"Unromantic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... American and indulged in a rosy picture of herself as the owner of a mine—a gold mine—coal was too unromantic. She saw herself in a short skirt and a sombrero superintending the exertions of a number of dusky workers who were loading neat little gold bars on the backs ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... Uninteresting and unromantic these things may be, but they were most important to us. We were only sorry the supply was not larger. While we never stinted ourselves, or cut the allowance of food, the amount was growing smaller every day, and it was not a question ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... forests and Cathay deserts are buffoons such as Florentine shopmen may have trapped out for their amusement in rusty armour and garlands of sausages. The only lifelike heroes and heroines are those of Ariosto. And they are most untragic, unromantic. The men are occasionally small scoundrels, but unintentionally on the part of the author. They show no deep moral cancers or plague-spots; they display cheerfully all the petty dishonour and small lusts which the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... has always made much of the nuns. It has ever been the custom of the priesthood to endeavor to throw a veil of romance over the very unromantic way of life followed by females who have shut themselves up for life in a place hardly equal to a second-class state-prison. Woman has an important place which God has assigned her in the world; but when she separates herself from the family circle, and elbows her way ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... remarkably sceptical age, and rapidly fade and die under the inquisitorial torture of modern inquiry—a result at least to be expected from the contact of their own dreamy and delicate nature with unromantic matter. It is perhaps safer to refer the origin of the name Cheli or tortoise, as applied to corded instruments, to the fact of their having sound chambers, constructed with tortoise-shell, as ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth century ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... believe I cannot emphasize too strongly the pastured pig. Pigs below trees (and nuts maybe above). This is merely the two-story farming that Europe was practising when Columbus was a boy. Upon all good nut growers I urge the pig for the first story. This unromantic but very practical aid to income for the nut-grower has had the great honor to be accepted by a president of the Northern Nut Growers' Association, Mr. Littlepage, and by a president of the National Nut Growers' Association, Colonel Van Duzee. Colonel Van ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... bristling and gleaming with silver and glass, was a round table, at which fourteen could have dined comfortably; and at opposite sides of this table sat two gentlemen, who looked as neat, grave, precise, and unromantic, as the place: Merchant Wardlaw, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... so unromantic, dreary. Nothing could be done for them, I thought—nothing. And then my thoughts were interrupted by barking dogs. Every dog in the street seemed to be barking—every kind of dog, not only the little ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark incongruity of the thing was appalling. How little those weary toilers, hemmed about with the commonplace, suspected that almost within sight from the car windows, amid prosy benches, iron railings, and unromantic, flickering lamps, two fellow-men moved upon the border ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... by the name of a very ordinary bird, but I, at least, will not be a party to it. I refuse to surrender the portcullis and the moat, the bastion and the well-manned towers, which were the features of every castle with which hitherto I have played, in order to take the field with allies so unromantic as a brace of rooks. You may tell me that "rook" is a corruption of this or that word, meaning something which has never laid an egg in its life. It may be so, but in that case you cannot blame me for continuing to call it the castle which ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... and force it to bleed enough to look like a bullet wound—which doesn't usually bleed much, anyway. Slow down heartbeat and respiration till their ordinary senses couldn't detect them. Near-total muscular relaxation, including even those unromantic aspects of death which are ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... for a recent trial, who of the outside public would even have guessed that the unromantic and quite Bozzian name of "Mr. and Mrs. TILKINS" meant the clever musician, Mr. IVAN CARTEL and the charming and accomplished actress and soprano, Miss GERALDINE ULMAR? The TILKINSES are to be congratulated on their winning the recent action of Tilkins v. Greaves with the award ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... inevitably to surround every early phase of typographic art, aPrinter's Device may be described as nothing more or less than a trade mark. It is usually a sufficient proof that the book in which it occurs is the work of a particular craftsman. Its origin is essentially unromantic, and its employment, in the earlier stages of its history at all events, was merely an attempt to prevent the inevitable pirate from reaping where he had not sown. At one time a copy, or more correctly ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... rolls, an omelette, and a savory little bird, with excellent and unromantic appetite. Then the service was cleared away, and the real business of the day began. She was under the hands of her maid, deep in the mysteries of ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... a catch in his mirth, a ring as of something hollow. He opened some letters, and looked up from one with a twitching face and a curious droop of the eyelids. "Miss Wishart is all right," he said. "My aunt says that she is none the worse, but that Stocks has caught a tremendous cold. An unromantic ending!" ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... these stories are rightly called romances, no one can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic side. This was not true of Scott's poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature, and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the ablest of Scott's critics, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... sterling; unsophisticated, unadulterated, unvarnished, unalloyed, uncolored; in its true colors; pukka^. well-grounded, well founded; solid, substantial, tangible, valid; undistorted, undisguised; unaffected, unexaggerated, unromantic, unflattering. Adv. truly &c adj.; verily, indeed, really, in reality; with truth &c (veracity) 543; certainly &c (certain) 474; actually &c (existence) 1; in effect &c (intrinsically) 5. exactly &c adj.; ad amussim [Lat.]; verbatim, verbatim et literatim [Lat.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... position, therefore we have thought fit, even at the risk of throwing a wet blanket over you, to commence this tale on one of the most romantic of subjects by stating—and now repeating that our hero was a member of the large and (supposed to be) unromantic ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... as her dowry, and would inherit double that sum. Her modest, quiet, amiable disposition made him drift into a strong attachment; her appearance was sufficiently womanly and charming, and her steady, practical views on things, utterly unromantic an unenthusiastic, harmonized entirely with his own. It was refreshing for him to hear her chatter about people and things with the calm good sense of a Philistine, especially in a society where the bombastic and exaggerated talk of original, poetically minded young ladies had repelled and ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... and a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; she has no truth or magnanimity in her. The more we know that she is real, the more we know that she is vile. In short, Bernard Shaw is still haunted with his old impotence of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine the main motives of human life from the inside. We are convinced successfully that Anne wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very process we lose all power of conceiving why Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. A writer with a more romantic strain ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... stretches himself in his bunk and is happy. Only, when morning comes again, he awakes stiff and sore. But, no matter for that, inexorable duty claims him for the same toil. And so wags our daily life—hard, unremitting, unromantic labour, day after day, year after year. Still we say it is a glorious life, and we believe what we say. Anyhow, it is better than being chained to a desk, or growing ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... chaplain (a good man of no present account) stayed to see the police arrive that night, and the romantic ruffians taken thence next morning in unromantic bonds. Comparatively little attention was paid to their departure—partly on account of the truculent attitude of the police—partly because the Episcopal pair were making an equally early start in another direction. No one accompanied the armed men and the bound. But ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... based on medieval ideals gradually lost their worth. They were not in relation to the altered facts of life; they had become an empty convention which could be turned to very unromantic uses. The movement for the emancipation of women was not consciously or directly a movement of revolt against an antiquated chivalry. It was rather a part of the development of civilization which rendered chivalry antique. Medieval romantic love implied in women a weakness in the soil of which ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... in a few months hence," said Anne, when they were alone. "It is a very unromantic doctrine, but few young wives know how much the happiness of a home depends on little things—that is, if anything can be little which is done for his comfort, and is pleasant to him. There's a lecture for ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... I? I suppose I know. I would have said, "Lord, I'd like to. I wish I could. I've always wanted to do something magnificent. It has occurred to me again and again as I have read the record of thy dealings with thy saints that the Christian life is not to be a dull and drab and unromantic thing. I have felt a thousand times that the faith of the saints ought to have far more of buoyancy and enthusiasm and daring and romantic adventure in it than it has. So since you have bid me come, Lord, I'd like to come. I'll think it over. ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... this moment, being only withheld from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the most commonplace, humdrum, unromantic existence imaginable. Teas and dances, dances and teas, clubs and theatres, theatres and clubs, motors and yachts, yachts and motors. It was horrible, and I can't help thinking it was all my dear old governor's fault. He had no ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... then, of course, the Countess was a woman, and it is to be feared that even good women love to triumph over others. She, of course, could have no love for this portly old gentleman of seventy. But it is pitiful to think he was madly infatuated. The poor old man, in spite of his unromantic appearance, had warm blood in his veins and plenty of romance in his heart. At last, in spite of gossip and opposition, they were married, and then, instead of settling down, as the happy groom had hoped, to a life of wedded bliss in one of his country houses ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Grammar School played Cato in the teeth of an explicit presbyterial anathema, and again in the same year—in the month of August—the boys of the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy, which Smith was at the time attending, enacted the piece their master had written. It bore the rather unromantic and uninviting title of "A Royal Council for Advice, or the Regular Education of Boys the Foundation of all other Improvements." The dramatis personae were first the master and twelve ordinary members of the council, who sat gravely round a table like senators, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... a just criticism of mine. One part of the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can walk down distress of ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... Everything else was still, even the leaves overhead did not move, and the silence was so infectious that by degrees all talk ceased—each had his or her own dreams for the moment. Bella and Doctor Morton, utterly unromantic pair of lovers as they were, must have had some touch of the ordinary softness of human nature; they looked content with all the world. Lucia, leaning back with her crochet lying on her lap, and her eyes half hidden by their ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... little dwelling, newly built, a mile or two from the village of Ragland, tastefully ornamented with an immense heap of compost, which nearly barricaded the drawing-room window. The inhabitant must have been a prodigious agriculturist; and probably preferred the useful, but unromantic heap, to any other object in the view. We gave it the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... certain unromantic yearning for oats under his loosening girth, the stallion Sooltan raced Damaris back to ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... didn't give you the impression I was ashamed of loving her or would ever be ashamed of her anywhere?" continued Tetlow, a very loverlike light in his usually unromantic eyes. "If I did, it wasn't what I meant—far from it. You'll see, when I marry her, Norman. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... mill by the Neckar-side, to which many people resort for coffee, according to the fashion which is almost national in Germany. There is nothing particularly attractive in the situation of this mill; it is on the Mannheim (the flat and unromantic) side of Heidelberg. The river turns the mill-wheel with a plenteous gushing sound; the out-buildings and the dwelling-house of the miller form a well-kept dusty quadrangle. Again, further from the river, there is a garden full of willows, and arbours, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... and she dried her eyes. She was exhausted and hungry and when she had passed over the river she made her way to a shop where chocolates could be bought. She knew their comforting and sustaining properties. It was unromantic, but hunger asserts itself ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... amuse myself with the phraseology of the Mississippi bluff-player) and "goes" a few ticals "better." There are always several enterprising Stars of the Harem ready to vary the monotony by engaging in this unromantic business; and the agitation among the "sealed" sisterhood, though by no means boisterous, is lively, though all have tact to appear indifferent in the presence of their awful lord. The meagreness of the royal allowance of pin-money ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... started in the tone of a novel of manners and experience briefly treated, this defect might be lessened and our mystery seem to inhere in life. The tone of the age, its movement, the mingling of races and classes in the dollar hunt, the fiery and not quite unromantic struggle for existence, with its changing trades and scenery, and two types in particular, that of the American handy-man of business and that of the Yankee merchant sailor—we agreed to dwell upon at some length, and make the woof to our not very precious warp. Hence Dodd's father, and Pinkerton, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inclined to doubt that slowly stirring effort of memory. He was a man of unromantic temperament, unimaginative, and by no means of an adventurous turn of mind. He sought naturally for the most reasonable explanation of this strange picture, which no effort of his will could dismiss from his memory. It was a dream, of course. But the dream did not fade. Slowly it ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... any event the boy's introduction to war was going to be as unromantic as anyone could want, short of being thrown cold and untrained into a major battle. They must be prepared for a bad time until they made it out of the Union lines and ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... a matter of cold unromantic fact, and one which very ardent, impossible lovers regard almost in the light of a desecration. As the prosaic side of life has to be faced, it is very necessary that money matters should find a place in the ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on them almost less money than words. Another opera composer of the time was Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice, rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather sordid and unromantic group. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... during an evening she will gradually take on the mannerisms of that time. This very point was brought up recently in conversation with an artist, who in referring to one of the most successful costume balls ever given in New York—the crinoline ball at the old Astor House—spoke of how our unromantic Wall Street men fell to the spell of stocks, ruffled shirts and knickerbockers, and as the evening advanced, were quite themselves in the minuette and polka, bowing low in solemn rigidity, leading their lady with ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... everything so that he could place his hands readily upon it, found that he had half an hour to spare. He said to himself: "Miss Ludolph is wrong. I shall leave the house for a short time. I am a most unromantic individual; for, no matter what or how I feel, I do get hungry. But I am sure Miss Brown's coffee and sandwiches would choke me. I have already swallowed too much from her to care for any more, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the first time, I explored my small future domain, which is bounded, on the right, by the high-road; on the left, by a not unromantic little mill-stream, with bits of rock, and cedar-bushes, and dams, and, I am sorry to say, a very picturesque, half-tumbled-down factory; on the north, by fields and orchards of our neighbors, and another road; and on the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... assurance of inner strength; and long before I had fairly realized how rapidly I was drifting, I found myself whirling down the swift current, and was lost. Nor was it a marvel that this should have so happened. To one who sits aloof in his unromantic, distant home, it is an easy thing, indeed, to moralize about matters of inferior station and mesalliance; but I believe that few could have seen little Jessie, as she first appeared to me, and not have felt ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... doubted that my thoughts, as I fell asleep (for, unromantic as it may appear, truth compels me to state that I never slept better in my life), turned upon my unexpected meeting with Clara Saville. The year and a half which had elapsed since the night of the ball had altered her from a beautiful girl into ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... "boozed." A thick cloud of tobacco-smoke filled the kitchen. Heads were rolling about from side to side and arms stretched over the tables among the debris of broken pipes and in pools of spilt beer and froth. Despite these rude, unromantic surroundings, Absalom and Madge were leaning close against each other, hand-in-hand, almost silent, but looking in each other's eyes. What account takes passion of pipes or beer, smoke or drunken men, of snores and hoarse voices? None: ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... a life in the woods was an enemy to every sort of sentimentalism—though a more unromantic being than the pioneer can hardly be imagined—yet his character unquestionably took its hue, from the primitive scenes and events of his solitary existence. He was, in many things, as simple as a child: as credulous, as unsophisticated. Yet the utmost cunning of the wily savage—all the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... mingling with those shrill and peculiar exclamations with which Spanish muleteers are in the habit of urging on their animals, made a not unpleasing medley of sounds. But the creamiest part of the whole affair was—I must confess it, unromantic as it may seem—when the twenty-five or thirty pretty creatures were collected into the small space between our cabin and the Humboldt. Such a gathering together of ham-and-mackerel-fed bipeds, such a lavish display of ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature in my character, and the only good point to be found in my very unromantic and in no way honourable distress. For though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in general was ever in my thoughts, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... had been put to an enormous expense and risk in sending vessels in, was so much reduced that the ventures hardly paid. And when at last Fort Fisher was taken, and thus all blockade-running entirely put an end to, the enterprise had lost much of its charm; for, unromantic as it may seem, much of that charm ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... sorrowful friends behind them. Even William, the bell-ringer and purveyor of hot batter-cakes at Mrs. Haley's hotel, walked to the railroad station to see them safely off. General Garwood accompanied them to Atlanta; and though the passenger depot in that pushing city is perhaps the most unromantic spot to be found in the wide world—it is known as the "Car-shed" in Atlantese—it was there that he found courage to inform Miss Eustis that he purposed to visit Boston during the summer in search not only of health, ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... mouth is at its narrowest, it is natural that it was chosen as the site of one of the forts built to defend the capital. Here, then, on a sandbank washed once by every high tide, but now joined to the mainland by so unromantic a feature as the gasworks, a tower begun by Dom Joao II., and designed, it is said, by Garcia de Resende, was finished by Dom Manoel about 1520 and dedicated to Sao Vicente, ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... love matters. They are too explosive, too vitally dangerous; outsiders ought never to meddle with them. And I never do. Come back with me to Cairo. And when we are once more safely established on the solid and unromantic isles of Britain, you will forget all about the Princess Ziska; or if you do remember her, it will only be as a dream in the night, a kind of vague shadow and uncertainty, which will never seriously trouble your mind. You look incredulous. I ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... at him in wonder. If ever there was a man who seemed unromantic, it was he, heavy and prosaic and so shy that he was visibly agitated even in ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... reasons why Larry was appealed to by the idea of making his home for the present in this old house in this dingy, unexciting, unromantic street. He was drawn toward this bluff, outspoken, autocratic painter, and was curious about him. And then the way his grandmother had spoken, the gleam in her old eyes, had stirred an affection for her ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... success in college; and, though Litton was too much of a gentle heart to hate anybody, if he could have hated anybody it would have been Teed. A girl was concerned in one of their earliest encounters, though Litton's share in it was as unromantic as possible. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... will, though?' asked Jacker McKnight dubiously. He had found his parents very unromantic people, who took a severely commonplace view of things, and retained unquestioning faith in the strap as a means ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... silence along the beach, and, rounding a corner of the cliffs, they came presently to a cave. In earlier days W. Bales could have done desperate deeds against smugglers there, with Miss Spratt looking on. Alas for this unromantic age! It was now a place for picnics, and a crumpled sheet of newspaper on the sand showed that there had been one there that ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... a special branch of education, in which experts are only gradually becoming developed. The phenomena are as massive and wide-spread as is anything in Nature, and the study of them is as tedious, repellent and undignified. To reject it for its unromantic character is like rejecting bacteriology because penicillium glaucum grows on horse-dung and bacterium termo lives in putrefaction. Scientific men have long ago ceased to think of the dignity of the materials they work in. When imposture has been checked ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the scene she had pictured when she imagined what "breaking her engagement" would be like. Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in tears on the horsehair ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... English. A respectable old chateau, with a rookery, quick hedges, and extensive woods, thick enough for a fox covert, kept up the illusion agreeably. This style of ground continues beyond Saulieu; and between the latter place and Arnay le Duc, eighteen miles farther, its features are not unromantic. One or two castles of a very baronial air occur; the first of which, reduced to ruins, is visible at about a mile beyond Saulieu, occupying an insulated hill at some distance from the road, and much resembling the remains of an Italian freebooter's stronghold. Another, situated at the head of a ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... interest the story of the achievements of the New England mariners on all the oceans of the globe. Little danger from tempest was encountered here. The natural perils to navigation were but an ignoble and unromantic kind—the shifting sand-bar and the treacherous snag. Yet, in the early days, when the flatboats were built at Cincinnati or Pittsburg, with high parapets of logs or heavy timber about their sides, and manned not only with men to work the sweeps and hold ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... reason she had thought to discover a burglar of one or another accepted type—either a dashing cracksman in full-blown evening dress, lithe, polished, pantherish, or a common yegg, a red-eyed, unshaven burly brute in the rags and tatters of a tramp. But this man wore unromantic blue serge upon a person neither fascinating nor repellent. She could hardly imagine him either stealing a diamond tiara or ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... enlargement after it issued from the little parent rock, or fill our pages with the rest of the pedigree. Senefelder invented Lithography. His invention has not made so much noise and larum in the world as some others, which have an origin quite as humble and unromantic; but it is one to which we owe no small profit, and a great deal of pleasure; and, as such, we are bound to speak of it with all gratitude and respect. The schoolmaster, who is now abroad, has taught us, in our youth, how the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... fashion of our still too adolescent world, Mr. Britling and Mrs. Harrowdean proceeded to negotiate these extremely unromantic matters in the phrases of that simple, honest and youthful passionateness which is still the only language available, and at times Mr. Britling came very near persuading himself that he had something of the passionate ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... that she was very cold, and she went into the Big Soprano's deserted and disordered room. The tile stove was warm and comfortable, but on the toilet table there lay a disreputable comb with most of the teeth gone. Harmony kissed this unromantic object! Which reveals the fact that, genius or not, she was only a young and rather frightened girl, and that every atom of her ached ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and down his room with much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the usual soliloquy of "To be or not to be," or something equally to the purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came bursting into the room, begging him for all sakes not to "ruin the character ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... continued round towards her belly, and as unlike the young cunts I had seen as possible. Those seemed to be but little indents. That the delicate ladies of the novels should have such divisions seemed curious, ugly, and unromantic. My sensuous temperament was developing, I saw females in all their poetry and beauty, but suppose that my physical forces had not kept pace with my brain, for I have no recollection of a cock-stand, when thinking about ladies; and fucking never entered into my mind, either when I read novels, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... would be left behind, like Charlestown and all the old life, when Mother Carey and the stormy petrels flitted across unknown waters from one haven to another. Joanna having earlier proved utterly unromantic in her attitude, Nancy went further with Ellen and gave her an English novel called, "The Merriweathers," in which an old family servant had not only followed her employers from castle to hovel, remaining there without Wages for years, but ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... scholar whose name has hardly yet crossed the Atlantic,—Professor Ashley Horace Thorndike,—has lately made some studies in dramatic chronology which go far to confirm the unromantic conjecture that to the end Shakspere remained imitative and little else. Professor Thorndike, for example, has shown with convincing probability that certain old plays concerning Robin Hood proved popular; a little later, ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... irresistibly towards the five hundred a year, and the strange conditions with which it was burdened; he discovered in his heart an invincible repugnance to the name of Scrymgeour, which he had never hitherto disliked; he began to despise the narrow and unromantic interests of his former life; and when once his mind was fairly made up, he walked with a new feeling of strength and freedom, and nourished himself ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his eyes the brim of a rusty plug hat, he thrust fat hands into the pockets of his shabby trousers and lounged against the polished pillar even more energetically than before: if that were possible. An unromantic, apathetic figure, fitting so naturally into his surroundings as to demand no second look even from the most observant; yet one seeming to possess a magnetic attraction for the eyes of the hall-boy of the apartment hotel (who, acquainted by sight and hearsay with the stout gentleman's identity ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... have made Captain Dangerous relate in fiction will be found narrated, act for act, and nearly word for word, in the very unromantic evidence given before the first parliamentary committee on slavery and the slave-trade moved for ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... was not prone to wax enthusiastic over the delights of architecture or natural scenery. He called himself unexpansive and unromantic; he confessed to small understanding, small veneration, for artistic effects. The beauty of a man's character moved him more strongly than the beauty of any picture or any landscape. Yet, on arriving next afternoon at the upper plateau of Nepenthe he could ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... March 22nd.—This unromantic Captain Frere had had some romantic incidents in his life, and he is fond of dilating upon them. It seems that in early life he expected to have been left a large fortune by an uncle who had quarrelled with his heir. But the uncle ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the parcel was opened. It contained a morocco case, lined with dark blue satin and velvet—an unromantic and prosaic expression of as truly high and noble feeling as ever found a vent in more poetic ways—and on the velvet ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... for the consumption of magazine readers. So here it is raw, so to speak— just as it was told to me—but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... smiling. And what avails reviling? Such pitch without defiling Can "Prince" or "Patriot" touch? This quicksand unromantic Closes on him, the Antic, Whose hands with gestures ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... "Thank you," but as he stooped for the unromantic tool, he kissed his little bride behind the folding door, with a look that made Aunt March whisk out her pocket handkerchief with a sudden dew in her sharp ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... taken me to show myself at my most prosaic and unromantic. I think it was the contrast with the glamour of those fine gentlemen. I had neither claim nor desire to be of their company, and to her I ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... found there was a second skull, with a bullet-hole I could have stuck my two thumbs in - say anybody else's one thumb. My Samoans said it could not be, there were not enough bones; I put the two pieces of skull together, and at last convinced them. Whereupon, in a flash, they found the not unromantic explanation. This poor brave had succeeded in the height of a Samoan warriors ambition; he had taken a head, which he was never destined to show to his applauding camp. Wounded himself, he had crept here into the bush to die with his useless trophy by his ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Grand" Medici was Salvestro, son of Alamanno, of the line of Chiarissimo III., called "The German," because of his alien Teutonic mother. Great-great-grandson of Ser Filippo, the last of the doctor-apothecaries, Salvestro does not appear to have gone in for the steady, unromantic life of a banker, but to have addressed his energies to the profession of arms. Nevertheless, he was chosen Prior in 1318, and contributed, during peace, to the advancement of his city's interest. Upon the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... unromantic change in the subject Nan laughed. And as laughter and ill-temper never go hand in hand, it was not long before Nan ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... music master in several young ladies' boarding-schools, a post for which his face particularly recommended him. He was entirely dependent upon his earnings. Running about to give private lessons at his age! —Think of it. How many a mystery lies in that unromantic situation! ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... of a basketful of things Mr. Linden had brought her. Very simple things they were, and unromantic enough to be useful; yet with sentiment enough about them,—if that name might be given to the tokens of a care that busied itself about all the ins and outs of her daily life, and sought out and remembered the various little things that she wanted and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... he at last urged her. "We still have more than a mile to go and a pretty stiff hill to climb. It grows late, you will be abominably tired to-morrow. Why this fascination for a passing steamer, probably some unromantic, villainously dirty old tramp too, you would not condescend to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Spain and England. The ambition of Spain was measureless; she desired not only the mastery of America and its riches, but the empire of the world, the leadership in commerce, and the ownership of the very gates of Heaven. England sought land and trade; she was practical and unromantic, but strong and daring; and in her people, unlike the Spanish, were implanted the seeds of human freedom. She had not as yet the prestige of Spain; but men like Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh went far to win ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... see him! How very, very glad! Yet he only looked his usual sober, unromantic self, standing there at the bottom of her pretty old walnut-wood bed, looking at her with all his wistful, ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... the modern woman the colonial marriage, with its fixed rules of courtship, the permission to court, the signed contract and the dowry, seems decidedly commonplace and unromantic; but, after all, this is not a true conclusion. The colonists loved as ardently as ever men and women have, and they found as much joy, and doubtless of as lasting a kind, in the union, as we moderns find. Many bits of proof might be cited. Hear, for instance, how Benedict ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... she had had a disappointment in her youth, and had been incapable of loving twice. It never struck them—which was actually the case—that she had been incapable of loving once; and that her single-blessedness was due to no unforgotten love-story, but to the unromantic fact that among her score of lovers she had never found a man for whom she seriously cared. In a delicate and ladylike fashion she had flirted outrageously in her time; but she had always broken hearts so gently, and ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... select a name for our frightful play? There is a wharf in London that is known as Wapping. In these days that we call the present it has sunk to common use and its rotten timbers are piled with honest unromantic merchandise. But once a gibbet stood on Wapping Wharf, and pirates were hanged upon it. It was the first convenient harborage for inbound ships to dispose of this dirty deep-sea cargo. So it was the somber motif of a pirate's life—his moment of reflection after he ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... be inspiring to summon the vision of Honora, in rustling garments, poised as the figurehead of this craft, beckoning him on to battle and victory. Alas! the launching happened at that grimmest and most unromantic of hours-ten minutes of eight in the morning. There was a period, indeterminate, when she poured out his coffee with wifely zeal; a second period when she appeared at the foot of the stairs to kiss him as he was going out of the door; a third when, clad in an attractive dressing-gown, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the act of applying still more powder to the tip of her nose and regarding the Little Captain with a horrified expression, "why drag the mention of such unromantic things into ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope
... unromantic ending to this experience that, forgetful of the consequences of what he did, he finally became sensible of the irksomeness of his standing position, and sat down, with his back to the rock, that he might enjoy it all without ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... head came through slowly with a surprised expression upon his face. He remembered. He remembered the thing as a bald discovery, and without a touch of emotion. With all the achromatic clearness, the unromantic colourlessness of ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... a curious, not unromantic feeling, that of wandering about a strange town at midnight, and the effect increases as, leaving the place, I turn down a little by-street—the Rue de Guise—closed at the end by a beautiful building or fragment, unmistakably ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... must confess, very unromantic, and not at all like the hero of three volumes, to confess that, for a time, my impulses of anger had given way to the gnawings of hunger; and I thought, for a time, less of Joshua Daunton than of the first succulent cut into a ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard |
