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tawdry
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  • "Your tawdry effort in The Daily World," he says scathingly.†   (source)
  • Billy left his room, went down the slow elevator, walked over to Times Square, looked into the window of a tawdry bookstore.†   (source)
  • She had that distinctive English quality of looking terrifically fresh and crisp even while conveying tawdry intimations of the state of her underwear and the fact that she bathes only under pressure from her roommates, Fiona and Georgina.†   (source)
  • Everything seemed strange, so tawdry and grotesque.†   (source)
  • It's tawdry, of course.†   (source)
  • I have no desire to hear the tawdry details of what went on last night, or hear how awful I was for not accepting Dawson in the first place.†   (source)
  • Comments like the one to which I refer would have seemed something fit for one of the tawdry novels I read, not for a serious comment from my husband.†   (source)
  • The sunlight crowd were mostly tourists or the harried urban professionals who didn't much care if the decor looked tawdry and the service was surly.†   (source)
  • Dear Lord ...The smee was still telling tawdry tales when Max reined their horse to a halt.†   (source)
  • Hollywood's excesses may be repeatedly trashed in bitter exposes, and the tawdry quality of many movies dismissed by critics, but the people love the product, and the dream factory keeps humming.†   (source)
  • Beside such treasures the gloves looked cheap and tawdry.†   (source)
  • Without the dark, without the bright glow of colored lights, the carnival looked too much like what it was...a little weary, more than a little tawdry.†   (source)
  • There was nothing left for her in France but the ignominy of a tawdry grave.†   (source)
  • It is redolent of the tawdry decadence of a far-flung but key imperial frontier.†   (source)
  • Now the lights and the rides and the cotton-candy stand looked so garish, so tawdry.†   (source)
  • She was pale and pock-faced and dressed in the tawdry, over-shiny garb of a woman who had obviously once been in the trade.†   (source)
  • Whether you found it dashing or tawdry, at least it had been a romance, complete with intrigue and scandal and a wrenching separation.†   (source)
  • Saw her walk to the town, along the narrow lane which ran past the tannery, following it to where it broadened with beedi shops along one side and tawdry stalls on the other, where men with bold eyes lounged smoking or drinking from frothing toddy pots.†   (source)
  • It was all paternalism, my insatiable desire to be the benevolent tyrant dispensing tawdry gifts and moldy foodstuffs to the subjects who stumbled into the spiritual famine of my sad kingdom.†   (source)
  • We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.†   (source)
  • Ashe led them past a shop window full of "girlie" magazines, down a narrow alley, at the far end of which shone a tawdry neon sign: PUSSYWILLOW CLUB—MEMBERS ONLY.†   (source)
  • In your truly Protestant department, where after his day of professionally indifferent justice (strained, bent, dented here and there by the age-old hammerings of low pay and temptation always too ready-at-hand, by anger, boredom, and the despair which comes with dealing out more justice than any policeman gets), the man of the force goes home to a wife who involves him, as soon as he crosses his threshold, in excuse-making and bribery and pointless anger of his own; and lest he begin to slide into a comfortable self-hatred, a schizophrenic separation of the policeman in him and the tawdry man, she kisses him on the cheek and, sooner or later, unmans him in his bed.†   (source)
  • I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be—instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.†   (source)
  • The molting pink feathers are tawdry as carnival dolls and some of the starry sequins have come off.†   (source)
  • The striped awning was gone, the dark booths looked scratched and tawdry.†   (source)
  • Some tawdry circus designer's idea of the East.†   (source)
  • An artist is a tawdry, lazy sort of thing to be, as most people in this country will tell you.†   (source)
  • But compared to the sharp, sour reek of the men, even the tawdry scent was transporting.†   (source)
  • It's too theatrical, too tawdry, thinks Simon; it reeks of the small-town lecture halls of fifteen years ago, with their audiences of credulous store clerks and laconic farmers, and their drab wives, and the smooth-talking charlatans who used to dole out transcendental nonsense and quack medical advice to them as an excuse for picking their pockets.†   (source)
  • I got most of the story, the boy watching the girl at every opportunity, even when the light is poor or he has the "blinds" (I'm not making this up) pulled almost all the way down; the boy blinded by love, then by vanity; the boy envisioning himself as a hero out of a romance; the boy going to the supposedly exotic bazaar, Araby, arriving late to find much of it already in darkness, registering it as the tawdry and antiromantic place that it is; and finally the boy,nearly blinded by his own angry tears, seeing himself for the ridiculous creature he is.†   (source)
  • Also five copies of the first edition, with the dust jackets still in mint condition — tawdry, but dust jackets were then, in the years just after the war.†   (source)
  • "We have that honor, ser." The Knight of Flowers shone so fine and pure in his white scales and silk that Jaime felt a tattered and tawdry thing by contrast.†   (source)
  • The millionaire IS shocked at the tawdry spectacle but also secretly intrigued and he finds himself going back there night after night, alone, and it isn't long before he falls in love with the girl, yes, her limpid eyes and dimpled knees and her sweet and fleecy pubes.†   (source)
  • It's not tawdry!†   (source)
  • Tawdry?†   (source)
  • The lure of thefair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers.†   (source)
  • Removing her brassiere on the last note, she held it above her head, displaying her meager body with its three tawdry patches of tinsel hanging from it like old Christmas tree decorations.†   (source)
  • Clinging to the sides of the dreamlike waterways was the litter of our times, the motels, the hot-dog stands, the merchants of the cheap and mediocre and tawdry so loved by summer tourists, but these incrustations were closed and boarded against the winter and, even open, I doubt that they could dispel the enchantment of the Wisconsin Dells.†   (source)
  • Her expression was a little strange when she took the tawdry, shabby box into her big hands.†   (source)
  • The two sisters stooped, broad, lethargic; stooping, they presented an incredible expanse of pale cloth and a flutter of tawdry ribbons.†   (source)
  • I learned about their tawdry dreams, their simple hopes, their home lives, their fear of feeling anything deeply, their sex problems, their husbands.†   (source)
  • Though the sidewalks were jammed, the faces she saw were as unfamiliar as the signs overhead, new people, many rough-looking men and tawdrily dressed women.†   (source)
  • The two girls, neither much over twenty, are typical dollar street walkers, dressed in the usual tawdry get-up.†   (source)
  • People felt tawdry in the Justice Room when the old soldier had left it, and many eyed the red whips sideways, with a secret dread.†   (source)
  • In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.†   (source)
  • But this rather tawdry exuberance was only one aspect of the town that day; not a few of those filling the streets at sundown, among them Rambert and his wife, hid under an air of calm satisfaction subtler forms of happiness.†   (source)
  • It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding cake.†   (source)
  • Her new cerise dress has been a failure, and makes her look tawdry and wan.†   (source)
  • A part of Dick's mind was made up of the tawdry souvenirs of his boyhood.†   (source)
  • He remembered with bitterness that scene of tawdry tribute.†   (source)
  • And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.†   (source)
  • He was sure that he could do something better than his friend had ever done, or could ever do, something higher than mere tawdry journalism if he only got the chance.†   (source)
  • In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair.†   (source)
  • She pitied herself that her romance should be pitiful; she sighed that in this colorless hour, to this austere self, it should seem tawdry.†   (source)
  • His arms, outstretched, held out before him a little image of the Blessed Virgin—a tawdry, scarlet and Prussian blue affair that the girl had given him on her first return from the convent.†   (source)
  • We ought to pity a humanity that had let a tawdry array of flimsy numbers compel it to believe in its own nothingness, that had allowed itself to be deprived of the pathos of its own importance.†   (source)
  • It had that woebegone, forsaken, tawdry appearance, which reminds one so much of a ball-dress, the morning after.†   (source)
  • Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.†   (source)
  • Then, in a very great desire of rebellion and unleashing of all her hatreds, "The pettier and more tawdry it is, the more blame to Main Street.†   (source)
  • He was alone at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scene-cloths and human dolls framed by the garish lamps of the stage.†   (source)
  • They talked to each other across the theatre, and shared their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them.†   (source)
  • She awoke at ebb-time, at three of the morning, woke sharply and fully; and sharply and coldly as her father pronouncing sentence on a cruel swindler she gave judgment: "A pitiful and tawdry love-affair.†   (source)
  • "My son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured Mrs. Vane, taking up a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch it.†   (source)
  • But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.†   (source)
  • Tawdry!†   (source)
  • In one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the tawdrily-painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two haggard women mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust.†   (source)
  • It was the usual collection of small oddments: bits of cloth, quack medicines, cheap fairings, a clothful of atta—greyish, rough-ground native flour—twists of down-country tobacco, tawdry pipe-stems, and a packet of curry-stuff, all wrapped in a quilt.†   (source)
  • The last scene of her dismal Vanity Fair comedy was fast approaching; the tawdry lamps were going out one by one; and the dark curtain was almost ready to descend.†   (source)
  • "Can your idols walk or speak, or have they the glorious gift of reason?" demanded the trapper, with some indignation in his voice; "though but little given to run into the noise and chatter of the settlements, yet have I been into the towns in my day, to barter the peltry for lead and powder, and often have I seen your waxen dolls, with their tawdry clothes and glass eyes—"†   (source)
  • Bareacres Castle was theirs, too, with all its costly pictures, furniture, and articles of vertu—the magnificent Vandykes; the noble Reynolds pictures; the Lawrence portraits, tawdry and beautiful, and, thirty years ago, deemed as precious as works of real genius; the matchless Dancing Nymph of Canova, for which Lady Bareacres had sat in her youth—Lady Bareacres splendid then, and radiant in wealth, rank, and beauty—a toothless, bald, old woman now—a mere rag of a former robe of state.†   (source)
  • If she had so little moral character that she could ignore an upright man like me for the tawdry glitter of New York, she wasn't worth thinking about.†   (source)
  • Come, you promised me a tawdry lace, and a pair of sweet gloves.†   (source)
  • His habit, made of calico, was dirty, greasy, and very proper for a Mersy Andrew or Scaramouch, with all its tawdry trappings, as hanging sleeves, tassels, &c.†   (source)
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