"Shiftlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... means of gingerbeer-bottle wire; his periodic onslaughts on sock-darning; the celebrated pudding it had taken him over four hours to make. And Polly, listening to him, forgot her desire to run away. Instead, she could not help laughing at the tales of his masculine shiftlessness. But as soon as they came in view of the others, Tilly and Purdy sitting under one parasol on a rock by the cave, Jinny standing and looking out rather aggressively after the loiterers, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... is a slight consciousness of mental processes, but the mind rarely watches itself work; the neurasthenic is unable to concentrate, and gets charged with inconstancy and shiftlessness. ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Everybody spoke slightingly of Mrs. Jim Sloane. The men laughed meaningly when they saw her pass, wrapped in an old plaid shawl, which she wore summer and winter, and which seemed almost like a uniform. Stories were told of her dirt and shiftlessness, of the hens which roosted in her kitchen. Poor Mrs. Jim Sloane, in her blue plaid shawl, tramping frequently from her solitary house through the village, was a byword and a ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... agricultural products and other commodities, was one of the chief citizens of the village, and during his son's childhood was chosen an alderman and shortly after mayor, as we should call it. But by 1577 his prosperity declined, apparently through his own shiftlessness, and for many years he was harassed with legal difficulties. In the village 'grammar' school William Shakspere had acquired the rudiments of book-knowledge, consisting largely of Latin, but his chief education was from ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the shiftlessness and sensuality of the masses of the American negroes to-day can be wholly attributed to hereditary influences, but it would be a great mistake to suppose that the African environment did not have something to do with these two dominant characteristics of the present American ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... removal and of the subsequent one, two or three years later, was undoubtedly the uncertainty of land titles in Kentucky in that day. This "roving disposition" cannot fairly be charged to shiftlessness. In spite of the extraordinary disadvantages of Thomas Lincoln's early life, he lived as well as his neighbors, though that was humble enough, and accumulated a small amount of property in spite of the low ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... government of the island; and, as Irving neatly says, "it was a time of jubilee for offenders; every culprit started up into an accuser." All the ills of the colony, many of them inevitable in such an enterprise, many of them due to the shiftlessness and folly, the cruelty and lust of idle swash-bucklers, were now laid at the door of Columbus. Aguado was presently won over by the malcontents, so that by the time he was ready to return to Spain, early in 1496, Columbus felt it desirable to go along with him ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... one sad day came the crash,—all the hard-earned dollars of the freedmen disappeared; but that was the least of the loss,—all the faith in saving went too, and much of the faith in men; and that was a loss that a Nation which to-day sneers at Negro shiftlessness has never yet made good. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois |
