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squalid
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  • Cecilia had carried up trays of tea to her mother's room—as spectacularly squalid as her own—thinking some intimate conversations might develop.†   (source)
  • It's a strange sight in that squalid room, like a rose in a junkyard.†   (source)
  • "It's a bit squalid, isn't it?"†   (source)
  • The fairy gestured around her at the squalid filth.†   (source)
  • They forged deeper into Dras-Leona, leaving the squalid entrance behind.†   (source)
  • Jacob Riis, the New York journalist who had devoted himself to revealing the squalid housing of America's poor, came to Chicago bearing counsel of a graver sort.†   (source)
  • From here it's a thirty-foot drop to the water, they are looking out across the prosperous, clean white neighborhood of the Russian people, separated from the squalid dark tangle of the Raft per se by a wide canal patrolled by gun-toting blackrobes.†   (source)
  • I stepped back to survey the remains of the shattering moment, the scene of squalid violence and lonely death at the shadowy fringes of society.†   (source)
  • Others were condemned to squalid holes in the infamous areas of Gesia, Smocza and Zamenhof Streets, which had been occupied by the Jewish proletariat from time immemorial.†   (source)
  • Sometimes the story is growing in squalid backstreet bars, Dockside in Tarbean.†   (source)
  • "Yes, my squalid little serf," I said, and fluttered my hands in royal dispensation.†   (source)
  • In the last light of the day, the outskirts of Port-au-Prince look the same to me as on every previous trip, chaotic, squalid, broken-down.†   (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)
  • He and several freedom fighters were transferred to a squalid jail in Pretoria where they were treated brutally by the police.†   (source)
  • The camp, home to more than twenty thousand refugees from the war in Liberia, was squalid, with frequent food shortages and a quiet threat in the form of soldiers who worked in the camp to recruit young men back into the war.†   (source)
  • And having thus paid his ultimate compliment to Johnnie, Himes relapsed into intermittent slumber as Shade moved away down the squalid, dusty street under the fierce July sun.†   (source)
  • A squalid alameda where there stood a rotting brushwood gazebo and a few old iron benches.†   (source)
  • When Aureliano Segundo decided to go see what was going on, he found only the corpse of the horse and a squalid mule in the ruins of the stable.†   (source)
  • There is no hint of the squalid dump it replaced.†   (source)
  • "Cowed by Parvi, Yakub drove them in Changazi's Land Cruiser to a squalid building site near the bank of the Indus, a mile to the southwest of town.†   (source)
  • Blanca was raising a Brazilian rubber tree, a shy, squalid little bush whose one attraction was its price: it was sold by the leaf.†   (source)
  • Who would shield him against animosity and deceit, against people with ambition and the embittered snobbery of the big shot's wife, against the squalid, corrupting indignities of the profit motive and the friendly neighborhood butcher with inferior meat?†   (source)
  • That sudden desire of Franz's reminds us of something; yes, it reminds us of Stalin's son, who ran to electrocute himself on the barbed wire when he could no longer stand to watch the poles of human existence come so close to each other as to touch, when there was no longer any difference between sublime and squalid, angel and fly.†   (source)
  • Not in San Antonio during the Great Depression nor in St. Louis' worst neighborhoods did he find such squalid living conditions.†   (source)
  • He could rightfully have fumed over the heat, the mosquitoes, the squalid shacks of the work crews; or the projected cost of the project; or the questionable real estate ventures that had failed year after year, despite so many grand promises.†   (source)
  • Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter's decline, Annie had no idea.†   (source)
  • She calls their squalid new dwelling a "pigsty."†   (source)
  • She knew that he hated the ordeal of signing the "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" on the registers of squalid roadside hotels.†   (source)
  • You're trying to make me feel squalid and low again.†   (source)
  • He wasn't sure which was the most embarrassing: the dirty underwear and socks that were scattered everywhere; the cartoon superhero posters that he hadn't gotten around to taking down; theSports Illustratedbikini posters that he had just gotten around to putting up; or the rancid smell that seemed to permeate the whole squalid mess.†   (source)
  • The sprawling camps of humans were just ahead, filthy and squalid.†   (source)
  • I knew she had taken up with Lincoln Evans, living with him (and probably others) in a squalid flat down in the city, though I no longer had either cause or interest in finding her.†   (source)
  • Well, here's one of the wonders, he told himself, gazing about the squalid, foul-smelling hall.†   (source)
  • In squalid corridors crippled beggars vie with half-dressed prostitutes and drug peddlers in the eerie wash of naked bulbs that hang from exposed wires along the stone walls.†   (source)
  • Harrison was the kind of man who liked having such squalid creatures around--made him feel real good about himself, by contrast, Hooch figured--but Hooch didn't like seeing such miserable specimens of humanity.†   (source)
  • It was simply shelter, less comfortable than the hotel, and within a few days more squalid.†   (source)
  • I imagined him going to the drugstore to pick up the package of photos and hurrying to this squalid room to warm himself with the view of his wife, his children, his parents, his girlfriend—who knows?†   (source)
  • The program, of course, was meant to be secret, like most of Hitler's squalid schemes, but such iniquity could scarcely be kept completely in the dark.†   (source)
  • Costello, a chief petty officer, never passed a weekend without having several officers' wives beg him to slake his appetite for flesh in delightfully squalid hotels.†   (source)
  • Now the spirits had left them; they were ordinary, squalid, poor.†   (source)
  • His flat was small and squalid, done in brown paint with photographs of Clovelly.†   (source)
  • It was due in part to the public reaction to the new type of legislator who too often, in 1900, included the swollen corporation lawyer and the squalid political boss.†   (source)
  • He had been brought up somewhere in the suburbs of Johannesburg, and she guessed, though he had not said so, that his childhood had been less squalid than hers, though pinched and narrow.†   (source)
  • Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.   (source)
    squalid = unpleasant
  •   So absurd an essence,
      That something, which is not,
      Nevertheless should populate
      Empty night more solidly
      Than that with which we copulate,
      Why should it seem so squalidly?   (source)
    squalidly = dirty or unpleasant in a moral sense
  • Trillian was reminded unavoidably of the London Underground, though it was less thoroughly squalid.†   (source)
  • The squalid hotel he had managed to find had no such conveniences as a telephone.†   (source)
  • He has no home, because he has just abandoned his squalid New Orleans apartment.†   (source)
  • These girls were said — by those who had done the locking — to be working as maids, and to have been brought from their squalid countries-of-origin for their own good.†   (source)
  • I take my meals — with the exception of the breakfasts, which have thus far been even more deplorable than the breakfasts we shared as medical students in London — at a squalid inn located in the vicinity, where every meal is a burnt offering, and nothing is thought the worse for the addition of a little dirt and grime, and a seasoning of insects.†   (source)
  • Some 1,500 Jews volunteered to go, thinking that anything must be better than the squalid environment they were in.†   (source)
  • I don't exempt myself: I relish these grubby little sins, these squalid family tangles, these cherished traumas.†   (source)
  • The ultimate white-knight fantasy: He steals the abused princess from her squalid circumstances and places her under his gilded protection in a castle that no one can breach but him.†   (source)
  • Next come the villages, with squalid hovels and squinting urchins and women lugging bundles of sticks, the dirt roads murky with pig-wallow.†   (source)
  • The children there had been sewn into their underwear in the fall and not unsewn until the spring, a detail that has remained in my mind as particularly squalid.†   (source)
  • You can't face the possibility that all the time you were having your squalid little fling with her, she must have been in and out of bed with another man — one she loved, unlike you.†   (source)
  • She lives in this squalid apartment.†   (source)
  • He resolves to save her from this squalid life and more or less buys her from the madam for an enormous sum of money and takes her to his hilltop mansion overlooking the Hudson River, where he brings in teams of doctors, tutors, psychologists and nutritionists and where he watches the girl develop intellectually and grow into a healthy young woman who speaks four languages and shows a talent for the oboe.†   (source)
  • At the edge of Petersburg he trots past "the houses of negroes," in the words of one Union colonel, "and here and there a squalid family of poor whites"—but no one else.†   (source)
  • She sat in a corner of the squalid, dimly lit clinic, patiently waiting for the doctor, and told us how wild dogs had mauled her husband to death a few weeks earlier.†   (source)
  • Hanging from a few nails on the wall were old dresses, feather boas, squalid bits of fur, imitation rhine-stone necklaces, hats that had gone out of style fifty years before, stained petticoats with threadbare lace, dresses that were once flashy and whose sheen had long since disappeared, inexplicable admirals' jackets and bishops' chasubles, all thrown together in grotesque fraternity, in which the dust of years had made its nest.†   (source)
  • He'd dug himself in even deeper some years later by calling Taxi Driver a squalid little film from a trifling talent.†   (source)
  • It is the center of the world, the gate between north and south, the bridge between east and west, ancient beyond memory of man and so magnificent that Saathos the Wise put out his eyes after gazing upon Qarth for the first time, because he knew that all he saw thereafter should look squalid and ugly by comparison.†   (source)
  • Aureliano Triste stood on the threshold waiting for the dust to clear and then he saw in the center of the room the squalid woman, still dressed in clothing of the past century, with a few yellow threads on her bald head, and with two large eyes, still beautiful, in which the last stars of hope had gone out, and the skin of her face was wrinkled by the aridity of solitude.†   (source)
  • One evening about the holidays, miserably wet, and offering its squalid contrast to the season, Johnnie, plodding along between the two little girls, with Pony and Milo following, met Gray Stoddard face to face.†   (source)
  • She has salmon-colored lingerie, I see it hanging over the shower curtain rod in her squalid bathroom.†   (source)
  • He wandered the squalid streets of the Yau Ma Ti, his prisoner in tow, wrists still in traction, finding what he wanted to find, paying thousands of dollars for items worth a fraction of the amounts paid.†   (source)
  • She did not see the girls diving into the transparent rivers like tarpons, leaving the passengers on the train with the bitterness of their splendid breasts, or the miserable huts of the workers all huddled together where Mauricio Babilonia's yellow butterflies fluttered about and in the doorways of which there were green and squalid children sitting on their pots, and pregnant women who shouted insults at the train.†   (source)
  • But that impression—of a certain amount of learning, of casually expressed good manners, of sophistication—made me cringe at my raw ignorance and the benighted seizure I had had on the subway train, with my simpleminded premonition of squalid gloom and cultural deprivation.†   (source)
  • It's typical of your rotten little half-country and your squalid little Service that you get big uncle to do your pimping for you.†   (source)
  • The train sped across New Jersey's satanic industrial barrens, the clickety-clack momentum hurling us past squalid slums, sheet-metal sheds, goofy drive-ins with whirling signs, warehouses, bowling alleys built like crematoriums, crematoriums built like roller rinks, swamps of green chemical slime, parking lots, barbarous oil refineries with their spindly upright nozzles ejaculating flame and mustard-yellow fumes.†   (source)
  • They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.†   (source)
  • Lit by a small window that gave upon the squalid grey bricks of an airshaft, the room was gloomy.†   (source)
  • Packed into squalid cabins, smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis broke out among them.†   (source)
  • The light from winking cornerlamps fell with a livid stare across the fronts of the squalid houses.†   (source)
  • It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside.†   (source)
  • I looked at him and did not answer; there flashed through my mind a quick, running picture of all the squalid hovels in which I had lived and it made me feel more than ever a stranger as I stood before him.†   (source)
  • I had gone to the squalid and muddy district because I preferred adventure, and, having begun, I had to go on….†   (source)
  • Oh, Charles, what a squalid wedding!†   (source)
  • He stepped carefully down in squalid Toytown, noting that everything was low, near, and shrunken as he made his Gulliverian entry.†   (source)
  • How you have nudged, how you have interrupted, how hideous you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite each other staring in the Tube!†   (source)
  • What was the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nine o'clock in the morning?†   (source)
  • I, he said, was this man's intimate friend and associate; in fact, the whole background of the crime was of the most squalid description.†   (source)
  • It was settled uneven on the stones of the square, and occasionally in the midst of admiration gave you a heavy, squalid, gut-sick feeling, so much it incorporated all that was in the surroundings.†   (source)
  • Well, no one can ever resist going to see her own present, so that was quite a success, but the reception Rex gave next day at the Savoy for the wedding guests was very squalid.†   (source)
  • Now and then the church bell would sound, lurching back and forth as if someone were carrying water that was clear, all right, but in a squalid bucket, and stumbling and slipping on the stones.†   (source)
  • Seeping through the squalid air of the police station, the sour smell of dirt and disinfectant, came the sweet, rich smoke of a Havana cigar—of two Havana cigars, for the sergeant in charge was smoking also.†   (source)
  • No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty.†   (source)
  • [Raising a paean of squalid triumph] I done you.†   (source)
  • His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivined and squalid way of life.†   (source)
  • All before her and alongside lay the squalid environs of the town.†   (source)
  • He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the rainy winter twilight.†   (source)
  • They were old, crumbling, broken down, squalid.†   (source)
  • That place is too sweetly squalid for words.†   (source)
  • He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous.†   (source)
  • The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant.†   (source)
  • Whatever they might be, they surely were hunger-stricken and squalid.†   (source)
  • His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity caused by the shade.†   (source)
  • Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.†   (source)
  • A poor prisoner, fed on alms and broken victuals; a squalid, disgraced wretch!'†   (source)
  • The negress was clad in squalid European garments.†   (source)
  • It contained but two rooms, and these exhibited all the squalidness of the most miserable penury.†   (source)
  • Presently this was thrown open, and Marguerite found herself on the threshold of the most dilapidated, most squalid room she had ever seen in all her life.†   (source)
  • All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid—so useless, futile…. the way animals die….†   (source)
  • To toil long hours for another's advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death.†   (source)
  • Now, since I, being a nobleman, am in the secret too, think how tedious to me must be your unending cant about all these moralistic figments, and how squalidly disastrous your sacrifice of your lives to them!†   (source)
  • " 'She—there,' said the child, pointing to a squalid woman in a doorway opposite, who fled suddenly down the street.†   (source)
  • We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live.†   (source)
  • The place would have been squalid enough in any case, but the litter, the untidiness, made the impression revolting.†   (source)
  • They both knew this about themselves and each other, and they also knew that each of them knew this about themselves and one another—and that it was all tangled and squalid.†   (source)
  • The squalid bedroom grew quiet; the silly intrigues, the gossip, the shallow discontent were stilled, while words accepted as immortal filled the indifferent air.†   (source)
  • The houseless prince, the homeless heir to the throne of England, still moved on, drifting deeper into the maze of squalid alleys where the swarming hives of poverty and misery were massed together.†   (source)
  • When his way homeward led him again into the street of frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.†   (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)
  • He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town.†   (source)
  • A squalid family lived there now.†   (source)
  • Now and then she espied dilapidated log cabins and surroundings even more squalid than the ruined forest.†   (source)
  • But the drivers, through miles of dark squalid road, poured out their souls to the dryads and the saints, and Lucy poured out hers to her cousin.†   (source)
  • After early nightfall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels.†   (source)
  • He thought, after what he had seen of the women standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would put sex altogether out of his own life.†   (source)
  • A squalid view of things, Settembrini asserted, and he felt himself almost above combating such an attitude.†   (source)
  • It all looked so horribly squalid, so dirty and uninviting, that Marguerite hardly dared to cross the threshold.†   (source)
  • Hour after hour he tramped through back alleys and squalid streets, seeking groups and crowds, and finding no end of them, but never any sign of the boy.†   (source)
  • …the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway—the car cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether some one isn't leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate—at best just people—too hot or too cold, tired, worried.†   (source)
  • She pictured herself leading such a life as theirs—a life in which achievement seemed as squalid as failure—and the vision made her shudder sympathetically.†   (source)
  • His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice.†   (source)
  • When it is not employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice.†   (source)
  • She had never been farther west than Jersey City; and her conception of the West was a hazy one of vast plains and rough mountains, squalid towns, cattle herds, and uncouth ill-clad men.†   (source)
  • She had come into that squalid hole, Madeline Hammond, earnest enough, kind enough in her own intentions; but she had been almost imperious—a woman habitually, proudly used to being obeyed.†   (source)
  • For the last four years he had lived in squalid conditions with a woman whom only Lawson had once seen, in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor of one of the most dilapidated houses on the Quai des Grands Augustins: Lawson described with gusto the filth, the untidiness, the litter.†   (source)
  • But those mute and ugly things seemed to say to her that they were waiting for Percy; that soon, very soon, he would be here, that the squalid room being still empty, they would be alone together.†   (source)
  • But although Hans Castorp was usually repelled by tangled and squalid affairs and even felt repelled in this instance as well, he continued to splash about in these murky waters, taking consolation in the certainty that he was here only on a visit and would soon be leaving.†   (source)
  • The squalid scene composed itself around him; the common accents, the burning gas-jets in the shops, odours of fish and spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women.†   (source)
  • Some of the houses he went to, in filthy courts off a dingy street, huddled against one another without light or air, were merely squalid; but others, unexpectedly, though dilapidated, with worm-eaten floors and leaking roofs, had the grand air: you found in them oak balusters exquisitely carved, and the walls had still their panelling.†   (source)
  • He rose quickly from the table, and walked round the bare, squalid room, listening attentively at the door, through which Brogard has just disappeared, and whence only muttered oaths and shuffling footsteps could be heard.†   (source)
  • But even that seemed less terrible to bear than the thought that he should never know how much she loved him—that at any rate would be spared her; the squalid room itself, which seemed to be waiting for him, told her that he would be here soon.†   (source)
  • The individual who had come to the door in response to Sir Andrew's knock, and who, presumably, was the owner of this squalid abode, was an elderly, heavily built peasant, dressed in a dirty blue blouse, heavy sabots, from which wisps of straw protruded all round, shabby blue trousers, and the inevitable red cap with the tricolour cockade, that proclaimed his momentary political views.†   (source)
  • Marguerite had thought that by now she had lived through the whole gamut of horror and anguish that human heart could bear; yet now, when Desgas left the house, and she remained alone in this lonely, squalid room, with that fiend for company, she felt as if all that she had suffered was nothing compared with this.†   (source)
  • The air was keen and full of brine; after that enforced period of inactivity, inside the evil-smelling, squalid inn, Marguerite would have enjoyed the sweet scent of this autumnal night, and the distant melancholy rumble of the autumnal night, and the distant melancholy rumble of the waves; she would have revelled in the calm and stillness of this lonely spot, a calm, broken only at intervals by the strident and mournful cry of some distant gull, and by the creaking of the wheels, some…†   (source)
  • Place the theatres on the same footing, and we shall promptly have a similar revolution: a whole class of frankly blackguardly plays, in which unscrupulous low comedians attract crowds to gaze at bevies of girls who have nothing to exhibit but their prettiness, will vanish like the obscene songs which were supposed to enliven the squalid dulness, incredible to the younger generation, of the music-halls fifteen years ago.†   (source)
  • The stranger was meanly dressed, with every appearance about his person and countenance, of squalid poverty and of the most dissolute habits.†   (source)
  • Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things.†   (source)
  • Oliver, whose days had been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.†   (source)
  • I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood.†   (source)
  • The squalid and withered person of this hag might well have obtained for her the character of possessing more than human cunning.†   (source)
  • It was scarcely necessary to do this, but Miss Squeers was as good as her word; and poor Nicholas, in addition to bad food, dirty lodging, and the being compelled to witness one dull unvarying round of squalid misery, was treated with every special indignity that malice could suggest, or the most grasping cupidity put upon him.†   (source)
  • In both, there were several knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on their distress.†   (source)
  • …a matter of course that so far as they could be seen from the river, I missed none of the towers and spires of that once don-beridden city; but the meadows all round, which, when I had last passed through them, were getting daily more and more squalid, more and more impressed with the seal of the "stir and intellectual life of the nineteenth century," were no longer intellectual, but had once again become as beautiful as they should be, and the little hill of Hinksey, with two or three…†   (source)
  • Whenever Mr. Snagsby and his conductors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from its squalid depths obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket.†   (source)
  • They first passed through the "black town," with its narrow streets, its miserable, dirty huts, and squalid population; then through the "European town," which presented a relief in its bright brick mansions, shaded by coconut-trees and bristling with masts, where, although it was early morning, elegantly dressed horsemen and handsome equipages were passing back and forth.†   (source)
  • Sometimes a group of squalid old crones, squatting in a file under the shadow of the steps to a porch, scolded noisily as the archdeacon and the bellringer passed, and tossed them this encouraging welcome, with a curse: "Hum! there's a fellow whose soul is made like the other one's body!"†   (source)
  • The life of the long and busy day—spent in occupations that might so easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspect—had been made pleasant, and even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely duties seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play.†   (source)
  • Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD.†   (source)
  • The houses on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked along.†   (source)
  • And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two—lay thick and close—corrupting in body as they had in mind—a dense and squalid crowd.†   (source)
  • It was a strangely unreal ride through the old squalid streets, with a sensation of being raised out of them into an airy world of wealth and grandeur.†   (source)
  • …of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.†   (source)
  • I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession, an incident which would doubtless have occasioned some surprise had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty.†   (source)
  • The rags of the squalid ballad-singer fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith's treasures, pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food, hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass—an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.†   (source)
  • He thought of her having been born and bred among these scenes, and shrinking through them now, familiar yet misplaced; he thought of her long acquaintance with the squalid needs of life, and of her innocence; of her solicitude for others, and her few years, and her childish aspect.†   (source)
  • …of noise and motion: stemming as it were the giant currents of life that flow ceaselessly on from different quarters, and meet beneath its walls: stands Newgate; and in that crowded street on which it frowns so darkly—within a few feet of the squalid tottering houses—upon the very spot on which the vendors of soup and fish and damaged fruit are now plying their trades—scores of human beings, amidst a roar of sounds to which even the tumult of a great city is as nothing, four, six, or…†   (source)
  • It was morning, I remember, when I thus awoke to understanding; I had forgotten the particulars of what had happened and only felt as if some great misfortune had suddenly overwhelmed me; but when I looked around and saw the barred windows and the squalidness of the room in which I was, all flashed across my memory and I groaned bitterly.†   (source)
  • It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms; environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at top.†   (source)
  • From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.†   (source)
  • The opening scene can seem a squalid quarrel between stubborn and short-sighted men.†   (source)
  • …shriveled the supple skin on his lithe limbs,
    stripped the russet curls from his head, covered his body
    top to toe with the wrinkled hide of an old man
    and dimmed the fire in his eyes, so shining once.
    She turned his shirt and cloak into squalid rags,
    ripped and filthy, smeared with grime and soot.
    She flung over this the long pelt of a bounding deer,
    rubbed bare, and gave him a staff and beggar's sack,
    torn and tattered, slung from a fraying rope.
    All plans made,
    they went…†   (source)
  • …tending a garden.
    All's well-kept here; not one thing in the plot,
    no plant, no fig, no pear, no olive, no vine,
    not a vegetable, lacks your tender, loving care.
    But I must say—and don't be offended now—
    your plants are doing better than yourself.
    Enough to be stooped with age
    but look how squalid you are, those shabby rags.
    Surely it's not for sloth your master lets you go to seed.
    There's nothing of slave about your build or bearing.
    I have eyes: you look like a king to me.†   (source)
  • What squalid specters, in the dead of night, Break my short sleep, and skim before my sight!†   (source)
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