"Unattractive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... books lay here and there, volumes of unattractive binding, and presenting titles little suggestive of a holiday in Campania; works which it would be misleading to call theological; the feeblest modern echoes of fierce old Puritans, half shame-faced modifications ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... to the materials and structure of modern poetry I seem to have noticed—(but here I beg to be understood as speaking with the utmost diffidence)—in our common landscape painters. Their foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... magnifying glass between him and this spined and spiky face. Indeed, Duke was not in a position to think the matter over quietly. If he had been able to do that, he would have said to himself: "We have here an animal of most peculiar and unattractive appearance, though, upon examination, it seems to be only a cat stealing a fishbone. Nevertheless, as the thief is large beyond all my recollection of cats and has an unpleasant stare, I will leave ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... the young man thoughtfully, "there are other things worth living for—duty. An unattractive nose would not interfere with that. Some people think it is rather more important than love. I admit ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... race was a very ugly and unattractive mammal. He was quite small. The heat of the sun and the biting wind of the cold winter had colored his skin a dark brown. His head and most of his body were covered with long hair. He had very thin but strong fingers ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... ground; following the arete of curiously jumbled and thwarted hill-slopes; passing beneath the battlements of Rossena, whence the unfortunate Everelina threw herself in order to escape the savage love of her lord and jailor; and then skirting those horrid earthen balze which are so common and so unattractive a feature of Apennine scenery. The most hideous balze to be found in the length and breadth of Italy are probably those of Volterra, from which the citizens themselves recoil with a kind of terror, and which lure melancholy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... younger Henry being now his only son. Marriage schemes had always been prominent features in his policy, and the marriage schemes for himself which he evolved one after the other in the closing years of his reign show him in a singularly unattractive light, at the same time that his financial methods were growing increasingly mean, and his evasions of honourable ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... sledges; and humiliating as publicly as possible, any white man that it does not gore. It seems to cherish a peculiar spite against all Europeans; for a buffalo, that is as mild as a lamb with the most unattractive native, cannot be brought to tolerate the proximity of the most refined, and least repulsive of white men. Which one is there amongst us, who does not bear a grudge against the water-buffalo as a class, and against some one black or pink bully in particular? Which of us is there, who has not ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the contrary it is quite rare, and is seen only among those of "strong" mentality. Anyone may fasten his Attention upon some passing, pleasing thing, but it takes a trained will to fasten it upon some unattractive thing, and hold it there. Of course the trained occultist is able to throw interest into the most unattractive thing upon which it becomes advisable to focus his Attention, but this, in itself, comes with the trained Will, and is not the possession of the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... constantly to prevent the sauce from scorching. Sauce made according to this method does not require long cooking because the flour added to the hot fat cooks quickly. In fact, it is a very desirable method, for the browned butter and the flour lend flavor to the sauce. Many otherwise unattractive or rather tasteless foods can be made much more appetizing by the addition of white sauce made in ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... constructed periods which seem to have prejudiced many persons against reading his works, but which are full of that peculiar, if unattractive, eloquence which flows from mastery of the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... there lived a "gink" who was very much wrapped up in himself. At a local social function he took the prize one day for being the most unpopular man in the community; and this caused him to sit up nights, and study himself as others saw him flitting across his unattractive and uneventful stage. The winning of this prize spoke to him with greater accent than could the exploding of a sixteen-inch German gun, and it sent a quiver through his entire avoirdupois. It was not only an appalling revelation to him to know that he was unpopular, ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... was to be his when "grandmother" should relinquish her claim to all earthly possessions. So he was really able to live in comfort; but, instead of that, the old red farmhouse, which was his father's before him, was a model of angularity, unadorned and unattractive, both inside and out, only preserving a decent aspect ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... Marylebone, to the north of Regent's Park, has a High Street of its own—a wide street with comparatively low buildings. The vista, on looking back from the top to the trees of the burial-ground and Regent's Park, is not unattractive. The shops which line either side of the road, though small, are clean and bright. St. John's Wood Terrace is a very wide thoroughfare. In it stands St. John's Wood Church, chiefly distinguished by a very heavy portico. The church is at present used ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... merely in the mode of presenting their subject. The ecclesiastical histories are generally deficient in art, and hence are uninteresting. The ablest and the most learned of modern historians is doubtless Neander. He is also the fullest and most satisfactory; but even he is unattractive. Mosheim is dry and dull, but learned in facts. Dr. Schaff has most ably presented primitive Christianity, and his recent work is both popular and valuable. Milman is the best English writer on the church, and he is the most readable of modern historians. Tillemont and Dupin are very full ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the village of Belton. The house itself was an ugly residence, three stories high, built in the time of George II, with low rooms and long passages, and an immense number of doors. It was a large unattractive house—unattractive that is, as regarded its own attributes but made interesting by the beauty of the small park in which it stood. Belton Park did not, perhaps, contain much above a hundred acres, but the land was so broken ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... much stress on what you have been telling me," I observed quietly as we approached that unattractive building. "No man will believe a girl who has just accepted his suit to ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... man of average height could not stand upright in it. This loft had neither window nor skylight, and the gloom would have been intense, had not a few faint sun-rays struggled through the interstices of some ill-adjusted tiles. In this unattractive garret Lecoq established himself one fine morning, just at the hour when May was taking his daily walk in the courtyard of the prison accompanied by a couple of keepers. Under these circumstances there was no fear of Lecoq's movements attracting the prisoner's notice ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... him. Bulchester turned to him also, and in the eyes of the two men as they met was war. Waldo had come back with the determination that while there was life there should be hope. He had until this time regarded Bulchester's marked attentions with the amusement that the nobleman's unattractive exterior was likely to meet with in a rival. Added to that was Waldo's conceit, which made him look through the large end of the telescope in viewing others. But now he had heard Katie's dallying—why hadn't she finished the fellow up quickly?—he had read ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... tempts all kinds of artists. Anyone can achieve it who has the mind. It is a substitute for expression, as mere duty is a substitute for virtue. But, as a forbidding sense of duty makes virtue itself seem unattractive, so professionalism destroys men's natural delight in the arts. Like the artist himself, his public becomes anxious, perverse, exacting; afraid lest it shall admire the wrong thing, because it ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... mussed artificial flowers, was tipped over her forehead. Her features were not bad, but her nose was blotched, her face strongly freckled and her red hair very untidy. Only the mild blue eyes redeemed the unattractive face—eyes very like those of Mary Louise in expression, mused Mr. Conant, as ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... "Come, Spencer wasn't so unattractive," protested Foster. "I hold no brief for him; in fact, some of his business transactions were shady; but upon my word, he was exceedingly good-looking, and if I remember rightly, you encouraged him to come to ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... off, however, but that Dolly's spirits sprang up again after the letter was despatched, and were able to take exquisite pleasure in everything the further journey offered. Even the unattractive was novel, and what was not unattractive was so charming. She admired the quaint, clean, bright, fanciful Dutch towns; the abundance of flowers still to be seen abroad; the smiling country places surrounding the towns; the strange carvings and devices ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... young men the expedition which Edward Lynde had undertaken would have seemed unattractive and monotonous to the last degree; but Lynde's somewhat sedentary habits had made him familiar with his own company. When one is young and well read and amiable, there is really no better company than one's self—as a steady thing. We are in a desperate ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the Turks, first in Damascus and Asia Minor and finally in Constantinople. The narrative, which is purely one of action, the action being supplied by the efforts, finally successful, of the author and various brother-officers to escape from their most unattractive captivity, nevertheless offers a most vivid picture of the social fabric of the Near East and in particular of the attitude of the melange of Oriental peoples that comprised the Turkish Empire towards the War ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... alliance offensive and defensive with the earl against the common enemy, Dorothy. The two fathers had partly agreed that the heir to Derby should wed the heiress of Haddon. The heir, although he had never seen his cousin except when she was a plain, unattractive girl, was entirely willing for the match, but the heiress—well, she had not been consulted, and everybody connected with the affair instinctively knew there would be trouble in that quarter. Sir George, however, had determined that Dorothy should do her part in ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... him see his welcome, and he doubtless thought the road to Dorothy's heart a fair and easy one. I certainly thought so, and I spent my days in moping about the place, cutting a most melancholy and unattractive figure. ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... she been deceived, that now, at the age of eighteen, she had learned to distrust her fellow creatures, and oftentimes in secret would she weep bitterly over her lonely condition, lamenting the plain face and unattractive manners, which she fancied rendered her an object of dislike. Still there was about her a depth of feeling of which none had ever dreamed, and it only required a skillful hand to mold her into an altogether different being. She was, ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... for the reason that, unless his taste happens to be peculiarly "Augustan," he will obtain a more immediate satisfaction and profit from his acquisitions in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth. There is in eighteenth-century literature a considerable proportion of what I may term "unattractive excellence," which one must have for the purposes of completeness, but which may await actual perusal until more pressing and more human books have been read. I have particularly in mind the philosophical authors of ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... of the term, they have never had to keep, and their squalid abiding-places, overrun with wretched and quarrelsome half-clad children, and bare of the commonest comforts of life, have offered very unattractive fields for womanly originality and painstaking endeavor. A cheerful, quiet home, wherein the laborer is always sure of warmth and light and wholesome food, has in it a saving grace which all the creeds in Christendom cannot compass without its ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... erected to Sir Thomas Picton, the Guildhall, the two gaols, a fish and butter market-place, over which is the town fire-bell; the slaughter-house, similar to the abattoir at Paris, and excellent shambles, with poultry and potato market-places annexed. The church, which is an ancient one, has an unattractive exterior; but when you enter it, I think you will say it can compete with any church for ancient beauty and ornament. Amongst the tombs in the chancel are those of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, with the effigies of him and his lady, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... the genial hospitality; he was surrounded by friends to whom he became so much attached that it was with pain he parted from them. The gayety of city life, the levees of the Doge, and the balls, were not unattractive to the handsome young man; but what made Genoa seem like home to him was his intimacy with a few charming families, among whom he mentions those of Mrs. Bird, Madame Gabriac, and Lady Shaftesbury. From the latter he experienced the most cordial and unreserved friendship; she greatly interested ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... it. Here I am, and here I shall stay. I take comfort in the fact that no one connects Ian Verity with an elderly and unattractive spinster hidden in a hermitage on Bessmoor. You will not betray me, I know, and it is good of you to come and visit me in my solitude. I am growing old and you have all your life before you. I have crossed to the shady side of the road while ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous Upas of slavery, the tree that was ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... sketches he had seen) as a "prairie schooner"; in front of another store he saw a spring wagon of the "buckboard" variety. That was all. The aroma of sage-brush filled his nostrils; the fine, flint-like, powdered alkali dust lay thick everywhere. It was unattractive and dismal. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... meeting as his taste was at the pamphlet. Mingled odors of tobacco-smoke, beer, human breath, and damp clothes filled the air; the people at the tables had an indescribably common stamp, unlovely manners, harsh, loud voices, and unattractive faces. They gossiped and laughed noisily, and coarse expressions were frequent. The earnest moral tone, the almost gloomy melancholy which Wilhelm had found so attractive in socialistic writings, was absent, and it seemed ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... her care from infancy. In after-years I came to the conclusion that she was in love with my uncle; and perhaps the sense that he was indifferent to her save after a brotherly fashion, combined with the fear of betraying herself and the consciousness of her unattractive appearance, to produce the contradiction between her looks ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central formation of which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into a second whole. I am not denying, of course, the civilisation of the Chinese, for instance, though it be not our civilisation; but it is a huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilisation. Nor do I deny a civilisation to the Hindoos, nor to the ancient Mexicans, nor to the Saracens, nor (in a certain sense) to the Turks; but each of these races has its own civilisation, as separate from one another as ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of delicate consideration for the convalescent Andrea was still very pale and thin, which made his eyes look extraordinarily large, the somewhat sensual expression of his mouth forming a singular and not unattractive contrast to the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... The quality of the paper, the kind of printing or engraving, the mechanical make-up—all these things contribute to the IMPRESSION a letter makes upon the recipient even BEFORE THE MESSAGE IS READ. Many letters come to nothing because their dress is unattractive, cheap, slovenly; and so progressive business men are learning to select their stationery with care to insure for it both tone and dignity. The kind of paper to select—the size, the tint and the quality—is described and explained in ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... stained, so that stones naturally unattractive by their dull grey tints come to be valuable for ornamental purposes. The art of staining the stone is believed to be very ancient. Possibly referred to by Pliny (bk. xxxvii. cap. 75), it was certainly practised at an early ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in the material conditions of life will be formed by effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes, the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the public. Men will gather in the streets ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... which led them to crime, to convince them of our good faith and good will, and to disabuse them of their suspicion that we distrust them, condescend to them, and despise them. For this prodigal brother of ours has become a very unsightly and unattractive object during these thousands of years of his sojourn among the pigsties and corn husks. He does not speak in our language or observe our manners or contemplate our ideals, or care for our refinements. We shall have ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... commercial hotel, clean apparently but otherwise wholly unattractive. Henneford led the way up-stairs and with some pride threw open the door of a room on the first floor. "We've got you a sitting-room," he said. "Thought you might want to talk to these Press people, perhaps, or do a bit of work. Your secretary's ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the working class are fond of wearing enormous bushy whiskers, and women of all classes are accustomed to wear moustachios. The thin line of softest down which accentuates the ripe lips of the senhorina of some seventeen summers becomes an unattractive incident in the broad countenance of the stout lady of advancing years; and when, as sometimes happens, the hirsute appendages take the form of a thin, straggling beard, with a tooth-brush moustache, it can only be ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Avenues, a neighborhood at one time much in vogue, but now given up almost entirely to boarding-houses of the cheaper kind. Old-fashioned brownstone residences, with high ceilings, cracked walls, dirty, paper-patched windows, and narrow little gardens choked up with weeds, they were as unattractive-looking from without as they were gloomy and destitute of comfort within. Yet poverty-stricken as were the surroundings, the street itself was respectable enough. As in the case of a homely woman, its very ugliness served to keep ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... assumed that 'Salsette and Elephanta' has been read by all who care about the undertaking. It was recited in the theatre at Oxford, printed in the same year (1839), and reprinted exactly forty years afterwards. It is a by no means unattractive piece of rhetoric. ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... only a selection taken haphazard from the mass of fugitive literature which the early years of the Reformation brought forth. In spite of a certain rough but not unattractive directness of diction, a prolonged reading of them is very tedious, as will have been sufficiently seen from the extracts we have given. Their humour is of a particularly juvenile and obvious character, and consists almost entirely in the childish device of ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... house. The Wickhams were already in the drawing-room. Mrs. James Wickham was a pretty young woman, a good ten years younger than her unattractive husband. Of the two, Nora preferred Mr. Wickham. There was a certain cynicism about her insincerity which his, somehow, lacked. Even now, they wore ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... make him pause. Events in Central Italy had gone farther than he looked for, and his private map of the kingdom of Upper Italy was growing smaller every day. Why was this? He cannot have been seized with a warm interest in the unattractive despotism of the Duke of Modena, or the chronic anarchy kept down by Austrian bayonets at Bologna. But it was becoming apparent that if Modena and Romagna were joined to the new Italian kingdom, Tuscany would ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... moderate amounts of methaqualone, small amounts of heroin, and cocaine bound for Southern Africa and possibly Europe; a poorly developed financial infrastructure coupled with a government commitment to combating money laundering make it an unattractive ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... had not always been so unattractive; her dark eyes were good and her face held the glow of fine health. She had added to the severity of her sharp features by the too-elderly manner in which she parted her hair exactly in the centre of her high brow and brushed it sharply backward to ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... of the Molly were as unattractive as their appearance and manners. These soubriquets spoke not of pious parents who had given their children to God, with a Christian name which they trusted would be registered in heaven. They told rather of lawless lives, and a past which must be ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... most perfect sea pictures he has produced, and especially remarkable as being painted without one marked opposition either of color or of shade, all quiet and simple even to an extreme, so that the picture was exceedingly unattractive at first sight. The shadow of the pier-head on the near waves is marked solely by touches indicative of reflected light, and so mysteriously that when the picture is seen near, it is quite untraceable, and comes into existence as the spectator retires. It is thus of peculiar truth and ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... we are to compromise truth, but to study the native character, and not present the truth in an unnecessarily unattractive form. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fear and peace I take my rest, assured from every ill. Wherefore, my children, here is the pastime upon which I settled long since, after having in vain sought contentment of spirit in all the rest.... For he that knows God sees everything beautiful in Him, and without Him everything unattractive." Prologue, 13-15. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... front to the persons who saw her, to the insufficient staff of servants, to the village to the vicar and his wife, and the few far-distant neighbours who perhaps once a year drove miles to call or leave a card. She was an old woman sufficiently unattractive to find no difficulty in the way of limiting her acquaintances. The unprepossessing wardrobe she had gathered in the passing years was remade again and again by the village dressmaker. She wore ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the task set him, and was wondering whether the prospect of seeing something of that lovely region of Schleswig-Holstein, [See Map A] as I knew from hearsay that it was, was at all to be set against such an uncomfortable way of seeing it, with the season so late, the company so unattractive, and all the other drawbacks which I counted and treasured as proofs of my desperate condition, if I were to go. It needed little to decide me, and I think K—'s arrival from Switzerland, offensively ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... conversation swerved off in another direction. Once or twice I felt half inclined to precipitate a discussion. Indeed, I was in the act of doing so when our hostess brought in the tea. A snowy cloth, home-made scones, delicious oat-cake, abundance of cream—how tempting it all was! And how unattractive ecclesiastical controversy in comparison! We sat there in the twilight for what seemed like an age, talking of everything under the sun. Of everything, that is to say, save one thing only. And there brooded heavily over our spirits the consciousness ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... long before she discovered that Drummond was watching intently, without seeming to do so, a nervous-looking fellow whose general washed-out appearance of face was especially unattractive for some reason or other. He was very thin, very pale, and very stary about the eyes. Then, too, it seemed as if the bone in his nose was going, due perhaps to the shrinkage of the blood ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... pray the readers of the following Lectures to remember that the duty at present laid on me at Oxford is of an exceptionally complex character. Directly, it is to awaken the interest of my pupils in a study which they have hitherto found unattractive, and imagined to be useless; but more imperatively, it is to define the principles by which the study itself should be guided; and to vindicate their security against the doubts with which frequent discussion has lately incumbered a subject which all think ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... "I have had to use the money I have made by my teaching for—for other purposes," she explained, in the stiff, cold manner that seemed so unattractive to gracious, sunshiny Madge. "I am sorry to have worried you with my troubles," Miss Jones said again. "Please forgive me and forget what I have told you. I shall probably do ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... paraded with a kind of passion. To this delight in antique details Filippino added violent gestures, strange attitudes, and affected draperies, producing a general result impressive through the artist's energy, but quaint and unattractive. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... untouched by grey," hazel eyes with very long, very finely marked eyebrows (secretly they are the joy of my life!) good features, and a sulky expression. The old Evelyn used to be very good-looking—(she's dead now, so I can say so, as much as I like)—this new one is good-looking too, in a disagreeable, unattractive kind of way. If you saw her dining at the next table in an hotel you would say, "Rather a fine-looking girl!" And the man with you would reply, "Think so! Too much of a temper for my fancy. Glad she don't belong ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in a locked-up journal, so I shall always tell the truth here—quite different things to what I should say if I were talking to some one and describing to them this scene. Then I should say I found him utterly unattractive, and, in fact, I hardly noticed him! As it was, I noticed him very much, and I have a tiresome inward conviction that he could be very attractive indeed, if ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... The effect of climate upon disposition and upon manners needs to be considered some day; but we are now only trying to understand the attractiveness of the disagreeable. There must be some reason for it; and that would explain a social phenomenon, why there are so many unattractive people, and why the attractive readers of these essays could not get on ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... repeatedly applied to other mythologies with invariable failure, is now disowned by every distinguished student of European and Oriental antiquity; and to seek to introduce it into American religions is simply to render them still more obscure and unattractive, and to deprive them of the only general interest they now have, that of illustrating the gradual development of the religious ideas ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... hoarding, on every bare piece of wall, were spread large, flamboyant posters showing a garish but not unattractive landscape. There was the sun sparkling on a wide stretch of water edged with high trees, and gay with little sailing boats, each boat with its human freight of two lovers. Jutting out into the blue lake was a great white building, which Sylvia realised must be the Casino. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... particularly odd or unattractive about the house in those little-girl days, and it seemed a perfectly normal establishment to her now. It was home, and it was good to get home after the long day. She ran up the flight of stairs that the gas- bead dimly lighted, and up another, where a second gas-jet, ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... defending himself from the severe and often fatal injuries following his being hit by the pitched ball. Fortunately, the change in the distance between the pitcher and batsman has decreased the opportunity for this class of unattractive games. But it will not do to go over to the other side and by too much weakening of the box work give the "line-'em-out" class of "fungo" hitters a chance to revel in over-the-fence hits, and give the batsman undue preponderance in the ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... amusingly described in his book "Crotchets and Quavers." More than twenty years later he attempted to continue the story in a musical journal, and gathering the disconnected chapters together, issued them in an unattractive form under the title "Flats and Sharps." The first book is, to some extent, a contribution to musical history, though its strong personal equation and its effort to be entertaining mar its value and influence. The impression to which I have given utterance, that he was ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... arts and wiles of securing popular favor to the self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonly regarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible for the fatal mistake of making the surroundings of "good influences" singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimand quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the surroundings of "evil influences" so beguiling. Both are akin to that state of mind which narrows the entrance ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... "to be relieved of looking down those unattractive muzzles. Ah! thank you!—The chairs, gentlemen!" with ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... affords a more important difference still, indeed one which is very striking. I pointed out in the appropriate place—not at the moment thinking of Feuillet at all—the strange fashion in which Alexander the Younger constantly "makes good" an at first unattractive story; and, even in his most generally successful work, increases the appeal as he goes on. With Feuillet the order of things is quite curiously reversed. Almost (though, as will be seen, not quite) ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... alluring, engaging, enticing, magnetic, prepossessing, personable, winning, mesmeric, taking, seductive, bewitching. Antonyms: unattractive, repellent, repulsive, forbidding, repugnant. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... incredibly difficult task of subduing the formidable forest Indians, with their peculiar and dangerous system of warfare; and he possessed no capacity for getting on with the frontiersmen, being without sympathy for their virtues while keenly alive to their very unattractive faults. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... unattractive, and unfortunately the unprepossessing but valuable outer coat is polished away. This is done in a mortar hollowed out of a section of a tree trunk or out of a large stone. One may see a young man or a young woman ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Destined by his father for the law, at the completion of his legal studies he was admitted an advocate of the parlement of Paris in 1785. His professional success was not great; his manner was violent, his appearance unattractive, and his speech impaired by a painful stammer. He indulged, however, his love for literature, was closely observant of public affairs, and thus gradually prepared himself for the main duties of his life—those ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... working-rooms. On Tuesday morning (the 8th), with the help of a few volunteers, chiefly ladies connected with the school, who had arrived a day or two in advance, the dormitories, which were still encumbered by shavings, sawdust, etc., were swept, and presently transformed into not unattractive sleeping-halls. They were divided by neat sets of furniture into equal spaces, above each of which was placed the name of the person to whom it was appropriated. When all was done, the large open rooms, with their fresh pine walls, floors, and ceilings, the rows ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... so to speak, in the character of a sort of accomplice; that her position was a perilously uncertain one, which would probably end in utter downfall, leaving her in her old and proper place as an elderly, insignificant, and unattractive poor relation, without a feature to recommend her. But being, as before remarked, a timid man, and recalling the interview between himself and his employer held outside the dining-room door, and having also a disturbing ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had taken on an aspect of decay that caused the Governor to frown. The courtyard was littered with rubbish from a building that had actually fallen down, and a new one was being erected. And though some of the houses were quite comfortable within, the exterior was very unattractive, from the different materials, like patches put on to add ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... in the early hours of the morning, but it does seek at times to hover on the edge of disrespectability with something of the roguish curiosity of childhood. And now the respectables and the unrespectables, a motley gathering in that garish room, amid the ugly debris of their feasting, made an unattractive picture from which I turned with a sense of relief to the quieter ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... nature, and a simplicity that betokened perfect purity of thought Nor was this extraordinary confidence without its advantages to Eve; for, thrown so early among the artificial and calculating, it served to keep her own ingenuousness of character active, and prevented that cold, selfish, and unattractive sophistication, that mere women of fashion are apt to fall into, from their isolated and factitious mode of existence. When Eve, therefore, put the questions to her nurse, that have already been mentioned, it was more with a real wish to know ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... now having no harbor worthy of the name, the traveler by sea must land at Gravosa about a mile north of the old city. Gravosa is merely a suburb of warehouses, shipping, and sailor-men, as unattractive as the London Docks, and the Hotel Petko swarmed with mosquitoes and an animal which seems to thrive and flourish ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... words—but inwardly he was himself aware that it would be a hard and difficult task for him to win love.... A hard and difficult task for him to win love, but easy and simple enough to wear a mask of indifference, of silent haughtiness. Avdey Ivanovitch was unattractive and no longer young; but on the other hand he enjoyed a terrible reputation—and consequently he had every right to pose. He was used to the bitter, unspoken enjoyment of grim loneliness. It was not the first time he had attracted the attention of women; some had even tried to get upon ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... generous relations or if he has energy and an ingenious unfatigued mind. But a man who is tired and neither clever nor important in any degree and who has reared his brood in one of the Channel Islands with a faded, silly, unattractive wife as his only aid in any difficulty, is wise in leaving the whole hopeless situation to chance and luck. Sometimes luck comes without assistance but—almost invariably—it ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... encourages earnest getting-together in every household and results in a clearing up of the entire stock of eligible daughters. But think of the unhappy lot of an adorable and much-coveted maiden who finds herself wedged in behind something unattractive and shelf-worn! Jeneka was thus pocketed. She could do nothing except fold her hands and patiently wait for ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into a second whole. I am not denying of course the civilization of the Chinese, for instance, though it be not our civilization; but it is a huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilization. Nor do I deny a civilization to the Hindoos, nor to the ancient Mexicans, nor to the Saracens, nor (in a certain sense) to the Turks; but each of these races has its own civilization, as separate from one another as from ours. I do not see ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... inherited Pokrovskoe, but she did not long reside there. In the second year of her marriage with Kalitine, who had succeeded at the end of a few days in gaining her affections, Pokrovskoe was exchanged for another estate—one of much greater intrinsic value, but unattractive in appearance, and not provided with a mansion. At the same time Kalitine purchased a house in the town of O., and there he and his wife permanently established themselves. A large garden was attached to it, extending in one ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... have been to a queen, married to a tiresome, unattractive Bourbon—and Fersen was young and gallant and thoughtful for her slightest good, and, from what one hears and has read, he must have understood her, and been her friend as well—and sometimes she must have forgotten about being a queen for a few ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... this metaphor the emphasis is laid upon the two attributes which I have named—beauty and purity. The figure teaches us that ugly Christianity is not Christ's Christianity. Some of us older people remember that it used to be a favourite phrase to describe unattractive saints that they had 'grace grafted on a crab stick.' There are a great many Christian people whom one would compare to any other plant rather than a lily. Thorns and thistles and briers are a good deal more like what some of them appear to the world. But ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... make the teaching profession unattractive, is the very strenuous life which it entails under modern conditions. Again, so far as women are concerned, there is not complete security of tenure, though apart from the regulation that obtains under ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... disguise of a small boy (and I cannot think of any more effective disguise an angel could have assumed), with a can of beer in one hand, and in the other something at the end of a string, which he let down on to every flat stone he came across, and then pulled up again, this producing a peculiarly unattractive sound, ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... enchantingly beautiful, as seriously satisfying, as those which surrounded the Tuscans in their landscape. And it is in the extracting of such beauty of lines out of the bewildering confusion of huge frescoes, it is in the seeing as arrangements of such lines the sometimes unattractive men and women and children painted (and for that matter, often also sculptured) by the great Florentines of the fifteenth century, that consists the true appreciation and habitual enjoyment of Tuscan Renaissance painting. The outline of an ear and muscle of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... top hat and his yellow gloves in his hand, and his sister-in-law thought she had never seen Jacques look so plain and unattractive, and—and tiresome ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... English taste demands covers which show every mean stain, every soiled finger-print; but these volumes are always a reproach to me, because they show me, alas! how many subjects, how many methods of presenting subjects, are wholly uninteresting and unattractive to my trivial mind. This time, however, my eye fell upon a poem full of light and beauty, and of that subtle grace which seems so incomprehensible, so uncreated—a lyric by Mr. Alfred Noyes. It was like a spell ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Tarleton was not favourably impressed by him. He had thick features and a generally unattractive appearance; he spoke, too, with an accent which Tarleton distrusted, although Klein assured him that he was a French Alsatian, and as proof thereof showed the secretary a letter from the French Embassy which vouched for his being a devoted citizen of the Republic. ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... is to shake the vines at intervals so that the ripe berries drop on sheets spread below the vines. The juice which exudes from the point where the stem is broken off causes the berries to become smeared and gives them an unattractive appearance. Owing, however, to the tough skin, the berries do not crack as badly as other grapes would under the same conditions, but nevertheless they are not adapted to long-distance shipments. Under reasonably ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... formal in a letter—if I write at all I must write as I think. It seems Ellen has told you that I am become a governess again. As you say, it is indeed a hard thing for flesh and blood to leave home, especially a good home—not a wealthy or splendid one. My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world—the profound, the intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source—when they ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... for the rings which he saw on Grant's fingers, but without success. Speke had wished to take two of the king's sons to be educated in England, but instead, he sent two orphan boys, who, being both of the common negro breed, were so unattractive in appearance that Speke declined receiving them. They had been kept the whole time almost as prisoners, without being allowed by the suspicious king to move about the neighbourhood, while no one had been permitted to visit them. They were therefore thankful when ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... plants, with stems similar to those of the globose Echinocactuses and floral characters quite distinct from all other genera. They cannot be said to possess any particular beauty, as their stems are stiff and dumpy, their spines large and rigid, and their flowers small and unattractive. But what is wanting in beauty of form or colour is atoned for in the cap which crowns the stem, and forms the flower-head, growing taller and taller whilst the stem remains stationary, till, under ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... CENTURION (an unattractive man of fifty, short in his speech and manners, with a vine wood cudgel in his hand). How now? What is ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... time we reached Jerusalem friend Jeremy was ripe for almost anything except the plan we had agreed on. Having talked that over pretty steadily most of the way from Abu Kem, it seemed already about as stale and unattractive to him as some of his oldest tricks. And Jerusalem provided plenty of distraction. We hadn't been in Grim's quarters half an hour when Jeremy was up to his ears in a dispute that ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... coating of the flour on the outside. These sweetmeats were nicely packed in straw baskets, of a different manufacture from those before-mentioned, and were very superior to the common sort which is brought from the coast in small coarse earthenware basins, exceedingly unattractive in their appearance. ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... we find Mr. Adams on his way to Washington, the raw and unattractive village which then constituted the national capital, wherein there was not, as the pious New Englander instantly noted, a church of any denomination; but those who were religiously disposed were obliged to attend services "usually performed on Sundays at the Treasury Office and ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... tragedy which had deprived him at once of the girl he had loved and the incentive to a better, worthier manhood which her love had supplied. For her sake he could have done much, could have vanquished all the petty failings, the selfish weaknesses which marred his not otherwise unattractive character; but when Hilda Ryder vanished from his life he lost ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... though during that silence she gave no sign of distress or agitation. It was for her obviously a moment of reflection. Her lips were compressed a little in a characteristic, capable manner. I looked at her with a friendliness I really felt towards her slight, unattractive, and dependable person. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... and Lord Ongar's will be altogether different, even if I should succeed in getting up to London. If you ever come to see Hermione here, I may chance to meet you in the house. But you will not do that often, the place is so dull and unattractive." ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... years in seeking preferment in it. Preferment had not come, and the only means of building up the family fortunes in his own person, was now a moneyed wife. He was poor, fifty years old, and personally unattractive. A contemporary chronicle describes him as short, thin, and pale, and with a projecting nose. He had nothing to offer but his rank; but in the case of a very obscure heiress, this might suffice, and such a one ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... lightly fastened together. The inside was lined with dried leaves, grass, and the coarser feathers of the ostrich. When they saw that we were encamped, the three hunters lighted a fire and sat themselves down before it to enjoy a sumptuous repast of ostrich flesh. Though unattractive in appearance, they were honest little fellows, and we slept in perfect security, knowing that they would give us timely notice of the ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... of Fetters on the Feet (ARNOLD), she is living with some Quaker cousins and spending most of her time in mending stockings. So many people make stockings who refuse absolutely to mend them that I imagine there must be something peculiarly unattractive in this work of restoration, and it was a fortunate day for Margaret when the pedantic young man of the house proposed to marry her. After this we discover that she has both a history and a will of her own. She leaves the Quakers, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... about four o'clock, as I was sauntering slowly through a seemingly unattractive street, by which there ran a stream as black as the ink called "Eau de Robec," my attention, fixed for the moment on the quaint, antique appearance of some of the houses, was suddenly attracted by the view of a series of second-hand furniture ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the city were strange. The shops on the narrow streets were plain and unattractive, and the signs unintelligible. The windows of the lower floors of the dwellings were grated with iron bars like a prison. Beneath a bridge over a walled ravine that kept a rushing stream within bounds in the rainy season, women washed clothes and spread them on rocks to dry. In the ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... we see this illustrated in the case of a young woman who suddenly becomes conscious that she is plain and unattractive; who, by prodigious exercise of her will and untiring industry, resolves to redeem herself from obscurity and commonness; and who not only makes up for her deficiencies, but elevates herself into a prominence and importance which mere personal attractions could ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... built at the conflux with the river of a small affluent, and here lived an old Malay who was employed in receiving the products from the workers in the field. Only his wife was present, he having gone to Naan on the Djuloi River, but was expected to return soon. The place is unattractive and looked abandoned. Evidently at a previous time effort had been made to clear the jungle and to cultivate bananas and cassavas. Among felled trees and the exuberance of a new growth of vegetation a few straggling bananas were observable, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... chief seaport in E. of Scotland, on the Forth, contiguous to Edinburgh and the port of it; is an old, unattractive, but busy town. The harbour comprises five docks. The imports are corn, flour, wines, sugar, and fruit; the exports, coal, iron, paraffin, and whisky. There are shipbuilding and engineering works, breweries, distilleries, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... are ravaged, his coco-nut palms felled with the axe. The motive for this destruction of the property of the deceased is not mentioned, but the custom points to a fear of the ghost; the people probably make his old home as unattractive as possible in order to offer him no temptation to return and haunt them. The same fear of the ghost, or at all events of the infection of death, is revealed by the stringent seclusion and ceremonial pollution of the grave-diggers. They ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... they would buy if their pockets were lined. These dreams are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any neighborhood in which the wanderer happens to find himself. For myself, I have never been in a country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be able to purchase the most considerable house it contained. In New England and other portions of the United States I have coveted the large mansion with Greek columns and a pediment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... after the jubilant, alert robins have returned from the South, the Purple Trillium unfurls its unattractive, carrion-scented flower. In the variable colors found in different regions, one can almost trace its evolution from green, white, and red to purple, which, we are told, is the course all flowers must follow to attain to blue. The white and pink ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... difficult to exaggerate the encouragement which a President of Sir Charles Dilke's distinction can give in these various ways to workers in the unpopular and unattractive paths of statistical science. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... twenty-five of the most unattractive animal-looking females, dressed in ordinary hideous clothes, who all took their seats on a row of chairs at the farther end. They wore no national costume nor anything to attract the eye, but were simply garbed as concierges or shop-girls might ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... idiot," Jean growled. "You do not know what you are doing. I do. She is young and lonely. You are young and not unattractive to women. Already she turns pale when I so much as ask if she ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... theory of a descent from the apes is clearly due in most men to feeling rather than to reason. They shrink from the notion of such an origin just because they see in the ape organism a caricature of man, a distorted and unattractive image of themselves, because it hurts man's aesthetic complacency and self-ennoblement. It is more flattering to think we have descended from some lofty and god-like being; and so, from the earliest times, human vanity has been pleased to believe in our origin from gods or demi-gods. The Church, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... ever saw was that of a woman whom the world calls beautiful. Through its "silver veil" the evil and ungentle passions looked out hideous and hateful. On the other hand, there are faces which the multitude at the first glance pronounce homely, unattractive, and such as "Nature fashions by the gross," which I always recognize with a warm heart-thrill; not for the world would I have one feature changed; they please me as they are; they are hallowed by kind memories; they are beautiful through their associations; nor are they any ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... waggonette; before long they were at Donohoe's Hotel, and Mary Grant was soon rigged out in an outfit from Mrs. Donohoe's best clothes—a pale-green linsey bodice and purple skirt—everything, including Mrs. Donohoe's boots, being about four sizes too big. But she looked by no means an unattractive little figure, with her brown eyes and healthy colour showing above the ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... exhibits a body of sceptical writers whose characters are so unattractive as the French unbelievers; whose coarseness of mind in failing to appreciate that which is beautiful in Christianity is so evident, that charity could not forbid us to doubt, even if there were not independent proof, that faults of character contributed very largely to the formation of their ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... began to get scarce with them, the barrels of salt pork that had been in the skiff when she sank in the Morumbidgee had their contents damaged by the admission of the fresh water. The fish, though abundant, were more than unattractive to their palates, and the men took no trouble to set the night lines. The strictest economy had, therefore, to become the order of the day. The skiff being only a drag to them, she was broken up, and burnt for the sake of the nails ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... (with the permission of his sitters, of course) had connected the two figures in a group. Eustace had briefly told me, in the days of our courtship, that he had more than once fancied himself to be in love before he met with me. Could this very unattractive woman have been one of the early objects of his admiration? Had she been near enough and dear enough to him to be photographed with her hand in his? I looked and looked at the portraits until I could ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... language; but his look and air expressed a good deal of what he said, and Gerberge looked all the more unattractive. ...
— The Little Duke - Richard the Fearless • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a small silence. Charmian knew now that she was making the wrong impression, that she was obstinately doing, being, all that was unattractive to Heath. But she was governed by the demon that often takes possession of girls who love and feel themselves unloved. The demon forced her to show a moral unattractiveness that did not really express ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a glance, though he had seen it only once, in a note written to Lady MacGregor. The letter was from Victoria, and was addressed to "Mr. Stephen Knight," in American fashion—a fashion unattractive to English eyes. But because it was Victoria's way, it seemed to Stephen simple and unaffected, like herself. Besides, she was not aware that he had any kind of handle to ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hands made short work of unpacking the books, the patched undergarments, and the few pitifully unattractive dresses. Pollyanna, smiling bravely now, flew about, hanging the dresses in the closet, stacking the books on the table, and putting away the undergarments in ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... repugnance from these humble avocations of domestic life. It speaks most highly in behalf of the intelligence and sound judgment of her mother, that she was enabled thus successfully to allure her daughter from her proud imaginings and her realms of romance to those unattractive practical duties which our daily necessities demand. At one hour, this ardent and impassioned maiden might have been seen in her little chamber absorbed in studies of deepest research. The highest ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... close friendship with Monteverde as a result of meeting him so often at the countess's. He no longer seemed foolish and unattractive. Renovales found in him something of the woman he loved and therefore his company was pleasing. He experienced that calm attraction, free from jealousy, that the husband of a mistress inspires in some men. They sat together at the theater, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Agar "gave him up," to make use of her own expression. She was one of those women who either fear or despise that which they do not understand. She could scarcely fear Jem, so she persuaded herself that he was stupid and unattractive. At this time there came another influence to militate against any excess of love between Jem and his stepmother. It came to her, for he was ignorant of it. And this was the knowledge that before long the little heir's undisputed reign in the nursery ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... him, and the Church is divided into many and often hostile factions. All the more it becomes the test of our religion if our hearts feel and rejoice in the fellowship of God's simpler and more needy and more devoted believers, however unattractive they ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think of other ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a point of principle with the infantry to assume that the cavalry, as well as all Higher Commands, were capable of every stupidity and of nothing but stupidity—would cut up B Company, his own, who had a certain unattractive duty assigned to them on the extreme left. He also told us that the Median Wall would be shelled to blazes, which ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... unusually late, he saw her still at work—no doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying. She had her normal and natural look and air—the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and uninteresting. With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... approaches the frontiers, first of the Orange Free State, and then of the Transvaal Republic, which bounds that State on the north. Bushes are seen, and presently trees, nearly all prickly mimosas, small and unattractive, but a pleasant relief from the bare flats of Kimberley, whence all the wood that formerly grew there has been taken for mine props and for fuel. There is more grass, too, and presently patches of cultivated land appear, where Kafirs ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Coffee and claret were still present, not only in cups, bottles, and glasses, but also on the table-cloths. The men were of all ages, but youth preponderated and had the most to say and the loudest manner of saying it. The ladies were, as to the majority, unattractive in appearance, nasal in voice, and unabashed in manner. The assemblage was, in short, a specimen of self-styled, self-conscious Bohemia; a far-off, much-adulterated imitation of the sort of thing that some of the young men with ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... choice handiwork, man has come in to mar and spoil the whole. The mountains, clothed with brightest green, rise grandly towards the sky, but all along the narrow gorge of the Bienne, in which Morez lies, stand closely compacted masses of many storied manufactories and congeries of dark, unattractive houses. There is hardly a garden, a chalet, or villa to redeem the prevailing, crushing ugliness; yet, for all that, if you can once get over the profound sadness induced by this strange contrast, nothing can be more delightful and exhilarating than the mountain environment of this little ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... mind. Letters upon blue paper in straight up and down handwriting—other papers, also blue, with ruled lines and numerals, for which Mr. May was more frightened than he would have been for a charge of cavalry. These were the very unattractive contents of this drawer. He brought two or three of them out in a bundle and read them over, one after another, with contracted brows. Debt is an idiosyncrasy like other things. Some people keep clear of it miraculously, some seem to drop into it without cause ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Give to the industrious practical workers the sort of things they like, big salaries, short hours, social consideration, expensive pleasures. Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of his trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute. For all let there be a choice between a life of dignified, highly-paid, and not over-exacting employment and the despicable life of a vagrant. There can be ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... creature absolutely demolished them. Oh! she did it in such a fine, simple, unworldly sort of way. I only wish you had seen her! They were twitting her about not going in for all the fun here, and, above everything, for keeping her room so bare and unattractive. You know she has been a fortnight here to-day, and she has not got an extra thing— not one. There isn't a room in the hall like hers— it's so bare and ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the seat of the Imperial Court of Justice. If he had any such serious purpose, his experience of the place speedily dispelled it. The place itself he found distasteful; a "little, ill-built town," he calls it, though the modern visitor finds it not unattractive, with its climbing, tortuous streets, reminiscent of the Middle Age, and with its impressive cathedral, one of the most interesting specimens of mediaeval architecture to be found in Germany, and still unfinished in Goethe's day. Instead of the spectacle of an august tribunal administering ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... of an unnaturally stout official having an interminable succession of white rabbits produced from the various recesses of his waistcloth admittedly melts the austerity of the superficial of both sexes. But can you, beneath the undeceptive light of day, turn a sere and unattractive hag into the substantial image of a young and beguiling maiden, and by a further complexity into a fruitful fig-tree; or induce a serpent so far to forsake its natural instincts as to poise on the extremity of its tail and hold ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... In proof of it he tossed a volume to the table. "I asked you to come up here, Gilbert, because I have a proposition to make and I thought you wouldn't want anyone around." Harry seated himself, took one knee into his clasped hands and smiled at the visitor. It was a peculiarly unattractive ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... services of two American adventurers who had had some military experience in Central America and elsewhere were enlisted and taken into the pay of this merchants' guild. Their names were Ward and Burgevine, and they were both adventurers of an unscrupulous and unattractive type. In addition to excellent pay, they were promised handsome money rewards for the capture of specified places, and what spoil there was to take should be theirs. Such a prospect was very inviting to the bold spirits of a great port like Shanghai, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... who vowed that in her company alone he found happiness, who could not await the evening that would bring him to her, who declared that his affection would never cool, and their whole wedded life would be one continuous honeymoon, now finds her company tedious, her home unattractive. He looks upon his home as his boarding and lodging-house, upon his wife as the kitchen scullion, or as the nurse of his children, for which services he generally allows her so many dollars a week. At the breakfast ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... time the town and county had changelessly voted the good old Democratic ticket. Here at least the rights of property would be respected, and there would be no lawless city mobs to make the restoration of a slave difficult. The brick house and ill-kept garden before which he paused looked unattractive. Beside the house a one-storey wooden office bore the name "Henry W. Swallow, Attorney-at-law." There was neither bell nor knocker. Mr. Grey rapped on the office door with his cane, and after waiting a moment without hearing any one, he ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... good books, though they may often be expensive, cannot be too highly commended. One can turn to a page in inviting letterpress so much easier than to a page of an unattractive volume.'[4] ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... a hotbed of reaction and bigotry. True, she had a history differing vastly from that of the other Italian states, but the facts of the hour presented her in a most unattractive light. The Genoese felt the keenest heart-burnings in submitting to a decision in which they had no voice, and which came to them as a mandate of political extinction from the same powers that confirmed the sentence of death on Genoa's ancient and glorious rival. The seeds were ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... girl while she talks. This rustic beauty, in her cotton bodice, her blue print skirt and her wooden shoes, no longer shouts. She expresses herself better and does not gesticulate so violently. She is quieter in her movements and her shyness is not unattractive. Rays of light filter through the branches and cast shifting patches of light on her face and figure. I always love to observe the details of her beauty, but to-day my heart contracts for a moment as my eyes follow the curve of her chin, which ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... shoulder of the woman. He did not look at Clara but at himself. In the dim light his hands, nervously fumbling about, his long, loosely-put-together body, everything connected with his person, seemed ugly and altogether unattractive. He could see the woman's small firm hands that lay on the railing of the bridge. They were, he thought, like everything connected with her person, shapely and beautiful, just as everything connected with his own person was ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson |
