sordid

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.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

I guess it’s to protect our frail ladies from sordid cases like Tom’s.

Harper Lee -- To Kill a Mockingbird

All the sordid suggestions of the place were gone—in the twilight it was a vision of power.

Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle

In glowing sentences he painted a picture of Animal Farm as it might be when sordid labour was lifted from the animals’ backs.

George Orwell -- Animal Farm

He killed a man cold-bloodedly, in pursuance of some sordid vendetta in the underworld of prostitutes and pimps.

Albert Camus -- The Stranger

Sophie Neveu seemed far too solid of character to be mixed up in something that sordid.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

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Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

I talked about Aunt J, confessed her sordid secrets about our father.

Ellen Hopkins -- Burned

He had had a sordid reputation; his family had abandoned him.

John Hersey -- Hiroshima

This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded Nately of his father because the two were nothing at all alike.

Joseph Heller -- Catch-22

Amidst this sordid scene, sat a man with his clenched hands resting on his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground.

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

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.

George Orwell -- 1984

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.

Agatha Christie -- Murder On The Orient Express

At bottom the character of M. Bonacieux was one of profound selfishness mixed with sordid avarice, the whole seasoned with extreme cowardice.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

The sordid legend suddenly came back …. St. Teresa was a nun sainted after she claimed an angel had paid her a blissful visit in her sleep.

Dan Brown -- Angels & Demons

She always felt uneasy driving past this dirty, sordid cluster of discarded army tents and slave cabins.

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

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.

Daphne du Maurier -- Rebecca

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.

H.G. Wells -- The Invisible Man

The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

The Children’s Crusade struck him as only slightly more sordid than the ten Crusades for grown-ups.

Kurt Vonnegut -- Slaughterhouse-Five

The whole of this sordid abode was dimly lighted by an evil-smelling oil-lamp, which hung from the rickety rafters of the ceiling.

Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel

The more hopelessly sordid and insensible he appeared, the greater became Mrs. Shelby’s dread of his succeeding in recapturing Eliza and her child, and of course the greater her motive for detaining him by every female artifice.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.

Charles Dickens -- A Christmas Carol

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.

Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged

And of course doing it with that musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night

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.

Ellen Hopkins -- Crank

Dost canker thy soul with sordid business when all that be leal men and true make holiday?

Mark Twain -- The Prince and The Pauper

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.

Robert Louis Stevenson -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

We no longer see merely the sad and sordid modern story of a jazz musician and his algebra-teacher brother.

Thomas C. Foster -- How to Read Literature Like a Professor

In short the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual.

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

However, the Headmaster likes you to sit the examination, so…’ Her voice trailed away delicately, leaving them all in no doubt that Professor Trelawney considered her subject above such sordid matters as examinations.

J.K. Rowling -- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

It was a semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces sordid, dull, and stupid.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that do these things.

Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

I did indeed observe that the Yahoos were the only animals in this country subject to any diseases; which, however, were much fewer than horses have among us, and contracted, not by any ill-treatment they meet with, but by the nastiness and greediness of that sordid brute.

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver’s Travels

Now I don’t have to hear the sordid details of PE.

Sarah Dessen -- Someone Like You

This very square—so I am told—witnessed yesterday the most sordid of tragedies.

E.M. Forster -- A Room With A View

He gave the touch of drama to the sordid tale.

Robert Penn Warren -- All the King’s Men

When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things!

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

The murder of an old woman who kept a little tobacco shop seemed, somehow, sordid and uninteresting.

Agatha Christie -- The ABC Murders

This, as Elizabeth later considered it, was the first in the sordid series of mistakes which was to cause her to fall so low.

James Baldwin -- Go Tell It on the Mountain

The washrooms were disagreeable, crude, if not foul places, and the whole atmosphere was sordid.

Theodore Dreiser -- Sister Carrie

Then they ran down sordid Wilford Road.

D.H. Lawrence -- Sons and Lovers

So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the things it looks upon to bless.

Charles Dickens -- Hard Times

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.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor’s clothing with a feminine fragrance.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera