E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • More 'Strait-laced' Quotes from Famous Books

... something to think about," assented Tucker, "and to think hard about, too—and yet I cut my teeth on the theory that women have no sense of honour. Now, that is pure, foolish, strait-laced ...

— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... laughing. 'Many have lived with me for years and would give me a certificate for temper. But this is too much. Sir Edward Mortimer is my mother's younger brother, Clarke, but he is not many years older than myself. A proper, strait-laced, soft-voiced lad he has ever been, and, as a consequence, he throve in the world, and joined land to land after the scriptural fashion. I had befriended him from my purse in the old days, but he soon came to be a richer man than I, for all that he gained ...

— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... "Mme. d'Espard is the more prudish and particular because she herself is separated from her husband, nobody knows why. The Navarreins, the Lenoncourts, the Blamont-Chauvrys, and the rest of the relations have all rallied round her; the most strait-laced women are seen at her house, and receive her with respect, and the Marquis d'Espard has been put in the wrong. The first call that you pay will make it clear to you that I am right; indeed, knowing Paris as I do, I can tell you ...

— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... child's nature as a whole, education arrests the growth of all the master faculties of his being, and that there are some at least among these which, even in the judgment of the supernaturalist, imperatively need to be trained. When the strait-laced, result-hunting teacher reminds us that his sole business is to teach certain subjects, and that therefore he cannot concern himself with growth, we answer that, in neglecting to foster growth, he makes it impossible for the child to put forth a special "sense," a special ...

— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... can write, my dear child, and, as I before observed, the mind and the body influence each other. I am about to write a strictly moral dialogue, and I never could do it unless I am strait-laced. Now I feel fit for the wife of Cato ...

— Valerie • Frederick Marryat

... disinterestedness might be enough to prove her insanity; but Durtal, in contradiction to received ideas, did not think that a contempt for money was necessarily allied with madness, and the more he thought of it the more was he convinced that she was a saint, and not a strait-laced saint, but ...

— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... little things may easily excite a laugh: but in the first place they are continually occurring with couples who love each other, or where one of them loves the other: besides, in a woman so strait-laced, so reserved, so worthy, as this lady, these acknowledgments of affection went beyond the limits imposed upon her feelings by the lofty self-respect which true piety induces. When Madame de Fischtaminel narrated this little scene in a devotee's life, dressing it up with choice by-play, acted ...

— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac

... w'at are you going to do? That's the question—w'at are you going to do?" He cocked his head sidewise and looked at me speculatively as a cat might look at a rather large mouse. "We been a little rough," he went on after a moment, "and some folks is strait-laced. There might be trouble. And you know a heap ...

— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams

... is a subject for laughter among the gods. To see such an one present a sensible workman with a pamphlet entitled "Who Paid for the Mangle?—or, Maria's Pennies," is to know what overpowering joy means. Yet the severe and strait-laced censors are not perhaps so much of a nuisance as the sternly-cultured and emotional persons who "yearn" a great deal. The "yearnest" man or woman always has an ideal which is usually the vaguest thing in the cloudland ...

— Side Lights • James Runciman

... that at last, I being quite released From this strait-laced Egoity My soul will vastly be increased Into that All Which One we call, And One in itself ...

— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... of him, and heard very little, before the Court Martial met. No one acquainted with the code of that age—so strait-laced in its proprieties, so full-blooded in its vices—will need to be told that she never dreamed of asking her brother's permission to visit the Prisoners' Infirmary. He reported—once a day, perhaps, and casually— that the patient was doing well. Dorothea ventured once to sound General Rochambeau, ...

— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... outlived all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on earth. And yet I saw some young fellows about the smoking-room who seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count himself strait-laced, in need of some more practical sort of teaching. They seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do so speedily. It was not much more than a week after the New Year; and to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto unspeakable was not altogether pleasing. ...

— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... catch a puff of air. Blue trousers and beaver scrapers soon gave way before the elements, and were succeeded by nankeens, straw hats, and canvas caps. In the captain's cabin, where the presence of the governor, our passenger, still kept up the strait-laced etiquette of the service, coats and epaulettes appeared at dinner; but in the gun-room, the officers, the instant they came below, slipped on their light white jackets, and, disdaining waistcoat, seized ...

— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall

... feeling the difference between trying to pull him and poor Mervyn upwards! There may be more excuse for Mervyn, but Owen knows where he is going, and springs towards it; while Mervyn wonders at himself at every stage, and always fancies the next some delusion of my strait-laced imagination.' ...

— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... seriously, "I've been an arrant cad since I've come to St. Amory's, and if those horses hadn't bolted with your mater I should never have seen in you anything but a strait-laced prig, as I've all along thought you. I have, really. But that's all changed now, and I'm going to dry up. I suppose you know you aren't popular ...

— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson

... replied, laughing, "you'll find him a very nice boy; just a little too strait-laced for me, but he'll ...

— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... in the first embryo parliament of the Prussian monarchy? And if uncongenial to the generation of Prussians among whom he had grown up, how infinitely greater was the dislike against him of South Germans, more gifted, as a rule, by nature, to whom the name of Prussian is synonymous of all that is strait-laced and ...

— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... was a very strait-laced individual, and wont to raise his hands in horror at the mention of fighting, or anything, in fact, that partook of violence. He always gave it as his opinion that football was a brutal game, equal to the bull rights of the Spaniards, and could hardly be induced ...

— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster

... dull suppression sundry comments on a certain Rhenish law, whereof my author's mind had at one time studiously cogitated a grave and wholesome homily. For our censor of the press, one strait-laced Mr. Better Judgment, has, "with his abhorred shears," clipped off the more eloquent and spirited portion of a trenchant argument concerning—the revealed doctrine of a superior sex, the social evils of female domination, ...

— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... this age of rapid deviation from the standard rules that governed feminine deportment and education when I was a girl, many of the precepts and admonitions penned by the authors I have mentioned are derided and repudiated as 'puritanical,' 'old-fashioned,' 'strait-laced,' 'stupid and prudish'; but if these indeed be faults, certainly in the light of modern innovations they appear 'to lean to virtue's side.' In fashionable society, such as you are destined to meet at Mr. Palma's, ...

— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... be expected to know that. She is a long-headed woman, Mr. Gwynne. I suspect she is considerably worried about Viola. Your half-sister is being rather assiduously courted by a young man named Lapelle. Mrs. Gwyn does not approve of him. She is strait-laced and—er—puritanical." ...

— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon

... prudish and particular because she herself is separated from her husband, nobody knows why. The Navarreins, the Lenoncourts, the Blamont-Chauvrys, and the rest of the relations have all rallied round her; the most strait-laced women are seen at her house, and receive her with respect, and the Marquis d'Espard has been put in the wrong. The first call that you pay will make it clear to you that I am right; indeed, knowing Paris as I do, I can tell you beforehand that you ...

— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... wear as a Doctor of Divinity, because it savoured of the "Scarlet Woman." "Dr. Humphrey," said the queen, with the tact alike of a Tudor sovereign and of a true woman, "methinks this gown and habit become you very well, and I marvel that you are so strait-laced on this point—but I come not now to chide." This President complained that his headship was "more payneful than gayneful," a charge not usually ...

— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... Norwegian Church as it then existed. The controversies on the ministry, on predestination, on conversion and synergism, while expressive of deep conviction and loyalty to the Truth, do not form a chapter in our history of which Lutherans can feel proud. When orthodoxy becomes so strict and strait-laced and legalistic, when it stands up so erect as to lean backward, both the interests of the Truth and of the Church are bound to suffer. The cause of unity is harmed, and union or cooperation is rendered impossible." However, if the paramount object of ...

— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente

... time they were written; and if there had been, it would hardly have commended itself to the old-fashioned taste of Dr. Bryant, to whom Pope was still a power in poetry, as Addison, no doubt, was in prose. It was natural, therefore, that he should offer his boy to the strait-laced Muses of Queen Anne's time; that the precocious boy should lisp in heroic couplets, and that he should endeavor to be satirical. Politics were running high in the first decade of the present century, and the favorite bug-bear in New England was President Jefferson, ...

— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... an elaborate pinch of snuff. 'You'll forgive me,' he answered. 'But before this about her birth came out, I fancied that you were doing, or going about to do the girl no good. Now, my dear Sir George, I am not strait-laced,' the doctor continued, dusting the snuff from the lappets of his coat, 'and I know very well what your friend, my Lord March, would do in the circumstances. And you have lived much, with him, and think yourself, I dare swear, no better. But you are, my dear sir—you are, though ...

— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... observation of English provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless hardihood; and every one must be glad that ...

— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... impoverish the family or to leave the general affairs of the house of Scroope worse than he found them. Much less than half of that which he understood to be the income coming from the estates would suffice for him. But let his uncle or aunt,—or his strait-laced methodical brother, say what they would to him, nothing should induce him to make himself a slave ...

— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope

... doctored two fractures with an invaluable cement. The pecuniary gain may have been half-a-crown. The loss in self-respect she did not seem to estimate. Aunt Theresa would not have done it herself, but she laughed encouragingly. It is difficult to be strait-laced with a lady who had so much old point, and whose silks are so stiff that she can rustle down your remonstrances. Another friend, a young officer whose personal extravagance was a proverb even at a station in India, boasted for a week of having sold a rickety knick-knack shelf to ...

— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... man, bred a soldier," as if the last fact were an excuse for the former, he contributed largely to the furtherance of these pious objects, "spending liberally all his salary and perquisites of office," for which generous trait of character an early and strait-laced historian is obviously of the opinion that General Nicholson should have been suffered to swear in peace and, as it were, in ...

— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... in that suggestion. This was no time for convention, for placid weighing of this consideration against that, for strait-laced repression. The environment encouraged her. Her exulting joy drove ...

— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... learned to know him as a jovial artist, who in the days of his youth very possibly might have given the strait-laced lady cause for anxiety. Even when his locks were white he was ready for any pleasure; but he devoted himself earnestly to art, and I am under obligation to him for being the means of my mother's possessing the friendship of ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers