Slovenly Quotes & Sayings

Those who don't have a bed at all, you eliminate on the spot. From those who remain, you eliminate the owners of any dirty or slovenly beds. And when only those who have clean and tidy beds remain, you choose the one you find most attractive. Unfortunately, the method is not a hundred per cent foolproof. You can make a terrible mistake." "You're — Andrzej Sapkowski

The blacks of this region are a cheerful, careless, dirty, race, not hard worked, and in many respects indulgently treated. It is of course the desire of the master that his slaves shall be laborious; on the other hand it is the determination of the slave to lead as easy a life as he can. The master has the power of punishment on his side; the slave, on his, has invincible inclination, and a thousand expedients learned by long practice ... Good natured though imperfect and slovenly obedience on one side, is purchased by good treatment on the other. — William C. Bryant

Baseball is slovenly and excessive in midsummer, with its onrolling daily cascade of line scores and box scores, shifting statistics, highlights and lowlights, dingers and shutouts, streaks and slumps. — Roger Angell

They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate - not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Most of the time when I receive a script, it says something like 'Rosenberg is the fat, slovenly Mayor, who doesn't want the kids to use the Skateboard Park', or 'Stein is a pompous, rotund attorney, imposing to all.' It would be so freeing to get a script where my character is simply described as 'A Man.' — Fred Melamed

Really good films don't diminish anything, they don't close things off. On the contrary, they open up new insights, they make new thoughts thinkable. They crowd us, they deflate our slovenly lifestyle, our thoughtless way of chattering and pissing away our time and energy and passion. Believe me, films can teach us a huge amount. And they give us a true picture of the way life is."
Mari laughed. "Of our slovenly lifestyle, you mean? You mean, maybe they teach us to piss our lives away with a little more intelligence, a little more elegance? — Tove Jansson

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. — William Faulkner

I agree that a well groomed appearance or a slovenly appearance says a lot about one's character. — Gloria Gaynor

A great deal of the joy of life consists in doing perfectly, or at least to the best of one's ability, everything which one attempts to do. There is a sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in all its parts-which the superficial man, who leaves his work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns work into art. The smallest thing, well done, becomes artistic. — William Matthews

There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised. — Rachel Cusk

Approaching us through a haze of dust that overhung the road was a long column of men - a slovenly column that marched irregularly and out of step, so that it had the look of a gigantic centipede whose feet hurt. — Kenneth Roberts

He hovered, as it were, on the fringes of both the scientific and the classical worlds, making, apparently, no deep impression on either. Perhaps the characteristics that he inherited from D'Arcy the Elder partly accounted for this. Gifted, volatile, impulsive, and individual, neither could suffer a fool gladly, and they spoke their minds freely when occasion demanded and sometimes when it did not. They both went their own way; they would not 'run with the pack'; they despised the instinct that leads men to say what others say because it is easier, or do as others do for fear of being thought different. Alike in demanding the highest standard of integrity in behaviour and work they spared no man who was slovenly in either; critical of their own achievements they were equally so of other men's. — Ruth D'Arcy Thompson

Writers - particularly storytellers like myself - write about people. That is ironic, since we actually know nothing about them. Think about it. Why does someone become a writer? Is it because they like people? Of course not. Why else would we seek out a job where we get to spend all day, every day, cooped up in our basement with no company besides paper, a pencil, and our imaginary friends? Writers hate people. If you've ever met a writer, you know that they're generally awkward, slovenly individuals who live beneath stairwells, hiss at those who pass, and forget to bathe for weeklong periods. And those are the socially competent ones. — Brandon Sanderson

This was the sort of girl who should be attending college, not ones like that dreadful Minkoff girl, that brutal and slovenly girl who had almost been raped by one of the janitors just outside of his office. Dr. Talc shuddered at the very thought of Miss Minkoff. In class she had Insulted and challenged and vilified him at every turn, egging the Reilly monster to join in the attack. He would never forget those two; no one on the faculty ever would. They were like two Huns sweeping down on Rome. Dr. Talc idly wondered if they had married each other. Each certainly deserved the other. — John Kennedy Toole

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest. — W. H. Auden

Somehow the notion has been loosed that nature is hostile to man or that her ways are offensive or slovenly, so that every step of progress is measured by how far we have altered these. Nothing short of a recovery of the ancient virtue of pietas can absolve man from this sin. — Richard M. Weaver

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. — Winston S. Churchill

Come, for my part I will have only those glorious, manly pleasures of being very drunk, and very slovenly. — William Wycherley

The entrance to the natural EM senses is now guarded by artificially monstrous EM waves carrying every kind of pattern irrelevant to nature, from TV sitcoms to defense radar broadcasts. It is as though we have covered the whole surface of the globe with a slum of slovenly, impalpable constructions during the past eighty years or so since Marconi. They are literally skyscrapers in as much as they touch the ionosphere and are reflected from it. They are tenements full of the disorderly displays of sitcoms and the sterile reflections of military radar. — Peter Redgrove

the Cameron Highlanders were ordered to muddy their spats because they were a dazzling white target for the Hun. Within 24 hours the order was countermanded by the Big Chief Cameron of Lochiel who presumably didn't want his Highlanders to look slovenly when dead. — Phyllida Law

Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage. — Mary McCarthy

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader. — Maya Angelou

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper. — Pat Barker

Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, "flinging shit everywhere" - and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. "Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought," Shea riffed. "If you were going to cast Jersey Shore, you'd go with heidelbergensis. — Marilyn Johnson

perhaps it is clear why a writer should be interested in the constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war. — Ernest Hemingway,

I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder. — Hermann Hesse

(regarding Charles Lee) This eccentric and notably slovenly man was always trailed by his beloved dogs. "When I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs", he once explained, "I shall transfer my benevolence to them. — Ron Chernow

Now, Betteredge, exert those sharp wits of yours, and observe the conclusion to which the Colonel's instructions point!" I instantly exerted my wits. They were of the slovenly English sort; and they consequently muddled it all — Wilkie Collins

Now, tell me, my dear, I said, what are you crying about?
About the years that are gone, Mr. Betteredge," says Rosanna quietly. My past life still comes back to me sometimes.
Come, come, my girl, I said, your past life is all sponged out. Why can't you forget it?
"She took me by one of the lappets of my coat. I am a slovenly old man, and a good deal of my meat and drink gets splashed about on my clothes. Sometimes one of the women, and sometimes another, cleans me of my grease. The day before, Roseanna had taken out a spot for me on the lappet of my coat, with a new composition, warranted to remove anything. The grease was gone, but there was a little dull place left on the nap of the cloth where the grease had been. The girl pointed to that place, and shook here head.
The stain is taken off, she said. But the place shows, Mr. Betteredge
the place shows! — Wilkie Collins

As the index tells us the contents of stories and directs to the particular chapter, even so does the outward habit and superficial order of garments (in man or woman) give us a taste of the spirit, and demonstratively point (as it were a manual note from the margin) all the internal quality of the soul; and there cannot be a more evident, palpable, gross manifestation of poor, degenerate, dunghilly blood and breeding than a rude, unpolished, disordered, and slovenly outside. — Philip Massinger

...there was almost no opinion, however nonsensical, that wasn't tolerated, at least for long enough for it to be delivered. But it wasn't just that, nor his charm nor eccentricity, his sometimes slovenly, sometimes stunning intelligence, that made him so attractive as a tutor; it was the utterly unfamiliar sensation one got, as a student, of his respect for, or at least well-performed interest in, what one thought. — Janet Hobhouse

An artist cannot do anything slovenly. — Jane Austen

Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. — Winston Churchill

We cannot have islands of excellence in a sea of slovenly indifference to standards. — John W. Gardner

Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted ... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style. — Clive James

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness ... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful. — Kenneth E. Boulding

It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. — Adam Smith

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time. — Virginia Woolf

Racism, at the individual level, can be seen as a predictive model whirring away in billions of human minds around the world. It is built from faulty, incomplete, or generalized data. Whether it comes from experience or hearsay, the data indicates that certain types of people have behaved badly. That generates a binary prediction that all people of that race will behave that same way. Needless to say, racists don't spend a lot of time hunting down reliable data to train their twisted models. And once their model morphs into a belief, it becomes hardwired. It generates poisonous assumptions, yet rarely tests them, settling instead for data that seems to confirm and fortify them. Consequently, racism is the most slovenly of predictive models. It is powered by haphazard data gathering and spurious correlations, reinforced by institutional inequities, and polluted by confirmation bias. — Cathy O'Neil

In my criminal work anything that wears skirts is a lady, until the law proves her otherwise. From the frayed and slovenly petticoats of the woman who owns a poultry stand in the market and who has grown wealthy by selling chickens at twelve ounces to the pound, or the silk sweep of Mamie Tracy, whose diamonds have been stolen down on the avenue... — Mary Roberts Rinehart

When the general is weak and without authority; when his orders are not clear and distinct; when there are no fixed duties assigned to officers and men, and the ranks are formed in a slovenly haphazard manner, the result is utter disorganization. — Sun Tzu

Write a true, careless, slovenly impulsive, honest diary every day of your life. — Brenda Ueland

When we got off the streetcar at Times Square, it was somewhat of a letdown. Newspapers were blowing about the road and pavement, and Broadway looked seedy, like a slovenly woman just out of bed. — Charlie Chaplin

Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer-and-soda joint. There was a Coca-Cola box full of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube-metal stools covered in yellow glazed leather ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made horrible screeching noises when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room, where certain people checked in at certain times. — William S. Burroughs

Everywhere the crisis of the private financial system has been transformed into a tale of slovenly and overweening government that perpetuates and is perpetuated by a dependent and demanding population ... For about ten days the crisis was interpreted as a consequence of the ineptitude of the highly paid, and then it transmogrified into a grudge against the populace at large. — Marilynne Robinson

Extremely large greens breed slovenly play. When any green ceases to command respect, it loses its value as a test of that rarest of all strokes, the shot home. — A. W. Tillinghast

Why are you looking at me like that?"
"I guess I've never seen you in a T-shirt before. Or jeans."
"It's for the distasteful thing," Gansey said. He plucked at the T-shirt with deprecating fingers. "I'm rather slovenly at the moment, I know."
Blue concurred, "Yes, slovenly, that's exactly what I was thinking. Ronan, I see that you're dressed slovenly as well. — Maggie Stiefvater

It is indolence ... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine. — Jane Austen

There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him, in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing. — Charles Dickens

The inattentive, slovenly way we drift into the presence of God is an indication that we are not bothering to think about Him. Whenever our Lord spoke of prayer, He said, "Ask." It is impossible to ask if you do not concentrate. — Oswald Chambers

Most people call my style of dress slovenly, I call it extreme casual. If I didn't have a mother and a sister for the times I do have to get dressed, I would be absolutely lost. — Joshua Jackson

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes. — Cesare Pavese

The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all. — Barbara Ehrenreich