"Unsightly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking new sand over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little doorways of the burrowers are as trim as city fronts. It takes man to leave unsightly scars on the face of the earth. Here on the mesa the abandoned campoodies of the Paiutes are spots of desolation long after the wattles of the huts have warped in the brush heaps. The campoodies are near the watercourses, but never in the swale of the stream. The Paiute ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... is extremely elegant, although useless as a bow: note the grace of the long peak. It is seldom that one finds these peaks so well preserved as many have been first broken and then cut down to remove the unsightly jagged end. The dimensions of this bow are:—Total length, 28-1/8 in.; length of hair, 23-1/4 in.; distance of hair from stick at heel, 3/4 in.; breadth of hair 1/4 in. The nut is on the same ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... behold. All her starboard side was torn and splintered; her starboard anchor was gone; and a great part of the starboard bulwarks; while every one of the lower yard-arms had been broken, in the same direction; so that she now carried small and unsightly jury-yards. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... possess rather an antiquarian than a living interest. No one can tell the story of the witch trials of sixteenth and seventeenth century England without digging up a buried past, and the process of exhumation is not always pleasant. Yet the study of English witchcraft is more than an unsightly exposure of a forgotten superstition. There were few aspects of sixteenth and seventeenth century life that were not affected by the ugly belief. It is quite impossible to grasp the social conditions, it is impossible ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... stood out, sharp and unsightly, in the keen February sunlight. A mile away in a dip of the desert, lay the town, a sorry sprawl of frame buildings, patternless save for the one main street, which promptly lost itself at either end in a maze of cholla, prickly pear, and the lovely, golden-glowing roseo. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the facades of the palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are executed in ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... pressed on a little faster. It was almost dark, however, when they reached the edge of an opening in the firs and saw a cluster of iron-roofed, wooden buildings and a tall chimney-stack, in front of which the unsightly ore-dump extended. Wet, chilled and worn out as the men were, there was comfort in the sight; but Vane frowned as he noticed that a shallow lake stretched between him and the buildings. On one side of it there was a broad strip of tumbling foam, which ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... it might deaden the pangs of hunger. Then he glanced at Grenfell, who lay fast asleep close by, with his blanket falling away from him. The man's face was half buried among the withered needles which were thick in his unkempt hair, and he lay huddled together, grotesque and unsightly in ragged disarray. Weston vacantly noticed the puffiness of his cheeks, and the bagginess beneath his eyes. The stamp of indulgence was very plain upon him, and the younger man, who had led a simple, strenuous life, was sensible of ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... more hope for its victim than for the souls of the damned who have received the final judgment. One drop of that bright water upon the tongue of a Titan would blast him like Jove's thunderbolt, would shrivel him up to a black, unsightly cinder! ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... idealism, is in philosophy the belief that we have an immediate cognition of things external to us, and that they are as they seem. In art and literature it is the tendency to conceive and represent things as they are, however unsightly and immoral they may be, without any respect to the beautiful, the true, or the good. In Ruskin's teaching mere realism is not art; according to him art is concerned with the rendering and portrayal ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of joy, so deep that it assumed the shade of melancholy; they pointed to each other the minutest objects about the homesteads, things in their hearts, and were now comparing them with the originals. But where hollow places by the wayside, grass-grown and uneven, with unsightly chimneys rising ruinous in the midst, gave indications of a fallen dwelling and of hearths long cold, there did a few of the strangers sit them down on the mouldering beams, and on the yellow moss that had ...
— An Old Woman's Tale - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... look a little dismayed. She went and fetched her work-basket at once, however, and set about it, tacking the edges to a strip of canvas, in preparation for some kind of darning, which would not, she hoped, be unsightly. ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... cooled out enough so the flesh will cut easily, I draw it. I chop off the head close up, draw back the skin of the neck a couple of inches, and then cut off the neck. The flap of skin thus left serves to cover the bloody and unsightly stub of the neck. Next I open up the chicken from behind and below the vent and pull out the gizzard—if the chicken has been kept off feed for twenty-four hours the empty crop will come with it—intestines and liver. I remove the gall bladder from the liver, ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... "'t is such a melancholy, unsightly object, when seen from any part of the Hall"—turning round on his horse to look at the rear of the Hall, which was at about two hundred yards' distance. "It looks such an old withered thing among the fresh green ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... to the lawn. Do not let the grass get so tall that the mower will not do a good job in cutting it. This necessitates mowing at regular intervals. If you mow only once a week, I would advise the use of the rake, as long grass-clippings are always unsightly because they remain on top of the sward, while short clippings from frequent mowing sink into it, and ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... landscape into a scene of wonder and beauty beyond anything described in Johnnie's fairy tales. Trees, shrubs, the roofs and sidings of the buildings, the wooden and even the stone fences, the spires of dead grass, and the unsightly skeletons of weeds, were all incased in ice and touched by the magic wand of beauty. The mountain-tops, however, surpassed all other objects in the transfigured world, for upon them a heavy mist had rested and frozen, clothing every branch and spray with a feathery ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... dark color, coarse texture, and French manufacture. It must have been of an inferior kind when new and fresh, and a long tarry in a tropical climate was not calculated to improve its character. Besides being mouldy, it was dotted with insects, of an unsightly appearance and unsavory flavor. The quality of the beef was, if possible, worse than that of the bread, and we had no other kinds of provisions. Before we arrived at St. Bartholomew the water began to give signs of impurity. The casks, stowed in the half-deck, had been filled through a molasses hose. ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... such unharmonious sounds assailed the ears of the queen before. But she seemed to be quite amused with it. The louder little Jacob screamed and kicked, the closer she pressed him to her heart; nor did she seem to observe that his dirty little feet were leaving unsightly marks upon her rich ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the 'Affair of Nanci;' by some called the 'Massacre of Nanci;'—properly speaking, the unsightly wrong-side of that thrice glorious Feast of Pikes, the right-side of which formed a spectacle for the very gods. Right-side and wrong lie always so near: the one was in July, in August the other! Theatres, the theatres ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... save the mark! that the traveler up the Erie railroad, will certainly not recognize in the description of the vale of Ramapo, the hill-sides all denuded of their leafy honors, the bright streams dammed by unsightly mounds and changed into foul stagnant pools, the snug country tavern deserted for a huge hideous barn-like depot, and all the lovely sights and sweet harmonies of nature defaced and drowned by the deformities consequent on a railroad, by the disgusting roar and screech of the steam-engine. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... employed in the Asylum are required to cultivate a calm and deliberate method of performing their daily duties—carelessness and precipitation being never more out of place than in an insane asylum. Loud talking, hurrying up and down stairs, rude forms of address to one another, and unsightly styles of dress, are wholly misplaced where everything should be strictly decorous ...
— Rules and Regulations of the Insane Asylum of California - Prescribed by the Resident Physician, August 1, 1861 • Stockton State Hospital
... How long the treasure remained buried in deep waters! How long the earth showed unsightly furrows and barren places! For nearly twenty years there had been warm sunshine, and no failure of the dews nor the early and latter rain. But grass had not grown nor flowers blossomed in the path of ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... cypress, remained water-tight, and so protected the interior from the ruinous effects of moisture. In outward appearance, however, Arcadia House had sadly degenerated. The stucco that originally covered the outer walls had fallen away here and there, leaving unsightly patches to vex the eye, and in many of the windows the glazing had been destroyed either wholly ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... dearest {father}, to my AEneas, who, {born} of my blood, has made thee a grandsire, a godhead, {even} though of the lowest class; so that thou only grant him one. It is enough to have once beheld the unsightly realms, {enough} to have once passed over the Stygian streams." The Gods assented; nor did his royal wife keep her countenance unmoved; {but}, with pleased countenance, she nodded assent. Then her father said; "You are worthy of the gift of heaven; both thou who askest, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... might not have been so notorious to posterity, had not the artists of Constantine's time added some figures of inferior merit. Forsyth says, "Constantine's reign was notorious for architectural robbery;" and the styles of the two emperors, in the present arch, mar the harmony by their unsightly contrasts. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... in a manner that those unsightly cottages were swept away; but they meant homes for many poor souls; and all that they possessed was contained ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river. Only down the long, sterile canyons, the train shot hooting, and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the sebaceous glands in which the sebaceous (fatty, cheesy) secretions become thickened; the excreting ducts, appearing on the surface, as yellowish or blackish points. They appear chiefly on the face, neck, chest, and back and are very unsightly. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... to the burial place of the great Abraham Lincoln's mother are carved on their bark. With this exception, the spot is wholly unmarked. The grave never had a stone, nor even a board, at its head or its foot, and the neighbours still dispute as to which of these unsightly hollows contains the ashes of Nancy Lincoln." If Democracy in the New World sometimes stones the prophets, it is seldom guilty of building their sepulchres. Out of sight, off the stump, beyond the range of the interviewer, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... silent. Mick's arms and shoulders were a mass of bruises from the lead pipe, but his face was clear. Twinetoes was all right, he said, but craving for a wet. I alone showed evidence of the struggle; my eye was unsightly and painful, and my left wrist was slightly sprained. The girl sobbed quietly. "Oh! Oh!" she cried repeatedly, "whatever's ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... chief of the hamlets, has since developed into an organized city, and the capital of the Territory. Its site was certainly not chosen for its natural beauty. Along the main gulch are the mines,—huge piles of earth turned up in unsightly heaps. At one side of the mines, and up a ravine which crosses the gulch at right angles, lies the city. In shape it was originally like the letter T, but its later growth has forced new streets and houses far up the hillsides. Not so much regard was paid, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... market on their own legs, and very long, feeble legs they were, for a more unsightly beast than a Breton pig was never seen out of a toy Noah's ark. Tall, thin, high-backed, and sharp-nosed, these porcine victims tottered to their doom, with dismal wailings, and not a vestige of spirit till the trials and excitement of the day goaded them ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... were both unsightly and unpleasant; and that rawness was bad enough when taken in conjunction with beefsteaks, without being extended to one's own hands. He had also a summer passion for ices and creams, which were forbidden luxuries to one in training, - although ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... lowly style which characterizes his writing pre-eminently qualifies him, and to which, doubtless, he is indebted for the patronage of The Christian Advocate. I shall only indulge the reader with the following beautiful description of the Established Church:—"It is a bloated, unsightly mass of formalities, hypocrisy, bigotry, and selfishness, without a single charitable impulse or pious aspiration." After this touching display of genuine American feeling, he draws the picture of a clergyman in language so opposite, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... split timber: these fences are very offensive to my eye. I look in vain for the rich hedge rows of my native country. Even the stone fences in the north and west of England, cold and bare as they are, are less unsightly. The settlers, however, invariably adopt whatever plan saves time, labour, and money. The great law of expediency is strictly observed;—it is borne of necessity. Matters of taste appear to be little regarded, or ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... sometimes expressed, or the regrets that have been uttered at its removal. It may have been designed to carry a wooden spire, such as was afterwards erected on the bell-tower. But most will agree with the criticism that it was "a low and unsightly structure." It hardly rose more than eight or ten feet above the top of the lantern, and the whole height of the central tower, including the octagon, was less than the height of the south-western spire of ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... is blind, at least myopic, for Fenelon of the strong and subtle mind could not see that service for the beloved is the highest joy, and the more menial the service the better. Madame sought to deceive herself by making her person unsightly to her lord, and so she wore coarse and ragged dresses, calloused her hands, and allowed the sun to tan and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... A.R.I.B.A., with much care and consideration for the fabric of which he is the surveyor. The latest act affecting the history of the building has been the addition of a new north-western tower to take the place of the unsightly rents and wreckage that have disfigured and helped to destroy the structure at that part during the last two hundred years. It was designed by the late Mr. J.L. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Chichester (1901) - A Short History & Description Of Its Fabric With An Account Of The - Diocese And See • Hubert C. Corlette
... finny travelers came together to a little clear brook, with a bottom of fine gravel, over which the water was but a few inches deep. Our fish painfully worked his way to it; for his tail was all frayed out, his muscles were sore, and his skin covered with unsightly blotches. But his sunken eyes saw a ripple in the stream, and under it a bed of little pebbles and sand. So there in the sand he scooped out with his tail a smooth round place, and his companion came and filled it with ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... becomes red and then there appear tiny vesicles (water blisters) which soon rupture and "weep." This fluid which oozes from these tiny, ruptured vesicles, in connection with the perspiration and exfoliation of old skin, forms heavy crusts upon the face which are both unsightly and annoying. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... great lead and zinc mines. Over on Garber the heavily loaded trains, with engines puffing and panting on the heavy grades, and waking the echoes with wild shrieks, follow their iron way. But in the Mutton Hollow neighborhood, there are as yet no mines, with their unsightly piles of refuse, smoke-grimed buildings, and clustering shanties, to mar the picture. Dewey Bald still lifts its head in proud loneliness above the white sea of mist that still, at times, rolls over the valley below. The paths are unaltered. From the ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... at this unsightly wreckage wished to rebuild at once. But the old grandfather had objected that this spot of misfortune was situated in the northeast corner of the mansion, a quarter notoriously exposed to the attacks of oni (evil spirits). He was in favor ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... characteristic image of the thing; but the name of Jelly-Fish, or Sun-Fish, or Sea-Blubber, as the larger Acalephs are also called, suggests to most persons a vague idea of a fish with a gelatinous body,—or, if they have lived near the sea-shore, they associate it only with the unsightly masses of jelly-like substance sometimes strewn in thousands along the beaches after a storm. To very few does this term recall either the large Discophore, with its purple disk and its long streamers floating perhaps twenty or thirty feet behind it as it swims,—or the Ctenophore, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the amusement programme had reached the last act, and people yawned for something new, when 'sweet charity' came to the rescue, and proposed an entertainment to raise funds for enlarging an ecclesiastical 'Columbary' where aged, unsightly and repentant doves might moult, and renew their plumage. Musical, dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants constituted the method of collecting the money, and the selections would have made Rabelais chuckle. We ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Forest-dames outstretched before him, All are clad in scanty raiment, Dressed in soiled and ragged linens. Spake the stranger Lemminkainen: "Wherefore sit ye, forest-mothers, In your old and simple garments, In your soiled and ragged linen? Ye, forsooth! are too untidy, Too unsightly your appearance In your tattered gowns appareled. When I lived within the forest, There were then three mountain castles, One of horn and one of ivory, And the third of wood constructed; In their walls were golden windows, Six the windows in each castle, ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... much has not yet got into being; while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty Semblance or Clothes-suit; and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's-blanket,—here still ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... invincible energy of the French character, the people who paid to the conquering nation in fifteen months nine milliards of francs will restore the broken ornaments of the empress city. From the smoking walls and unsightly ruins of bureaux and palaces that wring a tear from the patriot, France will see life restored to the emblem of her greatness, the phoenix-like, will rise on the horizon of time to claim for the future generation her position ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... private armed ships in hopes of as great a prize. * * * I entered on board a new Brig called the 'Fair American.' She carried sixteen guns. * * * We were captured on the 27th of August, by the Solebay frigate, and safely stowed away in the Old Jersey prison ship at New York, an old, unsightly, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... wood had been inserted where the hero's head had been, and whitened over, for me to draw another. The rest of the design had been engraved. That face gone! How could I conjure it up again on that unsightly, isolated patch of block, with all the rest of the drawing engraved and therefore my lines undiscernible? I did my best. When it was printed it was seen that the face did not fit on the neck properly, and ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... are to be procured of M. Servas, No. 69, Rue Richelieu, who is the inventor, and for which he has received a medal from a scientific society, they are of so light and elastic a nature, that they do not cause the slightest pressure upon the brow, nor leave that unsightly mark upon the forehead, that is often a great annoyance to those gentlemen who object to having a stain upon the blanche purity of that feature, and as those who are tenacious in that respect must naturally be so with regard to the form and the material of which their hat is composed, they ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... in no sense a patching up of Judaism. He had not come to mend old and torn garments; the cloth He provided was new, and to sew it on the old would be but to tear afresh the threadbare fabric and leave a more unsightly rent than at first. Or to change the figure, new wine could not safely be entrusted to old bottles. The bottles here referred to were really bags, made of the skins of animals, and of course they deteriorated with age. Just as old leather splits or tears under even slight strain, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... to them they seemed but the calf-sigh of some young writer so deep in his first devotion that he jumbled up his lady-love, Hesper, and Aphrodite, in the same poetic bundle—of which he left the string-ends hanging a little loose, while, upon the whole, it remained a not altogether unsightly bit of prentice-work. Tom had not been at the party, but had gathered fire enough from what he heard of Hesper's appearance there to write the verses. Here they are, as nearly as I can recall them. They are in themselves not worth writing ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... after much practice to produce a uniformly colored surface. A small quantity of fat only is needed, and where the fat, i.e., the heat, ends, a crack is formed in the outer coat, through which flavor escapes and fat enters; the appearance also is rendered unsightly. Flat fish can be fried fairly well by this method, or, indeed, almost any thin substance, as thin edges are not affected in this way. For pancakes and other articles of similar nature it is the best method. It rarely ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil
... for soda, taking tea at the Waldorf, and trying to outdo each other in dress and show. New York certainly was a dull place with all its boasted cosmopolitanism. There was no denying that. Destitute of any natural beauty, handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers, made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art interests, no interest in anything not immediately connected with dollars, it was a ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... 'Oh, you unsightly, sanctified, idolatrous, Bagnigge-Wells coppersmith, you think because I'm a lord, and can't swear or use coarse language, that you may do what you like; rot you, sir, I'll present you with a testimonial! I'll settle a hundred ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... now know to have been her own room. Her dress was, in all respects, the same as before, with one exception—her white slippers had been exchanged for blue ones. This seemed to show that they had been rendered unserviceable, or at least unsightly, by the walk she had taken. This in itself was not remarkable nor would her peculiar escapade have made more than a temporary impression upon my curiosity if she had not afterward shown in my presence such an unaccountable and extraordinary interest in the murder which had taken ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... me, I saw no other course open, and as the crowd was gathering, I got inside. Before setting out to call upon the Canadian missionaries stationed at the place, I held a long conversation with a hump-backed old man, an unsightly mass of disease, who seemed to be a traditional link of Luchow. I might say that this scholastic old wag spoke nothing but Chinese, and I, as the reader knows, spoke no Chinese, so that the amount of general knowledge derived one from the other was ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... still, yet dying, leave his lessons half unlearnt." And yet the former fill, happily, the sphere which God in nature assigned them; while the latter, with all his capacities and powers of reason, conscience, &c., wanders incessantly from his orbit, and must be a most unsightly spectacle to God and holy angels, and all other high and noble intelligences. When will man return to his native sphere, and the moral and intellectual world move in due harmony and happiness, like the physical? When will each ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... human blood once marked the ceiling over the north-east corner of the apartment, said to have dropped down from the room above, where an unfortunate poacher, who had been much injured by a gun, was confined. It is asserted that for many years no water could remove nor whitewash hide the unsightly marks. ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... hired out to his neighbors when he left the place, a few implements and a little rude furniture. The sale was held outside, and when George arrived upon the scene during the afternoon a row of light wagons and buggies stood behind the rickety shack, near which was an unsightly pile of broken crockery, discarded clothes and rusty provision cans. It was characteristic of Langside that he had not taken the trouble to carry them as far as the neighboring bluff. In front of ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... and were scattered about the spot where they had stood. Here and there were the marks of fire, which had run along the country till some interval of previous desolation had stopped it; and where this had been the case, the black unsightly remains lay strewn over the surface, one further step advanced in dissolution than the dead world around. There was no want of habitations for their nightly shelter. Palaces and cottages, all alike, were open; all alike ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... melodious, pure, and cool, And meads, with life and mirth and beauty crown'd? Ah! see, the unsightly slime and sluggish pool, Have all the solitary vale imbrown'd; Fled each fair form, and mute each melting sound, The raven croaks forlorn on naked spray: And, hark! the river, bursting every mound, Down the vale thunders, and with ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... direct the young discoverer. He sees the apple tree let fall its blossoms, and, lo! the fruit grows day by day to a mellow and enticing ripeness under his eyes. Suddenly he detects a hidden sequence between flower and fruit! The rose bush is covered with buds, small, green, unsightly; a night passes, and, behold! great clusters of blossoming flowers that call him by their fragrance, and when he has come reward him with a miracle of colour. Here is another mystery; and day by day they multiply and grow ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... dangerous to interfere with them at all, except they run to such an extent as to become very troublesome. The sudden healing of these cutaneous affections has again and again been followed by head-disease. They are unsightly in the eyes of a parent, but it must be recollected that they render the situation of such children much more safe; and when teething is completed they will generally disappear spontaneously; or, if they should not, they will readily do so by proper medical ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... vicious habits of the principal actor in the scene, and of those who resemble him! Men who to the rigidly virtuous are objects almost of loathing, and whom therefore they cannot serve! The poet, penetrating the unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has unveiled with exquisite skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling, that often bind these beings to practices productive of so much unhappiness to themselves, and to those whom it is their duty to ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... sun was shining brightly As it was necessary that it should, The rooms were swept and all that was unsightly They hid away as quickly as they could; And then the edibles, both many and good, Julia and Hannah carried to the spot (The nearest way was through the primrose-wood) And then turned homeward with a merry trot, And waited for the time t' arrive; and ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... blackened logs were piled in heaps, and the ground was prepared for its first crop of grain. The green blades soon sprang up and covered the ground, where a short time before was only to be seen the unsightly fallow or the remains of ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... along the banister at every step, then saw it feel over the bedroom door, and, pushing it back, cling to it as if nailed there, and only then did it occur to him that he was standing on the threshold of the maid's room, and that in the gray basket, under those rather unsightly wrappings, lay the child. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... their hips stood out bony and unsightly above their swollen stomachs as they racked across the benches, and their eyes were wild and haggard. But to the eye of Creede, educated by long experience, they were still strong and whole. The weaklings were those that hung about the water, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... description without ceremony. My remembrance of the scene was too vivid to require any prompting of that sort. I saw again, in the dim evening light, the unsightly mound which had so strangely attracted my attention at Gleninch. I heard again the words in which Mr. Playmore had explained to me the custom of the dust-heap in Scotch country-houses. What had Benjamin and Mr. Playmore ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... if rightly treated, enhance its beauty. Steam-pipes or radiators may stand under windows, behind an open screen or grill of polished brass, or they may be incorporated with the chimney piece, and need not, in either case, be unsightly or liable to work mischief upon the carpets or ceilings under them. Wherever placed, a flue to bring in fresh air should be provided and fitted with a ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... It narrowly escaped lighting upon the bark in which Ulysses sat, but with the fall it raised so fierce an ebb, as bore back the ship till it almost touched the shore. "Cyclop," said Ulysses, "if any ask thee who imposed on thee that unsightly blemish in thine eye, say it was Ulysses, son of Laertes: the king of Ithaca am I called, the waster of cities." Then they crowded sail, and beat the old sea, and forth they went with a forward gale; sad for fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped at any rate; till they ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... for the course of life to which he was so soon introduced. Too often the petulance and frowardness of children indicate the defective nature of their education: indulgence has permitted the wild plant to shoot forth its branches with irregular luxuriancy, and it has become both unsightly and enfeebled for want of being properly pruned. To suffer the propensities and passions of children to go unrestrained is the extreme of cruelty, being the most direct means of rendering them burdens to ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... Queen herself performed the same ceremony at Vincennes, respecting the fortress, and the magnificent tower built by Charles VII, but erecting beneath its shadow a commodious residence on the space which had heretofore been cumbered with a mass of unsightly buildings, totally unsuitable for ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... M'sieur does not like the Waldorf. Eh, bien, Paris is not New York, no." Having sufficiently humbled Paris, he withdrew into the background, rubbing his hands as if he were cleansing them of something unsightly. Brock spread one of the buttered biscuits with honey and inwardly admitted that Paris was not ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... barriers to shut out light and separate away from the Earth. "See what we've come to!" it said plainly. And it included even his clothes and boots and collar, the ridiculous hat upon the peg, the unsightly "brolly" in the dingy corner. Had there been room in me for laughter, I ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... never thought it good husbandry to water the tender plants of reform with aqua fortis, yet, where so much is to do in the beds, he were a sorry gardener who should wage a whole day's war with an iron scuffle on those ill weeds that make the garden-walks of life unsightly, when a sprinkle of Attic salt will wither them up. Est ars etiam maledicendi, says Scaliger, and truly it is a hard thing to say where the graceful gentleness of the lamb merges in downright sheepishness. We may conclude with worthy and wise Dr. Fuller, that 'one may be a lamb in private wrongs, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... so busy holy-stoning the quarterdeck, while all hands are wanted to keep the ship afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it that would be very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal man, however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise of power, such as emergencies always give rise to. If any half-loyal man forgets his code of half-decencies and half-duties so far as to become obnoxious to the peremptory justice which takes the place ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... for a few moments on the steps of the town house the next morning in order to gaze out surlily on the left-overs of that day of celebration. Smyrna's village square was unsightly with a litter of evil-smelling firecracker remnants, with torn paper bags, broken canes, dented tin horns and all the usual flotsam marking the ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... repeatedly speaks of the serenity of the weather here, and says that the scenery recalled to him delightful places in England. He felt as if the smooth, lawn-like slopes of the island must have been cleared by man. Every thing unsightly seemed to have been removed, and only what was most graceful and picturesque allowed to remain. He says, "I could not possibly believe that any uncultivated country had ever been discovered exhibiting so rich a picture." ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... as I read it, at least. Here are some fine houses we are coming to. That at the corner is Sir Richard Littleton's, that great one was my Lord Bingley's. 'Tis a pity they do nothing better with this great empty space of Cavendish Square than fence it with these unsightly boards. By George! I don't know where the town's running. There's Montagu House made into a confounded Don Saltero's museum, with books and stuffed birds and rhinoceroses. They have actually run a cursed cut—New Road they call it—at the back of Bedford ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was believed, by the fond parents and others, as likely to be productive of the most healthful and happy consequences. The result was an accumulation of adipose substance, that rendered me one of the most unsightly, not to say monstrous productions of nature. I ought not to say nature, perhaps; for, if not perverted, she produces no such monsters. At the age of six months, my weight was twenty-five pounds; and it rose soon after ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... well, and oft would beg me sing; Which when I did, he on the tender grass Would sit, and hearken even to ecstasy, And in requital ope his leathern scrip, And show me simples of a thousand names, Telling their strange and vigorous faculties. Amongst the rest a small unsightly root, But of divine effect, he culled me out. The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it, But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil: Unknown, and like esteemed, and the dull swain Treads ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... is bent; the schools in which the noble and the freeborn learn grace and beauty of movement are not for him. And so it must remain, the children must be even as the fathers; can the unclean onion-root produce a rose, or the unsightly radish a hyacinth? Constant bondage bows the neck of the slave, but the consciousness of freedom gives dignity ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... years ago when the saving of rags was inculcated as a domestic virtue and a patriotic duty. Methods have changed, but the material remains the same. In a complete modern mill making writing and other high-grade papers, the process begins with unsightly rags as the material from which to form the white sheets that are to receive upon their spotless polished surface the thoughts of philosophers and statesmen, the tender messages of affection, the counsels and admonitions ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... all, still more feminine than masculine, it would sometimes happen that I put more emotion into a state than I myself knew. I really was capable or attachment, though it never seemed so till the hour of separation. And if a connexion was torn up by the roots, the soil of my existence showed an unsightly wound, which long refused to ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... were the clumsily accoutred feet, and stout, ill-shaped, brown, unstockinged legs, which the shortness of her Majesty's petticoats, proportioned originally to the stature of a European belle, displayed to a rather unsightly extent. ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... prevent their steel cased bullets from rusting and to lessen the friction in the barrel of the gun, cover them with a heavy lubricant, which gives the cartridges an unsightly appearance and causes them to gather dust and sand. The French employ a lubricant at the base of the projectile, with a small copper disk between the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... cords are not cut short, or accidentally torn off, they drag along the ground, and so prevent the poor animal from moving with any degree of comfort or freedom. Some few owners, who admire and cultivate these long cords, keep them tied up in bundles on the dog's back, but so unnatural and unsightly a method of burdening the animal is not ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... through the wilderness of ruin, in the midst of untold and eternal tortures, from cell to cell, from dungeon to dungeon, the last alway surpassing in monstrous ghastliness, until finally we came within view of an enormous entrance hall, most unsightly of all that I had previously seen. It was very spacious and terribly steep, running in the direction of a gloomy red corner, full of the most inconceivable abominations and horrors: it was the royal court. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... grows commonly throughout England on dry exposed plains. It covers these during the flowering season with a gorgeous sheet of yellow blossoms, orange perfumed, and which entirely conceals the rugged brown unsightly branches beneath. Its elastic seed vessels burst with a crackling noise in hot [64] weather, and scatter the seeds on all sides. "Some," says Parkinson, "have used the flowers against the jaundice," but probably ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... Reynolds said that 'he had paid attention to Johnson's limbs; and far from being unsightly, he deemed them well formed.' Prior's Malone, p. 175. Mrs. Piozzi says:—'His stature was remarkably high, and his limbs exceedingly large; his features were strongly marked, and his countenance particularly rugged; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Nothing is more unsightly and unappetizing than a portion of chicken with the bones chopped at all sorts of angles, and with splinters of bone in the meat. All bones will separate easily at the joint when the cord or tendon and gristly portion ...
— Carving and Serving • Mrs. D. A. Lincoln
... was miserable, and then the reaction came. She began to think it all over, and all the years she had known him from his boyhood passed in review. And in all those years there was not one unsightly fact, or one hour, or one word she could wish were blotted out. And they said he had loved her from the days of short dresses! Well, what if he had? It was no disgrace. Then pride came in and she began to feel thankful he had, and as the recollection ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... had been nothing but flower-beds covered with unsightly clods, muffled shrubs, and bandaged vines. Then had come a blaze of tulips, exhausting the palette. And then, but a short time before—it seemed only yesterday—every stretch of brown grass had lost its dull tints in a coat of fresh paint, on which the benches, ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... New-Hampshire village, had one of his legs crushed so as to require amputation. The little fellow was furnished with a "Peg" and stumped round upon it for ten years. We can imagine what he suffered as he grew into adolescence under the cross of this unsightly appendage. He was of comely aspect, tall, well-shaped, with well-marked, regular features. But just at the period when personal graces are most valued, when a good presence is a blank check on the Bank of Fortune, with Nature's signature at the bottom, he found himself made hideous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... did Time His glass sublime Fill up with sands unsightly, When wine, he knew, Runs brisker through, And sparkles far more brightly? Oh, lend it us, And, smiling thus, The glass in two we'll sever, Make pleasure glide In double tide, And fill both ends for ever! Then wreath the bowl With flowers of soul The brightest wit can find us; ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... but that is the very point. The fight is never among the sheep, but only among the shepherds. Look at our splendid system, beginning with Tom, Jim, and Ned, and culminating in the President—the roots rather red and unsightly, but oh! such a pretty flower, all broadcloth, kid gloves, and affability—contemplate the superb machinery," continued the General, warming, "the primaries, the ward committees, the—in fact, all the rest of ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... to among the English women, that the poorest maid-servant is careful to be in the fashion. They seem to be particularly so in their hats or bonnets, which they all wear: and they are in my opinion far more becoming than the very unsightly hoods and caps which our German women, of the rank of citizens, wear. There is, through all ranks here, not near so great a distinction between high and low as ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... confusion to it: The king and subject, lord and every slave, Dance a continuall haie; our roomes of state Kept like our stables; no place more observ'd 30 Than a rude market-place: and though our custome Keepe this assur'd confusion from our eyes, 'Tis nere the lesse essentially unsightly, Which they would soone see, would they change their forme To this of ours, and then compare them both; 35 Which we must not affect, because in kingdomes, Where the Kings change doth breed the subjects terror, Pure innovation is ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... of a material in itself unsightly, the one course is to cover it entirely with stitching, as did the Persian and other untireable people of the East. But not they only. The famous Syon cope is so covered. Much of the work so done, all-over work that ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... there in their shrouds—my husband and his faithful Monkaushka with their poor bodies crushed and mangled—O! I cannot tell you more! The machine is an unsightly heap at the bottom of the ravine. I cannot write—I cannot think and yet I must do both. What have I done but love with all my womanhood and all ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... blanched by the most fervent of prayers. Her outlook on life, her intensest wishes, were those of a white girl of more than decent perceptions—of actual refinement, for they tended to the avoidance of everything unpleasant and unsightly. In other respects, too, she was an absolute variant from the type, for her sensitiveness to the pain of others and of the lower animals amounted almost to a mania; for though she had a girlish horror of blood, her eagerness ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... two lofty towers, and the interior is a perfect blaze of gilding. The monastery attached to it is one of the largest in the world, but the greater part of it is in ruins, and one of the wings is used as a barrack. Those unsightly, unadorned convents, which cling to every church save the cathedral, have neutralized nearly all ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... the river were factories. Katie had never given much thought to factories beyond the thought that they disfigured the landscape. Now she wondered what the people who had spent that hot day in the unsightly buildings thought about the world in general—be it one world ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... dark waste hills, ye brown unsightly plains, Congenial scenes, ye soothe my mournful strains: Ye tempests, rage! ye turbid torrents, roll! Ye suit the joyless tenor of my soul. Life's social haunts and pleasures I resign; Be nameless wilds and lonely wanderings mine, To mourn the woes ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... classes. We all know how it is in the human body. An injury to one small bone in the foot may cause distress which shall be felt "all over," and shall disturb the operations of the lordly brain itself. So in the body social. The wealthy and refined, into whose luxurious dwellings enters no unsightly, no uncleanly object, may say to themselves, "Never mind those poor wretches down at the other end, huddled together in their filthy tenements. They are ignorant, they don't know how to get along; but their condition ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery,[2] it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the appetite. For when we are put down in some unsightly neighborhood, and especially if we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist after a rare plant. Day by day we perfect ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... keeper of a financial fortune must deal in dry documents. Behind those documents glitters the gold, and behind those bones shines the wonder of the things that were. And when an object once beautiful has by age become unsightly, one might suppose that he would wish to show it to none save his colleagues or the reasonably curious layman. When a man makes the statement that his grandmother, now in her ninety-ninth year, was once a beautiful woman, he does not go and find her to prove his words and bring her tottering ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... Sarah' of Marlborough, though the duchess was by no means the most agreeable woman in the world to deal with, is not much to Van's honour. When the nation voted half a million to build that hideous mass of stone, the irregular and unsightly piling of which caused Walpole to say that the architect 'had emptied quarries, rather than built houses,' and Dr. Evans to write this epitaph ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... not been all to the bad, by any means," commented Grandfather Fernald. "We have at least got rid of those unsightly tenements bordering the water which were such a blot on Freeman's Falls; and once gone, I do not mean to allow them ever to be put back again. I have bought up the land and shall use it as the site of the new granite bridge I intend to build across the stream. And in case I have more land than ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... suitable lengths with a minimum of effort, with clean, effective strokes of the ringing axe, the cuts sharp and even; I could cut any log into lengths and enjoyed the effort, but I sweated over it and laid half my strokes awry, so that the ends of my lengths were notched and unsightly. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... easily guessed. When the last portion of the earth gave way, the waters of the lake precipitated themselves upon the beautiful and peaceful glen, carrying death and destruction in their course, and leaving nothing but a dark unsightly morass behind them. So is it with the mind of man. When he gives the first slight assent to a wrong tendency, or a vicious resolution, he resembles the shepherd's boy, who, unconscious of the consequences that followed, made ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... Anything more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier, drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime. And yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow, and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint of colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and repeats the note—because, in short, it is Florence, it is ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... when they rob us. For I was not sure myself, but that it might be very bad manners to go again too early without an invitation; and my hands and face were chapped so badly by the bitter wind, that Lorna might count them unsightly things, and wish to see ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... to work here to solve the problem before them. The life of ease and the life of toil are seen side by side, and all the brighter influences of the one brought to bear on the other. The tall factory chimneys are unsightly here as elsewhere, and nothing can be uglier than the steam tramways, noisily running through the streets. But close to the factories and workshops are the cheerful villas and gardens of their owners, whilst near at hand the workmen's dwellings offer an exterior equally ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... issuing from a trunk formed like a cone; but occasionally they are to be seen of very stunted growth. Around the full-sized tree are frequently to be found a whole family of dwarfs, nature having arrested their growth when from one to ten feet high. These would present an unsightly look, were it not for the mantle of Spanish moss that envelops, and gives them ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... to these things, you will have an attractive and luxuriant garden spot, instead of an unsightly bare one. And in clearing off these patches for rye, beware of waste. If you have hens, or by chance a pig, they will relish old heads of lettuce, old pea-vines, still green after the last picking, and the stumps and outer leaves ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... and rational. But if we would see the gorgeous palace towering in symmetry and grandeur, unpleasant work must be done; the rubbish must be removed, the soil excavated, the marble chiselled into form, and the unsightly timbers erected. Without these, though it might glitter in the sunbeams, it would be but a gossamer tissue. So this mental part is the bone and sinew, the life, of a system of beneficence. Confined to resolutions and conduct, its movements would be like ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... of voices from the room above greeted my ear, while the printing-room was bedecked with a most unsightly litter of tattered garments of nondescript shape and purpose laid out to dry. I was not surprised at this, however, as I had long grown used to unannounced invasions. Unexpected persons would arrive at the office, of whom ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... allowed to rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But well-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a little distance from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, "The muse of Coila finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle over him." ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... wits' ends what to do. Not only was his cheek unsightly and painful, but his neighbours began to jeer and make fun of him, which hurt his feelings very ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... Since Heaven would sure grow weary of a world Productive only of a race like us, A monitor is wood—plank shaven thin. We wear it at our backs. There, closely braced And neatly fitted, it compresses hard The prominent and most unsightly bones, And binds the shoulders flat. We prove its use Sovereign and most effectual to secure A form, not now gymnastic as of yore, From rickets and distortion, else, our lot. But thus admonished we can walk erect, One proof at least of manhood; while the friend Sticks close, a Mentor worthy of his ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... time she saw him returning at the head of his ragged brigade. The poor fellows were indeed a loathsome sight, worn, feeble, clad only in the unsightly rags which had been their prison wear. They were not shown into the office, but to a vestibule without, and their first desire was for water, soap—the materials for cleanliness. Mrs. Marsh examined her stores for clothing. That which was on hand was mainly designed for ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... this—with a sort of loathing. I sometimes wondered why it was that nobody except me fancied that he was looked upon with aversion? One of the clerks had a most repulsive, pock-marked face, which looked positively villainous. I believe I should not have dared to look at anyone with such an unsightly countenance. Another had such a very dirty old uniform that there was an unpleasant odour in his proximity. Yet not one of these gentlemen showed the slightest self-consciousness—either about their clothes or their countenance or their character in any way. Neither of them ever ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... Reputation in giving out a good Merchandize, before they pack it up in Vessels, pick it, and throw aside the little, wither'd, and thin Kernels, which are not only unsightly, but render ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... And the railway's unsightly indications strewn across the countryside—ballast heaps, excavations, noisy stationary engines, hand-propelled barrows bumping along toy lines, gangs of men at labour with pick and shovel—met Sabre's thoughts on this June morning because he was thinking of the Penny Green Garden ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... grown! O faith so mutable! Shades of my fathers, not august but fond! How hollow were the darlings of my dream! But she, O Lotus-flower, my promised bride, Star of my youth, my pure unspotted dove! Again I see her in her gentle pride, Her starry eyes meet mine with melting beam; Unsightly grief approach not near my Love, Flee from her presence, O thou gaunt Despair, Good Time, embalm her daintily and fair, Link her sweet fame with hymns and fragrancy. And happy stars, and blissful utterance, And with ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... most remarkable of all about an orchid is that this marvel of colour and form and of texture of fabric unfolds itself from within a most ungainly, unsightly, unlikely-looking tuber. From shapeless, colourless tubers, which attach themselves to trunks and branches of trees and cling on to rocks, there emerge these peerless aristocrats of the flower-world, finished, polished, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... is this that floats on the undermist Of the mirror towards the dusty grate, as if feeling Unsightly its way to the warmth?—this thing with a list To the left? this ...
— New Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... ugly, a. repulsive, unsightly, loathsome, hideous, grewsome, frightful; (Colloq.) crossgrained, ill-natured, unamiable, inaffable, surly, refractory, vicious, indocile, spiteful, sullen, morose; uncomely, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... erected an artistically designed cast-iron road sign; instead of the unsightly wooden ones, cast-iron automobile warnings were placed at every dangerous spot; community bulletin-boards, preventing the display of notices on trees and poles, were placed at the railroad station; litter-cans were distributed over the entire community; ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... darling, could accept the unspoken between them, and spare him definitions and declarations. A situation undefined is so often a situation saved. Life grows over and around it. It becomes a mere mummied fly, preserved in amber; unsightly perhaps; but unpernicious. After all, he told himself—and he went on thinking over the incidents of the afternoon while he dressed—after all, Madame von Marwitz might not be much in London; she ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the sturdy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full swing, the watermen bending lustily to their task. Under their unceasing urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with their towering, impassive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was passed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at anchor, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... weeks before had been a bare, unsightly stick was now a miracle of dainty beauty. From the creek, below the little girl's house, the orchard hill appeared against the soft, blue, sky a wonderous, cumulus, cloud of fleecy whiteness flushed with a glow of delicate pink. The meadows and pastures ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... there was the mark identifying the stolen property. Poor little child of the tropics, swinging in his leafy, native haunts from bough to bough, gripping the branches with paw and tail, he little anticipated that his last swing would be by the neck, like that of a murderer from the black, unsightly gallows! He had strayed away, carrying with him the cord binding him to his master's wrist. In his peregrinations over various roofs, he had examined the cupola, and reaching a paw through an opening where a slat chanced to have been removed, he had abstracted the property of the club. ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... cut away so that the street stretched away as broad and as straight as you see it to-day. Numbers were put on the houses and streets were cut through the waste lands about the Collect Pond, and the barracks which were built for the British soldiers were torn away as unsightly structures. These barracks were log huts a story high, enclosed by a high wall. The gate at one end, called Tryon's Gate, gave the name to Tryon's Row as it now exists. Trinity Church, which had been in ruins since the fire, was rebuilt, as well ...
— The Story of Manhattan • Charles Hemstreet
... English style; for instance, in the word cre-a-tion, of three syllables, it is better to divide on the second vowel, thus crea-tion,—the syllable tion being more easy to pronounce; and the vowel at the beginning of a line being unsightly. ...
— The Importance of the Proof-reader - A Paper read before the Club of Odd Volumes, in Boston, by John Wilson • John Wilson
... of cutting past the centre at each fold is to avoid the unsightly creasing that results from folding two or more thicknesses of paper when ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... it but partook of the nature of the particular sort of church-going public it wished to attract, which was none other than the heterodox element which flocked in vast numbers to All People's church. The All People's edifice was a big, unsightly brick building. It had been originally designed for a ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... poured forth its cloud of smoke, when every andiron held a generous log,—andirons which are now gone to decorate Mr. Centennial's home in New York or lie with a tag in the window of some curio shop. The mantel, carved in delicate wreaths, is boarded up, and an unsightly stove mocks the gilded ceiling. Children romp in that room with the silver door-knobs, where my master and his lady were wont to sit at cards in silk and brocade, while liveried blacks entered on tiptoe. No marble Cupids ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... nothing, in Bean's view, if you came right down to it. Besides being of too few inches for a man and unspeakably old, he was unsightly. Nothing of the Gordon Dane about Breede. The little hair left him was an atrocious foggy gray; never in order, never combed, Bean thought. The brows were heavy, and still curiously dark, which made them look threatening. The eyes were the coldest of gray, a match ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... should wish to unite a horse's neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight? Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man's dreams, are all vain and fictitious: so that neither head nor foot can correspond ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... too late, nothing was on her side of the stream but the horse's tail, which immediately gave way at her infernal grip, as if blasted by a stroke of lightning; but the farmer was beyond her reach. However, the unsightly tailless condition of the vigorous steed was, to the last hour of the noble creature's life, an awful warning to the Carrick farmer not to stay too late ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various |
