Shabby Quotes

On this page you will find all the quotes on the topic "Shabby". There are currently 95 quotes in our collection about Shabby. Discover the TOP 10 sayings about Shabby!
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  • The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.

    Eye   Class   Portions  
    Thorstein Veblen (2012). “The Theory of the Leisure Class”, p.77, Courier Corporation
  • ... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of which Want is the mother. "Miserable" covers many; "shabby" most, and I am sadly aware that, in a large majority of minds, "disagreeable" includes them all.

    Mother   Mind   Majority  
    Albion Fellows Bacon (1914). “Beauty for Ashes, by Albion Fellows Bacon; with Numerous Illustrations”
  • At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

    Life   Years   Trying  
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”, p.45, Lulu.com
  • Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about. He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.

    Beautiful   Real   Boys  
    Margery Williams, Margery Williams Bianco, William Nicholson (2011). “The Velveteen Rabbit”, p.32, Courier Corporation
  • the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.

    J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “Tales from the Perilous Realm”, p.348, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

    Jay McInerney (2011). “Bright Lights, Big City”, p.31, Vintage
  • Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

    Sex   Crazy   Mean  
  • Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

    Love Is   Gold   Our Love  
    Iris Murdoch (1962). “An Unofficial Rose: A Novel”
  • The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

    Money   Self   Ideas  
  • To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

    Teaching   Mean   College  
    H. G. Wells (2009). “The Invisible Man”, p.66, Cosimo, Inc.
  • Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

  • We are not cowed into timidity by death and life. Were we forced to rely on our own shabby resources we would be pitiful people in deed. But the awareness of Christ's present risenness persuades us that we are buoyed up and carried on by a life greater than our own.

  • I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

  • This human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.

    May   Stuff   Irony  
    "Mrs. Wallop".
  • Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

    "Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964". Book by Randall Jarrell, "The Development of Yeats's Sense of Reality" (p. 89), 1980.
  • A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

    Shoes   Matter   Rooms  
    Willa Cather (2002). “The Professor's House”, p.59, U of Nebraska Press
  • The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.

    Book   Men   Elderly  
    Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). “The Blithedale Romance”, p.9
  • Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

    Edward Dahlberg (1964). “Alms for oblivion: essays”
  • The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

    Art   Mistake   Science  
    Dyer's Hand (1963) "The Poet and the City"
  • It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat.

    Men   Coats   Every Man  
    Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.112
  • Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

    Country   Lying   Winter  
    1918 My Antonia, bk.2, ch.7.
  • Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.

    Wise   Kings   Clothes  
  • In the early forties and fifties almost everybody "had about enough to live on," and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.

  • Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

    East Coker (1940) pt. 5
  • A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart and put it back into its normal condition, as a tough somewhat scarred but operating organ.

    Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead (2006). “The letters of Martha Gellhorn”, Vintage
  • All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one's own hand.

    Suicide   Fall   Mean  
    Hermann Hesse (1983). “Steppenwolf”, Bantam
  • Humor is widely used by Indians to deal with life. Indian gatherings are marked by laughter and jokes, many directed at the horrors of history, at the continuing impact of colonization, and at the biting knowledge that living as an exile in one's own land necessitates. . . . Certainly the time frame we presently inhabit has much that is shabby and tricky to offer; and much that needs to be treated with laughter and ironic humor.

    Laughter   Land   Impact  
  • It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.

    Arrogance   Want   Kind  
  • ... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.

    Mother   Flower   House  
    Alice Walker, Barbara Christian (1994). “Everyday Use”, p.47, Rutgers University Press
  • The more supple vagabond, too, is sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust, in an ever-shabby coat, though finer than the farmer's best, yet never dressed.... He especially is the creature of the occasion. He empties both his pockets and his character into the stream, and swims in such a day. He dearly loves the social slush. There is no reserve of soberness in him.

    Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.241, Xist Publishing
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