"Corset" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arrival in France his comrade called him only Mademoiselle Fifi. This nickname was bestowed upon him on account of his coquettish style of dressing and manners, his slender waist, which looked as if it were laced in a corset, his pale face on which a nascent mustache could hardly be seen, and also on account of the habit he had acquired, in order to express his supreme contempt for persons and things, of using continually the French locution: "Fi! fi donc!" which he ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... invariably wore a corset-cover of yellow flannel, the Baroness a wrapper mottled with stains from cosmetics and the Biscayan lady a red waist through whose opening was regularly presented, for the admiration of those who happened along the corridor, a huge white udder ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... sitting writing only half dressed, folded the paper reverently, put it to her lips for lack of a seal, and then buttoned it firmly inside her corset waist. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... better, and when she has to confess that she has never done anything outside of her own house, and nothing there except agreeable things, such as entertaining friends who next week will entertain her, and embroidering 'insets' for corset-covers for dainty ladies who already have corset-covers enough to fill a store-window,—I wonder if she will be able to put it over on the heavenly doorkeeper that 'the Doctor would not let her.' If all I hear is true, Saint Peter will say, 'Who ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... entirely rid herself of the notion that she was dreaming. A lace petticoat hanging over the back of a chair and a brocaded pink corset over another contributed to the illusion. She could not yet believe they were hers, any more than was the twenty-dollar creation in the hat box on the shelf in ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... embellishments, she presented herself to the eyes of her family and friends with a genuine sensation of guilt. Perhaps three hours out of all her days were spent in some such occupation; between bathing, manicuring, hair-dressing, and intervals with her dressmaker and her corset woman it is improbable that the subject of her appearance was long out of the lady's mind. Yet she was not vain, nor was she particularly well satisfied with herself when it was done. That about one-fifth of her waking time—something more than two months out of the year—was ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... provenance, with the exception of a kind having a cross-arm like the halberd commonly used in China from the seventh century before Christ. Yamato armour affords little assistance to the archaeologist: it bears no particularly close resemblance to any type familiar elsewhere. There was a corset made of sheet iron, well rivetted. It fastened in front and was much higher behind than before, additioned protection for the back being provided by a lattice-guard which depended from the helmet and was made by fastening strips of sheet iron to ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... circumstances, is more liable to this difficulty than her mate, just as the human being is more liable to it than the four-legged beast. Man's upright position has not been well adjusted by appropriate structures. Childbearing, lack of vigorous exercise, the corset, and the hustle and bustle of the early morning hours so that regular habits are not formed, bring about a sluggish bowel. Indeed it is a cynicism amongst physicians that the proper definition of woman is ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... outwards, came the corset, a most serious affair. This exceedingly expensive instrument of torture was compounded chiefly of silk (which easily frayed) and whale-bone. Many good women of the middle class have gone to their graves for three hundred years believing that Almighty God had specially created toothless whales ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... brown, over-coiffured and over-ringed—with an elderly angular daughter, hard to marry, regarded us with eyes of disapproval. Elodie in happy mood threw off restraint, as, in more private and intimate surroundings, she would have thrown off her corset. But we cared not for the disapproval of the correct ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... mistaken. It was sheer horror that held Susan's gaze upon Violet's incredible hips and thighs, violently obtruded by the close-reefed corset. Mabel had a slender figure, the waist too short and the legs too nearly of the same girth from hip to ankle, but for all that, attractive. Susan had never before seen a woman in tights without any sort ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... a corset for her, for the same purpose as the King's under-waistcoat, without her knowledge; but she would not make use of it; all my entreaties, all my tears, were in vain. "If the factions assassinate me," she replied, "it will be a fortunate event for me; they ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... gently down, his practiced hand over the heart. "No; she's not dead. The blow was aimed at her heart, but something in her dress—a corset, probably—turned the weapon aside. Call me a cab, somebody. You're off duty, I think, sergeant—can you come ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... outline. Wrinkles had drawn in the corners of the indomitable eyes, and ill-health had dulled their blue. That saddest of all changes she repaired by hand-massage, pomade, and belladonna. The somewhat unrefined exuberance of her figure she laced in an inimitable corset. Next she arrayed herself in a suit of dark blue cloth, simple and severely reticent; in a white silk blouse, simpler still, sewn with innocent daisies, Maggie's handiwork; in a hat, gay in form, austere in colour; and in gloves ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... cheeks hung forward like a spaniel's, not of fat, but heaviness. Hattie's arms and thighs were granite to the touch and to the scales. Kindly freckled granite. She weighed almost twice what she looked. Marcia, whose hips were like lyres, hated the ridge above the corset line and massaged it. Mab smacking ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency, and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... architecture by artificial illumination, and to use colored light with a view to its purely pictorial value. Though certain buildings have since been illuminated with excellent effect, it remains true that the corset, chewing-gum, beer and automobile sky signs of our Great White Ways indicate the height to which our imagination has risen in utilizing this Promethean gift in any but necessary ways. Interior lighting, except negatively, has not been dealt with from the standpoint of beauty, ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the living charm of her neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need only have bent his head a little to have touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her body, the scent of perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she moved. He did not see her marble beauty forming a complete whole with her dress, but all the charm of her body only covered by her garments. And having once seen this he could not help being aware of it, just as we cannot renew an illusion ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the shoulders, the upper third of these alabaster torsos and arms being absolutely naked, save for a band of pearls, diamonds, or other gems, of a size rarely seen in the Orient; but I learned later that the bone or steel corset, which molds the form, constituted the support of the gown. I gradually became habituated to the custom, and did not notice it. My friend ——, an artist of repute, explained that it all depends on the point of view. "Our people are essentially artistic," he said. "There is nothing ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... brooch which pinned her ruffle. Dear reader, there are some sensations so powerful and so sweet that years cannot weaken the remembrance of them. My mouth had already covered with kisses that ravishing bosom; but then the troublesome corset had not allowed me to admire all its perfection. Now I felt it free from all restraint and from all unnecessary support; I have never seen, never touched, anything more beautiful, and the two magnificent globes of the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of this invention is to furnish an improved abdominal corset, which supports the weight of the abdomen in a perfectly comfortable and easy manner, and throws the strain on the shoulders and hips of the wearer. The corset is adjustable to the varying conditions of the abdomen, does not interfere with the motion ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... that you read of In these story picture books, They can't ride in roping distance Of that girl in style and looks. They have waists more like an insect, Corset shaped and double cinched; Feet just right to make a watch charm, Small, of course, because they're pinched. This here Nancy's like God made her,— She don't wear no saddle girth, But she's supple as a willow, And the purtiest thing on earth. I'm in earnest; let me ask you— 'Cause I want to reason ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Bartley took care of that. He would never let me wear a corset, and for years he made me do ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... this jail, I think, Yet they play for shoes, for drabs and drink. She, my lawless, sharp-tongued gypsy maid Will not scorn with me this jail-bird trade, Pets some fox-eyed boy who turns the trick, Tho' he win a button or a stick, Pencil, garter, ribbon, corset-lace— HIS the glory, MINE is ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... of the merry hearted Flora, who quickly doffed the blue jerkin that, girded round her waist, had given her such a sailor-like air, and disclosed a bust of such perfect symmetry, that it would have served as a model for a statue of Diana. And this was charmingly displayed in a sleeved corset of dark green color, cut after the fashion of a habit, with an incision in front, disclosing a stomacher of fine Spanish lace, set with rows of tiny brilliants. Her gauntlets quickly followed her jerkin, exposing tiny, swan white fingers, sparkling with jewels. And ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... periot made of gray Indian taffetas with dark stripes of the same color with two collars, one white, one yellow with blue silk fringe, having a reverse trimmed in the same manner. Under the periot was a yellow corset of cross blue stripes. Around the bosom of the periot was a frill of white vandyked gauze of the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is a large braid with ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... collection of presents. There were in all no less than fifty-nine articles, among which were the following: a dress-box, a pair of boots, a thermometer, a carbine-carrier, a pair of trousers and a corset. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... about to leave the Pearl of the Ocean for other seas, for other lands. The walled garden full of shadows blazed with colour as if the flowers were giving up the light absorbed during the day. The amazing old woman became very explicit. She suggested to the girl a corset and a petticoat with a cynical unreserve which humiliated me. Was I of no more account than a wooden dummy? The girl snapped ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... badly cut. Instead of holding himself upright with an elastic corset, he felt that he was cooped up inside a hideous shirt-collar; he hung his dejected head without resistance on the part of a limp cravat. What woman could guess that a handsome foot was hidden by the clumsy boots which he had brought ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... and had fallen over some stumps. Instantly they saw that she had been prostrated by the heat, and having recently studied "First aid to the injured" they proceeded to remove her blouse and open her corset, when lo! there upon a silver chain around her neck was not only Ethel Hollister's ring but another belonging to Honora Casey. She had missed it a few days after Ethel had lost hers, but she wisely refrained ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... beauty, so tall and slender. Her waist measure is only twenty-one and two thirds inches. The woman who makes her corsets and my mamma's told us so. She brought us one of her corsets to look at, a love of a corset, in brocatelle, all over many-colored flowers. That material is much more 'distingue' than ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that woman,—who knows that stays will bend,—seizes her corset by the lower end, and bends it ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... then, for municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... horses, creaked down the street. They concentrated their fire upon the driver by tacit consent, for each of the marksmen had had an aversion to causing runaways drilled into him by the hair brush or corset steel method. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... know. Some neighbors took me in at first, and I worked for them; then I got a job in a dry-goods store, and finally in the corset department. I filled out when I began to get something to eat and I developed a good figure. Finally I got to be a model. I was quick to learn, and when rich dames came in I watched them. I became good-looking, too, although not so pretty as I am now, for I couldn't put the time or the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... woman. Further investigations, however, with a wider basis and more accurate methods—and one may surely add more common-sense—have changed the whole aspect of the matter. This difference has been proved to be due, not to Nature at all, but wholly to the effect of corset-wearing and woman's conventional dress. There is, it would seem, no limit to the quagmire of superstition and error into which sex-difference have drawn even the most careful inquirers if once they fail to cut themselves adrift from that superficial view of Nature's scheme, by which the ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley |
