him on the stone steps at the door bending down with an almost pathetic clumsiness to pin the woolen shawl of a poor little mite, who, like so many others, worked with her shiftless father and mother to add to their weekly earnings. It was always the poorest and least cared for of the children whom he seemed to befriend, and very often I noticed that even when he was kindest, in his awkward man fashion, the little waifs ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lightness of his heart, indulged in what, for him, was a piece of extravagance. In all such regions there are broken-down, elderly men, who live by taking fish. Liquor has usually been their great enemy, and all have the same generic character of laziness, shiftless and ill-regulated exertions, followed by much idleness, and fits of intemperance, that in the end commonly cause their deaths. Such a man fished between Oyster Pond and Shelter Island, being known to all who dwelt ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mountains, in the southern Alleghenies, or in the Rockies and Sierras. A big lumbering company, impatient for immediate returns and not caring to look far enough ahead, will often deliberately destroy all the good timber in a region, hoping afterwards to move on to some new country. The shiftless man of small means, who does not care to become an actual home-maker but would like immediate profit, will find it to his advantage to take up timber land simply to turn it over to such a big company, and leave it valueless for future settlers. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... joys and sorrows, however, is a frontier existence compounded; and of the growing thousands who turned their faces toward the setting sun, comparatively few yielded to discouragement and went back East. Those who did so were usually the land speculators and people of weak, irresolute, or shiftless character. ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... moaning and crying, and at last it all came out. It seems that when she went to the closet to get down her jacket, a coat of her husband's fell off the hanger. The pockets was stuffed with letters, the shiftless way men-folks have, and they went sprawling all over the floor. She picked up this among the rest. It was addressed to W. Thompson, at some hotel in Cleveland, and it had been forwarded to the city office of his firm. And seeing it ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... re-asserted her influence—that the essences of the scene, subtle and pervasive, had recurred, creating a receptive spirit, so deep a religion of assent that shadow and substance intermingled to my bewilderment? I was permitted to be a sensitive percipient in the midst of the ashes of shiftless folk who had passed away, catching but a casual and deceptive glimpse of the coming of the desolating ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... appearance of two evil spirits about to attend some incantation scene of which the circular fire was the visible indication. Crosstrees, of four pieces of squared timber, lay near the fire, with a tireless wheel placed flat upon them, the hub in the square hole at the center. Shiftless farmers always resisted having tires set until they would no longer stay on the wheel. The inevitable day was postponed, time and again, by a soaking of the wheels overnight in some convenient puddle of water; but ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... tall and lank, his hair fell down upon his shoulders, his whiskers were as tangled and matted as a little brush heap—in short, he was as fine a specimen of a poor white as one could find anywhere in the seceded States. He looked stupid as well as shiftless, but the young pilot knew he wasn't. He was as sly as a fox and as cunning as well, and Marcy confessed to himself that he stood more in fear of him than he did of Captain Beardsley. When the man heard Marcy's step upon the porch, he tried to assume the servile air which was ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... loving mother," he writes, "and my best friend." As we ponder on such facts and then consider for what Beethoven stands, we can only exclaim, "God works in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform." It was early seen that the young Beethoven had unusual ability, and so the shiftless father, with the example of Mozart's precocity before him, submitted the boy to a deal of enforced drudgery in the way of harpsichord and violin practice. He had one good teacher however, Neefe, who records that the boy of thirteen played the harpsichord with energetic ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... and opportunity! The land where everyone's rights are respected! The land where the son of a shiftless drunkard can grit his teeth and say, "I'm going to be rich and famous some day!" Here in America we pride ourselves on the fact that everyone has the right to live his own life as he pleases—provided, that is, that he does not ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson |
