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Rubbish   /rˈəbɪʃ/   Listen
Rubbish

verb
1.
Attack strongly.



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"Rubbish" Quotes from Famous Books



... "Rubbish," declared Roy stoutly, although his heart began to beat uncomfortably fast. "What man could there be here unless it was Alverado, and he couldn't possibly have arrived by ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... respectable one this time, one who won't let you down when you are not looking, who won't call you a fool when you make mistakes—in short, a gentleman. There are plenty of them about. But they are not to be found in the world's rubbish heap. There's nothing but filth ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... means, Lilly. Now, clear that rubbish off the chair—it's well got rid of, I never liked the shape—go, put yourself to rights, use one of my bonnets, and come out for a walk. To-morrow you shall go into town and arrange with Pax and Blurt about the villa and the cottage to the best of your ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne

... or four such facts of the most heterogeneous description, brought together out of the most distant lands and remote times and heaped up, generally distract and bewilder the judgment and understanding without demonstrating anything; for when exposed to the light they turn out to be only trumpery rubbish, made use of to ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... vegetable gardens, same income; vineyard, with Malaga plants, which should bring about 2,000 fr. He has the commune of Sevres deed over to him a walnut tree, worth annually 2,000 francs to him, because all the townspeople dump their rubbish there. And so on, until at the end of four years he sees himself obliged to sell his domain for 3,000 francs, after spending on it thrice ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... wheel-barrow and a rake, and went out to the hen-house. They raked the floor all over, drawing out the old straw, sticks, &c., to the door. They then with a fork pitched this rubbish into the wheel-barrow, and wheeled it out, and made a heap of it in a clear place at some distance from the buildings, intending to set it on fire. There were four wheel-barrow loads of ...
— Stuyvesant - A Franconia Story • Jacob Abbott

... "Rubbish!" she retorted plainly. "I wanted to look nice—I had to go in there lots of times. And I wanted to be dressed ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... sad stop, my lord, Where rude misgoverned hands from windows' tops Threw dust and rubbish ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]

... hat on, without uttering a word. His silence in itself had nothing startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc's taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that the two women were impressed by it. They sat silent themselves, keeping a watchful eye on poor Stevie, lest he should break out into one of his fits of loquacity. He faced Mr Verloc ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... actor. "That's not the thing to hope for. Why couldn't it have killed me—that first fall?" ("My dear, my dear!" she stammered.) "There would have been some satisfaction in getting out of the way, and that in decent fashion; like a charge of powder, not like a rubbish-heap. I can't accept it of you, Bibi. I'm enraged for you. I can't ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... conception of the majesty of Sinai. Indeed, at this period his infant fancy was much exercised with the threats and terrors of the Law. He had a little plot of ground at the back of the house, marked out as his own by a row of oyster shells, which a maid one day threw away as rubbish. He went straight to the drawing-room, where his mother was entertaining some visitors, walked into the circle and said, very solemnly, 'Cursed be Sally; for it is written, cursed be he that removeth his ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... you imagine that Biology kills blushing in a woman? Do you think that Philosophy keeps me from crying myself to sleep when I think he doesn't care for me, or growing idiotically glad when he tells me he does? What rubbish people write upon this subject! Even Pope proved that he was only a man ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... brightness on the roofs of Monroe. Even here, under the dark trees, pools of light had formed and the heavy foliage was shot with shafts of radiance. A strong wind was clicking the eucalyptus leaves together, and carrying bits of rubbish here and there about the yard. Martie could hear voices, the barking of dogs, and the whine of the ten o'clock ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... generation. It was nurtured on the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Italy, which was also a classical land for the France of that day; and it was almost beside itself with enthusiasm for them. The traditions of the mediaeval lyric and all its fixed forms were swept away with one breath as barbarous rubbish by the proclamations of the young admirers of antiquity. The manifesto of the new movement, the Dfense et Illustration de la langue franaise by JOACHIM DU BELLAY, bade the poet "leave to the Floral Games of Toulouse and to the puis of Rouen all those old French verses, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

... gates, he stood awed at the wonder and magnificence of all that he saw. The whole structure was complete. Not a pole or plank of scaffolding was left standing, no litter or rubbish heaps were to be seen; every approach, every yard of the enclosure was beautifully swept. A few officials, in a remarkable uniform moved here and ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson

... next door, a kind of contracted by-lane which had been covered with a sloping glass roof. Damp oozed from the walls, and the footfall sounded as hollow on the tiled floor as in an underground vault. It was crowded with the kind of rubbish usually found in a garret. There was a workbench on which the porter was wont to plane such parts of the scenery as required it, besides a pile of wooden barriers which at night were placed at the doors of the theater for the purpose of regulating the incoming stream of people. ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... put together with the fragments of temples and palaces which even now tell of the power and splendour of Rome. The shafts of fluted columns, capitals wearing the acanthus, pieces of cornice and frieze, all mortared together with undistinguishable rubbish, bear testimony in the quiet garden of the Ursuline convent to the vanity of human works. Vesunna, splendid city of Southern Gaul, completely Latinized, with native poets, orators, and historians speaking and writing the language ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... aren't any wiser in their choice, either. The only difference is that a smaller number of them have the chance to marry, and when they can't be married, they have something besides cats and maiden aunts to fall back upon. But interests in common with their husbands, intellectual interests,—rubbish! A man who amounts to anything is always a specialist, and he doesn't care for feminine amateurishness. An acquaintance with Dante and the housing of the poor doesn't broaden the breakfast table, not a ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... This is the way to get out safe," shouted a Captain as he rose, from the rear of a pile of rubbish, amid the laughter of the men now on their backward move. The burly form of the exhorting Colonel was seen to follow the no less burly form of the Captain, and father and son were spared ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong

... days as Ashtarout or Jupiter-Ammon. As famous too is Al-Iman ul-Ouzaai the scholar; al-Makrizi the historian; Kallinichus the chemist, who invented the Greek fire; Kosta ibn Luka, a doctor and philosopher, who wrote among much miscellaneous rubbish a treaty entitled, On the Difference Between the Mind and the Soul; and finally the Muazzen of Baalbek to whom "even the beasts would stop to listen." Ay, Shakib relates quoting al-Makrizi, who in his turn relates, quoting one of the octogenarian ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... it taken down and rebuilt, and if thou art willing to undertake the job I will employ thee." On his consenting, she led him to her house, and shewing him the wall, gave him a pick-axe, directing him as he went on to place the stones in one heap and the rubbish in another. He replied, "To hear is to obey." She then brought him some provision and water, when he refreshed himself, and having thanked God that he had escaped, and was able to get his living, began his task, which he continued till sunset. His employer ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... deliverer on the 10th of July, 1584, in his house at Delft. Like Booth, Gerard used the pistol, a weapon that seems to have been invented for the promotion of murder. He made a determined effort to get off, and might have succeeded, had he not stumbled over a heap of rubbish. To all these attacks on Orange some of the most eminent Spanish statesmen and soldiers of that time were parties, and Spain was then the premier nation. The Prince of Parma, one of the foremost men of a period in which there was an absolute glut of talent, spoke of Gerard's detestable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... are simple! It's because they've got bad figures! Training! Religion! It makes me boil to hear such rubbish! Have I been brought up any worse than other women? Have I less religion than they have? Tell me, Robert, how many really well-made women have you ever seen? Just reckon them up on your fingers. Yes, there ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France

... Stone. This stone is an immense block of granite, which seems to have fallen from a projecting rock above it, rising to the height of several hundred feet, and forming the broad shoulder of Ben Muich Dhui. The stone rests on two other blocks imbedded in a mass of rubbish, and thus forms a cave sufficient to contain twelve or fifteen men. Here the visitor to the scenery of Loch Avon takes up his abode for the night, and makes himself as comfortable as he can where 'the Queen of the Storm sits,' and at a distance of fifteen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... thereof by continuous mediations from the First [Being], can but hold hypotheses, disjoined and divorced from their causes, which, when surveyed by a mind with an interior perception of things, do not appear like a house, but like heaps of rubbish. ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... festoon its dusky beams, appears still to await the labor of the carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in a recess, were a number of barrels, piled one upon another, containing bundles of official documents. Large quantities of similar rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think how many days and weeks and months and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... by abandoning all Ambitions and Hopes in this World, and by retiring from the noise of all Business and almost Company; yet I stick still in the Inn of a hired House and Garden, among Weeds and Rubbish; and without that pleasantest Work of Human Industry, the Improvement of something which we call (not very properly, but yet we call) our own. I am gone out from Sodom, but I am not yet arrived at my little ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish called Henry and Frances to the Vicar of Wakefield: and that, when a woman, she deliberately offended Chateaubriand by praising the Itineraire rather than the Genie du Christianisme, or Atala, or Rene, or Les Martyrs. She had very little inventive ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... his village. His heart beat fast when he saw that a great cloud of smoke was rising from the houses. Clearly, the thieves were making quick work of the place, and soon there would be nothing left but piles of mud, brick, ashes and other rubbish. ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman

... Howe'er unwillingly it quits its place, Nay though at Court, perhaps, it may find grace: Such they'll degrade; and sometimes, in its stead, In downright charity revive the dead; Mark where a bold expressive phrase appears, Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years; Command old words that long have slept, to wake, Words that wise Bacon or brave Raleigh spake; Or bid the new be English, ages hence, (For use will farther what's begot by ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... south-east, missing their great objective. It was for Paris that they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris— Paris the great and beautiful—seemed to be within their grasp, and the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... ugly had been at least absorbed in plans for enjoyment. Now plans for enjoyment gave place to expedients for protection. Sally was indeed fierce and resentful. It was with animosity that she put together the few sticks of rubbish which remained to them and helped her mother to rearrange these things in a single room which they had taken on the other side of Holloway Road. No more for them the delights of Hornsey Road and three rooms; but the confined space surrounded by these four dingy walls. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... his nervous master would be out of temper for a day afterwards. On wet days Piero was merrier, for he would watch the drops splashing into the pools, and laugh as if they were fairies. Sometimes he would take Andrea for a walk, and all at once stop and gaze at a heap of rubbish, or mark of damp on a lichened wall, picturing all kinds of monsters and ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)

... round with responsibility above the pile; in the broken lights from jutting rooms overhead, where the women lie, chin between palms, looking out of windows not a foot from the floor; in every glimpse into every courtyard, where the men smoke by the tank; in the heaps of rubbish and rotten bricks that flanked newly painted houses, waiting to be built, some day, into houses once more; in the slap and slide or the heelless red-and-yellow slippers all around, and, above all, in the mixed delicious smells of frying butter, Mohammedan bread, kababs, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... In modern gardens a concrete bottom two or three inches thick, sloping towards a drain in front, is sometimes made. Methods must depend on soil and means. A concrete bottom is better than a stratum of stones or brick rubbish. Persons content with a few small trees may lift them frequently or root-prune annually, in which case ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum

... carelessly thrown down, might destroy them all in half an hour, for with material so combustible, help would be unavailing. This fear was never out of his mind. It disturbed his peace by day and his rest by night. That frail structure, crowded from garret to cellar with seeming rubbish, with boxes, cases, barrels, casks still unpacked and piled one above the other, held for him the treasure out of which he would give form and substance to the dream of his boyhood and the maturer purpose of his manhood. The hope of creating a great ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... ] Nor was it pleasant to these incipient Christians, as they sat in class listening to the instructions of their teacher, to find themselves and him suddenly made the targets of a shower of sticks, snowballs, corn-cobs, and other rubbish, flung at them by a screeching rabble of vagabond boys. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... "Bande Noire," so celebrated for its devastations, had its birth in the brain of old Sauviat, the peddler, whom all Limoges afterward saw and knew for twenty-seven years in the rickety old shop among his cracked bells and rusty bars, chains and scales, his twisted leaden gutters, and metal rubbish of all kinds. We must do him the justice to say that he knew nothing of the celebrity or the extent of the association he originated; he profited by his own idea only in proportion to the capital he entrusted to the since famous firm ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... Horns, knowest thou who owned this skull?" Quoth he, "Nay;" and quoth the other, "He who owned this skull was a King of the Kings of the world, who dealt tyrannously with his subjects, specially wronging the weak and wasting his time in heaping up the rubbish of this world, till Allah took his sprite and made the fire his abiding-site; and this is his head." He then put forth his hand and produced another skull and, laying it before Iskandar, said to him, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... "Rubbish!" cried Mrs. Ladybug, regarding him with a frown. "Go get yourself some working clothes! Take off your black velvet and gold! And save that ...
— The Tale of Mrs. Ladybug • Arthur Scott Bailey

... and steadied; with some little difficulty in extricating himself from the rubbish and thorns which beset him, Bertram descended: and was not sorry to find himself, though amongst such society, suddenly translated from the severe cold of the air and a situation of considerable peril to the luxury of rest and ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey

... profusion of rarest art, now lying like so much rubbish, a Roman was dragging a woman who appeared quite dead. Her hair hung in masses over her face, hiding a part of it, hiding a face which was crimson with blood. Her garments were torn, and the soldier threw her down close to where the two ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short

... recollections of France.—"I have tried all I could," said he to Lord Nelville, "to discover something interesting in these ruins of which they talk so much, and I can really find no charm in them. It must be the effect of a very great prejudice to admire those heaps of rubbish covered with thorns. I shall speak my mind of them when I return to Paris, for it is time that this Italian delusion should cease. There is not a monument now standing whole in any part of Europe, that I would not sooner see than ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... their uses. They knock down obsolete rubbish and enable a man to start building anew. The most sensitive recluse cannot help being a member of society. As such, he unavoidably gathers about him a host of mere acquaintances, good folks who waste his time dulling the edge of his wit and infecting him with their orthodoxy. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... ticketing some grouse for my friends southward: but the question staggered my sexton so sensibly, that I came to the uncharitable conclusion—he had stolen it. And then follows confession: how, among the rubbish in a vault, he had found a small oak chest—broke it open—no coins, no trinkets, "no nothing,"—except parchment; a lot of leaves tidily written, and—warranted to keep out the wet. A few shillings and a tankard make the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... indifference to property. Graham was unable to finish any business, and after ten or more years he died, leaving the estate unsettled. Finally, the ladies of the village took possession of the common, removed the rubbish, leveled the ground, and made the spot an agreeable feature of ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... area. It was a dank, dark place, only lit where the yellow light streamed forth from the scullery. It had a couple of low bays hollowed out of the masonry under the little courtyard, the one filled with wood blocks, the other with broken packingcases, old bottles and like rubbish. I explored these until my hands came in contact with the damp bricks at the back, but in vain. Door and window remained the ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... because without knowing it Billy has got hold of the biggest force in the world to run his business. He's just using love,—plain, old-fashioned love,—and love is making money for Billy. He's picked out of the very gutters all the human waste and rubbish that the others, the wise business men, threw there and with the town's worst drunkard and half a dozen mistreated, misborn, misunderstood boys he's playing the business game and winning. He's got the knack of making his help feel like partners and he's so square ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... the great unused upper story, where heaps of household rubbish obscured the dusty half-windows. In a corner, behind Louise's baby chair and an unfashionable hat-rack of the old steering-wheel pattern, they found the little brown-painted tin trunk, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various

... Education, which Aristotle has brought to explain his Doctrine of Substantial Forms, when he tells us that a Statue lies hid in a Block of Marble; and that the Art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous Matter, and removes the Rubbish. The Figure is in the Stone, the Sculptor only finds it. What Sculpture is to a Block of Marble, Education is to a Human Soul. The Philosopher, the Saint, or the Hero, the Wise, the Good, or the Great Man, very often lie hid and concealed in a Plebeian, which a proper ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... "standardized" make, and gave them a long and racking tour over English highways. Workmen then took apart the three cars and threw the disjointed remains into a promiscuous heap. Every bolt, bar, gas tank, motor, wheel, and tire was taken from its accustomed place and piled up, a hideous mass of rubbish. Workmen then painstakingly put together three cars from these disordered elements. Three chauffeurs jumped on these cars, and they immediately started down the road and made a long journey just as acceptably as before. The Englishman had learned the secret of American success with automobiles. ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... is not; yet I speak of it As what is to be feared more than the odds. For like to forests are communities— Fair at a distance, entering you find The rubbish and the underbrush of states, 'Tis ever the mean soul that counts the odds, And, where you find this spirit, pluck it up— 'Tis full ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair

... all that, the sweat on your salty skin Shall dry and crack, in the breathing of a wind That's like a draught come through an open'd furnace. The leafage of the trees shall brown and faint, All sappy growth turning to brittle rubbish As the near heat of the star strokes the green earth; And time shall brush the fields as visibly As a rough hand brushes against the nap Of gleaming cloth—killing the season's colour, Each hour charged with the wasting of a year; And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... mass, a concretion of many materials. He admits the existence of regard for the spirits of the dead as one factor, he gives Sabaeism a place as another. But what chiefly puzzles him, and what he chiefly tries to explain, is the worship of odds and ends of rubbish, and the adoration of animals, mountains, trees, the sun, and so forth. When he masses all these worships together, and proposes to call them all Fetichism (a term derived from the Portuguese word for a talisman), De Brosses is distinctly unscientific. But De Brosses is distinctly ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... vast amount of sentimental rubbish about women being pure and faithful!" he soliloquised—"But when they ARE pure and faithful we are more bored with them than if they were the worst ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli

... wind the waters turned a terrible dark green, forming choppy and continuous waves with a light yellowish foam. The boats would begin to dance, creaking and tugging at their hawsers. Between their hulls and the vertical surface of the wharfs would be formed mountains of restless rubbish eaten underneath by the fish and pecked above by ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... rubbish!" he responded, wrathfully. "What is a boy of his age to know about such things? Tell him from me to put this nonsense out of his head for the next year or two; there is plenty of time to look out for a wife after that. But I won't have him ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... and one or two visits to North Wales, Darwin's experimental knowledge of geology and allied sciences was considerably increased. In his zeal for collecting beetles he employed a labourer to "scrape the moss off old trees in winter, and place it in a bag, and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of the barges in which reeds were brought from the fens, and thus ... got ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... Worse than this, the bursting into bloom of seeds of selfish recklessness in himself was what had turned the garden of their life into an arid waste. And now, in their dry and withered old age, he and Angy were being torn up by the roots, flung as so much rubbish by ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... along the Battery, were many of the finest residences, stately mansions with broad verandas, which bore the terrible effects of the long bombardment. Their walls were scarred and rent. The roofs were crushed, the glass shattered, piles of rubbish and other debris encumbered the ground, and the grass was growing in the streets. The siege of the city had steadily and relentlessly continued for five hundred and eighty-eight days. It was commenced on the twenty-first of August, 1863, by the opening of the Swamp ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer

... they swept the people out of the Precinct, and destroyed the streets; they pulled down the Courts, Spiritual and Temporal, and opened the doors of the prison; they grubbed up the burying ground, and with the bones and the dust of the dead, and the rubbish of the foundations, they filled up the old reservoir of the Chelsea water-works, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... with all the necessaries and even non-necessaries of life in such a region. Our tool chests would have suited an army of pioneers; several distinguished ironmongers of the city of London had cleared their warehouses in our favour of all the rubbish which had lain on hand during the last quarter of a century; we had hinges, bolts, screws, door-latches, staples, nails of all dimensions — from the tenpenny, downwards — and every other requisite to have completely built a modern village of reasonable ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... and spare me; leave the whole interview out; it is rubbish. I wouldn't talk in my sleep if I couldn't talk ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... dogs standing in a row behind him. All these were rather stiff and badly painted, yet gave an air of neglected grandeur to the grotto. There were marble seats, and a rickety marble table, and a little broken statue of Cupid in the corner, and the floor under the rubbish was of blue glazed tiles, so that the building, though fallen on evil days, still showed some remnants of its former glory. As it was in an out-of-the-way spot and far from the tennis courts, it was not often visited, ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... profitable psychology of the auction that the rubbish must be sold first—pots and bottles and jugs at five-cent bids, and hoes at ten—and after that, the friction of the contest having warmed in the bidders an amiable desire to purchase goods they do not want and cannot use, the auctioneer gradually puts ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson

... d'Ailleboust. The good Fathers who had already assisted them most liberally, promised the services of their lay brothers and workmen to help on the building. All this was encouraging. The snow had hardly melted away when the Nuns began to clear the rubbish from the foundations, and on the 19th of May, 1651, Madame de la Peltrie laid the first stone of the second monastery precisely on the site previously occupied by the first. The burden of care and responsibility again fell on the Venerable Mother, who as before, was charged with the superintendence ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... in our offices. You are to take my place and to carry on our line.... This hasn't seemed to impress you. You have been childishly selfish. You have thought only of yourself—of that thing you fancy is your individuality. Rubbish! You're a Foote—and a Foote owes a duty to himself and his family that should outweigh any personal desires.... I don't understand you, my son. What more can you want than you have and will have? Wealth, position, family? Yet for months ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... spun about in circles, 275 Fanned the air into a whirlwind, Danced the dust and leaves about him, And amid the whirling eddies Sprang into a hollow oak-tree, Changed himself into a serpent, 280 Gliding out through root and rubbish. With his right hand Hiawatha Smote amain the hollow oak-tree, Rent it into shreds and splinters, Left it lying there in fragments. 285 But in vain; for Pau-Puk-Keewis, Once again in human figure, Full in sight ran on before him, Sped away in gust and whirlwind, On the shores of Gitche Gumee, 290 ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... predict immortality for the works of its day; yet to say that what is intrinsically good is good for all time is but a truism. The misfortune is that much of the best in literature shares the fate of the best of ancient monuments and noble cities; the cumulative rubbish of ages buries their splendours, till we know not where to find them. The day may come when the most valuable service of the man of letters will be to unearth the lost treasures and display them, rather than add his grain of dust to ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... practically puts the thing in its coffin. We have never had high anticipations of the usefulness or continued existence of this organization. It is a queer proceeding to throw a new-born baby on a rubbish-heap, and leave it there, while its parents walk around on stilts to look at it. The British society is glowing with warmth compared with the state of its American cousin. It is clear that the psychical knowledge which the society desires to obtain ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brickwork. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself—"Here at least, then, my labor has not been ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... better off, and we shall live in a nice little house in Clapham, and I can have two servants of my own; he is having the house refurnished and repapered for me—in his own taste, it is true, for he will not hear of what he calls Liberty rubbish. But it is going to be very comfortable, and I look forward to my change of surroundings ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade

... and $5 paid for it. It was written in Concord when I was sixteen. Great rubbish! Read it aloud to sisters, and when they praised it, not knowing the author, I proudly announced ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... harangue). All I can say is, I never read such rot in all my life. Why, the fellow doesn't know a gun from a cartridge-bag. I'm perfectly sick of reading that everlasting rubbish about "pampered minions of the aristocracy slaughtering the unresisting pheasant in his thousands at battues." I wonder what the beggars imagine a rocketing pheasant is like? I should like to have seen one of 'em outside Chivy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various

... of money was wasted. 'She stays here,' said he, 'for my sake, and her youth and beauty wither away here in Siberia. She shares my bitter lot with me,' said he, 'and I must give her all the pleasure I can for it....' To make his wife happier he took up with the officials and any kind of rubbish. And they couldn't have company without giving food and drink, and they must have a piano and a fluffy little dog on the sofa—bad cess to it.... Luxury, in a word, all kinds of tricks. My lady did not stay with him long. How could she? ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... all the best things about the Brontes have been said already, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearing away some of the rubbish that has ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... rubbish this instant, Deerslayer," cried the girl, springing up to leave the room, "and never do I wish to see it on any ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that sad stop, my lord, Where rude misgovern'd hands, from window tops, Threw dust and rubbish on king ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt

... "seeing," on the next rainy day there was heard the noise of hammer and saw in a chamber over the kitchen. This chamber had never been finished or used save as a place in which to store old rubbish of all kinds, and was a gloomy, out-of-the-way room at best. Grandmother Lyman looked rather sober over the prospect; and Phoebe wanted to interfere, but as that was against the rules of the house, John ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... to her surprise Margery began, "There've been a squaw here to-day, and, you know, they don't come much about Cacouna, thank goodness, nasty brown things—but this one, she came with her mats and rubbish, in a canoe, to be sure. Your ma, she was out, and I caught sight of something coming up the bank towards the house, so I went out on the verandah to see. As soon as she saw me, she held up her mats and says, 'Buy, buy, buy,' making believe she knew ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... find comment in the "Surrender of Ulm," and in another of my plates, "Tiddy Doll, the Great French Gingerbread Maker, drawing out a New Batch of Kings," where Talleyrand seems, very appropriately, to be the figure in the background kneading the dough (note, too, the rubbish heap). But the worst danger was past already at the time (as we know now) of that fine plate that commemorates the "Death of Admiral Lord Nelson in the Moment of Victory," published by Humphrey of St. James Street, on December ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton

... one to talk to, I drew out from among the crumbs and rubbish in my pockets a letter that had arrived from my mother that morning. My young mother's love for me was always of the extravagant kind, and the words with which ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... of the Bulgarian army, you found it impossible to imagine that an army had passed that way; because there was none of the litter which is usually left by an army. It was not that they cleared away their rubbish with them; it simply did not exist. Their bread and cheese seemed to ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox

... of stone and dried clay, which formed the boundary of the Plaza. It fell, leaving an opening of more than a hundred paces, through which multitudes now found their way into the country, still hotly pursued by the cavalry, who, leaping the piles of rubbish, hung on the rear of the fugitives, striking ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott

... cattle and sheep close by, and an old grove or plantation of shade-trees bordered with rows of tall Lombardy poplars. The whole place had a decayed and neglected appearance, the grounds being weedy and littered with bleached bones and other rubbish: fences and ditches had also been destroyed and obliterated, so that the cattle were free to rub their hides on the tree trunks and gnaw at the bark. The estancia was called Canada Seca, from a sluggish muddy stream near ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... On our first visit, seeing a number of red caps of liberty painted on the walls, he said to M. Lecomte, at that time the architect in charge, "Get rid of all these things; I do not like to see such rubbish." ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... one will venture to fix the date at which they first began to be worked. (2) Now in spite of the fact that the silver ore has been dug and carried out for so long a time, I would ask you to note that the mounds of rubbish so shovelled out are but a fractional portion of the series of hillocks containing veins of silver, and as yet unquarried. Nor is the silver-bearing region gradually becoming circumscribed. On the contrary it is evidently extending in wider ...
— On Revenues • Xenophon

... only while his astonishment kept him helpless; then he took up his work. He first stripped away the twigs from his sapling top. Then he tied the twine firmly at either end of the stick, leaving the string loose. Next he fumbled among the mass of rubbish he had brought in from the rotten trunk and broke off a chunk of hard wood several inches in length. By rubbing this against the fragment of the wheelhouse, he managed to reduce one end of the little stick ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand

... about five years before, in a very sudden and unaccountable manner, and up to the date of this narrative all attempts had failed of obtaining any intelligence concerning them whatsoever. To be sure, some bones which were thought to be human, mixed up with a quantity of odd-looking rubbish, had been lately discovered in a retired situation to the east of Rotterdam, and some people went so far as to imagine that in this spot a foul murder had been committed, and that the sufferers were in all probability Hans Pfaall and his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... she was a very stupid girl, and all the stupider that she thought herself rather clever. She fancied that she was very acute in reading character, and she trusted a great deal to instinct, and first impressions, and all that sort of rubbish by which women excuse themselves from taking the trouble to use their reason. Well, once upon a time, this girl met a man whom she did not like. Her vanity was touched, in the first place, because he disapproved of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... the manuscript, and threw it into the fire. 'Let this rubbish be of some use,' he said, holding the pages down with the poker. 'The room is getting chilly—the Countess's play will set some of these charred logs flaming again.' He waited a little at the fire-place, and returned ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins

... of business and industry, and to clamber above us in the scale of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather than chastened us, and our irritation has been greatly exacerbated by the swaggering bad manners, the talk of "Blood and Iron" and Mailed Fists, the Welt-Politik rubbish that ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... has the right to talk," he said. "I need not tell a man who knows the world, like you, that I should never have hanged those women—poor country rubbish though they were, and ugly too, I remember. But the men had tried to resist, and martial law must ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... Showers was thinking of withdrawing, she demanded a private interview with him. Next day she posted off to old Sir Percy, who is a perfect fool of the chivalrous school, and was desperately fond of her, and, mirabile dictu, that evening Sir Percy withdraws on the plea of ill-health or some such rubbish, and Showers walks over. Within three months, Mr. Bellamy becomes Sir John Bellamy, nominally for his services as town-clerk of Roxham, and I hear that old Sir Percy is now perfectly rampant, and goes about cursing her ladyship up hill and down ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... gems of imagery, broad seams of satire, and silvery streams of sentiment, with wealth of wisdom and of wit. Hard iron-fisted facts also, and funny mercurial fancies are to be found here in abundance, and there are tons of tin in the form of rubbish, which is usually left at a pit's mouth, and brings little or no "tin" to those who brought it to light, while there are voluminous layers of literary lead, whose weight and dulness render the working of them tedious;—but this need not, and does not, dishearten the ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne

... bless himself with, a creature whose character is just kinks. Well, I'm sure—pass me the butter—laughing at you. And what were they laughing at pray? Aren't you straight and the best looking man in Charleston? Couldn't you buy the Rhetts twice over if you wanted to buy such rubbish? Aren't you the top man in Charleston in name and position and character? Why, they'll be laughing at the jokes in the N'York papers next—They'll be appreciating their own good sense and cleverness and personal beauty next thing—They'll ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... spoilt by the depredations committed on the rocks to make alum. I do not know the process. I only saw that the rocks looked red after they had been burnt, and regretted that the operation should leave a quantity of rubbish to introduce an image of human industry in the shape of destruction. The situation of Christiania is certainly uncommonly fine, and I never saw a bay that so forcibly gave me an idea of a place of safety from the storms of the ocean; all the surrounding objects were beautiful ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... to Fennessy myself about this," said Mrs. Alexander, making for the door with concentrated purpose, "and in the meantime I wish to hear no more of this rubbish." ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... they were stealing them, of course, because they could not imagine such fascinating things being thrown away, even by those fool men—to snatch them hurriedly, fly off with them to the tall green pine-top, and hide them in their old nest till they got it looking quite like a rubbish dump, and good pasture for a goat. And most of all, perhaps, was it fun to tease the lazy old kitchen cat, till her tail would get as big as a ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts



Words linked to "Rubbish" :   attack, assault, wish-wash, lingo, lash out, rubble, snipe, jargon, patois, litter, trumpery, dust, waste matter, slang, scrap, junk, drivel, rubbish dump, scrap metal, detritus, assail, round, waste product, waste, vernacular, waste material, debris, cant, argot, garbage



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