All 17 Uses of

sordid
in
Of Human Bondage

Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias because to describe the object of his attentions he used the word hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by the English language.†
Chpt 29-30

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.†
Chpt 33-34

There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts.†
Chpt 49-50

He knew some who had dragged along for twenty years in the pursuit of a fame which always escaped them till they sunk into sordidness and alcoholism.†
Chpt 49-50

Cronshaw's slim bundle of poetry did not seem a substantial result for a life which was sordid.†
Chpt 49-50

The streets on the South side of the river were dingy enough on week-days, but there was an energy, a coming and going, which gave them a sordid vivacity; but on Sundays, with no shops open, no carts in the roadway, silent and depressed, they were indescribably dreary.†
Chpt 59-60

Now he was seized with a desire to do horrible, sordid things; he wanted to roll himself in gutters; his whole being yearned for beastliness; he wanted to grovel.†
Chpt 77-78

He wanted to get away from the sordid rooms in which he had endured so much suffering.†
Chpt 77-78

Leonard Upjohn in his intricate style drew graceful little pictures of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking, writing poetry: Cronshaw became a picturesque figure, an English Verlaine; and Leonard Upjohn's coloured phrases took on a tremulous dignity, a more pathetic grandiloquence, as he described the sordid end, the shabby little room in Soho; and, with a reticence which was wholly charming and suggested a much greater generosity than modesty allowed him to state, the efforts he made to transport the Poet to some cottage embowered with honeysuckle amid a flowering orchard.†
Chpt 85-86

It was in reaction from what Hayward represented that Philip clamoured for life as it stood; sordidness, vice, deformity, did not offend him; he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and he rubbed his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty, selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing.†
Chpt 87-88

They too loved and must part from those they loved, the son from his mother, the wife from her husband; and perhaps it was more tragic because their lives were ugly and sordid, and they knew nothing that gave beauty to the world.†
Chpt 105-106

It was that of a shabby lodging-house in a sordid street; and when, sick at the thought of seeing her, he asked whether she was in, a wild hope seized him that she had left.†
Chpt 109-110

He wandered along the sordid street in which, behind a high wall, lay the red brick house which was the preparatory school.†
Chpt 111-112

Definition:

immoral, dishonest, or disgusting