"Run-down" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it seemed the end of all things had come, some unknown power would jerk it on again like a run-down watch in which the key had suddenly been inserted, and she would feel the key grinding round and round and round in a winding-up process that was even more dreadful than the running-down. Then would ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... generations of Waldensian Protestant ancestry in Italy, this alert, efficient, cultured Italian pastor. He found the parish to which he was assigned composed of several thousand of his countrymen in a Hudson river town; the building to be used for church purposes a dirty, run-down old hall, a part of the most ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... and, besides, she wanted to be wide awake when father come. So night arter night she would set by our one taller candle, a-mendin' of my jackets, and a-darnin' of my stockin's, and a-straightenin' and a stiffenin' up of the run-down heels ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... by mischance, blunder, or imprudence have lost their heritage. Yet half the world hardly knows what real health is. Our hospitals and sanitariums are crowded, our streets are full of half-sick people-hollow chests, sallow faces, dark-rimmed eyes, nervous, run-down, worn-out, brain-fagged, dragging on their existence, or dying before their time, robbed by stupidity and ignorance of their birthright of full-breathed rosy-cheeked health, and robbing the society that has reared them of the full quota of their ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... puts it over. Her voice sounds like a run-down fifteen-cent harmonica. But that doesn't matter. Not at two a.m. in an all-night cabaret. You don't need a voice to knock us out of our seats. You ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... ex-engineers at Bob Slattery's saloon, had stopped and greeted him. Dock looked as if he had tramped, had drank, was dirty, coat had holes, soles of his boots badly worn, wheezing, seemed hungry and lifeless, been eating poor food, and was in a general run-down condition. Gun had "set out his packing" by feeding him and put him in a bed at the Grand Central Hotel—nicknamed the "Grayback's Corral." Gun thought he would have to reform, before the M. M. put him into active ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... tell Mr. Manning that he is Mr. Hartsell, or whoever he pleases, a real estate dealer from the East, and that his ostensible business in Westville is to invest in farm lands. Buying in run-down or undrained farms at a low price and putting them in good condition, that's a profitable business these days. Besides, since you are an agent for farm lands, that will explain his relations ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... largest undertakings were in Russia, one at Kyshtim, in the Urals, the other at Irtish on the Siberian plains near Manchuria. The Kyshtim property was a great but run-down historic establishment, on an estate of an area almost equal to that of all Belgium. One hundred and seventy thousand people lived on the estate, all dependent on the mining establishment for their support. The ores were of iron and copper, but ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... I was purer blooded than the white trash here? And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River? You would not believe that I had been to school And read some books. You saw me only as a run-down man With matted hair and beard And ragged clothes. Sometimes a man's life turns into a cancer From being bruised and continually bruised, And swells into a purplish mass Like growths on stalks of corn. ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... had been worrying more than usual lately over the affair, and this, with a general run-down condition, and the hardships of his calling, ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... fallen timber and across gullies like a kangaroo. Nearly every Sunday we were after the brumbies, until they got as lean as greyhounds and as cunning as policemen. We were always ready to back White-when-he's-wanted to run-down, single-handed, any animal in the bush that we liked to put him after—wild horses, wild cattle, kangaroos, emus, dingoes, kangaroo-rats—we barred nothing, for, if he couldn't beat them for ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... speculating upon the nearness of the moment. When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat like run-down clocks. ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad |
