"Unmentionable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Passes, fierce Chilcats, and Queen Charlotte Islanders. And the looks they cast upon her were black and frowning, save—and far worse—where the merrier souls leered patronizingly into her face and chuckled unmentionable things. ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... clouds, wrapt in clouds^; invisible &c 447; buried, underground, perdu [Fr.]; secluded &c 893. undisclosed &c 529, untold &c 527; covert &c (latent) 526; untraceable; mysterious &c (unintelligible) 519. irrevealable^, inviolable; confidential; esoteric; not to be spoken of; unmentionable. obreptitious^, furtive, stealthy, feline; skulking &c v.; surreptitious, underhand, hole and corner; sly &c (cunning) 702; secretive, evasive; reserved, reticent, uncommunicative, buttoned up; close, close as wax; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... chapel, and the women on the other—did not excite much interest. The men, especially, were among the worst hearers I had ever seen. I felt ashamed of my countrymen. The spitting was incessant, and attended with certain unmentionable circumstances which render it most disgusting and offensive. What a contrast to my own clean and comely congregation of black and coloured people in New Amsterdam! In about twenty minutes after the preacher had begun his sermon, one-half of the men had their heads down, resting on both arms ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... fictional art in its unrelated, lugged-in character: and as well of eighteenth century morals in its drastic details. We have seen that Fielding was frankly episodic in handling a story; Smollett goes him one better: as may most notoriously be seen also in the unmentionable Miss Williams' story in "Roderick Random"—in fact, throughout his novels. Pickle, to put it mildly, is not an admirable young man. An author's conception of his hero is always in some sort a give-away: it expresses his ideals; that Smollett's are sufficiently low-pitched, may be seen here. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... upon which my assumed name was painted in flaming capitals. The columns of the newspapers teemed with my advertisements, in which I was declared to be the only regular advertising physician—one who had successfully treated twenty-five millions of cases of delicate unmentionable complaints. Certificates of cure were also published by thousands, signed by people who never existed. Having procured an old medical diploma, I inserted my borrowed name, and exhibited it as an evidence of my trustworthiness ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... of her fairest lands, and this is what Portugal has decreed shall not terminate in what she calls her African dominions for some years to come. In other words, it has been coolly decreed by that weakest of all the European nations, that slavery, murder, injustice, and every other conceivable and unmentionable vice and villainy shall still, for some considerable time, continue to be practised on the men, women, and ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... pioneers, for example, often exhibit notches, each of which bears silent witness to the shedding of blood. The writer knew intimately a very mild, kindly old man who had a strop fashioned out of several thicknesses of Apache skins. The Apaches had inflicted unmentionable torments upon him and his, and the strop was his dearest possession. The men and women of the wilderness are primal in their ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... I took my place for Pittsburg, in the "Good Intent line," professing to carry only six inside; but this excellent intention of the worthy proprietors must be consigned to the commissioners of pavement in a certain unmentionable place, since it was never fulfilled. We commenced our journey with seven, the book-keeper making it a favour that we should take in one gentleman who was greatly pressed for time. I perceived, as we started, another person get ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... picture of the feasts of Sodom and Gomorrah, the music, the lights, the flowers, the unmentionable orgies of lust and drunkenness, until the candles on the walls blushed at the shamelessness of the display and fired the palaces that sheltered such depravity. Suddenly there was a terrific explosion. The fire, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... about her was the fact that she never, for an instant, used her situation as a means of enhancing her attraction. With a husband like Trant it would have been so easy! He was a man who always saw the small sides of big things. He thought most of life compressible into a set of by-laws and the rest unmentionable; and with his stiff frock-coated and tall-hatted mind, instinctively distrustful of intelligences in another dress, with his arbitrary classification of whatever he didn't understand into 'the kind of thing I don't approve of,' ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... terrible rumors regarding her private life. These reports began to circulate at the time of the murder of Gandia and of her divorce from Sforza; the cause of both these events was stated to have been an unmentionable crime. According to a reliable witness of the day it was the lord of Pesaro himself, injured and exasperated, who first—and to the Duke of Milan—had openly uttered the suspicion which was being whispered about Rome. By ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... route leads down the Erie Canal, alternately riding down the canal tow-path, the wagon-roads, and between the tracks of the New York Central Railway. On the former, the greatest drawback to peaceful cycling is the towing-mule and his unwarrantable animosity toward the bicycle, and the awful, unmentionable profanity engendered thereby in the utterances of the boatmen. Sometimes the burden of this sulphurous profanity is aimed at me, sometimes at the inoffensive bicycle, or both of us collectively, but oftener is it directed at the unspeakable mule, who is really the only party to blame. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the king into whose land he had escaped conceived a passion for the daughter of the slave wife. It must needs have been a mighty sentiment, for the conditions which Hurdeo Sing exacted were of a nature to try the strongest love. These were, that the nuptial banquet should be prepared by the unmentionable hands of the slave wife herself, and that the king and his court should partake of it—a proceeding which would involve the loss of their caste also. But the prince loved, and his love must have lent him extraordinary eloquence, for he prevailed on his royal father ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... suspenders,” a discovery of great importance (over three thousand patents have been taken out for this one necessity of the toilet!). This brace performs several tasks at the same time, such as holding unmentionable garments in place, keeping the wearer erect, and providing a night-key guard. It is also said to cure liver and kidney disease by means of an arrangement of pulleys which throw the strain according to the wearer’s position—I omit ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... first I hear of what you allude to. I think you must be mistaken as to Mrs. Drayton Deane's having had any unmentioned, and still less any unmentionable, knowledge about Hugh Vereker. She would certainly have wished it—if it bore on ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... notions upon domestic work were being modified with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic work—and in particular washing up—had been regarded as base, foul, humiliating, unmentionable—as toil that any slut might perform anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive suburban families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash up—of that he was aware—but they washed up in secret ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... that you have been very happy in your poverty," she adjured him, with the dim flicker of a returning smile. "Very likely there are people who are so constituted, but they are not my kind. I don't want to hear them tell about it. To me poverty is the horror—the unmentionable horror!" ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... green painted with daisies, through which, unshackled, the buoyant breeze swept so peacefully. It was an invariable rule, in those days, to troop through the meadows at early morn and, like a young knight-errant, bear home in triumph "Marguerite," the peerless daisy, rescued from the clutches of unmentionable dragons, and now to beam brightly on us for the rest of the day from a neighboring mantel-piece. And it was with great reluctance that we refrained from decapitating the whole field of daisies at one fell sweep, when we were once allowed ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... bound to be a certain percentage of abnormals who will be up to all sorts of deviltry whenever they find themselves free of direct restraint," she said. "The history of warfare shows that. But this Belgian woman's account puts a different face on things. These unmentionable brutalities weren't isolated cases. Her story gave me the impression of ordered barbarity, of systematic terrorizing by the foulest means imaginable. The sort of thing the papers have ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... going on in the curious old church. One has now to elbow his way to enter, and all around the door, even out into the middle court, contadini are kneeling. Besides this, the whole place reeks intolerably with garlic, which, mixed with whiff of incense from the church within and other unmentionable smells, makes such a compound that only a brave nose can stand it. But stand it we must, if we would see Domenichino's frescoes in the chapel within; and as they are among the best products of his cold and clever talent, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... by flying closest to the flame without singeing their satin wings; by executing a pirouette on the extremest ledge of the abyss, yet escape toppling in; female Blondins skipping across the tight rope of Platonic friendship, stretched above the unmentionable. You are shocked?" ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... man from youth upward. He was not wont to boast of his pedigree until in later life, being assailed by vilest slander, all his kindred nearest or most remote being charged with every possible and unmentionable crime, and himself stigmatized as sprung from the lowest kennels of humanity—as if thereby his private character and public services could be more legitimately blackened—he was stung into exhibiting ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... neither Delahaye, if he lives, nor any other person, will appeal to the law to force you to give the child up. This is the truth. I see you still hesitate. Listen! This also is truth. The child is in danger from Delahaye—hideous, unmentionable danger." ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with the glory of Jehovah, an unmentionable space, for there was no time there. Neither were there the aged or dying, for Satan had not as yet cursed any thing that Jehovah had made. But justice being the authority of Jehovah, he must be just with Satan also. He could not ...
— The Secret of the Creation • Howard D. Pollyen
... out a long string of "sacre chien," "sacre diable," and still more unmentionable phrases. The effect-upon the dogs was magical; the cariole flew to the summit; the progress of the episcopal tour was undeniably expedited, and a-practical exposition was given of the poet's thought, "From seeming evil still ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... witness it. The judges and the parents of the delinquents reprimand the unfortunate couple, then from two to four lashes are on each occasion inflicted, first upon the man and then upon the woman. These are applied to an unmentionable part of the back, which is bared, the poor wretches standing with their hands tied to the pole. The executioner is given mescal that he may be in proper spirit to strike hard. The woman has to look on while the man is being punished, just as he afterward ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... procurer for the purposes of mental prostitution. My books breed moral pestilence and spiritual disease. The unholy filth I write fouls the minds and pollutes the imaginations of my readers. I am an instigator of degrading immorality and unmentionable crimes. Work! No, young man, I don't work. Just now, I'm doing penance in this damned town. My rotten imaginings have proven too much—even for me—and the doctors sent me West ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... painted with red and blue hands on the rhubarb ground: all over his horse were these red and blue hands and red stripes, and the beast had a red mane and tail. This villain, who had a most appropriate name, unmentionable to ears polite, completed his charms with a great pair of blue goggles. The red stripes upon his horse signified how many horses he had taken—the red hands, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... were over dark. God was dethroned by science. One looked startled at humanity, seeing not the accustomed countenance, but, for a moment, glimpsing instead the baleful lidless stare of the evil of the slime, the unmentionable of a nightmare.... ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... details of which were at his fingers' ends. It was at once comical and sad to see this harmless old gentleman, with his naive, benevolent countenance, and his thin hair flaming up in a semicircle, like the footlights at a theatre, reveling in the intricacies of the unmentionable deed. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... in the unmentionable place are barred in this connection," he continued gayly. "On my way to carry out these good intentions—at some one else's expense, remember, all the time—I was called to the bedside of a dying man, and detained there some time. When ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... were not cordially embraced by either the patroons or their creators at home; in fact, it was still-born. That the people should rule themselves was as good as to say that the horse should loll in the carriage while his master toiled between the shafts. The thing was impossible, and should be unmentionable. The people, however, continued to mention it, and even to neglect paying the taxes which had been imposed with no regard to their reasonable welfare. A deputation went to Holland to tell the directors that they could neither farm nor trade with profit unless the burdens ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the times before the Great Rebirth, else we are sentenced to three years in the Palace of Corrective Detention. It is only the Old Ones who whisper about it in the evenings, in the Home of the Useless. They whisper many strange things, of the towers which rose to the sky, in those Unmentionable Times, and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of the lights which burned without flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all ...
— Anthem • Ayn Rand
... vulgar men. But finally her sense of duty overcame every restraining influence, and she came forward as the eloquent pleader for the wretched drunkards and their wives and mothers, and their poor, helpless children, the last mentioned of whom, as she eloquently expressed it, were subjected to unmentionable and almost unimagined indignities, and had to suffer untold, misery through the curse ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... be supposed, however, that in the delivery of such passages I was found at all deficient in the looking asquint—the showing my teeth—the working my knees—the shuffling my feet—or in any of those unmentionable graces which are now justly considered the characteristics of a popular performer. To be sure they spoke of confining me in a strait-jacket—but, good God! they never suspected me of having ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Dekkar's works which will be most likely to immortalize his name is that often-quoted one, taken from a play whose very name is unmentionable to prudish ears:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... talking easily; he soon put Jurgis on a friendly footing—he was evidently a man of the world, used to getting on, and not too proud to hold conversation with a mere laboring man. He drew Jurgis out, and heard all about his life all but the one unmentionable thing; and then he told stories about his own life. He was a great one for stories, not always of the choicest. Being sent to jail had apparently not disturbed his cheerfulness; he had "done time" twice before, it seemed, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... for no penalty which the law inflicts is designed for evil, but always makes him who suffers either better or not so much worse as he would have been. But if any citizen be found guilty of any great or unmentionable wrong, either in relation to the Gods, or his parents, or the state, let the judge deem him to be incurable, remembering that after receiving such an excellent education and training from youth upward, he has not abstained from the greatest of crimes. His punishment ...
— Laws • Plato
... flounce off her too lacy petticoat to bind up a messenger boy's cut finger, and no scarf-pin that came within three feet of her was immune from her quick touch. The only hour that ever struck for her was sex o'clock. The unmentionable lay mentioned in her discourse so frequently that to Lilly the Broadway Melody Shop became a slimy-sided vat, horrible with small-necked young men with flexible canes and Gertrude Kirk's slit-eyed ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... in from the King of Olympus downward. Upon the whole, then, we must admit that Greek mythology indicates a barbarian social state, man-stealing, piracy, human sacrifice, polygamy, cannibalism, and crimes of revenge that are unmentionable. A personal interpretation, such as man in his infancy resorts to, is embodied in circumstances suitable to a savage time. It was not until a later period that allegorical phantasms, such as Death, and Sleep, and Dreams were ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... as the clouds, he dipped as low as the cellars of the London poor. He analyzed the London fog, and found it two parts smoke, one disease, one unmentionable abominations. He published a pamphlet, which was violently attacked. Then he knew he had ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... spread through the city, finding shelter in colonnades and temples. They ceased to recognize any head-quarters, to go on guard, or to keep themselves in training, but fell victims to the attractions of city life and its unmentionable vices, until they deteriorated both physically and morally through idleness and debauchery. A number of them even imperilled their lives by settling in the pestilent Vatican quarter, thus increasing the rate of mortality. They were close to the Tiber, and ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... is in Salem," she continued; "and I've heard he has the most peculiar appearance. Very probably the result of the unmentionable practices of the Orient. Father liked the Chinese though; so many of our shipmasters have, and not always the merchants.... What was I saying? Oh, yes, Edward Dunsack. I understand you had a distinct alarm in that quarter, about the girl and Gerrit Ammidon. But I forgot to ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... armor found it impossible to march, and some rode asses and oxen when they could be found. The lowliest animals, even hogs were made burden-bearers until these, too, perished and left their loads to be wasted on the road. After unmentionable horrors of birth and death, the army was rescued by the finding of water by the dogs, who, however, exposed by their finding it many incautious drinkers to death from too quickly filling themselves with water. The fair and fertile ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... a perfectly unprintable speech. It was delivered in unshod American—a language he had not spoken for years. It took in each individual of the whole gang, it told them they were dogs and sons of dogs, killers of men, unmentionable carrion, cayotes, kites, and that he would have hanged them each and individually with his own hands (and I believe by some legerdemain of strength he would), but that they were without hearts, souls or intellect, not ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... thought of certain "ladies" (objects of perfectly needless respect among men) who, being requested to leave the Court, at unmentionable Trials, persist in keeping their places. It was a relief to him to feel—if his next questions did nothing else—that they would disappoint ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... of the Olympia Music-Hall in Marseilles reeked of grease paint, stale human exhalations, the acrid odour, creeping up the iron stairs, of a mangy performing lion, and all manner of unmentionable things. The month of June is not the ideal month to visit Marseilles, even if one is free to pass the evening at a cafe table on the Cannebiere, and there is a breeze coming in from over the sea; but in copper-skied thundery weather, the sirocco conditions of more southerly latitudes, especially ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who with the help of this craze, are at present in power, and do not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude policy—owing to all this and much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most unmistakable signs that EUROPE WISHES TO BE ONE, are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted. With all the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the real general tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls was to prepare ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was a kingly sensation, that of speed wedded to danger, and it took me back to Davos at a breath. Then I tried it with Dinkie, and then with Poppsy, and then with Poppsy and Dinkie together. We had some grand old tumbles, in the loose snow, and some unmentionable bruises, before we became sufficiently expert to tool our sleigh-runners along their proper trail. But it was good fun. The excitement of the thing, in fact, rather got into my blood. In half an hour the three of us were covered with snow, were shouting like Comanches, ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... buying; but it was eagerly followed by many of the reckless agents and partisan leaders, British, tories, and Canadians, who themselves often accompanied the Indians against the frontier and witnessed or shared in their unmentionable atrocities. It is impossible to acquit either the British home government or its foremost representatives at Detroit of a large share in the responsibility for the appalling brutality of these men and their red allies; but ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... was a settled affair—merely a question of Dale speaking. And, instead of speaking, he will have nothing to do with her, and spends all his time—and, I suppose, though I don't like to refer to it, all his money—in the society of this unmentionable woman." ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... that it is extremely pleasant, and one sleeps better thus than on a mattress. They are neat and clean in their persons, which is a natural consequence of their perpetual bathing; but some of their habits are unmentionable.... ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... sacrificed the honour and interests of Britain. He was too lazy and sensual to delight in playing the part of a tyrant himself; but he never checked tyranny in others, save in one instance. He permitted beastly butchers to commit unmentionable horrors on the feeble, unarmed, and disunited Covenanters of Scotland, but checked them when they would fain have endeavoured to play the same game on the numerous, united, dogged, and warlike Independents of England. To show his filial piety, he bade the hangman dishonour ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... and darkened. He lost sleep, he lost appetite; some great and secret fear seemed preying upon him. What was it? His family noticed it, and inquired about his health. He rebuffed them impatiently; he was quite well—he wanted to be let alone—why the unmentionable-to-ears-polite need they badger him with questions? They held their peace and let him alone. That it in any way concerned commercial failure they never dreamed; to them the wealth of the husband and father was something illimitable—a golden river flowing ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... to many unholy and disgusting ceremonies, and forced him to kiss the superior on the cheek, the navel, and the breech, and spit three times upon a crucifix; that all the members were forbidden to have connexion with women, but might give themselves up without restraint to every species of unmentionable debauchery; that when by any mischance a Templar infringed this order, and a child was born, the whole order met, and tossed it about like a shuttlecock from one to the other until it expired; that they then roasted it by ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... particularly was the mortal terror that was depicted on the blind man's face. It was as though he expected some cruel, crippling blow to follow; as though it were the last straw on the back of unmentionable former agonies. Hilary shuddered. It was not good to witness such animal fear. A dark shadow blotted out the brightness of the Earth-day for him. There was something wrong here, something that required ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... to Brighton, as the irate lady suggested, or to a warmer place unmentionable history sayeth not. But St. Rest remained, as its name implied, restful,— and the barbaric yell of the cheap tripper, together with the equally barbaric scream of the cheap tripper's 'young lady' echoed chiefly through modernised and vulgarised Riversford, where there were tea-rooms and stuffy ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... one day a tiny ulcer. At first he treated it with salve purchased from an apothecary. Then after a week or two, when this had no effect, he began to feel uncomfortable. He remembered suddenly he had heard about the symptoms of an unmentionable, dreadful disease, and a vague ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... be seen in the whole of the West, save those which a luxuriant Nature herself has sown and planted; and the immediate surroundings of the substantial farm-house, like those of the mud cabin, are filth unmentionable, savage ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... stentorian voice, while he thumped his desk with his shut fist, or struck it with his great ruler at the end of each argument, in a manner that made the youngster put his hands behind him several times, to be certain that that portion of his dress which is unmentionable was tight upon him. If in these encounters the young candidate for the honors of the literary sceptre was not victorious, he again resumed his studies, under his old preceptor, with renewed vigor ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... said my uncle. "Lord Baltimore has had his reasons for sending such a scoundrel—he knew what he was, you may be sure, father. His Lordship, sir, is the most abandoned rake in London, and that unmentionable crime of his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... your"—FOUR ASTERISKS. "Oblige me, whenever clandestine Fate brings us together, by showing me that"—always that, if you would give me pleasure when we meet. "And oh," next stanza says, "to think what our glory is founded on,"—on view of that unmentionable object, I declare to you!—And through other stanzas, getting smutty enough (though in theory only), which we need not prosecute farther. [OEuvres de Frederic, xii. 70-73 (WRITTEN at Freiburg, 6th November, when his Majesty got thither, and found the Bridge burnt).] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... said that he was a terrible object which should remain in the background along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases. He was like poverty and injustice,—present but ignored. And this being shunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about in furtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... expanse of quiet night, there was not a single flicker of light, and at that time not a sound to indicate that unmentionable numbers of our men were facing one another in parallel ditches across the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... little challenge, or rather request for discussion, is a model of courtesy. Knox did not meet him in argument, as far as we are aware; but in 1562, Fergusson, minister of Dunfermline, replied in a tract full of scurrility. One quite unmentionable word occurs, and "impudent lie," "impudent and shameless shavelings," "Baal's chaplains that eat at Jezebel's table," "pestilent papistry," "abominable mass," "idol Bishops," "we Christians and you Papists," and parallels ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... indescribable revelry and licence. All distinctions of property were for the time being suspended. Men and women arrayed themselves in all manner of fantastic garbs, addressed one another in the foulest language, and practised unmentionable abominations openly in the public square of the town. The nearest relationships, even that of own brother and sister, seemed to be no bar to the general licence, the extent of which was indicated by the expressive phrase of ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... he offers, with stentorian utterances, for a price "a hundred per cent less, you bet, than you kin buy 'em for on Broadway." Other salesmen lean furiously over the gallery railing, flourishing shirts, stockings, and garments of every kind, mentionable and unmentionable, in the faces of the gaping loafers below. Sometimes a particular "lot" will attract the attention of a spectator, and he will chaffer about it for a while; but the sales do not often appear to be very brisk. The people ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... could the political party who are in power at this moment with disrepute and discredit. Why should you yourself shrink from aiding me in this task? They are the party in whose ranks—high in whose ranks, I might say—are those who stooped with baseness, with deceit unmentionable, to rid themselves of you. Therefore, I say strike. Come with me and you shall help. And when the time comes, I think I can promise you that I can show you a way back, a way which ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that the natural function of eating, which nowadays may be discussed intrepidly anywhere, was once regarded by the Philistines, of at all events the Shephelah and the deme of Novogath, as being unmentionable. This ancient tenet of theirs, indeed, is with such clearness emphasized in a luckily preserved fragment from the Dirghic, or pre-Ciceronian Latin, of Saevius Nicanor that the readiest way to illustrate the chameleon-like traits ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... outward appearance of Pereira, the fountain-head of the slave-trade on this part of the coast, who was believed in his day to be the very worst man in Africa, a pre-eminence to which few can hope to attain. Until his face had been seen, stamped as it was with the traces of long and unmentionable wickedness, few honest men could guess to what depths humanity can sink. Some indeed have declared that to see him was to understand the Evil One and all ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... baleful influence, my son," said he in a thick voice. "And you'll come under it if you sit too long beneath its effulgence. That's what has happened to me. It makes one talk unmentionable imbecility." ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... servant comes in, reads off the formula, and immediately becomes an emperor of the elemental spirits. He gives them a horrible time. He summons and dismisses them alternately with the rapidity of a piston-rod working at high speed; he keeps them flying between the doctor's house and their own more unmentionable residences till they faint with rage and fatigue. There is all the best of the Middle Ages in that; the idea of the great levellers, luck and laughter; the idea of a sense of humour ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... brought him nearly to a standstill, and under the regulations he had passed through the station at ten miles an hour. These were the only occasions, however, on which he had slackened speed at all. The train attendant, who was a nervous man, began to shiver again and imagine unmentionable things. The guard, who had never left his own brake, went home and dreamed that his effigy had been added to the collection of Madame Tussaud. The reporters were the only people who were really happy, with the exception, ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... honor of Jesus Christ." "The blasphemies of Voltaire," he says, "pale into insignificance when compared with those of Marlowe;" he "deliberately accused Jesus Christ and his personal followers of crimes which are justly considered unmentionable in any civilised community," and "any monument which may be erected in honor of Christopher Marlowe will be ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... how to brace himself for that other authority—there had, at any rate, been consistency and even a kind of chiselled magnificence in that stiff brutality—now there was degradation, crawling devilry, things unmentionable.... ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... duty. There is nothing that is shameful about its being there; indeed, it is the dominant force in the world. The shameful thing is to use it shamelessly." Yet the attitude of parents too often is to treat the subject, not as if it were sacred, but as if it were unmentionable; so that the very fact of the child's own origin would seem to be ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... scarcely a moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally. We feel that some of the virtues have been dropped out in the lists made by all the saints and sages, and that Charles II. was pre-eminently successful in these wild and unmentionable virtues. The real truth of this matter and the real relation of Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... of a man, unless the necessity of legitimate self-defense demands it. On the other hand, solitary confinement came in with the second current of the classic school of criminology, when at the same time, in which Beccaria promulgated his ideas, John Howard traveled all over Europe describing the unmentionable horrors of mass imprisonment, which became a center of infection for society at large. Then the classic school went to the other extreme of solitary confinement, after the model of America, whence we adopted the systems of Philadelphia and Harrisburg in the first ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... then has his powers so adjusted that he is tyrannical just where it is important that he should be tolerant, and tolerant just where he could screw up the standard a little by being tyrannical. His plea that there are unmentionable depths to which managers and authors would descend if he did not prevent them is disproved by the plain fact that his indulgence goes as far as the police, and sometimes further than the public, will let it. If our judges ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and all the other ills, mentionable and unmentionable, that arise from excessive segregation. It sets these evils up as benefits and blessings representing the highest attainable degree of honour and virtue, whilst any criticism of or revolt against them is savagely persecuted as the extremity ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... At present he does not and cannot know this, for the white trash and vagrant Negro form a wedge separating the new Southerner from the new Negro so completely that they cannot know each other. Every unmentionable crime committed by the vagrant Negro, every lynching bee conducted by white trash, every Negro disfranchisement law passed by misguided legislators, every unjust discrimination against the Negro by the people drives this wedge deeper ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... confusion," says Luttrell, laughing. "Consider what unmentionable form I have displayed. How long have I outstayed my time? It is uncommonly good of you, Mrs. Massereene, not to have given me my conge long ago; but my only excuse is that I have been so utterly happy. Perhaps you will forgive me when you ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... as to weather. A few days of calm would have brought unmentionable horrors on board that schooner, but with the help of land and sea breezes, in less than a week after clearing the Sunda Straits, he anchored off the Batu Kring mouth within a pistol-shot ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... boots off, but there was actually a satin coverlet left, and pillows. All the stud- and jewellery-cases had been opened and their contents stolen, and Madame de C.'s writing-table had also been forced open, and papers and the contents of the drawers scattered on the floor. Other unmentionable ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... of the garment of which we have just stripped it would be unmentionable, save in the world of the insect, that manufacturer devoid of shame. This doublet is, in fact, obtained from the creature's excretions. Instead of evacuating downwards, on the superannuated principle, the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... are very likely to enquire from impure companions, or get some of the pernicious literature which is issued in quantity by the quacks who prey upon the fears of the young, and upon their dislike to speak to their parents on a subject which the latter have taught them by silence is one which is unmentionable. ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... comparison,' said Rhoda coldly. 'What man lives in celibacy? Consider that unmentionable fact, and then say whether I am wrong in refusing to forgive Miss Royston. Women's battle is not only against themselves. The necessity of the case demands what you call a strained ideal. I am seriously convinced that before the female ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical composure of bag-wig and senatorial dignity, whispering unmentionable sonnets in his dialect of Xe and Ga. Somehow or another that last dotage of S. Mark's decrepitude is more recoverable by our fancy than the heroism of Pisani in the fourteenth century. From his prison in blockaded Venice the great admiral was sent forth on a forlorn hope, and blocked victorious ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... to be saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling reason why he should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... rhetorical defiance, but as no one answered he proceeded to express the teachers and officers in terms of unmentionable quantities. Suddenly he turned upon a big, vacant-looking ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... everywhere; his address (as he used to put it himself) being "Post Office, Europe—to be left till called for." Twice over, he made up his mind to come back to England and see us; and twice over (saving your presence), some unmentionable woman stood in the way and stopped him. His third attempt succeeded, as you know already from what my lady told me. On Thursday the twenty-fifth of May, we were to see for the first time what our nice boy had grown to be as a man. He came of good blood; ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... after all, must come. When she had, in May, at last taken thought for the morrow, and applied at the Foreign Office for one of those secret jobs which could not be mentioned because they prepared the doers to play their parts after the great unmentionable event, she was too late. The Foreign Office said they could not take over people from other ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... seemed to revive the second engineer's mad animosity. Collecting afresh all his energies, he directed Jukes in a low and brutal tone to shove the unmentionable instrument down his gory throat. Who cared for his crimson barometer? It was the steam—the steam—that was going down; and what between the firemen going faint and the chief going silly, it was worse than a dog's life for him; he didn't care a tinker's curse ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... the older books are full of absurd nostrums. A century ago, Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred ingredients. Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of vipers, powder of dead men's bones, and other horrors, best mused in expressive silence. Go to the little book of Robert Boyle,—wise man, philosopher, revered of cures for the most formidable diseases, many of them of this fantastic character, that disease ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... scrolls? To what end the gluing and the trimming, the cedar-oil and saffron, the leather cases and the bosses? Much good your purchases have been to you; one sees that already: why, your language—no, I am wrong there, you are as dumb as a fish-but your life, your unmentionable vices, make every one hate the sight of you; if that is what books do, one cannot keep too clear of them. There are two ways in which a man may derive benefit from the study of the ancients: he may learn to express himself, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... 1917, at Dyersburg, immediately after the adjournment of services in the churches of the town, Lation Scott, guilty of criminal assault, was burned; his eyes were put out with red-hot irons, a hot poker was rammed down his throat, and he was mutilated in unmentionable ways. Two months later, on February 12, 1918, at Estill Springs, Jim McIlheron, who had shot and killed two young white men, was also burned at the stake. In Estill Springs it had for some time been the sport of young white men in the community ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... for that was what the woman Maddalena had called me. Her husband, if he was her husband, never gave me any title, except when he was abusing me, and then my names were many and unmentionable. Nowadays I am the Baron Antonio Antonelli, of the Legion of Honour, but that is merely an extension of the old concise Anton, so far as I know, the only name I ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... this the drollest world to live in that one could imagine, short of being in a fit of delirium tremens? Here is a fellow-creature of mine and yours who is asked to see all the glories of the firmament brought close to him, and he is too busy with a little unmentionable parasite that infests the bristly surface of a bee to spare an hour or two of a single evening for the splendors of the universe! I must get a peep through that microscope of his and see the pediculus which occupies a larger space in his mental ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... revolting crimes such as even the most debased and cruel beasts of the field never commit. I refer to wanton wholesale murder, often with torture; assault with violence, robbery in a hundred cruel forms, and a dozen unmentionable crimes invented by degenerate man and widely practiced. If anyone feels that this indictment is too strong, I can cite a few titles that will be quite ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... this particular Opera was in a quite congenial atmosphere. Odd that in the two Principalities, Monte Carlo and Wales, the objects for Disestablishment should be so diametrically opposite. In Wales it is the particular Church, and at Monte Carlo it is the not-at-all-particular t'other word, unmentionable twice in the same paragraph to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, March 4, 1893 • Various
... seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don't run away with the idea that I don't see the drawbacks—horrors—unmentionable things done in our very midst! I'm under no illusions. Few people, I suppose, have fewer illusions than I have. Have you ever been in a factory, Miss Vinrace!—No, I suppose not—I may ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... men gazed for a long while. Amid that coterie of exquisites, wherein allusion to whatever might be ugly in the world was tacitly allowed to be unmentionable, Lady Honoria glitteringly went about the moment's mirthful business with lovely ardor. You saw now unmistakably that "Light Queen of Elfdom, dead Titania's heir" of whom Ufford writes in the fourth Satire. Honoria's prettiness, rouged, frail, and modishly enhanced, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... What volumes are conveyed in a single smile! It is the magnetic telegraph by which sympathetic hearts convey their untold and unmentionable purposes. To the anxious lover it is the bearer of the first tidings of joy. Long before the heart dare resort to coarse, material words, the smile carries the messages of affection. To the villain it reveals the sympathetic purposes of his according ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... luxuriant waste untouched by man's hand, than the abode of thousands, and the central mart of Western Abyssinia. For a few days we resided in the town, where several of the best houses had been put at our disposal; but the countless host of unmentionable insects fairly drove us away. We obtained permission to pitch our tents on the sea beach, on a pleasant spot only a few hundred yards from the town, where we enjoyed the double luxury of fresh ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... His tone stiffened. "The hell you say. Too tony, eh? Too—'ic! Have a smile, I ask you, one gent to 'nother. Have a smile, you (unmentionable) pilgrim; fer if ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... should be served in his own sitting-room, until such time as it suited him to find another place of residence than the Grey House. For their allegiance went on all fours with Theresa's. It was also unimpaired. Propriety had been outraged on every hand; matters, heretofore deemed unmentionable, rushed into the forefront of knowledge and conversation; yet never had they actually enjoyed themselves so greatly. The sense of being a storm centre—inasmuch as they harboured the viper assassin—produced in them an unexampled militancy. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... across his features, for he knew, of course, that death was his only expectation, and he had greatly feared that his taking off would be accompanied by the most horrible tortures that could be devised by people who were not the least expert in the practice of the unmentionable cruelties of the age, "you, at least, are a father, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... collectively, some spirit higher and stronger than their own keeps them unanimous in their rejection of the notorious Realist who sacrifices all the canons of art and beauty to the discussion of topics unmentionable in decent society." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... any means got a knowledge of this proceeding, or whether he only suspected some unmentionable design on her part, there is no sufficient means of determining. At any rate, when they met, an hour or two after these occurrences, he could not help noticing how easily she seemed to have got over her excitement. She ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that Friday evening. She was still wearing the blue serge school dress that she and her aunt had made for her high-school debut, also some coarse, faded brown stockings, and stout cheap shoes, not to mention an unmentionable hat of no style at all. She had taken that unfortunate joke of the trust company's president literally: she must not waste her substance upon clothes. Even without this inhibition she had scarcely the skill and the courage necessary to spend her two hundred ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... the business was presently disposed of. So far, things were not too seriously bad, and Prudence sighed in great relief. Then the Ladies took out their sewing, and began industriously working at many unmentionable articles, designed for the intimate clothing of a lot of young Methodists confined in an orphans' home in Chicago. And they talked together pleasantly and gaily. And Prudence and Fairy felt that the cloud ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... to be,' said Gabriel, coolly, as he rattled the money in his unmentionable pockets, and looked ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Nature without exaggerated prudery and without shamelessness, such conditions are impossible in a society where for a thousand years Nature herself has been depreciated by Religion, associated with sin and the Devil, stamped as unmentionable and in preference denied, in which, for that very reason, brutality takes so much more terrible a satisfaction and revenge. As grown-up people never spoke of the forces of Nature in a pure and simple manner, it became to the children a concealed ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... mentioned Lindsay's offer to Dresser, who was rising at laborious hours and toiling in the McNamara and Hill's offices, he realized how unmentionable and trifling were his grounds for hesitation. Dresser's enthusiasm almost persuaded him that Lindsay had given him something valuable. And if he found it difficult to explain his distaste for the thing to Dresser, what would he have to say to other people—to the Hitchcocks? Yet ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... had been crossed with fish and seaweed. Down by the Docks, they 'board seamen' at the eating-houses, the public-houses, the slop-shops, the coffee-shops, the tally-shops, all kinds of shops mentionable and unmentionable—board them, as it were, in the piratical sense, making them bleed terribly, and giving no quarter. Down by the Docks, the seamen roam in mid-street and mid-day, their pockets inside out, and their heads no better. Down by the Docks, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... the odor of Whitechapel and St. Giles. The streets were noisy with match-pedlars, with vendors of cake and tripe and coke; there were touts there too, altars to unimportant divinities, lying Jews who dealt in old clothes, in obscene pictures and unmentionable wares; at the crossings there were thimbleriggers, clowns and jugglers, who made glass balls appear and disappear surprisingly; there were doorways decorated with curious invitations, gossipy barber shops, ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... all, Macgregor. It is quite unmentionable,' she returned with a majestic wave. 'Robert, give Macgregor ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... mysterious-looking vehicle, rather resembling one of the early locomotives exhibited in the South Kensington Museum, standing in the mud outside a farm-billet, its superheated interior stuffed with "C" Company's blankets, is performing an unmentionable ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... angry words, mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig, and from that went crescendo into unmentionable adjectives—in English. The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe. I could hardly see him, ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... friends called his attention to the frown or the pout of her, Whenever he did anything which appeared to her to savour of an unmentionable place, He would say that "she would be a very decent old girl when all that nonsense was knocked out of her," And his method of knocking it out of her is one that covered him ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... for four hours. The plan of defence was to compare the wrongs of the father with those of the children, and to see which had suffered the more. The larger share of responsibility was put upon Beatrice; but she, it appeared, had been the one most sinned against, and certain unmentionable villainies in her father's conduct, which were darkly hinted at, aroused the pity of the Holy Father to such an extent that he gave them all comparative liberty, with the hope of ultimate acquittal. At this juncture of affairs, a certain nobleman, Paolo Santa Croce, killed his mother ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... went in and locked the door, above which a green paper-lantern swung gently to and fro in the soft night wind. Hung Wapu passed through the store to the chop-house, where several dozen Chinese were squatting on the ground dining on unmentionable Chinese delicacies, which consisted of anything and everything soft enough to be chewed. No one watching the vacant expression of these people would have dreamed for a moment that anything was wrong; no one observing these chattering, shouting sons of the Celestial Kingdom ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... white eyelashes. He looked as if he had known all the degradations and all the furies. He looked as if he had been cuffed, kicked, rolled in the mud; he looked as if he had been scratched, spat upon, pelted with unmentionable filth... and he smiled with a sense of security at the faces around. His ears were bending down under the weight of his battered felt hat. The torn tails of his black coat flapped in fringes about the calves of his legs. He unbuttoned the only two buttons that ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... noticed it, he probably mistook it for a Service Bible—in which I searched for words when occasion offered. I had carefully committed to memory the French equivalents for all the articles on our shopping list—a pot of honey, a bottle of Benedictine, a pair of unmentionable garments for Lawson, and a toothbrush—so that I walked across the main square with a proud ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett |
