"Unlovely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Still—those frowsy, unlovely hordes of apes and monkeys were so completely lacking in signs of kingship; they were so flighty, too, in their ways, and had so little purpose, and so much love for absurd and idle chatter, that they would have struck us, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... beauty that stretched before her through this lonely hollow to the distant sleeping hills. The bursting barn in the foreground, heaped with grain that fringed its eaves and bristled from its windows and doors until its unlovely bulk was hidden in trailing feathery outlines; the gentle flutter of wings and soothing twitter of swallows and jays around its open rafters, and the drifting shadows of a few circling crows above ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... my way, I 1 O burghers of my father's land! With one last look on Helios' ray, Led my last path toward the silent strand. Alive to the wide house of rest I go; No dawn for me may shine, No marriage-blessing e'er be mine, No hymeneal with my praises flow! The Lord of Acheron's unlovely shore Shall ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... says Leon. "And of so discouraging a quality. While, if we had but a few handfuls of good soil in some small boxes by the windows—— Come, I will show you. Here, and here, where the sun comes in the morning. I could secure them myself if you would not think them unlovely to ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... in his gorgeous vestments, turned in fury, as he hung head downwards in that ghastly company, and, seizing his fiendish confederate, fixed his teeth in his bare breast, and so the guilty pair expiated their hellish rage—unlovely in their lives, revolting ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... the limestone hills of Derbyshire I came to an unlovely dreary-looking little village named Chilmorton. It was an exceptionally hot June day and I was consumed with thirst: never had I wanted tea so badly. Small gritstone-built houses and cottages of a somewhat sordid aspect stood on either side of the street, but there ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... very stealthy and underhand way, the talk grew more general, and the restraint slackened more and more, until sewing and reading were both forgotten and the fun became fast and furious, culminating in the sudden appearance of Jake Dexter dressed up as an ancient and altogether unlovely old woman, whom Dick Hardcastle presented in a stage whisper as "Baroness Bunsen in the closing chapter," and who forthwith proceeded to act out in dumb show the various events of that admirable woman's life, as judiciously and sonorously touched upon by Mr. Webb in the drawing-room ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... interested in the aesthetic side of bird nature. A recent writer, in describing "A Buzzards' Banquet," asks a couple of pregnant questions: "Is there anything ugly out of doors? Can the ardent, sympathetic lover of nature ever find her unlovely?" To the present writer these questions present no Chinese puzzle. He simply brushes all speculation and theorizing aside by responding "Yes," to both interrogatories, on the principle that it is sometimes ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... and muscular. Albeit, a sum of money—about fifty pounds—scraped together by thrifty self-denial during a dozen years of servitude, amply compensated in the eyes of several idle and needy young fellows for the unlovely outline of her person; and Anne, with an infatuation too common with persons of her class and condition, and in spite of repeated warning, and the secret misgivings, one would suppose, of her own mind, married ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little boys' playthings from top to bottom,—in all these summer or winter nests he was always at home and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stay on the surface for a while. Then he went below to look over things. The cook, standing over some unlovely slop which marked the end of a half a dozen eggs broken by the concussion, was giving his opinion on destroyers. The cook was a child of Brooklyn, and could talk. The opinion ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... you not come away from that interview thinking me very rude, very unladylike, very affected and unlovely? did you not cordially determine never to think of me again—and have ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... faith, when flesh and heart fail to say, "Thou wilt show me the path of life; in thy presence is fullness of joy, and at thy right hand are pleasures forevermore." What then must be the happiness of fixing the heart on God, where there is nothing unlovely, nothing fickle, nothing false or dying. We may place our affections on the things of earth, and sooner or later we are severed from them. Here all is change, disappointment and consequent sorrow. It is not so in Heaven where all, is pure and immutable. From our best affections ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... is at sea behind the scenes. Why do they fear and funk? Alas, alas, The Hunky Kid Is lamentably drunk! He's in that most unlovely stage Of half-intoxication When men resent the hint they're tight ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee
... weeks. The poor unlovely wife, lying in the dismantled four-poster in the only bedroom, was too far gone to benefit by the 'nouragement' Mrs Brome contrived to administer. The sixpenn'orths of brandy Depper, too late relenting, ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... taking place in the more aristocratic neighbourhood of Curzon Street. Here, however, the little party was a much smaller one, and the innocent gaiety of the gathering at Daisy Villa was entirely lacking. The luncheon table around which the four men were seated presented all the unlovely signs of a meal where self-restraint had been abandoned—where conviviality has passed the bounds of licence. Edibles were represented only by a single dish of fruit; the tablecloth, stained with wine and cigar ash, seemed crowded with every sort of bottle and ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... it befell that Elizabeth Hand, whose blunt ways, unlovely person, and temperament so oddly nervous and reserved, kept her from attracting any "sweetheart" of her own class, had unconsciously imbibed her mistress's theory of love. Love, pure and simple, the very deepest and highest, sweetest and most solemn thing in life: to be believed ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... scandal. As if pulling him down, raised us! We are all tarred with his disgrace. There are, indeed, two ways of stating the ideal of democracy: you can say, "I am just as good as any one else," which in the first place, is not true, and, in the second, would be unlovely of you to express, were it true. You can say, on the contrary, "Every other human being ought to have just as good a chance as I have," which is right; and yet you will hear the ideal of democracy phrased a dozen times the first way, where ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... driven for a space we came to something that lay by the roadside that was a fitting occupant of such a spot. It was like the skeleton of some giant creature of a prehistoric age, incredibly savage even in its stark, unlovely death. It might have been the frame of some vast, metallic tumble bug, that, crawling ominously along this road of death, had come into the path of a Colossus, and been stepped upon, and then kicked aside ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... scudding and whirling along the dusty, airless streets, under a light wind, gave the last dreary touch to the scene that Nelly Sarratt was looking at. She was standing at a window, listlessly staring at some houses opposite, and the unlovely strip of garden which lay between her and the houses. Bridget Cookson was sitting at a table a little way behind her, mending ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this member which connects the volutes is bounded below by a depressed curve, graceful and vigorous. With the gradual degradation of taste this curve tended to become a straight line, the result being the unlovely, mechanical form shown in Fig. 71 (from a building of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who reigned from 283 to 246 B.C.). Better formed capitals than this continued for some time to be made in Greek lands; but the type just shown, or rather ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... than Prior Street, with its sombre symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on the unlovely and unsacred street. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... the centre of the absurd living room, a tall, lank, awkward figure, a little stooped now. His face was beginning to be furrowed with lines—deep lines that yet were softening, and not unlovely. He made you think, somehow, as he stood there, one hand on his own coat lapel, of Saint-Gaudens' figure of Lincoln, there in the park, facing the Drive. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... find it easier to forget, In England here, among the daffodils, That there in France are fields unflowered yet, And murderous May-days on the unlovely hills— Let them go walking where the land is fair And watch the breaking of a morn in May, And think, "It may be Zero over there, But here is Peace"—and kneel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... the city with charms of new beauty, gleaming upon the surface of the swift-rolling Tiber, giving fresh radiance to the marble palaces and temples, adding effect to whatever was already beautiful, diminishing the deformity of whatever was unlovely, even imparting a pleasant aspect of cheerfulness to the lower quarters of the city, where lay congregated poverty and dishonor and crime. The Appian Way no longer swarmed with the crowd that had trodden it an hour ago. The priests had completed the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sanity, his balance, his power to see both sides, that of Luther and of the Church, his delicate satire, his saving humor, his avoidance of the zealot's extremes. Perhaps a not less striking figure is that of this much less known French printer, striving in the midst of petty cares and unlovely sectarian strife to maintain the stoical serenity of a Marcus Aurelius side by side with the spiritual exaltation of a Saint Paul. There are two types of great men equally worthy of admiration: those of unmixed and lifelong devotion to a single aim springing from a single source, such ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... was a pair of man's shoes, many sizes too large, which had evidently been cast away as useless by some former owner, himself squalid. These she managed to keep on by tying the tops with wrapping-cord. A more unlovely human being it would have been hard to find in all the great city. There she sat, crooning a ballad to herself in a high, cracked voice. It sounded like ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... One might have met her frequently, and have supposed that he was well acquainted with her, and still have loved her very much. Yet there was one thing in her character which every one, as soon as he saw it, must dislike, and which sometimes, where she was well known, made her appear exceedingly unlovely. Shall I tell you what that was? I will do so, so as to put you on your guard in that particular point. That trait in her character was selfishness. If she ever got anything that she liked, she used to act as if she were not willing that any one else should enjoy it with her. Indeed, she appeared ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... the crowing of the morning cock give others over to the bitter cold of dawn. Let Molon alone, my friend, bear the torment at that school of passion! For us, let us secure a quiet life, and some old crone to spit on us for luck, and so keep all unlovely ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... Scotland Yard without so much as a tremor, passed up the broad stairs and along the unlovely corridors, till he came to the double doors which marked the First Commissioner's private office. Stafford disappeared for a moment and presently returned with the news that the First Commissioner would not be able ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... haven't; but I seem to possess the remainder of his lordship's traits—inconsequence, self-centred selfishness, the instinct for Fifth Avenue nest-building—all the feathered vices, all the unlovely personality and futility and uselessness of my prototype. ... Only, as you observe, I lack the quality ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the victim worm.—Three or four vigorous pecks—the starlings running elsewhere—to loosen the surrounding soil, and the moist pink living string was steadily, mercilessly, drawn upward into the uncompromising light of day, to be devoured wriggling, bit by bit, with most unlovely gusto.—The chaff-chaff sharpened his tiny saw tipping about the branches of the fir trees in the Wilderness, along with the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... lettres-de-cachet at Versailles—was revolted by the name of the cruel patriot who slew his son for the honour of discipline.[201] How came Rousseau of all men, the great humanitarian of his time, to rise to the height of these unlovely rigours? ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... advance you to the centre for the stately and wise Aspasia"—the central figure wore her draperies hanging straight to her feet, hence the "advance" and consequent concealment of the unlovely limbs. It was quickly and kindly done, for the girl was not only spared mortification, but in the word "advance" she saw a compliment and was happy accordingly. Then my turn came. My arms were placed about Aspasia, my head bent and turned and twisted—my upon my ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... turned to her its quite pleasantly modelled features glowed and it was transfigured. So far as she was concerned, with Sir Isaac as foil, he was real enough and good enough for her. And by the virtue of that unlovely contrast even a certain ineffectiveness—became ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... pains to describe this person, for two remarkable reasons; the one is, that this unlovely creature was taken in the fact with a very pretty young fellow; the other, which is more productive of moral lesson, is, that however wretched her fortune may appear to the reader, she was one of the merriest ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... which a West Asian town in Africa could not. But Italy's turn came before Spain's; and all Hamilcar's haughty heroism, and Hannibal's magnanimous genius, went for nothing; and Rome, the admirable and unlovely, that had suffered the Caudine Forks, and then conquered Samnium and beheaded that noble generous Samnite Gaius Pontius, conquered in turn the conqueror at Cannae, and did for his reputation what she had done with ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the lee of heavily shadowed shrubbery the Cardinal sat on his haunches and wrinkled his unlovely brow in contemplative thought. Not far away masses of honeysuckle climbed over a rail fence festooned with blossom. Into the night stole its pervasive sweetness and the old house was like a temple built of blue gray shadows with columns touched into ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... young nation, as they are to be felt pulsing in the Federal City. He was up in arms for the Old World, wondering sorely and secretly what the New might do with her in the times to come, and foreseeing an ever-increasing deluge of unlovely things—ideals, principles, manners—flowing from this western civilization, under which his own gods were already half buried, and would soon be hidden beyond recovery. And in this despondency which possessed ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... amid which she had lived till now—a monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of hotels, and everywhere a chattering unlovely crowd. ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... am to go back to Akpap in April. I love no other place on earth so well. But I dare not think of leaving the crowds of untamed, unwashed, unlovely savages, and take away the little sunlight that has begun to flicker out over ...
— White Queen of the Cannibals: The Story of Mary Slessor • A. J. Bueltmann
... carried on with him by writing. Superficial observers inferred from this fact that the inability to hear his compositions must have reacted unfavorably upon them, and probably accounted for many passages which were unlike his early works, and unintelligible or unlovely to the critics aforesaid. It is true that between the early and the latest compositions of Beethoven there is a greater difference in intelligibility than between the early and the late compositions of any other master. But the difference is not one of judgment ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... chimes were deluging the air with music; throngs were passing by on their way to and from church, and exchanging the greetings of the day; wreaths of holly were in her own windows and in those of her neighbors; and the influences of the hour—half poetical, half religious—held the unlovely and the evil within her in benign though temporary thrall. The good angel was dominant within her, while the bad ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... arranging this narrative in chronological sequence; but I think it was in this year that we went to Manchester to see the exposition. The town itself was unlovely; but, as we had Italy in prospect, it was deemed expedient to accustom ourselves in some measure to the companionship of works of art, and the exhibition professed to contain an exceptionally fine and catholic collection of them. My father ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... heard the awful murmurs, and shrieks, and deep, shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes forming themselves into words almost articulate, would have seized upon Mr. Smooth-it-away's comfortable explanation as greedily as we did. The inhabitants of the cavern, moreover, were unlovely personages, dark, smoke-begrimed, generally deformed, with misshapen feet, and a glow of dusky redness in their eyes as if their hearts had caught fire and were blazing out of the upper windows. It struck me as a peculiarity that the laborers at the forge and those ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lover, Many years have swept us apart, But none of the long dividing seasons Slay your memory in my heart. In the clash and clamour of things unlovely My thoughts drift back to the times that were, When I, possessing thy pale perfection, Kissed the ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... head. "My spirit is free from many delusions," he whispered; "but I did not tell you that I, unlovely as I am, I love Perpetua. Her hand has led me, her voice has inspired me. If ever I be saved she will ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... could detect the spiritual essence. What a heart-sickness comes over those who love! What a change in the appearance of all things! The very sun-light is disagreeable, the very skies a mockery; the very roses unlovely. We look out of the casement, and see the external face of nature still the same; how heartless, how destitute of sympathy, now appears the whole world without, with the home, that inner world! How can those birds sing so sweetly on the branches; how can ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... the best results of foreign travel is that it makes one revise his estimate of alien races. When I started out it was with a strong prejudice against the Japanese, probably due to my observation of some rather unlovely specimens whom I had encountered in San Francisco. A short stay in Japan served to give me a new point of view in regard to both the people and the country of the Mikado. It was impossible to escape from the fact that here is a race which places loyalty to country and personal honor ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... a characteristic of this unlovely and unloving man. He never considered men's feelings, nor sought to give pleasure to others by means of the small courtesies of life. He had a farm in the suburbs of the city, and a garden at the back of his ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... wash the sands and headlands with my tide; My brow is crowned with branches of the pine; Before my chariot-wheels the fishes glide. By me all things unclean are purified, By me the souls of men washed white again; E'en the unlovely tombs of those who died Without a dirge, I cleanse from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... of pleasure in the society and fellowship of those who love us. Love is the principle of unselfishness: love 'seeketh not her own'; it is the preference of another's pleasure and profit over our own, and hence is exercised toward the unthankful and unlovely, that it may lift them to a higher level. Such love is benevolence rather than complacence, and so it is "of God," for He loveth the unthankful and the evil: and he that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. Such love is obedience to a principle ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... your own. A conspiracy to populate a part of the Downs near the sea, a mile or so to the east of Rottingdean, seems gloriously to have failed, but what was intended may be learned from the skeleton roads that, duly fenced in, disfigure the turf. They even have names, these unlovely parallelograms: one is Chatsworth ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... care will be to construct, patiently and with much labour, a picture (which is often less than an outline) of the conditions of the humanity that has been; and he neither rejects nor despises any relic, however trivial or unlovely, that will help him, in its degree, to understand better that humanity or to bridge the wide chasms of his ignorance. Moreover, great age hallows all things, even the most mean, investing them with a certain sanctity; and the little sandal of a nameless {15} child, or the rude amulet placed ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... far she spake by rage impelled, And then the queen deep silence held. He heard her speech full fraught with ill, But spoke no word bewildered still, Gazed on his love once held so dear Who spoke unlovely rede to hear; Then as he slowly pondered o'er The queen's resolve and oath she swore. Once sighing forth, Ah Rama! he Fell prone as falls a smitten tree. His senses lost like one insane, Faint as a sick ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... embankment to the head of the Quai gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage. Kirkwood, hanging breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their footfalls ringing in hollow rhythm on the planks of the inclined way,—could even discern Calendar's unlovely profile in dim relief beneath one of the waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... head of the rout enjoyed themselves with utmost abandon. Such was, and is, the deduction from the new gospel (crude enough, doubtless, in many respects), which has finally petrified in the lordly egotism of Nietzche and in the unlovely outlines of one or two ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... windows of Andelsprutz in her houses looked vacantly over the plains like the eyes of a dead madman. At the hour her chimes sounded unlovely and discordant, some of them were out of tune, and the bells of some were cracked, her roofs were bald and without moss. At evening no pleasant rumour arose in her streets. When the lamps were lit in the houses no mystical flood of light stole out into ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the marble shapes that set men dreaming, Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming Showed not unlovely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... itself, And hiding itself amid flowers and mandolins, Stared at by all between salad and coffee. And to see him tremble, and feel myself Prescient, as one who signs a bond— Not flaming with gifts and pledges heaped With rosy hands over his brow. And then, O night! deliberate! unlovely! With all of our wooing blotted out by the winning, In a chosen room in an hour that was known to all! Next day he sat so listless, almost cold So strangely changed, wondering why I wept, Till a kind of sick despair and voluptuous madness Seized us to ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... slopes, where she could see them at all, the moon was throwing her silvery beams, while closer at hand broad, irregular wastes of blackness sailed over the dry plateau as the clouds that caused them drifted across the dazzling face. Harsh and unlovely as were the surroundings by day, they lost something of their asperity under the softening shimmer of that mystic light. Far down by the stables she could hear the ringing watch-call of the sentries proclaiming half-past ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... In the ample grounds of Girard College, looking up at its five massive marble edifices, strolling in its shady walks or by its verdant play-grounds, or listening to the cheerful cries of the boys at play, the most sympathetic and imaginative of men must pause before censuring the sterile and unlovely life of its founder. And if he should inquire closely into the character and career of the man who willed this great institution into being, he would perhaps be willing to admit that there was room in the world for ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... ideal lover needs most is ugliness, so that he may honour beauty the more. Once I knew a boy who was uglier than sin, and who wrote a story—in a sprawling hand and on ruled paper—a wonderful story, telling how an unlovely but admirable Knight, worshipping a Princess, rode out to win her by great deeds, and how when he came back triumphant, the sight of her brought his unworthiness home to him so that he dared not claim her. And I knew another boy who ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... on the day of departure, Josephine St. Auban found herself standing before her mirror. It was not an unlovely image which she saw there. In some woman's fashion, assisted by Jeanne's last tearful services and the clumsy art of Lily, she had managed a garbing different from that of her first arrival at this place. The lines ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... detection. Then, to use the words of the eye-witness, the gull "set at a sparrow as a pointer dog would do at its game." In an instant it had the luckless victim by the back, and swallowed it without giving it time to shut its eyes. But this was an unlovely friendship. The motives were altogether mercenary and low. The story affords, however, a curious instance of the power of reasoning ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of mean cottages surrounding it, giving token of an industrial life totally opposite to that which is found beside the silver streams of the Tweed and its tributaries. When we passed near any of these spots, we were sure to catch the unlovely details, so frequently, though so unnecessarily attendant on factory-life—the paltry house, the unpaved, unscavengered street, the fry of dirty children. It was a beautiful tract of natural scenery in the process of being degraded by contact with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... me. I knew now why I had been so reluctant to go so far away from Mars. It was because I thought Mona was there; but now, with my present opinion, the moon had suddenly changed its character and become to my imagination a bright and beautiful world. To such a degree does love transform the most unlovely objects. ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... Katie's heart at thought of having talked of nothing. What was there to talk about so important as talking of nothing? In a new way it drew her back to the crowds; the crowds that talked so loudly of many unlovely things in order to still in their hearts that call for the loveliness of ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... suffering humanity. But as a matter of fact my imagination is not made of stuff so elastic as all that. I believe that if I attempted to put the strain of the Supernatural on it it would fail deplorably and exhibit an unlovely gap. But I could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... shown themselves only in bursts of feeling most graceful to see, and engaging the sympathy of all; but this same soul, imprisoned in a dry, angular body, stiff and old, and looking out under beetling eyebrows, over withered high cheek-bones, could only utter itself by a passionate tempest—unlovely utterance of a lovely impulse—dear only to Him who sees with a Father's heart the real beauty of spirits. It is our firm faith that bright solemn angels in celestial watchings were frequent guests in ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Barracks, Glasgow, to look exactly like a gaol, but these gaunt unlovely buildings, packed beyond endurance with men of the new army, were at least in some way in touch with what was happening elsewhere. Even in that first month of the war it seemed callous to be breathing the sweet, clear air of Braemar, or to let one's eyes linger on the ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... venial misdemeanour! Who now would dare contend that life was ever sordid, grim, and cruel, indigestible from soup to savoury? Who would have the hardihood to uphold such contention when made acquainted with the case of Sarah Manvers, yesterday's drudge, unlovely and unloved, to-day's child of fortune, ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... brought to a sudden end this little touch of moralizing, and a wrinkled old porter thrust out a very withered and unlovely face. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... think that such was his need—that his soul was searching after One whose form was constantly presented to him, but as constantly obscured and made unlovely by the words without knowledge spoken in the religious assemblies of the land; that he was longing without knowing it on the Saturday for that from which on the Sunday he would be repelled without knowing it. Years passed before he drew nigh to the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... by a rare combination of chances to escape the doom of annihilation, where was one to turn to for hope, or for a motive for effort? How could one reconcile the marvellous beauty of the universe, the miracles of colour, form, and, above all, of music, with such a chaotic moral condition, and such unlovely laws in favour of dulness, cowardice, callousness, cruelty? One aspired to be an upholder and not a destroyer, but if it were a useless ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... see?" he asked. "Can't you understand that that sort of thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely throws me back, retards the coming of the great hour! Perhaps when it comes I shall be able to piece that side of life on to the other, on to the true religion of joy. At ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... almost down that afternoon when Bobby Whaley came out of the wretched house that was his home to stand on the front doorstep. The dingy, unpainted buildings of the Flats—the untidy hovels and shanties—the dilapidated fences and broken sidewalks—unlovely at best, in the long shadows of the failing day, were sinister with the ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... sluices of spiritual feeling is to quicken into ever-increasing activity its hidden springs; and neither the teachers nor the children have yet forgotten their lesson. The children are poor, pale, thin, unkempt, ill-clad, unlovely; but I am told that when they sing their faces are transfigured, and they all ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... from the daily market, and at matters of house-keeping in general,—that the house was to him his home. Any one could enter his bachelor's bungalow by day or night, and the life that he led there was an unlovely one. In the house in the city his feet only could pass beyond the outer courtyard to the women's rooms; and when the big wooden gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera for queen. And there was going to be added to this kingdom a third person whose arrival Holden ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... that was sufficient for me. She was proud of being my secretary, and I was never able to persuade her to give up any part of her share in that unlovely work. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... through the homely scenes of the outskirts, that black fringe which makes an unlovely border to the city, Choulette took from his pocket an old book which he began to fumble. The writer, hidden under the vagabond, revealed himself. Choulette, without wishing to appear to be careful of his papers, was very orderly about them. He assured himself ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Harrow write Latin verses, the result in both cases being, as a rule, hideous and artificial doggrel. The little book, Wee Macgregor, written in what may be called the Scotch Cockney dialect, was a brave and amusing attempt to phonograph the talk of a Glasgow boy of the lower middle class. The unlovely speech employed by the author is, happily, quite unlike the careful and deliberate speech of the educated citizen of Glasgow or Paisley. The main differences between the educated Scot and the educated Englishman are that the vowel sounds of the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... agrees with one whose hours Have past in old Anacreon's bowers, Yet think not poesy's bright charm Forsook me in this rude alarm;[1]— When close they reefed the timid sail, When, every plank complaining loud, We labored in the midnight gale; And even our haughty mainmast bowed, Even then, in that unlovely hour, The Muse still brought her soothing power, And, midst the war of waves and wind, In song's Elysium lapt my mind. Nay, when no numbers of my own Responded to her wakening tone, She opened, with her ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... of her first drives after the long imprisonment of her nervous malady.] A wonderful feeling of renewed hope seems to fill the heart of all created things in the spring, and even here in this smoky town it finds its way to us, inclosed as we are by brick walls, dusty streets, and all things unlovely and unnatural! I stood yesterday in the little court behind our house, where two unhappy poplars and a sycamore tree were shaking their leaves as if in surprise at the acquisition and to make sure they had them, and looked up to the small bit of blue sky above them with pleasurable ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... which may appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choice between virtue and virtue. In the disorder and confusion sometimes incident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to see anything but the unlovely ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... amongst which we were pursuing our way. Preston's strange heat and Southernism, Mr. Davis's wile and greatness, a coming disputed election, quarrels between the people where I was born and the people where I was brought up, divisions and jealousies, floated before my mind in unlovely and confused visions. Then, remembering my father and my mother and Gary McFarlane, and others whom I had known, I ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... put in this class, and also much of Browning. Similarly a sculptor may not captivate us by the fluent beauty of his marble, but by the power and passion which his crude mighty figures express. In such cases we may even come to regard what, from a purely formal point of view, is unlovely, as a thing of the most extreme beauty. Even the roughness in such direct revelations of strength, may come to be regarded as elements of the beautiful. And where massiveness of effect does not suffice to retrieve ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... taken two different lines in the desperate effort to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of everyday life in ordinary situations. The disreputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... gaiety, or what is called pleasure, as that she loved to have people about her, to be the dispenser of enjoyment, to live a life in which there was always something going on. This is a temperament which meets much censure from the world, and is stigmatised as a love of excitement, and by many other unlovely names; but that is hard upon the people who are born with it, and who are in many cases benefactors to mankind. Lady Randolph's desire was that there should always be something doing—"a magic lantern ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... four intended travelers met at Gordon's house. Gordon had a wife, Maggie, and a son, Patrick, aged twelve, as unlovely in outward aspect as were his parents. Carpentier, who showed himself even more plainly than on the previous night a man of native refinement, confessed to a young wife without offspring. Mario told his story of love and alliance with one as fair of face ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the world. Doubtless he imagined that they were hidden in the corners and crevices of his library, and that they peeped out from among the leaves of many of his books, as he turned them over, at midnight. He supposed that these unlovely demons were everywhere, in the sunshine as well as in the darkness, and that they were hidden in men's hearts, and stole into their ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... neighbour of Vincennes is Conflans, another poor, rent relic of monarchial majesty. The Chateau de Conflans was situated at the juncture of the Seine and Marne, but, to-day, the immediate neighbourhood is so very unlovely and depressing that one can hardly believe that it ever pleased any one's fancy, least of all that of a ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... unlovely face impressed me with a sense of his underlying honesty. 'Very well,' I answered,'I'll come, if you follow me no further.' I reflected that Fraunheim was a populous village, and that only beyond it did the mountain ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... nothing to illumine or render happy the lives of those about her. She believed intensely in a God who punished. He saved—she knew He saved—but only through fire. In the dark winter evenings she poured out her stern thoughts, her unlovely ideas, into the ears of her young daughter. As a child Bet listened in terror; as a woman she simply ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... at withered flowers, whose dye is gone from them, and what can we call them but unlovely things? Yet in the hour of their bloom these unlovely things ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... house; it would ill have harmonised with the sweet autumn day and the robin's song. I sat, idly thinking so, and wondering whether it were a necessary and universal fact that human beings, unlike the year, should become harsh and unlovely as they grow old. ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... negation of everything which one could possibly associate with the living spirit of Christ as evident in the utterances of Catholic Bishops, like Hartmann of Cologne, as in those of Lutheran Pastors. Put all this together and say if the human race has ever presented a more unlovely aspect. When we try to find the brighter spots they are chiefly where civilisation, as apart from religion, has built up necessities for the community, such as hospitals, universities, and organised charities, as conspicuous in Buddhist Japan as in Christian Europe. We ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... certainly not been employed on this leaflet. His finer senses were as shocked at the meeting as his taste was at the pamphlet. Mingled odors of tobacco-smoke, beer, human breath, and damp clothes filled the air; the people at the tables had an indescribably common stamp, unlovely manners, harsh, loud voices, and unattractive faces. They gossiped and laughed noisily, and coarse expressions were frequent. The earnest moral tone, the almost gloomy melancholy which Wilhelm ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... you no more unwomanly than I think a rose unlovely—but the rose has thorns which sometimes prick the hands that would train it out of harm's way. And it might occur even to your inexperience that when a gentleman who does not know you presumes to address you, he can have nothing to say which it would ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... very cooling to the fervour Of over passionate ones, Beloved, like you. Nay, turn your lips to mine. Not quite unlovely They are as yet, as yet, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... destitute. "The perilous, hairbreadth ridi" was our word for it; and in the conflict that rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that must be her costume. In that, and naked otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia. Bundle her in a gown, the charm is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trifle, giving a faint suggestion of open areas beyond. Beginning where they stood, some time in past years a square place had been slashed out of the timber, trees felled and partly burned, the stumps still standing and the charred trunks lying all askew as they fell. The unlovely confusion of the uncompleted task was somewhat concealed by a rank growth of weeds and grass. This half-hearted attack upon the forest had let the sunlight in. It blazed full upon a cabin in the center of the clearing, a square, squat structure of logs with a roof of poles and dirt. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... are detestable, the best of them," he suggested, "and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on the dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... loved. In his desire to nag and annoy her he adopted a manner of hardness and repression to his son—which became permanent. He was always "down" on John; the more so because Janet was his own favourite—perhaps, again, because her mother seemed to neglect her. Janet was a very unlovely child, with a long, tallowy face and a pimply brow, over which a stiff fringe of whitish hair came down almost to her staring eyes, the eyes themselves being large, pale blue, and saucer-like, with a great margin of unhealthy white. But Gourlay, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... away from her husband's body, unlovely in death as he had been unloved in life, and clung ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Abbott and Barclay were declared the regular Democratic nominees for Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of the state. In six weeks followed their election by a small plurality, and on the first of January the two men moved into their adjoining rooms, in the inexcusably unlovely state capitol, on the main hill of Kenton City, wherein they were, thenceforward, separated, one from the other, by two inches of Georgia pine and a practically infinite diversity of ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the best of the Reformer died out with that correspondence. It is after this, of course, that he wrote that ungenerous description of his intercourse with Mrs. Bowes. It is after this, also, that we come to the unlovely episode of his second marriage. He had been left a widower at the age of fifty-five. Three years after, it occurred apparently to yet another pious parent to sacrifice a child upon the altar of his respect for the Reformer. In January 1563, Randolph writes to Cecil: ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his old age.[177] The discipline was hard, and the life unlovely, but the home was at least decent and orderly, and no opportunities or provocations to loose manners or ill doing existed therein. In Cardan's own case it is to be feared that, after Lucia's death, the affairs of his household fell into dire confusion, in spite of the presence ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... still is, a minority who open windows to the stars; and through these windows, in passing, the plain man sometimes looks. The impression America makes on me is that the windows are blocked up. It has become incredible that this continent was colonised by the Pilgrim Fathers. That intense, narrow, unlovely but genuine spiritual life has been transformed into industrial energy; and this energy, in its new form, the churches, oddly enough, are endeavouring to recapture and use to drive their machines. Religion is becoming a department of practical business. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... lingered on it all, taking everything greedily in. She had looked on so many unlovely places in her life, poor child; but this was as lovely as anything she had ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed as a fate" she returned the popular gaze, and appeared somewhat bored by my efforts to find Harry. In the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... strutted the rival, a tight smile rendering his unlovely features yet more disagreeable. Behind him trotted the red-faced counselor who had accompanied him on his first visit. But matching the rival step for step was the "Boss," while "Red" brought up the rear in ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... homely to him, and yet such was the honor of the man that he did not in the least realize that the homeliness was an exterior thing. It seemed to him that he saw her encompassed with the stiffness of her New England antecedents, as with an armor, and that he got a new and unlovely view of her character. On the contrary, Evelyn's charming, half-smiling, half-piteous face turned towards him seemed to afford glimpses of sweetest affections and womanly gentleness and devotion. Evelyn wished to say that she was sorry ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... handsome, comely, personable, beauteous, elegant, exquisite. Antonyms: homely, ugly, repulsive, unlovely, hideous, uncomely, inelegant. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... their room she lay awake, Watching the moonlight slip along the floor, She felt the chain and wept for Theodore's sake. She had loved Heinrich also, and the core Of truth, unlovely, startled her. Wherefore She vowed from now to break this double life And see herself only ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... architecture, and wished particular stress to be laid on 'the general outline as seen from a good distance.' This is greeted by some of the papers as particularly side-splitting and eccentric. Looking at the unlovely streets of London, never one of the more beautiful cities of Europe, where each new building seems contrived to go one better in sheer uglitude (especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... was left feeling very thoroughly disturbed. That people could talk so—and think so—about what was so precious to her; talk about being saints, as if it were an undesirable thing; and as if such were unlovely. Her thought went back to Juanita, who seemed now half a world's distance away instead of a few miles; her love and gentleness and truth and wisdom, her prayers and way of living, did seem to Daisy somewhat unearthly in their beauty, compared ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner |
