Sample sentences for HAND-TO-MOUTH

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Definition

a subsistence level of poverty such that all resources are needed just to survive and none are left to save or invest for the future

She lives hand-to-mouth.

She'd been living hand-to-mouth in a cardboard lean-to a few blocks from the seawall when she was picked up.
Abraham Verghese -- Cutting for Stone
After a couple of months, I was living pretty much hand to mouth.
Mal Peet -- Tamar
When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman—just from hand to mouth.
Henrik Ibsen -- A Doll's House
"[64] [64] Tirer le diable par la queue, "to live from hand to mouth."
Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
There she is with plenty of money, and a house and farm, and horses, and comfort, and here am I living from hand to mouth—a needy adventurer.
Thomas Hardy -- Far from the Madding Crowd
He knew besides that the Athelnys lived from hand to mouth, and with their large family had neither space nor money to entertain a stranger.
W. Somerset Maugham -- Of Human Bondage
Magdalena gave birth to a baby girl, Amantina, and for years they lived hand to mouth.
Julia Alvarez -- In the Time of the Butterflies
Best live a careless life from hand to mouth.
Sophocles -- Oedipus the King
Gollum watched every morsel from hand to mouth, like an expectant dog by a diner's chair.
J.R.R. Tolkien -- The Two Towers
We live from hand to mouth, as you can see .... there is no wealth here, such as your goods might have brought.
Kamala Markandaya -- Nectar in a Sieve
In America society seems to live from hand to mouth, like an army in the field.
Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 1
But what help are you going to be to these people on Brewster while you're living hand-to-mouth on file-clerk jobs waiting for a revolution?
Gloria Naylor -- The Women of Brewster Place
The German poet Goethe once said that "he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth."
Jostein Gaarder -- Sophie's World
We had together consumed all my pistoles, and now just rubbed on from hand to mouth.
Benjamin Franklin -- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was.
Virginia Woolf -- To the Lighthouse
They were people of a sort very common in America today, who live respectably from hand to mouth.
Theodore Dreiser -- Sister Carrie
I'm tired of living hand to mouth.
Dave Peizer -- A Man Named Dave
At eighteen he would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to hour, from penny to penny, until eighty.
Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit
Now you have to understand that twenty pennies might be a good bit of money for some little ragamuffin troupe living hand-to-mouth.
Patrick Rothfuss -- The Name of the Wind

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