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fastidious
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  • He was not only the city's oldest and most illustrious physician, he was also its most fastidious man.   (source)
  • Then he dried his steel-rimmed glasses on a towel and, because he was fastidious, got his surgical gown on.   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail; or excessively concerned with cleanliness
  • Haitians, he said, are a fastidious people.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • Both, for example, were fastidious, very attentive to hygiene and the condition of their fingernails.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness
  • One was wearing a soccer uniform, shirt neatly tucked in, socks pulled up to her knees, in the fashion of a peewee soccer player who had been fastidiously dressed by her mother.   (source)
    fastidiously = with careful attention to detail
  • Your bed is neatly made—you have always been fastidious.   (source)
    fastidious = careful about detail; or excessively concerned with things like housekeeping
  • Xavier himself had a near-monopoly on fastidiousness in Lonesome Dove.   (source)
    fastidiousness = excessive concern with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • Cedric has always been fastidious about his person.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • It was a dream fall, my body languid and fastidious as to where to land, until the floor became impatient and smashed up to meet me.   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail
  • Her father had been a fastidious man, impeccable, close-shaven, with razor-sharp creases pressed into his trousers.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • She stood there, fastidiously groomed, wearing a...   (source)
    fastidiously = giving careful attention to detail
  • No one ever saw her without the defensive shield of grooming, but she knew what was beneath the fastidiousness and gloss.   (source)
    fastidiousness = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • The workmanship was no less fastidious...   (source)
    fastidious = with great care to detail
  • No one cared much for Sidney Martin—too fastidious, too skinny, hair too blond and fine. The way he kept pushing. A believer in mission, a believer in searching tunnels and bunkers. Too disciplined. Too clearheaded for such a lousy war.   (source)
    fastidious = too careful to do everything right
  • And from now on Peyton—all of us—can't afford to be so fastidious. We'll flush the toilets only twice a day.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • She moved jauntily, stepping with outrageous fastidiousness amid the litter of the street,   (source)
  • Tjaden has become so fastidious that he only half smokes his cigars.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with little things
  • Maxim, of all people, who was so fastidious.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • Fastidious Johnny had bought his own cup, emulating men who were in better circumstances.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • ...slowly and fastidiously as though you were peeling an endless strip of skin off the live flesh.   (source)
    fastidiously = with careful attention to detail
  • The room was still untouched, and Poirot idly gathered up the cards, shuffling them with his tiny, fastidiously groomed hands.   (source)
    fastidiously = with excessive concern for cleanliness or matters of taste
  • She had broken up Jane Austen's sentence, and thus given me no chance of pluming myself upon my impeccable taste, my fastidious ear.   (source)
    fastidious = tasteful and detail-noticing
  • These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious script, murmuring, "Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but pondering upon it."   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail
  • He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness
  • Such an episode in the Island's grand naval story her naval historians naturally abridge; one of them (G.P.R. James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not "impartiality forbid fastidiousness."   (source)
    fastidiousness = a concern with matters of good taste or propriety
  • He swiftly lost the fastidiousness which had characterized his old life.   (source)
    fastidiousness = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • At the head of the bed there was a niche in the wall where, fastidiously tidy, stood a candle, a bottle of ink, and a pen with a bundle of papers   (source)
    fastidiously = with careful attention to detail
  • He coughed, put on his glasses, arranged them fastidiously, coughed again,   (source)
  • Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when there was no one present at it but the family.   (source)
    fastidiousness = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • I fear me she is coquettish, and over nice and fastidious!   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to proper manners and good taste
  • Too, she thought Pete to be a very fastidious person concerning the appearance of women.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • How was it that a man so exact and fastidious could have made this error of a day?   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail
  • The appurtenances of the writing-tables, about which Alexey Alexandrovitch was himself very fastidious, were exceptionally good.   (source)
    fastidious = careful in paying attention to detail
  • ...her face, in which the most rigid critic could only have desired a little less rouge, and the most fastidious sculptor a little more fineness in the nose.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her debut.   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail
  • Mrs. Linton eyed him with a droll expression — half angry, half laughing at his fastidiousness.   (source)
    fastidiousness = excessive concern with what is proper
  • He was kept well dressed, for St. Clare was fastidiously particular on this point.   (source)
    fastidiously = with careful attention to detail
  • You have been tutored and refined by books and retirement from the world, and you are therefore somewhat fastidious; but this only renders you the more fit to appreciate the extraordinary merits of this wonderful man.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • At length his accurate and fastidious eye seemed satisfied, and, throwing out his left arm on the barrel, he was slowly elevating the muzzle, when...   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail
  • She steps fastidiously around the wet pink puddle.†   (source)
  • They were fastidious about their pads and when he inhaled against them, an earthy popcorn smell filled his senses.†   (source)
  • "We can't be too fastidious," a CIA officer said, in perfect Modern Standard Mandarin.†   (source)
  • He was fastidious and timid and easily teased by the boys on his floor; on the nights he was given dorm duty—for the entire four floors—Waterhouse Hall seethed with revolution.†   (source)
  • One February midnight, von Rumpel lets himself into Dupont's fastidious shop not far from Sacre-Coeur.†   (source)
  • She was dressed head to toe in black, her hair pinned in a perfectly round knot atop her head, with lace gloves and a high-collared blouse fastened tightly at her throat—as fastidiously neat as the house itself.†   (source)
  • For one thing, a lot of his more creative efforts were rife with small inaccuracies, in-jokes almost, and he was not always so fastidious about his materials as someone turning out deliberate forgeries would have been.†   (source)
  • It was covered with Tamar's tiny fastidious handwriting.†   (source)
  • He was neat—maybe fastidious was the better word—and his clothing and behavior suggested financial well-being.†   (source)
  • They might be crack vials, but the caps are still on them, and pipeheads wouldn't be so fastidious as to replace the lid on an empty vial.†   (source)
  • He was fastidiously brushing dust off the sleeve of his coat while two of his Golems explored the cellar.†   (source)
  • The fastidious dresser became a disheveled wreck who wandered the streets with musical instruments, slept in the woods and carved names into trees.†   (source)
  • She never had to search for anybody to eat with in the cafeteria--they flocked to the table of her choice, where she opened fastidious lunches, shaming our jelly-stained bread with egg-salad sandwiches cut into four dainty squares, pink-frosted cupcakes, sticks of celery and carrots, proud, dark apples.†   (source)
  • Gene, who was more fastidious than C. J., had not been quite so eager to try them.†   (source)
  • "So he darned well ought to be," replied Bigwig, "the great dandy"—for by their standards Strawberry was scrupulously clean and fastidious.†   (source)
  • He seemed overly fastidious, and she could not imagine he had a wife or daughter or servant or anyone else close to him who would lavish so much attention on the capsof his fingers.†   (source)
  • He puts the plate in the sink when he's finished and then decides to wash it and dry it and he does this fastidiously, plus utensils.†   (source)
  • Even during his five daily prayer sessions, Mouzafer, a fastidious man of faith, would steal a glance away from Mecca to make sure Mortenson was still nearby.†   (source)
  • Others clung to fastidious habits of civilian life.†   (source)
  • General Peckem laid great, fastidious stress on small matters of taste and style.†   (source)
  • A man of cultivated, even fastidious tastes, Jefferson was later to tell his Virginia neighbor James Madison that he had observed in Adams a certain "want of taste," this apparently in reference to the fact that Adams was known on occasion to chew tobacco and take his rum more or less straight.†   (source)
  • Alexander Hadfield was a fastidious man who preferred cutting cloth to hacking at flesh and bone and would not soil even his second-best suit of clothes in any manner of outdoor work.†   (source)
  • There was a cold symmetry to General Durrell's office, a rigorous attention to detail that was both fastidious and obsessive.†   (source)
  • With Captain Ono, in fact, it was more a point of "purity" than disease; he was particularly fastidious in his personal practices, as he was always groomed and shaved like any town physician, and most often took his meals alone in the officers' mess, unless he was to dine there with the commander.†   (source)
  • Her father had always cleaned the blade in the godswood after he took a man's head, Sansa recalled, but Ser Ilyn was not so fastidious.†   (source)
  • It was the largest number I ever had at any one time, and I had some difficulty in providing so many with food and shelter, but, as may well be imagined, they were not very fastidious in either direction, and were well content with very plain food, and a strip of carpet on the floor for a bed, or a place on the straw in the barnloft.†   (source)
  • Clark is fastidious in his cleanliness, so at just under ten feet wide and eighteen feet long, furnished with four-poster bed, table, bureau, and chairs, the bedroom is a cramped though very neat space.†   (source)
  • She was aware that it was a contradiction that someone who had been through all that she had should be so fastidious, should shrink so from strange epidermises, from alien touch.†   (source)
  • It was fastidiously barbered and slicked back with an unguent.†   (source)
  • JEAN is very fastidiously dressed: brown suit, red tie, stiff collar, brown hat.†   (source)
  • Her hair is arranged with fastidious care.†   (source)
  • She patted the cakes of soap fastidiously with the tips of her small fingers and tucked them in with the washcloth.†   (source)
  • For we are dealing with an age less fastidious than our own.†   (source)
  • So fastidious and stern was she when he was arranging for the rooms, that he'd found it embarrassing to ask whether washing was included. Her manner had implied that she was not in the habit of discussing the state of men's personal items with them, such painful matters being best left to the servants.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • Marriage, children—all had been sacrificed to the Great Agony and her home was a tribute to the fastidiousness of her dedication (and the generosity of her father's will).   (source)
    fastidiousness = tendency to give careful attention to detail or matters of taste
  • He was a fastidious, precise man who ordinarily taught math but had been filling in for the regular art teacher.   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to detail
  • He is dressed in threadbare black clothes and his white shirt is frayed at collar and cuffs, but everything about him is fastidiously clean.   (source)
    fastidiously = showing an excessive concern for cleanliness
  • He looked like a drawing from a men's magazine, fastidiously groomed, a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his dark suit.   (source)
    fastidiously = with careful attention to detail
  • And he was really a very pleasing young man, a young man whom any woman not fastidious might like.   (source)
    fastidious = giving careful attention to small details
  • the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small limits of the society around them.   (source)
    fastidiousness = highly concerned with matters of taste
  • Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • It was evident, from her figure and the perfumes she had about her, that she was young and fastidious in her tastes, but that was all.   (source)
    fastidious = concerned with matters of good taste
  • But there was such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man's heart, that, in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least of all in the street.   (source)
    fastidiousness = concern with matters of taste
  • All the antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses.   (source)
    fastidious = excessive concern with matters of taste
  • the fastidious lady, who seemed desperately apprehensive that he was going to relate something improper,   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • Some fastidious persons ... affirmed that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of Georgiana's beauty, and rendered her countenance even hideous.   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with cleanliness or matters of taste
  • That Marianne, fastidious as she was, thoroughly acquainted with Mrs. Jennings' manners, and invariably disgusted by them, should overlook every inconvenience of that kind...   (source)
    fastidious = excessively concerned with matters of taste
  • Her hair is no longer fastidiously in place.†   (source)
  • Isabelle fastidiously ordered a fruit smoothie, Simon asked for coffee, and Clary, after a moment's hesitation, chose a large coffee and coconut pancakes.†   (source)
  • The colours came in little tubes and bottles, and had to be very carefully applied with tiny brushes, the excess fastidiously blotted off You needed taste and the ability to blend, so the cheeks wouldn't look like circles of rouge or the flesh like beige cloth.†   (source)
  • He was enclosed in fastidious tenderness.†   (source)
  • And so he paid for his fastidious nature, his compulsion to keep things perfect.†   (source)
  • He reached out a fastidious booted toe and shoved Luke, who made a choking sound.†   (source)
  • "Oh, dear," said Pangborn, gazing at the fallen body of his comrade with fastidious distaste.†   (source)
  • She remembers her husband's fastidiousness, his war against germs.†   (source)
  • Fastidious John grew focused on his laundry.†   (source)
  • Peyton's a fastidious little girl," Helen said.†   (source)
  • As much as it was understood that the subject of conversation between a psychiatrist and his patient was also "confidential," Owen should understand the degree to which the fastidious Swiss gentleman had cared for his car.†   (source)
  • There had been the same parties to attend when they were growing up, the same episodes of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island the children watched as the parents feasted in another part of the house, the same meals served to them on paper plates, the carpets lined with newspapers when the hosts happened to be particularly fastidious.†   (source)
  • She is a fastidious woman.†   (source)
  • He returned more fastidious than when he left, more in control of his nature, and none of his contemporaries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he in his science, and none could dance better to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano.†   (source)
  • Anything but little girls with dirty knees and their fingers up their noses: about matters of personal hygiene she was fastidious.†   (source)
  • When he was enraged by some human effort or flaw, he was able to regard himself as discriminating, fastidious, and full of nice scruples.†   (source)
  • In the snow, the view of the clock tower of Upper Canada College—especially from the distance of Kilbarry Road, or, closer, from the end of Frybrook Road—reminds me of the clock tower of the Main Academy Building in Gravesend; fastidious, sepulchral.†   (source)
  • She found his fastidiousness and complete lack of humor touching, and longed to introduce him to the idea of delight.†   (source)
  • His hours were his own, the competition was slight, the clientele was already persuaded and therefore manageable, and he had numerous opportunities to witness human stupidity without sharing it or being compromised by it, and to nurture his fastidiousness by viewing physical decay.†   (source)
  • She liked the last place least, not because Sula slept in the room with her but because her love mate's tendency was always to fall asleep afterward and Hannah was fastidious about whom she slept with.†   (source)
  • He is …. fastidious, shall we say?†   (source)
  • Over coffee they shiver: they themselves are fastidious, they will bottle-feed, which is anyway more sanitary.†   (source)
  • Raphael was nothing if not fastidious.†   (source)
  • She had neither iron nor clothes but did not stop her fastidious lining up of pleats or pressing out of wrinkles even when she acknowledged Nel's greeting.†   (source)
  • He's fastidious…the camp looks as if we've been here no more than a half hour rather than a week…yet he hasn't shaved in that amount of time.†   (source)
  • It amused Augustus to watch Jake eat--he was so fastidious about it--but the sight put Call into a black fidget.†   (source)
  • Most of the patrons of the Dry Bean were so lacking in fastidiousness that they wouldn't have noticed a dead skunk on the tables, much less a few crumbs and spilled drinks.†   (source)
  • Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917, he had returned to Medallion handsome but ravaged, and even the most fastidious people in the town sometimes caught themselves dreaming of what he must have been like a few years back before he went off to war.†   (source)
  • She looked at the angular tiers of lights rising through the snowy curtain, and-glancing at him, at the grip of his gloved hands on the wheel, at the austere, fastidious elegance of the figure in black overcoat and white muffler-she thought that he belonged in a great city, among polished sidewalks and sculptured stone.†   (source)
  • An inexplicable kind of distaste, part fastidiousness, part boredom, stopped him whenever he tried to consider it.†   (source)
  • I saw the tongue come out and fastidiously touch the upper lip as though to sample the salt.†   (source)
  • He wrinkled his nose fastidiously, in self-mockery.†   (source)
  • He brushes his sleeve fastidiously.†   (source)
  • Wynand wrinkled his nose fastidiously.†   (source)
  • The Gormer MILIEU represented a social out-skirt which Lily had always fastidiously avoided; but it struck her, now that she was in it, as only a flamboyant copy of her own world, a caricature approximating the real thing as the "society play" approaches the manners of the drawing-room.†   (source)
  • As tourists do when their minds have been broadened and enriched by travel, when they return to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent a whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged round the deck, who after midnight was seen standing by himself at the rail.†   (source)
  • The walk up Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously-equipped carriages—giving her, through the little squares of brougham-windows, peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting-lists, of hurried hands dispensing notes and cards to attendant footmen—this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty's…†   (source)
  • He was not born an idealist, and his fastidiously dry and sensuous soul, with its French tinge of cynicism was not capable of dreaming….†   (source)
  • Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used to being fallen in love with; but she, for her part, had remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor.†   (source)
  • The disorder was almost more than his fastidious taste could bear.†   (source)
  • She watched the air of fastidious elegance around her.†   (source)
  • As an old and fastidious connoisseur of music, I could feel my gorge rising against the gramophone and jazz and modern dance-music.†   (source)
  • After ten years in various parts of Asia he had attained to a somewhat fastidious valuation of places and happenings; and this he was bound to admit promised unusually.†   (source)
  • The contrast between the dirty, hairy old man and the four neat, fastidious ladies was as great as though he were a grizzled, vicious old watchdog and they four small kittens.†   (source)
  • I am not fastidious.†   (source)
  • Not by the animal desire of an Actaeon, not by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth— to twelfth-century Japan.†   (source)
  • Soon you vill eat hot dogs beneath the villow trees and trink free vine—(abruptly in a haughty fastidious tone) The champagne vas not properly iced.†   (source)
  • Her thin arms rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctuality, like your own effortless motion in a dream.†   (source)
  • I vill trink champagne beneath the villow—(with a change to aristocratic fastidiousness) But the slaves must ice it properly!†   (source)
  • It had a fastidious jacket of midnight blue with plain silver letters and a silver pyramid in one corner.†   (source)
  • Francon asked Keating in the rose-lit satin-stuffed rooms of the A.G.A., wrinkling his nose with fastidious amusement.†   (source)
  • The terror came from that plate, not from the fastidious monster across the table; the rest of the room was warm and safe.†   (source)
  • He thought that things like this could not be done in such a place; the fastidious magnificence made it monstrous; he wished it were a dank cellar.†   (source)
  • He had no distaste for modern architecture and built cheerfully, when a rare client asked for it, bare boxes with flat roofs, which he called progressive; he built Roman mansions which he called fastidious; he built Gothic churches which he called spiritual.†   (source)
  • It was not a positive stand rationally taken; not defiance in the name of a cause of importance; just a fastidious feeling, something pertaining almost to chastity: the hesitation one feels before putting one's foot down into muck.†   (source)
  • Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive, its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.†   (source)
  • This was just like Toohey, thought Keating; this pose amidst the severe fastidiousness of his living room; a single canvas by a famous artist on the wall behind him—and the rest of the room unobtrusive like a monk's cell; no, thought Keating, like the retreat of a king in exile, scornful of material display.†   (source)
  • But you must not expect me to adopt your inexplicable, fantastic, petulant, fastidious ways:†   (source)
  • He was the picture of fastidious comfort.†   (source)
  • You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.†   (source)
  • "I would advise you not to be too fastidious," said Newman.†   (source)
  • ALTMAYER A most fastidious person you appear.†   (source)
  • All my fastidiousness would suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, vanish.†   (source)
  • Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?†   (source)
  • "I would not be so fastidious as you are," cried Mr. Bingley, "for a kingdom!†   (source)
  • I was simply the most fastidious young gentleman living.†   (source)
  • Certainly, you are fastidious," said Mrs. Tristram.†   (source)
  • "Now, Laurie, don't be too fastidious and worldly-minded.†   (source)
  • "You are very fastidious," said Athos; "such a beautiful woman!"†   (source)
  • "You are fastidious, Chateau-Renaud," replied Debray; "those clothes are well cut and quite new."†   (source)
  • But I am very fastidious; she might not at all.†   (source)
  • You're too fastidious; you've too many graceful illusions.†   (source)
  • You're too fastidious, and too indolent, and too rich."†   (source)
  • He was certainly fastidious and critical; he was probably irritable.†   (source)
  • But conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.†   (source)
  • If Tess had been artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in that lonely lane, notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness with which he was possessed, he would probably not have withstood her.†   (source)
  • And she reproached herself for a fastidiousness, a hypercritical sense of refinement that could not help distinguishing what these women lacked.†   (source)
  • Tall and refined, with shoulders that seemed braced square by an effort of the will, and a head that was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portals of a French cathedral.†   (source)
  • Fastidious people?†   (source)
  • I thought it a certain silly fastidiousness on my part, but it persisted in spite of me, and I merely shrugged my shoulders in answer.†   (source)
  • He took it with a care to which the precision of his movements imparted something that was almost over-fastidious, and with a delicacy that was rendered almost touching by the evidence of his splendid strength.†   (source)
  • He was fastidious, and, aiming at something he did not quite fully grasp, was constantly dissatisfied with his work as a whole: perhaps a part would please him, the forearm or the leg and foot of a figure, a glass or a cup in a still-life; and he would cut this out and keep it, destroying the rest of the canvas; so that when people invited themselves to see his work he could truthfully answer that he had not a single picture to show.†   (source)
  • Take my word for it, that smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I who will be fastidious, and complain that true joy begins in the eyes, and that the eyes of Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were anxious and hungry.†   (source)
  • Carley, I hope you tell your fastidious and immaculate Morrison that you held one of my pigs in your beautiful hands.†   (source)
  • So few could enter into my feeling—they would say 'twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and condemn me….†   (source)
  • No wild nature here: rather a most aristocratic mountain landscape made by a fastidious artist-creator.†   (source)
  • When Carley went into the reception room of the Plaza that night Morrison was waiting for her—the same slim, fastidious, elegant, sallow-faced Morrison whose image she had in mind, yet somehow different.†   (source)
  • He was immaculate and fastidious.†   (source)
  • Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.†   (source)
  • Wouldn't the woman, for example, be very bad-natured if she didn't like to live with her husband; merely"—her voice undulated, and he guessed things—"merely because she had a personal feeling against it—a physical objection—a fastidiousness, or whatever it may be called—although she might respect and be grateful to him?†   (source)
  • She fluttered toward the tailor shop, dashed into its slovenly heat with the comic fastidiousness of a humming bird dipping into a dry tiger-lily.†   (source)
  • The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its husband's, and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be addressed to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his ears from his own fastidious brain.†   (source)
  • It does not occur to them that if women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.†   (source)
  • Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier, very scholarly, and perhaps the most powerful American exponent of cooperation in science, but he was also a man of the world, fastidious of boots and waistcoats.†   (source)
  • Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred.†   (source)
  • A more critical, fastidious, handsome face, paler and colder, without Tanner's impetuous credulity and enthusiasm, and without a touch of his modern plutocratic vulgarity, but still a resemblance, even an identity.†   (source)
  • Had you and I been in his place at his age, who knows whether we might not have done as he did, unless indeed your fastidiousness had saved you from the empress Catherine.†   (source)
  • He, who had the reputation of weighing all things in the nice balance of fastidious perceptions, had been uncritical and simple in his view of her: his cleverness had never overawed her because she had felt at home in his heart.†   (source)
  • Among the friends to whom I have read this play in manuscript are some of our own sex who are shocked at the "unscrupulousness," meaning the total disregard of masculine fastidiousness, with which the woman pursues her purpose.†   (source)
  • More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness.†   (source)
  • At such moments she lost something of her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of the admiration received than for its quantity.†   (source)
  • The great central purpose of breeding the race, ay, breeding it to heights now deemed superhuman: that purpose which is now hidden in a mephitic cloud of love and romance and prudery and fastidiousness, will break through into clear sunlight as a purpose no longer to be confused with the gratification of personal fancies, the impossible realization of boys' and girls' dreams of bliss, or the need of older people for companionship or money.†   (source)
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