"Repellent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in some respects, exceedingly unattractive. Indeed, it may truly be said to be in many respects repulsive. There are usually odours in such a camp which are repellent to the nose, dishes that are disgusting to the taste, sights that are disagreeable to the eyes, sounds that are abhorrent to the ear, and habits that are ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... integrated into every phase of community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable manner? He suggested a series of questions concerning ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... occasion that she then approached the most humble, and would ask them a thousand obliging questions; a flash of lightning made her squeeze their hands; a peal of thunder would drive her to embrace them, but with the return of the calm, the Princess resumed her stiffness, her reserve, and her repellent air, and passed all by without taking the slightest notice of any one, until a fresh storm restored to her at once her dread and her affability. [Which reminds one of the elder (and puritanic) Cato who said that he "embraced" his wife only when it thundered, but added that he ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... think," said Durnovo, who seemed to be following Gordon's thoughts, "that the idea would be so repellent to your sister as ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... there are chaperons and chaperons! But it must be said that the very word has a repellent schoolteacherish sound. One pictures instinctively a humorless tyrant whose "correct" manner plainly reveals her true purpose, which is to take the joy out of life. That she can be—and often is—a perfectly human and sympathetic person, whose unselfish ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... other worship than his "creator." This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—not always in good taste. He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days when he came to Acredale aspired to political ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... fireplace, sealed by an iron ornament like a monumental tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife's easy ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... or a sense of comfort, neither trust nor hope, but the sheer joy of love, the child would come at her in a tumultuous rush, cast himself in her arms, and cover her face with kisses—the face that had at first so terrified him, that was so typical of cruelty and craft and repellent pride. Then as they nestled together they would repeat in concert—poor woman! perhaps she thought it a mystic invocation charged with some potent power of prayer or magic—"Ding-dong-bell!" and ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... over-use,—they had become so unpopular that their political careers ended with their terms. Protect him I must, though the task would be neither easy nor pleasant. It involved a collision with my clients,—a square test of strength between us. What was to me far more repellent, it involved my personally taking a hand in that part of my political work which I had hitherto left ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... acknowledged. "That was the pleasurable part of it I have been so, used to looking on at shows that bored me, listening to conversations that wearied me, attempting sensations which were repellent, that I just welcomed feeling, when it came—feeling of any sort. I was excited. I forgot everything else. I was so fascinated that I could not look away. But if you ask me whether I liked it, and I have to answer truthfully, I hated it! I felt nothing of the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the size is thoroughly incorporated with the fibers as these revolve or flow around the engine. This sizing renders the paper more nearly impervious to moisture. The difference between a paper that is sized and that has a repellent surface which prevents the ink from settling into it when it is written upon, and an ordinary blotting-paper with its absorbent surface, is due entirely to the fact that the former is most carefully treated with sizing both in the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... disturbed her ideals of virtue and good taste—that particular mental atmosphere mysteriously, inevitably woven round the soul by the conditions of special breeding and special life. If, then, this affair were real it was sordid, and if it were sordid it was repellent to suppose that her family could be mixed up in it; but her people were mixed up in it, therefore ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... felt inclined to accept his word that the path by which we had come was the only one by which we could reach the spot where we stood. The circles of black rocks above the tops of the highest trees, though indescribably beautiful, were strangely repellent in their weird conformation. They struck us as the walls of a prison from which the only way to liberty lay across the path in ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... is, in some sort, due to everything—however unbeautiful, however even vile or repugnant—which is a constant quantity in human affairs and human character, due to everything in the realm of Nature also, however repellent, if it is really ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... fire; and the majority of so-called love-stories are merely disastrous conflagrations of that sort. In such cases the new love is no sooner found than the old becomes grievous, a burden; by a malignant witchcraft the old charms have grown veritably repellent, and "all the heaven that was" irretrievably disenchanted. Which is the illusion, one wonders,—the original enchantment ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... had never met a man for whom she could possibly entertain any feelings of that sort, no, not even if he had been able to make a queen of her, or to endow her with all the cash resources of all the beef trusts in the world. Men in that aspect were repellent and hateful to her; the possibility of such a union with any one of them was poisonous, even unnatural to ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... tall thin figure, vaguely repellent, upon realizing that I was set on departure, and conducted me out by way of the front door. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... engendered by Christian dogma in those times. No sooner had the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Japan than a fierce quarrel broke out between them and the Jesuits—a quarrel which even community of suffering could not compose. "Not less repellent was an attempt on the part of the Spaniards to dictate to Ieyasu the expulsion of all Hollanders from Japan, and an attempt on the part of the Jesuits to dictate the expulsion of the Spaniards. The former ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... constitute with me a never-failing source of interest and amusement. They are composed of Dutch and Irish, often located on adjoining townships, but keeping their borders as clearly defined as though the wall of China were drawn between them. No two bodies exist in nature more repellent; neither time, nor the necessities of traffic, which daily arise amongst a growing population, can induce a repeal of their tacit non-intercourse system, or render them even tolerant of each other. I have understood ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... a weird stretch of the repellent cactus, whose great gnarled branches locked and intertwined themselves in a verdureless mass of thorns and spikes which well might have daunted even an Indian. The hedge was many feet in width and higher than Ninian's shoulder, still green on top, but too unlovely to have been ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... century ignored, or underrated, the works of the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls "rigidity" of Canachus, combined with what we seem to see of his poetry of conception, his freshness, his solemnity, we may understand no really repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of labour, the expression of which is constant in all the best work of an early time, in the David of Verrocchio, for instance, and in the early Flemish painters, as it is natural and becoming in youth itself. The very touch of the struggling hand was upon ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... any more than I naturally dislike coal-men. I don't classify people by their occupations. Doubtless I should find some coal-men repulsive, and you may find some singers so. But I have reason to believe that, at least, I'm one of the less repellent." ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... training could have made the didactic poet lyric or passionate. Sincerity and common-sense were his predominating qualities, and he had the rare faculty of obedience to his own instincts. He first studied for the priesthood, but anything like mysticism was too repellent to his matter-of-fact mind. Then, as many of his family had been lawyers, he naturally turned toward that career. But the practice as taught him seemed senseless and arbitrary. Its rational basis upon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... two or three weeks Charnock occupied himself with his duties and everything went smoothly at the store and hotel. He was popular in the neighborhood, since his weaknesses were rather attractive than repellent to people who did not suffer from them. Men who drove long distances from their lonely farms liked a cheerful talk and to hear the latest joke; others enjoyed a game of cards in the back office when ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... hard, so repellent, to believe a lover guilty even of a trivial error, we may readily suppose that Lucy never for a moment admitted the supposition that Clifford had been really guilty of gross error or wilful crime. True that expressions in his letter were more than suspicious; but there is always ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The repellent look was still on John's face as he replied more ungraciously than before: "Nay, I can think o' nowt. I can tell thee, though, that the maister's told me to have the carriage ready to catch the train that goes east at ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... repellent. On both sides indeed there was a note of something else than prosperous love-making. On his, the haunting doubt lest she had so far given her heart to Philip that full fruition for himself, that full fruition which youth at its zenith instinctively claims from ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... roomy end of his seat to her. She passed on, however, and the little ex-burglar glanced sharply at his master as if to accuse him of frightening the fair one away. But Quentin was lying back, half-asleep, and there was nothing repellent about the ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... growth on the roof anything to do with your divination?" asked Vendale, holding his light towards a gloomy ragged growth of dark fungus, pendent from the arches with a very disagreeable and repellent effect. "We are famous for this growth in ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... contemptuously called it, likening it, in point of texture, digestibility and nutritive properties, to the product of picked oakum, which it in many respects strongly resembled. The pork, though it lost less in the cooking, was rancid, putrid stuff, repellent in odour and colour-particulars in which it found close competitors in the butter and cheese, which had often to be thrown overboard because they "stunk the ship." [Footnote: To disinfect a ship after she had been fouled by putrid rations or disease, burning sulphur and ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... George is gone, Libby Hamersley, Ned Bunce, Henry Robinson. The friends are passing, one by one; our house, where such warm blood and such dear blood flowed so freely, is become a cemetery. But not in any repellent sense. Our dead are welcome there; their life made it beautiful, their death has hallowed it, we shall have them with us always, and there will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... her emphasis, the extreme figure of speech she had used, were repellent to Mr. Withers over and above his amazement at her words. As he had not been observing her, he was totally unprepared ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... suffers from her husband's shiftlessness. She always speaks of me as "This" or "that woman." The family consists of a grown-up son, a shiftless, melancholy-looking youth, who possibly pines for a wider life; a girl of sixteen, a sour, repellent-looking creature, with as much manners as a pig; and three hard, un-child-like younger children. By the whole family all courtesy and gentleness of act or speech seem regarded as "works of the flesh," if not of "the devil." They knock over all one's things without apologizing ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... few weeks of this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... added an equal strain from the gay, genial, affectionate Abigail Smith. The son, though of deep inner affections, and even hungering for good-will if it would come without his help, was on the surface incomparably colder, harsher, and thornier than his father, with all the socially repellent traits of the race and none of the softer ones. The father could never control his tongue or his temper, and not always his head; the son never lost the bridle of either, and much of his terrible power in debate came from his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sadly mutilated several brave officers and students, who had had the bad luck to stand up against him. He himself was anything but pleasant to look upon, his natural plainness having been rendered repellent by a life of low debauchery. He cherished a secret grudge against the bridegroom and bitter feelings toward the bride, because the latter had so plainly shown her aversion for him when he had ventured to pay ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... in order to put it right, to atone for my sin, Katusha," and he was going to say that he would marry her, but, meeting her eyes, he read in them something so dreadful, so coarse, so repellent, that ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It is this ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... be contested that the diffusion of these things among children involves serious dangers alike to their morals and to their health. Speaking generally, upon adults pornographic objects have rather a repellent than a sexually exciting effect. In the case of children in whom no sexual sensibility has as yet developed, they exercise no sexual stimulation, but may later give rise to ill effects. But it is to ripening children and young persons, who do not yet understand the sexual ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... from the reserved Cecil, who had lately been so conspicuously repellent? He thought the change too good so be believed, and, without another asking, accompanied her to the arbour; but she insisted on the ostensible motive of their ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... with small lilac-blue flowers that yield an aromatic oil. Aromatic plant (Hedeoma pulegioides) of eastern North America, having purple-blue flowers that yields an oil used as an insect repellent ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... on, "I have been finding out my mistake, and I have wanted to tell you so; but you have always been so cold and repellent that I dared not. You are rough and stern, Roger, not ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... no souls in it making it comfortable to the spiritual sense? That the knowledge of such presence would make most people uneasy, is no argument against the fancy: truth itself, its intrinsic, essential, necessary trueness unrecognised, must be repellent. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... mother, to whom she was to be very good, and who was to be her mother's companion. She pictured her as her own mother would be, a good deal older and feebler, in a gentle, receptive, patient old age. Of so repellent, aggressive, unlovely an old woman as this she had had no conception. It would be hard to do justice in words to Mrs. White's capacity to be disagreeable when she chose. She had gray eyes, which, though they had a very deceptive trick of suffusing with tears as of great sensibility ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... in the world for rough and coarse. I know men who have the reputation of being hard and harsh, yet who are, inside, and in their own consciousness, as gentle and sensitive as women—who put on a stern air and a repellent manner, when they are really yearning for sympathy. I have seen this air and manner broken through and battered down by a friendly man, who found what he suspected behind it—a generous, warm, noble heart. This perverseness seems to be akin to that of the miser who knows he is rich, takes his ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... say here of the men does not, however, apply to the professional officers. Amongst the Germans these are mostly of the aristocracy. Their haughty, scarred faces were always repellent to me. Luckily I was not told off to nurse them. They had a special ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... political activities were "democratic," and the effect on the "English" work of some of the boys in middle forms was most remarkable. The present writer recalls, for instance, a Middle Fifth essay of some three thousand words on the complex, and in some ways repellent, subject of "National Guilds." On how many successive nights the rule against "sitting up" was broken over the composition of this work the recipient of the ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... you!" says Sir Adrian, in a surprised tone that has certainly no cordiality in it, but, just as certainly, the tone is not repellent. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... subjects, even the most repellent, when the circumstances of life thrust them before us, can thus be observed with curiosity and treated with art. The calling forth of these aesthetic functions softens the violence of our sympathetic reaction. If death, for instance, did not exist and did ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... her turn: could the fierce, repellent, whisky-craving woman be the mother of her gracious Gibbie? Could she be, and look so lost? But the loss of him had lost her perhaps. Anyhow God was his Father, whoever ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... high wall the carriage had stopped. A huge, repellent Ethiopian was standing before an opened doorway, through which a ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... a guilty feeling through Lorraine, until she remembered that a slow horse might save her from this man who was all bad,—except, perhaps, just on the surface which was not altogether repellent. She looked around at the tiny basin set like a saucer among the pines. Already the dusk was painting deep shadows in the woods across the opening, and turning the sky a darker blue. Skinner rolled over twice, got up and shook himself with a satisfied snort and went away to feed. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... to whom the previous one belonged, yet is it unworthy of such owners. I suspect it has been cropt in its second binding. It is stained all through, at top, and the three introductory leaves are cruelly repellent. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... through the dark, as was his custom, to enter the chamber of enchantment. Never before had his hand failed to alight, sure as a lark on its nest, upon the brass handle of the door that admitted him to his paradise. It missed it now, and fell on something damp, and rough, and repellent instead. Horrible, but true suspicion! While he was at school that day, his grandmother, moved by what doubt or by what certainty she never revealed, had had the doorway walled up. He felt ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... of the embodiment of evil is naturally repellent, a study of the Devil's personality, as represented in theology, romance, and popular tradition, reveals much that is interesting. In the role of a medical pretender, however, he deserves no more ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... was his real name—was far from being unamiable or repellent. That he was cowardly, untruthful, selfish, and lazy, was undoubtedly the fact; perhaps it was his peculiar misfortune that, just then, courage, frankness, generosity, and activity were the dominant factors in the life of Redwood ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... it is the most potent influence in our social and our business lives. It is a gift of the gods, and most conspicuous successes, in whatever line, are due to it. Now and then comes an individual who is cold, even repellent, and yet who rises to full accomplishment by reason of pure intellectual force or strength of character; but nine times out of ten the man who gets ahead, be he merchant, banker, promoter, or crook, does so by reason of this abstract asset, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the most philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... there is the same confession of failure as when day-by-day happenings grow stale and repellent. The difference is that when love goes, the fortress has been taken and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... and intellectual uplift of our masses. Let us be done with sowing the seed of bitterness; we can only reap the whirlwind of destruction. Because an inflamed sentiment drove black miners from Pana, Illinois, every community is not repellent. Because a man rose in the Christian Endeavor meetings in Detroit and tried to cast bad reflections on our race, every Christian Endeavorer is not our enemy. We shall be wise when we find our friends of whatever locality, of whatever faith, of whatever rank, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... on the repellent view of Negro funeral custom, I must in justice to them cite their better view. There is a custom that I missed much on going south of Calabar, for it is a pretty one. Outside the villages in the Calabar districts, by the sides of the most frequented roads, you ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... that she couldn't help it, she didn't know why she became at once so taciturn and repellent. "Oh, she'll come again," she said in self-excuse, and with vague ideas of atonement, after Lois had gone away. Besides, the things that Lois had said in the way of solicitude, sympathy, and God made no appeal to her. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... Booker T. Washington, leaves the dire fact of two races side by side and yet unassimilated socially, politically, and, in large measure, economically. Two other possibilities, race admixture and caste, are both so repellent to white American thought, that they cannot be looked upon as solutions. Segregation in a separate state, or separate states, is a thorogoing proposal, but is practically impossible. Finally there is the conceivable, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... had she associated the idea of him with embarrassing recollections. But now, on the very day when his brother's marriage to another woman had consummated his brother's treason towards her, there was something vaguely repellent in the prospect of seeing him. The old nurse (who remembered them both in their cradles) observed her hesitation; and sympathising of course with the man, put in a timely word for Henry. 'He says, he's going away, my dear; and he only wants to shake hands, and say good-bye.' ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... possible sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... to hope that a man like you should ever stoop from your height to desire her for a wife. She has vexed you, of that there can be no doubt; how, I can only guess. If, however, it has been through her repellent pride, that ought not to hurt you, for a woman is like a soldier, who only puts on his armor when he is threatened by an opponent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... heart she is cold and callous or warm and loving. So far as we were justified in drawing conclusions regarding the character of Nature as a whole from what we saw of her manifestations in the life of the forest, we came to the conclusion that she was not so hard and repellent as she assuredly would be to us if her guiding principle of action were the survival of the fittest. We inferred, rather, from our observations of her in the forest that she was actuated by an aspiration ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... how far this was fostered by those old-fashioned habits of strictness which it is the present habit to view as repellent? Every morning, immediately after breakfast, Lady Patteson read the Psalms and Lessons for the day with the four children, and after these a portion of some book of religious instruction, such as 'Horne on the Psalms' or 'Daubeny on the Catechism.' The ensuing ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his disadvantage, and he showed it. Solemn and strange among this wealth of colour and voluptuous glitter, strange and constrained towards its haughty mistress, whose repellent beauty it repeated, and presented all around him, as in so many fragments of a mirror, he was conscious of embarrassment and awkwardness. Nothing that ministered to her disdainful self-possession could fail to gall him. Galled and irritated with ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... as originally published by Arrian, contained eight books, of which only four have come down to us. They are in many respects the most valuable expression of his views. There is something slightly repellent in the stern concision, the "imperious brevity," of the Manual. In the Manual, says M. Martha,[66] "the reason of the Stoic proclaims its laws with an impassibility which is little human; it imposes silence ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm of the river, by the inertia of the moving volume, the water is thrown, and with less velocity, upon the opposite bank, which it pursues until it meets another repellent obstacle, from which it refracts, taking direction again for the other side. Above the Missouri, the river is principally directed by the natural trough of the valley. Below this, however, the channel is purely the work ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the laws regarding Sabbath observance is undeniable. Movement was restricted, many acts were forbidden which were not in themselves laborious. The Sabbath was hedged in by a formidable array of enactments. To an outside critic it is not wonderful that the Jewish Sabbath has a repellent look. But to the insider things wear another aspect. The Sabbath was and is a day of delight. On it the Jew had a foretaste of the happiness of the world to come. The reader who wishes to have a spirited, and absolutely true, picture of the Jewish Sabbath ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... beard, and when he looked up again there was for a moment an interested expression in his misty gaze. Razumov discouraged it with a cold, repellent smile. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... him; which induces that condoning of the moral rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitated tables to obscure the solemn finality of death and to gloze over the guilty ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... animal glitter, a far harder light than had accompanied the significant reference to the patriotic impulse which she had nipped in the bud. It was probably only the old, old look of the lioness whose whelp is threatened, but it was something new to me in Catherine Evers, something half-repellent and ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... on the plea that it would bore her to listen. If the work bores the mother it is not surprising that the child attacks it with mind fixed on metal more attractive and eyes seeking the clock. Occupations which are repellent in early life leave behind them a memory calculated to render them forever distasteful. It is therefore a grave mistake not to make music study from the outset throb with vital interest. An appeal to the intellect will quicken the aesthetic instincts, be they never so slender, ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... little jealous of an interloper," thought Mr. Danforth, noticing the repellent manner of young Dawkins. "Never mind, they will ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... here that will keep me for the next two hours.' 'But it will be dark then,' objected the caller. 'Well, my good {106} sir,' was the retort, 'we can walk in the dark, I suppose'—which Blake would naturally much prefer. Edward Blake's outward bearing was cold and unsympathetic. He was often repellent to those desiring to be his friends. Intimates he appeared to have none: he would not allow people to be intimate with him. He would hardly even, when leader of the Opposition, accept the co-operation of his supporters or ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... look as cold as all arctics and says, 'It's repellent'—that's all, just 'repellent.' I see I was up against it. No good talking. Sometimes it comes over me like a flash when not to talk. It does to some women. So I affected a light manner and pretended to laugh it ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... her eyes met his and she shuddered slightly, there was a world of refined cruelty in their depths. She looked out of the window as the train rushed on through the darkness, then almost against her will turned her eyes again in the direction of the repellent stranger. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... as to her soul by the prescribed boundaries of her position in life. Anderson, returning rather earlier than usual, found her with his mother, and retreated with actual rudeness, the woman became all at once so repellent to him. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... made to rise in the air like a balloon. Everything, in fact, that was heavy could be made light; and as a great part of labor, all over the world, is caused by the attraction of gravitation, so this repellent force, wherever applied, would make weight less and work easier. I told her of many, many ways in which the invention might be used, and would have told her of many more if she had ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... be a great colourist unless he is a great deal more. A great colourist is no better than a great wordist unless the colour is well applied to a subject which at any rate is not repellent. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances when gathered ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... from that haughty exclusiveness which is to be found wherever real excellences are wanting. The women of the so-called better classes among us at home treat their less fortunate sisters with such repellent arrogance simply because they cannot get rid of the instinctive feeling that these poorer sisters would have very well occupied their own places, and vice versa, had their husbands been changed. And even ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... test and the only true one. The man who does not believe he is to be blotted out when his body ceases to breathe, who holds all history for his heritage and the wide present for his battle-ground, believes also the future is no repellent void but a widening and alluring world. If in his travel he is scrupulous in detail, it is in the spirit of the mariner who will neither court a ship-wreck nor be denied his adventure. He cannot ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... squid are esteemed, and even the devilfish is on the tables, hideous, repellent, slimy, horned, and tentacled; not mighty enough to crush out the life of the fisher, as was the horrific creature in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea," whom his hero fought, yet menacing even when dead. It is a frightful figure ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago. Richard III., for example, beside being less subtly conceived, is a far greater figure and a less repellent. His physical deformity, separating him from other men, seems to offer some excuse for his egoism. In spite of his egoism, too, he appears to us more than a mere individual: he is the representative of his family, the Fury ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... ending in square-toed curbstone, with an air about them as if they had thrust their hard hands into their wealthy pockets forever, with a character of arctic reserve, and portly dignity, and a well-dressed, full-fed, self-satisfied, opulent, stony, repellent aspect to each, which says plainly, "I belong to a rich family, of ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... involves the trouble of hauling it in for examination now and then; but it is better to be at that trouble than be fishing with, mayhap, a mangled lure, or one that has got out of spinning order, and more likely to act as a repellent than an attraction to any fish in the neighbourhood. In trolling any likely ground, the proper way is to tell your man to zigzag it, not pulling the boat in a straight line, but going over the ground diagonally, and thus covering as much of it ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic faith—remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... she is a princess!" said she, her voice so cold and repellent that his eyes closed, involuntarily, as if an unexpected horror had come before them. "You must not tell me that you came to ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... aware that there are incidents which may strike the modern reader as brutal and repellent. It is useless, however, to draw the Twentieth Century and label it the Fourteenth. It was a sterner age, and men's code of morality, especially in matters of cruelty, was very different. There is no incident in the text for which very good ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... or repel house flies fill a certain need in connection with the house-fly problem. No very satisfactory repellent substances for this insect have been found which are at the same time adaptable to general use about the home, or places where foods are handled. Extracts of pyrethrum flowers are now generally available commercially, and these give fairly good results in the destruction of house flies in buildings. ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp
... into the beautiful face of the young girl who was talking in this repellent fashion. Then he took her gently by the hand and said in ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... intent that every plant should blossom and bear fruit, and that every human being should mate and produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not, once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind, and can control such tendencies ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... part, and they led in no particular direction, nowhere uniting into anything like a trail. She wondered, if she could bring herself to drink the blood of a jack-rabbit, and if it would quench her thirst. But the thought was repellent, and, besides, she was not a good shot with a revolver. Nor did the cactus offer any relief, since it was only just coming into bloom, and ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... puzzled and uneasy frame of mind. Theoretically, it should have pleased him to hear a woman talking thus, but the actual effect upon him was repellent. He did not care to look at the speaker, and it became difficult for him to keep up the conversation. Luckily, at this moment the first ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... struggle with environment, heredity, and the manifold forces that affect the earning of a livelihood. His characters are more often remembered as specimens exhibiting some phase of life than as attractive or repellent personalities. Increasing power of portraying character, however, is evident in his later work. He has a daring imagination, a sense of humor, satiric power, and a capacity for expressing himself in vivid and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... drive from &c 276; chase, dispel; retrude^; abduce^, abduct; send away; repulse. keep at arm's length, turn one's back upon, give the cold shoulder; send off, send away with a flea in one's ear. Adj. repelling &c v.; repellent, repulsive; abducent^, abductive^. centripetal Phr. like charges repel; opposite charges attract; like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something incalculably evil presided over ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Fengers, shortly after her coming to Haynes-Cooper's, had proved her faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. Indeed, she hardly considered it that. The sex side of her was being repressed with the artist side. Most men found her curt, brisk, businesslike manner a little repellent, though interesting. They never made love to her, in spite of her undeniable attractiveness. Fascinating Facts drove her about in his smart little roadster and one night he established himself in her ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... interference in spiritual matters. Charles, on the other hand, owed his advantages to his position and not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none of the physical or intellectual graces of Francis I. and Henry VIII. He excelled in (p. 101) no sport, was unpleasant in features and repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity or chivalry lightened his character, no deeds in war or statecraft yet sounded his fame. He was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations had worn the imperial crown; ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... appear cumbersome, and the action moves slowly; but, after analyzing the book, it may be claimed for this "Francesca da Rimini," that it reflects the age in which the tragedy occurred. Much artistic construction is shown in the contrast of the Polenta and Malatesta families, and, repellent as he is at times, D'Annunzio has moments of great poetic fervour; his fire swings forth in many of Francesca's speeches, that alternate with the languor ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... obscure New England girl, and desire to make her mistress at Halford Castle? Ought she not to feel flattered in having a noble lord for a lover? The thought did not stir her blood. Why was she averse to receiving his attentions? What was there about him that made the thought repellent? Was he not a gentleman? Was he not polite? Did he not show proper respect not only to herself but to everybody? Why not make an effort to overcome her repugnance to him? Would any other girl in Boston or anywhere else hesitate a moment ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... placed the message with the officers' mail when the two policemen entered. Fyles's expression was morose, and his manner repellent. McBain was ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... was not much affection between this ill-matched couple. For long years I saw in my grandfather only a coarse, violent old man, niggardly and censorious. And to him there was doubtless something unwholesome and repellent in the most innocent of my tastes; I could not even sin roundly, like other boys, by pilfering or truantry, but must display an exotic passion for reading forbidden books, an abhorred dexterity at caricature. I think we were equally headstrong and unreasonable, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... with which Caroline listened—so sincere, so quiet, yet so evident—stirred the elder lady's faculties to gentle animation. Rarely, probably, had she, with her chill, repellent outside, her diffident mien, and incommunicative habits, known what it was to excite in one whom she herself could love feelings of earnest affection and admiring esteem. Delightful, doubtless, was the consciousness that a young girl towards ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... successors up to our own day, to try to conceive the world dynamically within the limits of their spectator-consciousness and thus to form a dynamic interpretation of the universe based on its heliocentric aspect. This was just as repellent to Goethe as ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... thread in some obscure cell or dim closet, where pride of authorship, as we may feel and enjoy it, there was none, when beyond the walls of a convent or those of a native town their names were unknown, their personality unrecognised. Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem! How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men (Universal, Irrefragable, or Seraphic Doctors), and after ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... There is something repellent in counting our advantages under the shadow of so great a tragedy but we must try to be as practical as those who are fond of accusing us of materialism. Does any one think that the steam-roller of admirably organized and Government-fostered ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... her own unhallowed height of questionable illumination. To be sure d'Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the "King of the Sorcerers." This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... crayon sketches of himself—dilectissimae imagines—are as much as he should ever do. That D'Orsay's portraits, even his much-approved portrait of the Duke of Wellington, are quite amateurish, is no excuse. It is the process of painting which is repellent; to force from little tubes of lead a glutinous flamboyance and to defile, with the hair of a camel therein steeped, taut canvas, is hardly the diversion for a gentleman; and to have done all this for a man who was ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... sufficient courage to attack the lamb—and he found reason to regret it. Afterwards came fowls stuffed with raisins, parsley, and crumbled bread, and the banquet ended with pastry of weird forms and repellent aspect. ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... Unity is to be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. The merchant ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... as he was always called, was not of a sociable disposition and lived alone. As he was never known to speak of his own affairs nobody thereabout knew anything of his past, nor of his relatives if he had any. Without being particularly ungracious or repellent in manner or speech, he managed somehow to be immune to impertinent curiosity, yet exempt from the evil repute with which it commonly revenges itself when baffled; so far as I know, Mr. Eckert's renown as a reformed assassin or a retired pirate of the Spanish Main had not reached ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... trampling on the stairs that awakened them. The door was quickly unlocked, it was thrown open, and the hairy face of O'Sullivan Og, who held it wide, looked in. Behind him were two of the boys with pikes—frowsy, savage, repellent figures, with drugget coats tied by the ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... of slighting any person or friend, denotes that you will fail to find happiness, as you will cultivate a morose and repellent bearing. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... deserted, moon-blanch'd street, How lonely rings the echo of my feet! Those windows, which I gaze at, frown, Silent and white, unopening down, Repellent as the world;—but see, A break between the housetops shows The moon! and, lost behind her, fading dim Into the dewy dark obscurity Down at the far horizon's rim, Doth a ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of mind about syphilis forms the background of the darkest and most repellent chapter in the story of the disease. Yet we ought to confront it if we wish to master the situation. The irresponsible person has either no regard for, or no conception of, the rights of others where a dangerous contagious disease is concerned, ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... by many a long and minutely corrected despatch to Viscount Strangford, our envoy at Lisbon. But, fortunately for us, Napoleon committed the blunder which so often marred his plans: he pushed them too far: he required the Prince Regent to adopt a course of conduct repellent to an honourable man, namely, to confiscate the merchandise and property of British merchants who had long trusted the good faith of the House of Braganza. To this last demand the prince opposed a dignified resistance, though on all other points he gave way. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... beginning to play the Fantasia of Chopin, I was moved, and the tears had come into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room, large and stately and symmetrical, full—but not too full—of twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and there a fine curve in a piece ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... as white as snow, and his keen, far-seeing eyes, above which, exactly in the middle, his bristly eyebrows grew strangely long and thick, shone and sparkled with clear intelligence, firm self-reliance, and a repellent severity which would no more have become an intending mendicant than the resolute and often scornful expression which played about his lips. There was nothing amiable, nothing prepossessing, nothing soft in this man's face; and those who knew what his life had been could not wonder that the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... give light in its absence. Under the disadvantage of this loss—after the setting of the sun—it was to exercise itself on an unlimited diversity of important things, inquiring, comparing, and deciding. All those things, if examined far, extended into mystery. All genuine thinking was a hard repellent labor. Casual impressions had a mighty force of perversion. The senses were not a medium through which the intellect could receive ideas foreign to material existence. The appetites and passions would infallibly occupy and actuate the whole man. When ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... something pathetic in it, and the trust in the uprightness and honor that Anthony Leverett reposed in him touched him keenly. But this part surprised and, at first, annoyed him. He drew his fine brows in a repellent sort of frown. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... narrow forehead. In that face, with its intense eyes, there was the possibility of rare charm and fascination, and beauty of a very unusual kind; but at the present moment, as she looked carelessly and almost sullenly at her visitor, there was something repellent. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... Christ, who opened His arms wide for publicans and harlots, to have welcomed this fair, ingenuous seeker with some kindly word. But He has none for him. We adopt the reading of the Revised Version, in which our Lord's first word is repellent. It is in effect—'There is no need for your question, which answers itself. There is one good Being, the source and type of every good thing, and therefore the good, which you ask about, can only be conformity to His will. You need not come to Me to know what you are to do.' He relegates the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... effect of his labor, has become a slave,—that is, a chattel, a thing,— again become a person by the same labor, or in continuing the same exercise? Why is it not seen that these ideas are mutually repellent, and that, if, by some impossibility, the proletaire could reach a certain degree of intelligence, he would make use of it in the first place to revolutionize society and change all civil and industrial relations? And what I say is no ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to be one of the graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of narrowed will power, was yourself stripped of the mask of joy and pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... which took place nine months after the death of his first wife. A very large portion of his life he devoted to Spain, which he knew so intimately that in 1845 he produced that remarkable Handbook in two closely printed volumes, a most repellent-looking book in appearance to those who are used to contemporary typography, usually so attractive. Ford, in fact, was so full of his subject that instead of a handbook he wrote a work which ought to have appeared in half a dozen volumes. In later editions the ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... one whom he knew and Spain knew to be her determined foe, did all he could through his ambassador to frustrate their efforts and bring on a catastrophe. The States-General and Maurice were now on as confidential terms with Carleton as they were cold and repellent to Boississe and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... holds worlds in their orbits, and neutralizes the power of gravitation, is but one of those powers that awaits the growing genius of man to utilize. The magnetic force is the attractive or centripetal power; the electric force is the repellent or centrifugal power. A machine will be invented, in the near future, that will combine these into a single electro-magnetic force, and with this force the power of gravitation will be neutralized. Then the world's traffic will be as readily carried in the air as now it is upon the ground. The ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... its sides. Even the most prominent of these, the Black Hill, which jutted out on the Flat like a gigantic tumulus, had been stripped of its dense timber, feverishly disembowelled, and was now become a bald protuberance strewn with gravel and clay. The whole scene had that strange, repellent ugliness that goes with breaking up and throwing into disorder what has been sanctified as final, and belongs, in particular, to the wanton disturbing of earth's gracious, green-spread crust. In the pre-golden era this wide valley, lying ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... moment ago, at the hospital," said he, steadfastly ignoring her repellent tone. Indeed, if anything, the tone rejoiced him, for it told a tale she would not have told for realms and empires. He was ten years older and had lived. "But—forgive me," he went on, "you are trembling, Miss Angela." She was, and loathed herself, and promptly ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... thing has to be done the quickest way is generally the best way. It is like the morning bath—don't ruminate, jump in, for the longer you wait the more dubious you get, and the tub begins to look arctic and repellent. ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... reason why. Patrick could not understand O'Connell at all. It was certain that Dan remembered him; and he could not have forgotten the encouragement he gave him to write on behalf of his country; yet now he was cold, even repellent in his manner; and he tried to pretend that he did not know who Patrick was. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The belief is implanted in man by the wish; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... seemed to say, "Poor boy, and art thou too one of us? Hast thou too to fight with poverty and guidelessness, and the cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, as I have done!" But when I tried to speak to him earnestly, his manner was peremptory and repellent. It was well for me that so it was—well for me, I see now, that it was not from him my mind received the first lessons in self-development. For guides did come to me in good time, though not such, perhaps, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... cast in the mould of the face, though individually the features were not amiss except for their thinness, and in fact the unpleasantness of the expression had insensibly been softened during this last month, and there was nothing repellent, though much that was quaint, in the slight figure, with the indescribably one-sided air, and stature more befitting ten than fourteen years. What would the visitor think of him? The Doctor called to him, "Come, Peregrine, your uncle, Sir Peregrine ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... difficult," replied Crevel. "Valerie is a masterpiece in her way. My good mother, twenty-five years of virtue are always repellent, like a badly treated disease. And your virtue has grown very mouldy, my dear child. But you shall see how much I love you. I will manage to get you your ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... aid of animal magnetism (although we have no doubt that it belongs to that mysterious science) experience has taught us all, that there are some natures that possess certain repellent qualities, which never can be brought into affinity with our own—persons, whom we like or dislike at first sight, with a strong predilection for the one almost amounting to love, with a decided aversion to the other, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... critics, Rellstab, the editor of the Berlin musical journal Iris, admits—after censuring the composer's excessive striving after originality, and the unnecessarily difficult pianoforte passages with their progressions of intervals alike repellent to hand and ear—that this is "on the whole a praiseworthy work, which, in spite of some excursions into deviating bye-paths, strikes out in a better direction than the usual productions of the modern composers" (1833, No. 21). The editor of the Leipzig "Allgemeine musikalische ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... in creation, he would hardly be a hair's breadth nearer the end of his own making. It is better to hold honestly one fragment of truth in the midst of immeasurable error, than to sit alone, if that were possible, in the midst of an absolute vision, clear as the hyaline, but only repellent of falsehood, not receptive of truth. It is the positive by which a man shall live. Truth is his life. The refusal of the false is not the reception of the true. A man may deny himself into a spiritual lethargy, without denying ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... position, then, for a man is to be God's slave. The harsh, repellent features of that wicked institution assume an altogether different character when they become the features of my relation to Him. Absolute submission, unconditional obedience, on the slave's part; and on the part of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... back of the tent had to be removed in order to let out those who no longer had possession of themselves, and to let in those—to a ten-fold degree—who strove for admission on the rumour spreading that something exceptionally repellent was progressing within. ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... a meaning look, though what the meaning was Annesley could not guess. She knew only that she did not like the Countess as she had wished to like her lover's friend. There was something secret in the dark eyes, something repellent about the long, slender thumb with its ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... thoughts that we communicate in the form of reproachful personal application. There may be exceptions to this rule, but it is undoubtedly, in general, a sound one. For the work which we have to do, is not to attempt to drive the heart from the wrong to the right by any repellent action which the wrong may be made to exert, but to allure it by an attractive action with which the right may be invested. We must, therefore, present the incidents and instructions of the Word in their alluring aspect—assuming, ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... pleasant and even joking terms with the waitresses. But with Daisy he never joked. He called the other girls by their first names, as became a social superior, but Daisy was always Miss Obloski to him. With Linnevitch alone he made no headway. Linnevitch maintained a pointedly surly and repellent attitude, as if he really wished to turn away a profitable patronage. And Barstow learned to leave the ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... repellent, was far from encouraging. I found myself in the embarrassing position of having nothing left to say. I gave up all ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
