DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Undershirt' Quotes from Famous Books

... in the living room, which was none too ample for him; a mountain of a man with tousled gray-brown hair, his broad face masked in a tangle of gray-brown beard. He wore a faded and grimy bush jacket with clips of rifle cartridges on the breast, no shirt and a torn undershirt over a shag of gray-brown chest hair. Between the bottoms of his shorts and the tops of his ragged hose and muddy boots, his legs were covered with hair. Baby Fuzzy was sitting on his head, and Mamma Fuzzy was on ...

— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... the storm came, it might render crossing impossible. Our ambulance was heavily laden, and the crossing dangerous. Before I ventured, we unloaded about half the weight, and then I undressed, save for my undershirt, and went to investigate the bed of the crossing for quicksands. As soon as I had determined where ...

— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... off his overshirt, unbuttoned his red undershirt and turned it in until you could see the hair on his breast. Rolling up his sleeves, he flew at his job once more. He was getting his work reduced to a science by this time. He rolled his dough, cut his dough, and turned out the fine ...

— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams

... walk brought us to the beach and there lay the Kawa as handy as you please. She had been considerably tidied up since our departure. Our blanket-sail had been stowed and between the dingey-oars, which were rigged fore-and-aft, stretched a rope of eva-eva from which, to our surprise, hung an undershirt and a dainty feminine rigolo. But no sign of William Henry Thomas. In vain we shouted, "Kawa ahoy!" and hurled lumps of coral. All was ...

— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points. Then too, a baseball suit requires so much in the matter of leg. Therefore, when I say that Rudie Schlachweiler was a dream even ...

— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber

... men who worked in these who ran the most risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving ...

— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... only had on an undershirt," thought Bean, struck by this swiftly devised effect of correct dressing. He sat in the roomy rear seat beside Nap, leaning an elbow negligently on the arm-rest. He watched Paul shrewdly in certain mysterious preparations ...

— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... your O. D., And your undershirt. Wrap a towel 'round your waist, Wrestle with the dirt; Do not get the sponge too wet— Little drops will trickle Down a soldier's trouser legs— Golly! How ...

— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces

... and the hat, Malone did not feel exactly chipper. His shirt and undershirt were no longer two garments, but one, welded together by seamless sweat and plastered heavily and not too skillfully to his skin. His trouser legs clung damply to calves and thighs, rubbing as he walked, and at the knees each trouser leg attached and detached itself with the unpleasant ...

— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett

... very unsatisfactory race," said Miss Van Tuyn. "I am only twenty-four and have found that out already. It is very clever of the French to cultivate irony as they do. The ironist always wears clothes and an undershirt of mail. But the sentimentalist goes naked in the east wind which blows through society. Not only is he bound to take cold, but he is liable to be pierced by ...

— December Love • Robert Hichens

... police. On the naked rock there was no hope for them. Before they could clamber down Koolau could have picked off the last man. But he did not fire, and, after a conference, one of them took off a white undershirt and waved it as a flag. Followed by another, he advanced along the knife- edge to their wounded comrade. Koolau gave no sign, but watched them slowly withdraw and become specks as they ...

— The House of Pride • Jack London

... Thornton could see, it was the same old room, only now crammed with books and pamphlets and crowded with tables of instruments. Hooker, clad in sneakers, white ducks, and an undershirt, was smoking ...

— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... loin-cloth; but the white man clung to him closely and desperately. At times, from weakness, his head drooped and rested on the woolly pate. At other times he lifted his head and stared with swimming eyes at the cocoanut palms that reeled and swung in the shimmering heat. He was clad in a thin undershirt and a strip of cotton cloth, that wrapped about his waist and descended to his knees. On his head was a battered Stetson, known to the trade as a Baden-Powell. About his middle was strapped a belt, which carried a large-calibred ...

— Adventure • Jack London

... I called. The coal heaver had only trousers and an undershirt on, and looked as black as a Negro. Sweat poured over his coal-blackened face. We gripped hands. The ...

— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... seemed to have been manufactured out of the same hide. They, too, were dirt-brown, patched, wrinkled, and greasy. They did not meet each other, but left bare a piece of the ankle, and that also was dirt-brown like the buckskin. There was no undershirt, waistcoat, or other garment to be seen, with the exception of a close-fitting cap, which had once been catskin; but the hair was all worn off, leaving a greasy, leathery-looking surface, that corresponded well with the other parts of the dress. Cap, shirt, leggings, and moccasins, ...

— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... the Bowles stethoscope, it has been found that the heart-beats can easily be counted if there is but one layer of clothing between the stethoscope and the skin. Usually it is placed directly upon the undershirt of ...

— Respiration Calorimeters for Studying the Respiratory Exchange and Energy Transformations of Man • Francis Gano Benedict

... neat, webbed belt, and unlaced the soldierly leggings. The emblemed coat came off carefully. The khaki shirt followed. Last of all, having slipped his feet out of the wonderful shoes, he pulled off the trousers, and stood, a pathetic little figure, in an old undershirt of Grandpa's, the sleeves of which he had shortened, and a pair of Grandpa's underdrawers, similarly cut—to ...

— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. ...

— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... by a man stopping at the gate and bidding her good-morning. He was the fishman from Polk Street, extremely excited, his greeting followed by a voluble description of how he had escaped from a collapsing building in his undershirt. Aunt Ellen swapped experiences with him, and pointed to the chimney, which if it had fallen inward would have killed her. The fishman was not particularly interested in that and went on to tell how he had been down to Union Square and seen thousands of people there—and had she ...

— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... waist. Trousers carefully folded will only need pressing about twice a year. Hose should be well shaken, and unless perfectly clean, thrown in the soiled-linen basket. Evening silk hose can be worn several times. The undervest, or undershirt, and the drawers should be also subjected to a vigorous shaking, and hung on the back of the same chair where you have already placed your hose. All these intimate garments are to be aired, and the chair on which you have hung ...

— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain

... there the real martyrdom began. Clad only in an undershirt and drawers, the men stood at their posts, a cloth wound about their foreheads to keep the running sweat from streaming into their eyes. Their blood hammered and raced in their temples. Every vein boiled as with fever. It was only by the exertion ...

— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... owner of the nondescript bed resting on the cabin floor. His neck, grimed, red and wrinkled as that of an ancient turtle, rose above his bare brown shoulders and his upper chest, likewise exposed. His only body covering was an undershirt, or two undershirts. Their flannel over-covering had left them apparently some time since, and as for the remnant, it had known such wear that his arms, brown as those of an Indian, were bare to the elbows. He was always thus, so far as any neighbor could have remembered him, save ...

— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough

... three-months' note, not only Christmas and the Fourth of July, but St. Patrick's Day, Ash Wednesday and sixteen Sundays, so that, by the time he has deducted the interest, what's coming to me looks like a Jaeger undershirt after its first interview with an African blanchisseuse. That's the kind of thing the poet had in mind when he wrote—"I know a bank whereon the wild ...

— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... November. Richard relocked his dear boot-heel in the casket; eleven and Matzai had entered the room together. Matzai laid out Richard's clothes, down to pin and puff tie. Richard shook off his bathrobe skin and shone forth in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of those cotton trousers, cut short above the knee, which dramatic usage ...

— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... fever should be put in bed, and kept there during the entire illness,—that is, from four to six weeks. Light, and the free circulation of fresh air are absolutely necessary for the proper care of a scarlet fever case. The child should be clothed only with the usual night gown and a light undershirt. No extra wraps or ...

— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... in his trousers and his undershirt, and was laboriously shaving himself before the mirror. He turned round and grinned. Phil grinned back at him and sat down on the ...

— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... fluttering feminine fashion, no calflike barytones from masculine adolescence to drive him to the woods, where it was always rather difficult for him to focus his attention on printed pages. The balm of heavenly silence pervaded the house, and in its beneficent atmosphere he worked in his undershirt, inhaling inspiration and the aroma of whale-oil, soap, ...

— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... next thing was for one of us to catch a cold and try what cured it; we all wanted to be the one, but it was Dicky's idea, and he said he was not going to be done out of it, so we let him. It was only fair. He left off his undershirt that very day, and next morning he stood in a draught in his nightgown for quite a long time. And we damped his day-shirt with the nail-brush before he put it on. But all was vain. They always tell you that these things will give you cold, but we ...

— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit

... paced the room, while his agony rose to a climax. "Ye gods! What do you think Miss Pratt will think of the people of this town, when she's invited to meet a few of my friends and the first thing she sees is a nigger in his undershirt? What 'll she think when she finds that child's eaten up half the food, and the people have to explain that the dog in the front yard belongs to the darky—" He interrupted himself with a groan: "And ...

— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... to the beating of the ranger's heart. Then, seemingly with a single motion of his knife, he slit the sleeve of the ranger's shirt. Another motion laid open the undershirt sleeve, disclosing the arm to the shoulder. The physician examined it closely. The arm was swelling fast. The physician opened his case and gave the ranger some medicine. "Now we'll get to bed as soon as possible," he said, "and rest for ...

— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... poor. Poor I had lived. I had gone hungry on occasion. I had never had toys nor playthings like other children. My first memories of life were pinched by poverty. The pinch of poverty had been chronic. I was eight years old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store across the counter. And then it had been only one little undershirt. When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home-made things until it was washed. I had been so proud of it that I insisted on wearing it without any ...

— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... clothes to take to Tuskegee was the question. Up to that time I had never worn an undershirt, or a pair of drawers, or a stiff-bosom shirt, or a stiff collar. All these I had not only to get, but had to learn to wear them. My shirts and collars were bought second-hand from a white neighbor and were all ...

— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various