"Modish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from me?" Mrs. Feinermann gasped. Her hat was awry, and what had once been a modish pompadour was toppled to one side and shed hairpins with every palsied nod of her head. "I ain't done nothing!" ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... take thee. We go to England by the first boat,—nay, lay back, calm thyself or I take my wagging tongue away; if thou dost so much as stir again, I leave thee. Thou art to go to a great house over there and see grand folks with fine airs and modish dress. Wilt be glad to see outside of convent walls? 'Tis nine years since I brought thee here a babe of six, and have nursed thee well to this hour, and thy strength and health and beauty show the care given thee." She suddenly arose ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... her fine coloring and clear eyes, silently agreed with her. The widow made a charming picture in her modish tea-gown, and the physician, watching her with an appraising eye, acknowledged the beauty which had captivated all Washington. Mrs. Brewster had carried her honors tactfully, a fact which had gained her popularity even among the dowagers and match-making mothers ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... eloquent silences when there was any need of them; and thus the fop and the coquette traversed the remainder of that solemn wood without any further speech. Modish people would have esteemed them ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... in Grace's cheeks. In her modish frock of the black which she affected, and which was this morning of fine serge set on by a line of fur at hem and wrist, and topped by a little hat of black velvet which framed the vividness of her glorious hair, she looked ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... our present word m[)o]dern. And the law under which Shakespeare uses the word is this: whatsoever is so trivial as to fall into the relation of a mere shape or fleeting mode to a permanent substance, that with Shakespeare is modish, or (according to his form) modern.[29] Thus, a weak, trivial argument (or instantia, the scholastic term for an argument not latent merely, or merely having the office of sustaining a truth, but urged as an objection, having the polemic office of contradicting an opponent) is in Shakespeare's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... offering in the shape of a bow and some arrows upon which, he said, he'd been working for days. When he returned, laden with luxurious contributions to the evening meal, the camp had still another guest. Keela was sitting by the fire. Philip eyed with furtive approval the modish shirtwaist, turned back at the full brown throat, ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... girl, cuts love, they say— Mere modish love perhaps it may: For any tool of any kind Can separate ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... elder, without being regularly handsome, had a noble appearance and an aristocratic air. She was graceful, intellectual and refined. Her toilette was as finished as Miss Champlin's, but she was not as fresh, in spite of what De Fersen said. The younger, Nancy Hunter, is not so modish, but a perfect rosebud. Her character is gay: she is always laughing, and has beautiful teeth—a thing not common in America." But Vauban, who on this occasion acted as master of ceremonies, promised the prince a greater treat for the morrow, and took him on that day to a house ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... about him. His eyelids were red. His face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish. As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... answered, cautiously. Then she gave a little start. "Some one is coming," she said, and, indeed, some one was coming. A man had just mounted the bridge from the Neuilly road and stood there for an instant surveying the two girls. He was a modish young gentleman, very splendidly attired, who carried himself with a dainty insolence, and he now came slowly towards the girls with ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... after all, when they arrived at the theatre, the Sphinx and Lady Dolly. The older feminine presentment sent her belittling gaze over their heads and beyond them from the curtain; Lady Dolly turned a modish head to greet them from the front of the box. Lady Dolly raised her eyes but not her elbows, which were assisting her a good deal with the house in exploring and being explored, enabling Colonel John Cummins, who sat by her side, to observe ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... inexpensive foulard frock—No glasses hid her blue eyes. Her hair was not torn back and screwed into a knot, but might have been dressed by Alice's maid—and her hat, the simplest thing possible, was most becoming, with the proper modish "look."— ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... Lorelei began to see sunshine, and before she knew it she was laughing, in the best of humor with herself and her surroundings. Adoree, clad now in a nameless, formless garment which she had discovered in a closet, her own modish belongings safely rolled up in a sheet, had covered her head with a towel turban and incased her feet in an old pair of shoes. Thus equipped, she fell upon the task of regeneration with fanatic zeal. She became grimy; a smear of soot disfigured ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... precipitation that might seem ridiculous in any man of the world who was not a Montaiglon satiated by acquaintance with scores of Dame Stratagems, fair intrigueuses and puppets without hearts below their modish bodices. Olivia charmed by her freshness, and the simple frankness of her nature, with its deep emotions, gave him infinitely more surprise and thrill than any woman he had met before. "Wisdom wanting absolute honesty," he told himself, "is only ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the flagstones gray with dust; An all-round east wind volleying straws and grit; ST. MARTIN'S STEPS, where every venomous gust Lingers to buffet, or sneap, the passing cit; And in the gutter, squelching a rotten boot, Draped in a wrap that, modish ten-year syne, Partners, obscene with sweat and grease and soot, A horrible hat, that once was just as fine; The drunkard's mouth a-wash for something drinkable, The drunkard's eye alert for casual toppers, The drunkard's neck stooped to a lot scarce thinkable, A living, crawling ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... pathetic grace which made her seem, in comparison with the others—radiant with untried health,—some gentle, plaintive spirit from a sadder sphere. Her clinging blue robe appeared too heavy for the frail body; her fair curls and carefully arranged chignon were too modish for the ethereal yet anxious countenance; the massive wedding-ring seemed too coarse a bond for the almost transparent hand which trembled nervously on the cover of the Serious Call. Sara, in black velvet and sable, with ostrich plumes and golden beads, with ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Latz, leaping impulsively forward on the chair that was as tightly upholstered in effect as he in his modish suit, then clutching himself there as if he had caught the impulse on the fly—"I just wish ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... be used for making this pretty jacket, which is extremely modish, and very comfortable for the cool days and evenings sure to be experienced during summer outings. Six skeins of fourfold Germantown will be sufficient; or four skeins of one color for the body and two of white for the border, if made in ...
— Handbook of Wool Knitting and Crochet • Anonymous
... the hopes of pleasing some one of us. No sooner he takes that in hand, but he pleases every one else by-the-bye. It has an immediate effect upon his behaviour. There is Colonel Ranter, who never spoke without an oath, till he saw the Lady Betty Modish;[164] now never gives his man an order, but it is, "Pray, Tom, do it." The drawers where he drinks live in perfect happiness. He asked Will at the "George" the other day how he did? Where he used to say, "Damn it, it is so," he now believes there is some mistake: ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... rise also, and join in the sport? it would but interrupt some tale of scandal, or some description of a toupee. Active wit, however despicable when compared with intellectual, is yet surely better than the insignificant click-clack of modish conversation," casting his eyes towards Miss Larolles, "or even the pensive dullness of affected silence," changing their ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... not mine (O, muse forbid!) the boon Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune, The jingling medley of purloined conceits Out-babying Wordsworth, and out-glittering Keats, Where all the airs of patchwork pastoral chime To drown the ears in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... her self-assertion, though more elaborate, was not a bit more impressive, and the phrases she used, the turn of her sentences, the colour of her speech, very little resembled anything that would have fallen from a damsel bred in the modish world. Her affectation was shot through with spontaneity; her impertinence had a juvenile seriousness which made it much more amusing than offensive; and a feminine charm in her, striving to prevail over incongruous elements, made clear appeal to ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... in the Liverpool docks, is the Dutch galliot, an old-fashioned looking gentleman, with hollow waist, high prow and stern, and which, seen lying among crowds of tight Yankee traders, and pert French brigantines, always reminded me of a cocked hat among modish beavers. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... train of thought and went back once more to the bundle of clothes. Surely there was a clue concealed somewhere among them, if only he could find it. They were poor clothes, and yet, judging by their cut, he fancied the girl had looked exceedingly well in them—nay, even modish. She had evidently spent much time on them, as the beautiful needlework attested. At this point Anderson's mind ran out on to thin ice again, so he reverted to the girl herself for the nth time. She was Canadian, her hands were ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... a Von. I will tell you. Today comes Frau Nirlanger by me and she says: 'Frau Knapf, I wish to buy clothes, aber echt Amerikanische. Myself, I do not know what is modish, and I cannot ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... landscape, these fresh, simple pictures which to-day look so natural to us were regarded with distrust. Not even the shepherd, much less the warrior or the demigod, inhabited these quiet scenes. A picture which any rural gentleman could see from his front door, smacked too little of art for the modish town. Moreover, Constable, no doubt sighing for something lighter and more brilliant, was accustomed, in a vain effort to rival the clear light of out-of-doors, to use the lightest colors of his palette. On a varnishing day at the Royal Academy, the word was passed around among the astonished ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... a stronger man than Calvin Gray, these two. He could well imagine the sensation he and they would create in the lobby of the modish Ajax. But his first surprise was succeeded by a gentle pity, for Ma Briskow greeted him rapturously, and in Allegheny's somber eyes he detected a look of mingled suffering and defiance. She knew, somehow or other, that she was conspicuous, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... stock quotations. The productions of "Curll's chaste press" are also this connoisseur's favourite reading,—the lives of players in particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in Carlyie's essay on Scott.[8] Among these the memoirs of Cibber's "Lady Betty Modish," Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster Abbey, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... necessary as the arbiter of what was modish for families whose connection with the fashionable world was slight. He assumed airs of authority, and took to writing books on how the Grand Tour should be made. Such is The Voyage of Italy, with Instructions concerning Travel, by Richard Lassels, Gent., who "travelled through Italy ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... hat and seated herself on a footstool near her aunt's chair, clasping her hands about her knees. Her slim and flexible figure, clad in a modish mourning costume, accommodated itself easily and gracefully to the trying position. Her bright and youthful face, with its pair of sparkling, life-enamoured eyes, tried to compose itself to the seriousness that the occasion seemed ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... hour; my poor limbs smart, and my poor head aches: ay, do, do, smart limb, ache head, and sprout horns; but I'll be hanged before I'll pity you:—you must needs be married, must ye? there's for that; [Beats his own head.] and to a fine, young, modish lady, must ye? there's for that too; and, at threescore, you old, doting cuckold! take that remembrance;—a fine time of day for a man to be bound prentice, when he is past using of his trade; to set up an equipage of noise, when he has most need of quiet; instead of her being under ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... soon learns that the difference between comfort and misery, if not health and illness, may depend on whether he is properly clad. Proper, in this case does not mean modish, but suitable, serviceable, proven by the touchstone of experience to be best for the work or play that is in hand. When you seek a guide in the mountains, he looks first in your eyes and then at your shoes. If both are right, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... the convenience of the passing crowd, at the left of the big window, showed her reflection quite plainly. She was suddenly inspired to take the soft taffeta girdle from the waist of her dark blue muslin gown, and bind it turban-wise about her head. The effect was pleasingly modish and conventional, and she quickened her steps—satisfied. There was a tingle in the air that set her blood pleasantly in motion, and she established a rhythm of pace that made her feel almost as if she were walking to music. Insensibly her mind took up its responsibilities again ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... elder, and would sit eating cherries with him out of one paper bag, with an affectionate and ironical smile twisting up an eyebrow and curling his lips a little. And he was always careful to have money in his pocket, and to be modish in his dress, so that his son need not blush for him. They were perfect friends, but never seemed to have occasion for verbal confidences, both having the competitive self-consciousness of Forsytes. They knew they would stand by each other ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Standing there in her modish suit so cunningly devised to emphasize her charms, with the flowers slipping from her arms to the dusty rug, she wept at the vagueness of her recollections, the fading away of grief, to which she had ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... months, but had not entirely learned to like the weed, because of a slight nausea which it invariably caused me to feel. But I thought by practice now and again to inure myself to the habit, which was then so new and fashionable among modish gentlemen. While I smoked I mused upon the past and present, and tried to peer into the future—a fruitless task wherein we waste much valuable time; a vain striving, like Eve's, after forbidden knowledge, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... have been evident that the original owner of these clothes had come from somewhere beyond the Susquehanna, and had either been a football player or had travelled with a glee club, to these three Northmen it seemed merely that here was the modish echo ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... being cut in March, sweet as cedar, whereof it is accounted a spurious kind; all of them difficult to remove with success; nor prosper, they being shaded at all, or over-drip'd: The Swedish juniper (now so frequent in our new modish gardens, and shorn into pyramids) is but a taller and somewhat brighter sort of ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... hesitatingly, sometimes defiantly. The imitation of Sterne is strongest at the beginning, both in outward form and subject-matter, and this measure of indebtedness dwindles away steadily as the book advances. Gchhausen, as other imitators, used at the outset a modish form, returned to it consciously now and then when once under way, but when he actually had something to say, amessage of his own, found it impracticable or else forgot ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... gigantic critic Johnson) are dissolved by the chance which combined them, but the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities neither admits increase nor suffers decay." And assuredly there was never an age in which man so masked his nature under modish innovations as he does ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes increasingly complex and minute and exacting and time-occupying in precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... be accounted conservative. It sanctions promiscuously usages as venerable as civilization itself, and as transient as the fad of the hour. Democratic institutions and universal educational privileges have bred a social mass intelligent and responsive enough to be modish, but lacking in ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... unavailing. Somewhat of the doggedly independent spirit of the boot-rejecting Dr. JOHNSON in this poor deaf violinist apparently. Verily, EUGENIUS, the story requires but the 'decorative art' of the literary sentimentalist to make it moving, even to the modish. The ingeniously emotional historian of LA FLEUR would have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... Jevne it might be said that she was real where Ray was artificial, and artificial where Ray was real. Everything that Miss Jevne wore was real. She was as modish as Ray was shabby, as slim as Ray was stocky, as artificially tinted and tinctured as Ray was naturally rosy-cheeked and buxom. It takes real money to buy clothes as real as those worn by Miss Jevne. The soft charmeuse in her graceful gown was real and miraculously draped. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... smiling. Her hand, held fast in Guy's, rested on his knee; Nan's charming head, with its modish dressing, lay against her shoulder. What more could a mother ask? Across the fireplace, Sam Burnett, most satisfactory of sons-in-law, and Margaret, Guy's best beloved, who had made the year one long honeymoon to him—so ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... of winding along the banks of the river, as far as the church, that she might see the fine new monument raised to the memory of Lady Modish. Her sisters insisted on going to the next village, as they wanted to buy muslin for a doll's frock. After some little altercation on each side Caroline, with affectionate condescension, gave way to her sisters' inclination, though, as eldest, she had the right of choice, saying she could see ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... the table, one of venerable aspect, with short, white curls, held from her face by side-combs, a modish breakfast-cap, and a morning-gown of thin gray silk. The other was young enough to be her daughter, as indeed she was, dressed in deep mourning. Rising instantly from her place as hostess behind the silver service, she extended her ...
— The Phantom Of Bogue Holauba - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... man whose simple dress and subdued air strongly contrasted the artificial graces and the modish languor of Mr. Vernon; but though wholly without that nameless distinction which sometimes characterizes those conscious of pure race and habituated to the atmosphere of courts, he had at least Nature's stamp of aristocracy in a form eminently noble, and features of manly, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
