"Bricks and mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ought to escape. But then wealthy villa people do do odd things. Les Miserables who have to write like myself must put up with anything and be thankful for permission to exist; but people with mighty incomes from tea, or crockery-ware, or mud, or bricks and mortar—why on earth these happy and favoured mortals do not live ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... till his death. In the former he gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,—for he had either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,—he made on a small scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... tide, the ceaseless effort seaward of the stream, and those low-lying spaces on the Surrey side. It was the nearest bit of nature, unharnessed, irresponsible nature, which I could get to; and it symbolised emancipation from monotonous labour and everlasting bricks and mortar. I could watch the dying of the sunset, and the outcoming of the stars, the tossing of the pale willows—there on the eyot—in the windy dusk, undisturbed. And so I have come to entertain a great ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... yonder, on the river bank, with the aspen grove behind it, an' the run of prairie on the right, an' the little lake not a gun-shot off on the left? That's the spot I've sometimes thought of locatin' on when my gun begins to feel too heavy. There'll be cities there some day. Bricks and mortar and stone 'll change its face—an' cornfields, an'—but not in our day, lad, not in our day. The redskins and the bears 'll hold it as long as we're above ground. Yes, I'd like ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... having disposed of his peltries, and obtained new traps and a fresh outfit, started westward in the course of a fortnight, declaring that he could not breathe among the bricks and mortar. He promised that he would not fail to look out for Charley, for whose recovery, however, even Dick, by this time, had begun to despair. We were beginning to get a little tired of civilised ways and to sigh for the wild life of the prairie, when Armitage received a letter calling him to New York ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... her command that there should be no time lost, and men were set at work, carrying bricks and mortar. It so chanced that one of them, going in through a back entrance with a hod over his shoulder, and being young and lively, found his eye caught by the countenance of a pretty, frightened-looking girl, who seemed to be loitering about ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by the north end of the railway bridge, one turns first to the right and then to the left, and soon after leaving the uninteresting bricks and mortar of the town, one enters some of the most beautiful lanes in the home counties. At the first cross road one turns to the right, and again through an open gate to the left, and thence a field ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... are in the country—the glorious country! Outside of the thronged streets; away from piled up bricks and mortar; outside of the clank of machinery; the rumbling of carriages; the roar of the escape pipe; the scream of the steam whistle; the tramp, tramp of moving thousands on the stone sidewalks; away from the heated atmosphere of the city, loaded with the smoke and dust, and gasses of ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... tripod of my telescope and burying the whole works, including myself. But what interested and amused me most was when a shell rooted out that cat and sent it flying down into my quarters, unhurt but so plastered with dust from the bricks and mortar that no one would have ever suspected it of being black. It was an entirely new variety—a red cat. It sat and looked at me for a long time. Disgust, just plain, every-day disgust, was written all over that animal's face. I don't ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... often used to take the three eldest of us out for a walk on Sunday afternoons, sometimes to the Zoological Gardens, more often to the lanes and fields between St. John's Wood and Hampstead or West End. For then the flood of bricks and mortar ceased on the Finchley Road just beyond the Swiss Cottage, and the West End Lane, winding solitary between its high hedges and rural ditches, was quite like a country road in holiday time, and was sometimes gladdened in June with real dog-roses, although ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet—might feel at last that he ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... them at the old wicket, and Bess was just within the doorway. They were come so far to meet the travellers, and had even prepared tea for them in the new kitchen, having cleared away some of the bricks and mortar, and raised benches with the pieces of planks left about. Tea was just ready for Stephen's refreshment, and he felt that he was in the greatest need of it; so they sat down to it as soon as Martha had laid out the provisions, among ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... mechanical contrivance was put to the test. For more than eighteen years the vicinity of the house resembled a builder's yard, in the centre of which the Duke lived and moved and had his being, enjoying, in his way, the piles of bricks and mortar surrounding him. After he had decided upon the erection of a new building he had a model of it made for his inspection, and if approved of, ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a little hamlet. And the hamlet—it had been knocked to bits before we got into it—the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud—have forgotten all about live trees, and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept as products of Nature and things of course, a reduced Bantam family of my acquaintance ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... curtain-rod is a pleasant thing. He has the satisfaction of feeling that, having once bought it, he has bought it for the rest of his life. He may change his house and with it his Fixtures, but there is no loss on the brass part of the transaction, however much there may be on the bricks and mortar. What he pays out with one hand, he takes in with the other. Nor is his property subject to the ordinary mischances of life. There was an historic character who "lost the big drum," but he would become even more historic who had lost a curtain-rod, and neither ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... set about vindicating myself from the aspersions of Will Maskery? Besides, I'm not so sure that they ARE aspersions. I AM a lazy fellow, and get terribly heavy in my saddle; not to mention that I'm always spending more than I can afford in bricks and mortar, so that I get savage at a lame beggar when he asks me for sixpence. Those poor lean cobblers, who think they can help to regenerate mankind by setting out to preach in the morning twilight before they begin their day's work, may well have a poor opinion of me. But come, let us have our luncheon. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Mind said, "Why ask about things that are not? Take notice of those that are hugely before you,—the struggle and the fight, the army and armaments, the bricks and mortar, and labourers without number." ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... Heraclea, naturally marshy, and abounding with tall trees, furnished timber in abundance for every kind of work; and then, as the Aetolians had fled into the city, the deserted suburbs supplied not only beams and boards, but also bricks and mortar, and stones of every size ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... deposits of the Far West by Professor Marsh, with great labour and sometimes at the risk of his scalp. Professor Marsh told me how he took him to the University, and proposed to begin by showing him over the buildings. He refused.] "Show me what you have got inside them; I can see plenty of bricks and mortar in my own country." [So they went straight to the fossils, and as Professor Marsh writes ("American Journal of Science" ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... building, long enough at least for one to go up the hill and fetch a pail of water. This remedy consists simply in choking the flues and stopping the draught, which can easily be done by filling in with bricks and mortar between all the studs of both outer walls and inner partitions at or near the level of each floor. A cut-off half way up is an additional safeguard. The horizontal passages between the floor-joists should also be closed in a similar manner, otherwise the smoke and sparks from ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... are built in quite a different way from ours. First of all a complete skeleton house is set up, made of wood, and, when this is finished, the spaces between the wooden structure are filled in with bricks and mortar. Before the roof is put on, a large green bush is hoisted up as far as the eaves, and there tied to the scaffolding poles. This is supposed to drive away the pixies or wicked fairies, and no one would dare to put the roof on without the protection ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... father, who ruined himself by building, Villiers had a monomania for bricks and mortar, yet he found time to write 'The Rehearsal,' a play on which Mr. Reed in his 'Dramatic Biography' makes the following observation: 'It is so perfect a masterpiece in its way, and so truly original, that ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... ma's sake, because it held so many other good wimmen; for they jest about worshipped her all on 'em. And one of her boys, while the rest of 'em wuz helpin' men and wimmen to build up better lives, he wuz buildin' up his creed of helpfulness and improvement in bricks and mortar, tryin' to do good, there ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... heap in front of us?" said Dennis. "We'll make for that, and, if we reach it, then dash straight across the open for the back of the church, and leave the rest to chance. It's rotten work fighting broken bricks and mortar, but there it is; it's got ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... towered above all other arts. Yet, for one problem solved after the magnificent fashion of the Brooklyn bridge and the Dacotahs, hundreds of plans were devised with delicate ingenuity for filling up with bricks and mortar the small remaining air space in the rear of tenement blocks. And this noblest and most humane of all the arts was degraded in the service of millionnaire land-owners and sub-letting agents until the problem of to-day is, how to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... not a shame, after this, to hear our Lakers in 'Kendal green,' and our Bucolical Cockneys, crying out (the latter in a wilderness of bricks and mortar) about 'Nature,' and Pope's 'artificial in-door habits?' Pope had seen all of nature that England alone can supply. He was bred in Windsor Forest, and amidst the beautiful scenery of Eton; he lived familiarly and frequently at the country seats of Bathurst, Cobham, Burlington, Peterborough, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... piteously. One of them was so badly frightened that he was afterward useless and we turned him out to pasture and he grew lean and absolutely worthless. Things were considerably disturbed, but the engines were apparently uninjured. The watchman was not injured, although surrounded by falling bricks and mortar. I was told that the water supply was stopped, and later learned that it was because the earthquake had broken ...
— San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 • James B. Stetson
... drains won't be put in the right place, or they'll pitch the wrong way; then he'll have to dig out new ones. The receivers for the stove-pipes will be forgotten or set in the ventilating-flues; then he might as well have no chimney. The masons will drop bricks and mortar and trowels down the flues; then he'll have to climb upon the roof with a brick tied to a rope and try to churn them out. Just at the place where the flues ought to be plastered outside and in, against the floor and roof timbers, the masons can't reach, and like as ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... Domitian was not pious or admirable, but possessed with the disease of building, and turned everything into bricks and mortar, just as it is said Midas turned things into ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... although you could, so often, hear the organ, but now Brandon had the strange fancy that it had drawn closer during these last weeks, and was leaning forward with its ear to his house, listening just as a man might! Funny how Brandon now was always thinking of the Cathedral as a person! Stones and bricks and mortar and bits of glass, that's what the Cathedral was, and yet lately it had seemed to move and have a being of ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... common mark of the culture of our wealthier classes. Despite many fine pictures of natural scenery, especially along the English roadsides, he was upon the whole emphatically on the side of the town. He was on the side of bricks and mortar. He was a citizen; and, after all, a citizen means a man of the city. His strength was, after all, in the fact that he was a man of the city. But, after all, his weakness, his calamitous weakness, was that he was a man ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... those who live a hundred years hence will not be troubled with that fool. True, there will be other Berkinses, and there will be other gardens, and other girls, but that doesn't make it the least less sad to see this garden pass into bricks and mortar." ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... place with the outside. The three rooms looked out over a small enclosed lawn, which was separated from the park by a brick wall surmounted by iron railings. All the fireplaces had been closed with bricks and mortar. ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... Massachusetts, a public institution has escaped the tyranny of bricks and mortar; and we are permitted to indulge the hope, that any future additions will tend to make this spot a neighborhood of unostentatious cottages, quiet rural homes, rather than the seat of a vast edifice, which may provoke the wonder of the sight-seer, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... that flower put there? You may answer, "to please me." My dear friends, I should be the last person to deny that. I can never see a child picking a nosegay, much less a little London child, born and bred and shut up among bricks and mortar, when it gets for the first time into a green field, and throws itself instinctively upon the buttercups and daisies, as if they were precious jewels and gold;—I never can see that sight, I say, without ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley |
