"Trashy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... might be improved; and when Gabriella passed through the ivory and gold doorway into the street, she had convinced herself that she was preminently designed by Nature to undertake the necessary work of improvement. The tawdriness she particularly disliked—the trashy gold and ivory of the decorations, the artificial rose-bushes from which the dust was never removed, the sumptuous velvet carpets which were not taken up in ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... they got wrecked on a Desert Island they don't seem to care. And then there are languages. What they will need when they come to be children. And have to talk to all the animals. And magic. Which is deep. And they hate it. And say it is rot. They are full of tricks. One catches them reading trashy novels. Under the desk. All about love. Which is wasting their children's money. And God knows it is hard enough to earn. But the children are not angry with them. Remembering how they felt themselves. When they ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... he said. "Not even prospects! And set up housekeeping in the shelter-house with my good friend Minnie carrying us food and wearing herself to a shadow, not to mention bringing trashy books to ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... in America, and sold at the rate of two or three shillings a volume. The daily newspapers, sold on the railways, are numerous; but these, with very few exceptions, are quite unworthy of the country. In general there are no articles worth reading, for they are filled with foolish and trashy anecdotes, written, apparently, by penny-a-liners of the lowest order of ability. The magazines, and some of the weekly illustrated papers, are a degree better, but a great deal of the wit in these is ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... that great commodity will testify, is short of, and insufficient for the demand. From the agricultural labourers you cannot receive any material number of recruits. The land, above all things, must be tilled; and—notwithstanding the trashy assertions of popular slip-slop authors and Cockney sentimentalists, who have favored us with pictures of the Will Ferns of the kingdom, as unlike the reality as may be—the condition of those who cultivate the soil of Britain is superior to that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... things occupy a high place among the things which appeal to him as subjectively valuable. The mother whose interests are chiefly in clubs and other social organizations places these higher in her scale of values than her home. The reader who can become interested only in light, trashy literature must admit that matter of this type ranks higher in his subjective scale of values than the works of the masters. Teachers and students whose strongest interest is in grade marks value these more highly than true attainment. For, whatever may be ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... of GOLDEN DAYS, by James Elverson, Philadelphia. This admirable weekly for the youth of this great land is now well established, and has an increasingly large and well-deserved patronage. Its readers are not treated with trashy matter, but with pictures and puzzles and stories of thrilling adventure and useful knowledge. GOLDEN DAYS is supplanting a poisonous literature, and performing a wholesome mission in this day, when too much good seed cannot be sown ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... new 'sound' books that I have met are just what my mother and sister like—either dull, or sentimental and trashy." ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nothing; be unmeaning &c adj.; twaddle, quibble, scrabble. Adj. unmeaning; meaningless, senseless; nonsensical; void of sense &c 516. inexpressive, unexpressive; vacant; not significant &c 516; insignificant. trashy, washy, trumpery, trivial, fiddle-faddle, twaddling, quibbling. unmeant, not expressed; tacit &c (latent) 526. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... right sort of men and women and boys and girls—the kind that you would like to know, and that you would want to be like. Once try it, and you find that you like that kind of reading better than you do the cheap, slangy, trashy stuff, just as you like, and never get tired of, good bread and butter and roast beef and apples and milk and cream and pudding and pie. Good sound stories of home life and adventure and travel are just as important in making your minds wholesome and happy as these ...
— The Child's Day • Woods Hutchinson
... I deduced that element of the case," stated Green. "Conceding this man to be the fugitive Maxwell, it is quite evident that he has a highly developed imagination—his former love of trashy literature and his present passion for moving pictures would both seem to prove that. Now then, you remember that all the accounts of that murder told of the deep marks of finger-nail scratches in the old man's ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... divided on fundamentals. I'm no mealy mouth to curse plutocracy in order to please the mob. Plutocracy fills the workman's dinner pail and keeps the mills going and opens the mines and builds the railroads. Mobocracy, your grubby corn cob and trashy roses, that, what does it do? Mouthe and mouthe and try to pull down what is above it! It will have to be fought out! No? It will not be another French Revolution! Our bullets are ballots, nowadays; and the American people get exactly the form of Government which they want. If they want another ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... The little, stout, rosy-faced fellow who guarded the book-stall touched his hat. Brandon stopped and looked at the papers. Advertisements already of special Jubilee supplements—"Life of the Good Queen," "History of the Empire, 1837-1897." Piles of that trashy novel Joan had been talking about, The Massarenes, by Ouida. Pah! Stuff and nonsense. How did people have time for such things? "Yes, Mr. Waller. Fine day. Very fine May we're having. Ought to be fine for the Jubilee. Hope so, I'm sure. Disappoint ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... of the French Revolution. This I did with much care, for it seemed to me that this period in history, giving most interesting material for study and thought, had been much obscured by ideas drawn from trashy books instead of from ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... wrought and corrected proof-sheets; went to the Court, and had a worry at the usual trashy small wares which are presented at the end of a Session. An official predecessor of mine, the facetious Robert Sinclair, was wont to say the three last days of the Session should be abolished by Act of Parliament.[145] Came ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, "but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with this fashionable, trashy author.'" The sand and "filings of glass," mentioned in the last stanza, are referable to the well-known verses of the poet apologising to a lady for having paid an unconscionably long morning visit; and where, alluding ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... to which, for that very reason, I clung with a tenacity and read with an earnestness which brought at last its own beautiful fruits. Then, there was the "Scottish Chiefs," a treasure-house of delight to me,—two or three trashy novels, given me by Tom Salyers, of which my mother knew nothing,—and (the only poetry I had ever seen) a song-book, which had, scattered among its vulgarisms and puerilities, some gems of Burns and Moore. These my natural, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world: I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Agnes passed under the roof of Mr. Fairland, was enough to convince her that the Sabbath day with them was passed much like all other days. She was shocked to see novels, and other light and trashy works, in the Lands of the Misses Fairland on this holy day, and to hear them howling snatches of opera tunes, as they ran up and down the stairs. These young ladies sometimes went to church in ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... simple and radically true. She had taken the life that was given. She had not, in her arrogant conceit, insisted on creating life to fit herself. Her mother was right, profoundly right, and she herself had been false, trashy, conceited. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... town, and are lined with steamers of all kinds and classes, but all built on a similar plan; and the number of them gives sure indication of the commercial activity of Cincinnati. When a steamer is about to start, book-pedlers crowd on board with baskets full of their—generally speaking—trashy ware. Sometimes these pedlers are grown-up men, but generally boys about twelve or fourteen years of age. On going up to one of these latter, what was my astonishment to find in his basket, volume after volume ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... fool thing. Yeh jus' went crazy readin' trashy papers, an' yeh run away widdout tellin' a soul, 'cause yeh knew they wouldn't ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Now, THIS book is a wonderful picture of Florence in old times, and the famous people who really lived are painted in it, and it has a true and clean moral that we can all see, and one feels wiser and better for reading it. I do wish you'd leave those trashy things and try something ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... thinkin' then. 'Tis all brain-sickness, I'll lay. I doan't want no doctor's traade in my 'ouse if us can keep it outside. The Lard's my doctor. Keep your sawl clean, an' the Lard'll watch your body. 'E's said as much. 'E knaws we'm poor trashy worms an' even a breath o' foul air'll take our lives onless 'E be by to filter it. Faith's ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... moral is as pure as his poetry is glorious."—"Pope's charities were his own, and they were noble and extensive, far beyond his fortune's warrant."—"I have loved and honoured the fame and name of that illustrious and unrivalled man, far more than my own paltry renown, and the trashy jingle of the crowd of schools and upstarts, who pretend to rival, or even surpass him. Sooner than a single leaf should be torn from his laurel, it were better that all which these men, and that I, as one of their ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... obliged, with her talent, to climb all those stairs, to hang about in the waiting-room, she, Lily Clifton! And it reeked of vice, stunk with the trashy scent of the "not-up-to-muches:" merely to look at them suggested faces seen in Piccadilly at night or in ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... upon him but was free to the good he might derive. The sparkling eyes, quick smile, and manly voice, the active limbs and generous heart, seemed at the service of every soul that breathed. Trashy thought and base utterance could not cheat his soul of her integrity; the vileness of Salt Lane had nothing to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... "Life in London." I don't know who wrote the French "Life." Pierce Egan could scarcely have been the author; for he was then at the height of a vicious and ephemeral popularity; and any book, however trashy, with his name to it, would have been sure to sell. This "Life in Paris" was very probably the work of some obscure hack, who, when he was describing the "eccentric characters in the French metropolis," may not impossibly have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk's purse became an exceedingly "Iago"-like, "something, nothing, trashy" sort of affair—in other words, that its owner, Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk, was regularly stumped; and as the Amateur Dramatic Theatrical Committee "always go upon the no pay no play system," Mr. Horatio Fitzharding Fitzfunk was about ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... subordinate position. I had often heard him declare that he was born to be a leader of men, and had laughed at what seemed to me to be his inordinate conceit. He hated work as heartily as he loved trashy, sensational literature; and he displayed a quite childish love of dainty food and showy clothes. And these were not his only faults: he was an unblushing liar; he scoffed at such old-fashioned virtues as honesty and truth and godliness; he sneered ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... trying to do something that he isn't fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew into ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... hanging lamp was her special aversion. She attacked it with merciless raillery—what a trashy thing it was, such as some little work-girl with no furniture of her own might have dreamt of! Why, lamps in the same style could be bought at all the bazaars at seven francs fifty ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaures had known that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have thrown away ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 'Thrilling Tales,' 'Awful Disclosures,' and 'Startling Discoveries,' succeed each other with truly fearful rapidity. Thus he who wastes the midnight kerosene, and spoils his weary eyes in poring over the pages of trashy productions, so well designed to murder sleep, may truly say with Macbeth, 'I have ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... so with but moderate success. They had all their own way of going, and would not go her way. She piped to them, but they would not dance. She offered to them good honest household cake, made of currants and flour and eggs and sweetmeat; but they would feed themselves on trashy wafers from the shop of the Barchester pastry-cook, on chalk and gum and adulterated sugar. Poor Miss Thorne! yours is not the first honest soul that has vainly striven to recall the glories of happy days gone by! If fashion suggests to a Lady ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... happily adapted to the family as well as the school-library; and we are glad to know that they have been adopted for the latter purpose in some of our principal cities. They will constitute a wholsome check upon, as well as an agreeable substitute for, most of the trashy and pernicious literature that is now so freely poured upon the public. Mr. JOHN ALLEN, at the office of the KNICKERBOCKER, is the agent ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... sho as you snore. An' they better leave Daisy's name outa dis, too. I done told her and told her to come straight home from her work. Naw, she had to stop by dat store and skin her gums back wid dem trashy niggers. She better not leave them white folks today to come traipsin' over here scornin' her name all up wid dis nigger mess. Do, I'll kill her. No daughter of mine ain't goin' to do as she please, long as she live under de sound of my voice. ...
— The Mule-Bone: - A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts • Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes
... our forefathers, are and have been poisoned by this cursed drench, without taste or flavour — The only genuine and wholesome beveridge in England, is London porter, and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cyder and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species — But what have I to do with the human species? except a very few friends, I care not ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... myself. I walked up and down the room some time. At length, seeing some old books lying in a corner, I laid hold of them, carried them to the table, sat down and began to inspect them; they were the three volumes of Scott's "Cavalier"—I had seen this work when a youth, and thought it a tiresome trashy publication. Looking over it now when I was grown old I thought so still, but I now detected in it what from want of knowledge I had not detected in my early years, what the highest genius, had it been manifested in every page, could not have ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... smart, ole feller. But come, stir yerseff; we want ter gwo 'long,' replied Jim, with a manifest lack of courtesy that showed he regarded the white man as altogether too 'trashy' to be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... manly affection of one not too refined to censure her own deficiencies of education, what more could he ask for his sister, as he pictured her to himself, with her hair hanging over her ears, and her mind running into seed over some trashy novel. But before he could reply, Violante's father came to add his own philosophical consolations to the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I read, besides some very trashy novels, several by Jean Paul, with most of which I had become familiar while a school-boy in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by an odd anticipatory reversal of what was to be his son's way, spent a great deal of time on more or less trashy[305] plays before he took to his true line of romance, and so gave opportunity to others to get a start of him in the following of Scott, it was inevitable that his own immense success should stir emulation in this kind afresh. In a way, even, Sue and Soulie may be said to belong to the class ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... I have finished both "Henry Esmond" and "The Virginians." I like Thackeray because he is not trashy, and because he writes principally of nice people. My theory of literature is an author who does not indulge in trashiness—writes about people you could introduce into your own home. I agree with my Uncle Sydney, as I once heard him say he did not care to read ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... and that they conveyed a solemn prognostication of a fate that was not his. Little we dreamed, as we lisped out the verses, that the 'gentleman who roamed in a' not velvet but 'plum-coloured suit,' according to Lady Hester Stanhope, was the illustrious George Brummell, The Beau wrote these trashy little rhymes—pretty in their way—and, since I was once a child, and learnt them off by heart, I will not cast a stone at them. Brummell indulged in such trifling poetizing, but never went further. It is a pity he did not write his memoirs; they would have added a valuable page ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... I sent you a note fierce as Faliero himself[81], in answer to a trashy tourist, who pretends that he could have been introduced to me. Let me have a proof of it, that I may cut its ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... else that is poetical—weak folly and nonsense that no sensible man would have anything to say to. How a young man like you, who know how to conduct yourself in some things, and have, I don't deny, many good qualities, can give in to come to an ending like a trashy novel, is more than I can understand. You are fit to be put in a book of the Good-child series, Frank, as an illustration of the reward of virtue," said the strong-minded woman, with a little snort of scorn; "and, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Even if these trashy books, which we find everywhere, not excepting the Sunday-school libraries, be not actually exciting and immoral in tone and sentiment, they are so vapid, so utterly without purpose or object, so devoid of any healthy vigor and ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... always been allowed to mankind by kings, rulers, and priests, in all their disguises, we should never have had the "trash" of which you complain inundating our country and thinking itself a substitute for the simple lessons and glorious promises of Christ. Whereas in proportion as it is less "trashy," it approaches more nearly, though unconsciously, to what He taught, borrowing what is best in it from Him, only giving an earthly tone to what He made divine. I have, perhaps, more indulgence than you for some of the anti-Christian thinkers and writers of the day—those ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... girls knew how to select the good from the trashy merchandise. There were a man, a woman, and a young girl who waited on the customers, all dressed in Mexican costumes; they were too wise to interfere much with the selections of the customers ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... abominable, trashy, revolting poem, called—'The Rise and Progress of the Certiorari.' The consequence of all which, is—here's my horse; find the martingale, you black cub!—the consequence is, that my office work is not done as it should be, and I shall be compelled to get another ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... my soul a marrow-bone might seize! For the old egg of my desire is broken, Spilled is the pearly white and spilled the yolk, and As the mild melancholy contents grease My path the shorn lamb baas like bumblebees. Time's trashy purse is as a taken token Or like a thrilling recitation, spoken By mournful mouths filled full ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... of a dramatic poem may be scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and character may be of the highest order; as in Goethe's admirable Torquato Tasso; or again, the story as a mere story may be well got up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely commonplace. The combination of the two excellences ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... husband returned from an evening meeting, which I had not attended, and told me of a woman who had come to him in great distress. She had been an earnest Christian worker, but love for light, trashy fiction had so grown upon her as to work havoc in her Christian life. She had come to Keswick three years in succession, hoping to get victory, ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... advertisements to the necessity Harpers felt through the rivalry of the Ledger. This sort of enterprise cost, but it convinced people that respectable journals advertised as did the Ledger. People said it was 'cheap, trashy literature, etc.' ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... the German would cry, after spending an hour in going through some trashy modern Italian music. "Now, my child, you shall hear something worth listening to;" and with a sigh of relief he would turn to some old piece by Mozart or Bach, some minuet of Haydn's, some romance ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... opposition to the institution of which it is the organ, as directed by "envy, malice, and uncharitableness," and intimates that it is occasioned by the inability or unwillingness of the committee to purchase the trashy productions of incompetent painters constantly offered to them. We submit to the gentlemen connected with the Art-Union, that they should not suffer the hirelings they may sometimes employ upon the Bulletin, thus to refer to such artists and such men as Durand, Wier, Kellogg, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... eat and how much we eat must be carefully planned, for our body temple is really made of what we eat. If you were erecting a beautiful mansion you would not think of allowing cheap, trashy, and inferior building materials to enter into the construction of your home. Neither should you permit unfit and inferior materials to become a part of the daily dietary of your little boy or girl, thus to become a part of their ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler |
