"Provincialism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... To think that Annie Eustace, little Annie Eustace, who had worshipped at her own shrine, whom she had regarded with a lazy, scarcely concealed contempt, for her incredible lack of wordly knowledge, her provincialism, her ill-fitting attire, should have achieved a triumph which she herself could never achieve. A cold hatred of the girl swept over the woman. She forced her lips into a smile, but ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time. Provincialism has no SCALE of excellence in man or vegetable; it never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature's best. I have often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... seen the great in the little, and ennobled the humbler ways of existence with spiritual insight. They have set to music the homely service and simple enjoyments of common life. They have touched the chords that speak to the universal heart. The very provincialism of our poets endears them to us. Their work, as some foreign critic said, has been done in a corner. We do not deny it. But, verily we believe, that New England is the corner lot of our national estate. Our poets have preserved ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... days when we lived under the king," had yielded little in the way of literature that is of any permanent interest. There would seem to be something in the relation of a colony to the mother country which dooms the thought and art of the former to a hopeless provincialism. Canada and Australia are great provinces, wealthier and more populous than the {323} thirteen colonies at the time of their separation from England. They have cities whose inhabitants number hundreds of thousands, well ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... own in Venice and Verona, and not unfrequently their own works show an uncouth attempt to adopt that greatness, which comes out in exaggeration of colour even more than of form, and speaks for that want of taste which is the indelible stamp of provincialism. But there were Venetian towns without the traditions even of the schools of Vicenza and Brescia, where, if you wanted to learn painting, you had to apprentice yourself to somebody who had been taught by somebody who had been a pupil of one of Giovanni ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... look an old fool, as I do now," said he. "Sit thee down, lad! and hold that soft tongue o' thine. I can stand a fair flyting [scolding: still a Northern provincialism] or a fustigation [beating], but I never can one of ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... collection of knowledge. Thus, Bronchlemmitis is not Polypus bronchialis, but Croup.—The accent of laryngeal and pharyngeal is incorrectly placed on the third syllable. In this wilderness of words we look in vain for the New York provincialism "Sprue." The work has a right to some scores, perhaps hundreds, of such errors, without forfeiting its character. If the Elzevirs could not print the "Corpus Juris Civilis" without a false heading to a chapter, we may excuse a dictionary-maker ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... seems to me that you are affected with a special malady that, as a doctor, you ought to study; it is called the spirit of provincialism." ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... tending? This anxiety of man to know the aim and the end is essentially human; it is a kind of infirmity or provincialism of the mind, and has nothing in common with universal reality. Have things an aim? Why should they have; and what aim or end can there ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... abstractions, nor impersonal institutions. Men conduct them; and they do not cease to be men. A man is made up of six parts of human nature and four parts of facts and other things—a little reason, some prejudice, much provincialism, and of the particular fur or skin that suits his habitat. When you wish to win a man to do what you want him to do, you take along a few well-established facts, some reasoning and such-like, but you take along also ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... is seldom either a lovable or an interesting character. He has certain rude virtues which command respect and other qualities, not in themselves virtues—such as clan conceit and an intensely narrow provincialism—that beget the virtues of industry, honesty and frugality. But to the philosopher and student of character all types are interesting, and Mr. ERVINE'S skill lies in his ability not merely to draw his Ballyards hero to the life but to interest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... influence is accidental and complementary merely. It is the mere fact of our physical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quite largely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currents of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialism ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but also to release his affection for—the world of small-town America. The dream of an unconditional personal freedom, ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... cannot move without rogues," and that, in respect of America, "the huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution." He ridicules our unsuspecting provincialism: "Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston? Then you may as well die!" He does not spare our tendency to spread- eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying of Americans that, "Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech," he proceeds to speculate ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... as many as a half-dozen cigarettes. In some amateur theatricals the winter before, in which I took the part of a young man, I had bravely smoked through half of one, and made my speeches too. What this man had said of Hilton and its provincialism was in my mind now. I meant no wickedness, no harm. I took one of the proffered cigarettes with the grand indifference of having done it many times before. Mr. Sewall watched me closely, and when he produced a match, lit it, and stretched it out toward me in the hollow of his hand. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... nationalized rather than a merely localized democracy; and the triumph of the North in the war, not only put an end to the legal right of secession, but it began to emancipate the American national idea from an obscurantist individualism and provincialism. Our current interpretation of democracy still contains much dubious matter derived from the Jacksonian epoch; but no American statesmen can hereafter follow Douglas in making the democratic principle equivalent to ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... time something more than a geographical expression for a number of petty feudal states, practically independent and almost always at strife. Henceforward there was peace; and throughout the whole of this northern part of his domains it was the constant policy of Philip gradually to abolish provincialism and to establish a centralised government. He was far too wise a statesman to attempt to abolish suddenly or arbitrarily the various rights and privileges, which the Flemings, Brabanters and Hollanders had wrung ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... Lancashire varies with its valleys. It is only necessary, therefore, to remark that as these Idylls are drawn from a once famous valley in the North-east division of the county, the provincialism is peculiar to that valley—indeed, it would be more correct to say, to that section of the valley ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather |
