"Wastrel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not afraid. When once you are on level terms with the community you begin to see what is the true result of drink. The clergyman, the district visitor, the professional slummer—all the people who "patronise"—never learn the truth, and they positively invite the wastrel classes to lie. ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... this showed a woman of vigour—although our conventions did not allow us to treat Clockie or any known wastrel so masterfully—and there was an evident anxiety ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... do wuss," said he; "and the wust I could do 'ad be to give everythin' to that wastrel, Iver, who don't know the vally of a good farm and of a well-established public-house. I don't want nobody after I'm dead and gone to see rack and ruin where all were plenty and good order both on land ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... me, which I certainly had done nothing to deserve, or the fear of the law which, ages before my birth, was painfully built up by the society into which I intruded, that prevented that catastrophe. If I was nourished, cared for, taught, saved from the vagabondage of a wastrel, I certainly am not aware that I did anything to deserve those advantages. And, if I possess anything now, it strikes me that, though I may have fairly earned my day's wages for my day's work, and may justly ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... he watched me near the zenith? Three years back That dream pounced on me and began to soar; Having been sick, my heart had found new lies; The only thoughts I then had ears for were Healthy, virtuous, sweet; Jaded town-wastrel, A country setting was the sole could take me Three years back. Damon might have guessed From such a dizzy height What fall ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... different. The temptations might be greater, the cost considerably higher, the dividing line between the "mays" and "mustn'ts" more fluctuating and less sharply drawn. Susy, thrown on the world at seventeen, with only a weak wastrel of a father to define that treacherous line for her, and with every circumstance soliciting her to overstep it, seemed to have been preserved chiefly by an innate scorn of most of the objects of human folly. "Such trash as he went to pieces for," was her curt comment on her parent's premature demise: ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... had been no better than a sot and wastrel, having contracted the habit of drunkenness at Port Said, where he spent three years as porter in a small hotel. He had squandered all his savings and had drunk himself to the verge of madness, when one summer night, as he lay on the floor of his house (as he himself expressed it) "between ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... A wastrel, she had been in many strange places, but never before had she found herself in a situation so extraordinary. To her startled outlook, the boat might well have seemed a chip tossed on the mad foam of ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... as you met him. He couldn't pass him off on you as just a travelled brother from the Dominions, with perhaps a bit of an accent; he had to tell you at once, because you were bound to find out, that Robert was a wastrel." ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... am not tired. There is for my great good-for-nothingness not that excuse. I am—a wastrel of my gifts." It was, she saw, one of the crises of despair under which many artists suffer, but its intensity was most painful. "You are good to me, Brigitte," he said, brokenly, taking her left hand and ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... retainer gathered up the spoil, and paid me a compliment concerning my shooting, though well I knew he had sized me up as a "wastrel" with a rifle, for his shy eyes gave the lie to his oily tongue. We hunted round for awhile, and then from the top of a little kopje I saw a beautiful herd of vildebeestes one hundred and sixteen in number, lumbering slowly towards where we stood. The wind blew straight from them towards us, ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... a quarter of an hour," said the Laird. "I have an appointment with that wee wastrel of a man-of-law, McKinstrie, down at the Foulds. He is coming express-like from Cairnryan to meet me—and it's me that will have to pay for ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... The virtues, on the contrary, are matters of geography, in great part—to each race its own. They are prone to vanishing in the mixed blood. Usually, too, the civilized white man who degrades himself to mate with a savage woman is himself a wastrel, essentially evil, likely to beget ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... down-town he met young Bert Darrow, son of the man after whom the adjacent lumber-town had been christened. Mr. Darrow had recently been indicted under the Mann law for a jolly little interstate romance. But yesterday, Mr. Daney had regarded Bert Darrow as a wastrel and had gone a block out of his way to avoid the scapegrace; to-night, however, Bert appealed to him as a man of courage, a devil of a fellow with spirit, a lover of life in its infinite moods and tenses, a lad with ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the process, the polished shaft is to be broken in two, and tossed away as rubbish? If death ends faculty, it is a pity that the faculty was so patiently developed. If God is educating us all in His school, and then means that, like some wastrel boys, we should lose all our education as soon as we leave its benches, there is little use in the rod, and little meaning in the training. Brethren! life is an insoluble riddle unless the purpose of it lie yonder, and unless all this patient training of our sorrows and our gladnesses, the warmth ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren |
