"Ugliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thought Frank as he gazed entranced at the scenery. "I've never seen anything like it. It looks like Heaven after the ugliness of Rohar. And how delightfully cool it is, too, up in the mountains! Well, with this climate and good shooting in the forest below life won't be as dreadful as I thought. I wish poor Violet were here out of the heat and glare. How ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... as you will see (fig, 1, C), he has grown darker, and has developed a mouth and a tiny pair of breast-fins; but beautiful he certainly is not, judged by human standards of beauty. It often happens, however, that the outward mark of ugliness is but the sign of hidden peculiarities of unusual interest. Up to this point this baby sole is very like any other fish-baby; but from now onwards it enters on a most remarkable career. At six days old he shows all the promise of a well-grown fish; that is to say, his body is round and ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... appearance so different from that of the beaten, bruised, and wounded poor elf he first had seen, with clouted shoes, torn stockings, and coarse coating, dripping with water, and clotted with blood, was so great as scarcely to be credible. The ugliness of my companions did but enhance the superiority of my look; he could not be mistaken in which was his grandson, and the pleasure my pre-eminence inspired excited a smile of no little approbation. For my part I had conceived an affection for him; first I had saved his ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... of those fishes to which, on account of their uncouth appearance, the name of Toad Fish has been popularly given. Under this denomination there have been included many very dissimilar kinds, extreme ugliness being held as alone sufficient for the establishment of an undeniable claim to the title. The present fish, and those nearly related to it, advance, however, peculiar claims to the appellation. Their belly and side fins are borne upon supports which project from the body in the semblance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various
... the guests incautiously lifted the veil. By a thoughtless word he broke the serene charm and uncovered the truth in all its naked ugliness. Ere the thought formed itself in his mind, his lips uttered ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... appearance,—whether the building may as well be ugly as beautiful. By no means; what I have said is in the interest of beauty, as far as it is possible to us. Positive beauty it may be often necessary to forego, but bad taste is never necessary. Ugliness is not mere absence of beauty, but absence of it where it ought to be present. It comes always from a disappointed expectation,—as where the lineaments that do not disgust in the potato meet us in the human face, or even in the hippopotamus, whom accordingly Nature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... "the hot sandy plains of the desert possess generally thin, wiry forms, capable of great exertion, and severe privation. Many are of low stature, but not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected, like coster-mongers' dogs, on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently English ideas of the whole tribe are formed in the same way, as if the ugliest specimens of the English were exhibited in Africa as characteristic of the entire ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... dull leathery black. Its thick, hairless hide hung in creases and folds on a gaunt frame. Shorter than the tree-eater, it was still a thing of mammoth ugliness. Its hind legs were powerful and armed with claws that curved deep into the earth; its front legs displayed the same fearful weapons. A thick, heavy tail slashed forward and back over the ground. And from this ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... a procession of the blackguardism of all ages and of all countries under heaven. The sexes were apparently in equal numbers and in equal degrees of ugliness and ferocity. There were faces flat for want of noses, and mouths ghastly for want of teeth; faces scarred, bruised, battered into every shape but what might be called human. There were fighting-men of every species and variety—men ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... these, continually repeated, caused Poinsinet to be fully convinced of his ugliness; he used to go about in companies, and take every opportunity of inveighing against himself; he made verses and epigrams against himself; he talked about "that dwarf, Poinsinet;" "that buffoon, Poinsinet;" "that conceited, hump-backed Poinsinet;" and he would spend ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... life it was—feeble beyond expression, and ugly with the ugliness of savagery. She wriggled and screwed up her skinny features with inane ferocity. A motherless wallaby would have submitted to human solace and ministrations with daintier mien; but the whole household thrilled with excitement. Could the spluttering spark of life be made ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... must not omit to mention that at the time when her aunt was Abbess, the Prior, thinking that his ugliness was the cause of her refusal, had caused Sister Marie to be tempted by a handsome young monk, in the hope that if she yielded to this man through love, he himself might afterwards obtain her through fear. The young monk aforesaid spoke ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... like that on Sundays,' the Bat replied. 'Come,' it went on, 'stop crying. I didn't tell you the dread secret of your ugliness just to make you cry—but because I know the way for you to be as pretty all the week as you are on Sundays, and since you've been so kind to me I'll tell you. Sit down close beside me, it fatigues ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... Pintura. A certain young friar was famous amongst his order, for his skill in painting; and he took peculiar delight in drawing the Virgin and the Devil. To heighten the divine beauty of the one, and to devise new and extravagant forms of ugliness for the other, were the chief recreations for his leisure hours. Vexed at last by the variety and vigor of his sketches, Beelzebub, to be revenged, assumed the form of a lovely maiden, and crossed under this guise the path of the friar, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... mind people and their lies any more than I shall; if the toad does 'take it into his toad's head to spit at you'—you will not 'drop dead,' I warrant. All the same, if one may make a circuit through a flower-bed and see the less of his toad-habits and general ugliness, so much the better—no words can express my entire indifference (far below contempt) for what can be said or done. But one thing, only one, I choose to hinder being said, if I can—the others I would not if I could—why prevent the toad's puffing himself ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... it, as it were, made her valiant to meet the new. And for him that old life, the life menaced, though so trivially, by the arriving presence, seemed embodied in the free spaces of the great harbor, the soaring sky of frosty rose, the grotesque splendor of the giant city, the glory, the ugliness of the country he loved, the country that made giant-like, grotesque ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... knew not that then, as a dove may be caught by a lynx, you were to be caught by a great war, a war greater than the great river, and should return to these scenes a transport; a poor, scarred, bedraggled consort to gunboats; slow reptilian monsters of iron ugliness and bellowing ferocity. They knew not of days when you must swarm with blue soldiers—including Marburg—sometimes hot and merry for battle, sometimes shot-torn, fever-wasted, yellow-eyed, a human rubbish of camp and siege, ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... volcano's vat and at different spots saw the treacly sulphur pouring out, brilliant yellow with red streaks. The man to whom there first came the idea of hell and a prisoned revengeful power must surely have looked into a crater. In the throat of this crater there seethed and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there was a high ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... enhance yet further the suffering that produced the distortion, he would often represent attendant demons, whom he made as ugly as his imagination could compass; avoiding, however, all grotesqueness beyond what was sufficient to indicate that they were demons, and not men. Their ugliness rose from hate, envy, and all evil passions; amongst which he especially delighted to represent a gloating exultation over human distress. And often in the midst of his clouds of demon faces, would some one who knew him recognise the painter's own likeness, such as the mirror might have presented ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the interval, in watching the numerous boats, crowded with the inhabitants, which came off to visit the steamer. I did not notice a single Greek woman who maintained the reputation of her countrywomen for any thing but ugliness; and none of the men were of that fine race of beings whom I expected to see. There was nothing national in their costume; the women being mostly dressed in imitation of the Parisian mode; and, apparently, many of the men took their cut from Bond Street. Over a cabinet ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... mizzen-sky-sail, royal and topgallant-sail. The sailors passed us, or toiled close to us, with lowered eyes. They did not look at us, so far removed from them were we. It was this contrast that caught my fancy. Here were the high and low, slaves and masters, beauty and ugliness, cleanness and filth. Their feet were bare and scaled with patches of tar and pitch. Their unbathed bodies were garmented in the meanest of clothes, dingy, dirty, ragged, and sparse. Each one had on but two garments—dungaree trousers and a shoddy ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds to give ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... a few of this variety, the soft, gold-hearted lavender. See what increase." The youth plunged supple fingers into the balmy-scented loam, among the swelling tuber forms. "A beautiful kind of ugliness," he mused. "I remember I used to think——" The young gardener, as if he felt that the eyes fixed upon him were grown suddenly too eager, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ingenuity, frequently misdirected; ugliness, the result of a false ideal of beauty—these in general characterize the architecture of our immediate past; an architecture "without ancestry or hope of posterity," an architecture devoid of coherence or conviction; willing ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... emphasizing the immense energies devoted to artistic enterprises is to lead us to consider what is the end of all this labor. He points out scathingly the ugliness, frivolity, and crudity of much that passes for drama in the theater, for music in the concert hall, and for literature between covers. He pleads for a simple art that shall express with sincerity the genuine emotions of the great ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the old woman, raising her voice, "a scoundrel of a howling dervish robbed me at Scutari of all I had for my subsistence, and of my daughter's portion, seven hundred sequins, in a goat's-skin bag!" and then she began to curse. May the dogs of the city howl at her ugliness! How she did curse! She cursed my father and mother—she cursed their graves—flung dirt upon my brother and sisters, and filth upon the whole generation. She gave me up to Jehanum, and to every species of defilement. It was a dreadful thing to hear that old woman curse. I pulled ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... the ruins of the ancient abbey. "Why were these hard times for the poor?" Brooding over these questions, he observed two men hard by in the old cloister garden, one of lofty stature, nearer forty than fifty years of age, the other younger and shorter, with a pale face redeemed from ugliness by its intellectual brow. Egremont joined the strangers, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... looking past the ugliness within to the morning majesty without. But it was not either that he ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... life and death of the Son of God. Blessed are wisdom and courage, joy and health, and beauty and love and marriage, childhood and manhood, corn and wine, fruits and flowers; for Christ redeemed them by His life. And blessed, too, are tears and shame, blessed are weakness and ugliness, blessed are agony and sickness, blessed the sad remembrance of our sins, and a broken heart and a repentant spirit. Blessed is death, and blest the unknown realms, where souls await the resurrection day, ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... of Lotys,—and that prettiness becomes like a cheap advertisement on a hoarding or a match- box! Contrast the perfect features, eyes and hair of the newest social 'beauty,'—with the magical expression, the glamour in the eyes of Lotys,—and perfection of feature becomes the rankest ugliness! Once in a hundred centuries a woman is born like Lotys, to drive men mad with desire for the unattainable—to fire them with such ambition as should make them emperors of the world, if they had but sufficient courage to snatch their thrones—and yet,—to fill them with such ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... ugliest men who are the most agreeable fellows in the world. The ladies may doubt this remark; but if they compel me to produce an example, I shall waive all modesty, and prove my veracity by quoting myself. I have often thought how it is that ugliness contrives to invest itself with a "certain something," that not only destroys its disagreeable properties, but actually commands an interest—(by the by, this is referring generally, and nothing personal to myself.) I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... with that strange law of memory that horror, ugliness, and power should spring to the mind before humour, grace, or beauty, it is the tragic side and passionate purpose of Punch's career as shown in his cartoons that first arise in one's recollection. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Antisthenes, denied any value whatever to these earthly things that are not virtue—to health or sickness, riches or poverty, beauty or ugliness, pain or pleasure; who would ever mention them when the soul stood naked before God? All that would then matter, and consequently all that can ever matter, is the goodness of the man's self, that is, of his free and living will. The Stoics improved ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... appear the result of accident. Having failed in effecting Middleton's death by this excellent way, he shall perhaps think that he cannot do better them to make his own exit in precisely the same manner. It might be easy, and as delightful as any death could be; no ugliness in it, no blood; for the Bloody Footstep of old times might be the result of the failure of the old plot, not of its success. Poison seems to be the only elegant method; but poison is vulgar, and in many ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... monstrous nonsense. For the enjoyment the mind feels must come from the beauty and harmony which it perceives or contemplates in the things that the eye or the imagination brings before it; and nothing that has any ugliness or disproportion about it can give any pleasure. What beauty, then, or what proportion of the parts to the whole, or of the whole to the parts, can there be in a book or fable where a lad of sixteen cuts down a giant as tall ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... farm leads Agnolo to praise the pleasure and profit to be derived from life in the Villa. But at the same time a town-house has to be maintained; and it is here that the sons of the family should be educated, so that they may learn caution, and avoid vice by knowing its ugliness. In order to meet expenses, some trade must be followed, silk or wool manufacture being preferred; and in this the whole family should join, the head distributing work of various kinds to his children, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... cries pushed my way in. The Jews' Market is a series of covered arcades with a square in the middle of it, and in the middle of the square a little church with some doll-like trees. These arcades are Western in their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern, so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs, the cries, the singing, and the dancing that meets one ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... beneath the Jeremiah is "Salomon Rex."[22] These inscriptions belonged, of course, to the kings which made way for Donatello's prophets. The Zuccone must belong to the series of prophets; it is fruitless to speculate which. Cherichini may have inspired the portrait. Its ugliness is insuperable. It is not the vulgar ugliness of a caricature, nor is it the audacious embodiment of some hideous misshapen creature such as we find in Velasquez, in the Gobbo of Verona, or in the gargoyles of Notre Dame. There is no deformity about it, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... trousers, with black socks and straw slippers. His hat, something like a reversed bowl, shone with lacquer and ornaments of gold. I must say, however, that Europeans have no right to quiz the head covering of any nation in the world, as ours far surpass all others in ugliness, and in the want of adaptation of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... pawns? Why had he come back to it? He dared not confess the reason. The best he could do was admit to himself he had been mistaken. The rose tints had vanished from his sky and the path he had chosen was disclosed in all its drab ugliness. He had chosen it fatuously. The rose tints had been of his own making. He viciously snapped his mind shut on the thought. For a while he would feverishly clamp his attention to his work, while outside the sky continued serenely blue, and the breeze that drifted through his window was languorous ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... man, tall and lean, his robes, undimmed by the years, blazed in crimson and gold. But the face above! Garry shivered in spite of himself at the devilish ugliness the artist had copied. It was dead black in color, with slitted eyes that had been touched up artfully to bring out their venomous stare. The head itself rose up to a rounded point that added to the inhuman brutality of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... pits. So it seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were discoloured by hereditary antagonism. Had he preserved his philosopher's eye, he would have known that the Hoofed One is too wily to show himself, owing to his ugliness. The Black Goddess and no other presides at her own game. She (it is good for us to know it) is the Power who challenges the individual, it is he who spreads the net for the mass. She liquefies the brain of man; he petrifies or ossifies the heart. From her comes craziness, from him perversity: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Lee's manners after this bit of horse-play, and it is safe to say he was not soon again invited to an evening party. Mrs. Hamilton and Mrs. Mercy Warren both call Lee "a crabbed man." The latter described him in a letter to Samuel Adams as "plain in his person to a degree of ugliness; careless even to impoliteness; his garb ordinary; his voice rough; his manners rather morose; yet sensible, learned, judicious, ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... sometimes as his confessor and sometimes as his child. Its stones were to him as flesh and blood, its altars as lips that whispered consolation in answer to his prayers. The figures of its saints were heavenly companions. In its ugliness he perceived only beauty, in its tawdriness only the graces that are sweet offerings to God. The love that, had he not been a priest, he might have given to a woman he poured forth upon his church, and with it that other love which, had it been ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... rise day by day to fuller, stronger, healthier spiritual life. You will be able more and more to keep down low passions, evil tempers, and all the works of the flesh, when they tempt you; you will despise and hate them more and more; for having seen the beauty of goodness, you will see the ugliness of sin. So the bad passions and tempers, instead of being merely put to sleep for a while to wake up all the stronger for their rest, will be really mortified and killed in you. They will die out of you; and you, the real you whom God made, will live and grow continually. And, instead ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man living, who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Indian bucks, squaws, and papooses. Their curiosity. Pride of an Indian on his ability to repeat one line of a song. Indian women. Extreme beauty of their limbs; slender ankles and statuesque feet; haggardness of expression and ugliness of features. Girl of sixteen, a "wildwood Cleopatra," an exception to the general hideousness. The California Indian not the Indian of the Leatherstocking tales. A stop at the Buckeye Rancho. Start for Pleasant Valley Rancho. The trail again lost. Camping ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... ugliness was small part of Alice's discontent, for though the coating grew a little deeper each year she was used to it. Moreover, she knew that she was not likely to find anything better in a thousand miles, so long as she kept to cities, and that none of her friends, however ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... my stay has been a peasants' ball on the lawn of the chateau with the best bagpipers of the place. The people of this part of the country present a remarkable type of gentleness and good nature; ugliness is rare here, though beauty is not often seen, but there is not that kind of fever which is observable in the peasants of the environs of Paris. All the women have the appearance of those sweet faces one sees only in the pictures of the old masters. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... revolting picture which contemporaneous history gives us of these barbarians. In their faces was concentrated the ugliness of the hyena and the baboon. They tattooed their cheeks, to prevent the growth of their beards. They were short, thick-set, and with back bones curved almost into a semicircle. Herbs, roots and raw meat they devoured, tearing their food with their teeth or hewing it with ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... of piercing through to the accepted hells beneath. Of ugliness—To me there is just as much in it as there is in beauty—And now the ugliness of human beings is acceptable to me. Of detected persons—To me, detected persons are not, in any respect, worse than undetected persons—and are not in any respect worse than I am myself. Of criminals—To ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... traveled through the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own presence and in a particular place to make me see ten or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long before was most famous in that profession. I saw both proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I enquired and talked with her a long time, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... bosom's hideous rent, Which this unfailing dagger gave.... I dread that blood!—no more—this day Is ours, though her eternal ray Must shine upon our grave. Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given To thee the robe I stole from heaven, Thy shape of ugliness and fear Had never ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... about the year 1845, he entered upon the course of proceedings which rendered him one of the most influential and useful persons of his time. He had long lamented the backward condition of arts of design in England, and the consequent ugliness of the various objects in the sight and use of which human beings pass their lives. English furniture, wall-papers, carpets, curtains, cutlery, garments, upholstery, ranged from the tolerable to the hideous, and were inferior ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... ugliness; she is determined to," thought Nora; "but I see all the beauty. Oh! the dear, dear old place, it shan't go if Nora can save it." Then, with a great ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... loved enough, because she is not seen; and vice loseth much detestation, because her ugliness is secret. Certainly, my lords, there are so many beauties, and so many graces in the face of goodness, that no eye can possibly see it without affection, without ravishment; and the visage of evil is so monstrous through loathsome ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the man's ugliness was something almost ludicrous, it aroused not the slightest inclination to laugh. The exceeding melancholy which found an outlet in the poor man's faded eyes reached the mocker himself and froze the gibes on his lips; for all at once the thought arose that ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... door," replied the king. Young Monsieur, the king's brother, leaned forward towards his sister-in-law, and, "What does your Majesty think of this door?" he whispered. "I think it very nice and handsome," answered the young queen. The king had thought her handsome, "despite the ugliness of her head-dress and of her clothes, which had at first taken him by surprise." King Philip IV. kept looking at M. de Turenne, who had accompanied the king. "That man has given me dreadful times," ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... studs, &c., of the most hideous conceits imaginable, characterised the jewellery designs of Birmingham until about 1854-55, when a little more intelligence and enterprise was introduced, and our manufacturers learned that work well designed sold even better than the old-styled ugliness. A great advance has taken place during the past thirty years, and Birmingham jewellers now stand foremost in all matters of taste and design, the workmen of to-day ranking as artists indeed, even the commonest gilt jewellery turned out by them now being of high-class ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... place where the large avenue unfolds its four rows of trees. They were following the stone parapet surmounted by a hedge of boxwood, which entirely hides the ugliness of the buildings on the quay. One felt the presence of the river by the milky atmosphere which in misty days seems to rest on the water. The sky was clear. The lights of the city were mingled with the stars. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bank. The last Child died early in this century. A descendant of Addison is a member of the present firm. In Chapter 1., Book I., of his "Tale of Two Cities," Dickens has sketched Child's bank with quite an Hogarthian force and colour. He has playfully exaggerated the smallness, darkness, and ugliness of the building, of which he describes the partners as so proud; but there is all his usual delightful humour, occasionally passing ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the Lake should be the progenitor of an extraordinary offspring. Elsewhere we have seen her sisters the totems of clans, the goddesses of nations, the parents of great families and renowned personages. Melusina gave birth to monsters of ugliness and evil,[234] and through them to a long line of nobles. So the heroine of the Llanberis legend had two sons and two daughters, all of whom were remarkable. The elder son became a great physician, and all his descendants were celebrated for their proficiency in medicine. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Ugliness.—I do not know that she was virtuous; but she was always ugly, and with a woman, that is half the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Let Him Be Poor mean? It means let him be weak. Let him be ignorant. Let him become a nucleus of disease. Let him be a standing exhibition and example of ugliness and dirt. Let him have rickety children. Let him be cheap and let him drag his fellows down to his price by selling himself to do their work. Let his habitations turn our cities into poisonous congeries of slums. Let ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... question about their mother and made no further allusion to her while they remained in the room. She wondered whether their father had enjoined upon them not to mention her, and reflected that even if he had such a command would not have been efficacious. It added to the ugliness of Selina's flight that even her children didn't miss her, and to the dreariness, somehow, to Laura's sense, of the whole situation that one could neither spend tears on the mother and wife, because she was not worth it, nor sentimentalise about the little boys, because ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... have the eye to see and the mind to appreciate, you will behold an illuminated canvas whereon is depicted, within the limited area of your vision, everything that a great city holds of wealth and poverty, beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow, luxury and squalor, purity and degradation, truth and falsehood. It is all there, in this narrow environment, with the lights and the shadows meeting and blending, as the noise from below merges ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... conventional beauty. He feels himself often insulted, tossed about like a tennis ball over the net between the two parties of the outer and the inner beauty. To those who are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner. Almost alone in severing himself from conventional beauty is the Austrian composer, Arnold Schonberg. He says in his Harmonielehre: "Every combination ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... world with a perceptible odour! Ordinarily he had the common insular appetite for ventilation, but now stuffiness appealed to him; he scented it almost voluptuously. The ugliness of the wallpaper, of the furniture, of everything in the room was naught. Christine's profession was naught. Who could positively say that her profession was on her face, in her gestures, in her talk? Admirable as ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... burned as he spoke. She did not talk much, but devoted all her time and energies to looking with her whole soul. Never before or since was there a girl so much in love. A young girl thoroughly in love is the most beautiful object on earth—beautiful even in ugliness. Imagine, then, what ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... and Great Britain to the capital of the United States was a striking change. Washington, in its early struggle for existence, was so unattractive a spot, that foreigners must have been at a loss to discover the principle which had governed the selection. It combined all the ugliness with all the discomfort of an unprosperous frontier settlement on an ill-chosen site. What must European diplomats have thought of a capital city where snakes two feet long invaded gentlemen's drawing-rooms, and a carriage, bringing ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... even he had his ugliness. For now Isaacson believed in the liaison between him and ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Jill, turning, became aware that the man on her right was looking at her intently. He was a big man with rough, wiry hair and a humorous mouth. His age appeared to be somewhere in the middle twenties. Jill, in the brief moment in which their eyes met, decided that he was ugly, but with an ugliness that was rather attractive. He reminded her of one of those large, loose, shaggy dogs that break things in drawing-rooms but make admirable companions for the open road. She had a feeling that he would look better in tweeds in a field than in evening dress ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... time, it was almost an unknown article in the United States, but in 1820 a pair of India-rubber shoes were exhibited in Boston. Even then they were regarded as merely a curiosity, and were covered with gilt foil to hide their natural ugliness. In 1823, a merchant, engaged in the South American trade, imported five hundred pairs from the Para district. He had no difficulty in disposing of them; and so great was the favor with which they were received, that in a few years the annual importation of India-rubber shoes ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... could enviously enquire, where you might appeal so confidently to measurement? Mr. Saltram's queer figure, his thick nose and hanging lip, were fresh to me: in the light of my old friend's fine cold symmetry they presented mere success in amusing as the refuge of conscious ugliness. Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular. In my scrap of a residence—he had a worldling's eye for its futile conveniences, but never ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... Eleseus also; but he did not rise nor bow as a man should do in saying thanks for a cup of coffee; not he, indeed—he would see her at the devil for a bitter-tongued lump of ugliness. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... been in secular life, everything that amused, interested, excited, all fine pictures, great poems, lovely scenes, intrepid thoughts, exercise, work, jests, laughter, perceptions, fancies—they were all one now; only sorrow and weariness and dulness and ugliness and greediness were gone. The thought was fresh, pure, delicate, full of a great ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... about the town, we naturally enquired for the chapel of skulls, the ugliness of which had shocked us when here formerly, and were not sorry to find that that hideous monument of bad taste is falling fast to ruin. I cannot imagine how such fantastic horrors can ever have been sanctified, but so it is; and the Indian fakir who fastens a real skull round his neck, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... and industrious. The wine had never been better served; the dinner had rarely come to the table so hot. Had she been a butler of the first magnitude she could not so have discouraged the idea of acquaintance; her attraction, if anything, was a combination of her self-effacement and her ugliness. The latter might have been noticed as she entered the dining-room; it was soon forgotten in the unconsciously observed ease with which she ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... surprise did my fellow-passengers view the ugliness of this town, which from a distance promises so much! On me it made but little impression, for I had seen towns precisely similar in Galicia. The streets and squares are full of pits and holes; the houses are built without the slightest regard to taste or ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... kiss-tickets and soul-warrants in the lottery of love. Forty-five years old at least. Her clientele is composed of boys, who are always satisfied if they don't have to pay, and men of letters, who are yet more easily satisfied—for the ugliness of authors' mistresses is proverbial. Unless this is simply a practical joke. But who would be playing one on me—I ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Mariner." "What 'The Ancient Mariner' is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendors of the sea, that 'Childe Roland' is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... do care about Notion of duty has to account for much of the misery in life People who haven't so many corners as our people have People who leave home on purpose to grumble Pet dogs of all degrees of ugliness Satisfy the average taste without the least aid from art Seemed only a poor imitation of pleasure Shrinking little man, whose whole appearance was an apology Small frame houses hopelessly decorated with scroll-work So many swearing colors Thinking of themselves ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... among the godless, as his brother Francesco was good among the great. As to his face, even contemporary authors have left utterly different descriptions; for same have painted him as a monster of ugliness, while others, on the contrary, extol his beauty. This contradiction is due to the fact that at certain times of the year, and especially in the spring, his face was covered with an eruption which, so long as it lasted, made him an object of horror ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... unshaken by the approaching peril, firmly stood his ground. The Austrians gained an excellent general in the Livonian, Gideon Laudon, whom Frederick had refused to take into his service on account of his extreme ugliness, and who now exerted his utmost endeavors to avenge the insult. The great Russian army, which had until now remained an idle spectator of the war, also set itself in motion. Frederick advanced in the spring of 1758 against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... you have had the sense and sagacity to marry a homely wife—or one comely at the best—nay, even that you have sought to secure your peace by admitted ugliness—or wedded a woman whom all tongues call—plain; then may an insurance-ticket, indeed, flame like the sun in miniature on the front of your house—but what Joint-Stock Company can undertake to repay the loss incurred by the perpetual singeing of the smouldering flames of strife, that ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... colloquy, Boucheseiche the collector, against whom they were thus plotting, had seized upon Julien de Buxieres, and was putting him through a course of hunting lore. Justin Boucheseiche was a man of remarkable ugliness; big, bony, freckled, with red hair, hairy hands, and a loud, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... even she is not without some extenuating traits. Her bigotry springs from her conscience, and she is truly devoted to her daughter's eternal welfare; she is of such a native frankness that at a certain point she tears aside her mask of dissimulation and lets Pepe see all the ugliness of her perverted soul. She is wonderfully managed. At what moment does she begin to hate him, and to wish to undo her own work in making a match between him and her daughter? I could defy anyone to say. ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... other, save by distant puffs of white steam through the clumps of trees. Perhaps already a high hill has intervened, and each train is on its solitary way,—one to end its course, after some hours, amid the roar and smoke and bare ugliness of some huge manufacturing town; and the other to come through green fields to the quaint, quiet, dreamy-looking little city, whose place is marked, across the plain, by the noble spire of the gray cathedral rising into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... it was slow. In 1664, the venerable Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women, named Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, to the stake at St. Edmondsbury, upon evidence the most ridiculous. These two old women, whose ugliness gave their neighbours the first idea that they were witches, went to a shop to purchase herrings, and were refused. Indignant at the prejudice against them, they were not sparing of their abuse. Shortly afterward, the daughter of the herring-dealer ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... throughout the empire, so many have been found that today all the great museums of Europe have collections of imperial busts. They are real portraits, probably very close resemblances, for each emperor had a well-marked physiognomy, often of a striking ugliness that ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... a hard sort of punishment at all," laughed Nealie; "because, you see, if he had no eye for beauty or artistic fitness the ugliness would not trouble him, he might even take a great deal of satisfaction in thinking how nicely he ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... disorder been aggravated to delirium, that the young man forgot entirely, for a time, the interview and the proposal which had been made him. But it was recalled to his memory some months after, when Four-Legs made his appearance, bringing with him a squaw of mature age, and a very Hecate for ugliness. She carried on her shoulders an immense pack of furs, which, approaching with her awkward criss-cross gait, she threw at his feet, thus marking, by an Indian custom, her sense of the relation that existed ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... explains troff's durability. After discussing the program's "obvious deficiencies — a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for computer resources" and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... these grim household gods, harmless victims of that future which as yet was but an audacious dream. He was standing in front of the great chiffonnier, with its marble top and plate-glass back, looking with daring derision at its ugliness, when old Joseph came in at his usual hour—the hour at which he had fulfilled the same duty for the last twenty years—to put out the lamps. Warrender could horrify the girls and insult the poor old familiar furniture, but he was not yet sufficiently advanced ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity? I asked myself that question as I passed through the clean desolation, the neat ugliness, the prim torpor of the streets of Welmingham. And the tradesmen who stared after me from their lonely shops—the trees that drooped helpless in their arid exile of unfinished crescents and squares—the ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... as Professor Wilson remarks, "exaggerations of national ugliness, or allusions to peculiar customs, which were not literally intended, although they may have furnished the Mandevilles of ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... withdraw: but tell me, do not you think me very ugly?" "That is true, (said Beauty,) for I cannot tell a lie; but I believe you are very good-natured." "So I am, (said the monster,) but then, besides my ugliness, I have no sense; I know very well that I am a poor, silly, stupid creature." "'Tis no sign of folly to think so, (replied Beauty,) for never did fool know this, or had so humble a conceit of his ...
— Beauty and the Beast • Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
... have repeatedly told you that suffering has a peculiar attraction for me. Nothing can intensify my passion more than tyranny, cruelty, and especially the faithlessness of a beautiful woman. And I cannot imagine this woman, this strange ideal derived from an aesthetics of ugliness, this soul of Nero in the body of a Phryne, except ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... strong line, in a twinkle he had tied one fore and one leg together, so that the bear, when he got again, could do little but hobble along. Then another pocket he drew a leather muzzle, which he buckled over the beast's head. But bear had had all of the ugliness knocked out him and was once more ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... spirits, touch his eyelids newly, With that rare juice whose magic power it is, To give the rose-hue to those things which truly Wear the sad livery of ugliness. Oh, dignify the office of the meanest Of all God's manifold created things; And sprinkle his heart's wounds with the serenest Waters of sweetness, from our fabled springs. Oh, close him round with visions ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... you will give an hour to reading, and then, during mass, devoutly say your prayers, you will find in this desert the same beauty as in cities; for he who knows God, sees all beautiful things in Him, and without Him all is ugliness.... ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... and now it lay like a painted light on the grass and paths over which they passed to the entrance of the grounds around the Tree. Holden Chapel, which enclosed the space on the right as they went in, shed back the sun from its brick-red flank, rising unrelieved in its venerable ugliness by any touch of the festive preparations; but to their left and diagonally across from them high stagings supported tiers of seats along the equally unlovely red bulks of Hollis and of Harvard. These seats, and the windows in the stories above them, were densely packed with people, mostly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dark thread, the opposition to, the rejection of, the Lover's wooing. But we'll not linger here. We've been seeing so much of this thread as we traced the other and studied the whole. Ugly things stand out by reason of their very ugliness. This stands out in gloomy disturbing contrast with all the rest. A brief quick tracing will fully answer our present purpose. And then we can hasten on to the dominating ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... in wings on every side, with its deep upper and lower verandas, looked out upon by a multitude of long French windows, seemed too large, too strangely imposing for a structure of wood. But whatever of original ugliness had been there was hidden now under a splendid tapestry of vines, and Flora, looking up at the rose and honeysuckle that panoplied its front, felt her ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... beautifying all its implements. What a revelation it might be to Neale, how a woman could make everything she touched exquisite, to Neale who had only known Marise, subdued helplessly to the roughness of the rough things about her, Marise who had capitulated to America and surrendered to the ugliness of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... she thought. 'Why?—for I get worse every day. That I may make less noise in dying? Well! one would like to go without ugliness and fuss. I might as well be dead now, I am so broken—so full of suffering. How I hide it all from that child! And what is the use of it—of living a ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... finer a man he was than I, how much stronger his body, that he could do anything with me if he liked. He asked me, very politely, whether I'd mind blowing out the candle and I did it at once. He watched me as I walked across the floor and I felt ashamed of my thinness and my ugliness and I know that he knew that I was ashamed. After the light was blown out I heard him settle into his bed with a great heavy plop. I couldn't sleep for a long time, and at every movement that he made I felt as though he were laughing at me. And yet with ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole |
