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squalor
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  • Farther south, the town descended into a vast, low-lying marshland of working-class houses, mobile homes, shanties, Fort Gordon army base, and a backwoods thoroughfare made famous by Erskine Caldwell as a symbol of rural squalor—Tobacco Road.†   (source)
  • He, as you saw, was left in squalor and poverty, with a very nasty temper, a fantastic amount of arrogance and pride, and a couple of family heirlooms that he treasured just as much as his son, and rather more than his daughter.†   (source)
  • What squalor and disorder her sister lived in!†   (source)
  • I leave a place of degradation and squalor, the likes of which I will never experience again.†   (source)
  • There is a certain grim satis faction to be derived from struggling upwards, however slowly; but the bulk of one's time is necessarily spent in the extreme squalor of a high camp, when even this solace is lacking.†   (source)
  • Such squalor!†   (source)
  • Step back, regard the squalor, make sure things were correctly placed.†   (source)
  • I stop my car and imagine Nathaniel pushing his cart through the squalor with a head full of beautiful music.†   (source)
  • We brought some money for a family here, and they are living in squalor, unlike you, Jackie.†   (source)
  • I tried to get him to acknowledge the squalor of Ameh Bozorg's home, but he defended his sister staunchly.†   (source)
  • Simple squalor?†   (source)
  • I think they gloried in my squalor as proof of my baseness.†   (source)
  • First, there was the issue of cleanliness, born of a cultural collision between one boy who grew up in casual comfort with a cleaning lady twice a week and the other who spent his life scrubbing dishes and toilets to stave off squalor.†   (source)
  • They'll think I've been lying about my entire life in London and that secretly I'm broke and living in squalor.†   (source)
  • Thomas saw the true squalor of the Horde on every side.†   (source)
  • Uncle thought he was simply rubbing some grease off his fingers, but in reality he was soiling himself in the squalor and degradation of our captivity--without him knowing it, or us intending it.†   (source)
  • To the Americans the wretchedness of the Spanish people, the squalor of the wayside taverns, were appalling.†   (source)
  • Culprits of tropical squalor!†   (source)
  • They crossed the squalor of the outer crescent and went through the second gate.†   (source)
  • To escape the forlornness and the squalor I sought Michael's company.†   (source)
  • Even in the midst of the squalor and depression that define the Oswalds' New Orleans summer, Lee Harvey Oswald reads JFK's carefully chosen words and is inspired to hope that one day he, too, will exhibit that sort of courage.†   (source)
  • The nation which had once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor," said Francisco d'Anconia in a press interview.†   (source)
  • The Milago were dying and living in squalor so that these people could get fat and live in such luxury.†   (source)
  • Max's first impression of the farmhouse was one of unimaginable squalor.†   (source)
  • Her mom wasn't home tonight so we sat in their tiny kitchen (amid the squalor which was pretty disgusting) and I asked Beanie what was up.†   (source)
  • The light was just now up, and I could see her dark eyes veiled through the skeins of her hair, staring out blankly across the loosely organized squalor of the camp.†   (source)
  • Think of the wretched of the city living in squalor.†   (source)
  • The squalor of the open market was a fitting barricade for the wall-less Walled City beyond.†   (source)
  • They provided us deep pleasure, an anodyne to the squalor and clutter of the street.†   (source)
  • No force on earth is going to keep a people of whatever color in the squalor and the poverty I see hereabouts, city and countryside.†   (source)
  • I studied the large framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru and wondered how, out of squalor like this, those men had managed to get themselves considered as men.†   (source)
  • No new wealth was created by these transactions and they did nothing to relieve the squalor of the town, but fortunes were made out of the futile reselling of goods already sold a dozen times over.†   (source)
  • Sin and squalor— what was that, Gertrude?   (source)
    squalor = dirtiness and unpleasantness
  • Imagining themselves in the bright, crystal world Alyss described, with heart palaces, walrus-butlers, frog-messengers, and giant, pipe-smoking caterpillars, they were able to escape for a short while from the poverty and squalor and daily scrounging of their own lives.   (source)
  • It is alarming how quickly one descends into squalor.†   (source)
  • He waved his stubby fingers, taking in all the waterfront squalor.†   (source)
  • Here they have lost all, and live in fear and squalor.†   (source)
  • Down there in a dim storage room adjacent to the furnace I've set up a realm of ersatz squalor.†   (source)
  • A few people still remained amidst the squalor, tending little gardens in amongst the weeds.†   (source)
  • The men on both sides of the trenches live in squalor and mud, enduring rats and deprivation.†   (source)
  • Once again he saw the squalor caused by the disease.†   (source)
  • The room had a certain anonymous squalor.†   (source)
  • Men, women, and children came running, thousands of them, in states of ragged squalor.†   (source)
  • He has grown up and now sees his children grow up in squalor.†   (source)
  • Harry glanced back at Hermione with a reassuring smile, but he was not sure she had seen it; she stood hugging herself in the midst of the candlelit squalor, looking toward the bookcase.†   (source)
  • Look at what I have here in this enclave of million-dollar homes, five miles from the squalor and hard limits of Skid Row.†   (source)
  • He began with a plea for the reform of mental asylums, too many of which remain the dens of squalor and iniquity they'd been in the last century.†   (source)
  • The squalor around it.†   (source)
  • It had taken him nearly a year to become desensitized to his childhood, to really notice the squalor that his countrymen accepted as the norm.†   (source)
  • The unhappy Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of squalor and misery — there could be no future for them.†   (source)
  • The family was all, it was everything, and too many families lived not so much in squalor but within the confines of a single room with a single bed and mats on coarse, clean floors.†   (source)
  • Almost hiding there, though I was sure—even as young and earnest and fearful as I was—it was not just from me; it was from that place and time, the whole picture and small detail, from the homely, dim structure about us, the squalor of the heavy air, from the ennui and restiveness of the entire encampment, the surreally distant war, and then of course from who I was as well.†   (source)
  • Not be so thankful or beholden to me, necessarily, but at least she'd be somewhat appreciative of the providence of institutions that brought her from the squalor of the orphanage—the best of which can be only so happy—to an orderly, welcoming suburban home in America, with a hopeful father of like-enough race and sufficient means.†   (source)
  • Long ago, this must have been a prosperous farm, but age and disrepair had driven it into a state of horrific squalor.†   (source)
  • …love the machines, the balers and hoppers and long conveyors, and the parents look out the windows through the methane mist and the planes come out of the mountains and align for their approach and the trucks are arrayed in two columns outside the shed, bringing in the unsorted slop, the gut squalor of our lives, and taking the baled and bound units out into the world again, the chunky product blocks, pristine, newsprint for newsprint, tin for tin, and we all feel better when we leave.†   (source)
  • It had taken him nearly a year to become desensitized to his childhood, to really notice the squalor that his countrymen accepted as the norm.†   (source)
  • Working in the squalor of Ameh Bozorg's kitchen, I did my best to scour the utensils and prepare a familiar American meal, ignoring the scowls of my sister-in-law.†   (source)
  • Moody wanted to realize his dream of living as the prosperous American educated doctor, a cultured professional who rose above the squalor of the world about him, but he had no time to attend to the details.†   (source)
  • Half of the clan lived like Ameh Bozorg, oblivious to squalor, contemptuous of western customs and ideals, and clinging to their own zealous brand of the Ayatollah Khomeini's fanatical Shiite sect of Islam.†   (source)
  • No signs remained of the shah's existence, but the tour guide described wicked and wasteful wealth for us and then had us look out over the neighboring slums and wonder how the shah could live in splendor while viewing the squalor of the multitudes.†   (source)
  • I had forgotten the illness which my native state had so rapidly undergone; bloated by war profits, the obscenely fecund urban squalor of Fairfax County swept across my vision like an hallucinated recapitulation of Fort Lee, New Jersey, and the sprawling concrete blight which only the day before I thought I was leaving behind forever.†   (source)
  • But when I think of Mustafa, and even when I hear the word "slave," I think of the squalor of our family compound, a mixture of school yard and back yard: all those people, someone always shrieking, quantities of clothes hanging on the lines or spread out on the bleaching stones, the sour smell of those stones running into the smell of the latrine and the barred-off urinal corner, piles of dirty enamel and brass dishes on the washing-up stand in the middle of the yard, children running…†   (source)
  • The need was so great that deep within, through the squalor and the humiliations of this life, I took some joy in the mere fact that I could be alone for a while inside the rest-room cubicle with its clean plumbing and unfinished wood walls.†   (source)
  • Existence becomes a grinding effort, guided by belly-hunger and the almost desperate need to divert awareness from the squalors to the pleasures, to lose oneself in sex or drink or dope or gut-religion or gluttony or the incoherence of falsity; and in some instances in the higher pleasures of music, art, literature, though these usually deepen perceptions rather than dull them, and can be unbearable; they present a world that is ordered, sane, disciplined to felicity, and the contrast…†   (source)
  • He lived the life of an aristocratic New Yorker in the squalor of Williamsburg.†   (source)
  • The squalor of that little house on the outskirts of the pueblo!†   (source)
  • The gleaming vault where he had kept this reserve wealth now let out the smell of squalor.†   (source)
  • I have—" he looked about the room at the clutter and near-squalor— "everything I want."†   (source)
  • Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare.†   (source)
  • For a quarter of an hour they had walked briskly through drab autumnal streets, descending finally a long rutted hill that led them, past a thinning squalor of cheap houses, almost to the outskirts.†   (source)
  • He even took a relish in the squalor, in the privilege of letting a last crust of buttered toast fall to the floor to be undisturbed until the random heel should grind it into the mud-colored carpet, in the spectacle of the fat roach moving across the cracked linoleum of the bathroom floor while he steamed in the tub.†   (source)
  • I had always felt a certain warmth with my mother, even when we had lived in squalor; but I felt none here.†   (source)
  • Yeah," Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm's length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building.†   (source)
  • Most ladies would have laughed, but Margaret really minded, for it gave her a glimpse into squalor.†   (source)
  • She had not believed such squalor could exist anywhere in America.†   (source)
  • And the misery of unfortunates was as disturbing almost as direct contact with disease and squalor.†   (source)
  • "Hullo!" he cried, shouting in at the open door, through which much squalor was visible.†   (source)
  • Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive--she spoke at once--his salutation remained.†   (source)
  • And the precious minutes slipped away, and Jacky and squalor came nearer.†   (source)
  • Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us, and strengthen the wings of love.†   (source)
  • The life of Paris had got into his bones, and he would not change it, notwithstanding its squalor, drudgery, and hardship, for any other in the world.†   (source)
  • She could not take their point of view; it was a negative thing; an intellectual squalor; a swamp of prejudices and fears.†   (source)
  • He would have preferred a more congenial spot, but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse.†   (source)
  • Its natural squalor hidden, the world seemed to be under a spell of icy purity, trapped inside a fantastic dream of fatal enchantment.†   (source)
  • When such a day coincides with the inner mood there is intoxication in its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the squalor of its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a youthful sense of adventure.†   (source)
  • He was conscious of failure and of detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.†   (source)
  • 'The sight of that watery-eyed old Jones mopping his bald head with a red cotton handkerchief, the sorrowing yelp of the dog, the squalor of that fly-blown cuddy which was the only shrine of his memory, threw a veil of inexpressibly mean pathos over Brierly's remembered figure, the posthumous revenge of fate for that belief in his own splendour which had almost cheated his life of its legitimate terrors.†   (source)
  • Squalor and ugly talk, the floor strewn with fragments of cane and nuts, and spotted with ink, the pictures crooked upon the dirty walls, no punkah!†   (source)
  • Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously consider the advisability of following his example.†   (source)
  • His notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high; but these things they heed no more than they heed the dirt and noise and squalor about them—it is out of this material that they have to build their lives, with it that they have to utter their souls.†   (source)
  • But suddenly he fell upon me almost with fury; I had had no time to mutter more than a couple of words; but he had doubtless observed that I was decently dressed and, therefore, took deep offence because I had dared enter his den so unceremoniously, and spy out the squalor and untidiness of it.†   (source)
  • That is my only pleasure: to see her happy and careless in the garden after the misery and squalor of the horrible room where we all four slept together.†   (source)
  • There are a hundred thousand mothers who are living in misery and squalor, struggling to earn enough to feed their little ones!†   (source)
  • But when this brief pride of silence upheld him no longer he was glad to find himself still in the midst of common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth of the city fearlessly and with a light heart.†   (source)
  • His soul danced with joy at that picture of starvation which is so good-humoured, of squalor which is so picturesque, of sordid love which is so romantic, of bathos which is so moving.†   (source)
  • He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity.†   (source)
  • He felt vaguely that here was something better than the realism which he had adored; but certainly it was not the bloodless idealism which stepped aside from life in weakness; it was too strong; it was virile; it accepted life in all its vivacity, ugliness and beauty, squalor and heroism; it was realism still; but it was realism carried to some higher pitch, in which facts were transformed by the more vivid light in which they were seen.†   (source)
  • He recalled his own equivocal position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind.†   (source)
  • Let Squalor be turned into Tragedy, whose eyes are the stars, and whose hands hold the sunset and the dawn.†   (source)
  • Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch?†   (source)
  • She feared, fantastically, that her own little flock might be moving into turmoil and squalor, into nearer contact with such episodes as these.†   (source)
  • Petulance and squalor were enough.†   (source)
  • So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a company of the dead.†   (source)
  • Sir Leicester's gallantry concedes the point, though he still feels that to bring this sort of squalor among the upper classes is really—really— "I was about to say," resumes the lawyer with undisturbed calmness, "that whether he had died by his own hand or not, it was beyond my power to tell you.†   (source)
  • This is a vast change from the situation in the past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was removed from the sight and hearing of the family.†   (source)
  • All this was much helped by the abolition of the squalor which our immediate ancestors put up with so coolly; and by the leisurely, but not stupid, country-life which now grew (as I told you before) to be common amongst us.†   (source)
  • …from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication…†   (source)
  • But to doubt the worth of his life-work,—to doubt the destiny and capability of the race his soul loved because it was his; to find listless squalor instead of eager endeavor; to hear his own lips whispering, "They do not care; they cannot know; they are dumb driven cattle,—why cast your pearls before swine?†   (source)
  • We stopped at Wallingford for our mid-day meal; of course, all signs of squalor and poverty had disappeared from the streets of the ancient town, and many ugly houses had been taken down and many pretty new ones built, but I thought it curious, that the town still looked like the old place I remembered so well; for indeed it looked like that ought to have looked.†   (source)
  • After all, you seem to prefer a certain dank squalor in your surroundings.†   (source)
  • There was a smell about the place, which I imagined as the smell of misery and fear, though I supposed it was no more than the niff of ancient squalor and an absence of drains.†   (source)
  • Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.†   (source)
  • It was argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they were depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the remotest notion of decency or honor.†   (source)
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