The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels;... the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suppose the fact is that no friendship can stand the breakfast test.... Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that... hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother's hair, and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls; but a... single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeab...le, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... nothing seems completely to differentiate the poor but poverty. We find no adjectives to fit them, as a whole, only those of w...hich 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede... something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cow and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grai...n, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass. Chicken shit is disagreeable and rasps the throat because of the quantity of ammonia. When you are cleaning out the henhouse, you're glad to go to the door and take a deep breath of fresh air. Pig and human excrement, however, smell the worst because men and pigs are carnivorous and their appetites are indiscriminate. The smell includes the sickeningly sweet one of decay. And on the far side of it is death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the ...head of mortal man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Miss. A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Missis (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) ar...e the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master.... If we must have them, let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to Mh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »