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Squalid   /skwˈɑləd/   Listen
Squalid

adjective
1.
Morally degraded.  Synonyms: seamy, seedy, sleazy, sordid.  "The seamy side of life" , "Sleazy characters hanging around casinos" , "Sleazy storefronts with...dirt on the walls" , "The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils" , "The squalid atmosphere of intrigue and betrayal"
2.
Foul and run-down and repulsive.  Synonyms: flyblown, sordid.  "A squalid overcrowded apartment in the poorest part of town" , "Squalid living conditions" , "Sordid shantytowns"



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"Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books



... to the seething sea, but had never breathed in mortal ear—I told him the tragedy of my life. How well I remember the scene! We were resting beneath the chestnut-trees that shadow a stretch of level sward immediately below the last short stage of ascent that leads into the heart of the squalid village now nestling in the crevices of the old Moslem fastness. The midday hush was on sea and sky. Far out on the horizon a level line of smoke showed where an unseen steamer was crawling along under the edge of the sapphire sphere. As I reached ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... and hastened away to the Capitol. All the way up the squalid and muddy avenue of that day he mused and wondered: "Who is Fitzhugh? Is there such a person any more than a Judge Basil? And yet there is a Judge, for Joyce has told me so. She, at least, can not lie to me. At last," he thought, "the dream of ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... Pump and the Cow! Such is the glorious partnership that shall finally monopolize the whole business of quenching thirst. Blessed consummation! Then Poverty shall pass away from the land, finding no hovel so wretched where her squalid form may shelter itself. Then Disease, for lack of other victims, shall gnaw his own heart and die. Then Sin, if she do not die, shall ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... ago in one of these dismal streets there stood a still more dismal yard, bearing the name of Angel Court, as if there yet lingered among those grimy homes and their squalid occupants some memories of a brighter place and of happier creatures. Angel Court was about nine feet wide, and contained ten or twelve houses on each side, with one dwelling at the further end, blocking ...
— Little Meg's Children • Hesba Stretton

... however, what I had been. I saw in the bit of mirror in my squalid lodgings a countenance stained with the indelible ink of vice and moulded beyond repair by excesses and the sufferings of shame. Could I present this horror to my daughter? Could I destroy her by claiming her? Could I ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... guest-room, however squalid, four objects were never missing: the sacred Ikon, portraits of the Tsar and Tsarina, and a printed copy of the posting rules. On the wall was generally also a bill of fare, in faded ink, which showed how many generations of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... and the legislature to put down so monstrous a nuisance. Yet still, bounded on the west by the great school of English jurisprudence, and on the east by the great mart of English trade, stood this labyrinth of squalid, tottering houses, close packed, every one, from cellar to cockloft, with outcasts whose life was one long war with society. The best part of the population consisted of debtors who were in fear of bailiffs. The rest were attorneys struck off the roll, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... conscientiously performing his part as ad interim guardian for Rose. There are also several mentions of impish, lovable Jimmy—he of the red hair, presumably—and of visits, on her afternoons off, to the cheap and somewhat squalid apartment where he lived with his thin, tired, but pitifully optimistic mother, and a stout, florid-faced father, who wore shabby, but very loud-checked, suits and was apparently a highly successful business man of big affairs, ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... hieroglyphic characters, executed in red chalk and charcoal. The ceiling had, in many places, given way; the laths had been removed; and, where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs. Over an old crazy bedstead was thrown a squalid, patchwork counterpane; and upon the counterpane lay a black hood and scarf, a pair of bodice of the cumbrous form in vogue at the beginning of the last century, and some other articles of female attire. On a small shelf near the foot of the bed stood ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... mourn as they mourn who have no hope: he has an absolute conviction in future compensation; and, meanwhile, his lively poetic impulse, the poetry of ideas, not of formal verse, and his radiant innate idealism breathe a soul into the merest matter of squalid work-a-day life and awaken the sweetest harmonies of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... having lost all his money in the Anglo-Bengalee Company (which, of course, went to pieces on Tigg's death), he sank lower and lower, till at last, a drunken, squalid old man, he eked out a miserable existence writing whining begging letters to the very people whom he had once labored so ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives

... by the police" to have entered the house. And in order to present an unbiased story, the side of the supposed malefactor should be given. In the intense excitement resulting from a newly committed crime, or in the squalid surroundings of a prison cell, an accused person does not appear to his best advantage, and it is easy for the reporter to let prejudice sway him, perhaps causing irreparable injury to innocent persons. The race riot in Atlanta, in 1905, in which numbers of innocent negroes ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... Mated with a squalid savage,—what to me were sun or clime? I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... suicide—others that he was merely leaning out too far in admiration of the view. Who knows what really inspired that sudden fierce rush to death? But whatever the cause there is one fact that remains—shining like a star above the squalid wreck of his latter years—he died happy. The indisputable proof of this can be obtained from perusal of the first line of a poem which was discovered in his ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... third time odd that he should find the door unbolted and go upstairs. All this, we say, would have been strange to a spectator, but it was not so to these three persons. Presently the one first named found himself in Mr. Secretary's somewhat squalid room. He then stood disclosed as the assistant whom the Secretary had first seen at Whitehall sitting in the Commissioner's Office. This was not the second nor third interview which had taken ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... move. She stood at the foot of the stairs, barring the way, the chill morning light falling on her threatening attitude, her grey dishevelled hair and all the squalid disarray of her dress. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... deliver her fisticuffs, like bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult. The voices of many are threatening and formidable. They are quick to anger, but quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons; nor among them is ever seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in ragged garments. At all ages they are apt for military service. The old man goes forth to the fight with equal strength of breast, with limbs as hardened by cold and assiduous labor, and as contemptuous of all dangers, as the young. Not one of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... an audible soliloquy, "is Irish life?" And then he answered the question himself as she remained silent. "A tragedy, a squalid tragedy!" But she looked at him cold, irresponsive, defiant, and he rushed away before the old man came back ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various

... to be happy. I wonder if I shall be in good form this week-end at cricket and tennis, and croquet and billiards, and all the other jolly games I mean to play. Look at those children trying to play cricket in that dirty backyard. Poor little beggars! Fancy living in one of those horrible squalid houses. But you cannot spoil to- day for me, little backyards. On Tuesday perhaps, when I am coming again to the ugly town, your misery will make me miserable; I shall ask myself hopelessly what it all means; but just now I am too happy for pity. After all, ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne

... country displayed the same kind of ridiculous vanity, and in the majority of towns which they visited, it was the first great care of their chiefs, to impress on their minds an idea of their vast importance, which in many instances was contradicted by their ragged tobes and squalid appearance. Yet, if their own accounts were to be credited, their affluence and power were unbounded. All truth is sacrificed to this feeling of vanity and vain glory; and considering that in most cases they hold truth in great reverence, they render themselves truly ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... that made the difference between the squalid atmosphere below Fourth Street and the glowing, flashing, radiant, jewelled world up-town? Money! It meant purple and fine linen, delicacies of food and drink, pulsing machines that could make a mile a minute, high-stepping horses and high-bred ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... narrative. Its various scenes are enacted on a stormy Christmas Eve; and it opens with a humorous description of a little dissenting chapel, supposed to stand at the edge of a common; and of the various types of squalid but self-satisfied humanity which find their spiritual pasture within its walls. The narrator has just "burst out" of it. He never meant to go in. But the rain had forced him to take shelter in its porch, as evening service was about to begin: and the defiant looks of the elect ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... silver standish and some useful plate, which he had been prevailed on to accept as pledges of kindness from some who most esteemed him, together with furniture that would not have disgraced a better dwelling, banished those appearances of squalid indigence which, in his less happy days, disgusted those who came to see him.' Some of the plate Johnson had bought. See post, April ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... woman were quarrelling violently. As I slunk in white of face and with a terrible quaking feeling inside me, I saw at once the man was worse than he had ever been, and as I entered the door of the squalid room he struck the woman an awful blow, then he saw me. He grabbed me, and I think might have killed me that night, but I wrenched myself away after he had given me the first blows; he pursued me, catching at my coat, ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton

... with a side of the ever-useful kerosene tin we patched the car up temporarily and pushed off at early dawn. Our route wound through groves of palms surrounding the tumble-down tomb of some holy man, occasional collections of squalid little huts, and in the intervening "despoblado" we would catch sight of a jackal crouching in the hollow or slinking off through the scrub. Deli Abbas proved a half-deserted straggling town which gave evidence of having ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt

... associations. It consists of a series of vaults excavated out of the solid tufa rock, where it slopes down from the Capitoline Hill into the Forum, each lined with massive blocks of red volcanic stone. For a long time these vaults have been used as cellars under a row of tall squalid-looking houses built over them between the Via di Marforio and the Vicolo del Ghettarello; and the sense of smell gives convincing proof that where prisoners of state used to be confined, provisions ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... a very true-to-life author, depicting the often squalid scenes he encountered with great care and attention to detail. His young readers looked forward eagerly to his next books, and through the 1860s and 1870s there was a flow of books from his pen, sometimes ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne

... another of the miserable figures ranged upon it. They were well-grown boys, young thieves some of them, to judge by their looks; and dirty and ragged so as to be objects of abhorrence much more than of anything else to his eye. Yet to these squalid, filthy, hardened looking little wretches, scarcely decent in their rags, Eleanor was most earnestly talking; there was no avoidance in her air. Her face he could not see; he could guess at its expression, from the turns of her head to one and another, and ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner

... of disturbance—all made her long to push this woman from the room; this woman with the skimpy figure, and eyes that, for all their patience, had in them something virago-like; this woman who carried about with her an atmosphere of sordid grief, of squalid menaces, and scandal. She longed all the more because it could well be seen from the seamstress's helpless attitude that she too would have liked an easy life. To dwell on things like this was to feel ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... squalid, ragged, and filthy, to a degree I had never before witnessed. There was apparently but little discipline on board, but a great deal of disputation and a continual jabbering. A ruffianly-looking fellow, with a swarthy complexion and big black whiskers, who proved to be the ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene—the moon gleaming from skies half-autumnal, hall-wintry, upon squalid decay, through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest, his sleep was feverish, and troubled by ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... were sitting in a park, a pallid child of ten asked to "shine" their shoes. In sympathy they allowed him to do it. The little fellow had a gaunt and hungry look and his movements were very sluggish. He said his name was Peter Turner and he gave some squalid east side tenement district as his home. He said that his father was dead, his mother was bedridden, and he, the oldest of three children, was the only support of the family. He got up at five and prepared their simple meal, and did ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... epidemic, and imputed it, not to infected substances imported from the East or West, but to a morbid constitution of the atmosphere, owing wholly or in part to filthy streets, airless habitations, and squalid persons. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... that the sunset light made everything lovely. To say that it made the keeper of the curiosity shop lovely would be a tribute to it perhaps too extreme. It would easily have made him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type. But he was a Jew of another and much less admirable type; a Jew with a very well-sounding name. For though there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of any people, one ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... gaze, and his mind's eye conjured up the contrast of his slovenly, shabby home, with all its neglected appurtenances! No trim garden at Rood Hall, no scent from odorous orange blossoms. Here poverty at least was elegant—there, how squalid! He did not comprehend at how cheap a rate the luxury of the Beautiful can be effected. They now approached the extremity of the Squire's park pales! and Randal, seeing a little gate, bade the farmer stop ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... given every farthing I was worth to have been snugly back in the Congo again. But the thing had got to be seen through, and I intended to keep my end up somehow. I couldn't afford to die like a rat in a squalid hole like that. ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... the city seemed to rise from the pavements. The wall of the Embankment was lined with people, leaning over to catch the languid breeze that crept up with the tide. They crossed the river and threaded their way through a nightmare of squalid streets, where half-dressed men and women hung from the top windows and were even to be seen upon the roof, struggling for air. The car at last pulled up at the corner of a ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... individuals, anxious, we concluded, to watch our proceedings. Our party was but small, for alas! the greater number of the lieutenants were unable from sickness to attend the funeral. We were a melancholy party—pale, haggard, and squalid. We placed the body on the grass. What a fine, handsome young fellow he looked! We began to dig his grave. Without consideration, we began to dig it east and west. When we had proceeded some way in our work, our French masters interfered and said that we ought to dig ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... wealth, and all the power, and all the functions of civil society in the United States shall have been transferred to Wall Street; then, when nothing shall remain to the American people except their squalid huts and the sorrowful reminiscences of a great republic; then, when Wall Street in very truth shall have possessed itself of the earth and consumed mankind,—I suppose that the benevolent owners of the world will found a few libraries, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... poor show, with its squalid houses, and glaring clayed roofs. We always wanted to invest in real estate there in Abraham Street or Noah Place, or some of its well-established thoroughfares, but are discouraged since we have had these views of the old town. Baalbec does ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... "vennels" running back from it was the High street of Glasgow at the time my story opens. And yet, though dirty, noisy and overcrowded with sin and suffering, a flavor of old time royalty and romance lingered amid its vulgar surroundings; and midway of its squalid length a quaint brown frontage kept behind it noble halls of learning, and pleasant old courts full of the "air of still ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... neighing of steeds and the baying of hounds; when there was daily hunting in the park, and nightly dancing and diversion in the hall,—it is with Hoghton Tower at this season that the present tale has to do, and not with it as it is now—silent, solitary, squalid, saddening, but still whispering of the glories of the past, still telling of the kingly ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... allotments, a few hundred thousands would be added to the population of the United Kingdom, at the cost of one of the few remaining beauties which make our country attractive to the eye. The introduction of the potato into Ireland added several millions of squalid inhabitants to that ill-conditioned island, and when the crop failed, large numbers of them inflicted themselves on the United States, to the detriment of that country. The richest countries to-day ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... Through squalid life they labored, in sordid grief they died,— Those sons of a mighty mother, those props of ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... wandering along San Fernando, but not meeting any sailor he knew, he decided to return home. As the night was beautiful, with a brilliant moon transforming the squalid city into a fantastic fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There he wandered back and forth, passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them, ever with the thought of Hongkong, of living ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... is situated, as everybody should know, in the Rue Neuve St.-Genevieve, just where it descends so steeply towards the Rue de l'Arbalete that horses have some trouble in climbing it. We know its squalid exterior, its creaking bell, the wall painted to represent an arcade in green marble, the crumbling statue of Cupid, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental pabulum, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, the lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... for a moment's breathing space near the summit. Beneath them the squalid little town huddled in the draw and ran sprawling up the hillsides. Shaft-houses and dumps disfigured even ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine

... is civilized as are the wide well-paved streets of Ferrara compared with the tortuous black alleys of mediaeval Paris; as are the well-lit, clean, spacious palaces of Michelozzo or Bramante compared with the squalid, unhealthy, uncomfortable mediaeval castles of Duerer's etchings. It is indeed a trifle too civilized; too civilized to produce every kind of artistic fruit; it is—and here comes the crushing difference between the Italian Renaissance and our ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... In the mean squalid room back of the saloon half a score of men were assembled. They were all young in years, in other things not youthful. Some of them lounged against the wall. Some sat at tables. All were drinking. The air was foul with smoke and reeked with ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... might have been more put out than he certainly was when, upon turning into the street, he felt the keen east wind nipping his ears; but it was from a poor house lying in the midst of a very labyrinth of squalid back streets and foul courts, and yet but a mere stone's-throw from ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford

... of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... tribe, the sheyk of the entire clan had laid claim to the principal captives, and had carried off the young lady and her uncle; and in his dwelling she had a boarded floor to sleep on, and had been made much more comfortable than in the squalid huts below. Her original master, Yakoub, had, however, come to seize her, with the force described by Murad. Then it was that again there was a threat to kill rather than resign them; but on this occasion it was averted by Sheyk Abderrahman's ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... fleet of Greece. Upstarted from his throne, appall'd, the King Of Erebus, and with a cry his fears 80 Through hell proclaim'd, lest Neptune, o'er his head Shattering the vaulted earth, should wide disclose To mortal and immortal eyes his realm Terrible, squalid, to the Gods themselves A dreaded spectacle; with such a sound 85 The Powers eternal into battle rush'd.[4] Opposed to Neptune, King of the vast Deep, Apollo stood with his wing'd arrows arm'd; ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... look after them, but they had already disappeared into that maze of crooked, squalid streets around the Pitti. Fortunately, there was not more than a sovereign in it. I was filled with regret, however, on account of my friend's letter. He had trusted me with some secret. I had accepted the confidence ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux

... a blanket worn into a large hole in the middle. The poor woman's long hair, unconfined by any cap, strayed about her bare and emaciated shoulders, and her shrunken bands picked at the blanket incessantly, everything appearing to her diseased vision covered with black spots. Never before had so squalid an object met Margaret's eyes. The husband sat by the empty grate, stooping and shrinking, and looking at the floor with an idiotic expression of countenance, as appeared through the handkerchief which was tied over his head. He was just sinking ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value. Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered region. In its ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... wandering, she found herself in a poorer quarter of the city; the streets were narrower and dirtier, and the people began to look squalid and wretchedly dressed; there were smaller shops and dingy houses. She saw unkempt men and women and uncared for little children. The poverty of the poor she had seen in her own village seemed comfort and luxury by contrast. ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the shadows twinkled a priceless mirror; shutting off Calvin's serving table was a painted screen worth its weight in gold. It was a far cry from the catsup bottles and squalid service of George's early days. The Bannisters of Huntersfield wore their poverty like ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

... places, and she had never before been brought into close touch with this side of life. The sight of actual raw misery had come home to her with an added force from that circumstance. Wandering on, she had reached a street which eclipsed in cheerlessness even its squalid neighbors. All the smells and noises of the East Side seemed to be penned up here in a sort of canyon. The masses of dirty clothes hanging from the fire-escapes increased the atmosphere of depression. Groups of ragged children ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... she awoke, and struggled hard to chase away the heart-rending vision, and then she sunk again to meet another still more frightful. The wind whistled gloomily through the forest trees; the wild bird screamed his death song; and a spectre rose with sunken eyes and squalid cheek, his wounds distilling blood, and his raven locks clotted with gore. It was her lover—he had left the tree on which he withered like the seared leaf of autumn, and stalked to her widowed couch smiling sadly in death,—she shrieked aloud—the phantom ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... non-resistance, they were broadly scouted as sentimental and idealistic idiots, and reminded of a nature red in tooth and claw rampant in this most sordid of all possible worlds. Now that the Rationalists take up the case against war from another end, they are denounced as squalid souls, with a greengrocer's outlook, morbidly anxious about the price of peas and potatoes, and urged to remember that not by bread alone doth man live. In The Foundations of International Polity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... easily persuaded that their proper sphere of action was Versailles, with its Assembly, that was able to do everything, and did nothing for the poor. They played the genuine part of mothers whose children were starving in their squalid homes, and they thereby afforded to motives which they neither shared nor understood the aid of a diamond point that nothing could withstand. It was this first detachment of invading women that allowed Stanislas Maillard to lead ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... tram and walked down a street of those squalid brick tenements which coal-mining seems to germinate like a rash upon the earth's surface. The debris and the scaffoldings of pits were dotted about the adjacent countryside. Sooty cabbage-patches occupied the occasional interspaces in the ranks of houses. Briggs directed ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir

... scramble, down the sides of ravines; it drew its followers up steep rock-faces that were baked almost to cooking heat by the sun; and finally, it broke up into fan-shape amongst decrepit banana groves, and presently ended amongst a squalid collection of grass and wattle huts which formed ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... here stated, it appeared reasonable to expect in Lee and his army some depression of spirits. The fact was strikingly the reverse. The army was in excellent spirits, probably from the highly-agreeable contrast of the budding April woods with the squalid trenches, and the long-unfelt joy of an unfettered march through the fields of spring. General Lee shared this hopeful feeling in a very remarkable degree. His expression was animated and buoyant, his seat in the saddle erect and commanding, and he ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke

... moment recall the Bourbons, that Napoleon executed the Duc d'Enghien. It was to make an end of claims older than his own upon the allegiance of a people essentially and naturally monarchical. It was a crime, but it was not a squalid and foolish crime like the murder of Louis XVI. It belonged to the same category with the execution of Conradin of Hohenstaufen by Charles of Anjou—not, indeed, as to its mere atrocity, but as to its motives and its intent. It announced ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... had killed, when suddenly a motley concourse appeared wading across the creek toward us. They filed past in rapid succession, men, women, and children; some were on horseback, some on foot, but all were alike squalid and wretched. Old squaws, mounted astride of shaggy, meager little ponies, with perhaps one or two snake-eyed children seated behind them, clinging to their tattered blankets; tall lank young men on foot, with bows and arrows in their hands; and girls whose native ugliness ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... on, we heard a great noise of men quarrelling in an adjoining court; and, altogether, it seemed a squalid and ugly place to live in, and a most undesirable one to die in. At the conclusion of our labors, the young woman asked us if we would not go into another chamber, and look at the corpse, and appeared to think that we should be rather glad than otherwise of the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... embassies had historians whose narratives may still be read with interest. Those historians described vividly, and sometimes bitterly, the savage ignorance and the squalid poverty of the barbarous country in which they had sojourned. In that country, they said, there was neither literature nor science, neither school nor college. It was not till more than a hundred years ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... verandah he suggested that they follow other guests into the Park. He gave Rachael his arm in the courtly fashion of the day, and they walked about the open paths and talked of the negroes singing in the cane-fields, and the squalid poverty of the North, as if their hearts were as calm as they are to-day. People turned often to look at them, commenting according to the mixing of their essences, but all concurring in praise of so much beauty. Hamilton's sunburn had ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... which soon turned from the well-lighted streets into a section where squalid houses crowded against each other, and dirty children swarmed in the streets in their last games of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... scenes, for life's endearments fled, Shall drop a tear and dwell upon the dead! Poor wretched Outcast! I will weep for thee, And sorrow for forlorn humanity. Yes I will weep, but not that thou art come To the stern Sabbath of the silent tomb: For squalid Want, and the black scorpion Care, Heart-withering fiends! shall never enter there. I sorrow for the ills thy life has known As thro' the world's long pilgrimage, alone, Haunted by Poverty and woe-begone, Unloved, unfriended, thou didst journey on: Thy youth ...
— Poems • Robert Southey

... was able to obtain a wretched little room to himself; but never did storm-tossed and endangered sailors enter a harbor's quiet waters with a greater sense of relief than did Haldane as he crept up into this squalid nook, which would at least give him a little respite from ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... form lurched out into the night; there, from a dance-hall came the rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street on each side, like interjected inanimate blotches, rows of squalid tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke to her—his untrained fingers fumbling in clumsy homage at the ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard

... He returned in the evening, Cornelius accompanying him to the station; but he did not read in the train which took him back to the Fountall Theological College, as he had done on the way out. That ineradicable trouble still remained as a squalid spot in the expanse of his life. He sat with the other students in the cathedral choir next day; and the recollection of the trouble obscured the purple splendour thrown by the panes upon ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy

... furnishings were similar to those in New England; but there were greater contrasts in table appointments. There was more silver, and richer food; but the negro servants were so squalid, clumsy, and uncouth that the incongruity made the meals very surprising ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... here were the histories of two of the occupants of our court. The others may have had experiences no less strange; and in many another court in this great city, from the stately inclosures of the Rue de Lille to the squalid dens of the Faubourg St. Antoine, (if the names have not escaped me,) lives well worth the telling are passing away. Such is ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... make me forget the brand of the dog, as I crouch in this hideous place; To make me forget once I kindled the light of love in a lady's face, Where even the squalid Siwash now holds me ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service

... drove to the door, a throng of mendicants and squalid peasants came forth. Their faces had a cadaverous hue, which could not but be remarked. Their eyes, too, seemed heavy, and deep set in the head; while many had their throats bandaged, from the effects of glandular swellings, brought on by the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... blackness of his sin. No Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... in Ancoats, that teeming, squalid quarter which lies but a stone's-throw from the principal thoroughfares and buildings of Manchester, and in its varieties of manufacturing life and population presents types which are all its own. Here are the cotton operatives who work the small proportion of mills still ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... as men sometimes will on a change of bed, and having many things on his mind. He was lying with his face towards the wall, but observing a light and some little stir in the room, he turned round in his bed, and saw the figure of a woman, squalid, and ragged in dress; her figure rather low and broad; as well as I recollect, she had something—either a cloak or shawl—on, and wore a bonnet. Her back was turned, and she appeared to be searching or rummaging for something ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... list of expected guests beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned I was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one day at the end of three years I received another visit from his aunt. She was drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs. Brooksmith, had been dead a year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had always looked after her a bit since her troubles; I never knew what her troubles ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... not in ease and competence, is genius usually born and nurtured; but often in adversity and destitution, amidst the harassing cares of a straitened household, in bare and fireless garrets, with the noise of squalid children, in the turbulence of domestic contentions, and in the deep gloom of uncheered despair. This is its most frequent birthplace, and amid scenes like these unpropitious, repulsive, wretched surroundings, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... helpers were a company of devoted women, drawn mainly from the fashionable fringe which skirted his squalid district and banded together as a Sisterhood. For clerical help he depended entirely on the brothers of his society, and the money saved by these voluntary agencies he distributed among the poor, the sick, and the unfortunate. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... a white man named Pratt,—that is to say, if he were washed in the river he would look white,—who said that he had lived with the tribe for sixteen years, and had nine (half-breed) children, and they were more filthy and squalid than ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle

... suspicion of Mateo's cabin and the family that lived there in squalid content. The incident ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower

... the McNulty cabin, buried in the most squalid district of the town, bearing a message from his mother. When he got there he found that Mr. McNulty was the ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman

... was overcast, rain threatened. A pall of mingled smoke and mist hung over the entire city. From the car window as the train wound its serpentine course in and out the maze of grimy offices, shops and tenements, everything appeared drab, dirty and squalid. New York was seen at its ugliest. Ensconced in a cross-seat, his chin leaning heavily on his hand, Howard gazed dejectedly out of the window. The depressing outlook was in keeping with his ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow

... constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... with her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had done, and lost themselves ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... thickens. Then all the sliding screens are closed. But in the paper panes there are holes; and at all the lower holes the curious take regular turns at peeping. At a higher hole I do some peeping myself. The crowd is not prepossessing: it is squalid, dull-featured, remarkably ugly. But it is gentle and silent; and there are one or two pretty faces in it which seem extraordinary by reason of the general homeliness ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... loud, merry voices. Traffic went on in the crowded mart, and pleasure was pursued in the luxurious halls of the noble. Here, flower-crowned guests reclined at the banquet, listening to sweet music, while yonder the squalid miser counted his gold, and there a fair young mother smiled upon her children. Just the same passions crowded into human hearts that day, just the same delusions were followed, the same pleasures felt, arid the same griefs deplored on that bright day in Imperial Rome, as now agitate, or delight, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... himself. Bartley declined to drink again. He was thinking of this squalid tragedy and of its possible outcome. The erstwhile sprightly Cheyenne held a new significance for the Easterner. That a man could ride up and down the trails singing, and yet carry beneath it all the grim intent some ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... himself alone! Mark maiden innocence a prey To love-pretending snares, This boasted honour turns away, Shunning soft pity's rising sway, Regardless of the tears and unavailing prayers! Perhaps this hour, in misery's squalid nest, She strains your infant to her joyless breast, And with a mother's fears shrinks at the rocking blast! Oh ye! who, sunk in beds of down, Feel not a want but what yourselves create, Think, for a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... seen, to sing or to recite something, to prove to themselves that they were still alive. Then, after this breath of pure air, this glimpse of the heavens above, comforted by a semblance of glory and success, they returned to their squalid apartments, having gained a little strength to vegetate. There were philosophers wiser than Leibnitz; there were painters longing for fame, but whose pictures looked as if an earthquake had shaken everything from its perpendicular; musicians—inventors of new instruments; savans in the style of ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... on the coffee-pot, remained engrossed in thought. She desired to know everything, so she would go. The thought of that mysterious place of assignation in so squalid a nook of Paris was an ever-present pain and vexation. She judged such taste hateful, but in it she ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... of the village, near the canal and the railway station, and many of the houses were dilapidated. Jack was thinking that Mary might write something about improving such a neglected, squalid quarter, when he heard a shriek from the door of a house ...
— Crowded Out o' Crofield - or, The Boy who made his Way • William O. Stoddard

... magnificent tradition of her courage. But it is impossible to overlook the elements which have taken the romantic colour out of the struggle. No chivalry could survive close experience of the vile and bestial cruelty of German methods. The sad and squalid aspects of a war of resistance, fought in the very bleeding flesh of the beloved mother-country, were bound to be fatal to "cette bonne humeur bienfaisante" which so marvellously characterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, the mere physical ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... City they saw numbers in front of the cafes and even going to the theatre. Flashy carriages of thievish men who had enriched themselves under the new conditions, rolled frequently by. The basis of their power, the squalid element with jealous, insolent eyes, also increased on ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall

... a minute or two, for they were passing out of the yard belonging to the "model dwellings," as Macclesfield Buildings were called, into the squalid street beyond; and in avoiding the group of loafers smoking the pipe of idleness, and enjoying the comfortable repose of sloth, Lesley and Mr. Kenyon were so far separated ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... far advanced. On the bare limbs of the forest hung a few withered remnants of its gay autumnal livery; and the smoke crept upward through the sullen November air from the squalid wigwams of La Salle's Abenaki and Mohegan allies. These, his new friends, were savages, whose midnight yells had startled the border hamlets of New England; who had danced around Puritan scalps, and whom Puritan imaginations painted ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... thunderstorm rolled away, the rain cleared off, the moon shone out, and Dorothea reached her squalid home, drenched, cold, weary, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... the figure of a man, who by the regulations of the place, was not entitled to be there, at that forbidden hour. The stranger was meanly dressed, with every appearance about his person and countenance, of squalid poverty and of the most dissolute habits. Sorrow had softened the military pride of Middleton, and, as he passed the crouching form of the intruder, he said, in tones of great mildness, or rather ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... of Sorata. From this distance the red tile roofs, the soft blue, green, and yellow of its stuccoed walls, look indescribably fresh and grateful. A closer inspection will probably dissipate this impression; it will be squalid and dirty, the river-stone paving of its street will be deep in the accumulation of filth, dirty Indian children will swarm in them with mangy dogs and bedraggled ducks, the gay frescoes of its ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... stone we knew not, but Elzevir spoke again, saying that the stone was ours and we had found it in England. When Mr. Aldobrand laughed again, and held the jewel up once more: were such pebbles, he asked, found on the shore by every squalid fisherman? And the great diamond flashed as he put it back into his purse, and cried to me, 'Am I not queen of all the diamonds of the world? Must I house with this base rascal?' but I ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... he ambles up the street beneath the roaring "El" between the rows of reeking sweat-shops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... accompanied the fleet to Brunai after MAGELLAN'S death, and published a glowing account of its wealth and the brilliancy of its Court, with its royally caparisoned elephants, a report which it is very difficult to reconcile with the present squalid condition of the existing "Venice of Hovels," as it has been styled from its palaces and houses being all built in, or rather over, the river to ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher

... became a sublime poem, where the glowing imagination of a tender faith lavished all its glories. That the Christian church then satisfied the heart with its mystic dogmas and symbolic representations, is proved by the fact that the masses did not care how obscure and squalid their own hovels might be, provided the temple was great and magnificent. It was the temple of simple, unreasoning, unquestioning faith, but decorated with the highest marvels of art; it was always thrown open to the people, and in it they passed nearly half their days. Man brought what he held to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... was unnecessary. Both she and her mother were on intimate terms with these hypothetical friends who so frequently turned up from Paris or elsewhere when it was necessary that she should suddenly go back to London and live in squalid seclusion in the unopened house, with a charwoman to provide her with underdone or burnt chops, and eggs at eighteen a shilling, while the shutters of the front rooms were closed, and dusty desolation reigned. She knew every detail of the melancholy squalor ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... was suddenly called from a lovely dream back to the squalid reality. "In the Temple of Isis," he said gloomily. "Agne? In the face of all the people? And ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... perfectly legitimate part too. At any rate it has come to be an impalpable aroma through which only both the songs and their singer must henceforth be read and absorb'd. Through that view-medium of misfortune—of a noble spirit in low environments, and of a squalid and premature death—we view the undoubted facts, (giving, as we read them now, a sad kind of pungency,) that Burns's were, before all else, the lyrics of illicit loves and carousing intoxication. Perhaps even it is this strange, impalpable post-mortem ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... darkening into dusk one day late in January when Philip Ashe stood in the hallway of a squalid tenement house, looking out into a dingy court. The place was surrounded by tall buildings which cut off the light and made day shorter than nature had intended, an effect which was not lessened by the clothes drying smokily on ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... walk. These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he would do so under ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... up the country, City Bushman, where you went, For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent; And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push, Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush; But we lately heard you singing of the 'plains where shade is not', And you mentioned it was dusty — 'all was ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson

... wet and muddy under lurid lamp-lights. Just above the house-tops appeared the full moon, a reddish disk, blurred athwart floating vapour. The car drove northward, speedily passing from the region of main streets and great edifices into a squalid district of factories and workshops and crowded by-ways. At Aston Church the young man alighted, and walked rapidly for five minutes, till he reached a row of small modern houses. Socially they represented a step or two upwards in the gradation which, at Birmingham, begins ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing

... his wife had large means, the household, under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually increasing ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... was a squalid sort of thing banked by mountains so grand in their rugged strength that I never got used to the dirty, dusty little half-civilized town there on the plateau. Even as a child I felt the intolerable difference between the place and its surroundings. Men ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades

... educational importance I rank the advantage of seeing human nature in its primitive surroundings, far from the squalid and chilly influences of the tail-end of the Glacial epoch. I admit at once that cold has done much, exceeding much, for human development—has been the mother of civilisation in somewhat the same sense that necessity has been ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... a place!" said the boy. "I don't mind quite a cottage if it's clean and cheerful, but this place is so grim and squalid. I can't tell you how glad I am you're not going to stay on here alone. It really isn't fit ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth

... and Murray was standing at his window gazing upon surroundings of squalid shacks, the tattered fringe of the main street. But he was not looking at these things. His thought was upon others that had nothing to do with the mire of civilization in which he stood. But he gave no sign, except ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... brisk pace which soon relaxed into a funereal jog, and went on and on through narrow, squalid streets till we reached the Nile. Although I had given myself an extra hour for emergencies, I became impatient ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... descried on the North River, near Washington Market, a boarding-house so very mean and squalid that he was tempted to go in and inquire the price of board there. The price was two dollars and ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... their cloaks over the varied and glittering plunder that lay scattered about on the ground; and strange was the contrast of the sparkling jewellery, the rich stuffs, and embroidered robes, strewed on the beach, with the mean and filthy garments that partially concealed them, and the wild and squalid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... in their shirt-sleeves, acclaimed the rarity of the bargains which they had to offer; and, allowing for the difference of costume, these tireless Israelites, heedless of climatic conditions, sweating at their mongery, might well have stood, not in a squalid London thoroughfare, but in an equally squalid market-street of ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... scant; Now absorb your neighbour's ground, And tear his landmarks up, your own to plant. Hedges set round clients' farms Your avarice tramples; see, the outcasts fly, Wife and husband, in their arms Their fathers' gods, their squalid family. Yet no hall that wealth e'er plann'd Waits you more surely than the wider room Traced by Death's yet greedier hand. Why strain so far? you cannot leap the tomb. Earth removes the impartial sod Alike for beggar and for monarch's child: Nor the slave of Hell's dark god Convey'd ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... better, he had something to say to her. He had made up his mind that day. His own present prosperity formed too great a contrast with the poverty of Lily ... that poor kiddie who had run away from home in pursuit of happiness and whom he now found here, in this squalid room.... It was all very well to theorize about children who have earned fortunes and who haven't a farthing; but that was mere talk! Suppose he helped Lily a little in the meantime. He had prepared all sorts of good reasons; ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne

... old, I thought I had never seen a congregation of more unpromising and ungainly heads, and accordingly they are the worst and lowest specimens of humanity; starved, ill-used children of poor and vicious parents, generally arriving at the school weak and squalid, with a tendency to every vice, and without having received any moral or intellectual cultivation whatever; but the system, under able and zealous teachers, acts with rapid and beneficial effect on these rude materials, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... the face as of a man long drowned,—bloated, bleached, seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse; and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable, squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth,—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had darkened ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... in a raffle for Dave's fiddle. Yes, sir; with her kind words and pleasant smile she had got Dave to consent to raffle off his fiddle, and she was going to sell twenty-four chances at fifty cents a chance, which would bring twelve dollars cash to the squalid home. I had to respect ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... go out through the shed, and she followed, to the kitchen, slowly, with the squalid feeling that comes of sleeping in one's day clothes, and there she found the fire low and his cup and plate on the bare table. She could see him through the window. There was the horse, hitched to the staple in the corner of ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... night was the one and only picturesque feature of Paradise Street—surely so named by an individual of singularly caustic and sardonic humour, for anything less suggestive of the delights of Paradise than the squalid and malodorous street so named it would indeed be difficult to conceive—and in the course of the four years during which it had been in position that lamp had become a familiar object to every man, woman, and child within a radius of at least a mile; for the Doctor's ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood

... me with a new enthusiasm. Forthwith I started to pursue the possible course of the fugitives, threading countless by-streets and alleys, peering into squalid courts and sending many a doubtful-looking loiterer shuffling hastily round the nearest corner. Of course it was fruitless. I had no clue and did not even know the men. I was merely walking ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman

... remonstrated, but I silenced him with a sharp word; and, despatching La Font with a couple of discreet men to keep watch in the court that we might not be surprised, I bade one of the servants throw some fir-cones on the fire. These, blazing up, filled the squalid room in a moment with a glare of light, which revealed alike the livid faces of the two prisoners and the excited looks and dark ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... rose up. He did not know what to make out of what had been told him, but there was courage now and hope in his heart. He shouted; his voice was like the roar of a lion calling to his mate. At his shout his comrades roused themselves; all squalid with the dust of the desert the Argonauts ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... the court, walked along yonder street to the House. The sight of so young a woman, and so great a sovereign, thus leveled by physical necessity with the meanest, excited some of the old enthusiasm with which she used to be greeted: the populace themselves, with their squalid faces, and in their extreme misery, greeted her; but the greatest feeling was aroused among the nobles and gentry who surrounded her, and who seemed to make a point of offering more homage, the less outer circumstances commanded it. There was assembled ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... little room, where the cracks let the boisterous wind whistle through, and the smoky, grimy walls looked cheerless and unhomelike. A miserable little room in a miserable little cottage in one of the squalid streets of the Third District that nature and the city fathers ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore

... southward out of the square and into ragged, poverty-haunted Varick Street. Up the narrow stairway of a squalid brick tenement he led the penitent offspring of the Octopus. He knocked on a door, and a clear voice ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... European travellers as one of the sights never omitted from a comprehensive itinerary. It is quaint, picturesque, grand, squalid, and luxurious all rolled into one. Its castle crowns the height above the town on one side, and Arthur's Seat does the same on the other, with gloomy old Holyrood in the gulf between, the whole softened and punctuated with many evidences of modern ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... must yield. Slatin Pasha, by the way, had gone over the battle-field and identified many of the slain Emirs. At 4.20 p.m., with two batteries, several Maxims and Colonel Maxwell's brigade leading, the Sirdar rode down the great north thoroughfare towards the central part of the squalid town. The houses, or more accurately huts, were full of dervishes, hundreds of whom were severely wounded. Women and children flocked into the streets, raising cries of welcome to us. Of all the vile, dirty places on earth, Omdurman must ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... From the cheap, squalid section of town known as "railroad end," Cable's rising influence carried him to the well-earned luxury. The lines of care and toil mellowed in the face of his pretty wife, as the years rolled by; her comely ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... cloud shadows, and a ruddy brownness of field and moor are the colors of Lorraine. Here and there, on the meadows of the river and the steep flanks of the hills, were ancient, red-roofed villages. Across the autumnal fields the smoke and flame of squalid Pompey ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... reached a tiny room, quite up at the top of the house. It had a low, sloping roof, much discoloured with damp and dirt, as were also the walls. The floor was bare and black with dirt and age, the whole apartment squalid and uncomfortable. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... into any city in America I can find beautiful and costly mansions in one part of the city, and miserable, squalid tenement hovels in another part. And I never have to ask where the workers live. I know that the people who live in the mansions don't produce anything; that the wealth producers alone are ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... no commerce and scarcely any agriculture, where the only money found is paper money! Yet they all say they will be rich enough to return to France in a year's time. They have been saying this for many years. Everything is in a state of squalid neglect. The streets are neither paved nor planted with trees; the houses are merely tents of wood, moved from place to place on rollers; the windows have no glass and no curtains, and it is rare that one finds within even a few ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... unfortunate, thus manacled, was held to the narrow limits of his chain for years together in a cell to which full daylight never penetrated; sometimes—iron being expensive—the chain was so short that the wretched victim could not rise to the upright posture or even shift his position upon his squalid ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... these are mostly in the City, maintained by the City Fathers for the exclusive benefit of poor citizens and members of the guilds. The few free hospitals are already over-crowded and ill-prepared. Squalid, outlying Limehouse, belonging to nowhere, cared for by nobody, must ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome

... is laid, in hasty books of travel, on the contrasts presented by the Moscow streets, the "palace of a prince standing by the side of the squalid log hut of a peasant," and so forth. That may, perhaps, have been true of the Moscow of twenty or thirty years ago. In very few quarters is there even a semblance of truth in that description at the present day. The clusters of Irish hovels in upper New York among the towering ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world. . . . Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... suggested that she was getting away from where the herds of London slept, into open spaces. For some obscure reason this made her nervous, and she turned back. After a while London closed in on her again, but this time in a more squalid quarter, a wilderness of dirty narrow streets, where even in the darkness the debasing marks and odours of squalid poverty were perceptible in the endless rows of houses which seemed to crowd in upon her. She came to ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... McKaye deeded him a mill-and town-site, and he founded a settlement on the eastern edge of Port Agnew, but quite distinct from it, and called it Darrow, after himself. It was not a community that Hector McKaye approved of, for it was squalid and unsanitary, and its untidy, unpainted shacks of rough lumber harbored southern European labor, of which Hector McKaye would have none. In Darrow, also, there were three groggeries and a gambling-house, with the ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... see distinctly the whole factory, its innumerable unshaded windows, its glistening panes, its tall chimney losing itself in the depths of the sky, and nearer at hand the lovely little garden against the ancient wall of the former mansion. All about were gloomy, miserable roofs and squalid streets. Suddenly she started. Yonder, in the darkest, the ugliest of all those attics crowding so closely together, leaning against one another, as if overweighted with misery, a fifth-floor window stood wide open, showing only darkness within. She recognized it at ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... as I regained the use of my sight, I began to look around me to 'define my position;' and I believe it would have puzzled the ingenuity of the most acute politician to know where he stood, had he been placed in the same 'fix' as myself. Casting a glance around, I found myself amidst a squalid, cadaverous throng of about six hundred, ranging from about fourteen to sixty years of age; and I never beheld a set of more wretched human beings. They were nearly starved and almost naked, and wholly unable to take exercise, from their crowded condition. It ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... away all the forenoon, walking down the river along the squalid waterside avenues; he found them in sympathy with the squalor in himself which always followed a squabble with his wife. At the end of one of the westward streets he found himself on a pier flanked ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells



Words linked to "Squalid" :   disreputable, unclean, soiled, dirty



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