"Navvy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... detested the dirty, laborious work of digging and dabbling in mud from morning till night. He began to see that, as far as the nature of his daily toil was concerned, he worked harder, and was worse off than the poorest navvy who did the dirtiest work in old England! He sighed for more congenial employment, meditated much over the subject, and finally resolved to give ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... ebbing energy. We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within us, so that a lazy stagnation or even a cottony milkiness may be preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material. The navvy waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life out of his still sleeping comrade, is understood to lack the trained motive which makes a character fairly calculable in its actions; but by a roundabout course even a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... is all the more reason why I don't want to stop you from working it out, or rather to make the "one erasure" you suggest. For as to stopping you, "ten on me might," as the navvy said to the little special constable who threatened ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... as short in the skirt as that of the prints of the Bavarian broom girls. She had white cotton stockings, and a pair of black leather boots, with leather buttons, and, for a lady, prodigiously thick soles, which reminded me of the navvy boots I had so often admired in Punch. I must add that the hands with which she assisted her scrutiny of my dress, though pretty, were very ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... was a navvy, and His hands were coarse, and dirty too, His homely face was rough and tanned, His time of ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... got the best share of the brains. Beatrice would be proud of me if I took my degree. I must make something of this essay if I 'burn the midnight'. Miss Roscoe will expect me to turn up trumps. I'll toil like a navvy!" ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... taken for an escaped convict, and was kept in prison for several months. Then he was released, and turned his hand to all sorts of work. He kept accounts and taught children to read, and at one time he was even employed as a navvy in making an embankment. He was continually hoping to return to his own country. He had saved the necessary amount of money when he was attacked by yellow fever. Then, believing him to be dead, those about him divided his ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... prepared] preparedness, readiness, ripeness, mellowness; maturity; un impromptu fait a loisir[Fr]. [Preparer] preparer, trainer; pioneer, trailblazer; avant- courrier[Fr], avant-coureur[Fr]; voortrekker[Afrikaans]; sappers and miners, pavior[obs3], navvy[obs3]; packer, stevedore; warming pan. V. prepare; get ready, make ready; make preparations, settle preliminaries, get up, sound the note of preparation. set in order, put in order &c. (arrange) 60; forecast &c. (plan) 626 prepare the ground, plow the ground, dress the ground; till ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... recorded and quotable that come anywhere near it. We talk about the popular Press; but in truth there is no popular Press. It may be a good thing; but, anyhow, most readers would be mildly surprised if a newspaper leading article were written in the language of a navvy. Sometimes the Press is interested in things in which the democracy is also genuinely interested; such as horse-racing. Sometimes the Press is about as popular as the Press Gang. We talk of Labour leaders in Parliament; but they would be highly unparliamentary if they talked ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... so tidy that there are white quartz stones arranged along each side of the yellow quartz ballast, and where there is sand ballast it is patted down as neatly as a pie crust. R. says it is difficult to prevent the native navvy making geometric designs ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... shelling and patrol encounters. On the 24th demonstrations were made against Beitunia to support the left of the 52nd Division's attack on El Jib, but the enemy was too strong to permit of the yeomanry proceeding more than two miles east of Foka. The roadmakers had done an enormous amount of navvy work on the track between Foka and Tahta. They had laboured without cessation, breaking up rock, levering out boulders with crowbars, and doing a sort of rough-and-ready levelling, and by the night of the 24th the track was reported ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... us, Reddy. Drag him out, and now we'll settle this navvy's job. It's one man less in the fo'c'sle mess, and dead men tell no tales; and now we'll have to do the work a bit short-handed; but we can clean it up between us now, and ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... from a walk in the Highgate Fields. As we plodded our dirty way homeward through the Caledonian Road we were stopped by a crowd outside a public-house. A gigantic drayman (they always seem bigger than they really are) was squaring up to a poor drunken lout of a navvy not half his size, who had been put up to fight him, and who was quite incapable of even an attempt it self-defence; he could scarcely lift his arms, I thought at first it was only horse-play; and as little Joe Lintot wanted to see, I put him up on my shoulder, just as the drayman, ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Mary Marshall's is a very sad case; she has seven children, not one of them old enough to work for himself; and she is dying, poor creature, of consumption. Her husband is a navvy, and he is at work at Lewes; I believe he is pretty steady, and sends the greater part of his wages to his wife, but there are too many mouths to feed to allow of comforts; his old blind mother ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and Young Bill were standing open-mouthed before the scouts' fire with the sleeping Raven at their feet. Smiley was a little twisted old fellow, but Young Bill was a gigantic navvy, powerful as a five-year-old bull. Their faces, too, were blacked in readiness for the night's work. Three minutes after Dick had crept away, they had slipped along the brook under the wood, turned a sharp corner, and come full upon the camp just as a bright ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain what a ward is. It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless man, if he be lucky, may casually rest his weary bones, and then work like a navvy next day to ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... close time, but uses illegal means to achieve his purpose, such as nets with meshes smaller than they should be, and the three-pronged spear. In the Tarn and other French rivers the fish have been destroyed in a woeful manner by poison and dynamite, but it is the rock-blaster and the navvy, not the regular poacher, who is chiefly to be blamed for this. Men who have the constant handling of dynamite, and who move from place to place, are rapidly destroying the life of the rivers and streams. Having noted a good pool, they return by night and drop into ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... bard who is careful at all about keeping his singing robes about him. He can doff them and work like a 'navvy' when he sees reason. He is very fond of coming out with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. He can rave upon occasion as well as another. Spontaneities of all kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... barely went to school—he frankly declares that his education only cost three-halfpence a week. He worked at his father's business at Chorley, and before he was twenty-one he was a stone-mason, bricklayer, millwright, carpenter, sawyer, and even a navvy, and all with a view of grounding himself in everything of a practical nature which would tend to make him an engineer—a profession on which his heart ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 70, and were a cheery crew, mainly from Wales. Their notions of military discipline were, as may be imagined, singular, and it is credibly reported that on one occasion, when General Fanshawe rebuked a navvy for not saluting him, the offender beckoned with his thumb towards a pal and exclaimed, ''Ere, Bill, come and 'ave a look ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... applied he was told that they had just dismissed men on account of work being so slack, and finding himself at the end of his resources, he made up his mind to undertake any job that he might come across on the road. And so by turns he was a navvy, stableman, stone sawer; he split wood, lopped the branches of trees, dug wells, mixed mortar, tied up faggots, tended goats on a mountain, and all for a few pence, for he only obtained two or three days work occasionally, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... receives into his system every twenty-four hours, about 3 ounces of that which is essential to give him power to perform his functions of labour. In other words, he eats in that time but 3 ounces of the representative of meat. What would the railroad "Navvy" of England say—what the farm labourer—if either was doled out 3 ounces of beef or mutton per day to work upon? and if he seemed listless and unenergetic, was then taunted with the name of "indolent, reckless, good-for-naught." Still, ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... Nag's Head, where the blasphemy of the Divine name was a normal occurrence, Snarley, of whose displeasure everybody went in fear, would never allow the name of Christ to be so much as mentioned, not even argumentatively by Hankin; and once when a foul-mouthed navvy had used the name as part of some filthy oath, Snarley instantly challenged the man to fight, struck him a fearful blow between the eyes and pitched him headlong, with a shattered face, into the village street. But in the matter of contempt ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... life, and a great longing for death ...—he saw him in his school, a genial pedant, surrounded by his pupils, dirty, coarse, vagabond, ragged, with hoarse voices, the ragamuffins with whom he squabbled, and sometimes fought like a navvy, one of whom once gave him a mighty thrashing ...—he saw him with his family, surrounded by his twenty-one children, of whom thirteen died before him, and one was an idiot, and the rest were good musicians who ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... constantly in mind that the war in its entire magnitude did not exist for the average civilian. He could not conceive even a battle, much less a campaign. To the suburbs the war was nothing but a suburban squabble. To the miner and navvy it was only a series of bayonet fights between German champions and English ones. The enormity of it was quite beyond most of us. Its episodes had to be reduced to the dimensions of a railway accident or a shipwreck before it could produce any effect on our minds at all. To us the ridiculous bombardments ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... absolutely silently, and I dared not meet his glance because I knew I should give myself away. The rascal has not been running his eye over young women all these years without being able to spot them in a moment, even in navvy's clothes. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various |
