"Slum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a better chance than most slum boys, for he had rugged health and an unusually sturdy body. His very strength had been his ruin. Working decently for wages, he had been told by other petty gang leaders that he was a "sucker," when he could get many times ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the colony, we have the more modern amusements, German opera and Italian opera and the theatre and subscription concerts. Then we have balls nearly every night in the season and dinner-parties and luncheons and lectures and musical parties, and we study a good deal and 'slum' a little. Last winter I belonged to a Greek class and a fencing class, and a quartette club, and two private dancing classes, and a girls' working club, and an amateur theatrical society. We gave two private concerts for charities, you know, and acted the Antigone for the benefit of the ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the drink evil shall we know its ravages in the home. Those of us who have lived in the pure air of free, country home-life can not easily realize the moral plague of drunkenness as it blights the home in the crowded districts of city slum life. Nor is the home of the city alone cursed by the drink evil. Three years ago this last holiday season we were doing some evangelistic work in a neighboring town, a mere village of a couple hundred ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... in mourn'ful num'bers, "Life' is but' an emp'ty dream'!" For' the soul' is dead' that slum'bers, And' things are' not ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... state of unrest. She had, as yet, been none too successful in the war with France. From the king's castle to the poorest slum in Seven Dials there was a temper bordering on despair. Ministries came and went; statesmen rose and fell. The army was indifferently recruited and badly paid. England's battles were fought by men of whom many were only mercenaries, with no stake ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thoughts that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing life of ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... about his life, and she told about hers—a pitiful and moving story. She had been brought to America as an infant; her father had been killed in an accident, and her mother had supported several children by scrub-work. Lizzie had grown up in a slum on the far east side of New York, and she could not remember a time when she had not been sexually preyed upon; lewd little boys had taught her tricks, and men would buy her with candy or food. And yet there had been something in her struggling for decency; of her ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... dinner, and that meal might be prolonged to cover another hour; but the evening still stretched onward, seeming interminable to his restless fancy. It was a relief when Brady came in and suggested that they drop in at a meeting of the Salvation Army to be held at a slum post in a region of the city ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... twentieth century more than 10,500,000 immigrants have entered the United States. Through the pressure of economic conditions a large proportion of immigrants and their children are forced into the centers of poverty, crime and disease, the slum districts of our great cities, and into huge colonies in industrial centers where they both receive and contribute to conditions that have become pathological for the community, real sources of infection, both mental and physical. It is therefore not surprising to find that the children of ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... gents, you know, it's this way. Just you fancy yerselves born In a back-slum like Ragman's Rents. 'Old 'ard, don't larf with scorn! Some on us is born there, yer know; it might ha' bin your luck, If yer mother'd bin a boozer, and yer father'd ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... in spite of the Honourable George's affiliations with the slum-characters of what I may call Red Gap's East End, he had not yet publicly identified himself with the Klondike woman and her Bohemian set, in consequence of which—let him dine and wine a Spilmer as he would—there was yet hope that he ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... days the stones and bricks had been thrown into the holes and covered with dirt. The low places had been filled in. It was a work in which the whole family joined. A small house was rented in the immediate neighborhood in lieu of their one room near the foul alleys of the city slum. ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... sniff and scorn, the weakness of the "swells"? But cease to move so near the clouds, and cease To sit a votary of the "Great Pooh-Pooh"; And come, for Labour's in the valley, come, For Toil dwells in the valley, come thou down And watch him; by the dim slum threshold, he, Or hand in hand with poverty in the docks, Or black with stithy-swartness by the forge, Or troll-like in the mine; nor cares to walk With Wealth and Fashion in the parks and squares; But follow! Come thou down, and let the cold Cramp-headed cynics yelp alone, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... been effusively praised. There is nothing in those Commandments to restrain the sweater, the rack-renter, the jerry-builder, the slum landlord, the usurer, the liar, the libertine, the gambler, the drunkard, the wife-beater, the slave-owner, the religious persecutor, the maker of wheat and cotton rings, the fox-hunter, the bird-slayer, the ill-user of horses and dogs and cattle. There is nothing about "cultivating towards all beings ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... back street, almost a slum," I said. "I daresay you have lived in the country always, and just at first it does not seem possible that there should be anything beautiful about a great city. When you get a little older I think ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... left the Chesilstowe cottage already," he said, "when that happened. It was last December. I had taken a room in London, a large unfurnished room in a big ill-managed lodging-house in a slum near Great Portland Street. The room was soon full of the appliances I had bought with his money; the work was going on steadily, successfully, drawing near an end. I was like a man emerging from a thicket, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... character-sketching, mainly Scotch; the day before that it was all problem-solving, chiefly religious; yesterday it was all adventure-seeking, called historical because it seems highly improbable; and to-day it is a mixture of automobile-journeys and slum-life. It looks to me as if there must be somebody always ready to read some kind of fiction, but ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... of the river slum Shiver dumb, Passed to-day a poorly clad and poorly shod Knight of God; Where the human eddy smears with shame and rags Paving flags, Hell shall weakly wail beneath the ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... there, too, who will be sure to invite her over week ends. If she gets tired she can go to them, you know. And really, I was glad to have something come up to take her away from that miserable little country slum she has been so crazy about. I was dreadfully afraid she would catch something there or else they would rob us and murder us and kidnap ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... the grass would all be trampled down; and these dirty people, these slum folk, who seem to spring out of the earth when anything of a disagreeable or shameful nature is taking place,—a fire, for instance, or a brawl,—might easily bring infectious diseases on to those gravel paths where the little Tapsters and their like run about, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... heard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer of the village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of a rather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a London slum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me, about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had gone over the ground after him, and not many of the nests had escaped ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... trying feverishly to think, and I suppose that my preoccupation made me careless. I was now in a veritable slum, and when I put my hand to my vest pocket I found that my watch had gone. That put the top stone on my depression. The reaction from the wild burnout of the forenoon had left me very cold about the feet. I was getting into the under-world again and there was no chance of a second Archie Roylance ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... come from the gloom of the slum Is charmed by the magic of dazzle and hum; He feasts his big eyes on the cakes and the pies, And they seem to grow green and protrude with surprise At the goodies they vend and the toys without end— And it's oh! if he had but a penny to spend! But alas, he must gaze ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... means the growth of slum-life. Hear me, you who live out in the uncrowded part of the country. Maud Ballington Booth tells of finding five families, living in one attic room in New York City, with no partitions between. Here they "cook, eat, sleep, wash, ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... dropped no matter where, no matter beside whom. None turns from his neighbour; none scorns or hates or loathes his fellow. The rigidly righteous bourgeoise lies in the straw breast to breast with the harlot of the village slum, and her innocent daughter back to back with the parish drunkard. Nothing matters. Nothing will ever ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... that it would be only to put himself under harsher constraint; she figured him toiling through sandy deserts under a tropical sun to find the source of some river or the haunt of some fly; she figured him living by the labor of his hands in some city slum, the victim of one of those terrible theories of right and wrong which were current at the time; she figured him prisoner for life in the house of a woman who had seduced him by her misfortunes. Half proudly, and wholly anxiously, she framed such thoughts, as they sat, late at night, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... had been largely spent in the slum district of a crowded city, and the change to the freedom of the Oro fields and woods was almost too much for the orphans. After school hours they all, with one consent, went mad, and ranged far and wide over hill ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... see how it comes in!" said Mickey. "If you could read the papers, you'd know. 'Sterilized,' is what they do to the milk in hot weather to save the slum kids. That's us, Lily. 'Deodorized,' is taking the bad smell out of things. 'Vulcanized,' is something they do to stiffen things. I guess ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... reappeared as the stenographer of the Police Court, and finally edged his way into the power-house of the Apex Water-Works. He boarded with old Mrs. Flynn, down in North Fifth Street, on the edge of the red-light slum, he never went to church or attended lectures, or showed any desire to improve or refine himself; but he managed to get himself invited to all the picnics and lodge sociables, and at a supper of the Phi Upsilon Society, to which he had contrived to affiliate himself, he made the best ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... water the few willow-trees left us by the Thames Conservancy looked doubtfully alive against the bleak sky and the row of wretched-looking blue-slated houses, although, by the way, the latter were the backs of a sort of street of "villas" and not a slum; the road in front of the house was sooty and muddy at once, and in the air was that sense of dirty discomfort which one is never quit of in London. The morning was harsh, too, and though the wind was from the south-west it was as cold as ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... year's work as interne in the women's hospital had heightened the expectations of her friends; and the success with which she had then served as physician and superintendent of a branch dispensary and hospital in the slum district had made all who were watching her progress predict for ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... come, From barren country-side and deathly slum, From bleakest wastes, from lands of aching drouth, From grape-hung valleys of the smiling South, From chains and prisons, ay, from horrid fear, (Mark you the furtive eye, the listening ear!) And all amazed and silent, scared and shy— An alien group ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay |
