"Pretentious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as an important family place in the county. The house was of stone, with a portico of Ionic columns which looked as though it hardly belonged of right to the edifice, and stretched itself out grandly, with two pretentious wings, which certainly gave it a just claim to be called a mansion. It required a great many servants to keep it in order, and the numerous servants required an experienced duenna, almost as grand in appearance ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... to the people who give these private balls, or dances, or dancing-parties (for these two synonyms are very commonly preferred to the more pretentious word "ball"). They may be roughly classified ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... abashed and hostile; most of them ridicule what they have to say. The press has been practically unanimous every morning in making fun of the piece and the author. If I enter a reading room I cannot pick up a paper without seeing: "Absurd as 'Hernani'; silly, false, bombastic, pretentious, extravagant and nonsensical as 'Hernani'." If I venture into the corridors of the theatre while the performance is in progress I see spectators issue from their boxes and slam the doors indignantly. Mlle. Mars plays her part honestly and faithfully, but laughs ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... rich. But the monuments of the church of Brou are not the noblest that one may see; the great tombs of Verona are finer, and various other early Italian work. These things are not insincere, as Ruskin would say; but they are pretentious, and they are not positively naifs. I should mention that the walls of the choir are embroidered in places with Margaret's tantalising device, which—partly perhaps because it is tantalising—is so very decorative, as they say in London. I know ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... thanks, however, and after dropping Nat and his mother at their home he rolled off with Peter, explaining that he would take the lad to his own door. Nat wondered not a little where that door was, and he would have been overwhelmed with amazement had he known that portals no less pretentious than those of the Coddington mansion itself opened to receive his chum. Very wide open indeed were they thrown when the car bringing Peter and his father turned into the long avenue leading to the house. How glad ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... is generally made to the Roman Church, partly because its adherents compose the majority of Christendom, partly because its demands are the most pretentious, and partly because it has commonly sought to enforce those demands by the civil power. None of the Protestant Churches has ever occupied a position so imperious—none has ever had such wide-spread political influence. For the most part they have been ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... piece of work, and is worth a crowd of far more pretentious productions."—News and Courier, ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... stock-broker he knew to motor over to lunch and tennis at the Beau Site, at Cannes, while Dorise and her mother had gone with some people to lunch at the Reserve at Beaulieu, one of the best and yet least pretentious restaurants in all Europe, only equalled perhaps by ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... comparatively easy to classify the majority—officers' wives; the frontier helpmates of the more prominent merchants of the town; women from the surrounding ranches, who had deserted their homes until the Indian scare ceased; a scattered few from pretentious small cities to the eastward, and, here and there, younger faces, representing ranchmen's daughters, with a school-teacher or two. Altogether they made rather a brave show, occasionally exhibiting toilets worthy of admiring glances, never lacking ardent ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... astonishing! original!' they consider their work perfect. Such poets seldom attempt long poems; if they should imprudently do so, we find but little sequence, and nothing of that clear order, of that marvellous unity, which mark the works of the masters. Everything is sought to flatter that pretentious vanity of the limited understanding which piques itself on its stereotyped knowledge, always striving to usurp the higher empire of the divining soul. Such writing certainly requires subtlety of intellect, for talent is required to discover that which no one can see; to invent relations ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... life amid particular surroundings, which they breathe and which colors them—dyes them in the wool. However skilless, they cannot help reproducing, any more than water poured from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness will not prevent the unpremeditated ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... village, which now swept into view as they rounded the spur of a hill. The village consisted of some five hundred huts surrounding a central stockade, which enclosed a small group of buildings of considerably more pretentious character than the ordinary huts, and which Dick and Grosvenor at once conjectured must be the royal palace and its dependencies. This conjecture was confirmed upon their arrival at the village, for at the gateway ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... and lightning ran rampant in the skies, but nothing served to lessen the speed of that swift flight over the highways leading into the sleep-ridden country. Inside the cab, not the one in which Dorothy Garrison had begun her journey to the altar, but another and less pretentious, sat the grim desperado and a half-dead woman. Whither they flew no one knew save the man who held the reins over the plunging horses. How long their journey—well, it ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... character in spectacles—the pretentious tortoiseshell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager. Babbitt's spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... Thanks to the Hitchcocks' introduction, and also to the receptive attitude of a society that was still very largely fluid, he had gone hither and thither pretty widely during this past year. There were quieter, less pretentious circles than this in which the Carsons aspired to move, but he had not yet found them. Anything that had a retiring disposition disappeared from sight in Chicago. Society was still a collection of heterogeneous names that ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... sympathising invariably deceives itself as to its power; woman would like to believe that love can do everything—it is the superstition peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is—how much more readily it destroys than ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... pains, if he ever possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ignorance, that strikes the keynote of our existing criticism. Men write without taking the trouble to ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... a treat) in papa's dressing-room. My sleep was broken by uneasy dreams, in which Mrs. Jones figured with the face of Mrs. Cadman and her hollow voice. I had a sensation that that night the house never went to rest. People came in and out with a pretentious purpose of not awaking me. My father never came to bed. I felt convinced that I heard the doctor's voice in the passage. At last, while it was yet dark, and when I seemed to have been sleeping and waking, waking and falling asleep again ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a pretentious word, which, with its derivatives, many persons—especially those who like to be grandiloquent—use, when homely English would ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... green prairies into a vast blue lake. There are log houses along the banks, and near the lake a more pretentious structure, also built of logs. Quaint as an old Dutch mill, with its overhanging second story, this fort of rude type answers its purpose well, for only Indians are likely to assail it, and Indians ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... first privately printed, and afterwards published in 1821. This was followed by Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, in 1816. In this he gives his own experience in the tragical career of the hero. His longest and most pretentious poem was The Revolt of Islam, published in 1819. It is in the Spenserian stanza. Also, in the same year, he published The Cenci, a tragedy, a dark and gloomy story on what should be a forbidden subject, but very powerfully ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... height from which difference of nationality and ancestry will appear but an insignificant speck on earth, well and good! Then let us be patriots and continue to nurse national characteristics; but we ought, at least, not to clothe ourselves in the mantel of Faust, in our pretentious sweep through space. We ought at least declare openly that the life of all peoples is never to be anything else but an outrageous mixture of stupid patriotism, national vanities, everlasting antagonism, and a ravenous ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... Ha, ha, ha! He always was Huffle Scuffle; a noisy, pretentious, empty-headed fellow. But I oughtn't to say so before you, young man. Come, we'll go ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... They go barefoot, and strut, rather than walk, without bending the knee, with chest and stomach pompously projected. From this gait results a certain balancing of the body and a movement to the hips, which gives to the women a bold, and to the men a pretentious air. Most of the women hide their faces when a stranger heaves in sight; but it must not be supposed from this that they are either modest or retiring, on the contrary, for young girls and women yield their persons indiscriminately to men ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... coinage is the first step in a series of rational, safe, and necessary reforms, are ready to be judged as much by the reasonableness of their doctrine as by the sincerity of their motives. They intend from now on to force the fight. The enemy will be sought out and assailed wherever found. No pretentious claims of infallibility will be accorded immunity from criticism. No authority will be permitted to shelter folly. It is time to expose the preposterous assurance of the gold-standard pundits. Nonsense will be called nonsense whoever utters it, and, ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... that the simple form of Tannhaeuser was composed in the years 1843 and 45 in and near Dresden, at a time, when there were neither means nor taste in Germany for such scenes, as those, which excited Wagner's brain. Afterwards success has rendered Wagner bolder and more pretentious and so he endowed the person of Frau Venus with more dramatic power, and thereby threw a vivid light on the great attraction, she exercises on Tannhaeuser. The decorations are by far richer and a ballet of Sirens and Fauns was added, a concession, which Wagner had to make ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... grades in Indianapolis the children have some oral English work every day. When they reach the seventh and eighth years this oral work takes on quite pretentious forms. Beginning with Aesop's Fables, the children tell fairy tales, Bible stories, Greek legends, Norse legends, animal stories, and any other stories that the teacher thinks appropriate. Each child may select in the particular ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... and fifty pounds, from a disturbance spirited up by obscure people, who never gave any better reason for it, than that it was their fancy to support the idle complaint of one rival actress against another, in their several pretentious to the chief part in a new tragedy. But as this tumult seem'd only to be the Wantonness of English Liberty, I shall not presume to lay any further ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Boulogne, lately telling me that he remembered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the place.' Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to Hohenlinden, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809) is truly one of 'the glories of our birth and state.' The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... being undiscovered like some we saw the day before. Rich people, but luckily people of taste, know all about that cup of crystal, Pompton Lake, the sweet singing Wanaqua River, and lovely Pequannock Park. They have made homes for themselves, quite wonderful in beauty, and never pretentious; never a staring house or grotesquely expensive gates to shock the dear little childlike mountains and shady river. Along the winding roads, where trees trailed shadows like dragging masses of ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... the disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external. This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth. When Horatio ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the day; it is evident from the large looking glass which overhangs the sideboard that the fashion had now set in to use these mirrors. Some thirty or forty year later this mirror became part of the sideboard, and in some large and pretentious designs which we have seen, the sideboard itself was little better than a support for a huge glass ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... and lock up our spoons. And that is what we have done very much as regards the Americans. We have walked with them and talked with them, and bought with them and sold with them; but we have mistrusted them as to their internal habits and modes of life, thinking that their philanthropy was pretentious and that their theories were vague. Many cities in the States are but skeletons of towns, the streets being there, and the houses numbered—but not one house built out of ten that have been so counted up. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... had been said for many generations than the mot credited to a young girl, who had described a ball given that season by the women of forty as "The Hags' Hop." Somebody else had called it "The Roaring Forties." Which was the better description of the two? "The Roaring Forties" seemed a little pretentious, and preference was given to the more natural ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... latter alone can be justifiable in moral and religious things. If a man sorrowfully and humbly doubts, because he cannot help it, he shall not be condemned. When he is proud of his doubts, complacently swells with fancied superiority, plays the fanfaron with his pretentious arguments, and sets up as a propagandist of disbelief, being all the while in reality "Most ignorant of what he is most assured, His glassy essence," his conduct is offensive to every good man, and his spirit must receive the condemnation of God. A missionary of atheism and death, horridly eager ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... erected, while their commander, if better housed, showed by actions more than words that he felt every pang of his soldiers. Washington's anxiety at this critical period was greatly aggravated by the conspiracy known as "Conway's Cabal," to depose him from the command, and put in his place the pretentious but incapable Gates. This conspiracy was narrowly defeated by the patriotic firmness of the supporters of Washington in Congress, one of whom—William Duer, of New York, an Englishman by birth—had himself carried in a litter to the floor of Congress, at ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... the necessary training in mathematics, dialectics, languages, and drawing, and the necessary knowledge of science, without either consuming all the leisure of the boy or destroying his individuality, as it is destroyed by the ignorant and pretentious blunderers of to-day; and there is an equally manifest need of a new type of University, something other than a happy fastness for those precociously brilliant creatures—creatures whose brilliance is too often the hectic indication of a constitutional unsoundness of mind—who can "get in" before ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... with an intellectual tool and then deny him the free use of it. The strength of America lies in the prodigious number of individuals who think and work at the same time. It is a severe test of pretentious mediocrity, but I fear it may also efface originality . . .You are right in believing that one works, or at least that one CAN work, better in Paris than elsewhere, and I should esteem myself happy if I had my nest there, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... more pretentious sort than the Maison Doucieux, but still the peculiar resort of the blousard—for there are cafe chantants of many grades in Paris—may be found in one of the back streets near the Boulevard St. Martin. Some of the cafes chantants are patronized by the well-dressed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... exposed, to the sea-breezes, is healthy, and a good anchorage is found close to it. The place presented an animated appearance, as traders from all parts of the archipelago assemble there. The buildings they inhabited were not, however, pretentious, being composed of bamboo and reeds; while many of the traders considered clothes somewhat superfluous. On the shore a number of prows were hauled up and being refitted for sea. Caulkers were at work on some; painters on others, who were covering them with a thick white lime ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... made a bad matter worse. The division into two scenes wasted time, and nothing was gained by it. Never obstinate, Henry saw his mistake and restored the original end after a time. It was weak and unsatisfactory, but not pretentious and bad, like the last act he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... and even in puritanic Boston. Much better than Hail Columbia was the Star-Spangled Banner, the words of which were composed by Francis Scott Key, a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than these was the once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., Adams and Liberty, recited at an anniversary of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society. The sale of this is said to have netted its author over $750, but it ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... of the Ginini was known as a castello, it was more in the nature of a comfortable and pretentious villa. It had dignity, however, and drowsed upon a commanding eminence fronted by a splendid terraced lawn which one beheld through clumps of flowering shrubs and well-tended trees. Here and there among the foliage gleamed statuary, and the musical ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... done. A game-preserving Aristocracy, guiltless of producing or apportioning anything. Owning the soil of England. (p. 213.)—The Working Aristocracy steeped in ignoble Mammonism: The Idle Aristocracy, with its yellow parchments and pretentious futilities. (216.) ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... pair of gaine-shaped pedestals—suggested by a sculptor friend—at their top. The exedra I mentioned just now is of concrete. The stuff is a temptation to be wary of. The ordinary gray sort—I have touched no other—is a humble medium, and pretentious designs in humble materials are one of the worst, and oldest, of garden incongruities. In my ventures with concrete I have studied for grace in form but grace subordinated to stability, and have shunned embellishment. Embellishment ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... "reserved force." Salvini had it, for the simple reason that his was the gigantic force which may be restrained because of its immensity. Men have no need to dam up a little purling brook. If they do it in acting, it is tame, absurd and pretentious. But Salvini held himself in, and still his groan was like a tempest, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... passed, and they stopped at a pretentious, many-windowed, Queen Anne house. Ruth ran lightly up the steps, ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... five feet high, with a face like a nut-cracker, in which could be seen only two eyes, two sharp cheek-bones, a nose and a chin. Having no teeth he swallowed half his words, though his style of conversation was effluent, gallant, pretentious, and smiling, with the smile he formerly wore when he received beautiful great ladies at the door of his shop. Powder, well raked off, defined upon his cranium a nebulous half-circle, flanked by two pigeon-wings, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... held was packed to overflowing. Accordingly Mrs. Bertram in a neat little brougham, which she had hired for the occasion, dropped her cards from house to house in peace; accordingly, too, she caught the maids-of-all-work in their undress toilets, and the humble homes looking their least pretentious. ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the course which we must follow to attain this goal, there may be various opinions. I proposed the establishment of a union of Central European States. The conservative press characterized that as "utterly pretentious."... ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... it all over and consulted Webster, as I said, and came to the conclusion that in view of this being a more pretentious house than either of the others they had a right to the word. Webster doesn't say what degree of pretension is necessary, ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... most amazing. It was so recently a mining town, just "Last Chance Gulch," where Chinamen were digging up the streets for gold, almost undermining the few little buildings, and Chinamen also were raising delicious celery, where now stand very handsome houses. Now Main street has many pretentious shops, and pretty residences have been put up almost to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... stood for. He would never tell them. All he said in reply to questions was: "It don't stand for nothin'. You've gotter have a' 'nitial, ain't you?" His name was, in fact, an almost inevitable school-boy modification of one felt to be absurd and pretentious. His Christian name was Temple, which became "Temp." His surname was Barom, so he was at once "Temp Barom." In the natural tendency to avoid waste of time it was pronounced as one word, and the letter p being superfluous and cumbersome, it easily settled itself into "Tembarom," and there remained. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... more so than Manchester and Liverpool. At Boston is very good literate company indeed; it is like Edinburgh for that,—a vast amount of toryism and donnishness everywhere. That of New York the simplest and least pretentious; it suffices that a man should keep fine house, give parties, and have a daughter, to get all ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Mill of Saint —— was less pretentious than its name. Even at its best it could not have been imposing. Now, partially destroyed and with its windows carefully screened inside by grain sacks nailed to the frames for fear of a betraying ray of light, it was not beautiful. But it was hospitable. A hanging lamp in its one livable ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... about the empty, grass-grown roads of the tiny settlement. To the right as one walked up from the beach stretched a long line of substantial-looking barracks, and many of the houses were of European appearance, attractively set in large gardens. Above the whole towered a rather pretentious two-spired church. The one native and business street running parallel with the beach showed little life; people did not wake up even at the coming of the fortnightly mail from Hong Kong, and the native population ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Since his return from Russia he had displayed in private life the utmost good sense. But in public life he seemed incapable of accepting the situation in which he must have known himself to be, holding the loftiest and most pretentious language both to the French nation and to the world. In his address on the opening of the legislature he dwelt on Wellington's reverses in the peninsula, and offered peace to Great Britain on the old terms of "uti possidetis" in Spain. In a less public way he had it thoroughly ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... She delighted Kenny with her willingness to play. Nothing tired her. Together they roamed to the quaint little restaurants of Bohemia; the Italian table d'hotes where Kenny was inclined to twinkle at the youthful art students who affected pretentious ties, the quiet old German restaurant that once had been a church, Chinatown where you ate unskillfully with chopsticks upon a table of onyx, and the Turkish restaurant where everything, Sid said, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... starting on a journey inland, he will not regret his foresight. Inns do not exist out in the country. In the larger cities, indeed, there are hotels, but all are modest establishments. Perhaps the most pretentious is the French Hotel in Santo Domingo City. In hotels which are located in important seaports or railroad termini and are frequented by travelers, the meals and accommodations are fair. In other localities the food is almost inedible to an unaccustomed palate, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... abhorrence. The perspective of all things had changed. The men who had once seemed great to him in this little world now appeared in the light of a wider judgment, as they really were—small, boastful, pompous, cowardly, deceitful, pretentious. Franklin was himself now a man, and a man graduated from that severe and exacting school which so quickly matured a generation of American youth. Tall, finely built, well set up, with the self-respecting ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... The social rank and the reputed ability of the seigneur were the determining factors. Men who had been members of the noblesse in France received tracts as large as a Teutonic principality, comprising a hundred square miles or more. Those of less pretentious birth and limited means had to be content with a few thousand arpents. In general, however, a seigneury comprised at least a dozen square miles, almost always with a frontage on the great river and rear limits extending up into the foothills behind. The metes and bounds ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... of the quarantine, El-Wijh, the town on the northern bank of its cove, has blossomed into a hauteville, dating from the last dozen years. The ancient basseville, probably the site of many former settlements, is now used chiefly for shops and stores. Another and a more pretentious mosque has supplanted the little old Zwiyah ("chapel") with its barbarous minaret, whose finial, a series of inverted crescents, might be taken for a cross; while a Jmi' or "cathedral," begun in the upper ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... was abundant, and a saw-pit had been erected, a more pretentious one-floored cottage residence was planned to join on to the first building, which before long was entirely devoted to the servants; and we soon had a very charming little home with shingle roof, over which beautiful creepers ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... east border of the lake, sometimes over a small stretch of rough or hilly shoreland, but usually through heavy growths of hemlock, white pine, oak, and other trees more or less characteristic of the country. Here and there along the way was a cottage, or summer house of more pretentious proportions, usually constructed near the water or some distance up on the side of the hill-shore, with a kind of terrace-walk leading down ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... they had found refuge was perched on the mountainside just at one edge of the draw. Rough as the girl had thought it, there was a more pretentious appearance to it than might have been expected. The cabin was of hewn logs mortared with mud, and care had been taken to make it warm. The fireplace was a huge affair that ate fuel voraciously. It was built of stone, which had been gathered from ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... occasionally the sound of the drum or the bugle, fit accompaniment for such surroundings. At the foot of the belfry was an antique building in another style, with a small open colonnade, which, though out of harmony, was still not inappropriate. The only thing jarring was a pretentious modern town-hall, in the style of one of our own vestry buildings, 'erected out of the rates,' and which must have cost a huge sum. It was of a genteel Italian aspect, so it is plain that French local ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... chateaux—some just on the border of the highroad, separated from it by high iron gates, through which one sees long winding alleys with stone benches and vases with red geraniums planted in them, a sun-dial and stiff formal rows of trees—some less pretentious with merely an ordinary wooden gate, generally open, and always flowers of the simplest kind, geraniums, sunflowers, pinks, dahlias, and chrysanthemums—what we call a jardin de cure, (curate's garden)—but in great abundance. With very rare ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... wife, who was supposed to be "queer," who remained at home in her house opposite Gallatin Park and made little German cakes,—a huge house which an unknown architect had taken unusual pains to make pretentious and hideous, for it was Rhenish, Moorish and Victorian by turns. Its geometric grounds matched those of the park, itself a monument to bad taste in landscape. The neighbourhood was highly respectable, and inhabited by families of German extraction. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... performance. He wondered that she could not have discovered something more original than to follow the footsteps of Maud Allan in a scene which years ago had become stale. He wondered that, at any rate, Concepcion should not perceive the poor, pretentious quality of the girlish exhibition. And as he looked at the mincing Dialin he pictured the lance-corporal helping to serve a gun. And as he looked at the youthful, lithe Queenie posturing in the shower-bath of rays amid the blazing chromatic ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... which sorrowing hearts had caused to be carved their regrets and coats of arms. Many good words are there engraved in black letters, epigrams reproving the curious, concetti, wittily turned farewells, rendezvous given at which only one side appears, pretentious biographies, glitter, rubbish and tinsel. Here the floriated thyrsus, there a lance-head, farther on Egyptian urns, now and then a few cannon; on all sides the emblems of professions, and every style of art,—Moorish, Greek, Gothic,—friezes, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... thus much the immensely weeded widow retraced her steps, and gave herself leisure to observe the movements of the fair. By and by her attention was arrested by a little stall of cakes and ginger-breads, standing between the more pretentious erections of trestles and canvas. It was covered with an immaculate cloth, and tended by a young woman apparently unused to the business, she being accompanied by a boy with an octogenarian face, who ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... impression on the heap of ashes, though, as the days passed on, the heap was seen to be slowly melting. My lords and gentlemen and honourable boards, when you in the course of your dust-shovelling and cinder-raking have piled up a mountain of pretentious failure, you must off with your honourable coats for the removal of it, and fall to the work with the power of all the queen's horses and all the queen's men, or it will come rushing down ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... college treasuries replenished. It was with money collected through a lottery that Massachusetts first encouraged cotton spinning; that the City Hall of New York was enlarged, the Court House at Elizabeth rebuilt, the Harvard University library increased, and many pretentious buildings put up at the Federal City. [Footnote: McMaster's United States, 588.] This was but a single form of the sporting mania. The public stocks, as well as the paper of the numerous canals, turnpikes, and manufacturing corporations now springing up, were gambled ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... of an autumn trip to an unhackneyed land is much better worth reading than many more pretentious volumes.... The authoress has an eye for what is worth seeing, a happy knack of graphic description, and a literary style which is commendably free ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... there would be an evening meeting in a public building, and then the proceedings were more formal and pretentious. The trumpeter disappeared and a chairman would open the ball. The occasion of which I am thinking was one of these meetings in the East End, where the Chairman was a local tradesman. He said that this was a war for liberty and that England could never sheathe the sword until ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... construction of dwelling houses, they exhibited a true perception of "the eternal fitness of things." The buildings of the fifties, in their extreme simplicity, are far more imposing than the nondescript, pretentious structures of today, and will, beyond ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... as food for laughter. Lucien pleaded a defective memory and excused himself. When he reappeared, nobody took the slightest notice of him; every one was chatting or busy at the card-tables; the poet's aureole had been plucked away, the landowners had no use for him, the more pretentious sort looked upon him as an enemy to their ignorance, while the women were jealous of Mme. de Bargeton, the Beatrice of this modern Dante, to use the Vicar-General's phrase, and looked at him with cold, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... means her husband had left her, but she was not parsimonious or inhospitable. Now she was actuated by a fierce maternal jealousy. Esther, despite her pleasant ways and her helpfulness, was often overlooked in a social way. This was due to her mother. The more pretentious laughed about Mrs. Robinson, and though the thrifty, contented housewife never missed the amenities which might have been extended to her, she was keenly alive to any slights put upon her daughter. And ...
— Different Girls • Various
... roofs. At the left of the village, and about an eighth of a mile distant, was an imposing red brick building with wings and a pair of octagon towers. It stood in a forest of pines and maples, and appeared to be enclosed by a high wall of masonry. It was too pretentious for an almshouse, too elegant for a prison; it was as evidently not a school-house, and it could not be an arsenal. Lynde puzzled over it a moment, and then returned for his saddle, which he slung across his back, holding it by a stirrup-strap brought over ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Pot an idealist. If he were, he might have been tempted to mistake the Pipkin for a statelier, more pretentious Vessel—a Vase, say, all graceful curves and embossed sides, but shallow, perhaps, possibly lacking breadth. No, the Pipkin is a pipkin, made of common clay—even though it has the uncommon sweetness and strength to overcome ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... a large, pretentious country town. A branch of some railroad terminated there. The main street was wide, bordered by trees and commodious houses, and many of the stores were of brick. A large plaza shaded by giant cottonwood trees ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... met him in time to hurry him and her cousin's provocative remains out of the country. In the midst of these reflections she had to pass the little hillside cemetery. It was a spot of great natural beauty, cypress-shadowed and luxuriant. It was justly celebrated in Pineville, and, but for its pretentious tombstones, might have been peaceful and suggestive. Here she recognized a figure just turning from its gate. It was ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... pretends to be what it at one time was—a pretty complete report of the scientific and other work of the department. The attempts which I have made through the proper authorities to get Congress to order more pretentious monographic works in quarto volume similar to those issued by other departments of the government have not met with encouragement, and in this direction many of the stations will, let us hope, be able to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... Select Woman had languished for want of a proper incumbent,—that is, where the feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and character are to be found in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the studios in which motion pictures are taken are expensive and pretentious affairs. An immense building of glass, with all the properties and stage-settings of a regular theatre, is required. The Bronx Park studio of the Edison company cost at least one hundred thousand dollars, while the well-known house of Pathe Freres in France—one of Edison's ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... would not give up; so day after day she traversed one street after another, looking wistfully in every face she met for the one she sought, questioning children playing in the parks and squares as to whether they knew any teacher by the name of Markham or Grant, ringing the door-bells of every pretentious-looking house and putting the same question to the servants, until the bombazine dress and black Stella shawl, and brown Neapolitan hat, and old-fashioned lace veil, and large sun umbrella became pretty well known in various parts of New York, while the owner thereof grew ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... pageant that rolls past our view under the direction of the aristocrat of literature made my late life seem poor and mean. How low we were! The darkened costers are interesting as studies in animal life; but the more pretentious persons whose humour reaches its highest flight in an indecent story, and whose wit consists in calling someone else a liar—how petty they are, and how fruitless is their friendship! I began to feel like a patrician who surveys the mob from his lordly dais, and I almost resolved ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... mills and grist mills were in operation; fulling mills held an important position, and shortly afterwards the production of iron became considerable. The first meeting-house was completed in 1770. The most pretentious dwelling-house was "The Long House," owned by Colonel Williams. The first appropriation for schools was twenty-two pounds eight ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... squares, separated from each other by wide roads; and the whole settlement is surrounded by stockades. At the further end of the town stands the convict prison, distinguished by its tower, and the Governor's house, which, though built of wood, is the most pretentious-looking edifice in the place. There is a nice little church close by, and some ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... lane, as its name implied, was not very pretentious, and all its rooms were small and low, and mostly upon the ground floor, except the one which Jerrie had occupied since she had grown too large for the crib by Mrs. Crawford's bed. In this room, in which there was but one window, and where the roof slanted down on both sides, Jerrie kept ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... son of the Contessa - and see the people bowing with profound respect. I breathe the faint, fine perfume of frankincense and lavender exhaling from my mother's clothes. And I recollect my sensation of calm and pride at the meals with the heavy pretentious plate, the great bouquets of roses, the violet hose of the clergy who were our guests, the fragrance of ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of his fathers, facing the Seigniorial pew, recorded, for a little, the name of the last d'Argentenaye; but now the proud Cure at length has had his will, and instead of its venerable house of God, Dormilliere wears in its centre a pretentious nondescript structure of cut-stone. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... space of two or three acres, cleared from tanglewood and dwarf palmettoes. In the centre was a log-house, larger and more pretentious than many log-houses which he had seen in the South. A Marshal Niel had climbed up one corner to the roof, and twined itself around the chimney, giving a rather picturesque effect to the house, and reminding the ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... families made a compromise and built what is called a modern house with bath-room and furnace (after the air-tight-stove craze passed), with jigsaw ornamentation outside and in, pretentious-looking dwellings with no proper kitchen accompaniments, and an unsavory garbage-barrel in the small back yard, under the next neighbor's windows. These houses are so close together that sounds and smells mingle; there is so little ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... gave four reals— I dare say the last he had in his pocket— to the steward, who waited upon him. I could not but feel a pity for him, especially when I saw him by the side of his fellow-passenger and townsman, a fat, coarse, vulgar, pretentious fellow of a Yankee trader, who had made money in San Diego, and was eating out the vitals of the Bandinis, fattening upon their extravagance, grinding them in their poverty; having mortgages on their lands, forestalling their ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... Square and the neighbourhood are not so pretentious as those in Belgravia, but it is still a fashionable place of residence. In South Eaton Place, near the south end, stood the Star and Garter Tavern, well known about 1760. The end of this street was called Burton Street (1826) until 1877. In Elizabeth Street, first called Eliza Street in ...
— Mayfair, Belgravia, and Bayswater - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... except when father has worked on me," Verena answered with an ingenuousness beside which humility would have seemed pretentious. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... helpless and aged are, like the asylums, the same as the houses of the rest of the town. No large building of pretentious style uprears itself for the poor; no men badged and badgered as paupers walk the place. Those poor who are really, from physical causes, unable to work, are maintained in a manner showing that they possess yet the dignity of human ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... part of the road Harry saw approaching him an open buggy of rather a pretentious character, driven by a schoolmate, Philip Ross, the son of Colonel Ross, a wealthy ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... the Des Meloises was a tall and rather pretentious edifice overlooking the fashionable ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 1490 and 1500, a hundred years before its episcopal elevation, and forms a most complete antithesis to Notre-Dame-du-Bourg which it supplanted in 1591. Where Notre-Dame is small, Saint-Jerome is large, where the old church is simple, the newer one is either pretentious or sumptuous, and where the one is Romanesque, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the State where he could be comfortable with his family till the affair blew over. The Tescherons spent their summers at the quiet village of Stukeville, where they had a comfortable country house; it was not pretentious, but it was beautifully situated on a knoll, overlooking the neighboring lake, and from the broad verandas a glimpse of the distant, more densely inhabited portion of the town might be obtained. But it was not possible to fly to Stukeville, because that is ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... pavements on either side, and of perhaps a distance equivalent to some seven or eight city blocks in length. Two blocks further up, on the same side of the street as that on which he was standing, was the bank—not a very pretentious establishment, he remembered; its staff consisting of but one or two apart from Forrester, as was not unusual with small local banks, though this in no way indicated that the business done was not profitable, or, comparatively, large. Jimmie Dale started forward along the street. On the corner ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Rutherford Wadley descended to a valley draw in which were huddled a score of Mexican jacals, huts built of stakes stuck in a trench, roofed with sod and floored with mud. Beyond these was a more pretentious house. Originally it had been a log "hogan," but a large adobe addition had been constructed for a store. Inside this the dance was ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... science, it is not a philosophical treatise, and it is not a dozen things that it might have been. The critic cannot forgive the author for this disrespect to him. This isn't a rose, says the critic, taking up a pansy and rending it; it is not at all like a rose, and the author is either a pretentious idiot or an idiotic pretender. What business, indeed, has the author to send the critic a bunch of sweet-peas, when he knows that a cabbage would be preferred,—something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... side of this road, what was of old the daintiest intricacy of its solitude is changed into a straight, and evenly macadamised carriage drive, between new houses of extreme respectability, with good attached gardens and offices—most of these tenements being larger—all more pretentious, and many, I imagine, held at greatly higher rent than my father's, tenanted for twenty years at Herne Hill. And it became matter of curious meditation to me what must here become of children resembling my poor little dreamy quondam self in temper, and thus brought ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of daily life. Sometimes I recognize with foreboding the kindly but stupid hand of one who tells with many words news that is no news. I have met a bishop with a jocose hand, a humourist with a hand of leaden gravity, a man of pretentious valour with a timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic man with a fist of iron. When I was a little girl I was taken to see[A] a woman who was blind and paralysed. I shall never forget how she held ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... stands with William of Malmesbury in the forefront of the historians of the twelfth century. His work, less pretentious than William's, is simpler and more straightforward. Eadmer was of Saxon birth and was brought up from childhood in Christ Church, Canterbury. Affectionately attached to Anselm from an early time, ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... the causes that led to the disaster of Caporetto. The pages in which Mr. TREVELYAN paints the portrait of a typical Italian soldier, home sick and perplexed, are likely to be borrowed by many more pretentious historians of the ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... boards, and its furniture, wrought painstakingly by an unskillful hand, had the charm of all handwork even when unskilled. Some of the chairs were rudely carved, one great throne especially, awkward, pretentious, and carefully ornate. ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... deal at that suggestion, for he had more than once cast a crest fallen look at his pretentious box. ...
— Dab Kinzer - A Story of a Growing Boy • William O. Stoddard
... belt. He did not come into the dining room or take regular meals, claiming to be sufficiently nourished by the raw wheat he masticated so industriously. We had not noticed him especially—no one took much notice of pretentious faddists—but on going around to the back door for the chicken-feed one evening Bonico and I recognized the wheat-muncher bending over the salver eagerly picking up whatever bits and pieces he could find to eat. He was so engaged in this employ ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... shock to the pretentious dogmatism of the Western world came with the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo that the current astronomy was fundamentally wrong. No sun-star or swarm of worlds in the infinite azure could be so precious in God's sight as this earth of ours, it was believed, for had it not ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... children, the judge was benignity itself, imitating the Grand Monarque, who bowed even to a chambermaid. He believed in good, orderly, respectable, old ways and entertainments, and had a quiet horror of all that is loud or noisy or pretentious; which sometimes made his social duties a trial to him, as was the case in regard to the ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... countenance, 'and I take you out as much as I can. Mr. Fitz Wilson has seven hundred a year. I could give you—say three; and surely with a thousand a year two young people might live in very good style—even in these pretentious days.' ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... not merely by these wishes, but by other factors in the situation, the wishes of other individuals, for example. The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is the same but the attitudes in which it finds expression ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... door of the ugly yet luxurious room which had been assigned him. He looked round it with fresh distaste, resenting its unnecessary size and its pretentious decoration, resenting also the very careful valeting which had evidently been bestowed on his shabby clothes and personal appointments, as though the magnificent young footman who looked after him had been doing his painful best ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... town of Eastbank is a house which, being very old, contrasts agreeably with the pretentious villas fashion has raised. It is gloomy inside, yet outside it looks like a cottage: low, rambling, gabled, and picturesque. It stands on a slope just above the sea, and its front garden runs down almost to the sea-shore. The aspect is southerly. The placid sea looks like a beautiful lake; ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... the headstones are boards, naturally; and one poor fellow, whose estate at death was probably a minus quantity, is commemorated by a strip of tin with his name pricked into it. There is a fair proportion of pretentious monuments, which were drawn by ten-horse teams ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... well! After a century of experiments that have led to nothing, and trials giving no results, there still exist ill-balanced minds who believe in guiding balloons. They imagine that a motor of some sort, electric or otherwise, might be applied to their pretentious skin bags which are at the mercy of every current in the atmosphere. They persuade themselves that they can be masters of an aerostat as they can be masters of a ship on the surface of the sea. Because a few inventors in calm or nearly calm weather ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... House looks like that," Bab said, after half a moment's pause. "I was so afraid it would be pretentious. But it is just big and simple and dignified as our President's home ought to be. It makes me feel so glad to be an American," Barbara ended with a flush. She was afraid the other girls were laughing ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... that a hien circuit or district corresponds to an old marquisate or feudal principality of the vassal unit type—is often a poor, dusty, dirty, depressing, ramshackle agglomeration of villages or hamlets, surrounded by a disproportionately pretentious wall, the cubic contents of which wall alone would more than suffice to build in superior style the whole mud city within; for half the area of the interior is apt to be waste land or stagnant puddles: it was so even in Peking ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... stories appeal, of course, to the sex impulse, humorous stories to laughter, and mystery stories to curiosity. Cynical stories, showing the "pillars of society" in an ignoble light, appeal to the self-assertive impulse of the reader, in that he is led to apply their teaching to pretentious people whom he knows about, and set them down a peg, to his own relative advancement. But here again we have to insist, as under the head of sports and daydreams, that interests of a more objective kind ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... of work at that period were from sunrise to sunset. Usually this rule, especially in the seasons of long days, required twelve, and very often fourteen and sixteen, hours a day. Yet the so-called statesmen and the pretentious cultured and refined classes of the day, saw nothing wrong in this exploitation. The reason was obvious. Their power, their elegant mansions, their silks and satins, their equipage and superior opportunities for enjoyment all were based upon the sweat and blood of these so-called ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... probably tell us when he has his plans perfected," Alice returned. "You know, though, that he promised if this 'A False Count' play should be a success he'd give us a chance in a more pretentious drama. I'm ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... was sometimes used as a lubricant. This was the only wheeled conveyance in California as late as 1840. Other Indians did the woodwork in buildings, made fences, etc. Some were carvers, and there are not a few specimens of their work that will bear comparison with the work of far more pretentious artisans. ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... stood on its dignity in those days. There were very nice and very old families living there then, and they kept themselves rolled up in their wealth and comfort, and looked coldly down on all new and pretentious people. West Bowling Green, too, put on airs of superiority over East Bowling Green, which it affected to designate with the term "rather vulgar." They were quiet, well brought up people on the West side, people who had made ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... in tears, was considering this doubtful reassurance when Bobby suddenly pointed again toward that pretentious estate on the hillside, and cried in quick excitement: "Look-ee, Mag, there's a autermobile a-comin' out from the castle, right now—see? She's a-goin' down the hill toward town. Who'll yer bet it is? Old Adam ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... further of her. Britt wrote once or twice, but did not allude to either Clarke or the Lamberts, and Serviss did not care to ask particularly about them. It was better for him not to be concerned further with the girl's singular history. He hated the irregular, the pretentious. His own life, so clear, so well regulated, made her daily performances the more monstrous. The whole had become so foolish in retrospect that he refrained from speaking of it, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland |
