"Riffraff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... riffraff of Utopia—work in a long shed together, nominally by time; we must keep at the job for the length of the spell, but we are expected to finish a certain number of toys for each spell of work. The rules ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... town and country, the riffraff of the houseboat element are in disfavor. It is not uncommon for them, beached or tied up, to remain unmolested in one spot for years, with their pigs, chickens, and little garden patch about them, mayhap a swarm or two of bees, and a cow enjoying free pasturage along the weedy ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... them down and drained off their soluble parts, leaving only a residuum of mud along fences and hedges where, a few days before had been shapely piles of snow. April came with its deluges of rain that washed the earth clean and carried off the riffraff of the previous season, making ready for another and more bountiful harvest. What a ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... Castle, and I thought I'd just give 'em the slip for an hour or two and take you by surprise," answered the old lady as she sat down. "No, you needn't ring—I ordered tea as soon as I came in. They just bore me out of my life, you see, and they've got a pack o' riffraff staying with 'em that I don't know how to sit in the same room with. But who's your young friend over there? ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... three or four policemen came in, each leading a man by the collar, the ordinary riffraff of the street, charged with petty offences. One was very drunk and abusive. He attracted the attention of everybody in the room by his antics. He insisted on dancing a breakdown which he called the "Essence of Jeems' River"; and in the scuffle which followed, first one and then the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... however, because after the death of Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. The attempt to form a third party had shown no strength and had broken down. There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who were with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But I proposed to lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the selfish and short-sighted time servers who thought the people had learned nothing and forgot nothing; ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... in the Hope So gambling place last night, drunk, staggering, mixing with that riffraff, on ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... no more than that. There was no need that she should know that Shere Ali, broken-hearted, ruined and despairing, was drinking himself to death with the riffraff of Rangoon, or with such of it as would listen to his abuse of the white women and his slanders upon their honesty. The contrast between Shere Ali's fate and the hopes with which he had set out was shocking enough. Yet even in his case so ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... he said. "Three months ago most of those fellows were riffraff—the kind that hang around street corners smoking and indulging in loose talk and profanity. Young Lambert, the chap with them, their Scout-master, picked that kind from choice, turned down a respectable church-mothered bunch for this ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... stores for the colonists. Pontgrave is to attend especially to the fur trading. There are the Baron de Poutrincourt and his young son, Biencourt, and other noblemen looking for broader domains in the New World; and there are the usual riffraff of convicts taken from dungeons. Priests go to look after the souls of the Catholics, Huguenot ministers to care for the Protestants, and so valiantly do these dispute with tongues and fists that the sailors threaten ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... shelter, I clambered through one of the broken windows, and dropped to the earthen floor within. I could see nothing, not even a hand held before my eyes, yet carefully felt my way forward through a tangle of rubbish, wheels, scraps of iron, some casks, a number of plough handles, and a riffraff of stuff I could not make out. The place had evidently been used as a repair shop, but must have been closed for months, as I could feel the grit of dust everywhere, and cobwebs brushed against my ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... and worked his jaws, licking blood from his chops. Peter looked in through the open wall-door opposite the check counter; the racket had not been noticed by the roomful of spacemen and riffraff. The babble of a hundred tongues still went on amid the clink of glasses and the disturbing strains of Xanabian music. Smoke from a hundred semi-noxious weeds lay in strata across the room, and at a table in the far corner two men faced one another, ...
— History Repeats • George Oliver Smith
... intemperance and crime that has been characteristic of city life, but statistics lay much of the guilt upon the degenerate American. There are poor whites in the cities as there are in the South country. The riffraff drifts to town from the country as the Roman proletariat gravitated to the capital in the days of decadence. A great many young persons who enter the city with high hopes of making a fortune fail to get a foothold ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe |
