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sordid
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  • I lied, made stuff up, told him all the sordid things he wanted to hear.†   (source)
  • I learned the sordid inner workings of the royal court in Modeg from a …. courtesan.†   (source)
  • They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor's clothing with a feminine fragrance.†   (source)
  • The room is a remnant of the bleakness of the thirties, sordid, homemade by a person who didn't know carpentry, but it's dry and has a heater and beds and that's all we want.†   (source)
  • It now made sense that Sal Weathers would be so invested in cataloging and publishing Brookline's sordid history—he was probably hoping to get the place torn down.†   (source)
  • Perhaps before today she had heard distant, circling footfalls around their lighted place, but tonight, hearing her own sordid, crummy story, she saw the actual silhouettes of all these things, and ye]low eyes that glowed like flashlights in the dark.†   (source)
  • I thought that you were just another sordid American, looking for a pretty, degenerate boy.†   (source)
  • Robyn Wanted the Whole Story I told her, then she shared her own sordid tale: I started crankin' to keep up with schoolwork around gymnastics, cheerleading, student council, and other extracurricular crap.†   (source)
  • My long, sordid history with the White Noise included several episodes of fainting, vomiting, and memory loss, not to mention my most recent experience with bleeding profusely out of my eyes and nose.†   (source)
  • Then Arya and Blodhgarm were moving among the men, silent and deadly, the elves' inherent grace making the violence appear more like an artfully staged performance than the sordid struggle most fights were.†   (source)
  • She prowled the foulest, most sordid neighborhoods of the city, fearlessly talking to prostitutes and trying to galvanize them to work together and inform on the pimps.†   (source)
  • It's just like my mother to save such a sordid article to add to her list of worries.†   (source)
  • She led me by the hand to a room shut like a tomb, its windows covered with dark curtains, in which the light of day could not have entered in eons but which was nonetheless a palace compared to the sordid quarters of the Red Lantern.†   (source)
  • This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded Nately of his father because the two were nothing at all alike.†   (source)
  • File now, file loudly, file loaded with as many sordid allegations as possible to make Mr. Lang appear to be the creep he really was.†   (source)
  • Now I don't have to hear the sordid details of PE. every day.†   (source)
  • He knew from her tone, from a long sordid history of affairs, it was his job to know and he did know.†   (source)
  • The very young lieutenant's face heated with anger and chagrin, the shine of her first adult romance suddenly gone, the whole thing turned sordid and calculating.†   (source)
  • His base jealousy of me, and his sordid envy of my commission for making a treaty of commerce with Great Britain have stimulatedhim to attempt an assassination upon my character at Philadelphia, of which the world has not yet heard, and of which it cannot hear until the time shall come when many voluminous state papers may be laid before the public, which ought not to be until we are all dead.†   (source)
  • The Children's Crusade struck him as only slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups.†   (source)
  • Details of a sordid affair with the flamboyant Monroe would have ruined the image of Camelot.†   (source)
  • In four years, a plan conceived, not by the cold calculations of the mind, but by the pure love of the heart, was brought to an end in the sordid mess of policemen, lawyers and bankruptcy proceedings.†   (source)
  • I was considering what she had suggested about our pretending to be other people, like figures in a Western novel, imagining how we could somehow exist outside of this place and time and circumstance, share instead the minute and sordid problems of such folks, the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love.†   (source)
  • A sordid little chapter, isn't it?'†   (source)
  • ROS: Well, really-I mean, people want to be entertained-they don't come expecting sordid and gratuitous filth.†   (source)
  • Whatever—and in his calm unflustered way he had done his best—my crime was ultimately beyond expiation, for in my mind it would inescapably and always be entangled in the sordid animal fact of my mother's death.†   (source)
  • So he'd felt--it must be three weeks ago now--sitting by the road in his car late at night, with fog spreading out from the marsh between the tarpaper house and the woods, his car full of the stink of old cigarettes, as he watched for the sordid lover of his client's wife to come creeping to the house.†   (source)
  • Only the superfluous is sordid.†   (source)
  • To William Cullen Bryant, Webster was "a man who has deserted the cause which he lately defended, and deserted it under circumstances which force upon him the imputation of a sordid motive."†   (source)
  • There was nothing left to connect her with the sordid little house on stilts, the screaming of trains, the dust, and the strife between her parents.†   (source)
  • The sordid legend suddenly came back ….†   (source)
  • I've found no incriminating emails, no sordid pictures or passionate letters.†   (source)
  • I talked about Aunt J, confessed her sordid secrets about our father.†   (source)
  • One is a politician; the other thinks that politics is a sordid form of show business.†   (source)
  • Elizabeth leans toward her, on the chance there might be more sordid details to come.†   (source)
  • told me that he had no real stomach for these foolish and sordid restrictions.†   (source)
  • But this was sordid and scandalous, and certainly not for children.†   (source)
  • …extended upon his tumbled bed — of Mrs. Humphrey, semi-conscious and with her hands fluttering helplessly in the air, minus her stays and with her chemise half torn off, her feet — curiously, still in their boots — kicking spasmodically, making faint mewing noises while being savaged by a hulking figure that bears no resemblance at all to himself; although — from above, and from the back, which is his point of view during this sordid scene — the quilted dressing-gown looks identical.†   (source)
  • But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilatedstory, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place.†   (source)
  • Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of yours?†   (source)
  • '), then a helicopter that had almost crashed in a field in Surrey, then a famous actress's divorce from her famous husband ('As if we're interested in their sordid affairs,' sniffed Aunt Petunia, who had followed the case obsessively in every magazine she could lay her bony hands on).†   (source)
  • Even if my father's identity and his story were painful to my mother—even if their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my parents—wasn't my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?†   (source)
  • Everything looked wretched and desolate, but out of the sordid taverns came the thunder of riotous music, the godless drunken celebration of Pentecost by the poor.†   (source)
  • In the poem's past, Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester carry on their dalliance on the water, but their modern counterparts are merely sordid and seedy.†   (source)
  • Despite the perpetual rain, the sordid merchants, and the Homeric vulgarity of its carriage drivers, she would always remember Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, not because of what it was or was not in reality, but because it was linked to the memory of her happiest years.†   (source)
  • It was disgusting and sordid.†   (source)
  • After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself.†   (source)
  • She hated the narrow cheerless room, the stink of old cigarettes because you couldn't open the stuck window, the sordid little shower in the corner, that woman she'd meet on the stairs — a woman like a downtrodden peasant in some musty old novel, you kept expecting to see her with a bundle of sticks on her back.†   (source)
  • The truth was that after all the dirty tricks she had done for him, after so much sordidness endured for him, she had moved on in life and was far beyond his twenty-year advantage in age: she had grown too old for him.†   (source)
  • A ghost from Daddy's past, one who has remained invisible (almost so, anyway) for a very long time, materializes from some sordid history we probably don't want to know about.†   (source)
  • Jose Arcadio, who left the seminary as soon as he reached Rome, continued nourishing the legend of theology and canon law so as not to jeopardize the fabulous inheritance of which his mother's delirious letters spoke and which would rescue him from the misery and sordidness he shared with two friends in a Trastevere garret.†   (source)
  • …conceived for both his wife and his wife's best friend and servant. there are virtually no entries other than these (often repugnant and degrading) until early in 1918, an editorial time jump i readily make in order to spare you, the reader, the sordid descriptions of the debauchery to which john rimbauer stooped. the only element you lose because of my red pencil is the growing frustration on the part of ellen and sukeena at being used in this way, to have what was once a pure love…†   (source)
  • When he went to bed alone, he dodged flak over Bologna again in a dream, with Aarfy hanging over his shoulder abominably in the plane with a bloated sordid leer.†   (source)
  • Jake knew the State had a long, sordid tradition of cash for pardons, but he refused to believe the Yawkey family could have been sophisticated enough to pull off a bribe.†   (source)
  • There was a terrifying innocence in Yves' face, a beautiful yielding: in some marvelous way, for Yves, this moment in this bed obliterated, cast into the sea of forgetfulness, all the sordid beds and squalid grappling which had led him here.†   (source)
  • In 1966, Lawford divorced JFK's sister Patricia and began making sordid accusations against the Kennedy family.†   (source)
  • Liam looked over his shoulder, trying to divide his attention between me and the boy reciting the sordid tale of my life.†   (source)
  • …to profess his love for her, though it was from the heart that he wrote:May Heaven permit you and me to enjoy the cool of the evening of life in tranquility, undisturbed by the cares of politics and war—and above all with the sweetest of all reflections that neither ambition, nor vanity, nor any base motive, or sordid passion through the whole course of great and terrible events that have attended it, have drawn us aside from the line of duty and the dictates of our consciences.†   (source)
  • It's all hanging out like Maggie's drawers, the whole sick sordid mess with no apologies on my part, chap.†   (source)
  • She had taken a sordid tale of victimization and--through her extraordinary courage and vision--become an inspiration to us all.†   (source)
  • But even this was not enough for Blanca, who found the apartment sordid, dark, and narrow and the building crowded.†   (source)
  • It is regrettable, but possible, that your high intentions may lead people to suspect things which …. well, which I'm sure you know to be of a sordid and scandalous nature.†   (source)
  • But there was another, uglier dread: the sordid shape of self-sacrifice, the suspicion, not to be uttered about him, that he wished to remove himself from her path and let its emptiness force her back to the man who was his best-loved friend.†   (source)
  • And since you bring up the word "sordid", there's nothing he's done that could match the filth of your own actions.'†   (source)
  • She gave a sigh of contentment and forgot all about the sordid surroundings, the peeling walls, the cold metal cupboards, the dreadful instruments, the smell of disinfectant, and even that raucous pain that had settled inside her.†   (source)
  • She was aware, as though she stood over them both with a camera, of how sordid the scene must appear: a married woman, no longer young, already beginning to moan with lust, pinned down on this untidy and utterly transient bed by a stranger who did not love her and whom she could not love.†   (source)
  • He remembered her hammering derision of his work, his mills, his Metal, his success, he remembered her desire to see him drunk, just once, her attempts to push him into infidelity, her pleasure at the thought that he had fallen to the level of some sordid romance, her terror on discovering that that romance had been an attainment, not a degradation.†   (source)
  • This, as Elizabeth later considered it, was the first in the sordid series of mistakes which was to cause her to fall so low.†   (source)
  • They were sitting over the sordid relics of the meal, while the boy moved about the table, slackly gathering dishes together.†   (source)
  • It was not only his sordid insertion of the issue of Vernichtung—even the most hidebound of the teachers had no stomach for such a notion, presented in whatever Swiftian mode of corrosive ridicule—but it was that Third Reich worship and pan-Germanic rapture of his which at this late date would make him blind and deaf to his colleagues' own throbbing, heartfelt patriotism.†   (source)
  • I remember telling you that Misha and I had once seen her, when she was still a schoolgirl, at some sordid hotel where your father took us.†   (source)
  • The murder of an old woman who kept a little tobacco shop seemed, somehow, sordid and uninteresting.†   (source)
  • To me, it is all rather sordid and unpleasant.†   (source)
  • As I stood there the sordid implications of politics flashed through my mind.†   (source)
  • He gave the touch of drama to the sordid tale.†   (source)
  • He had had a sordid reputation; his family had abandoned him.†   (source)
  • The ugliest thing about these stories was that they were all sordidly true.†   (source)
  • Sordid is an ugly word and I'm glad you resented my using it.†   (source)
  • The lie we lived, she and I. The shabby, sordid farce we played together.†   (source)
  • He fascinated me with his sordid imagination.†   (source)
  • Above all he remembered his continuous hunger, and the fierce sordid battles at mealtimes.†   (source)
  • Do you think I could stand the thought of my wife dragged through a sordid police case?†   (source)
  • I believe you'll find nothing sordid in this.†   (source)
  • Now that we've talked things out, I'm sure you'll stop writing those sordid little stories.†   (source)
  • And while I lathered my face, I thought of that sordid hole in the clay of the cemetery into which some unknown person had been lowered that day.†   (source)
  • In glowing sentences he painted a picture of Animal Farm as it might be when sordid labor was lifted from the animals' backs.†   (source)
  • The hideous houses and churches, the ill-kept farms and gardens, the slovenly, sordid aspect of the towns and country-side, which continually depressed Father Latour, he seemed scarcely to perceive.†   (source)
  • There was something sordid about the tumbled sheets, the sprawling blankets, and the thumped pillows, and that bedside table dusty with powder, spilt scent, and melting liquid rouge.†   (source)
  • He killed a man cold-bloodedly, in pursuance of some sordid vendetta in the underworld of prostitutes and pimps.†   (source)
  • Adjectives like EPOCH-MAKING, EPIC, HISTORIC, UNFORGETTABLE, TRIUMPHANT, AGE-OLD, INEVITABLE, INEXORABLE, VERITABLE, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: REALM, THRONE, CHARIOT, MAILED FIST, TRIDENT, SWORD, SHIELD, BUCKLER, BANNER, JACKBOOT, CLARION.†   (source)
  • Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened.†   (source)
  • She always felt uneasy driving past this dirty, sordid cluster of discarded army tents and slave cabins.†   (source)
  • For some reason or other you have got it into your head that I know something about this sordid business-this murder of a man I never saw before.†   (source)
  • I cannot seat myself in some sordid eating-house and order the same glass day after day and imbue myself entirely in one fluid—this life.†   (source)
  • I don't believe Clem had many of the vices that lead to damnation, but such as they were they were very evident on this occasion--late rising, puffiness, double-breasted slovenliness of the kind that old gentleman La Bruyere thought so sordid, tobacco stink, lint, and cat hairs on him, kept up by dime-store purchase and cheap accommodation, as in aftershave lotion, Sta-comb, artificial silk socks, and so forth, besides his lordly self-abuse look.†   (source)
  • He has the terrible grotesque air, in confessing his sordid baseness, of one who gives an excuse which exonerates him from any real guilt.†   (source)
  • She said: "That life story of the Bronx housewife who murdered her husband's young mistress is pretty sordid, Gail.†   (source)
  • Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater [1*].†   (source)
  • After all, sordid as this crime seemed be, it was a crime, and it was a long time since I had had any association with crime and criminals.†   (source)
  • Simple and sordid.†   (source)
  • There in that sordid hole in the clay, I thought, to the accompaniment of stupid and insincere ministrations and the no less stupid and insincere demeanor of the group of mourners, in the discomforting sight of all the metal crosses and marble slabs and artificial flowers of wire and glass, ended not only that unknown man, and, tomorrow or the day after, myself as well, buried in the soil with a hypocritical show of sorrow—no, there and so ended everything; all our striving, all our…†   (source)
  • And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses?†   (source)
  • The sordid crime took on a new aspect.†   (source)
  • This sordid murder of an old woman in a back street shop was so like the usual type of crime reported in the newspapers that it failed to strike a significant note.†   (source)
  • Miss Garnder handed her the "sordid" compositions and the play, saying, "When you get home, burn these in the stove.†   (source)
  • What does that mean--sordid?†   (source)
  • Sordid.†   (source)
  • Sordid: Filthy.†   (source)
  • The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils.†   (source)
  • This very square--so I am told--witnessed yesterday the most sordid of tragedies.†   (source)
  • All the sordid suggestions of the place were gone—in the twilight it was a vision of power.†   (source)
  • And of course doing it with that musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.†   (source)
  • The washrooms were disagreeable, crude, if not foul places, and the whole atmosphere was sordid.†   (source)
  • In short the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual.†   (source)
  • Dost canker thy soul with sordid business when all that be leal men and true make holiday?†   (source)
  • Philip was carried away by the sordid intensity of it.†   (source)
  • Perhaps he was—to the music of his sordid dreams.†   (source)
  • I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about.†   (source)
  • It seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the contract in a vestry.†   (source)
  • You went to the Opera while Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging?†   (source)
  • It was a cheap and sordid thing after all, this life, and the sooner over the better.†   (source)
  • "You think me horribly sordid, don't you?†   (source)
  • The Prince said— "Offend me not with thy sordid matters.†   (source)
  • Cronshaw's slim bundle of poetry did not seem a substantial result for a life which was sordid.†   (source)
  • And I make free to say that for the time being life assumed the same sordid values to me.†   (source)
  • There was a touch of romance in that sordid attic.†   (source)
  • He wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in which he had endured so much suffering.†   (source)
  • The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness.†   (source)
  • The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be washed away from her palm.†   (source)
  • It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that do these things.†   (source)
  • All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.†   (source)
  • It's a sordid, selfish world, and I wish I was out of it."†   (source)
  • A mother has no longer any mere sordid anxieties for the future of her children.†   (source)
  • The den upon which his eye now rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid.†   (source)
  • I could not bear to return to the sordid village, where, besides, no prospect of aid was visible.†   (source)
  • They have no sordid, selfish, money-getting ways, but rather a fine disdain for mere cash.†   (source)
  • "And he is worth—not to say his sordid expenses—but thrice his weight in gold," said Richard.†   (source)
  • She was a pious woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid.†   (source)
  • I remember myself as a gaunt black figure, going along the slippery, shiny pavement, and the strange sense of detachment I felt from the squalid respectability, the sordid commercialism of the place.†   (source)
  • I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me.†   (source)
  • It was two stories high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower story and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence.†   (source)
  • Hadn't we all commenced with the same desire, ended with the same knowledge, carried the memory of the same cherished glamour through the sordid days of imprecation?†   (source)
  • The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy—all this imparted to them a resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.†   (source)
  • Then they ran down sordid Wilford Road.†   (source)
  • But death in its more sordid and terrible aspects was a thing with which I had been unacquainted till now.†   (source)
  • She was realizing for the first time that a woman's dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.†   (source)
  • There appeared to be no end to the devastated forest land, and the farther she rode the more barren and sordid grew the landscape.†   (source)
  • There is nothing like Love: there is nothing else but Love: without it the world would be a dream of sordid horror.†   (source)
  • His clacker he had by this time thrown away from him, as being a mean and sordid instrument, offensive both to the birds and to himself as their friend.†   (source)
  • God might have made the buffalo to furnish the Indians and white men with meat and fur, but surely not through the sordidness of a few to perish from the earth.†   (source)
  • But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish, a smile, a brave conceit of the past.†   (source)
  • He pictured the rooms where these people lived—where the patterns of the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even love dressed as seduction—a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above.†   (source)
  • The whole of this sordid abode was dimly lighted by an evil-smelling oil-lamp, which hung from the rickety rafters of the ceiling.†   (source)
  • Robert, that is all very well for other men, for men who treat life simply as a sordid speculation; but not for you, Robert, not for you.†   (source)
  • "Mart, my son," he roared, "do you realize that in this, what some might call a sordid task, we are learning things that will enable us to heal the bodies and comfort the souls of countless lost unhappy folks?"†   (source)
  • I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority—which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn infallibly to the vindictive.†   (source)
  • …flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough, but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns, when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance, when the time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined.†   (source)
  • Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places—trading places—with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth.†   (source)
  • It was furtive, lascivious, sordid—nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature.†   (source)
  • Her brother had eloquently pleaded for her to keep herself above a sordid and brilliant marriage, yet he not only allowed a cowboy to keep her picture in his room, but actually spoke of her and used her name in a temperance lecture.†   (source)
  • To bring good fortune to her family; to take care of this beautiful, wild little sister; to leave the yellow, sordid, humdrum towns for the great, rolling, boundless open; to live on a wonderful ranch that was some day to be her own; to have fulfilled a deep, instinctive, and undeveloped love of horses, cattle, sheep, of desert and mountain, of trees and brooks and wild flowers—all this was the sum of her most passionate longings, now in some marvelous, fairylike way to come true.†   (source)
  • And now the sordid nature of him lowered him beneath these thieves, who had probably put the evil chances in his way.†   (source)
  • It was not less tragic because it was so sordid, because it had to do with wages and grocery bills and rents.†   (source)
  • And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them were so little more than voices—and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense.†   (source)
  • Go ahead and explain how illness and death are noble, but health and life are sordid—that's the surest method for engaging these pupils in the service of humanity.†   (source)
  • People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity.†   (source)
  • After supper that evening, Dick thought, he would finish the break; also he wanted to kick Franz's bottom for having partially introduced him to such a sordid business.†   (source)
  • What were the trivial, sordid, and selfish feelings that kept her in tumult compared to this welling emotion?†   (source)
  • He had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of life without him and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of the tides within him.†   (source)
  • Actually they were extremely small debauches; they rarely went beyond too much lager in the adjacent city of Zenith, or the smiles of a factory girl parading the sordid back avenues, but to Martin, with his pride in taut strength, his joy in a clear brain, they afterward seemed tragic.†   (source)
  • While he was boasting to me, in his sordid and repulsive agony, I couldn't help thinking of the chuckling talk relating to the time of his greatest splendour when, during a year or more, Gentleman Brown's ship was to be seen, for many days on end, hovering off an islet befringed with green upon azure, with the dark dot of the mission-house on a white beach; while Gentleman Brown, ashore, was casting his spells over a romantic girl for whom Melanesia had been too much, and giving hopes…†   (source)
  • They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual.†   (source)
  • He began, that hour, a sordid strategy which his old proud self would have called inconceivable; he began to equivocate, to put off announcement and production till he should have "cleared up a few points," while week on week Hunziker became more threatening.†   (source)
  • Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.†   (source)
  • We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others may feel confident in I feel doubts of—my being proof against the sordid conditions of a business contract again!†   (source)
  • The gratification of being welcomed in high company, and of making her own ascendency felt there, so that she found herself figuring once more as the "beautiful Miss Bart" in the interesting journal devoted to recording the least movements of her cosmopolitan companions—all these experiences tended to throw into the extreme background of memory the prosaic and sordid difficulties from which she had escaped.†   (source)
  • How willingly would he have fixed his abode for ever in the attics of some sordid but enviable house, where Odette went but never took him, and where, if he had lived with the little retired dressmaker, whose lover he would readily have pretended to be, he would have been visited by.†   (source)
  • But the hard road with its sheets of flying dust, the bleak railroad yards, the round pens she took for cattle corrals, and the sordid debris littering the approach to a huge sawmill,—these were offensive in Carley's sight.†   (source)
  • All that hot midday she reclined on the improvised seat in her wagon, holding her scarf to her nostrils and looking out occasionally at the sordid ugliness of abandoned camp sites.†   (source)
  • But it was not likely that he had reference to the kind of anguish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliating—unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even of pathos.†   (source)
  • Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself cleverness, genius!†   (source)
  • The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously, and the crimson nape of that lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs, the immense heaving of that dingy, striped green-and-orange back, the whole burrowing effort of that gaudy and sordid mass, troubled one's sense of probability with a droll and fearsome effect, like one of those grotesque and distinct visions that scare and fascinate one in a fever.†   (source)
  • In his dream he reached his sordid home all out of breath, but with eyes dancing with grateful enthusiasm; cast four of his pennies into his mother's lap and cried out— "They are for thee!†   (source)
  • Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole steaming liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over the snow, and forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle—to those who saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat.†   (source)
  • She had overthrown the sordid, self-seeking habit of life; she had awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood.†   (source)
  • His thousand and three affairs of gallantry, after becoming, at most, two immature intrigues leading to sordid and prolonged complications and humiliations, have been discarded altogether as unworthy of his philosophic dignity and compromising to his newly acknowledged position as the founder of a school.†   (source)
  • And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness about him, his dream had had its usual effect—it had intensified the sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold.†   (source)
  • One of these papers was as good as a circus, and nearly as good as a spree—certainly a most wonderful treat for a workingman, who was tired out and stupefied, and had never had any education, and whose work was one dull, sordid grind, day after day, and year after year, with never a sight of a green field nor an hour's entertainment, nor anything but liquor to stimulate his imagination.†   (source)
  • She did not dwell long on the poverty and hard work of her childhood, nor the vanishing hopes and ideals of her school days, nor the last sordid months that had been so hard to endure.†   (source)
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