"Bricks and mortar" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immediately for the spectators' enjoyment, and without leaving, as a consequence of the performance, any permanent result possessing exchangeable value: consequently the epithet unproductive must be equally applied to the gradual wearing out of the bricks and mortar, the nightly consumption of the more perishable "properties" of the theatre, the labour of Madame Pasta in acting, and of the orchestra in playing. But notwithstanding this, the architect who built the theatre was a productive labourer; so were ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... sometimes what it is that makes the house homelike, and why there are such strong attachments to the old home. Surely it is the familiar aspect of the furnishings, rather than the bricks and mortar, that makes the old home so dear! To the original owners there was an individuality about every piece, although to the collector the same characteristics of well-known objects tell that in days gone by the cabinet-maker followed stereotyped lines, and there were but few who moved ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... be so very grand like," observed Toby as we drove through it. "There bees no streets paved with gold, and no Lord Mayor in a gold coach,—only bricks and mortar, and people running about in ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... indeed, until recently, the shells had been bursting here in every direction, and their holes might be seen in the centre of those pavements heretofore sacred to the flaneurs of Paris. Strewn over the streets were branches of trees; and fragments of masonry that had been knocked from the houses, bricks and mortar, torn proclamations, shreds of clothings half concealing bloodstains, were now the interesting and leading features of that fashionable resort; foot passengers were few and far between, the shops and cafes hermetically sealed, excepting where ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... their money. They collected pictures, too, and were supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps, members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural course of things members of the Church of England, and caused their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more fashionable ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... we walked on towards La Magdalena. We passed through the street where we had been captured on the preceding night, but it was so altered that we should not have known it. Fragments of walls were thrown across the path, and here and there lay masses of bricks and mortar ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... here over the next day, and the next morning set fire to all the buildings containing army stores, and taking up our march for Macon, Ga., amid the bursting of shell and the explosion of amunition, causing the roofs and timbers to ascend heavenward, and the mass of bricks and mortar to fall inward. Caused by the vacuam from the explosion from within. The atmospheric pressure pushed ...
— History of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry • R. C. Rankin
... Stangate-street, and when you get to the bottom, you will find, on the left-hand, THE BOWER! And a pretty bower it is, not of leaves and flowers, but of bricks and mortar. It is not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... of feeling that, having once bought it, he has bought it for the rest of his life. He may change his house and with it his Fixtures, but there is no loss on the brass part of the transaction, however much there may be on the bricks and mortar. What he pays out with one hand, he takes in with the other. Nor is his property subject to the ordinary mischances of life. There was an historic character who "lost the big drum," but he would become even more historic who had lost a curtain-rod, ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... far from Wandsworth, in the green pasturelands of Southfields, that great magician was already casting into bricks and mortar his tremendous dream—the city of dreams, the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... ground that in the views of the objectors, education among the people has not succeeded, the term education is used with not the least reference to its real meaning, and is wholly misunderstood. Mere reading and writing is not education; it would be quite as reasonable to call bricks and mortar architecture—oils and colours art—reeds and cat-gut music- -or the child's spelling-books the works of Shakespeare, Milton, or Bacon—as to call the lowest rudiments of education, education, and to visit on that ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... the firm health and fine spirits of persons who live in the country, are not more from breathing a purer air, than from enjoying plenty of sound sleep; and the most distressing misery of "this Elysium of bricks and mortar," is the rareness with which we enjoy "the sweets of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the household because your brother acts as its master. Why shouldn't he? Are you fitted to take the reins or share his responsibility? If you were at your right job, Robert Fenley, you'd be carrying bricks and mortar in a hod; for you haven't brains enough to lay a ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... man," observed the stranger slowly, "changes a wilderness into a city. One great mind is surely a higher indication of civilisation than are incalculable leagues of bricks and mortar. ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... consider that Japanese architecture has no claim to be regarded as art. These persons have no conception of art in architecture unless it be Doric, Gothic, Byzantine, Early English, or something of the kind, and unless it be expressed in bricks and mortar. Now Japanese architecture is only wood, but though only wood, as regards its majestic beauty, seemliness, and adaptability to the purposes for which it is intended, it stands unique. Moreover, it is the only timber architecture in the world that has ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... beautiful than young ones and are little likely to be injurious to health, and ends them by raising mounds and sticking into them dense belts of quick-growing trees like poplars to hide as speedily as possible the desolation of bricks and mortar he has created. It is this senseless outdoor work of the builder and his nurseryman which stands most in need of revision from time to time in suburban residences, but which rarely receives it from a silly notion, amounting to tree ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... not surprised you find London dull, but I grieve that it has taken such an effect on you. I hoped that, as you are young, you would get used to the bricks and mortar ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... thoroughly impoverished and desolate;" and he accordingly, after viewing the marvels of the locality, pursued his way to Banda, and thence laid a dak (or travelled by palanquin with relays of bearers) to Calpee, "there to sit from nine to four, writing filthy accounts of bricks and mortar, square feet, cubic feet, and running feet, rupees, annas, and pie; squabbling with wrinkled unromantic villains, whose cool-tempered and overwhelming patience amply deserve their unlawful gains—I mean as labourers in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... and Hainault,—glades ringing with the shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a "leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... be further considered, as there is no evidence whatever to connect Spenser with Warwickshire. But in picturing to ourselves Spenser's youth we must not think of London as it now is, or of East Smithfield as now cut off from the country by innumerable acres of bricks and mortar. The green fields at that time were not far away from Spenser's birthplace. And thus, not without knowledge and symnpathy, but with appreciative variations, Spenser could re-echo Marot's 'Eglogue au Roy sous les noms de Pan et Robin,' and its descriptions of a boy's rural wanderings and ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... for once, in Massachusetts, a public institution has escaped the tyranny of bricks and mortar; and we are permitted to indulge the hope, that any future additions will tend to make this spot a neighborhood of unostentatious cottages, quiet rural homes, rather than the seat of a vast edifice, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... was a type usually to be found in rural Districts, built of bricks and mortar, whitewashed, and roofed with the thatching grass that grows on low-lying lands by the Ganges. Earlier in Raymond Meredith's career, Panchpokhur had been one of his own appointments, and every corner ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria Street may have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I dismissed the excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch, at the club, assuming ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... quite a different way from ours. First of all a complete skeleton house is set up, made of wood, and, when this is finished, the spaces between the wooden structure are filled in with bricks and mortar. Before the roof is put on, a large green bush is hoisted up as far as the eaves, and there tied to the scaffolding poles. This is supposed to drive away the pixies or wicked fairies, and no one would dare to put the roof on without the protection ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... and flowing tide, the ceaseless effort seaward of the stream, and those low-lying spaces on the Surrey side. It was the nearest bit of nature, unharnessed, irresponsible nature, which I could get to; and it symbolised emancipation from monotonous labour and everlasting bricks and mortar. I could watch the dying of the sunset, and the outcoming of the stars, the tossing of the pale willows—there on the eyot—in the windy dusk, undisturbed. And so I have come to entertain a great fondness for it, since it tranquillised me and helped me to see life ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... whose father put up the money for the purposes of publicity and propaganda. The transformation of a hamlet into a seaside resort has been treated as a sort of psychological romance by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in Mushroom Town, where the human beings are a background as it were for the bricks and mortar; Mr. A.S. NEILL, having chosen to make a farce of it, has provided a hero who believes in humorous advertisements, and has evidently persuaded the author to take him at his own valuation. This is hardly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... district, among mills and ash-trees, and houses with gardens and garden bowers, William and Dulcie were combating real flesh-and-blood woes—woes that would not so much set your teeth on edge, as soften and melt your tough, dry heart—among the bricks and mortar of London. These several years were not light sunshiny years to the young couple. It is of no use saying that a man may prosper if he will, and that he has only to cultivate potatoes and cabbages in place of jessamine and passion flowers; no use ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... pleased him still more, however, or at least called forth a warmer response, was the discovery of some inconveniencies which had already been remarked. "I am very glad you told me," he said. "I must have everything put right for you, mother. A thing that can be put right by bricks and mortar is so easy ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... went over the workshops, where in winter everything of every sort is made; these four hundred and seventy men—if they do not work for the outer world—work for themselves and their island home. They build their churches and other edifices, make the bricks and mortar, their coats and clothes, their boots and shoes, mould their pottery, carve their wooden church ornamentations, shape them in plaster, or beat them in metal. There are goldsmiths and joiners, leather tanners and furriers, amongst them, and ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud—have forgotten all about live trees and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... you have hardly seen anything but chimney-pots and bricks and mortar all your life, Sam,' said ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... street below, "you have won Madame de Verneuil's heart. You are a lucky little Asticot. And I am proud of you because I made you. You are a proof to her that I haven't spent all my life in absorbing absinthe and omitting to decorate Europe with palaces. Instead of bricks and mortar I have worked in soul-stuff and my masterpiece is an artist,—and a great artist, by the Lord God!" he cried with sudden access of passion, "if you will keep 'the sorrowful great gift' pure and undefiled as a good woman does her chastity. You must help me in my work, my son. Let me be able ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... did you guess it?" He paused, his fingers holding the lighted match, which went out before he could apply it to his tobacco. "Yus. 'The Pipes of Pan.' I don't know what it means. Anyway, he said he'd love to hear them in the real forest, but duty kept him to bricks and mortar and so he had to hear them in imagination. He said that all them footling little beasts were a-listening to 'em, and they told him all about it. I remember he told me more about the woods than I know myself—and I reckon I could teach his business to any gamekeeper or poacher in England. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... It consisted of one room only, and was, in its then condition, utterly unfit for my purpose; but I determined to set to work and build on to it—by no means the hazardous speculation in Gorgona, where bricks and mortar are unknown, that it is in England. The alcalde's permission to make use of the adjacent ground was obtained for a moderate consideration, and plenty of material was procurable from the opposite bank of the river. An American, whom I had cured of the cholera at Cruces, lent me his boat, and I hired ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... to a slow halt before a pile of bricks and mortar. Above them loomed a huge unfinished apartment house, from which were tramping forth the home-going laborers. The smell of the wet lime as they tracked across the rather narrow street was over-powering. The chauffeur opened the door ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... that from the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas. Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect makes them something else. The boulder which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the resolute. The difficulties which ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... badly frightened that he was afterward useless and we turned him out to pasture and he grew lean and absolutely worthless. Things were considerably disturbed, but the engines were apparently uninjured. The watchman was not injured, although surrounded by falling bricks and mortar. I was told that the water supply was stopped, and later learned that it was because the earthquake had ...
— San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 • James B. Stetson
... Bennett traces the progression of the English world from the generation of our grandfathers to our own generation; he shows this change creeping upon us at an accelerated pace, catching the older inhabitants unawares, a visible change in bricks and mortar, in widening streets, in enlarged factories, in the introduction of trams which in due course became electric trams; and a change no less decisive in customs and habits, the older folk marvelling at the new-fangled independence of the young; ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... one, the problem of where to live approaches more nearly to the simple question of where do you wish to live, and a rich daughter-in-law would have surely seen to it that she did not have to leave her square mile of Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks and mortar. If the house in Blue Street could not have been compounded for there were other desirable residences which would have been capable of consoling Francesca for her lost Eden. And now the detested Courtenay Youghal, with his mocking eyes and air of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... little or no control. If circumstances are favorable they need not work; if they are unfavorable they need not work. So far from man being the creature of circumstances he should rather be termed the architect of circumstances. From the same materials one man builds palaces and another hovels. Bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks till the architect makes something out of them. In the same way, out of the same circumstances one man rears a stately edifice, while another, idle and incompetent, lives for ever amid ruins. Circumstances rarely conquer ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees |
