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More "Squalor" Quotes from Famous Books



... their customs, language, and appearance vary with the districts they inhabit and the subdivisions to which they belong, the history of all is a confused legend of strife and misery, their natures are uniformly cruel and thriftless, and their condition is one of equal squalor and want. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... the fairy story flashed back into the lawyer's mind. He knew his New York and he knew Patchin Place, where poverty and ambition elbowed one another, and squalor stabbed at the heart of beauty. This Gordon Forsyth had his childhood amid this, lived on the rise and fall of an artist's day-by-day fortune. Now he would be taken from all that, brought to Gray Manor, put under special tutorage, so that, some day he could step into that other ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott

... ain't many of you I'd say it to;" and with that the tall, gaunt Mary bearing the baby, followed Norma into the house and up the narrow, broken stairs, and along the dark halls past door after door closed upon its story of squalor and poverty, until, at last, panting with the child's weight, she reached their own abode ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin

... Steady climbing now, and then a turn to the right and we see Pelago before us, perched on its crags, and by and by come to it—a tiny town, with a clean and alluring inn, very different from the squalor of Pontassieve: famous in art and particularly Florentine art as being the birthplace of Lorenzo Ghiberti, who made the Baptistery doors. From Pelago the road descends with extreme steepness to a brook in a rocky valley, at a bridge over which the real climb begins, to ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... to examine at a better perspective one of the leaning walls. Down the steps of the building came a young man who seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—a narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... casual observer the military element is not noticeable in the home life of the common people, as they are rapt in their work, very industrious and get their pleasure talking to their ever present babies, or tending some little plants, even if squalor surrounds them. But the word of the ones higher up is absolute law to them. Discipline is supreme from the time the small boy is taught the "Goose Step," preparatory to his military training, until he obediently marries the girl his parents have selected for him. He ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer

... might study the manners and customs of those dirty and repulsive tribes; he found their diet consisted wholly of fish and camels' flesh. But in the town of Makdasbu, there was an attempt at comfort and civilization, presenting a most agreeable contrast with the surrounding squalor. The inhabitants were very fat, each of them, to use Ibn's own expression, "eating enough to feed a convent;" they were very fond of delicacies, such as plantains boiled in milk, preserved citrons, pods of fresh pepper, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... there; but all those who had gave graphic descriptions of the total ignorance of Mrs M'Swat. Why, the place was quite tabooed on account of its squalor and dirt! ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... happiness was a fruit which hung within reach of every hand. Now I have lived for six years trying single-handed to relieve the want and suffering of the needy people with whom I come in contact, and their squalor and wretchedness have sickened me, and, what is still worse, I feel that all I can do is as a drop in the ocean, and, after all, amounts to nothing. I know I am no longer the same reckless girl who, with the ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... in this amazing manner, cinder-smeared, hot, rumpled, and very tired, Ailsa Paige and Letty Lynden entered the unspeakably dirty streets of the Capital of their country and turned into the magnificent squalor of Pennsylvania Avenue which lay, flanked by ignoble architecture, straight and wide and hazy under its drifting golden dust from the great unfinished dome of the Capitol to the Corinthian colonnade of the Treasury. Their negro ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... great many reasons against copious profanity of speech. Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which forbids its use in literature—namely, its ineffectiveness. But though she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her book leaves the impression of confident familiarity with this kind of life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, but assimilated. Knowing as we do that Mrs. Woods ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... household's pecuniary decency. No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not given up except under stress of the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... upon their life. But many offenders pass through little or no change of mind, and unless delivered from their surroundings they will continue to fall. Here, however, comes in the difficulty. Many of these people love their surroundings; they have no desire to change; a life of squalor among squalid companions is not distasteful to them; on the contrary, they will refuse to leave old haunts no matter what inducements are offered them elsewhere. It is hardly possible to do anything with these ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison

... some reasons vaguely defined, she was heavy-hearted. The city's endless drama of squalor and pain was all about her; she could not understand, she could not help, she could not even lift her own little problem out of the great total of failures! All day long the sense of ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... the pestilence, it has "walked in the darkness and wasted at noon-day." When we read of thousands of miserable wretches, in all the cities and towns of a great nation, huddled together like so many swine in a pen; in rags, squalor, and want; without work, bread, or hope; dragging out from day to day, by begging, or the petty artifices of theft, an existence which is worthless and a burden; and when, at the same time, we see a system of laws, that has carefully drawn a band of iron around every mode of human exertion; ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings. Robert Walmsley, of O. Henry's "The Defeat of the City," ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... the company of heaven, Dom Gregory, in a fine spirit of rectitude, proceeds to applaud the Count of Montcorbier for the high example he set to his fellow-men. Here, in effect says the worthy churchman, was a man who, having passed the flower of his life in squalor and all manner of ignobilities, still kept in a sense the whiteness of his soul and allowed the brightness of the celestial flame to burn, faintly indeed but unextinguished, on the altar of his heart. How ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... the unemployed came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames—such ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... said; "sentiment dies under the scalpel. In the filth and squalor of reality neither the belief in romance nor the capacity for desiring it endure long.... Even pity becomes atrophied—or at least a reflex habit; sympathy, sorrow, remain as mechanical reactions, not spontaneous emotions.... You can understand ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... we of the studio may be wild and thoughtless. We live gayly and do not trouble for the morrow, but we are not altogether fools; and even were there nothing else to unite us against the Commune, the squalor and wretchedness, the ugliness and vice, the brutal coarseness, and the foul language of these ruffians would band us together as artists against them. Now, enough of Paris, what have you been doing in England, besides ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... cottages, looking more like bee-hives than human habitations. They had also every one of them a group of date-palms, overhanging a cluster of mean bare houses; and they all alike had a picturesque and even imposing air from a distance, but faded away into indescribable squalor as one got abreast of them. Our progress was monotonous. At twelve, noon, we would pass Aboo-Teeg, with its mosque, its palms, its mud-huts, and its camels; then for a couple of hours we would go on through the midst of a green field on either side, studded by more mud-huts, ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... that the poor of Scrooby village were not interesting. There was very little squalor or degradation; their poverty seemed not a descent, but a condition to which they had been born; the faces which Sadie saw were dulled and apathetic rather than sullen or rebellious; they stood up when Miss Amelyn entered, paying HER the deference, ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... prevalent at this time. However, there was much to be seen. Palaces and hovels, magnificent hotels and humble coffee houses. Strange people and stranger costumes. Weird sights, sounds, and smells. Some streets no wider than our back lanes, teeming with people, filth, and squalor, and every window, doorway, or hole in the wall with something in it for sale. Veiled women and shuttered upper windows in the better class residential quarter hinted romance to those who had read the adventures of the Khalif. A wedding procession, and, again, a funeral ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett

... his company on their knees beside him, and the Grand Duke, accommodated with a camp-stool, buried his hand in his beard and followed every line without a breath. Of all in that tent, she, Mary Germain, had been the only person to feel the indescribable squalor in the situation—and she the only one who might have been born to it; for her upbringing had been humble, and her rise in the world sudden and short of durance. But she knew now that she had hardly been able to live ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink into the squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk—silk pajamas—and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew out the back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He crawled ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... beginning with suspicion and squalor around; with poverty within and without the first white walls of the new school home. Yet somehow the struggle then with all its helplessness and disappointment had not seemed so bitter as today: then failure ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... cross-lane. This enables Gogol to place before the reader not only the governor of the province, the judge, and the rich landowner, the possessor of hundreds of souls, but also the poverty-stricken, well-nigh ruined landowner; not only the splendor of the city, but also the squalor of the hamlet; not only the luxury of an invited guest, but also the niggardliness of the hotel-boarder. "Dead Souls" is thus a painting in literature,—what Kaulbach's "Era of the Reformation" is in history. And the originality of the execution lies in the arrangement ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... Warden of the Fleet, he fainted, and the blood started out of his mouth and nose." This example is by no means an exceptional one. It is impossible, within the limits of this volume, to give an adequate idea of the disease, the squalor, the cruelties and abuses which existed in the prisons. Their interiors are often described by the novelists, who were unable to exaggerate the actual circumstances. Poor prisoners, when acquitted, were dragged back to prison and kept there till their dues were paid ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... lark's song. A sudden angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace and freedom into the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, where wild valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor and splendour live here side by side. Grand Renaissance portals grinning with Satyr masks are flanked by tawdry frescoes shamming stonework, or by doorways where the withered bush hangs out a promise of bad wine. The Cappella Colleoni ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... is there who has not revelled in the thought of something new, the eager desire to see something fresh? The country boy to see vast London with all its greatness and littleness, its splendour and its squalor, its many cares and too often false joys—the town boy to plunge into that home of mystery and wonder, the country. And though as a rule the country boy is disappointed, he of the town, when once he has ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn

... and catching a thousand points of color in the gloom, she recognized the constant fluent interchange among all the atoms of the universe;—why was she alone, capable of flight, chained to one spot?—She gazed around her at the squalor and the want, the brutish shapes and faces, her own no better, at the narrow huts; thought of the dull routine of work never to enrich herself, the possibility of purchase and cruelty;—she sprung to her feet, all her blood boiling; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... Bludston as one factory chimney to another, and had plied their trade in many a mean street, so much the counterpart of Budge Street that he had watched a certain window or door with involuntary trepidation, until he realized that it was not Budge Street, that he was a happy alien to its squalor, that he was a butterfly, a thing of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the gloom. He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew whither. He was conscious of being a creature of mystery. He pitied the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... reflection of countless lamps; a dome woven over between its stars with the refraction of human needs and human fancies—immense mirror of pomp and misery that night after night stretches its kindly mocking over miles of houses and gardens, mansions and squalor, over Forsytes, policemen, and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object—to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... softened the shabby street below, veiling ugliness and squalor and subtly transmuting meanness and poverty to picturesqueness—as artists, using only the flattering simplicity of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies of a chop suey across the street ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... alley of low jutting houses over arcades, full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats—was on this early morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads from above looked down ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... there for months. The subject of the war was never broached in your home where opinions differed; but one morning the boys were missing. No one said a word, but one gray head was bent, and the happy light died out of the old eyes and never came to them again. Below all the squalor and discomfort was the agony of suspense or the certainty of death. But the parsnip coffee and the empty purse certainly did give a sting to the great overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... hovel with the door walled up and plastered over with clay, and with a narrow slit left for a window, through which they received food. They spoke to those who visited them but once in the year, at Pentecost; not content with the squalor and solitude of their hut, they loaded themselves with masses of iron which bent them double. Theodoret was wont to peer in through the chink at the revolting sight of the ghastly women, a mass of filth, crushed double with great rings ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... situation in the past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his father's parlors, and sees freedom on the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... you. Justice isn't squalor. It's—it's justice. As for your 'poor woman,' listen to this." And he read out the Bathurst advertisement with terrible emphasis on the words "Handsome reward offered." "Do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various

... relaxing the wretch's jaw. Between the paroxysms Campion and I sat on the bed watching him, scarcely exchanging a word. The wife, poor creature, whimpered on her mattress. It was not a pleasant vigil. It lasted till the grey dawn crept in, pitilessly intensifying the squalor of the room, and until the dawn was broadening into daylight. Then two of Campion's men from Barbara's Building arrived to relieve us. Before we went, however, the neighbour who had taken charge of the children came in to help the slatternly wife light a fire and make ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... round and round over the kettle; her sunburnt legs uncovered to the knee; the masculine attitude of her figure with the torn and worn garments that covered her—and she seemed to him a veritable trull of disorder and squalor. The gipsy, too, looked at him over her shoulder, and, as she gazed, her hand went slower and slower, until all motion ceased, and the spoon lay on the edge of the pot, when she turned deliberately, offering him the full sight of her ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... him, as he passes by. Is there any man who has mixed much with society, or whose avocations have caused him to mingle, at one time or other, with a great number of people, who cannot call to mind the time when some shabby, miserable wretch, in rags and filth, who shuffles past him now in all the squalor of disease and poverty, with a respectable tradesman, or clerk, or a man following some thriving pursuit, with good prospects, and decent means?—or cannot any of our readers call to mind from among the list of their quondam acquaintance, some fallen and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... night. These are known as the back slums. But nowhere is there any sign of poverty or anything at all resembling Stepney or the lower parts of an European city, The Chinese quarter is the nearest approach thereto, but it is quite sui generis, and squalor ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... likes of him, the divine title of a workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him in the face, yet—if he be a true man—with a little bird singing ever in his heart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson and Arkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... chance of your coming in when I happened to look out of the window. A girl was coming down the street, looking at the numbers of the houses. She stopped here. Intuition told me she was Miss Goodwin. While she was ringing the bell I did all I could to increase the shabby squalor of your room. She was shown in here, and I introduced myself as your friend. We chatted. I drew an agonising picture of your struggle for existence. You were brave, talented, and unsuccessful. Though you went often hungry, you had a plucky smile upon your lips. It was a meritorious ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... wake measures of relief for the middle classes, it had left the artisans and the peasants almost where it found them. In spite of the new Poor Law and other enactments, the people were burdened with the curse of bitter and hopeless poverty, and the misery and squalor in which they were permitted to live threw a menacing shadow over the fair promise of the opening years of the young Queen's reign. The historians of the period are responsible for the statement that in ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid

... years on ... As it is it would be madness ... madness and squalor and the end of everything ... Between us we haven't a couple of pennies to rub together ... How she rides! ... She was never meant for Brixton ... No, nor I ... Why didn't I hold my tongue? ... Oh what a fool, what a fool! Thank Heaven the horses ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason

... Lamo's buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked the ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer

... procured a number of photographs of these wretched men, representing them in all their squalor and emaciation. These were the first which were taken, though the Government afterwards caused some to be made which were widely distributed. With these Mrs. Tyler did much good. She had a large number of copies printed ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... be done was to clean out the church, which was in such a state of dirt and squalor that people had some excuse for not wishing to enter it. He then turned his attention to the clergy already there. They were ignorant and easygoing men, for the most part, who thought a good deal more of their own amusement than of the needs of their flock, but they were not bad at ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes

... told of England's sin and wrong, The ills her suffering children know, The squalor of the city's throng, The green field's ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... places that are pleasant. It is none the less glorious though no man follow it—nay, by the greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be quickened into loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song. From the mean squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the idyllist may soar on poesy's viewless wings, may traverse with fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithaeron though Faun and Bassarid dance there no more. Like Keats he may wander through the old-world forests of Latmos, or stand like ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... the power of dismissing his laborers, and from fear of this, the latter will practice deference, often amounting to servility. Such in time will become the established relation between the employer and the employed, the rich and the poor. If want be accompanied with sordidness and squalor, though it be pitied, the pity will be mixed with some degree of contempt. If it lead to misery, and misery to vice, there will ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... writer happens to know. Once, after going through the great wine-cellar where millions were coined, I went through the barracks in the upper portion of the same building, where a wretched tenantry of the Devil's poor lived in squalor. Each of these families was required to pay room-rent to the millionnaire. As I passed along, I found one man and woman in wrathful distress. They must pay their rent, or be turned out of their rooms. The rent was two or three ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... a dwelling as one may see in any part of Sicily where the inhabitants are not sunk in the direst poverty and squalor, a modest home consisting of two fair-sized rooms, one opening into the other. In each room was a mighty bed, high and white, with fat pillows, and a counterpane of many colors. At the head of each was pinned a crucifix and a little picture of the Virgin, Maria Addolorata, with a palm ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger

... at home is a much more lovable animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in Ireland is even more of a pig than in this country. Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be prepared for. It is the bare prose ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... He was looking back at a palace, his home; and he, too, was touched with a whip—the thrilling whip of pride. It lasted but a moment. His memory threw up a home for the friendless, and upon a background of hunger, squalor and wretchedness his fancy flashed the picture of an Italian hag, crooning ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read

... our first military service at St. Giles'. We left Breadalbane Terrace before nine in the morning and walked along the beautiful curve of street that sweeps around the base of the Castle Rock,—walked on through the poverty and squalor of the High Street, keeping in view the beautiful lantern tower as a guiding-star, till ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... ignorance and squalor and the repulsive habits of many of these unfortunate castes help to explain and to perpetuate their ostracism, but they do not exculpate a social system which prescribes or tolerates such a state of things. That if ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... rude, none-too-well-cared-for building, but it seemed respectable enough and very quiet, considering the mass of people it accommodated. There were marks of poverty everywhere, but no squalor. One flight—two flights—three—and then George's guide stopped, and, looking back at him, made a gesture. It appeared to be one of caution, but when the two came together at the top of the staircase, Sweetwater ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... look at them, for the human eye sees most! What do we see? Squalor, vice, misery, dementia, feeble minds and feeble bodies. Old women on the verge of the grave eating scraps of food gathered from the City dustbins. Dirty and repulsive food, dirty and repulsive women! who have begged during the day enough coppers ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... each and all their portent to the initiated eye. Day, with its fierce glories, brings the throbbing silence of intense life, and under flickering shade, amid the soft pulsations of Nature, the cultivator lives his daydream. What there is of squalor, and drudgery, and carking care in his life melts into a brief oblivion, and he is a man in the presence of his God with the holy stillness of Nature brooding over him. With lengthening shadows comes labour and a re-awaking. The air is once more full of all ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... Rousseau is perhaps the most squalid, as it certainly is one of the most splendid, among French literary names. The squalor belongs chiefly to the man, but the splendor is wholly the writer's. There is hardly another example in the world's literature of a union so striking ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... more at home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts. There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might have been done in picturing the repulsive and sensual ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... the open space in front of Shahjahan's palace fort, which was finished about 1648 A.D. To the beautiful buildings erected by his father Aurangzeb added the little Moti Masjid or Pearl Mosque. But he never lived at Delhi after 1682. The palace is therefore associated with the tragedies and squalor of the decline and fall of the Moghal Empire rather than with its glories. In 1739 it was robbed of the Kohinur and the Peacock throne by Nadir Shah, in 1788 it saw the descendants of Akbar tortured ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... head of an alley-way hard by the Place of the Temple, the Haram-esh-Sherif, in Jerusalem, a long wall built in rough-hewn courses lifts itself above the squalor of the Moghrebin quarter to an eastern sky from which a sun that seldom sleeps bakes the grey stones, bares every detail of a crumbling ruin, and intensifies the wistful odor of decay. This, the remnant of Solomon's ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... leaves us no room to doubt its possessing a living original; yet how disgusting to suppose that such a crew were really to be seen at the board of a brother writer! and in what bad taste does their host describe and ridicule their squalor! That such things were in those times cannot be doubted. Even in this century, in the golden days of book-making, we are told how Constable and how Ballantyne, the great publisher and the great printer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various

... o'clock in the morning, when it is comparatively cool and people are patronizing the market, trafficking and bartering for the day's supply of provisions, the streets present quite an animated appearance; but during the heat of the day the scene changes to one of squalor and indolence; respectable citizens are smoking nargilehs (Mark Twain's "hubble-bubble"), or sleeping somewhere out of sight; business is generally suspended, and in every shady nook and corner one sees a swarthy ragamuffin stretched out at full length, perfectly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into squalor. But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... there would be a new heaven and a new earth—a Utopia such as More never dreamed of, nor Plato, nor Bellamy, nor Campanella in his City of the Sun. Each hand would be at its own work; each eye would be upon its own task; each foot would be in the right path. All the fear, the weariness, the squalor, and the unrest of life would be done away. The life of each man would be a life of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... food is chiefly supplied by shooting the wild fowl and venison, and stealing from the cultivated patches of the plantations nearest at hand. Their clothes hang about them in filthy tatters, and the combined squalor and fierceness of their appearance is ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... of practical dictator in the city of Reuton. The story was seldom told without a mention of his man Max—Lou Max who kept the south end of Reuton in line for the mayor, and in that low neighborhood of dives and squalor made Cargan's a name to conjure with. Watching him now, Mr. Magee marveled at this cheap creature's evident ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... initiating—of the irreverence and pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps, wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating, turning beauty into ashes, and worse! That divine mechanics should thus, through selfishness and avarice, be leagued with filth and squalor and ugliness! When one looks upon Raglan, indignation rises—not at the storm of iron which battered its walls to powder, hardly even at the decree to level them with the dust, but at the later destroyer who could desecrate the beauty yet left by wrath ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... his mental nourishment and solace. When they were apart he found his mind dwelling on him as a sort of habit. But for this one man he would have lived a squalid life among his people at Janney's Mills—squalid because he had not the elasticity to rise above its narrow, uneducated dullness. The squalor so far as he himself was concerned was not physical. His own small, plain home was as neat as it was simple, but he had not the temperament which makes a man friends. Baird possessed this temperament, ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... stick in the dust on the ground. On the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education; continual aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery. I have so constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the root of all its sorrows, even as English misgovernment and Tory villainy." Almost the counterpart of this remark is ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... see, seated next him, a figure hideous enough to have personated one of the malignant beings of whom Zanoni had spoken. It was a small man, dressed in a fashion strikingly at variance with the elaborate costume of the day: an affectation of homeliness and poverty approaching to squalor, in the loose trousers, coarse as a ship's sail; in the rough jacket, which appeared rent wilfully into holes; and the black, ragged, tangled locks that streamed from their confinement under a woollen cap, accorded but ill with other details which spoke ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... for a little, before returning to the hotel—through the narrow cobble-paved streets, with their alternations of splendour and squalor, their palaces, churches, hovels, their dark little shops, their neglected shrines, their vociferous population, their heterogeneous smells—and along the Riva, with its waterside bustle, its ships loading and unloading, and its unexampled ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... the Sparrow Hills, from which Napoleon first saw Moscow and the Kremlin, was also interesting; but the city itself, though picturesque, disappointed me. Everywhere were filth, squalor, beggary, and fetishism. Evidences of official stupidity were many. In one of the Kremlin towers a catastrophe had occurred on the occasion of the Emperor's funeral, a day or two before our arrival: some thirty men had been ringing one of the enormous bells, when it ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... nature that blesses your life, can't help feelin' pity for those less blessed than herself. She looks down through the love- guarded lattice of her home,—from which your care would fain bar out all sights of woe and squalor,—she looks down, and sees the weary toilers below, the hopeless, the wretched; she sees the steep hills they have to climb, carry in' their crosses; she sees 'em go down into the mire, dragged there by the love that ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)

... her wolf-skin vesture, (If such it was, for they grow so hirsute 435 That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit) He was contrasting, 'twas plain from his gesture, The life of the lady so flower-like and delicate With the loathsome squalor of this helicat. I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned 440 From out of the throng, and while I drew near He told the crone—as I since have reckoned By the way he bent and spoke into her ear With circumspection and mystery— The main of the lady's history, 445 Her frowardness and ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... woman, younger than the boy, lay on a tumble-down bed, a rag of clothing over her—her face with a deathlike pallor upon it, as she lay in what appeared to be a stupor. She was ill, critically ill; it needed no trained eye to discern a fact all too apparent to the most casual observer. The squalor, the glaring poverty here, was even more pitifully in evidence than in the other room—only here upon a chair beside the bed was a cluster of medicine bottles and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun

... one in homeliness, his character was by the other drawn upward to the height of human nobility and aspiration. His great capacity of pain, which but for his buffoonery would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him, as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At once coarser ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown

... Harrodstown, the horrors of it are faded and dim, the discomforts lost to a boy thrilled with a new experience. I have read in my old age the books of travellers in Kentucky, English and French, who wrote much of squalor and strife and sin and little of those qualities that go to the conquest of an empire and the making of a people. Perchance my own pages may be colored by gratitude and love for the pioneers amongst whom I found myself, and thankfulness to God that we ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... grounds, but he was determined that his property should not be disfigured. Once, when a smart agent came to make proposals respecting the sinking of a pit, the Squire took him by the shoulders and solemnly pushed him out of his study. He fancied that a colliery would bring poachers and squalor and drunkenness, and many other bad consequences, so he kept his fields unsullied and his little streams pure. Without knowing it, the Squire was a bit of a poet. For example, he had one long dell, which ran through his woods, planted with hyacinths and the wild ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman

... and fine chteaux of rich manufacturers; but contrasted with these nothing like abject poverty. The houses of working-folk are clean, each with its flower-garden, the children are neatly dressed, no squalor or look of discontent to be seen anywhere. Every hamlet has its beautiful spire, whilst the country is the fairest, richest conceivable; in the woods is seen every variety of fir and pine, mingled with the lighter foliage of chestnut and acacia, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... read, in the chronicles of those days, that amid all this suffering and squalor there was drawn a strict line between "the quality" and those who had no claim to be patricians. "The quality" was made up of such emigrants as came from the more civilized East, or who had slaves, or who dragged with them some rickety vehicle with carriage-horses—however ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... it. As to Ireland, we may rejoice to say that there is less of it now than there was twenty years since. Things are mending there. But though such excuses may be truly made—although an Englishman, when he sees this squalor and poverty on the quays at Queenstown, consoles himself with reflecting that the evil has been unavoidable, but will perhaps soon be avoided—nevertheless he cannot but remember that there is no such ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... such a thing as bread; many had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few Villages possessed an oven. A weaving-loom was rare, the spinning-wheel unknown. The main article of furniture, in this bare scene of squalor, was the Crucifix and vessel of Holy-Water under it [and "POLACK! CATHOLIK!" if a drop of gin be added].—The Peasant-Noble [unvoting, inferior kind] was hardly different from the common Peasant: he himself guided his Hook Plough (HACKEN-PFLUG), and clattered ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... and squalor of the Five Towns, and reached Birches Street with pomp, while Annie wondered how William Henry would contrive to get credit from a cabman. The entire street would certainly gather round if there should ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... thrown down into the dark court in seeming mockery. It is impossible for any one to get from language alone, either spoken or written, an adequate idea of the loneliness, the sense of gloom, the filth and squalor, of the apartments in some of these Boston tenement houses. It requires a strong stomach, and a still stronger determination that nothing shall thwart you from knowing how your brothers and sisters live, to take you the second ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... your case entirely inconsistent with the facts that bear upon it What do you think of your red savage, who, making no pro-vision for even his animal needs, but merely supplying them for the moment as he can, and living in squalor, filth, and extreme discomfort, yet daubs himself with grease and paint, and decorates his head with feathers, his neck with bear's claws, and his feat with gaudily-stained porcupine's quills? What of your black barbarian, whose daily life is a succession ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... feel the call of life. Look at our friend Kaye! If Kaye had to live in London lodgings, he wouldn't mind a bit, if he could get to the Museum Reading-Room—he only wants books and his own work—he doesn't want company or music or art or talk or friends. He is wholly indifferent to nasty food or squalor. Poverty is not a real evil to him. If he had money he wouldn't know how to spend it. I read a book the other day about a priest who lived a very devoted life in the slums—he had two rooms in a clergy-house—and there was a ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and capital and conventions are vocally annihilated. In some of them food is served at prices which astonished his training at the expensive restaurants. There the musician and the girl went, he as explorer, fastidiously critical, yet enduring what he regarded as squalor and anarchy, for the new experience of feeling ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... then, is the man who has undertaken to crush my friend Lecour on the question of extraction! All the world knows that his paternal uncle, of the same name as he, is a common carter in Quebec, and his children in the last ditch of squalor and degradation." ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall

... and said to myself, I should like to bathe and cleanse myself from the squalor produced by my late hard life and by Mrs. Herne's drow. I wonder if there is any harm in bathing on the Sabbath day. I will ask Winifred when she comes home; in the meantime I will bathe, provided I can find a ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... letters,—this especially if you are a mother, wife, or sweetheart. It is an easy thing to forget. You mustn't. Out there life is chiefly squalor, filth, and stench. The boy gets disgusted and lonesome and homesick, even though he may write to the contrary. Write to him at least three times a week. Always write cheerfully, even although something may have ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes

... against the Jews, these merchants were oppressed and robbed, and saved themselves from destruction only by living a squalid life outside and a princely life in hidden quarters. It has been said: "You might follow an old merchant, spotted and stained with all the squalor of beggary upon him, through byways foul to the feet and offensive to every sense, and through some narrow lane enter what looks like the entrance of an ill-kept stable. Thence opens out a squalid hall of noisome odors. But ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among the curses ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

... these Aspasias made themselves a distinguished position, and occupied a place with their protector nearly akin to that of wife. But in the ordinary way their reign over any one heart was shortlived, and their career, though splendid, was brief,—a youth of folly, a premature old age of squalor and neglect. Their habits were luxurious and extravagant. In dress they outvied the splendour, not insignificant, of the Roman matrons; and they might be seen courting the admiration of the wealthy loungers of Rome by dashing ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... more, has reference to that—that occurrence about Wynston Berkley—he is the hero of the hellish illusion. At certain times, sir, it seems to me as if he, though dead, were still invested with a sort of spurious life; going about unrecognized, except by me, in squalor and contempt, and whispering away my fame and life; laboring with the malignant industry of a fiend to involve me in the meshes of that special perdition from which alone I shrink, and to which this emissary of hell seems to have predestined me. Sir, this is a monstrous ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... persistent tendency to present the wrong side as well as the right side—and not, as literary good-manners are supposed to prescribe, ignore the former—is obvious in the charming tale "At the Fair," where a little spice of wholesome truth spoils the thoughtlessly festive mood; and the squalor, the want, the envy, hate, and greed which prudence and a regard for business compel the performers to disguise to the public, become the more cruelly visible to the visitors of the little alley-way at the rear of the tents. In "A Good Conscience" ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... frank confession. For my own part, I should scarcely look at this old door if it were in the Cluny or any other museum; but here, in ancient Figeac, I see it where it was many lustres ago, and the pleasure of finding it in the midst of the sordidness and squalor that follow upon the decay of grandeur and the evaporation of human hopes makes me feel much that I should not feel otherwise, and calls up ideas as a February sunbeam calls gnats out of the dead earth and sets ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... husband, going with a lover, Andrea Marcosini, who abandoned her at the end of five years to marry a dancer; and in January, 1837, she returned to her husband's home emaciated, withered and faded, "a sort of nervous skeleton," to resume a life of still greater squalor. [Gambara.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... probation officer, was that the woman managed to keep the boy fairly neat and clean, regardless of her own condition, and he generally had food of some sort, although the mother sometimes went without food for days. Through the squalor and misery and degradation of her own life Bennie had somehow been kept unsullied, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... Verhaeren, the modern industrial city, with its spreading tentacles of devouring grime and squalor, its clanging factories, its teeming bazaars and warehouses, and all its thronging human population, is taken up triumphantly into poetry. Verhaeren is the poet of 'tumultuous forces', whether they appear in the roar ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really wanted to deal with overwork and squalor." ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... ordered Vedder to wait with the Dragon when the luggage had been taken down, and thus we saved ourselves some minutes which we should have lost in walking. We left the car as soon as possible, however, and plunged into the beauty and squalor of the High Street on foot. I annexed Barrie as a companion, and Somerled did not fight for her. Quietly he contented, or seemed to content, himself with Mrs. James, and my impression was confirmed that, whether he wanted Barrie or not, he was deliberately standing aside in ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... accountable for half of this excess of brilliancy; the author's native optimism is accountable for the other half. I do not remember, in all her novels, an instance of gross misery of any kind not directly caused by the folly of the sufferer. There are no pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average humanity which she favors is very borne in intellect, but very genial in heart, as a glance at its representatives in her pages will ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various

... this at first. He arrived in inclement weather, and it was some weeks before he became accustomed to the climatic conditions—so different from any northern atmosphere. He hated the filth of the much-neglected city, the squalor of its lower classes, the narrowness of its streets, and the peculiar pavement, which, as he says makes walking in Rome a penitential pilgrimage. He goes to the carnival, and his penetrating glance proves it ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... Italian troops entered Rome and took possession of it as the Capital of Italy, free from the Alps to Taranto, they found it a city of ruins, squalor, and hardly habitable in a sanitary point of view. Interesting, of course, to the traveller from its wealth of splendid relics of the past and vast treasures of art, but as undesirable for residence as the Upas Valley. Now what does the traveller see? A prosperous and happy population; ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... means an inviting place. It was an old stone edifice, two stories high, which had once been covered with, stucco; but the stucco had fallen off in most places, disclosing the rough stones underneath, and giving it an air of dilapidation and squalor. The front was by the road-side. A door opened in the middle, on each side of which was a small, dismal window. In the second story were two other small, dismal windows. At the end they law a window on each story, and a third in the ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... ward Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, and ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... had not failed to make a just impression. The red-haired girl of the pensive face still gazed dreamily down the court and her head inclined a little toward the earth as though she were listening for the sound of a footstep. Not only the dreamer of dreams in that den of squalor, this Alban Kennedy was her idol to-night as he had been the idol of fifty of her class since he came to live among them. What cared she for his ragged shoes or the frayed collar about his neck? Did not the whole ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton

... face showed close to one of the streaming windows; sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's outcasts; this was the shadowland, which last night had swallowed ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... the impression that they were satisfied with their romance. Impossible, of course. Romance is never in the place unless we put it there, and who would put even a sentimental dream into such a hole as Tabacol? Tropical squalor. Broken people! I've never seen romance in such a place, and don't expect to. . ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... all was squalor and dirt, dingy tents flapping in the ceaseless wind, unpainted shacks, wooden houses with boards warping under the hot sun, the single street deep in yellow dust, the surrounding prairie littered with tin cans, and all manner of debris. But with the coming of night much of this roughness ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish

... themselves—let them fight or eat the leek; but the child and the helpless and the sick it is a pleasure to aid. I love the poor as much as I love anything. I could live their life, if I were put to it. As a gentleman, I hate squalor and the puddles of wretchedness but I could have worked at the plough or the anvil; I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... epitomized; but here, too, all the miseries of that life. A ray of light falling from heaven as if by special favor on those puny flowers and the vigorous wheat-ear brought out in full relief the dust, the grease, and that nameless color, peculiar to Parisian squalor, made of dirt, which crusted and spotted the damp walls, the worm-eaten balusters, the disjointed window-casings, and the door originally red. Presently the cough of an old woman, and a heavy female step, shuffling painfully in list slippers, announced the coming of the mother of Ida Gruget. ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac

... Agnus Dei—a blind alley of low jutting houses over arcades, full of squalor, pink wash, children, and cats—was on this early morning ablaze with colour and music. From wall to wall (and eight feet will measure that) it seemed packed with the nobility. Tousled heads from above ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... began to slow down. It was morning—somewhere. Jimmy looked furtively out of the slit at the edge of the door to see that the train was passing through a region of cottages dusted black by smoke, through areas of warehouse and factory, through squalor and filth and slum; and vacant lots where the spread of the blight area had been so fast that the outward improvement had not time to build. Eventually the scene changed to solid areas of railroad track, and the trains parked there thickened until he could no longer ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... the street called Cossitollah, flows all the motliness of a Calcutta thoroughfare in two counter-setting currents;— one Chowriagee-ward, in the direction of Nabob magnificence and grace; the other toward the Cooly squalor and deformity of the Radda Bazaar;— and as, in the glare of the early forenoon sun, the shadows of the hither or thither passing throngs fall straight across the way, from the Parsee's godown, over against me, to the gate of the pucca house wherein my look-out is, I watch with interest the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... saw that the woman's strength was failing, and that she could not live. And there, in that nameless hovel, with death on the hearthstone and death and life hovering over the pitiful bed, the three great men went through the pain and the horror and squalor of birth, and they knew that they had never yet stood before ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke

... respect on account of their riches; others love to hide their riches, but to hug their money in secret, and seem to enjoy the prospect of dying rich. I was engaged in a singular case some time ago, in which an old lady who had starved herself to death, and lived in the greatest squalor, had secreted 250 pounds in a stocking under the mattress of her bed. It was stolen by one nephew, who was sued for it by another, and all the money went in law expenses. If then we are not to spend our money upon luxuries, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... was turned toward me. With one sinewy, aged hand he fondled the wisps of faded hair upon his head; with the other he moved small objects over a flat board. He was a lonely monarch upon a throne of squalor; he was playing a solitary ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... and the contagion that carry off one-half of mankind, to expel those enemies to the human race? The innumerable statistical inquiries of the last ten years on this subject, all go to prove that dirt, squalor, close air, and stagnant water, are the causes of one-half the mortality of mankind in civilised countries. The majority of thinking people of all classes—and these, though a small minority of mankind, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various

... be great, after being of none account, and hast gotten riches after squalor, being foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters, so that promotion is come unto thee; then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the endowments of the God. Thou ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn

... it is to them to stretch their limbs! I forget the squalor of the kennel in watching their happy gambols. I cannot drink more than one tumbler of brown brandy and water; but Dickon overlooks that weakness, feeling that I admire his greyhounds. It is arranged that I am to see them ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... everyday enslaves me more and more, has reference to that—that occurrence about Wynston Berkley—he is the hero of the hellish illusion. At certain times, sir, it seems to me as if he, though dead, were still invested with a sort of spurious life; going about unrecognized, except by me, in squalor and contempt, and whispering away my fame and life; laboring with the malignant industry of a fiend to involve me in the meshes of that special perdition from which alone I shrink, and to which this emissary of hell seems to have predestined me. Sir, ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... something abjectly, almost brutally, pathetic in the ugly squalor of a man's tears. Sandy Graff crying, and now and then wiping his eyes with the damp and dirty sheet, was almost a more ugly sight than he had been in the maudlin bathos of ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... was finished about 1648 A.D. To the beautiful buildings erected by his father Aurangzeb added the little Moti Masjid or Pearl Mosque. But he never lived at Delhi after 1682. The palace is therefore associated with the tragedies and squalor of the decline and fall of the Moghal Empire rather than with its glories. In 1739 it was robbed of the Kohinur and the Peacock throne by Nadir Shah, in 1788 it saw the descendants of Akbar tortured ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... hour the watchman braved the blinding path, and left the evening paper on the piazza floor. There it lay unopened. Mrs. Thorne fanned herself and looked at it. There must be fighting in Cuba; she did not move to see. Other mothers' sons were dying; what was death to such squalor as hers? Sorrow is a queen, as the poet says, and sits enthroned; but Trouble is a slave. Mothers with griefs like hers must suffer in the fetters ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... of the hazards of life made her thoughtful. She, to whom Maggie had always seemed an old woman, was a widow, but Maggie's husband survived as a lusty invalid. And she guessed that Maggie, vilely struggling in squalor and poverty, was somehow happy in ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... anywhere out of Italy. Looking from that jutting rock near Hope Gate, behind which the defeated Americans took refuge from the fire of their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... the Works. Joyce liked all that was trim and beautiful, but just now this house and lawn, so new and snug and smiling, jarred upon her like a discordant note. What business had he to live where fresh paint and large windows and broad verandas should mock at the poverty and squalor of all the other houses? She felt it almost as ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... in the line. They brought civilian minds, undisciplined to the conquest of fear, to their task; they never for one instant guessed the truly spiritual exaltation which gives wings to the soul of the man who fights in a just cause. Squalor, depravity, brutalisation, death—moral, mental and physical deformity were the rewards which the American public learned the fighting man gained in the trenches. They heard very little of the capacity for heroism, the eagerness for sacrifice, the gallant self-effacement ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... the door and opened it. There, bobbing her head and smirking mechanically, stood that loathsome creature, Old Meg. In these rich surroundings her frightful squalor was all the more accentuated. Those at the table drew back in utter disgust as she tottered into the room. As she passed ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... the window. A girl was coming down the street, looking at the numbers of the houses. She stopped here. Intuition told me she was Miss Goodwin. While she was ringing the bell I did all I could to increase the shabby squalor of your room. She was shown in here, and I introduced myself as your friend. We chatted. I drew an agonising picture of your struggle for existence. You were brave, talented, and unsuccessful. Though you went often hungry, you had a plucky smile upon your lips. It was ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... at the remains of Jim's lunch that littered the shabby oilcloth on the table. A black wave of despair swept over him. This was for him instead of cleanliness, comfort, brightness, friendly people—and Helen Dunbar. This squalor, this bare loneliness, was the harsh penalty of failure. He put his hand to his throat and rubbed it for it ached with the sudden contraction of the muscles, ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... politeness and courtesy. To the casual observer the military element is not noticeable in the home life of the common people, as they are rapt in their work, very industrious and get their pleasure talking to their ever present babies, or tending some little plants, even if squalor surrounds them. But the word of the ones higher up is absolute law to them. Discipline is supreme from the time the small boy is taught the "Goose Step," preparatory to his military training, until he obediently ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer

... to the smaller towns of the land, is in all respects the most attractive sight in America, and one of the most remarkable places in the world, ranking next to London and Paris in the extent and variety of its attractions. Its magnificence is remarkable, its squalor appalling. Nowhere else in the New World are seen such lavish displays of wealth, and such hideous depths of poverty. It is rich in historical associations and in treasures of art. It presents a wonderful series of combinations ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... enlivening; nor do the low brick houses, given up to nondescript longshore traffic, and freely punctuated with gilt-lettered saloons, add to its impressiveness. Squalid it is without doubt, this particular aspect of New York; but what is the squalor of West-street to that of Limehouse or Poplar? Are our own dock thoroughfares always paved to perfection? And if we had a blizzard like that of three weeks ago, how long would its vestiges linger in the side-streets of Millwall? Even as I mark the grimness ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... with society, or whose avocations have caused him to mingle, at one time or other, with a great number of people, who cannot call to mind the time when some shabby, miserable wretch, in rags and filth, who shuffles past him now in all the squalor of disease and poverty, with a respectable tradesman, or clerk, or a man following some thriving pursuit, with good prospects, and decent means?—or cannot any of our readers call to mind from among the list of their quondam acquaintance, some fallen and degraded man, who lingers ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... clashing billows upon enchanted mountains, valleys of the Shadow of Death, air-voyages and promenades in the abysses of the ocean, the duello, the battle, and the siege, the wooing of maidens and the marriage rite. All the splendour and squalor, the beauty and baseness the glamour and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and the baseness, of Oriental life ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... had desired to smother all thought of the Infinite, of Eternity and of God in the minds of those to whom they had nothing to offer in return. A threat of death yesterday, misery, starvation and squalor! all the hideousness of a destroying anarchy, that had nothing to give save a national fete, a tinsel goddess, some shallow laughter and momentary intoxication, a travesty of clothes and of religion and a dance on the ashes of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... on top of one of the highest hills in London, and entrenches itself as a fortress against the poverty and squalor that are creeping up the hill towards it. Around the square there are still gardens and crescents and roads of consideration, but ever dwindling in social status as one goes down the hill, till the consideration vanishes in ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... coincides with the inner mood there is intoxication in its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the squalor of its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a youthful sense of adventure. He had cut loose from the familiar shores of habit, and launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion; all the old tests and measures were left behind, and his course ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... spelunca, -ae, f., cave, cavern. sperno, spernere, sprevi, spretus, despise, scorn. spero, -are, -avi, -atus [spes], hope. spes, spei, f., hope. sponte, f. abl. sing., modified by mea, tua, sua, of one's own accord, voluntarily. squalor, -oris [squaleo, be dirty], m., dirt, filth. stabulum, -i [sto], n., standing-place, stall, stable, inclosure. statim [sto], adv., on the spot, forthwith, at once, immediately. statuo, statuere, statui, statutus [sto], ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.

... our lives comes from our material environment. Good clothes, artistic homes, beautiful pictures and decoration, attractive parks and lawns, well-kept streets, well-bound books—all these have a direct moral and educative value; on the other hand, squalor, disorder, and ugliness are an incentive ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... a far more mature intelligence than Hannibal's to comprehend those peculiar processes by which the judge sustained himself and his intimate fellowship with adversity—that it was his magnificence of mind which made the squalor of his daily life seem merely a passing phase—but the boy had managed to point a delicate distinction, and Betty grasped something of the hope and faith which never quite died out ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... just which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might easily have found himself saying of some present-day agitator against our Philippine conquest what he said of this or that reformer of his own time. He might have called him, as a private person, a tedious bore ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... McMaster, kindly Anglican lay-missionary, who deserves grateful remembrance for recognizing and temporarily helping merit under the most deceptive disguise, was obliged much against his inclination to dismiss Francis and to allow him to fall back into the pit of squalor and vagabondage. ...
— The Hound of Heaven • Francis Thompson

... nastiness, n. squalor, filthiness, pollution, filth, corruption, dirtiness; indecency, smut, obscenity, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... we are under a roof. It is evidence of the habitable nature of many of our much-abused cottages that in the Thames-side villages a great proportion are now occupied for several months in the year by people who, though willing to pay for simple accommodation, will not tolerate dirt, squalor, or want of sanitation. To their surprise they have found hundreds of cottages, homely, but not uncomfortable, kept with scrupulous neatness, and furnished by no means badly. Nearly all have ample kitchen accommodation, fair beds, and an equipment of glass, china, and crockery, which ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... supposed to be a sample of this soup to the officer seated in the pilot house high above the squalor, and he would pick out a bean from the mess on the end of a fork and place it to his lips and nod his head gravely, and the grinning steward ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis

... still kept an eye on the place. It was on the boundary line of the two most turbulent wards in the city. To the north was the Italian colony, to the south was the Irish colony. Both were orderly and self-respecting as a rule, though squalor and poverty abounded. But these two races are at once the simplest and most quick-tempered, and whenever an Irishman or an Italian crossed the boundary line there was usually a hurry call for the patrol wagon, and some one was always more ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... irreverence and pride and destruction that were about to follow in his footsteps, wasting, defiling, scarring, obliterating, turning beauty into ashes, and worse! That divine mechanics should thus, through selfishness and avarice, be leagued with filth and squalor and ugliness! When one looks upon Raglan, indignation rises—not at the storm of iron which battered its walls to powder, hardly even at the decree to level them with the dust, but at the later destroyer who could desecrate the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... trees, have on the whole a bare appearance, compared with a city like New Haven, with its majestic elms and robe of vivid green, which even in autumn seems to dream of summer bloom. Nevertheless, Los Angeles is clean, and poverty and squalor rarely show themselves; while, in the suburbs of the city, even the humblest dwellings are frequently surrounded by palm trees, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... destiny, fills much of the foreground and is a quite masterly piece of work. One cannot be wrong in assuming this to be essential autobiography; there is a passionate conviction as of things intimately seen and dreadfully suffered. Such material might well have tempted to a mere piling of squalor upon squalor. A fine discretion has given a noble dignity to a record through which shines the unquenchable human spirit. One passage, full of affectionate discernment about London, will cause a flicker of just pride in everyone who is authentic Cockney, whether by birth or adoption. A big ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... Hamel. Until recently it was supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish tetter, like sulphur or the rancid ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield

... not all. The very business itself absolutely disgusted her. It disgusted her to such a point that she would have preferred to do it with her own hands in secret rather than see others do it openly in all its squalor. The business might be more efficiently organized—for example, there was no reason why the sitting-room should be made uninhabitable between breakfast and dinner once a week—but it could never be other than odious. The kitchen floor must inevitably be washed every day by ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,—a straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city neighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has none of those colonial associations which, like sprigs of lavender in an old chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as dreary nooks ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... winter cold! Tonight in Chicago there are a hundred thousand children wearing out their strength and blasting their lives in the effort to earn their bread! There are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones! There are a hundred thousand old people, cast off and helpless, waiting for death to take them from their torments! There are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse of the wage-slave; ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... a number of photographs of these wretched men, representing them in all their squalor and emaciation. These were the first which were taken, though the Government afterwards caused some to be made which were widely distributed. With these Mrs. Tyler did much good. She had a large number of copies printed in Boston, after her return there, and both in ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... determined that his property should not be disfigured. Once, when a smart agent came to make proposals respecting the sinking of a pit, the Squire took him by the shoulders and solemnly pushed him out of his study. He fancied that a colliery would bring poachers and squalor and drunkenness, and many other bad consequences, so he kept his fields unsullied and his little streams pure. Without knowing it, the Squire was a bit of a poet. For example, he had one long dell, which ran through his woods, planted with ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman

... Peter that he would have to continue his sleeping and eating in Niggertown, and since his mother had died and his rupture with Cissie, the squalor and smells of the crescent had become impossible. He told the old Captain his objections as diplomatically as possible. The old man made short work of them. He wanted Peter to sleep in the manor within calling distance, and he might begin this very night and ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... threw away his fetishes after a hard struggle with all the past and present environment that bound him. Then at once his instinct was to make a better home for his family. He must get away from the heathen village, with its squalor, and impurity, and idolatry. It is true that environment does not regenerate the soul, but the renewed soul transforms the environment. Better conditions are evidence of the new life. On the contrary, when some fall back to heathenism, they fall into slovenly attire, ill-kept ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen

... abandoned her at the end of five years to marry a dancer; and in January, 1837, she returned to her husband's home emaciated, withered and faded, "a sort of nervous skeleton," to resume a life of still greater squalor. [Gambara.] ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... entered a room. His astonishment was so great that he half stopped, for the apartment was furnished in almost regal style; richly-upholstered furniture and oil paintings contrasted so vividly with the squalor and misery of the lower part of the house that the audacious detective could scarcely believe ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton

... him in this life of anything but a dismal stumbling down into disease and want, yet I do not in the least believe that that is the end of his horizon or his pilgrimage; and thirdly, one may be genuinely and not in the least evilly amused at the contrast between the disreputable squalor of the scene and the lofty claim advanced. The three emotions are not at all inconsistent. The pessimistic moralist might say that it was all very shocking, the optimistic moralist might say that it was hopeful, the unreflective humourist might simply be ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... black clothes, very solemn and respectable, with his beard flowing over his chest. At the same moment he saw me, and seemed to start in his saddle and glance quickly at all about—at my poor little house, the litter that lay about, the squalor of the town-end we lived in, and the laborious bent back of my man as he squattered about in the mud. He checked his horse an instant, as though by an impulse; for my father, though I honored him, was a weak man, in whom ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... pang of compassion and yet with feminine disdain, the horrible thing that his daily existence was. No wonder he would never allow Mrs. Maldon to go and see him! The spectacle of his secret squalor would have desolated the ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... coffee-pot without a spout, a saucer of rouge, a fragment of looking-glass, and a flask, labelled "Rosa Solis." Broken pipes littered the floor, if that can be said to be littered, which, in the first instance, was a mass of squalor and filth. ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... upward to the height of human nobility and aspiration. His great capacity of pain, which but for his buffoonery would no doubt have made him mad, was the source of his rarest excellencies. Familiar with squalor, and hospitable to vulgarity, his mind was yet tenanted by sorrow, a place of midnight wrestlings. In him, as never before in any other man, were high and low things mated, and awkwardness and ungainliness and uncouthness justified in their uses. At once coarser than his rival and infinitely ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown

... the old man, with a triumphant look, which for the moment effaced the squalor of his aspect. "I was coming out of Smith & Dawkins's with the money in my pocket, when I saw you opposite, just going into a shop. You could ha' knocked me down easy, I warrant ye. Didn't expect to come on yer tracks as fast as ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... low as the Son of God in a hovel, of what real parentage we know not; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surroundings; a young manhood vexed by weird dreams and visions, bordering at times on madness; singularly awkward, ungainly, even among the uncouth about him; grotesque in his aspects and ways, it was reserved for this strange ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... Arvilly's talk havin' slipped offen him like rain water offen a brass horn, "the poor man, after he has worked hard all day, and has nothing to go home to but a room full of cryin' children, discomfort, squalor and a complaining wife, is justified in my opinion to go to the only bright, happy place he knows ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... opinion To a million merciful and sneering men, While families cuddle the joys of the fireside When spurred by tale of dire lone agony. A newspaper is a court Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried By a squalor of honest men. A newspaper is a market Where wisdom sells its freedom And melons are crowned by the crowd. A newspaper is a game Where his error scores the player victory While another's skill wins death. ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane

... the women at poor Abel Edwards's funeral were worn and old before their prime, their mouths sunken, wearing old women's caps over their locks at thirty. Their decent best gowns showed that piteous conservation of poverty more painful almost than squalor. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... ancestor Caleb Parish had founded in revolutionary times, and it marked a contrast with its less provident neighbours. Many cabins scattered along these slopes were dismal and makeshift abodes which appeared to proclaim the despair and squalor of their builders ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... trivial lives,—lives which nevertheless strongly attracted white men of evil and shiftless, but adventurous, natures, and to which white children, torn from their homes and brought up in the wigwams, became passionately attached. Yet back of the lazy and drunken squalor lay an element of the terrible, all the more terrible because it could not be reckoned with. Dangerous and treacherous allies, upon whom no real dependence could ever placed, the Indians were nevertheless the most redoubtable of all foes when the war was ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... of evening softened the shabby street below, veiling ugliness and squalor and subtly transmuting meanness and poverty to picturesqueness—as artists, using only the flattering simplicity of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... proud, happy, praised; great men shook him familiarly by the hand, and a winsome maiden smiled upon him. Now he was a chained slave, doomed to work, eat, and sleep on a narrow plank for ten long years. Ten years! could he survive ten days of the horror and squalor and degradation? ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... not as yet in sight from this valley, however, though we are approaching it nearly and though it closely overtops the col which rises beyond Bareges. The road continues desolate, and the dull grey-green pastures hardly serve to relieve its deserted and forlorn squalor. The clouds brood on the hills, the air grows chilly as we ascend, and more than once we sigh half dubiously for the bright parlor left behind at Luz. We move leisurely, almost reluctantly, on, not in haste ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... has a drunkard's baby, born in a thieves' den, and dragged up amid the ignorant squalor ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,—a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens,—on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... say: "The Ghetto is an arrangement first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct. When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery, poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame—if he could, he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider. In the twilight days of Jewish ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... brighter from the midst of a corrupt and deplorable society. Epictetus showed that a Phrygian slave could live a life of the loftiest exaltation; Aurelius proved that a Roman Emperor could live a life of the deepest humility. The one—a foreigner, feeble, deformed, ignorant, born in squalor, bred in degradation, the despised chattel of a despicable freedman, surrounded by every depressing, ignoble, and pitiable circumstance of life—showed how one who seemed born to be a wretch could win noble happiness ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... spoken of her power, and gave him to understand that she did not require money; the squalor of her room made this seem rather enigmatical to the sick man, but he knew such people were sometimes eccentric in their mode of living, and this might possibly account for his surroundings. However, it was no affair ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld

... of them is that they fail to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale, even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger, it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been conscious of the contrast themselves. ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... Old Maggie had donned her ragged slippers and a blue calico wrapper and shuffled to the foot of the emergency bed. Old Maggie was of that vague neighbourhood back of the Avenue, where squalor and poverty rubbed elbows with vice, ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... those who have choice of places, how much more must it be so with us who must take what we can get, and what wonder is it that we utterly fail, or that we imbibe the squalor and shiftlessness of the miserable places we must occupy. All life is subject to the same general physiological influences. Man and plant alike flourish in the sunshine, and fade and weaken in the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... pleased to send him another way through the mist. Not that life was to him aught but a tragedy at any time, on whichever road he took. What but a tragedy could it be to a man bred at Douay and reared on Greek, and now condemned to live in loneliness and squalor among unlettered, unwashed creatures; to one who, banned by the law, moved by night, and lurked in some hiding-place by day, and, waking or sleeping, was ever in contact with the lawless and the oppressed, the wretched and the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... the gate. They entered the lane side by side, following the stream of villagers who were slowly wending their homeward way. It was a primitive English village, not adorned on the one hand with fancy or model cottages, nor on the other hand indicating penury and squalor. The church rose before them gray and Gothic, backed by the red clouds in which the sun had set, and bordered by the glebe-land of the half-seen parsonage. Then came the village green, with a pretty schoolhouse; and to this succeeded a long street of scattered whitewashed ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... vocally annihilated. In some of them food is served at prices which astonished his training at the expensive restaurants. There the musician and the girl went, he as explorer, fastidiously critical, yet enduring what he regarded as squalor and anarchy, for the new experience of feeling ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... personated one of the malignant beings of whom Zanoni had spoken. It was a small man, dressed in a fashion strikingly at variance with the elaborate costume of the day: an affectation of homeliness and poverty approaching to squalor, in the loose trousers, coarse as a ship's sail; in the rough jacket, which appeared rent wilfully into holes; and the black, ragged, tangled locks that streamed from their confinement under a woollen cap, accorded ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... thousands, who could see with his own eyes in almost every country of the world thousands of little girls rescued from defamation, thousands of women rescued from the sink of horrid vice, thousands of men new-born from lives of unimaginable crime and iniquity, thousands of homes once dreary with squalor and savagery now happy and full of purest joy; nay, who could see, as I have seen in India, whole tribes of criminal races, numbering millions, and once the despair of the Indian Government, living ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... classes in any European country before the years of the last wars was in a different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy, suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds; their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... displays of power in the First Church and in the tent meetings had had its effect upon the life of Raymond. But as he walked past saloon after saloon and noted the crowds going in and coming out of them, as he saw the wretched dens, as many as ever apparently, as he caught the brutality and squalor and open misery and degradation on countless faces of men and women and children, he sickened at the sight. He found himself asking how much cleansing could a million dollars poured into this cesspool accomplish? Was not the living ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... the nobles grew very rich but the masses lived in squalor and poverty. Never for a moment was the country at peace. It was for ever fighting someone, somewhere, for causes which did not interest the subjects at all. Until, through this continuous and exhausting warfare, most of the Assyrian soldiers had been killed or maimed and it became necessary to allow ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon

... tone and manner. In a moment poor Jessie's eyes and brain were as wide awake and alert as fear could force them. That dreaded voice would rouse her from the sleep of death almost, she thought. Shaking with cold and dread, she followed him along the lighted platform, and out into the gloom and squalor ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not given up except under stress of the direst necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket or the last pretense of pecuniary decency is put away. There is no class and no country that has yielded so abjectly before the pressure of physical ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... Khaki, but this admirable title had already been appropriated. Lastly, we decided on The Glory of the Trenches, as the most expressive of his aim. He felt that a great deal too much had been said about the squalor, filth, discomfort and suffering of the trenches. He pointed out that a very popular war-book which we were then reading had six paragraphs in the first sixty pages which described in unpleasant detail the verminous condition of the men, as if this were the chief thing to be remarked concerning ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... that we should range with science glorying in the time, While we force our brother mortals into squalor, need, and crime; Wicked we should pose as Christians singing songs to God on high, Heedless of his tortured creatures who in pauper ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... roads, to take off the English merchants, who in consequence of the revolutionary movements going on, sought shelter under their own flag. Here Mr. Seton, reduced to the last stage of destitution and squalor, boldly applied to Captain Bentham, the commander of the squadron, who, finding him to be a gentleman, offered him every needful assistance, gave him a berth in his own cabin, and finally landed him safely on the Island of Jamaica, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... up-hill streets of small palaces (but very large palaces for all that), with marble terraces looking down into close by-ways—the magnificent and innumerable Churches; and the rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide awake, and yet so ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... and known too much of jails to be happy in such a residence. She thought of her son, growing up inside prison walls, and seeing the squalor and daily misery of convicts, and witnessing the cruelties of the guards—mere matters of routine, but horrible nevertheless. Her husband had come up from the ranks in prison life, and was an efficient officer. He had no thought ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... of our princes goes for an afternoon into the slums in East London, everybody says, and says deservedly, 'right!' and 'princely!' This prince has learned pity in 'the huts where poor men lie,' and knows by experience all their squalor and misery. The Man Jesus is the sympathetic Priest. The Rabbis, who did not usually see very far into the depth of things, yet caught a wonderful glimpse when they said: 'Messias will be found sitting outside the gate of the city ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... tired, but it was just physical fatigue; he felt wide awake mentally. Earth life, for all its squalor and brutality, was tremendously exciting compared with shipboard existence. It was with a momentary pang of something close to disappointment that he remembered he would have to report back to the Valhalla in several days; there were so many fascinating aspects of Earth ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg

... alacrity, not to alight till not only Elmira was left behind, but more weary suburbs, too, on the other side. That night, as old travellers phrase it, we lay at Waverly, on the frontier of Pennsylvania, a sad, dirty little town, grotesquely belying its romantic name, and only surpassed in squalor by the classically named Athens—beware, reader, of American towns named out of classical dictionaries! Here, however, our wanderings in the brick-and-mortar wilderness were to end, for by a long, romantic, old, covered bridge we crossed the Chemung River, and there once more, on the other ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... fishing boats were gradually laid up, until scarcely enough remained in commission to supply the demands of the home merchant for fish. Where there had been prosperity and bustle about wharves, and fish-houses, there succeeded idleness and squalor. Shipbuilding was prostrate, commerce was dead. The sailors returned to the farms, shipped on the privateers, or went into Washington's army. But when peace was declared, they flocked to their boats, and began to rebuild their shattered ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... constitution, but the Bulls of Rome have been at the bottom of it; and, depend upon it, wherever you see a condition at all resembling hers, you will find, on inquiry, that the sufferer has allowed herself to be dealt with by the Bulls of Rome. The cases of squalor and ignorance, in all the world most like your aunt's, are to be found in their own household; on the steps of their doors; in the heart of their homes. In Switzerland, you may cross a line no broader than a bridge or a hedge, and know, in an instant, where the Bulls ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In Anyuta, the medical student and his mistress live in a room disgusting in its squalor: ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... fiddle. He did not love them the better because they were poor and miserable, and it was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets, where there is neither riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the nullity of the rich' nor 'the squalor of the poor' that his writing lost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace. Here were men and women who under the weight of their necessity lived, as the artist lives, in the presence of death and childhood, and ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats

... then, must become of clumsy and inferior work-women? Think of it long and patiently, till you come to see, as she bids you, the true relation between the idleness of women and money in the Fifth Avenue and the hunted squalor of women without money at the Five Points. Women of Boston, the parallel stands good for you. Listen, and you may hear the dull murmur of your own "Black Sea," as ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska

... case entirely inconsistent with the facts that bear upon it What do you think of your red savage, who, making no pro-vision for even his animal needs, but merely supplying them for the moment as he can, and living in squalor, filth, and extreme discomfort, yet daubs himself with grease and paint, and decorates his head with feathers, his neck with bear's claws, and his feat with gaudily-stained porcupine's quills? What ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... first thing that struck us was the gloom and darkness. In each corner of the room was a bed, with a smaller one pushed underneath, and two sick people suffering from slow fever. It is no wonder, for eleven people occupied this one room, about twelve feet square. Need we wonder that misery and squalor are seen all around? An old soap box from the grocery formed a corner cupboard. Two old chairs which perhaps belonged to their great-grandmother, all frame and no seat, an empty box, and a bucket of water with a tin scoop, formed the whole furniture of the mountain ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 2, February, 1889 • Various

... saintliness and renunciation. We know, the great cathedrals, the pageantry and splendor, the exquisite handicraft, the tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, the vast learning and the incomparable dialectic. We know also the social injustices, the misery and squalor the ignorance in which the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... question as to whether the louse bites the flesh or sucks blood, and decides a point interesting to physicians, i.e., that the loathsome disease called phthiriasis is a nonentity. From this source not only many living in poverty and squalor are said to have died, but also men of renown, among whom Denny in his work on the Anoplura, or lice, of Great Britain, mentions the name of "Pheretima, as recorded by Herodotus, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Dictator Sylla, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... at home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts. There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might have been done ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... not a sign of linen. On the worm-eaten table the Bulletins de la Grande Armee, reprinted by Plancher, lay open, and seemed to be the Colonel's reading; his countenance was calm and serene in the midst of this squalor. His visit to Derville seemed to have altered his features; the lawyer perceived in them traces of a happy feeling, a particular gleam set ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac

... at first. He arrived in inclement weather, and it was some weeks before he became accustomed to the climatic conditions—so different from any northern atmosphere. He hated the filth of the much-neglected city, the squalor of its lower classes, the narrowness of its streets, and the peculiar pavement, which, as he says makes walking in Rome a penitential pilgrimage. He goes to the carnival, and his penetrating glance proves it to ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... squalor seemed to him suddenly appalling. "There, don't do that," he protested—her arm had found its way ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... her society upon the others. Dick, who lighted his cigar, felt grateful to Fuller. It was some time since he had met people of any refinement on friendly terms, and until he took up his quarters in the locomotive shed had been living in squalor and dirt. ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss

... many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... environments. They perceive, with a keen sense of sorrow, that children who are born and bred away from these rural conditions, are robbed of more than one-half their natural rights. They realize, more than ever before, the filth, the misery, the squalor, the fetid air, and the unsanitary conditions, of our great cities. They shudder, when they contemplate, the bitterness of the misfortune, the cruelty of the deprivation, of the great mass of children, who must be born and bred in the midst of such depressing, unhealthy surroundings. ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... strangely garbed traders, laden camels, gorgeous Roman soldiers, brown-faced priests, black-bodied slaves; sunlit hills high above one, distant faintly blue mountains far ahead of one—a thronged labyrinth of shadow and light, of noise and confusion, of pomp and squalor. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... a fine looking, white-haired woman, who proved to be her mother. The older woman carried herself with a regal dignity that seemed quite remarkable in a place of such primitive squalor. ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... the lump is bad, but that it is not worse remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid. For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor immorality, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... sordid crone bent well-nigh double? So, glancing at her wolf-skin vesture (If such it was, for they grow so hirsute That their own fleece serves for natural fur-suit) He was contrasting, 'twas plain from his gesture, The life of the lady so flower-like and delicate With the loathsome squalor of this helicat. I, in brief, was the man the Duke beckoned {440} From out of the throng; and while I drew near He told the crone—as I since have reckoned By the way he bent and spoke into her ear With circumspection and mystery— The ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... which a Romeo might launch himself at daybreak, warned by the lark's song. A sudden angle in the road is turned, and we pass from airspace and freedom into the old town, beneath walls of dark brown masonry, where wild valerians light their torches of red bloom in immemorial shade. Squalor and splendour live here side by side. Grand Renaissance portals grinning with Satyr masks are flanked by tawdry frescoes shamming stonework, or by doorways where the withered bush hangs out a promise of bad wine. The Cappella Colleoni is our destination, that masterpiece ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... it. My sins are deep, my helpless miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's love comes down to the most sunken. However far in the abyss ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... had been under this roof she had grown ashamed of the squalor and starvation and wretchedness of her past existence. She did not like to think of it even; it had been no fault of hers, but she felt ashamed that she ever should have been that little, filthy, unkempt, naked thing, grovelling on the clay floor, and fighting for mouldy crusts with ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... should never paint again if I saw much of those hopeless lives that have no remedy. I know of such a dear lad about my Phil's age who has felt this so sharply that he has given his happy, lucky, petted life to give himself wholly to share their squalor and unlovely lives—doing all he can, of evenings when his work is over, to amuse such as have the heart to be amused, reading to them and telling them about histories and what not—anything he knows that can entertain them. And this he has daily done for ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... Florence; the houses are tall enough to be stately, if they were not so inconceivably dingy and shabby; but, with their half-dozen stories, they make only the impression of hovel piled upon hovel,—squalor immortalized in undecaying stone. It was now getting far into the twilight, and I could not distinguish the particularities of the little town, except that there were shops, a cafe or two, and as many churches, all dusky with age, crowded closely together, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and the glorification of pauperism. Dickens was born in a debtor's prison—constructively—and he leaped from squalor into fussy opulence. He wrote for the rabble, and he who writes for the rabble has a ticket to Limbus one way. The Rossettis made their appeal to the Elect Few. Dickens was sired by Wilkins Micawber and dammed by Mrs. Nickleby. He wallowed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... private and public documents that are slowly opening out a prospect of new economic methods, methods conceived in the generous spirit of scientific work, that may yet arrest the drift of our western civilization towards financial and commercial squalor and the social collapse that must ensue inevitably on that. In view of the composition of the Committee, the Majority Report is in itself an amazing triumph of Sir Richmond's views; it is astonishing that he was ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... says, you're free to come over and play with her, though there ain't many of you I'd say it to;" and with that the tall, gaunt Mary bearing the baby, followed Norma into the house and up the narrow, broken stairs, and along the dark halls past door after door closed upon its story of squalor and poverty, until, at last, panting with the child's weight, she reached their own ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin

... buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer

... abounding in pastoral graces. There are English-like parks and fine chteaux of rich manufacturers; but contrasted with these nothing like abject poverty. The houses of working-folk are clean, each with its flower-garden, the children are neatly dressed, no squalor or look of discontent to be seen anywhere. Every hamlet has its beautiful spire, whilst the country is the fairest, richest conceivable; in the woods is seen every variety of fir and pine, mingled with the lighter foliage of chestnut and acacia, whilst every orchard has its ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... discomfort and squalor is soon forgotten and the romance and picturesqueness of these far-off streets remains as a very pleasant memory amidst the winter fogs and coldness of our ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and the fog thickened and the lights grew vague, the multitude of heads passed into the blur beyond with an effect of mystery, pictorial, remote; but where Arnold and Lindsay walked the squalor was warm, human, practical. A torch flamed this way and that, stuck in the wall over the head of a squatting bundle and his tray of three-cornered leaf-parcels of betel, and an oiled rag in a tin pot sent up an unsteady ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... much of the sick and the dying. He had seen poverty, wretchedness, and sin in their most dreadful aspects, and the peace and comfort of his mother's present condition were a great contrast to the riot and squalor of many a death room into which he had sought to carry the gospel message of mercy. Truly he felt thankful in his inmost soul that she, over whom he was watching with filial love, was ready at any moment to appear before the great Tribunal, because she 'believed and knew in whom she ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale

... of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem comparable with the origin of sin and evil. First, of course, comes heredity, bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which are always near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief cause of crime. A large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously estimated, but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal as causative ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... night-journey between Inverness and Perth that had severed that shining time from the dull and commonplace hours he had now entered upon. He looked out of the window as the train thundered along—Preston—Wigan—Warrington—everywhere squalor, hurry, and noise, with a smoke-laden sky lowering over the sad and dismal country, different, indeed, from that other world he knew of, with its crimson slopes of heather, its laughing waters, its lonely solitudes in their noonday ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... Nivolet rising against the sky far across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty, silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy, and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... be changed, if only he will accept the generous offer I am bearing him," said Phil to himself, as he looked around at the evidences of squalor and poverty. "Inside of six months this place could have a thrifty look; the women would own decent dresses, the children shoes for their feet if they wanted them; yes, and even a schoolhouse would stand right in the middle of the village, with a teacher ready to show these poor things how to ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... but this he refused to do, and was cast into prison. "Are these then my judges?" he exclaimed when he was returning from the presence of the Inquisitors, whose ignorance astonished him. There he remained for five long years; until at length, wearied by his confinement, the squalor of the prison, and by his increasing years, he consented to recant his "heresy," and regained his liberty. The old man lost his sight at seventy-four years of age, and died four years later in 1642. In addition to the work which caused him so great misfortunes ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... paid—I swear, I swear I have. When the others used to take their dirty drugs to make them forget, they would dream of strange paradises, unknown heavens—but through the haze and mist that they brought, I would remember—I would remember. The filth and the squalor and vileness would fade and dissolve—and I would see the sun-dial, with the yellow roses on it, warm in the sun, and smell the clove pinks in the kitchen border, and touch the cresses by the brook, cool and green and wet. All the sullen ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... police-office. Henceforth, he was free of the family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash houses of Leith and the Grassmarket. With Jean Johnston, the blowen of his choice, he smeared his hands with the squalor of petty theft, and the drunken recklessness wherewith he swaggered it abroad ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... — N. ugliness &c. adj.; deformity, inelegance; acomia[obs3]; disfigurement &c. (blemish) 848; want of symmetry, inconcinnity[obs3]; distortion &c. 243; squalor &c. (uncleanness) 653. forbidding countenance, vinegar aspect, hanging look, wry face, "spretae injuria formae" [Vergil]. [person who is ugly] eyesore, object, witch, hag, figure, sight, fright; monster; dog[coll.], woofer[coll.], pig[coll.]; octopus, specter, scarecrow, harridan|!, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... the last scion of one of the most ancient families in the kingdom. She was a countess in her own right, but had to work at menial labor. Moreover, many had sunk down to the grade of peasantry, and lived in squalor on lands which were once the estates of ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... and out, round the great public squares, and within earshot of the broad white streets, and the time-blackened houses of the poor stood huddled out of sight behind the palaces of the rich, making perpetual contrast of wealth and poverty, splendour and squalor, just as one may see today in Rome, in London, in Paris, in Constantinople, in all the mistress cities of the world that have long histories of triumph and defeat ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... early Greeks, of the sacredness of the human body was recognized; when the old medieval feeling of helpful brotherhood yet lingered; and the restless misery of competition and all the train of woe, squalor and ugliness that "civilization" has brought ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard









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