"Workaday" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other women hurrying to change their workaday dress for visitors, and he imagined Helen hastily putting on her shoes and smoothing her hair. He was distinctly less in awe of her by reason of this girlish action—it made her seem more of his own rough-and-ready ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... over, and at the present moment the publisher is getting conscientiously anxious (for some publishers are more conscientious than some authors will admit!) to hand you over a nice little check for an amount which is not to be despised in this workaday world, I ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... workaday Paris will always centre about some point; so, through all periods of history, the Paris of the nobles and the upper classes converges towards some particular spot. It is a periodically recurrent phenomenon which presents ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... answered mechanically, his eyes still wide with the loveliness of the sun-kissed face that so suddenly broke in upon his workaday routine. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... meaning of this word RETREAT and why is it allowed on all hands to be a most salutary practice for all who desire to lead before God and in the eyes of men a truly christian life? A retreat, my dear boys, signifies a withdrawal for awhile from the cares of our life, the cares of this workaday world, in order to examine the state of our conscience, to reflect on the mysteries of holy religion and to understand better why we are here in this world. During these few days I intend to put before you ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... prominence as a national hero. Modesty is becoming as an abstract principle of human conduct, but Gordon carried it to an excess that made it difficult not so much for his fellow-men to understand him, as for them to hold ordinary workaday relations with him. This was due mainly to two causes—a habitual shyness, and his own perception that he could not restrain his tongue from uttering unpalatable and unconventional truths. He was so unworldly and ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... fought in sheer desperation, because otherwise he could not live in the camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different attitude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... love of music and little time for the joy of it; but occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories. There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of these winter afternoons, in St. James's Hall, he became aware ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... them yesterday. And indeed every aspect of this church—which to me has always been romantic and beautiful—can scarcely have undergone any substantial change. Even the worshippers must have changed but little, for this is the church of the workers, and the Spanish woman's workaday costume bears little mark of any specific century. If Cervantes were to return to this district—perhaps to this district alone—of the city he loved it is hard to see what he would note afresh, save the results of natural ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... classes. This experience has not been confined, to teaching. One does not live among these people day after day, pleading for a welcome for unwished-for babies, standing beside tiny graves, receiving pathetic confidences from wretched fathers and helpless mothers, without facing every problem of this workaday world; they cannot all be solved, even by the wisest of us; we can only seize the end of the skein nearest to our hand, and patiently endeavor to straighten ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... itself. Of all that "walking out" implied: of love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there, fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog of her workaday existence. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... many months, during which the keen edge of pleasure under civilized conditions had not entirely worn away, I was inclined to reply with a somewhat emphatic negative. But, once more a man in the world of men, lulled in the easy repose of routine, and performing the ordinary duties of a workaday world, old emotions awakened. The grand sweet days returned in irresistible glamour, faraway ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... dress since 1830 were evident, but for the workaday world shirtsleeves, heavy brogan boots and shoes, and rough wool hats were, of course, the rule. Salt bacon and "greens," with corn bread and thin coffee, composed the common diet, though milk and butter relieved the monotonous fare for the farmers. "Hog-killing time" was always a happy season, for ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... just one thing in all the room that looked poor, workaday. It was on the small table at the head of the bed, beside the candle-stick and match-safe, a black book, the commonest kind of Bible, such a Bible as is dispensed by those who have to furnish the sacred writings in large ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... when we see a man who makes himself unhappy, preventing by his very act of existence the happiness of another more equably tempered mortal! Now I believe this is the present case. Drusus, I understand, is leading a spare, joyless, workaday sort of existence, which is, or by every human law should be, to him a burden. So long as he lives, he prevents you from enjoying the means of acquiring pleasure. Now I have Socrates of imperishable memory on my side, when I assert ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... use in ordinary speech. A ritual is regarded as a sacred thing, unchanging, and usually unchangeable, except as the result of some great religious upheaval. The language in which it is framed continues fixed, amid the slowly developing conditions of the workaday world. Often, indeed, the use of an ancient language, which has gradually fallen into disuse among the people, is deliberately maintained for the air of mystery and of awe which is conveyed by its use, and which has something of the same effect upon the intellect ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... her," mused Koosje, rather blankly. If she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of osteology and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this workaday world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his fossilised wisdom to the ignorance of a ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... face for a moment, then, dismissing from this workaday world the baby, which had got ill in a tempest and had died from too much calm at sea, he asked me with a dental, shark-like smile—if sharks had false teeth—whether I had yet made my little arrangements for the ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... everybody who can isolate himself so utterly from the workaday world and live so completely in his own little paradise of art as you can, my dear fellow. Non omnia possumus omnes. You seem to be always up in the aesthetic clouds, with your own music automatically laid on, and no need of cherubim or seraphim ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... individually, scarcely interested me, but their collective presence was something of which I never seemed to be quite unconscious. It was as though the workaday atmosphere were scented with the breath of a delicate perfume—a perfume that was tainted with the tang ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... heaven alive," said Falkenberg. "Here am I now, sitting around in my best clothes, and they no better than another man's workaday things. I can give them a wash in a stream, and sit and wait till they're dry; if there's a hole I mend it, and if I chance to earn a bit extra some day, I can get some more. And that's the ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... critically. Writers in magazines and reviews had often made a study of his character. She remembered a brilliant contributor to a recent review, who had dwelt upon a certain lack of cohesion in his constitution, an inability to relegate sentiment to its proper place in dealing with the great workaday problems of the world. Conscientious, but never to be trusted, was the last anomalous but luminous criticism. Was this frame of mind of his a sign of it, she wondered? His place in politics was fixed and sure. What right had he, as a man of principle, ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lake—castles from Germany, castles from France and castles from Spain. Achilles eyed them with a little smile as his swift, thin feet traversed the long stones. There were turrets and towers and battlements frowning upon the peaceful, workaday lake. Minarets and flowers in stone, and heavy marble blocks that gripped the earth. Suddenly Achilles's foot slackened its swift pace. His eye dropped to the silver tag on the music-roll in his hand, and lifted itself again to a gleaming red-brown house at the left. ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... fresh bills, or to ask for money for all the thousand-and-one needs of a growing family. Her very dread and nervousness made her choose inappropriate moments for her requests, and Mr Connor's aloofness from the ordinary workaday world made matters still more difficult. He probably considered fifteen pounds a year a lordly dress allowance for his two step-daughters; certainly he would not have noticed if they had worn the same garments every day for years ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Lynch's delight. Her poor, big Danny could sit in it all day long. And from it she herself could watch the setting sun flame over the crest of the hills and the narrow river shake off its workaday dress and go racing into the shadows of the woods. Poor Moira, years of heartbreaking work and worry had not changed her very much from the girl who had liked to lie in the deep sweet grass of her dear Ireland and let her fancy ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... Major Carter," she said. "We live in a workaday world where the 'little people' have no place. All of us have our duties to perform. If some be less pleasant than others it is no excuse for not fulfilling them to the uttermost. We have a hard day before us. With His Majesty's ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... sometimes I'm almost sure it was E. It will come to me some day, no doubt, Baron, but till it does I shall have to wander about a nameless man, looking for it. And after all, I am not without the consolations of a certain useful, workaday ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... their names herewith—though not their workaday names, lest the wives of divers people be offended (and in many cases, surprised), but the appellatives which figured in my rhymes. They were Heart's Desire, Florimel, Dolores, Yolande, Adelais, Sylvia, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... of terse, strong, and practical discourses on the religion of the home, the office, the work-shop, and the field. It tells how, amid the cares and annoyances of this workaday world, one may grow towards a noble and peaceful life. It will be an invaluable companion, an indispensable "guide, philosopher, and friend." The eminent success of JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE in works of this high class is shown by the great popularity of ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... taking her with an irresistible impulse of admiring affection into my arms; "but if I had, it would have made no difference. I should still have talked about love, and of all it can do to make this weary workaday ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... told him to do so, in the first place. In the second place, he followed her because he was even more interested in her than his director had been, and he hoped to have a chance to talk with her. In his workaday life, Gil Huntley was quite accustomed to being discovered in some villainy, and to having some man or woman point a gun at him with more or less antagonism in voice and manner. But he had never in his life had a girl ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... to me now like a beautiful garment put on for a holiday and worn easily and pleasantly for a time. But I've put it off now, and put on workaday clothes again. It is only a week since I left Dalveigh, but it seems long ago. Listen to the wind, Rob! It is singing of the good days to be for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... no proper part of this story to add, that its opening on the other side of the world was attended by the welcome and surprising fragrance of patchouli, emanating from a little silk sachet secreted among the more workaday gifts.) ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... He listened with his workaday ears to separate from the clamour, as he once had done, the thread of golden melody. For a moment he was amazed and disappointed; no unusual voice was there. If Miss Nan was behind him, she was taking only a mute part in the praise, amused mildly perhaps—he ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... for the young lady of the grocer's almanack! Poor dear John is very nice and loves us—so he tells us, in his stupid, halting way; but how can we respond when we remember how the man loved in the play! The "artist has fashioned his dream of delight," and the workaday world by ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... workaday politeness frowns on too abrupt a departure from a lady, particularly one whom we have companioned thus distantly from the careless simplicity of girlhood to the equally careless but complex businesses of adolescence. The world is all before her, and her chronicler may not be her ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... to matters of moral and spiritual import, the language was poor to desperation. Egede's instruction began when he caught the word "kine"—what is it? And from that time on he learned every day; but the pronunciation was as varied as the workaday vocabulary, and ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... width, and its solid oaken sides rose some two feet from the floor. It was heaped indeed with the bronze-green fronds and russet-gold stalks of fresh-cut bracken, but this was only the ordinary workaday foundation, and was almost hidden beneath a coverlet of roses—roses of every hue from damask-red to saffron-yellow and purest white, heaped and strewn in richest profusion and filling the room with perfume. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... away. Beyond the broad window of her room, the hills of Skull Island and God's Warning stood yellow in the spring sunshine, rivulets dripping from the ragged patches of snow which yet lingered in the hollows; and the harbour water rippled under balmy, fragrant winds from the wilderness; and workaday voices, strangely unchanged by the solemn change upon our days, came drifting up the hill from my father's wharves; and, ay, indeed, all the world of sea and land was warm and wakeful and light of heart, just as it used to be. But within, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... you please, Mr. Bucket," said he. "The lady will excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room. The back is Guster's bedroom, and in it she's a-carrying on, poor ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... been the bathing-machines, or the gasometer beyond the railway station, or the flag above the Royal Hotel. The curtains of the night fell suddenly away from him. The workaday world came ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... all was, Milly thought, as they threaded their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets, mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificing THIS—"the real, right thing"—for ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... usual; I make a change of dress, for it is fitting that the day of spiritual rest should lay aside the livery of the laborious week. For me, indeed, there is no labour at any time, but nevertheless does Sunday bring me repose. I share in the common tranquillity; my thought escapes the workaday world more completely than ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... came earlier found him in guise more professional but no less elegant. He took a great deal of pains with his handsome hands, which many visitors pressed with cautious, admiring respect, as something a little too good to be true, as something a little too fine for this workaday world, and with his well-grown beard, which hugged his cheeks closely to make a telling manifestation upon his chin, after the manner of Van Dyck. This beard cried, almost clamoured, for picturesque accessories, and when Daffingdon went to a costume ball he generally wore a ruff ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... my instances approach the ludicrous? They do. They are meant to do so. But they are no more ludicrous than life itself. And they illustrate in the most workaday fashion how you can test whether your literature fulfils its function of informing and transforming ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. The low shoe and the low hum of the bumble-bee are again with us. The little striped hornet heats his nose with a spirit lamp ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... The poet Lessing by his books roused the ancient spirit of liberty, long dormant in the German mind. Goethe and Schiller became the foremost of a crowd of younger men whose revolt at first took the form of an extravagant devotion to romance as opposed to the dull workaday world about them.[22] Pestalozzi, a Swiss, conceived the idea of reforming the world through its children, encouraging the little ones by constant, loving example to develop all the strength and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... varnish of 'The Nights' serves admirably as a foil to the absolute realism of the picture in general. We enjoy being carried away from trivial and commonplace characters, scenes, and incidents; from the matter-of-fact surroundings of a workaday world, a life of eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, fighting and loving, into a society and a mise-en-scene which we suspect can exist and which we know do not. Every man, at some turn or term of his life, has longed for supernatural powers and a glimpse of Wonderland. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... George Moore was already wiser than his masters. He was to write of the love-life of Evelyn Innes, and the common workaday tragedy of Esther Waters, with a tender and profound sympathy far removed from the sentiments he felt obliged to profess here. This book is a young man's attempt to be sincere. It is the story of a soul struggling to be free from British morality. It is eloquent, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... whole scene, barring the concertina and the navvies' clothes, might have been transformed straight from a Greek vase of the best period. Here, in this green corner of rural England on a workaday afternoon (a Wednesday, to be precise), in full sunlight, I saw this company of the early gods sitting, naked and unabashed, and piping, while twelve British navvies danced to their music. . . . I saw it; and a derisive whistle ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the temptation to throw down his hook and go. The sacred arguments were on his side. Without choice or search of his they clamored and battered at his inner ear—those commands of the Gospels, the long reverberations of that absolute Voice, bidding irresolute workaday disciples leave the plough in the furrow, leave whatsoever task was impending or duty uppermost to the living or ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... we're in, my dear, A wonderful world, they say, And blest they be who may wander free Wherever a wish may stray; Who spread their sails to the arctic gales, Or bask in the tropic's bowers, While we must keep to the foot-path steep In this workaday life of ours. ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... quiet, rural, English spot. If the house had no beauty, it commanded a world of loveliness. All around it—north, south, and west—there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood and grassy common, in which the few workaday patches of hedge and ploughed land seemed ingulfed and lost. Close under the rectory windows, however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the largest and fruitfulest of the neighbourhood. At the present moment it was just ready for the reaper—the golden ears had clearly ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... subconscious is not a matter of location but of organization. There are billions of possible connections between the neurons of the cortex. Look at those potentialities as so many cards in the same pack. Shuffle the cards one way and you have the common workaday cogito, ergo sum mind. Reshuffle them, and, bingo! you have the combination of neurons, or cards, of the unconscious. The specterscope does the redealing. When the subject gazes through it, he sees for the first time the full impact and result of his underground mind's workings in other perspectives ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist, and a man with a vision more wonderful still. There is one of Lungren's pictures of the Western plains; and a picture of the Grand Canyon; and one by a Scandinavian artist who could see the fierce picturesqueness of workaday Pittsburgh; and sketches of the White House by ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... another. But though fiction is undeniably stranger and more attractive than truth, yet true stories are also rather attractive and strange, now and then. And, after all, we may return once more to Fairyland, after this excursion into the actual workaday world. ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... dependence on the phenomena of the universe—the trees and shrubs, the sun and stars, the lightning and rain,—for these to him are animate creatures. Even more than that, they are deified, therefore are revered and propitiated, since upon them man must depend for his well-being. To the workaday man of our own race the life of the Indian is just as incomprehensible as are the complexities of civilization to the ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... at least, that suggests opulence in the colour crimson, and the benches of the Upper Chamber are all in crimson leather, and the crimson has all the freshness which comes from rarity of use. In the House of Commons, with all its workaday and industrious life, the deep and dark green has always more or less of a worn and shabby look. In the Upper Chamber the original splendour of the crimson cloth is undimmed; for most of the benches remain void and unoccupied ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... which casts that cloud is far off not only in distance but in time. Paris, a few months ago so alive to the nearness of the enemy, seems to have grown completely oblivious of that nearness; and it is startling, not more than twenty miles from the gates, to pass from such an atmosphere of workaday security to ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... children, and, above all, she must be genuinely fond of music, in such a way that she cannot do without it. The last qualification often implies a certain sensitiveness, which finds a difficulty in accommodating itself to a workaday world, where people have little time, or inclination, to study the 'moods' of others. Very artistic people are a well-known difficulty to the authorities of schools. In order to excel in their art, they must not only have a 'capacity for taking pains', but a reserve store of emotional ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... of dialect which caught our ear; the details of our charming gypsy life, ashore and afloat, during which we were conscious of the red blood tingling through our veins, and, alert to the whisperings of Nature, were careless of the workaday world, so far away,—simply glad ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... of City men, of not well-to-do professional men, of minor officials, clerks, shopkeepers, our roads leading through the workaday world. Yet quite half our time was taken up in studies utterly useless to us. How I hated them, these youth-tormenting Shades. Homer! how I wished the fishermen had asked him that absurd riddle earlier. Horace! why could not that shipwreck have succeeded: it would ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... children are sad, because they are at work. Work is serious, yes; it is not sad. Very often the little ones mimic it in fun, and children's games, most times, are copies of their elders' workaday doings. ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... work, as during Old Home Week, when the stores kept open until 10 P.M.? Hal agreed, and, in the face of the dismalest forecasts from Shearson, prepared several editorials. Moreover, "Kitty the Cutie" took up the campaign in her column, and her series of "Lunch-Time Chats," with their slangy, pungent, workaday flavor, presented the case of the overworked saleswomen in a way to stir the dullest sympathies. The event fully justified Shearson in his role of Cassandra. Half of the remaining stores represented in the Retail Union notified the "Clarion" of the withdrawal of their ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a mob of hysterical ranters. This is fortunately true. To pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their business and leave ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... the face Phyllis saw in the mirror; but to her own eyes, fresh from the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired, twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green glass was dreadful. What made her feel worst—and she entertained the thought with a whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity—was that she'd had so much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance because her father was rich. ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... time Howard recalled that there was a man named Roberts, a teamster in Sanchia's Town; and that on the Desert Valley ranch there were mules which should be sold; and that, though there was a golden paradise here in Bear Valley, there remained a workaday world outside the charmed confines where time was of the essence. He made Helen understand that if he were to make good in his acquisition of the cattle range he must be down there among his men and his herds during every working hour of the day, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... of this country, the public excursion, both by land and water, is as bad as the road-house. Instead of being a time of relaxation and recreation, a time of freedom from cares of the workaday life and enjoyment of pure air, sunshine, and beauties of nature, and of fine social relationships of people, the excursions have become dissipations of physical and moral energy. With proper supervision ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... methodical enough; a shower, a thorough rub-down, and then into his workaday clothes. He packed his trunk and hand-luggage, overlooked nothing that was his, and went down into the living-room where he knew he would find Killigrew with the morning papers. He felt oddly light-headed; but he had no ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... good humour. The Story Girl sparkled through several tales that ranged from the afrites and jinns of Eastern myth, through the piping days of chivalry, down to the homely anecdotes of Carlisle workaday folks. She was in turn an Oriental princess behind a silken veil, the bride who followed her bridegroom to the wars of Palestine disguised as a page, the gallant lady who ransomed her diamond necklace by dancing ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... musingly. "I like that idea. Good or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in our daily practice. Every man is always making fancies about himself; but it is never his workaday self, but something else. The bank clerk who pictures himself as a financial Napoleon knows that his own thin little soul is incapable of it; but he knows, too, that it is possible enough for that other bigger thing which is not his soul, but yet ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... not then, not yet! There are pleasures of Tantalus as well as pains of Tantalus. Had I told her I was the King, she would have flung herself into my arms and there would have been a workaday end to the wonder. No. I lingered and sipped at sweet desires. I masqued and ambled Arcady for her; was no more than I seemed, a simple hunter; flattered her with honest boy-babble, said her farewell with a low sweep of my cap, and left her with a new happiness in my heart, the happiness of ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) so theology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages, might provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that lies in the dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations and mysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore be suffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with any clear fact or natural duty. They might continue ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Farish, in fact, typified the mediocre and the ineffectual. If there were compensating qualities in her wide frank glance and the freshness of her smile, these were qualities which only the sympathetic observer would perceive before noticing that her eyes were of a workaday grey and her lips without haunting curves. Lily's own view of her wavered between pity for her limitations and impatience at her cheerful acceptance of them. To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... an end. Prosaic and workaday to-morrows confronted him in endless and dreary perspective; and he felt again upon his shoulder the bony hand ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... was the Reply. "Although I have been denied the blessed Privileges of Higher Education, I love to get into an Atmosphere of four-ply Intellectuality and meet those Souls who are above the sordid Considerations of workaday Commercialism." ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... eyes when Clayton took her hands in adieu. "You have made me forget time, and my workaday world," he said. "I have now something to live for—to hear you sing! It seems so hard to meet only to part. I may never see your coming picture; you may never see mine again. But I cannot lose you from my life. It seemed, Fraeulein Irma," he said, earnestly, "when I first met the glance of your ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... a summer evening, bright and clear. The noise of day had ceased, and few were abroad. It seemed like a Sunday, just before evening service, when all were preparing for devotion, and he alone walked with workaday thoughts ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,—analysis." In Poe's hands, however, the enumeration of pins and buttons, the exact imitation of the prosaic facts of humdrum life in this workaday world, is not an end, but a means only, whereby he constructs and intensifies the shadow of mystery which broods over the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... friend, a few more weeks were added to his scant school term. They proved the last of his school-days, and the boy went forth from the little brick building on the Mall to finish his education in the great workaday world, under those stern old masters, poverty and experience. By and by Lloyd was a second time apprenticed to learn a trade. It was to a cabinetmaker in Haverhill, Mass. He made good progress in the craft, but his young heart still turned ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... a treasure, to dwell upon, alone, in moments of purest exaltation. 'Twas not a thing to bandy about where punts lay tossing in the lap of the sea; 'twas not a thing to tell the green, secretive old hills of Twin Islands; 'twas not a thing to which the doors of the workaday world might be opened, lest the ribaldry to which it come offend and wound it: 'twas a thing to conceal, far and deep, from the common gaze and comment, from the vulgar chances, the laugh and cynical exhaustion and bleared wit of the life we live. I loved Judith—her ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... 1914.—No mail in to-day. All communications seem to be stopped for the time being at least. Mobilisation here and in France requires all the efforts of all hands, and little workaday things like mail and newspapers ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... for a happy hour, letting thoughts happen as they would. Not till the school bell rang for dismissal did he drag himself back with a sigh to the workaday world that called. He had a lawn to mow and a back yard to clean up ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... on his face an unaccustomed appreciation of this larger side of the workaday world, stepped back inside the engine-room, laid his hand on a throttle, and at the signal, as if by magic, there was a whirr of slipping bands, a mighty throb, the renewed fashing of water down the jigs, a grinding, a pounding, a crunching, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the lock of the door forced and broken, one door panel slightly scorched and perforated by shot, and the window wide open. None of Mr. Polly's clothes were to be seen, but some garments which had apparently once formed part of a stoker's workaday outfit, two brownish yellow halves of a shirt, and an unsound pair of boots were scattered on the floor. A faint smell of gunpowder still hung in the air, and two or three books Mr. Polly had recently acquired had been ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the Sausalito Ferry and scattered for a workaday Monday, he found himself accepting invitations left and right. Dr. French asked him to motor out to the Cliff House that very night; Mrs. Masters wanted him to dinner; Harry Banks must have him over to his ranch under Tamalpais. Kate Waddington, mounting the steps ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... wrong. It was his manner, his air, that troubled her. What strange people these converts were! There was so much ardor at one time, so much chilliness at another; there was so little of that steady workaday acceptance of religious facts that marked the ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... attempts of shallow sceptics to question the reality of his existence or the literal truth of the myths they tell about him. Certainly these savages are far on the road to religion, if they have not already passed the Rubicon which divides it from the common workaday world. If an unhesitating faith in the unseen is part of religion, the Warramunga people of the Wollunqua ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and love manifests itself in service: the love that seeks its own ends, or strives to get instead of to serve, is no love at all. Therefore if Music is to express this spirit it must do so by contributing its meed of assistance to make this workaday world more bright by gladdening the heart of man. Quite obviously much of the music that is written has been composed with no such intent, therefore and to that extent it stultifies itself. It must be classed as the "sounding ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... myself almost aloud:"I'm Jack Pansay on leave at Simla—at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn't forget that— I mustn't forget that." Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club: the prices of So-and-So's horses—anything, in fact, that related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses. It gave me much comfort; and must have prevented my hearing Mrs. Wessington ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... whole of the village, without distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced (and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... when we knew them, these dear ladies, and they have been dead many years, but their simple, kindly lives have left a fragrance to sweeten this workaday world even as the mignonette in bygone summers scented their ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... would give such pleasure to his father and mother, such happiness to Mary. If he could make a little return for all her goodness, was he not bound to do so? He smiled with bitter scorn at his dead, lofty ideals. The workaday world was not fit for them; it was much safer and easier to conform oneself to its terrestrial standard. And the amusing part of it was that these new opinions which seemed to him a falling away, to others meant precisely the reverse. They thought ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... falling that evening. Gaily lighted cars offering glimpses of women in elaborate toilets and of their black-coated and white-shirted cavaliers thronged Piccadilly, bound for theatre or restaurant. The workaday shutters were pulled down, and the night life of London had commenced. The West End was in possession of an army of pleasure seekers, but Nicol Brinn was not among their ranks. Wearing his tightly-buttoned dinner jacket, ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... according to Cocker, according to Gunter; en regle [Fr.], selon les regles [Fr.], well regulated, orderly; symmetric &c 242. conventional &c (customary) 613; of daily occurrence, of everyday occurrence; in the natural order of things; ordinary, common, habitual, usual, everyday, workaday. in the order of the day; naturalized. typical, normal, nominal, formal; canonical, orthodox, sound, strict, rigid, positive, uncompromising, Procrustean. secundum artem [Lat.], shipshape, technical. exempIe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... experience for Anthony. He had stepped out from his workaday life among the grooms and officers and occasional glimpses of his lonely old master, into an enchanted region, where great personages whose very names were luminous with fame, now lived and breathed and looked cheerful or sullen before his very eyes; and one who knew them in their daily life ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... different days. How often does a man get up from his breakfast-table after a long night's rest, when he should be feeling fresh and invigorated, and say to himself, "I don't feel like working today." And it may take him until afternoon to get into his workaday stride, if, indeed, he reaches ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... sufficient unto themselves. Those women were intellectual amazons whom naught but the writhen bolts of God could humble, whose genius flamed with a white light even through the dun clouds of lechery; but we cannot measure the workaday woman by the few "whose minds might, like the elements, furnish forth creation." A Bernhardt is great, not because of her social sin, but despite thereof. With her art is the all-in-all, sex but an incident. She ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... farther by applying the brush faster. It is concrete reality that can teach the imaginative child reality; in the things he learns from books there is no check upon the imagined and the desired—one kind of outcome is as likely and as true as another. But in the experience of the workaday world causes and consequences cannot be so easily altered by a trick ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... philosophy founded on the vast experience of a week in the workaday world—I'll let you know later of any further ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... swayed by love, must find Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight, and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is forbidden to them ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... a great many new terms to my vocabulary, and in the three weeks I spent at the Fair I took a long leap from the little child's interest in fairy tales and toys to the appreciation of the real and the earnest in the workaday world. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... in the morning, We proceed to light the fire, Then our Majesty adorning In its workaday attire, We embark without delay On the duties of ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... brother, right down to this present prosaic and workaday world. Can you, and will you give me five minutes of ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... dreamed of other and wider things, the workaday grind speedily set such dreams to rout. When the gnawing of lonely unrest was too acute for bovine endurance—and when he could spare the time or the money—he was wont to go to the mile-off hamlet of Hampton and there get as nearly drunk ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... and the rotten fence. ...Over the fields where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... fast enough if Lady Calmady will take me as I am. Workaday clothes, and second best lot at ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... can hope for in America now is to have a body—to find some way to express ourselves in our daily workaday actions without saying a word—express ourselves so plainly that without saying a word our President, our Politicians—even the kind of men who seem to put up naturally with having to be in the Senate—the kind of men who can feel happy ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... liked them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for the "sweet sea-city." That was what made him have a sneaking kindness for them—that they were so out of the workaday world and kept him so out of it. The summer had waned when, with cries of ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand Canal. The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived. The Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn't ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... lounges in London. There was a spirit of freedom and social equality pervading the place which only belongs to assemblies where sport is the principal object and pleasure of all. There was also the absence of irksome workaday drudgery; I think that was, after all, the main cause of its being so delightful a ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... good worker at the bench, a sober and honest man; and Emmy could make a pound go as far as any other woman in Kennington Park. They had before them a faithful future of work in common, of ideals (workaday ideals) in common; and at this instant they were both marvellously content with the immediate outlook. Not for them to change the order ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... who looked so resplendent against this workaday background, and felt herself at a disadvantage with him. He had not wanted to come at all, but now that they were here, he exhibited a far more intelligent interest in what he saw than she did or could. Oddly enough, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... mistakes choke every Legation dossier. Determined to have nothing whatever to do, save in the last resort, with anything that savours of Radicalism, and inclining naturally towards ideals which have long been abandoned in the workaday world, diplomacy is the instinctive lover of obscurantism and the furtive enemy of progress. Distrusting all those generous movements which spring from the popular desire to benefit by change, it ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... likely to come to pass any day, but which, as in the case of poor Julia, may not be until she is thirty. Fancy living on mushrooms with a rich gray gravy and successively waltzing, meandering, or floating with the Tom, Dick, and Harry of the workaday social world from eighteen to thirty! And yet we fathers and philosophers ask ourselves why in thunder (or even more vehemently) our daughters have nervous prostration. Why should they? And yet I hear Josephine ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant |
