"Unreadable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... go forth into the world without due acknowledgment being made to that worthy old Dominie, Richard Johnson, to whose erudite but somewhat unreadable work the author is so largely indebted. As he flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, and the commencement of the seventeenth, great allowances should be made for his style, which is certainly not suited to the taste of ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... the same sense would go very far to establish the usage. On the other hand, the fact that any number of newspaper reporters agree in usage does not make the usage reputable. The style of newspaper reporters is not without merit; it is very rarely unreadable; but for all its virtue it is rarely a well ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... anchor and the following lettering: 12 PDR Boat Howitzer 1856 J.A.D. U.S.N.Y. Washington 757 LBS. 58 PRE No. 45. The cannon on the right has inscriptions which are very worn and indistinct. There is an engraved anchor, but except for a letter here-and-there, the inscription is unreadable. ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... watched him with a keen eye. He had studied the face of the big man from up north all during the scene, and he found the stern features unreadable. For one instant now he guessed that ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... But a carrier pigeon would have no such difficulty in returning. Means must be found, however, to make it possible for each bird to carry many letters. M. Dagron, a clever photographer, discovered this means. He showed how he could photograph a letter and reduce it in size till the writing became unreadable, even under an ordinary magnifying glass. This could be done on films so thin that a roll of twenty of them could be inserted in one quill, each film representing a large number of letters. Having proved to the authorities the success of his invention, M. Dagron departed in ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... probable. It was not even easy to imagine. What struck me most was her—I suppose I must call it—composure. One could not tell whether she understood what she had done. One wondered. She was not so much unreadable as blank; and I did not know whether to admire her for it or dismiss her from my thoughts as a passive butt of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... subject that I could hardly bear to correct the proofs (The proofs of 'Animals and Plants,' which Lyell was then reading.), and you gave me fresh heart. I remember thinking that when you came to the Pigeon chapter you would pass it over as quite unreadable. Your last letter has interested me in very many ways, and I have been glad to hear about those horrid unbelieving Frenchmen. I have been particularly pleased that you have noticed Pangenesis. I do not know whether you ever had the feeling ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... unable to apprehend the greatness of the "Divine Comedy." Voltaire called the "Inferno" revolting, the "Purgatorio" dull, and the "Paradiso" unreadable. The reason is because they are not rightly attuned for the acceptance of the great truths which the poem teaches, and because they look at it from a wholly mistaken standpoint. If anyone supposes that the "Inferno," for instance, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... aversion, who has nothing to do with the matter in hand. They cannot praise A, B, C, and D, without first assailing E. It will generally be found that E is a popular author. But the great virtue of a reviewer, who would be unreadable and make others unread, is a languid ignorant lack of interest in all things, a habit of regarding his work as a tedious task, to be scamped as rapidly and stupidly ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... rendered him the most redoubtable of antagonists. Many years afterwards, at the time when the Prelude was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth's admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience; and on inquiry it was discovered that the only ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... with a flowered pattern forms, with his shepherd's plaid trousers, his grey spats and patent-leather boots, a colour scheme of no mean order. Nor is it merely Mr. Smith's finely mottled face. The face, no doubt, is a notable one,—solemn, inexpressible, unreadable, the face of the heaven-born hotel keeper. It is more than that. It is the strange dominating personality of the man that somehow holds you captive. I know nothing in history to compare with the position of Mr. Smith among those who drink over his bar, except, though in a lesser degree, ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... than could have been expected, as the circumstances of the field were, from ten knights cumbered with bulky mail. Sir Harris Nicolas, the most candid English historian of the battle, and who prepared a very useful, but unreadable volume concerning it, after speaking of the bad arrangements adopted by the French, proceeds to say,—"The inconveniences under which the French labored were much increased by the state of the ground, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... speak,—yet utter not. Fair heavenly flowers Strewn on the floor-way of the angels' bowers! 'Twas HIS own hand that twined your chaplets bright, And thoughts of love are in your wreaths of light, Unread, unreadable by us;—there lie High meanings in your mystic tracery; Silent rebukings of day's garish dreams, And warnings solemn as your own ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... blockhead I am not to have put the book into my pocket; for, except in extreme cases, the traveller's person is never searched. The man opened the thin volume, and found it inscribed with mysterious and strange characters. It was written in short-hand. He turned over the leaves; on every page the same unreadable signs met the eye. He held it by the top, and next by the bottom: it was equally inscrutable either way. He shut it, and examined its exterior, but there was nothing on the outside to afford a key to the mystic ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Johnny put one dark, bony hand on her white shoulder, gently, reassuring. After a moment, finding herself, she turned away and lit a cigarette. Johnny finished pulling on his boots and stood, his hawk-like face unreadable in the cold gray light streaming ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... dealing with the composition and making of enamels for application to metals for the most part, but also for other allied purposes. It is written in a thoroughly practical way [Transcribers Note: Text source unreadable], and its author—Paul Randau—has made its subject a very particular study. The [Transcribers Note: Text source unreadable] almost all things which come from the German chemical expert, is a model of good workmanship [Transcribers Note: Text source unreadable] and arrangement, ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... of the "Glen Morris Stories" is to sow the seed of pure, noble, manly character in the mind of our great nation's childhood. They exhibit the virtues and vices of childhood, not in prosy, unreadable precepts, but in a series of characters which move before the imagination, as living beings ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... is at once too Oriental and not Oriental enough. He had small store of Arabic at the time—Lane of the Nights is not Lane of the Dictionary—and his pages are disfigured by many childish mistakes. Worst of all, the three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable as Sale's Koran by their anglicised Latin, their sesquipedalian un English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in Europe. Their cargo ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... found before the aasvogels had picked them clean, and these would be at work upon them now. And if they were found, the paper would have rotted or been blown away, or, at the worst, rendered so discoloured as to be unreadable. For the rest, there was nothing to connect him with the murder, now that his confederates were dead. Hendrik would prove an alibi for him. He was a useful man, Hendrik. Besides, who would believe that it was a murder? Two men were escorting an Englishman ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... of Nordenskjold Ice Tongue. At 9 p.m. Hooke called Cape Evans and sent weather reports to Wellington and Melbourne via Macquarie Island. Hooke and Ninnis on several evenings at about 11 o'clock have heard what happened to be faint messages, but unreadable. He sent word to Macquarie Island of this in hopes that they would hear and increase ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the past, but this dry chronicle is never likely to see the light except when unearthed by law courts or legislative committees. It seems worth while, therefore, to disentangle the essential thread of the tale of 1914 from the mass of unreadable detail in the minute books, and put it in a shape where those who are interested ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... you shall be better treated this time," smiled Cervera, dropping into a chair opposite the detective, and fixing her sensuous, dark eyes on Nick's calm, unreadable face. ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... for they thought the doings within the deep of the cavern now grew big enough. On looking into the darkness they saw a sight like unto two full-moons, or huge targets, with some monstrous figure (unreadable in the MS.) between them. They thought this was nothing but two eyes, and that nowise narrow of face might he be who bore such torches. Next they heard a chanting of a monstrous kind and in a big voice. A lay there was sung of twelve staves, with the final refrain ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... the alteration of perspectives will have gone so far that historians will be a little perplexed to explain the causes of the Great War. The militarist monomania of Germany will have become incomprehensible; her Welt Politik literature incredible and unreadable.... ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... must have been written by one little accustomed to the pen, for there was much hard spelling as well as irregular chirography. Adelle looked for the signature. It was in the lower inside corner, and the name, in the effort to economize space, was almost unreadable. It might be "Sam." After considerable puzzlement, she felt sure that it was "Sam." The S had an indubitable corkscrew effect, and the straight splotches must have been an m, and there was the faint trace of the a. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... men who loaf, my dear," she replied. "When you undertake the transcription of an author's scrawl at ninepence the thousand words you have to work hard, especially when, as it is in this case, the thing's practically unreadable. Besides, the woman in it makes me lose my temper. If I'd had a man of the kind described to deal with ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... apology. I should have to write a dozen of letters before I could print a line, and the line, at last, would be only like a bit of any other botanical book—trustworthy, it might be, perhaps; but certainly unreadable. Whereas now, it will rather put things more forcibly in the reader's mind to have them retouched and corrected as we go on; and our natural and honest mistakes will often be suggestive of things we could not ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... with an unreadable name beginning with an L,—and that's all; and a pretty penny he must have paid to send us such ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... sweet, and the brow one that promised passion and power? A thousand other eyes might have looked on either one of them, and forgotten; these two looked—and remembered. You cannot tell why; it is the old story; the hidden, unreadable affinity making itself known to its counterpart; the sign and countersign of nature. But it was only nature that gave and took; not ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... Revolution of Saint Domingo are useful chiefly as representing the prejudices, as well as the interests, of the planters. The article in the Quarterly is valuable, as being an able and liberal digest of various narratives; some derived from Hayti itself. Rainsford's book is nearly unreadable, from the absurdity of its style; but it is truly respectable in my eyes, notwithstanding, from its high appreciation of L'Ouverture's character. It contains more information concerning Toussaint than can be found, I believe, anywhere else, except in the Biographie; and it has the advantage ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Luis explained nervously because of the look in the black, unreadable eyes of this straight, slim Indian girl who was so beautiful—and so silent. "They go muy fas', Ramon an' Beel. Poco tiempo—sure, we ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... et noir, roulette, faro, keno, and stud-poker were going in full blast. The proprietor, his elegant diamonds flashing in the light, was seated on a raised platform from whence he could survey the entire company—his face, impassive as marble and unreadable as the sphinx, was turned toward the faro lay-out, which this evening appeared to ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... of the field of view opened to rational observation, and that those scientific works which have, to use a common expression, become 'antiquated' by the acquisition of new funds of knowledge, are thus continually being consigned to oblivion as unreadable. However discouraging such a prospect must be, no one who is animated by a genuine love of nature, and by a sense of the dignity attached to its study, can view with regret any thing which promises future additions ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... be too much praised, and there is no doubt but that in addition to being the possessor of great learning he was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the title-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for example, as his Visit to the Philippine Isles and Siam and the Siamese, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps the only book by him that to-day commands attention ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite;—insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran. We read in it, as we might in the State-Paper Office, unreadable masses of lumber, that perhaps we may get some glimpses of a remarkable man. It is true we have it under disadvantages: the Arabs see more method in it than we. Mohammed's followers found the Koran lying all in fractions, as it had been written-down ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... a worn brown binding, was offered at the end of a sale at Sotheby's. It had stood, for how long no man knows, on the shelf of a small parish library in Suffolk; and it was offered for sale 'presumably as being unreadable to country folk, and capable of being turned into hard cash wherewith a few works of fiction might be purchased.' Acquired by the Bodleian Library for L6, it proved, by perhaps one of the most romantic chains of evidence ever attached to a book,[7] to be the favourite devotional ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... soul. I will refrain—but in order that these effusions may not be lost to the world, I offer them to the annuals for 1839; not so much for the sake of pecuniary compensation, but in order to improve the reading of some of that very unreadable class of books. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... departure is possible in respect to their shape. In business printing, especially in newspaper advertisements, men are sometimes tempted to gain amount at the risk of undue fineness of type. But no advertiser who counts the cost will take the chance of rendering his announcement unreadable by the use of ornamental or otherwise imperfectly legible letters. He sets no value upon the form save as a carrier of substance. In works of literature, on the contrary, form may take on an importance of its own; it may even be made tributary to the substance ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... translation of Bottiger's 'Sabina,' a learned account of the Roman toilette. I here send you a companion to that work—not a direct translation, but a very minute abstract from a similar dissertation by Hartmann, (weeded of the wordiness which has made the original unreadable, and in consequence unread,) on the toilette and the wardrobe of the ladies of ancient Palestine. Hartmann was a respectable Oriental scholar, and he published his researches, which occupy three thick octavos, making in all one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight pages, under the title ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... which is the spectral throne of exiled rulers. He has the power of all strong natures of creating around him an atmosphere of uncertainty, apprehension, and fear. Of all the many problems of this Session of probably fierce personal conflict, this was the most unreadable sphinx. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... other verities. His voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... was there, and yet neither Lamb's version nor Hunt's is satisfactory. His "Atys" pales before Cranstoun's, and his "Epithalamium," is almost unreadable; while the lines "On the death of Lesbia's Sparrow" naturally compel comparison with Byron's version. Nor will readers of the translations by Sir Theodore Martin or Robinson Ellis gain anything by ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. One feels it as one wades through their columns. It is always the unreadable that occurs. I am afraid that there is not much to be said in favour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides, what I am pleading for is Lying in art. Shall I read you what I have written? It might do you a ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... collection, containing much the same matter as the Cabinet, and probably in Johnson's mind when he jotted down Prince Titi), quite barren. La Princesse Minon-Minette et le Prince Souci, Apranor et Bellanire, Grisdelin et Charmante, are none of them unreadable. The next volume, too, is better as a whole than any we have had for a long time. Mme. Fagnan's Minet Bleu et Louvette contains, in its fifteen pages, a good situation by no means ill-treated. The pair are under the same spell—that of being ugly and witty for part of the week, handsome, stupid, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... It is now long, long past midnight, and all is as silent around my habitation as if it were in the midst of a forest, or the plague had depopulated London. After a day's hard labour at mathematical operations and corrections I sit down to write to you these hasty and, I fear, almost unreadable lines. Will you excuse them for the promise of something better when I have more leisure to be point-device? Your opinion of my geometry was very grateful, chiefly as it confirmed my own—that there has been a great deal ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... [Transcriber's note: unreadable text] about sunset that evening, and the command went into camp and I went to Jim's new log house. He had built one and had started in to build the second, having two carpenters at ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... honourable ambition; but he soon fell away—soon became almost a castaway. 'For five years,' he told Bishop Burnet, when on his death-bed, 'I was never sober.' His reputation as a wit must rest, in the present day, chiefly upon productions which have long since been condemned as unreadable. Strange to say, when not under the influence of wine, he was a constant student of classical authors, perhaps the worst reading for a man of his tendency: all that was satirical and impure attracting him most. Boileau, among French writers, and Cowley among the English, were his favourite authors. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... head, for the riddle seemed quite unreadable, and as we had already sat up until long past midnight I begged for my candle, and proposed to defer our conversation until the morning. Jack, declaring that none of the beds in the damp old house was fit to ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... generally in the laborious unreadable, well-read style—the book about the book. You are as one (when you are in the book about the book) thrust into the shadow of the endless aisles of Other Books—not that they are referred to baldly, or vulgarly, or in the text. It is worse than this (for this could be skipped). But you are surrounded ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Her soft loveliness in the delicate light that left her eyes unreadable depths of shadow, her timidity and anxiety for his safety, were from their very unconsciousness most dangerous. And while he grasped at self-control, she came still nearer to the head of the steps and held out her small fair hand, mistaking his ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... JULES RAULIN, Etudes chimiques sur la vegetation. Recherches sur le developpement d'une mucedinee dans un milieu artificiel, p. 192, Paris, 1870. We have seen in the case of yeast that this ratio may be as low as [Proofers note: unreadable symbol]] On the other hand, if we deprive the yeast of air entirely, or cause it to develop in a saccharine medium deprived of free oxygen, it will multiply just as if air were present, although with less activity, and under these circumstances its fermentative ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... curious. Before the public he would have liked to vindicate the efficiency of his department by establishing the identity of that man. He was a loyal servant. That, however, appeared impossible. The first term of the problem was unreadable—lacked all suggestion but ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... do? "He said, I must get more interest in others, and more knowledge, and that I must care about the best things—but how am I to begin?" She wondered what books he would tell her to take up to her own room, and recalled the famous writers that she had either not looked into or had found the most unreadable, with a half-smiling wish that she could mischievously ask Deronda if they were not the books called "medicine for the mind." Then she repented of her sauciness, and when she was safe from observation carried up a miscellaneous selection—Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Butler, Burke, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... than from the true bibliophile in his. To him the content of a book matters not at all. He loves books because they are books, and discriminates them only by the irrelevant standard of their rarity. A rare book is not less dear to him because it is unreadable, even as to the snob a dull duke is as good as a bright one. Indeed, why should he bother about readableness? He doesn't want to read. 'Uncut edges' for him, when he can get them; and, even when he can't, the notion of reading a rare edition would seem to him quite uncouth and preposterous ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... requires further notice. The 'Complete Duty of Man' would, if nothing else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion. It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits. It is one of the few instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable. It is not, like some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so intolerably dull as to disgust the reader ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... than leaders and paragraphs in the Journal des Debats. M. Henry Houssaye was himself once a journalist. But he thought better of that, and became a historian. He has written one or two volumes which, without being unreadable, have achieved immense popularity. Stevenson used to delve in them for matter suitable to his romances. The French Academy now contains pretty nearly everything except first-class literary artists. Anatole France is a first-class literary artist ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... the finer points of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects, before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed, this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... like the caballero of whom I shall sing." And Boca hummed a tune, gazing at Pete with unreadable eyes, half-smiling, half-sad. How young, smooth-cheeked, and boyish he was, as he glanced up and returned her smile. Yet how quickly his face changed as he turned his head toward the doorway, ever alert for a possible surprise. Boca pushed ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... and observation. In 1874, he became "Reader" to Messrs. Smith and Elder, and in that capacity had the happiness of discovering Vice Versa, and the less felicitous experience of rejecting John Inglesant as unreadable. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... you're using force?" she asked. Her face was unreadable; her mental block was at its fullest force. "That I'm being ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... people did things. It would open his eyes and his brains. Electrically, something self-protective within her added the further message: it would keep him out of the way for a time. Sally breathed deeply. An unreadable smile was upon her lips, and no smile at all was in her eyes. Afar off she scented change; but what manner of change she did not as yet recognise. It was her instinct at work, her instinct for turning life to her own advantage. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... fanatical soldiery, or from the more deliberate fiendishness of the Inquisition. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the fires of Smithfield, the immolation of the Moors, the extermination of the West Indians, the fantastic horrors of the Piedmontese persecution, which make unreadable the too truthful pages of Morland,—these were the spectres, which, not as now, dim and distant through the mist of centuries, but recent, bleeding from still gaping wounds, flitted before the eyes of every Englishman, and filled his brain ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... from Hicks. And since they would recognize no authority save that of force, it seemed meet and just to deal with them as they had dealt with us. So Piegan Smith and I stood aloof and watched the grim play, for the fate of a woman hung in the balance. Hicks' salient jaw was set, his expression unreadable. ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Theologicus de Deo, an ugly, square, brown book of five hundred pages—is as unreadable as it is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it was shown to the King whilst out hunting, and that he forthwith read it with such energy as to be able to despatch within an hour to his resident at the Hague a detailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his reign seems to have excited him so ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... colored maid who came in daily to perform such chores cleared away the things. Jessie, with an unreadable countenance, brought back the bottle of Scotch and the glasses and a bowl of cracked ice and set them ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... sent them. They never took one of them from the postoffice, hence the accumulation in the postoffice grew until there was room for little else. These books were surveys and agricultural reports. Unreadable to say the least, but heavy in the extreme. The postoffice at Santa Fe was a little bit of a concern, and the postmaster said there was no room for the books there. Earlier in the year I had carried one of these sacks to the postoffice ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... lines she wrote. These stanzas were completed shortly after the coronation of Charles VII. A manuscript copy of this poem exists in which Joan of Arc is compared to Deborah, Judith, and Queen Esther. These poems are curious and quaint in their old French expressions, but they are quite unreadable for any but French students well versed in the literature ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... overlook all that are obvious to the vulgar part of mankind. Their art is the transmutation of styles. By happy alchemy of mind they convert dross into gold—and gold into tinsel. They see farther into a millstone than most others. If an author is utterly unreadable, they can read him for ever: his intricacies are their delight, his mysteries are their study. They prefer Sir Thomas Browne to the Rambler by Dr. Johnson, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... that captive and captivating prince, wrote thousands of rondeaux; even before his time a gallant company of gentlemen composed the Livre des Cent Ballades, one hundred ballades, practically unreadable by modern men. Then came Clement Marot, with his gay and rather empty fluency, and Ronsard, with his mythological compliments, his sonnets, decked with roses, and led like lambs to the altar of Helen or Cassandra. A few, here and there, of his pieces are lighter, more pleasant, and, in a quiet way, ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... translation of Book Alpha of the Iliad, quite literal and in its original metre of hexameters: hitherto I have failed to find a publisher kind enough to lose by it; for there are already at least twelve English versions of Homer unread, perhaps unreadable. Still, some day I don't despair to gain an enterprising Sosius; for my literal and hexametrical translation is almost what Carthusians used to call "a crib," and perhaps some day the School Board or their organ, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of Liberty, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse. Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... other. "You gave the essence of the thing. That is a higher veracity than any literal reporting which would be dull and unreadable. I thought I recognized the fictional ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... across at the gross figure which suggested so little of the man's real energy. His steady eyes were unreadable. His thoughts were his own, masked as emphatically as any ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... certainly nothing either in the quantity or the quality of the performance which makes this incredible, for it does not fill quite two hundred pages of the ordinary 18mo size and not very closely packed type of the usual cheap French novel, and though it is not unreadable, any tolerably clever boy might easily write it between the time when he gets his scholarship in spring and the time when he goes up in October. The author had evidently read his Pigault and adopted that writer's revised picaresque scheme. His most prominent character (the hero, Henri ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... pose languid, her eyes raised to him, but as unreadable as ever. He avoided looking into them for that very reason. He forgot himself in the contemplation of those passive arms, of these defenceless lips, and—yes, one had to go back to them—of these wide-open eyes. Something ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... were very picturesque with the sun shining on the snow. We have seen little shipping, one large oil boat passed west. All are taking the lack of news philosophically, nothing, as far as I can make out, being heard to-day. Code messages from battleships speaking to each other are received but are unreadable. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... then alive, and that he was regarded as greater than Alexander, Pompey, and Caesar. How many modern epics treat of a subject at once so popular, so historical in its basis, and so striking to the imagination? For us, it is true, the poem is unreadable. For other themes of the same kind the reader may be referred to the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the door jamb and with a parting "I should bibble," started back to his goats, which he had refused to graze outside the Basin as Holman Sommers advised. Helen May began valiantly to struggle with the fine, symmetrical, but almost unreadable chirography of the man of many words. She succeeded in transcribing the human polyp properly lithified and correctly constituting the strata of the psychozoic age, when Vic stuck his head in at the ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... read it aloud," she proposed calmly, "and I will assist in the corrections. For the French edition I may be able to suggest. The papers today are most amusing," she continued. "The German press is almost unreadable. No wonder that there is a price upon your head, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Terry Hollis?" interpreted Gainor, and his voice rose and rang over them. Those who had slipped past him on either side came back and faced him. In the distance Elizabeth had not stirred. Vance kept watching her face. It was cold as ice, unreadable. He could not believe that she was allowing this lynching party to organize under her own roof—a lynching party aimed at Terence. It began to grow in him that he had gained a greater victory ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... me, in that maddeningly unreadable cross-eyed expression of cold ferocity which the scars gave his ugly face. We had agreed on one-third each, the other two to split the other third between them. I was footing the bills, Jake was nearly broke. He had found the stuff, and tried to hold out for ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... character. They have been a theme upon which a "bookworm" could gloat, a chest of secret drawers into which the curious delight to pry, a difficult problem in Euclid for the mathematician to solve; and an unreadable book for the author. A conglomeration of languages for the scholar, a puzzle for the historian, and a subject for the novelist. These are points which it is not the object of this book to attempt to clear up and settle; all it aims at, as in the case of my "Cry of the Children ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... characteristic of his method and sensibility: 'In contemplating the origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' Would you read further? Then you will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece was translated into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography. Was ever thief treated with so grave ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... teetering head, rested his chin on his hands, which were clasped over the top of his walking-stick. Occasionally his eyes roved to the portrait of his wife, and a melancholy, unreadable smile broke the severe line ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... Knox, the second in order of interest among the reformers, lies dead and buried in the works of the learned and unreadable M'Crie. It remains for some one to break the tomb and bring him forth, alive again and breathing, in a human book. With the best intentions in the world, I have only added two more flagstones, ponderous like their predecessors, to the mass of obstruction that buries the reformer from the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a young man—and it is to his earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be attributed—Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his later writings as absolutely unreadable. He was of Spanish extraction, as his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order, but retired in 1515, the year before ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... "it's rubbish, and unreadable; and though they condescend to let us see it, I don't suppose two fellows in the Form ever ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... works are the most famous and the most unreadable in all Germany. Surely you have heard of his 'Treatise on Man?' A treatise on a subject in which everyone is interested, written in a style which no one ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... fully explain his processes or the reason of his confidence in one witness and not in another, his belief in one honest man against a half dozen untrustworthy men, without such prolixity as to make a general history unreadable. Now, in this position as trustee he is bound to assert nothing for which he has not evidence, as much as an executor of a will or the trustee for widows and orphans is obligated to render a correct account of the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... been cut up beginning le Figaro up to la Revue des Deux Mondes, including la Gazette de France and le Constitutionnel. And THEY have not finished yet! Barbey d'Aurevilly has insulted me personally, and the good Saint-Rene Taillandier, who declares me "unreadable," attributes ridiculous words to me. So much for printing. As for speech, it is in accord. Saint-Victor (is it servility towards Michel Levy) rends me at the Brabant dinner, as does that excellent Charles Edmond, etc. On the other hand ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... contents. The Dedicatory Epistle, which is dated May 20th, 1648, some twelve months prior to the outbreak of the Digger Movement, already recorded, is the most interesting and suggestive portion of this long, wearisome, and almost unreadable volume. It is addressed to—"The Despised Sons and Daughters of Zion, scattered up and down the Kingdom of England." He first reminds them that "they are the object of the world's hatred and reproach," "branded as ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... unhappier, more unfortunate man than himself. To have been betrayed by the one he had loved, second to but one, and to have this knowledge thrust upon him after all these years, was evil enough; but the nadir of his misfortunes had been reached by the appearance of this unreadable young woman. Of what use to warn her against himself, or against the possible, nay, probable misconstruction that would be given their unusual friendship? Craig would not be idle with his tales. And why had she put on all this finery to-night? To ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... illustration, whether he concerns himself with diversities of early Christian belief, the course of country-dances in England, or the growth of mediaeval legends, he adds the grace of telling a tale and drawing a character. He has published nearly a hundred volumes, not one of them unreadable. But no one man may write with equal pen of German history, of comparative mythology and philology, of theological dissertations, and of the pleasures of English rural life, while he adds to these ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... abominable Alessandro de' Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all in the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... in language and mistakes in science, the empty verbiage that dilates on a platitude in one place, and the jejune abstract that hurries over a knotty argument in another, without regretting that so unreadable a poet should have ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... yet low, Rina, true to her promise, came to attend upon Natalie. There was no change in her manner; her unreadable eyes expressed no consciousness of the events of the night before. She questioned Natalie in her best professional way. It was not yet necessary to disturb the dressings on the arm; but she volunteered to do Natalie's hair; and what other offices would contribute to her ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... Psalms. Of course, the preference is given to the native article. Here are doctors disagreeing about the treatment of a putrid fever then prevalent, and blackguarding each other with a characteristic virulence that renders the controversy not altogether unreadable. Here are President Wigglesworth and the Rev. Dr. Colman, endeavoring to raise a fund for the support of missionaries among the Indians of Massachusetts Bay. Easy would be the duties of such a mission now! Here—for there is nothing new under the sun—are frequent ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... memories of the Rockies through which I was wheeling exactly a year ago. While wending my way along the streets toward the central portion of the Bavarian capital the familiar sign, "American Cigar Store," looking like a ray of light penetrating through the gloom and mystery of the multitudinous unreadable signs that surround it, greets my vision, and I immediately wend my footsteps thitherward. I discover in the proprietor, Mr. Walsch, a native of Munich, who, after residing in America for several years, has returned to dream away declining years amid the smoke of good cigars ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... need not detain us. It is unreadable, and to quote his own sensible words, 'It is useless to criticise what nobody reads.' It was indeed the expressed opinion of a contemporary called Pot that Irene was the finest tragedy of modern times; but on this judgment of Pot's being made known to Johnson, he ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of thirty-six—suave, steady, incisive, with eyes as fine as those of a Newfoundland or a Collie and as innocent and winsome. They were wonderful eyes, soft and spring-like at times, glowing with a rich, human understanding which on the instant could harden and flash lightning. Deceptive eyes, unreadable, but alluring alike to men and to women in all walks and conditions ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... and sent him a beautiful painting by Behnes, the sculptor. John revelled in an elysium of bliss, and, hanging the picture on the place of honour over the mantelpiece, to the great disgust of Patty, got more and more embedded in tenderness, until his letters became sheer unreadable for passionate love, unassisted by grammar. The thing getting tiresome now, and there being no more verses to correct, Mrs. Emmerson thought fit to drop her Northamptonshire poet, and accordingly wrote him a quiet little note asking for a return of her portrait. John Clare fell from ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... those of the ordinary adult man—problems of pure aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like myself—that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... more pleasure, and as I still return to it from time to time I do not suppose I shall ever outgrow the feeling, in spite of its having been borne in on me, when I first conversed with readers of poetry in England, that Thomson is no longer read—that he is unreadable. ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... his eyes that gave him away, his eyes of rare green that from a distance looked black. Slanting, veiled, unreadable beneath the lowered silky lashes, there was the soul of a tiger in their sinister depths. It was his eyes that his ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... (Unreadable) and almost exclusively absorbed by material concerns. The climate, too, variable and oppressive in summer and winter alike, imposed upon the Chaldaean painful exactions, and obliged him to work with an energy of which the majority of Egyptians would ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of the conspirators. Why else should he mistrust Liane's sincerity in asserting that she had seen Popinot? Aside from the question of what he imagined she could possibly gain by making a scene out of nothing—a riddle unreadable—one wondered consumedly what had happened to render Monk suspicious of her ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... chessboard with my letters on it. I tried reading them downward, across, upward and diagonally, in the direction of the moves of different chess pieces—king, queen, rook and bishop. Nothing came of that, whatever I did; the thing was as unreadable as ever. But there remained one chess-move to try—the eccentric move of the knight; the move of one square forward, backward or sideways, and then one square diagonally, or, as it has sometimes been more concisely expressed, the move to the next square but one of a different ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... him. She put one hand on his shoulder, the other on his knee, and bent forward, peering into his face. Hollister matched that questioning gaze for a second. It was unreadable. It conveyed no message, hinted nothing, held no covert suggestion. It was earnest and troubled. He had never before seen that sort of look on Myra's face. He could make nothing of it, and so there was nothing in it to disturb ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... autobiography breaks off abruptly. Herr Wichard Lange had some trouble in deciphering it from Froebel's almost unreadable rough draft, and here and there he had even to guess at a word or so. Froebel had intended to present this letter to the Duke of Meiningen at the close of 1827, when the negotiations began to be held about a proposed National Educational Institution ...
— Autobiography of Friedrich Froebel • Friedrich Froebel
... run between Decks. The French gave 'em Quarters, and put the Prisoners on board the Victoire, the Prize yielding nothing worth mention, except Liberty to about fifteen Christian Slaves; she was carried into and sold with the Prisoners at [text unreadable]. The Turks lost a great many Men, the French not less than 35 in boarding, for they lost very few by the great Shot, the Sally Men firing mostly at the Masts and Rigging, hoping by disabling to carry her. The limited Time of their Cruize being ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe |
