"Workaday" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think that Dickie would be very excited by the thought of meeting, in this workaday, nowadays world, the children with whom he had had such wonderful adventures in the other world, the dream world—too excited, perhaps, to feel really interested in the little every-day happenings of "the road." But this was not so. The present was after all the real thing. ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... expenses were cleared three times over, and at the present moment the publisher is getting conscientiously anxious (for some publishers are more conscientious than some authors will admit!) to hand you over a nice little check for an amount which is not to be despised in this workaday world, I assure you!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... said Thirlstone musingly. "I like that idea. Good or bad, but always great! After all, we show a kind of belief in it in our daily practice. Every man is always making fancies about himself; but it is never his workaday self, but something else. The bank clerk who pictures himself as a financial Napoleon knows that his own thin little soul is incapable of it; but he knows, too, that it is possible enough for that other bigger thing which is not his soul, but yet in some odd way is bound up with ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... men are just as common in the real workaday world as in the old drama; and precisely such ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... see her so frequently, while her brother was alive and during the month following his death, could see the changes which the month had wrought. She saw the little wrinkles about the eyes and the lines of care about the mouth, the tired look of the whole plucky, workaday New England figure. She shook ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pounds is a very great sum—without sureties," said Belcovitch, rubbing his time-worn workaday high hat in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... man and thinker is to be found in a book by Judith Cladel, the daughter of the novelist (author of Mes Paysans). She named it Auguste Rodin, pris sur la vie, and her pages are filled with surprisingly vital sketches of the workaday Rodin. His conversations are recorded; altogether this little picture has much charm and proves what Rodin asserts—that women understand him better than men. There is a fluid, feminine, disturbing side to his art and nature very appealing to emotional women. Mlle. Cladel's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... there comes a feeling that this is rather like walking up a gigantic snail-shell, and that, when one reaches the top, it is the very top and end of all things. A tranquillity reigns over the tiny town which even the occasional sight of warders with their loaded rifles does not break; and the workaday world seems to have been left ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... bathing-machines, or the gasometer beyond the railway station, or the flag above the Royal Hotel. The curtains of the night fell suddenly away from him. The workaday world came ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... Warning stood yellow in the spring sunshine, rivulets dripping from the ragged patches of snow which yet lingered in the hollows; and the harbour water rippled under balmy, fragrant winds from the wilderness; and workaday voices, strangely unchanged by the solemn change upon our days, came drifting up the hill from my father's wharves; and, ay, indeed, all the world of sea and land was warm and wakeful and light of heart, just as it used ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... few minutes past eleven when the sloop's engine stopped and she glided up to her mooring in Sprowl's Cove. Five sleepy boys tumbled into the dory and paddled ashore. The Fourth was over and the routine of workaday life would begin again for them ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... and unceasing workaday of her life, she was a woman of great mind. She had adamantine opinions upon the situation in Armenia, the condition of women in China, the flirtation between Mrs. Minster of Niagara Avenue and young Griscom, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... grief and sorrow to the calm, sweet expression of content had been marvellous, to say the least—an event stranger, indeed, than any I had ever before witnessed. In the wild writings of the old romancers the dead have sometimes been resuscitated, but never in this workaday world of ours. There is a finality in death that ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced (and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure and well-dressed, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... the languages in which they could tutoyer. Even Pemberton liked them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for the "sweet sea-city." That was what made him have a sneaking kindness for them—that they were so out of the workaday world and kept him so out of it. The summer had waned when, with cries of ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand Canal. The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived. The Dorringtons were the only ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought for places inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and tragedies were to be witnessed upon the highways; but to all of them Kerry was blind as he was deaf to the din of workaday Babylon. In spirit he was roaming the bank of old Father Thames where the river sweeps eastward below Limehouse Causeway—wonder-stricken before the magic of the one-eyed wizard who could at will efface himself as an artist rubs out a drawing, who could camouflage a drug warehouse ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... like Tristan and Isolda, wholly swayed by love, must find Mark's grief wholly unintelligible, and have no power of explaining themselves to those not possessed with a passion like theirs, or of bringing themselves into touch with the workaday world of daylight, and that all Mark's most moving appeal means to them is that this world, where such annoyances occur, is not the land in which they fain would dwell. They live wholly for their illusion, and if it is forbidden to them ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... went on asking myself questions. And is it possible that I, who by all his friends will be regarded as a nobody, who am an American,—with merely human workaday blood in my veins,—that such a one as I should become his wife? Then I told myself that it was not possible. It was not in accordance with the fitness of things. All the dukes in England would rise up against it, and especially ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... true. To pass from the newspaper offices and political platforms and club fenders and suburban drawing-rooms to the Army and the munition factories was to pass from Bedlam to the busiest and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all their time ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... on his face an unaccustomed appreciation of this larger side of the workaday world, stepped back inside the engine-room, laid his hand on a throttle, and at the signal, as if by magic, there was a whirr of slipping bands, a mighty throb, the renewed fashing of water down the jigs, a grinding, a pounding, a crunching, a gurgling; and a long, resonant ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... from the sublime to the stern realities of this workaday world. Of all the people on this earth, a lone, lorn widower with three babies on his hands, is the most forlorn and miserable. Take care of them himself he cannot, and if he hires the ordinary woman ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... love of music and little time for the joy of it; but occasionally, when workaday noises were muffled by Saturday afternoons, it used to come back to him that there were glories. There were moreover friends who reminded him of this and side by side with whom he found himself sitting out concerts. On one of these winter afternoons, ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... inquiry—our contemporary system presents itself to Labour almost invariably in a legal guise. The natural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality of attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this great and necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade. Little reasonable things from the lawyers' point of view—the rejection, for example, of certain evidence in the Titanic inquiry because it might amount to a charge ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... you please, Mr. Bucket," said he. "The lady will excuse the front kitchen; we use it as our workaday sitting-room. The back is Guster's bedroom, and in it she's a-carrying on, poor thing, to ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... and the rotten fence. ...Over the fields where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... engaged in taking an affectionate, deeply sentimental farewell from a feminine companion who bore about her those significant signs—the terribly pathetic, battered air of wear and tear—which set apart, in our sane workaday ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... that in our hard workaday we shall forget the reality of the unseen, we shall get to think that gold and steel and land are the only real things, and we shall shape ourselves by the blind and base creed of gold, and steel, and land. How easy it is to measure every man by his ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... a great many new terms to my vocabulary, and in the three weeks I spent at the Fair I took a long leap from the little child's interest in fairy tales and toys to the appreciation of the real and the earnest in the workaday world. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... suppose all the vices of humanity concentrated in private ownership, and all the virtues of humanity concentrated in the community, but indeed that clear and striking contrast will not stand the rough-and-tumble of the workaday world. A little examination of the matter will make it clear that the contrast lies between private owners and public officials—you must have officials, because you can't settle a railway time-table or make a bridge by ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... falling that evening. Gaily lighted cars offering glimpses of women in elaborate toilets and of their black-coated and white-shirted cavaliers thronged Piccadilly, bound for theatre or restaurant. The workaday shutters were pulled down, and the night life of London had commenced. The West End was in possession of an army of pleasure seekers, but Nicol Brinn was not among their ranks. Wearing his tightly-buttoned dinner jacket, he stood, hands clasped behind him, staring ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... long, sympathetic face for a moment, then, dismissing from this workaday world the baby, which had got ill in a tempest and had died from too much calm at sea, he asked me with a dental, shark-like smile—if sharks had false teeth—whether I had yet made my little arrangements for ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... enough; a shower, a thorough rub-down, and then into his workaday clothes. He packed his trunk and hand-luggage, overlooked nothing that was his, and went down into the living-room where he knew he would find Killigrew with the morning papers. He felt oddly light-headed; but he had no time to ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... philosophy founded on the vast experience of a week in the workaday world—I'll let you know later of any further modification of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there, fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog of her workaday existence. ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... wonderful it all was, Milly thought, as they threaded their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets, mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificing THIS—"the real, right thing"—for ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... the growing grain. The women usually worked with the men, especially at harvest time, for extra labour was scarce. Even the wife and daughters of the seigneur might be seen in the fields during the busy season. Each habitant had a clumsy, wooden-wheeled cart or wagon for workaday use. In this he trundled his produce to town once or twice a year. For pleasure there was the celeche and the carriole. The celeche was a quaint two-wheeled vehicle with its seat set high in the air on springs of generous girth; the carriole, a ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... and I are such workaday damsels that we are not accustomed to handling such problems," explained Peggy demurely. "Thou art the only belle in the Social Select Circle, and having been instructed in French, I hear very thoroughly, thou hast waxed proficient in matters ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... "the Balzac Universe," looking after the characters he had created, seeing to it that they acted consistently, pulling the wires, supplying them conversation, dialogue, plot and counterplot, and amid all this bustle and confusion bringing out a perfect story. And still sanely to do the work of the workaday world was a miracle indeed! The man had the strength of Hercules, but even physical strength has its penalty—it seduces one to over-exertion. The midnight brain is a bad thing to cultivate, especially when reinforced with much coffee. Balzac was growing stout; physical exercise ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... could have elaborated their marriage rules were capable of workaday arithmetic if necessary, and few indeed of us know our family trees as the blacks ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... associations. We may be shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist, and a man with a vision more wonderful still. There is one of Lungren's pictures of the Western plains; and a picture of the Grand Canyon; and one by a Scandinavian artist who could see the fierce picturesqueness of workaday Pittsburgh; and sketches of the White House by ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... he could not live in the camp. And he smiled to himself more than once after that fracas, when he noted the different attitude they took toward him. Might was perhaps not right, but unless a man was both willing and able to fight for his rights in the workaday world that was opening up to him, he could never be very sure that his rights ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair |
