"Fastidious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of such great parts and extensive learning, with such fine thoughts, beautiful sentiments and wise reflections;—such a cool, abstracted philosopher, yet such an over-refined politician;—such a gloomy moralist, yet such an acute, fastidious observer of men and manners, was a cloistered monk or any obscure individual whatever was an idea to be immediately dispelled from the mind, for that the Annals was composed by such a man would have been about as incomprehensible an occurrence, as it ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... part of David's inheritance, his mother's family homestead. Things were all on a grand scale for a bride. Most brides began in a very simple way and climbed up year by year. How Kate would have liked it all! David must have had in mind her fastidious tastes, and spent a great deal of money in trying to please her. That piano must have been very expensive. Once more Marcia felt how David had loved Kate and a pang went through her as she wondered however he was to live without ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... man whom Fate suddenly swings from his fastidious life into the power of the brutal captain of a sealing schooner. A novel of adventure warmed by a beautiful love episode that every reader will ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... that this prejudice of taste has been suffered to rule in this way in no profession but that of the ministry. The most fastidious taste never carries a written speech to the bar or into the senate. The very man who dares not ascend the pulpit without a sermon diligently arranged, and filled out to the smallest word, if he had gone into the profession ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... suspecting the gravity of his condition. Not until the third day, when, upon waking in the morning, he saw a slender thread of blood that had flowed from his mouth over his beard and reddened his pillow, did that refined dandy shudder, that fastidious creature who held in horror all forms of human misery, especially disease, and who saw it creeping upon him stealthily with its defilement, its weaknesses and with the self-abandonment which is the first concession to death. Monpavon, entering the ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... faithful slave promise most faithfully to take nests no more,) was a grand string of birds' eggs, long enough to hang in festoons round, and round, and round her play-room, and sufficiently various and beautiful to gratify more fastidious eyes than those of our ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... past. Expansive persons found him a little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily's interest. Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... fashioned by binding the tops of bushes together and throwing skins or tattered blankets over the arched stems. Offal and carrion were strewn all about the place; it swarmed with flies. Nesting vultures would have built more carefully and been fully as fastidious. When the warrior reached the spot the rocks became alive with naked forms; they appeared from all sides as ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... will soon recognise that it is not possible for modern up-to-date Art to be florescent under this retrograde and fossilized system, and be warned that such untradesmanlike goings-on will deservedly forfeit the confidence and patronage of their most fastidious customers. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... midnight. And as it faintly chimed Mr. Prohack, supporting his wife, had a surpassing conviction of the beauty of existence and in particular of his own good fortune—though the matter of his inheritance never once entered his mind. He gazed down at Eve's ingenuous features, and saw in them the fastidious fineness which had caused her to recoil so sensitively from her son's display at the Grand Babylon. Yes, women had a spiritual beauty to ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... studio, the daily resort of the beauty and fashion of Florence, while his home was also the receptacle of all that taste could suggest, or the most fastidious could desire, contrasting strongly with his late want and suffering. Even the Grand Duke honored his studio with an occasional visit, which rendered the other artists of the city more ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... wilful conduct that caused him to wince in the heart of him. He was appalled by the thought of her shoulder to shoulder with the drunken rabble of traders and beachcombers at Guvutu. It was bad enough for a clean, fastidious man; but for a young woman, a girl at that, it was awful. The theft of the Flibberty-Gibbet was merely amusing, though the means by which the theft had been effected gave him hurt. Yet he found consolation ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... held recognised positions to which Jonson felt his talents better entitled him; they were hence to him his natural enemies. It seems almost certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... his towering knees, like the sun going down between two mountain-peaks. To such a length did he carry these romantic vigils that he shortly came to look as gaunt and hollow-eyed as Famine. In addition to which he had to endure no end of raillery from his not too considerate or fastidious companions, who, so far from inclining to harm a hair of Dora's head, were generally wholly indifferent to her presence, and could not enter into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Prince Maurice, then Stadtholder of Holland. Immense tortoises, delicious fish, thousands of turtledoves, and dodos a discretion, regaled the half-starved and scurvy-stricken seamen. The name dodo, however, had not then been given. Warwick's men, revelling in the luxuries of this virgin isle, became fastidious. Finding, after a hearty meal on the newly-discovered bird, that its extreme fatness disagreed with them, they gave it the name of walghvogel[1]—the nausea-causing bird. With our own experience—and that ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... which literally swarms on the kang and floor and walls, combine to make a night in a Chinese inn an experience that is not easily forgotten. However, the foreign traveller soon learns, perforce, to be less fastidious than at home and I found myself hungry enough to eat heartily and tired enough to sleep soundly in spite of the dirt and bugs. But the heat and bad air as the summer advanced were not so easily mastered, and so I began to sleep in the open courtyard, finding chattering Chinese and squealing ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... matador; as a skilful participant in riding at the ring, as well as a tireless hunter, he had scarcely found his equal. In the prime of his youth the hearts of many fair women had throbbed warmly for him, but he had been fastidious. Yet where he had aimed at ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... brilliant defence last week will probably have awakened some fastidious critics to their error in having depicted him as a low and coarse controversialist, while Lord Coleridge's judgment will have convinced the public that had Lord Coleridge occupied the place of Justice North, the defendant would have escaped with a mild penalty. In the meantime, Mr. Foote continues ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... passed over his handsome face. Van Ness had a fastidious taste. Her melodramatic poses had been familiar to him for years: they always had annoyed and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... eggs is better than cold piety," said the ex-Moderator, "and it may be a good discipline for fastidious young ladies who have been spoiled ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... his more fastidious taste in architecture detained him I do not know, but it was fully ten minutes after the others had landed before we who were watching on the aerodrome became aware that Toddles was coming home to roost. The usual signals were exchanged, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... tear gathered on her eyelash as she said to herself, 'I would not exert myself when I could; perhaps now I cannot, when I would give worlds to lighten one of his cares!' And then she saw one little bit of furniture standing awry, in the manner that used so often to worry his fastidious eye; and, in the spirit of doing anything to please him, she moved across the room to rectify it, and then sat down in the large easy chair, wearied by the slight exertion, and becoming even more depressed and hopeless; 'though,' as she told herself, 'all is sure to be ordered well. The ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... anything absurd," she answered. "This is really no place for fastidious choosing—and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... Malcolm, who was secretly disposed to agree with Cedric. Two maiden ladies of uncertain age might be endeared to their brother; but Malcolm, who was rather fastidious on the subject of female beauty, was not over-anxious to cultivate ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... lure onward a certain class of fair weather pilgrims, whom one wonders to meet with beyond Paris, and whose dolorous complaints of thin milk and large coffee-spoons, have afforded me no small amusement in casual rencounters. The most fastidious, however, of this class of smelfungi, would find but little to carp at under the roof the civil Mr. Boillet; and would do well to lay in a stock of comfortable recollections in this place, on which ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... elsewhere, only with their own consent; and when, in 1638, it appeared that a cargo of them had been forcibly introduced, they were sent back to Africa. Prisoners of war were condemned to servitude; and, altogether, the feeling on the subject of human bondage appears to have been both less and more fastidious than it afterward became. There was no such indifference as was shown in the Southern slave trade two centuries later, nor was there any of the humanitarian fanaticism exhibited by the extreme Abolitionists of the years before the Civil War. It may turn out that ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... so distinctly enunciated that every eye was at once attracted to Bessie's face. She colored, and with an odd, fastidious twist of her mouth—the feminine rendering of the squire's cynical smile—she answered, "Mrs. Chiverton has what she married for: God grant her satisfaction in it, and save me from her temptation!" In nothing did Bessie Fairfax's early breeding more show itself than ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the doom of traitors. By this law, Almagro and his followers had forfeited their lives and property, and the governor promised to distribute the latter among such of his men as showed the best claim to it by their conduct in the battle. This last politic promise vanquished the scruples of the most fastidious; and, having completed his dispositions in the most judicious and soldier-like manner, Vaca de Castro gave the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... alone; and having but few comrades in the flesh, he wisely courted the society of those whom, though long since dead, he held in far higher esteem than all the elderly ladies and curates and MacTavishes who ever lived. His appetite in literature was keen, but fastidious. He devoured all the books he could procure about the Renaissance of art in Italy. The works of Mr Walter Pater were as a treasure-house of suggestion to him, and did much to form and guide his gradually developing ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... in a Auction Room. Printed poster, "Free list suspended, with the exception of that proud boast of an enlightened country, a free press. Schools admitted by private arrangement. Nothing to raise a blush in the cheek of youth or shock the most fastidious." Mim swearing most horrible and terrific, in a pink calico pay-place, at the slackness of the public. Serious handbill in the shops, importing that it was all but impossible to come to a right understanding of the history of David ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... open confidence in him, and that he was at his wit's end to know what to do with me. I soon gave up the large room containing a grand piano, which he had allotted to me on the impulse of the moment, and retired to a modest little bedroom. The meals were my great trial, not because I was fastidious, but because I could not digest thorn. Outside my friend's house, on the contrary, I enjoyed what, considering the habits of the locality, was the most luxurious reception. The same young men who had been so kind to me on ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... population, ashore, is one thing—at sea, it is something else! First of all the question of clothing, most young men back home are fastidious—here all must wear the life preserver style trimmed a la canteen, which means our canteen, filled with water ration, must be our inseparable companion—very much attached to us, as ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... he would had the word prize or even plunder or booty been used. Yet there is no sign that the word swag will become good English. Expressive as it is, there is a vulgar flavour about it which would make people who are at all fastidious in their language very unwilling to ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... schooling the soul to recognize the magnitude and insistence of such obligations than by organizing ultra-select dancing-classes at Sherry's; giving "pink luncheons" to a bevy of simpering female snobs; uncorking eight-dollar bottles of Clos de Vougeot for a fastidious dinner company of men-about-town; squandering three thousand dollars on a Delmonico ball, or purchasing at vast prices the gowns and jewels of a deposed foreign empress. Yes, there are better ways. And for people who are ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... one just finished,—or, at least, finished to the eyes of ordinary mortals, though its fastidious master means to retouch it;—a quite pure line engraving, by Mr. Charles Henry Jeens; (in calling it pure line, I mean that there are no mixtures of mezzotint or any mechanical tooling, but all is steady hand-work,) from a picture by Mr. Armytage, which, without possessing any of the highest claims ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... and freshness is not a "sex-limited" attribute, and just as a husband wants his wife to be clean and dainty and well-groomed, so a wife may enjoy the same qualities in her husband. Some women are very fastidious, and while they may say nothing to their husbands for fear of irritating them, they may think ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... ended this extraordinary exordium; and half sitting, half leaning against the veranda, Mr. McClosky's guest turned his face, and part of a slight elegant figure, toward his host. The lower portion of this upturned face wore an habitual expression of fastidious discontent, with an occasional line of physical suffering. But the brow above was frank and critical; and a pair of dark, mirthful eyes, sat in playful judgment over the super-sensitive mouth and ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... I was an undergraduate at Oxford, there was one at least of my friends who took a genuine delight in the literary masterpieces of Greece and Rome,—the delight, not of a fastidious scholar but of a born lover of good literature. He got a "Third" in Classical "Mods," and was "gulfed" in "Greats." "Serve him right," his "dons" must have said, for I am afraid he cut their lectures. [Greek: hos apoloito kai allos ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... where he faced the two brothers as they sat at either side of the table. The General took out a bottle of spirits and placed it with scrupulous care in the very centre of the table; his brother lifted two tumblers from the corner cupboard and put them on each side of the bottle, fastidious to a hair's breadth as if he had been laying out columns of troops. It was the formula of the afternoon; sometimes they never put a lip to the glass, but it was always necessary that the bottle should be in the party. For a space that seemed ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... lodging with such subtlety that he needed but to make up his bed anywhere, even in a room hitherto untenanted, and to drag thither his greatcoat and other impedimenta, for that room at once to assume an air of having been lived in during the past ten years. Nevertheless, though a fastidious, and even an irritable, man, Chichikov would merely frown when his nose caught this smell amid the freshness of the morning, and exclaim with a toss of his head: "The devil only knows what is up with you! ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Middleton, with his horror of being alone; Lady Middleton, with her horror of impropriety; Miss Steele, who can always be made happy by being teased about the Doctor; Lucy Steele, pretty, clever, not over-fastidious in her principles, and abominably weak in her grammar; Robert Ferrars, whose airs are justly punished by his marriage to Lucy; Mrs. Ferrars, who contrives to be uniformly unamiable; Mrs. John Dashwood, fit daughter to such a mother; and Mr. John Dashwood, fit husband ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... just an inch taller or just a few pounds heavier the playful mood itself would have jarred upon the fastidious Cleggett; indeed, as she was, if she had been just a thought more playful, it would have jarred. But Lady Agatha, it has been remarked before, never went too ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... consequence; Bingen, Andernach, Bonn, and Nuyss. The other three, Tricesimae, Quadriburgium, and Castra Herculis, or Heraclea, no longer subsist; but there is room to believe, that on the ground of Quadriburgium the Dutch have constructed the fort of Schenk, a name so offensive to the fastidious delicacy of Boileau. See D'Anville, Notice de l'Ancienne Gaule, p. 183. Boileau, Epitre iv. and the notes. Note: Tricesimae, Kellen, Mannert, quoted by Wagner. Heraclea, Erkeleus in the district of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... expression of her face is one of miserable strain and endurance; the tone of her voice is full of complaint. In eating either she takes her food with the appearance of hungry grabbing, or she refuses it with a fastidious scorn. Any nervous woman who really wants to find herself out, in order to get well and strong, and contented and happy, will see in this description a reflection of herself, even though it may be ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... thing the box turned up!" he said; and there, after all, was the compliment, but so delicately inferred that the most fastidious taste could ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 'If I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be got.' That's my way, you know, Swordsley; I suppose I'm what you'd call fastidious. Always was, about everything, from cigars to wom—" his eye met the apprehensive glance of Mrs. Swordsley, who looked like her husband with his clerical coat cut slightly lower—"so I said: 'If I have ...
— The Choice - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... man in the world to object to horrible stories, having himself written some of the most horrible that exist in the world. The author of the Madman's Manuscript, of the disease of Monk and the death of Krook, cannot be considered fastidious in the matter of revolting realism or of revolting mysticism. If artistic horror is to be kept from the young, it is at least as necessary to keep little boys from reading Pickwick or Bleak House as to refrain ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... country—only yesterday it had been the frontier, and even yet a frontier code of personal conduct to some extent prevailed. Nevertheless, "Young Ed" Austin's life became a scorn and a hissing among his neighbors. They were not unduly fastidious, these neighbors, and they knew that hot blood requires more than a generation to cool, but everything Ed did outraged them. In trying to show their sympathy for his wife they succeeded in wounding her more deeply, and Alaire withdrew into herself. She became ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... keeping an uneasy eye on that very wilful and wrong-headed child. Why, my dear, she has the most fastidious, the sweetest, the most chaste mind, and yet the things she calmly discusses ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... part from apathy and want of intelligence. For three days they have kept up their graceful and kindly hospitality, going on with their ordinary life and occupations, and, though I have lived among them in this room by day and night, there has been nothing which in any way could offend the most fastidious sense of delicacy. ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... contentment and kindness of this quiet, benevolent man. Professor Macleod was brother to Macleod of Talisker, and brother-in-law to the Laird of Col. He gave me a letter to young Col. I was weary of this day, and began to think wishfully of being again in motion. I was uneasy to think myself too fastidious, whilst I fancied Dr. Johnson quite satisfied. But he owned to me that he was fatigued and teased by Sir Alexander's doing too much to entertain him. I said, it was all kindness. JOHNSON. 'True, Sir; but sensation is sensation.' BOSWELL. 'It is so: we feel pain equally from the surgeon's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... hear of some fastidious customer who objects to pure lard, because it looks white when cold. To such we would recommend lard oil as a great improvement, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... previously to its being placed in the hands of Mr. Dallas, been submitted by the noble author to the perusal of some friend—the first and only one, it appears, who at that time had seen them. Who this fastidious critic was, Mr. Dallas has not mentioned; but the sweeping tone of censure in which he conveyed his remarks was such as, at any period of his career, would have disconcerted the judgment of one, who, years after, in all ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... of altogether a different mold; but there were bodily wants that none knew better how to meet than the nice housewife, whose skill in such matters few could contest. The dainty bit was ever tempting, and the linen was pure and white, and the neat chamber inviting even to the most fastidious taste, so that there would have been nothing wanting to Archie's comfort or joy were it not for the void that but one could fill. "It was foolish to think of her!" that he so often repeated to himself, yet think of her and dream of her he did, and ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... itself to the same points of behavior as British prudery, and has a different code of the mentionable and the unmentionable, and for many other reasons the French tolerate plays which are never performed in England until they have been spoiled by a process of bowdlerization; yet French taste is more fastidious than ours as to the exhibition and treatment on the stage of the physical incidents of sex. On the French stage a kiss is as obvious a convention as the thrust under the arm by which Macduff runs Macbeth through. It is even a purposely unconvincing ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... not bargained for this sort of thing when he married. Hilda was not only pretty, but she could be, when she liked, sufficiently intellectual to satisfy his requirements. He was fastidious and had peculiar views with regard to women. He hated the so-called clever women, but at the same time he despised the stupid ones. To please him a woman must have tact—she must quickly understand his many moods. She must sympathize when he demanded sympathy, and when he showed by his manner ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... dictates of the conscience implanted in us at our birth, in order to steer in the right path. The texts are taken from the Chinese classical books, in the same way as our preachers take theirs from the Bible. Jokes, stories which are sometimes untranslatable into our more fastidious tongue, and pointed applications to members of the congregation, enliven the discourses; it being a principle with the Japanese preacher that it is not necessary to bore his ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... it in Parliament. By degrees his speeches became marvels of close reasoning, and they even soared, sometimes, when he was deeply moved, into a kind of eloquence superior to that of rhetoric, but the accent was never such as would satisfy a fastidious ear. The day came, however, when people hung with too much anxiety on the least of his utterances for any one to notice this defect. Cavour sat on the Right, and from the first he horrified his colleagues ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... into trouble last term, Bultitude," he said sternly, "on account of this same fastidious daintiness. Your excellent father has informed me of your waste and gluttony at his own bountifully spread table. Don't let me have occasion to reprove ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... still deadliness hung about the premises. No cheap, common house can be a haunted house. Ghosts like good architecture, especially when it has become pretty antique, and they have a passion for neglected door-yards. The place lacked nothing that I could see to make it attractive to even the most fastidious wandering wraith. As I say, I think this was not my first impression, but certainly it was about the next one, and I could see by her ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... envelope in order;—more than twelve sheets, written on both sides, and several newspaper clippings. In these clippings he saw portraits of Freya, a hard and blurred likeness which he could recognize only by her name underneath. He also beheld the portrait of her defender,—an old lawyer of fastidious aspect with white locks ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... phrased it. They had not merely to deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article or that, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and first of all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare the heedless and captivate the fastidious. These things did not come properly within March's province—that had been clearly understood—and for a while Fulkerson tried to run the art leg himself. The phrase was again his, but it was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg. The difficult generation, at once stiff-backed and slippery, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... reigned. Madame de la Baudraye, studying Lousteau, saw that he was dressed as the most fastidious dandy might have been. ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... his scrupulous search after truth, is sometimes too fastidious in regard to facts which border a little on the marvelous. The story of the golden ore rests on something better than mere tradition. The venerable Adrian Van der Donck, Doctor of Laws, in his description of the New Netherlands, asserts it from his own ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... barrel-organs were a nuisance, and of course I believed them; so that I left my home with a decided dislike to barrel-organs in general. Four years' residence, however, in the bush had rendered me much less fastidious in music, as well as in many other things; and during the two last years spent at York Factory, not a solitary note of melody had soothed my longing ear, so that it was with a species of rapture that I now ground away at the ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... upon him. It was a bitter remembrance to him now—that morning when Arthur breakfasted with him and seemed as if he were on the verge of a confession. It was plain enough now what he had wanted to confess. And if their words had taken another turn...if he himself had been less fastidious about intruding on another man's secrets...it was cruel to think how thin a film had shut out rescue from all this guilt and misery. He saw the whole history now by that terrible illumination which the present ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... such society as that, Reanda was easily first, apart from the talent which placed him at the head of the whole artistic profession. He had been brought up, taught, and educated among gentlemen, sons of one of the oldest and most fastidious aristocracies in Europe, and he had their manners, their speech, their quiet air of superiority, and especially that exterior gentleness and modesty of demeanour which most touches some women. In Gloria's opinion, he even had much of their appearance, being tall, ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... thou too fastidious. It is weak To make thyself a shame of being injured; And is it injury indeed? Nay, is it Anything but a mere opinion hurt? Not thou, but customary thought is here Molested and annoyed; the only nerve Can carry anguish from this to ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... It is told of him that he had four scarlet coats made for him before his delicate perception in this respect could be altogether satisfied. He would have the right tone of scarlet, or none at all. 'Fortunately,' observes a critic personally acquainted with the fastidious gentleman, 'he had as many brothers as rejected coats.' And Sherwin was really kind-hearted and generous. There seems to have been no false pride about him. With all his success and prosperity, his airs of fashion ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... bloomers. The bee balm, one of our handsomest perennials, has bright red whorls; it spreads upon the surface of the ground like mint, and thus may be divided and increased to any extent. It loves rich, moist land, but is not fastidious. Among the evening primroses the Missouri one is the brightest and biggest; speciosa, white, from Texas, of blossoms the most prolific; glauca, riparia, fruticera, and linearis, all yellow; many others, though perennial, are best treated ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... People's Books to suit the tastes of the most fastidious. The publishers consider themselves fortunate in being able to offer such a marvelous line of choice subjects, made up into attractive presentation volumes. Large type, fine heavy paper, numerous pictures in black, inserted with six lithographic ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... worse, were pretty mixed: part pride, or even conceit, and part prudence or parsimony. No matter. The influence was helpful, for the abstention was real, and the distaste grew always more rooted as time wore on. Also, the same influence tended to make me more fastidious, more critical, less crude than I might otherwise have been. It led me to give more serious attention to pictures, music, and literature of the less ephemeral sort than I might otherwise have given. It was not that Mr. Rawlence and ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... be placed in the first rank of privileged couples of this kind. The most fastidious old uncle or precise old dowager could not discover the slightest pretense for criticism. Age, social position, wealth, physical endowments, all seemed united by a chance as rare as fortunate. So Mademoiselle ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... is with that tiresome, common, old Mr. Selwyn!" exclaimed Mrs. Vanderburgh to her daughter. "I never was so surprised at anything in all my life, to see that he keeps it up now, for I thought that aristocratic Horatio King was the most fastidious being alive." ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... father and other competent judges, is thoroughly original; it is an exquisite monograph, and to me most instructive and striking. Every one will ask why such a man has not written more—a question my fastidious friend will find is ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... wearied with its eternal aspect of brick? Has the efflorescence of thy youth been "sicklied o'er" by the wasting turmoil of the town?—leave its precincts for one month of the fervid summer, and forget thy cares and toils in the embowered Isle of Wight. Let thy taste be ever so fastidious, there it may be gratified. If thou art in love with sentimental ease and elegance, take up thy residence amongst the library-visiting fashionables at Ryde—if thou hast a taste for the terrific and sublime, thou canst meditate amidst the solemn and sea-worn ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... as any poignant offense. But the mere adumbration of an odor is enough for the sensitive nose and clean tongue of youth. Decency demands that we draw several carbolized sheets over what the dormitory said to Mr. King and what Mr. King replied. He was genuinely proud of his house and fastidious in all that concerned their well-being. He came; he sniffed; he said things. Next morning a boy in that dormitory confided to his bosom friend, a fag of Macrea's, that there was trouble in their midst which King would fain ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... you there were two of us, at this inn. We met at meals. I think he was a commercial traveller. A tall young fellow, strongly built, a pleasure to look at; carefully dressed, intelligent, with hard and clear grey eyes. He had a ruddy but fastidious complexion, though he was, I noticed, a hearty and careless eater. He was energetic and swift in his movements, as though the world were easily read, and he could come to quick decisions and successful executions of his desires. He had no moments of ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... with the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, the discipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous. Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, etudes, nocturnes and waltzes in his master's cool, polite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too, might seem to have been written in order to be played in noble salons lit by massive candelabra, to countesses with bare shoulders. The twenty-four preludes Opus 11, for instance, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... with the elder brother of his old friend,—a man who possessed some of Ernest's faults,—very proud, and very exacting, and very fastidious; but all these faults were developed in the ordinary commonplace world, and were not the refined abstractions of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... circumstances. But there was one recess in the wall, no larger than a bird-cage, which was the private apartment of Tinker Bell. It could be shut off from the rest of the home by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most fastidious, always kept drawn when dressing or undressing. No woman, however large, could have had a more exquisite boudoir and bedchamber combined. The couch, as she always called it, was a genuine Queen Mab, with club legs; and she ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... reckless actor ever played melodramatic "heavies." He had a love for Shakespeare, but could not play him; he had a love of drink and could gratify it. His vigorous talents purchased for him much forbearance. I've seen Mr. Whally play the fastidious and elegant "Sir Archibald Levison" in shiny black doe-skin trousers and old-fashioned cloth gaiters, because his condition rendered the problem of dressing somewhat doubtful, though it could not obscure his acting. He was the only walking embodiment of "Bill Sykes" ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... decalcomania may be applied, as it can be transferred upon everything for which ornamentation is required, and the variety of designs which are printed especially for it is so great that something may easily be procured to suit the taste of the most fastidious. ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... at whom Jack Benson found himself staring with all his eyesight. The man was dressed in a rather fastidious-looking summer weight frock coat suit. On his head rested an expensive straw hat of the latest sort. Over his eyes were light blue goggles. His ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... to escape and hide herself from every one. She felt as fastidious women feel after a journey through miles of thick black dust, when they cannot bear to have their faces seen with the disfiguring stains of travel upon them. But she had to go back to the deck where people were dancing, before she could find her way to ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... no Catholic can be blind. We find there men possessed of many virtues, but proud, bashful, fastidious, and reserved. Why is this? it is because they think and act as if there were really nothing objective in their religion; it is because conscience to them is not the word of a lawgiver, as it ought to be, but the dictate of their own minds ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... refinement, I'd like to know, would have wanted him? For, say what you will, it is a most disagreeable thing to admit downright dirty vagabonds into our elegant dwellings. And dangerous, besides; for they might murder us in the night,—or steal something! Oh, we fastidious and fearful! where is our charity? where is the heart of trust? There was of old a Divine Man, who had not where to lay his head,—whom the wise of those days scoffed at as a crazy fellow,—whom respectable people shunned,—who made himself the companion of the poor, the comforter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... thicket stared hard at them both. And he saw his major break off a snowy Cherokee rose and, bending at his slim, sashed waist, present the blossom with the courtly air inbred through many generations; and he saw a ragged mountaineer girl accept it with all the dainty and fastidious mockery of a coquette of the golden age, and fasten it where her faded bodice edged the creamy ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so young but so formidably fastidious and refined. She had not expected him to look like that. All the clever young men she had met had displayed a noble contempt for appearances. To be sure, Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were limited to three little ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... assume or attempt to bolster up a false position. He would abandon his case first. He did so in the case of Buckmaster for the use of Durham v. Beener & Arthur, in our Supreme Court, in which I happened to be opposed to him. Another gentleman, less fastidious, took Mr. Lincoln's place and gained the case." His power as an advocate seems to have depended on his conviction that the right was on his side. "Tell Harris it's no use to waste money on me; in that case, he'll get ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... ornamented outside with various highly-colored pictures, drawn by artists of the most florid genius, representing cigar-boxes, pipes, meerschaums, narghillas, bunches of cigars, snuffboxes, plugs and twists of tobacco, and all that the most fastidious smoker, chewer, or snuffer can expect to find in any tobacco shop, besides a good many things that he never will find in any of these shops. Prominent among these symbolical displays is the counterfeit presentment of a jet-black ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... not obtain the same privilege. It was not probable, however, that the principle could ever be applied to more than four or five towns in the whole realm. Parliament, moreover, had not always been so fastidious in regard to the extension of a principle. It had not refused, for instance, the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders. But the present bill would not even add permanently to the members of the house; he proposed that in future cases of disfranchisement, the franchise should ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Mayor and Corporation of Dublin had not been consulted. Now it might have been very proper to consult these functionaries; it may even be a culpable omission to have neglected them; but this is not a time, nor is the House of Lords in circumstances, to be so fastidious and to stickle for such formalities. Their character with the nation is at stake, and it is of far greater consequence that they should do nothing calculated to throw suspicion on their motives, or odium on their proceedings, than to provide for a punctilious observance of respect and deference ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... Mr. Benjamin Doolittle's colloquialisms, though once he had declared them amusing, racy, of the soil, and had rebuked Genevieve's fastidious criticisms of them on an occasion when she had interpreted her role of helpmeet to include that of hostess to Mr. and Mrs. Doolittle—oh, not in her own home, of course!—at luncheon, at the ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... enterprise unostentatious; the theatre of their exploits remote; how could they possibly be favorites of worldly Fame—that common crier, whose existence is only known by the assemblage of multitudes; that pander of wealth and greatness, so eager to haunt the palaces of fortune, and so fastidious to the houseless dignity of virtue; that parasite of pride, ever scornful to meekness, and ever obsequious to insolent power; that heedless trumpeter, whose ears are deaf to modest merit, and whose eyes are ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... who is just a sort of ward politician, I understand, and a mother we don't know, and of course shouldn't care to. But, oh, Ramsey! if you had to make yourself so conspicuous why couldn't you be a little bit more fastidious? Your father wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it had been a self-respecting, intellectual girl. We both say that if you must be so ridiculous at your age as to persist in seeing more of one girl than another, why, oh why, don't you go and see some really nice girl ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... Miss Edith Hudson went to work for the International Machine Company as Mr. Compton's stenographer. Nor could the most fastidious have discovered aught to criticize in the appearance or deportment of ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fastidious about how he wanted his bed made up. Three separate times did he pull it to pieces again, to ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... on the lookout for a suitable place to conceal himself, until the friendly shades of night should again favor his movements. After the experience of the former night near the ford, he was very cautious in the selection of a hiding place. It is not always safe to be fastidious; for while Tom was rejecting one location, and waiting for another to appear, the river bore him into a tract of very open country, which was less favorable than that through which ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... very certain, that this Irish girl was not annoyed by the kinks in John's hair. Nor was she overly fastidious about the small percentage of colored blood visible in John's complexion. It was, however, a strange occurrence and very hard to understand. Not a stone was left unturned until John was safely on the Underground Rail Road. Doubtless she helped to earn the money ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... of these subjects may seem out of place in a work designed for every member of the family, yet they are presented in a style which cannot offend the most fastidious, and with a studied avoidance of all language that can possibly displease the chaste, or disturb the delicate susceptibilities ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... not fastidious in dress, and stood firmly and with dignity. I noted particularly his hair and his smile, the former black in color, plentiful, fine in quality, and parted distressingly straight; the ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... hair and give them those mournful, passionate black eyes through which the tragedy of the race always looks. But so vague, so mere a hearsay, was this negro stain, if it existed at all, that he had married a white wife, and moved in society unchallenged by these very fastidious descendants of Carolina ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... simple, but well cooked. Sibyl never ate with hearty appetite, and declined everything not of excellent quality; unlike women in general, she was fastidious about wine, yet took of it sparingly; liqueurs, too, she enjoyed, and very strong coffee. To a cigarette in the mouth of a woman she utterly objected; it offended her sense of the becoming, her delicate perception of propriety. When dining alone or with Hugh, she dressed as ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... The rate of pay for this latter class is one kail of wheat and half a mahboub per month for those who have no horses, and one kail of dates additional for those who are mounted. This division, however, is fastidious at present, as all those on service in Fezzan are now possessed of horses. In the whole regency of Tripoli there are but six hundred and sixty of these Arab soldiers; but in Bonjem and the Syrtis they are not cavalry, and the detachment at Ghadamez is mixed.[3] I am afraid these ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... tempting or appropriate viands. Let him feel the pangs of hunger very sharply, and his ideas of lusciousness and propriety in respect to food will rapidly change. The civilized world has condemned the practice as belonging to barbarians. A mountaineer, not being quite so fastidious, scouts these ideas, considering them foolish prejudices of people who have never been forced by necessity to test the wisdom of their condemnation. Let the epicurean sages have their choice, eat horse flesh ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... describe Pau as "a charming town" alluding, of course, to the society, which is to them the great desideratum everywhere; besides, they are accustomed to ill-paved streets, and are not fastidious about cleanliness. The guide-books of these parts cite the descriptions of early writers in order to compare its present with its former state; two are given, which are certainly as much at variance as those obtained ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... mentioned have suffered almost no change since first put upon the canvas, but they have from time to time appeared in at least a dozen different landscapes, and would doubtless have been placed in as many more before he had satisfied his fastidious ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... a small voice when Warren opened the drawing-room door, "and take off this shawl," continued the speaker, extracting with its minute hand the pin, and with a sort of fastidious haste doffing the clumsy wrapping. The creature which now appeared made a deft attempt to fold the shawl; but the drapery was much too heavy and large to be sustained or wielded by those hands and arms. "Give it to Harriet, please," was then the direction, "and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... a hide chair ten hours together that Sunday, only moving to light the stove for Harry, or to consume another pint of strong green tea, which is generally our sole indulgence on the prairie. It might not, however, have suited fastidious palates, because the little squirrel-like gophers which abounded everywhere, burrowing near by, fell into the well by scores, and we had no leisure to fish them out. Neither is there any mistaking ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... small for him, and it is unnecessary to add that he disposed of that suit. People who have hitherto allowed their children to put their pennies in the Sunday School Mission box, will perhaps hesitate to continue supporting the 'poor, down-trodden native' when they learn that he is so fastidious, and perhaps, after all, their spare coppers might be assigned ...
— The Boer in Peace and War • Arthur M. Mann
... silence, his nervous, fastidious, super-fine soul was screaming. Why couldn't he have been allowed to keep the poignant joy of touching her, of breathing her acrid, earthy atmosphere, of kissing her lips and her eyelids, to himself? It was an intoxication—but ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... the courtier, Hamlet; or the warrior, Posthumus; he is always the same—a gentle yet impulsive nature, sensuous at once and meditative; half poet, half philosopher, preferring nature and his own reveries to action and the life of courts; a man physically fastidious to disgust, as is a delicate woman, with dirt and smells and common things; an idealist daintily sensitive to all courtesies, chivalries, and distinctions. The portrait is not yet complete—far from it, indeed; but already it is manifest that Shakespeare's ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... not assure himself that he was as good as the ladies of his family. Then he had begun to reason with himself on this subject, as he did on all. What was there different in a girl's nature that ought to make her fastidious as to society which he felt to be good enough for himself? In entertaining the feeling which had been strong within him as to that feminine sanctity, was he not giving way to one of those empty prejudices of the world, in ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... of assent was unanimous. It could not be disregarded. Talbot rose and with fastidious concern brushed the cigarette ashes from his sleeve. As he moved toward the door he called back: "Only too delighted to keep out. The crowd in this room makes a ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... had better pay more attention to my appearance. Fix up a little more to be like other people, I mean. One feels better satisfied with herself when she is looking well. And then, Agnes, as Guy goes more into society, I fancy he is becoming fastidious." ...
— 'Our guy' - or, The elder brother • Mrs. E. E. Boyd
... he may be, keeps stoutly on the side of virtue—Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that 'perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless of words, and only ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... Copenhagen, Peter Jerndorff, the famous Acteur Royal, practically regarded him as his own son. Under Jerndorff's direction for five years, he obtained that thorough dramatic education which is so essential to the fastidious Scandinavian Theatre, and to which Ibsen ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... on the whiteness of a page, he was well known as such, and had plenty of work—had often, indeed, to refuse what was offered him, hence was able to decline all such jobs as would give him no pleasure, and grew more fastidious as he grew older in regard to the quality of the work he would undertake. He had never employed a journeyman, and would never take more than two apprentices at ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caracteres." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyere, always extremely fastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing to resemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began to diversify it with "portraits." These had been in fashion in Paris for more than a generation, but La Bruyere invented a new kind of portrait. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... period a man of his own age—scoundrelly in character but of an aristocratic and moneyed family. The better man finds himself barred from resuming his old name. How, coming into the other man's possessions, he wins the respect of all men, and the love of a fastidious, delicately nurtured girl, is the thread upon which the story hangs. It is one of the best novels of the West that ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... town with the cabbages. It will be seen that Esther as yet was not possessed of that which we call knowledge of the world. It did not occur to her that the neighbourhood of the cabbages would hurt her, though it might hurt her fastidious taste. It would not hurt her, Esther thought; and what did the rest matter? Anything but this pinching and sparing penny by penny. But if she drove into town with the cabbages, that would only dispose of Buonaparte; the other item—the rent—would remain unaccounted for. How ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... said to be a common ploughman; and when we consider him in this light, we cannot help regretting that wayward fate had not placed him in a more favoured situation. Those who view him with the severity of lettered criticism, and judge him by the fastidious rules of art, will discover that he has not the doric simplicity of Ramsay, nor the brilliant imagination of Ferguson; but to those who admire the exertions of untutored fancy, and are blind to many faults for the sake of numberless ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney |
