You see how fastidious they were.
Mark Twain
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.” “I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Bingley, “for a kingdom!
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Her father had always cleaned the blade in the godswood after he took a man’s head, Sansa recalled, but Ser Ilyn was not so fastidious.
George R. R. Martin
A Clash of Kings
And if, nevertheless, our honesty should one day grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter, easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us remain hard, we latest Stoics, and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in us:—our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our “nitimur in vetitum,” our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, intellectual Will to Power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves avidiously around all the realms of the future—let us go with all our “devils” to the help of our “God”!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
“I should never have thought, my boy, that you were so dainty and fastidious.
Carlo Collodi
The Adventures of Pinocchio
She was beautiful, but her beauty was of too marked and decided a character to please a fastidious taste; her hair was raven black, but its natural waves seemed somewhat rebellious; her eyes, of the same color as her hair, were surmounted by well-arched brows, whose great defect, however, consisted in an almost habitual frown, while her whole physiognomy wore that expression of firmness and decision so little in accordance with the gentler attributes of her sex—her nose was precisely what a sculptor would have chosen for a chiselled Juno.
Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo
Laurence.” “My lord!” “That man intends to marry our Jo!” “I hope so; don’t you, dear?” “Well, my love, I consider him a trump, in the fullest sense of that expressive word, but I do wish he was a little younger and a good deal richer.” “Now, Laurie, don’t be too fastidious and worldly-minded.
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
On my word of honor, rather than die in bed, of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms, syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannonball in my belly!” “You’re not over fastidious,” said the soldier.
Victor Hugo
Les Misérables
It could be shut off from the rest of the home by a tiny curtain, which Tink, who was most fastidious, always kept drawn when dressing or undressing.
J. M. Barrie
Peter and Wendy
Ah, Denis, if you could only read Knockespotch you wouldn’t be writing a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character, you wouldn’t be describing in endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and Hampstead.
Aldous Huxley
Crome Yellow
You have been tutored and refined by books and retirement from the world, and you are therefore somewhat fastidious; but this only renders you the more fit to appreciate the extraordinary merits of this wonderful man.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus
They might be crack vials, but the caps are still on them, and pipeheads wouldn't be so fastidious as to replace the lid on an empty vial.
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash
To hold them content without angering Auda was task delicate enough for the most fastidious mind.
T. E. Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
His face was fastidious, but his eye was wild; he had little nervous tricks, like a man shaken by drink or drugs, and he neither had, nor professed to have, his hand on the helm of household affairs.
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
Emma made her toilet with the fastidious care of an actress on her debut.
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
Instead of busting their heads open, he tramped in his galoshes and black raincoat through the drizzling darkness to invite Chief White Halfoat to move in with him, too, and drive the fastidious, clean-living bastards out with his threats and swinish habits.
Heller, Joseph
Catch-22