"Domesticity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... writing, and second, the enthusiasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him. The following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron's spirit of protest against the more selfish "greasy domesticity" ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... great simplicity of the whole struck me. It is like a little grange or farm. The rooms are small and low, and of a pleasant domesticity; it is a place apt for a patriarchal life, where simple people might live at close quarters with each other. The house is hardly visible from the gate. You turn out of a steep lane, embowered by trees, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... customary, in the East, for a person who is attached to any one by a tie of affection or of domesticity, to attend upon him when he goes to eat ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... alien. Doris indeed, and another female victim of Lady Dunstable (also deposited on the scene by the same obliging arm), get busy unearthing so various a past for the undesirable one that she retires baffled, epigrammatic brilliance bites the dust, and domesticity is left triumphant. It is a jolly little story, very short, refreshingly simple, and constructed throughout on the most approved library lines. If the writer's name were not Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD, I should say that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... personality, and here we may leave the personal side of Borrow. Beyond this we know that he was unquestionably a devoted son, a good husband, a kind father. The literary life has its perils, so far as domesticity is concerned. Sir Walter Scott in his life ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... before us, all seemed delicious, the domesticity of the amorous amusements, the passion with which she returned my embraces, her modesty and enjoyment were all so like the days when I fucked my mothers servants. The difference between her sensuous embraces and the matter of fact fucking ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... psychic, if not a geographic, frontier. The middle class have a philosophy with which they protect themselves against the insidious suggestions that come from the life of the conspicuous rich. These, on the other hand, half expecting that simplicity and domesticity may have some virtue, speak superciliously of middle-class smugness and the bourgeois "home." The less prosperous of the professional classes are prone to lay a good deal of stress upon their intellectual resources as compared with the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... said Mrs. Craggs, 'have been so long accustomed to connect the office with everything opposed to domesticity, that I am glad to know it as the avowed enemy of my peace. There is something honest in that, at ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... seemed to benefit by this, and settled down at Botzen. The following year, when Greta was just ten, she died. It was a shock to Paul. He gave up excessive drinking; became a constant smoker, and lent full rein to his natural domesticity. He was fond of both the girls, but did not at all understand them; Greta, his own daughter, was his favourite. Villa Rubein remained their home; it was cheap and roomy. Money, since Paul became ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to regret it during the year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the gardener's expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more communicable: ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... inferiors. Masses of secret intelligence poured into the central cabinet of the General; and the General himself ate, slept, prayed, worked, and moved about the world beneath the fixed gaze of ten vigilant eyes. Men accustomed to domesticity and freedom may wonder that life should have been tolerable upon these terms. Yet we must remember that from the moment when a youth had undergone the Exercitia and taken the vows, he became no less in fact than in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... summer long, you might find it wasteful to take many excursions abroad. For, having once received the freedom of family living, you will own yourself disinclined to get beyond dooryards, those outer courts of domesticity. Homely joys spill over into them, and, when children are afoot, surge and riot there. In them do the common occupations of life find niche and channel. While bright weather holds, we wash out of doors on a Monday morning, the wash-bench in the solid block ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... not disposed to carry his sentiments into the newspaper business. They must "make good" by themselves, like any other Tom and Gill, and Milly married to an impecunious newspaper artist would not be a social asset for the Star. So Milly, happily, was relegated to domesticity, and the management of her one raw little maid. Anyway, as she told Eleanor Kemp, her husband did not care to have his wife working—didn't think much of women in the newspaper business. She was proud ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... skull only slightly exceeds that of the wild rabbit. The Angora rabbit, No. 13, offers the most remarkable case; this animal in its pure white colour and length of silky fur bears the stamp of long domesticity. It has a considerably longer head and body than the wild rabbit, but the actual capacity of its skull is less than that of even the little wild Porto Santo rabbits. By the standard of the length of skull ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... him with amused resentment. It was his domesticity which was his undoing. Old Man Badger on the hillside would never have dillied or dallied ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... threatened, the other convinced by reason; another must be visited in sickness, another found work, for yet another must gratuitous lawyering be done—all this with jovial front and a camel's capacity for drink. This was his domesticity, amidst which must be sandwiched conferences and journeyings in Tuscarora County and the other counties of his district, and speeches on behalf of the party outside the Demijohn, entailed by too successful stumping in the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... tea pensively, and Wentworth listened contentedly to the musical murmur of her voice. Such an entrancing effect had it on him that he paid less heed to what she said than a man ought when a lady is speaking. The tea-drinking had added a touch of domesticity to the tete-a-tete which rather went to the head of the young man. He clinched and unclinched his hand out of sight under the table, and felt the moisture on his palm. He hoped he would be able to retain control over himself, but the difficulty of his task almost overcame him when she ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... only when women have the same equality of development and the same liberty of choice as men. The amendment I offer is merely a prayer that you will remove from women a disability, and secure to them the same freedom of choice that we enjoy. If the instincts of sex, of maternity, of domesticity, are not persuasive enough to keep them in the truest sense women, it is the most serious defect yet discovered in the divine order of nature. When, therefore, the Committee declare that voting is at war with the distribution of functions ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... had thought the beautiful dwelling might keep him at home. With her words, "Herrliche Wohnung, wonniger Hausrath," "Beautiful dwelling, delectable household order," first occurs the winning strain which afterward stands for Fricka in her love of domesticity, or, separate from her, for the ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... here, Mr. Copperfield,' said Mrs. Micawber, sipping her punch, 'Mr. Traddles being a part of our domesticity, I should much like to have your opinion on Mr. Micawber's prospects. For corn,' said Mrs. Micawber argumentatively, 'as I have repeatedly said to Mr. Micawber, may be gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative. Commission to the extent of two and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... ever-changing idyll of the highway and the bustle of animal life; with horses that really gallop, and dogs that really bark; with charming male and female figures in the most attractive old-world attire; with happy laughter and artless waggeries; with a hundred intimate details of English domesticity that are pushed just far enough back to lose the hardness of their outline in a softening haze of retrospect. There has been nothing more tragic in your travels than a sprained ankle or an interrupted affair of honour; nothing more blood-curdling than ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... explains the effect of evident cleanliness, security, economy, and comfort. This Dutch charm hardly needs explanation; we are conscious of the domesticity and neatness which pleases us in it. There are few things more utterly discomforting to our minds than waste: it is a sort of pungent extract and quintessence of folly. The visible manifestation of it is therefore very offensive; and that of its absence very ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Harriet closed the door, "how this terrible contagion of domesticity, as General Washington puts it, hath seized everybody! Here Betty hath married her Frenchman and gone to France; Clifford is to come for Sally before he sails for England; and now there is Robert and Harriet. What does ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... day near the Easter rest she felt lonely and without a soul to understand her in the world, and her mind ran once more on what is called Platonic friendship. Fanny was clearly happy and busy in her new sphere of domesticity, but no doubt he had his lonely hours. Did he ever think of those days in Rome, gone now beyond recalling? No one had understood her as he had done; no one in all the world. It would be a sort of melancholy pleasure to talk to him ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of his name, forced on him by the need he felt to perpetuate that name in a lawful manner. The monstrous injustice of the whole thing excited in him a perpetual suppressed fury. He had asked no better than to live in spotless domesticity, and now he must go into the witness box, after all these futile, barren years, and proclaim his failure to keep his wife—incur the pity, the amusement, the contempt of his kind. It was all upside down. She and that fellow ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... mind of Alfieri, which saw things only in sharpest black and white contrasts, there existed a still more complete incompatibility between a woman like the Countess of Albany, and a wife such as he conceived a wife: to marry Mme. d'Albany would be to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domesticity, and at the same time to frightfully depart from the normal type of matrimony, which required that the man be absolute master, and not afflicted with any sort of sentimental respect for his ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... play scene, withal Shakespearian! "Stability thy name is woman!" he exclaims bitterly, for he fears love with the compromising domesticity of marriage. It is his rigorous transvaluation of all moral values and conventionalities that proclaims this Hamlet a man of the future. No half-way treaties with the obvious in life, no crooking the pregnant hinges of his opinions to the powers that be. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... designation as a one-horse town. In 1884 came another shock to confidence, and in 1893, still another earthquake, as though the knees of the proud must at intervals be humbled. The one-horse station wagon continued to symbolize the quiet domesticity of the citizens of the Hoosier capital: women of unimpeachable social standing carried their own baskets through the aisles of the city market or drove home with onion tops waving triumphantly on the seat beside them. ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... from the office. He was the occupier for the time of a large, well-furnished official room, looking out into St. James's Park, and as he glanced round it he told himself that his own happiness must be there, and not in the domesticity of a quiet home. The House of Lords, out of which nobody could turn him, and official life,—as long as he could hold to it,—must be all in all to him. He had engaged himself to this woman, and he must—marry her. He did not think that he could now see any way ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... a view of the Dawson's alley-gate might have noted the hired girl starting for the grocery with unusual animation of step, and returning with her basket well stocked with beer and soda bottles—a provision made against a need for "dutch-cocktails," likely to assail Jack during his hours of domesticity. ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... were followed within ten years by critics of tastes so varied as the dramatist of domesticity Thomas Heywood, the gallant lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic and 'ever-memorable' John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and court, Sir William D'Avenant. Before 1640 Hales is said to have triumphantly ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... him passed beyond a faithful, sober affection that took him for granted, unhesitatingly and uncritically, as a new asset in a life dedicated elsewhere. Romance for her was personified in Tante, and her husband was a creature of mere kindly domesticity. It was to think too bitterly of Karen's love for him to see it thus, he knew, even while the torment grasped him; but the pressure of his own love for her, the loveliness, the romance that she so supremely personified ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... on a chair in a corner. I felt like Jezebel, or whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a husband who neglected me. He was going to see me branded a living lie, and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position. He was just the sort ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... recall a single philoprogenitive moment. These dream women were all conceived of, and I was conceived of, as being concerned in some tremendous enterprise—something quite beyond domesticity. It kept us related—gave us dignity.... Certainly ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... place in the large office room of the consulate. The big front doors stood open to the sea, where a mile away the breakers tossed and tumbled on the barrier reef. The back door was kept shut, to keep out the meaner noises of domesticity, but at intervals in the course of the trial you could hear the deliberate grinding of the consular coffee; the chasing of consular chickens; the counting of the consular wash; shrill arguments over the price of fish—a grotesque ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... and sympathy. Though her books were not remarkable for any perfection of literary style, they had the charm of brightness, vivacity, and unconventionality. They revealed a fascinating personality, and their touches of domesticity made them classics in many an English household. In all modern movements Lady Brassey took a keen interest. She gained a first-class certificate in the South Kensington School of Cookery, scullery department and all; was one of the most energetic members of the St. John's ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... her thus add the last touches to her toilet in his presence was a suggestion of familiarity, of domesticity, that was very ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... prepared to receive his advances. He had imagined himself dazzling her a little with his title and possessions, gracefully throwing the handkerchief at her feet, and giving her that slight share in his life and affection which his somewhat continental ideas of domesticity suggested. Had she really meant to be rude to him, or was she nervous? He looked at her once more, still with that unintelligent stare. Jeanne was perfectly composed, with her pale cheeks and large serious eyes. She was obviously speaking the truth. Then as he looked the ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Prize-essay The Possibilities of the Useful The Artist The Doer of Good The Disciple The Master The House of Judgment The Teacher of Wisdom Wilde gives directions about 'De Profundis' Carey Street Sorrow wears no mask Vita Nuova The Grand Romantic Clapham Junction The Broken Resolution Domesticity at Berneval A visit to ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... and the children?" Persis asked, shaking hands and returning to her sewing. She offered no excuse for continuing her work, nor did Thomas wish it. There was a delicious suggestion of domesticity in the sight of Persis sewing by the shaded lamp while he sat near enough to have touched the busy fingers, had he but won the right to ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... of these was, that Mrs. Dodds, like her of Auchtermuchty, or Mrs. Grumlie, carried domesticity to devotion, scarcely anything in the world having any interest to her soul save what was contained in the house—from Tammas, the chief article of furniture, down, through the mahogany table, to the porridge-pot; clouting, mending, darning, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... temporary structure bore no deep traces of its previous occupancy to disturb him with its memories, and for the same reason it gained in cleanliness and freshness. The dry, desiccating summer wind that blew through it had carried away both the odors and the sense of domesticity; even the adobe hearth had no fireside tales to tell,—its very ashes had been scattered by the winds; and the gravestone of its dead owner on the hill was no more flavorless of his personality than was this plain house in which he had lived and died. The excessive vegetation produced ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... destiny reserved for you than marriage to a hired secretary, however amiable, personable, and well-meaning. You must prepare yourself to move in a world beyond and above the common hearthstone of bourgeois domesticity." ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... necessarily been of the decorative arts adorning life throughout the centuries which have passed in rapid succession before us, they have taught two great facts—the beauty of art as an adjunct to the most ordinary demands of domesticity, and the value of the study of the varied arts of past ages as an addition to the requirements of our own. "Ever changing, ever new," may be the lesson derived from the investigation of any epoch. How much then may be obtained from a general review of all! Seroux d'Agincourt deduced a history ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... was cold; she had to make fresh, and wait till it was ready; and she stood by the table watching and preparing it, while Mr. Carlisle sat in his chair observing her. Eleanor's cheeks flushed more and more. There was something about this little piece of domesticity, and her becoming the servitor in her turn, that brought up things she did not wish to think of. But her neighbour liked what she did not like, for he sat as quiet as a mouse until Eleanor's trembling hand offered him the cup. She had to take a step or two for it, ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... her sweet sake, and the sake of the fragrant manliness of the stalwart and deserving knight, I straightway resolved to enter the thankless and precarious business of matchmaking, one in which I had not had one iota of experience; but as women have to ace marriage, domesticity, and mostly all the issues of life assigned them, without training, I did not give up heart. As a first effort I determined that Dawn should chaperon me when I went for my row on the morrow. As I looked at the sun sinking behind the blue hills and shedding a wonderfully mellow light over the broad ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated. It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as house-keepers or even as women. What are these unplumbed wastes between housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and professors of Greek, senators and journalists, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... well-known reticence of the Japanese," I continued, "we hope to meet some of them who will show us something more of their domesticity than we can see through ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... in her glory of domesticity, and as she passed from one room to another she told Caroline bits of interesting history about this piece or that. In her naivet she let the girl see into the long hard years that had been a hand-to-hand struggle for her and the major on their worn farm lands out in ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the most exciting, jolly, interesting, entertaining things were apart from it. Not that Jane was not quite willing to accept with approval, as part of the game of living, such episodes in this field as came her way; but she could not regard them as important. As to marriage, it was merely dowdy. Domesticity; babies; servants; the companionship of one man. The sort of thing Clare would go in for, no doubt. Not for Jane, before whom the world lay, an oyster ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... meant and was tempted to agree, though he felt this was weak. It was pleasant to lounge, enjoying careless talk, and the society of the two ladies had its charm. They added a touch of domesticity and gave the place a homelike look, while the girl made an attractive picture as she handed Lawrence his matches and cigarettes. Foster thought it was worth being ill to be waited on like that. Then his chair was comfortable and he ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... to desire offspring for the pleasures and responsibilities of domesticity and parenthood. There is a parental instinct as such, certainly very strong in most women, and not lacking to some degree in most men. The joys of caring for and rearing a child have too often been celebrated in literature and in life by parents ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... I came to be sitting in so unsavoury a place as Gorson's "fifteen cent oyster and chop house" that night. Most newspaper men—the rank and file—receive remuneration by the week. Those not given over to domesticity, those who enjoy that alluring regularity identical with liberty, fare sumptuously, as a rule, on "pay-day." Thereafter the quantity and quality of the good things of life that they enjoy diminish daily until ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... all the theologies. "We have not all the same gifts. There was a day when I thought it would be my lot to marry and subside into the dead level of domesticity; but I am thankful to think I ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... earnestness, but making it poetical instead of practical. In the following period even this poetical Christianity expired; the arts became devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, and in that they persist except where they are saved by a healthy naturalism or domesticity. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... married Lady Elizabeth Lee, a widow with two children, who seems to have been in favor with Queen Caroline, and who probably had an income—two attractions which doubtless enhanced the power of her other charms. Pastoral duties and domesticity probably cured Young of some bad habits; but, unhappily, they did not cure him either of flattery or of fustian. Three more odes followed, quite as bad as those of his bachelorhood, except that in the third he announced ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... There were a number of table d'hote places on the cross streets near the broad and shining way; and to one of these he had purposed to escort her, so that the bushel might not be removed from the light of his domesticity. ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... the awkwardness of her position, Nancy hesitated, not knowing whether to retreat or go forward. She had decided to go on, observing nothing—and of course she had observed nothing save an agreeable incident in the oft impugned domesticity of Mr. and Mrs. Wyeth—when a further revelation ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... bottles of wine in the course of an evening. No wonder that gout was the pervading disease among county squires, and even among authors and statesman. Morality was not one of the features of English society one hundred years ago, except as it consisted in a scrupulous regard for domesticity, truth, and honor, and abhorrence of meanness ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and domestic,—elephants,—ferrets{72}. Reproductive organs not subject to disease in Zoological Garden. Dissection and microscope show that hybrid is in exactly same condition as another animal in the intervals of breeding season, or those animals which taken wild and not bred in domesticity, remain without breeding their whole lives. It should be observed that so far from domesticity being unfavourable in itself makes more fertile: [when animal is domesticated and breeds, productive power increased from more ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... Mrs. STEEL'S own declaration, that it has been for her a grateful task to set down "a record of the most perfect passion ever shown by man for woman." This was the adoration of the EMPEROR for his consort, an amazing romance of Oriental domesticity, which makes the story of the pair stranger and more fascinating than fiction. A love-tale indeed; and, since 'tis love that makes a book go round, one may trust the circulating libraries to see to it that Mistress of Men is well represented on their shelves. As a study of an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... over to keep house for him?" he asked, with a motion of his head toward the cap'n, who seemed to be petitioning the god of domesticity lest his ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... of domesticity because she had not been able to "see" the interior of the cottage—"shack"—very clearly. Sunny rooms, white curtains, bright cushions and books, pictures and rugs mingled together rather confusingly in her mind when she dwelt upon the inside of her future home. It would be bright, and ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the Romans with their stolen wives, would have been ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... feeling a void in their daily routine of existence that stereotyped fashion is unable to fill. Besides, it would be a perfect godsend to thousands of unhappy bachelors, who sigh for the realities of domesticity amidst the artificiality ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... forgetting that at this point modern voices will want to break in on me with appropriate quotations from Bernard Shaw and others, and try to silence me by pointing out what a mean, petty, dull, sickly, and stodgy thing mere domesticity can be. Yes! it can be all that for people who let it be all that. Even love that once was passionate cannot redeem the life of two people unless there is something there to redeem. Two lifeless and stupid people living together can ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... all for the ultimate. She was always in revolt against babies and muddled domesticity. To her Jesus was another world, He was not of this world. He did not thrust His hands under her face and, pointing to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... the room and shut the door softly, and seemed thereby to shut us in, to enclose us against the world in a sweet domesticity of our own. The fire was burning brightly, the glasses and the decanter on the small table spoke of cheer, the curtains were drawn, and through a half-open door behind the piano one had a hint of a mysterious other room; one could see nothing within it save a large brass knob or ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... of Blandford's fond memories of his wife's conservative habits, Puritan practicality, religious domesticity, and strong family attachments, to withstand Demorest's dogmatic convictions. He smiled, however, with a certain complacency, as he also recalled the previous autumn when the first news of the California gold discovery had penetrated North Liberty, and he had expressed ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... thinking applies to the endless variations of domestic productions, which man accumulates for his mere fancy or use. No doubt these are all caused by some unknown law, but I cannot believe they were ordained for any purpose, and if not so ordained under domesticity, I can see no reason to believe that they were ordained in a state of nature. Of course it may be said, when you kick a stone, or a leaf falls from a tree, that it was ordained, before the foundations of the world were laid, exactly where that ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... blood you vomit, you will find illness a hurried and unexpected visitor. You will be cast down with gloomy forebodings, and children and domesticity in general will ally to work ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... history the instances are rare of women who have quitted the sphere of domesticity and private life to take an active part in the affairs of State. We say "fortunately;" for in our opinion such abstention has tended to the happiness ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... deal to do with his position as a member of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has no real country can have no real home. The average autochthonous Irishman is close to patriotism because he is close to the earth; he is close to domesticity because he is close to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology and elaborate ritual because he is close to the earth. In short, he is close to the heavens because he is close to the earth. But we must not expect any of these elemental and collective virtues ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... husbands and wives; describe their companionships as marriages; and be for the most part unconscious that they were any less married than Henry VIII. For though a glance at the legal conditions of marriage in different Christian countries shews that marriage varies legally from frontier to frontier, domesticity varies so little that most people believe their own marriage laws to be universal. Consequently here again, as in the case of Property, the absolute confidence of the public in the stability of the institution's name, makes it all the easier to ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... simply an ordinary citizen with ordinary views; and if you had told him so he would have taken it as an ordinary compliment. If you had asked him about women, he would have said that one must preserve their domesticity and decorum; he would have used the stalest words, but he would have in reserve the strongest arguments. If you had asked him about government, he would have said that all citizens were free and equal, but he would have meant what he said. If you had asked him ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... he refused to dwell on it even in thought. And so that strange, magic, yearning effluence of a soul into a visible projection and shape was ignored, slurred over, and, after ten years of domesticity in the bank premises, is gradually ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... that his feelings for her might be love. He had often before been on terms of friendship with women, married and single; but none of them had ever attracted him as much as she did. He had never felt any desire to be married; domesticity did not appeal to him. But now, as he watched Violet moving about her drawing-room or playing to him, he found himself thinking that it would be pleasant to return to his bungalow from parade and find a pretty little wife waiting to greet him with a smile and a kiss—and the wife of his ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... brightly. On a low shelf stood a great piggin of water, a fat yellow drinking gourd sticking out of it. The whole picture was a kitchen pastel, delicately toned, a kitchen of the long ago, Sally Madeira fitting into it exquisitely, re-establishing the stately domesticity of an old regime by her fine adaptability ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Mr. Farraday failed in peremptoriness, for that big, bonny gentleman nodded to him, then stood in the wing to catch Miss Lindsey in his arms and bear her away to immediate nourishment. In the excitement of the last few hours a domesticity had grown up between Mr. Farraday and Miss Lindsey that it would have taken months to build in a world less hectic than that in which ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... least idea of living up to the character my friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my unsociable exterior I have always had secret yearnings for domesticity) that I took his hint one autumn afternoon and went to Kerfol. My friend was motoring over to Quimper on business: he dropped me on the way, at a cross-road on a heath, and said: "First turn to the right and second to the left. ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... with her look as they silently left the room. She knew not how to enter upon what she had to say. To talk of the law and use threats in this atmosphere of serene domesticity seemed impossibly harsh. But the necessity of broaching the disagreeable subject was ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... between man and man, through which thousands pass without gaining anything except business acuteness, but which introduced the great psychologist to hundreds of new types, and showed to his keen, observant eyes man, not in society or domesticity, but in undress, fighting for life itself, or for all that makes life worth living. In the Rue de Lesdiguieres he had struggled with himself, striving in cold and hunger to gain the mastery of his art. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... ideas of a sufficient income were not extravagant. He looked forward to building a comfortable little house in the suburbs in the midst of an acre or two of garden and lawn, so that his neighbors' windows need not overlook his domesticity. He would have a horse and buggy wherewith to drive his wife through the country on summer afternoons, and later, if his bank-account warranted it, a saddle-horse for Emily and one for himself. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... population in this island—the educated class, and chiefly of pure Spanish blood—can be set down as valuable acquisitions to our citizenship and the peer, if not the superior, of most Americans in chivalry, domesticity, fidelity, and culture. Of the rest, perhaps one-half can be moulded by a firm hand into something approaching decency; but the remainder are going to give us a great deal of trouble. They are ignorant, filthy, untruthful, lazy, treacherous, murderous, brutal, and black Spain has ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... who came to the country, yes, and made money from it, but never settled down as did the Spaniards, never brought their families with them and made the islands their home. But here were two American women and a little girl—surely evidences of domesticity. ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... our entertainment, often, I say, have I envied the simple happiness of that family, and gone back to my bachelor chambers with an increased sense of dissatisfaction. Why, I thought to myself, had fate denied to me the peaceful domesticity of the DABCHICKS? I was as good a man as DABCHICK, probably, if the truth were known, a better than he. Yet there he was with a good wife, an agreeable family, and a comfortable income to compensate him for his extravagance with the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various
... greasy plates is the one thing that gets on my nerves. And it is a little Waterloo that must be faced three times every day, of every week, of every month, of every year. And I was never properly "broke" for domesticity and the dish-pan! Why can't some genius invent a self-washing fry-pan? My hair is growing so long that I can now do it up in a sort of half-hearted French roll. It has been quite cold, with a wonderful fall of snow. The sleighing could ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... were here, in the temper and power of the consummate art. In its practical methods there was another, the fatallest of all. These great artists brought with them mystery, despondency, domesticity, sensuality: of all these, good came, as well as evil. One thing more they brought, of which nothing but evil ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... like an impossible dream now, when he looked back on them: the late nights and champagne suppers, the glare of the footlights, the glamour and grease paint of the theatre. His soul sickened at the thought of the unnatural life he had led then. All he wanted now was quiet happiness—the life of domesticity for which he had once pitied himself, believing it would be his lot as Christine's husband, seemed the most desirable thing on earth; just he and she—perhaps down in the country—walking through fields and woods, perhaps ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his own, and the 'ideal' he seeks is but the perfect mirror. Yet it is not that mirror he marries after all: for when at last he has come to know what that word—one so distasteful, so 'soiled' to his ear 'with all ignoble' domesticity—what that word 'wife' really expresses, he has learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so well to write Ego as the last word of ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... tigers are being tamed, and come from the desert to amuse the peoples of the north. Animals which had never been able to grow accustomed to our climate, now leave their warm sun without dying, to live in domesticity among us, and even forget the proud and bitter sorrow which used to kill them when enslaved. It is because blood is congealing and growing poorer everywhere, while instinct grows and develops. The soul rises and leaves the earth, no longer ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... which I will not locate more definitely lest you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for fifty and sixty cents, 'vino compreso.' The material is excellent, and the treatment is artistic; the company of a simple and self-respectful domesticity which I think it an honor to be part of: fathers and mothers of families, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not deny a Merry Widow hat here and there, but the face under it, though often fair and young, is not a Merry Widow face. Those people all look as kind and harmless as ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... down here," he went on irritably, "the place has seethed with people, and overflowed with domesticity. I never hear one word spoken except on the subject of furniture, gardening and babies! I can't work in such an environment; it stifles all imagination. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry; she believed herself to be very French in long skirts. "I'll just say she said 'Yes' when I asked her. She never knows what ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... sick; Thick for thin and thin for thick;— In short each homogeneous trick For poisoning domesticity? And since our Parents, call'd the First, A little family squabble nurst, Of all our evils the worst of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Dunaston had been a day of blessedness, this was its twin sister, and the better favored of the two. There was a certain flavor of domesticity in these quiet hours passed together in the garden, interrupted only by the child as she ran hither and thither breaking in on them, sometimes not unpleasantly when speech was growing embarrassed because ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... combination between intellectual economy and energy can be seen by comparing Belloc with his great forerunner Cobbett, who made war on the same Whiggish wealth and secrecy and in defence of the same human dignity and domesticity. But Cobbett, being solely English, was extravagant in his language even about serious public things, and was wildly romantic even when he was merely right. But with Belloc the style is often restrained; it is the substance that is violent. There is many a paragraph of accusation ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Paterfamilias, or him who is but an uncle, to lie back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... usual small town collection of wedding cut glass and doilies, which she put away in the attic, after husband's decease; and, with them, she also put away all respect and desire for the married state. She was through with domesticity and all that it represented, and made up her mind to devote the rest of her life to earning as big a salary as she could and ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... husband ought to be! Why will you pretend to be so painfully modest, Clive, when you are really secretly pleased with yourself and entirely convinced that, in you, the world might discover a living pattern of model domesticity!" ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... standing at the corridor door, observed that his spirits had shot up in the most astonishing manner, and in their blindness they attributed the phenomenon to Edward Henry's delight in a temporary freedom from domesticity. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... be made ready for them, completely and perfectly ready, by professional skill and knowledge; but if it remained just where the interior artist or decorator left it, it would have no more of the sentiment of domesticity ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... go out of doors would have been the uttermost folly, and Stane busied himself in the fashioning of snow-shoes which now would be necessary before they could venture far afield. The girl was engaged in preparing a meal, and the cabin had an air of domesticity that would probably have utterly misled any stranger who had chanced to look in. Stane, as he worked, was very conscious of the girl's presence, and conscious also that from time to time his companion ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... business news with open indignation. She made her report to him that night, just after dinner; and she saw her father's business manner emerge sharply from beneath his genial domesticity. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's tea table the cheering cup ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... woman, to be a mother herself: and yet, somehow—though she would not admit it in so many words—when her young married sisters came with their babies, there was something about their bustling and complacent domesticity that seemed to make maternity bourgeois. She had not dreamed of being a mother like that. She was convinced that her old mother had never been a mother like that. "They seem more like wet-nurses than mothers," she said to herself, with her ...
— Different Girls • Various
... discussions with ever patient mamma as to what was to be done with it. I say Marianne and Jenny, for, though the case undoubtedly is Marianne's, yet, like everything else in our domestic proceedings, it seems to fall, somehow or other, into Jenny's hands, through the intensity and liveliness of her domesticity of nature. Little Jenny is so bright and wide awake, and with so many active plans and fancies touching anything in the housekeeping world, that, though the youngest sister and second party in this affair, a stranger, hearkening to ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... another nomad, had taught herself to accomplish a good deal with poor material. On the road in America, she had sometimes made even a bedroom in a small hotel tolerably comfortable, than which there is no greater achievement. Oddly, considering her life, she had a genius for domesticity. ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... art, the Mater Amabilis is the preeminent subject. This fact is due partly to the German theological tendency to subordinate the mother to her divine Son, but more especially to the characteristic domesticity of Teutonic peoples. From Van Eyck and Schongauer, through Duerer and Holbein, down to Rembrandt and Rubens, we trace this strongly marked predilection in every style of composition, regardless of proprieties. ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... resentful—respect for Willowfield was enormous. It did not behold it as a simple provincial town, whose business establishments were primitive, and whose frame houses, even when surrounded by square gardens with flower-beds adorning them, were merely comfortable middle-class abodes of domesticity. It was awed by the Willowfield Times, it revered the button factory, and bitterly envied the carriages driven and the occasional festivities held by the families of the representatives of these monopolies. The carriages were ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... he wept silently, while his friend, in eloquent language, told how famous authors, whose names were France's proudest possession, had been forgiven by their wives for slight lapses from strict domesticity, and these instances, he said, he would recount to Madame Valdoreme, and so induce her ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... pause again, taking her in as it seemed to him he had never done. "You were never finer than at this minute, in the deepest domesticity of private life. I've no conception whatever of what the actor can do, and no theory whatever about the importance of the theatre. Any infatuation of that sort has completely dropped from me, and for all I care the theatre may ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... admit, however, that, whatever pliability of disposition, or other inherent suitability, led to the first domestication of certain species of animals, the changes induced in their natures by many generations of domesticity have made them amenable to man's control to a degree which puts a wide difference between them and their wild relations. A wild ass, though brought up from its birth in a stable, would make a very intractable costermonger's moke. We may infer from this that the first subjugation of each ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... look back on the months which followed I can truthfully say that they were the happiest of my existence. The semi-detachment of our island domesticity was a charm against tedium; our ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... the surface sympathetic; in reality she never afterwards let pass an opportunity of making some scathing remark as to the folly of a young man sacrificing a possibly brilliant future for the commonplace joys of domesticity. I became even as the rest. My head was turned; my letters to Alice became less frequent; every penny of the money I was earning went to pay my tailor's bills, and to keep pace with the life which, as her constant companion, ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... And thus their domesticity at McClintock's began—with the tubbing of a stray yellow dog. It was an uproarious affair, for Rollo now knew that he had been grieviously betrayed: they were trying to kill him in a new way. Nobody will ever ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... party-aprons," she said gayly, noting how the pretty garment became the girl, "calculated to impress the masculine mind with the charm of domesticity in women. The doctor needs a little illustrated lesson of the sort. Life in boarding-houses isn't adapted to encourage a man in the belief that real comfort is to be found anywhere outside ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... upon Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more gratifying thought) among those who ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans. When that very typical German, George III., narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that was spirited, not only in the democracy of America but in the aristocracy of England, German troops were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the Atlantic. With their well-drilled formations they followed Burgoyne in that woodland march ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... respective corners in the family pew, and in their wildest dreams after the happiness of novelty never thought of Sir Cresswell Cresswell. In some respects—with regard, for instance, to the continued duration of their joint domesticity at the family mansion of Greshamsbury—they might have been taken for a pattern couple. But yet, as far as the doctor could see, they did not seem to add much to the happiness of each other. They loved each ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... only moderated by a nearly corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the Byronic dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely without justification. There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean and poor form of domesticity, which has always been too apt to fascinate the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light beating about a throne, it played ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley |
