"Unsociable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... proceeded to Vintain, a town situated about two miles up a creek on the southern side of the river. This place is much resorted to by Europeans on account of the great quantities of beeswax which are brought hither for sale; the wax is collected in the woods by the Feloops, a wild and unsociable race of people. Their country, which is of considerable extent, abounds in rice; and the natives supply the traders, both on the Gambia and Cassamansa rivers, with that article, and also with goats and poultry, ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... send to Coventry, keep at arm's length, draw a cordon round. depopulate; dispeople^, unpeople^. Adj. secluded, sequestered, retired, delitescent^, private, bye; out of the world, out of the way; the world forgetting by the world forgot [Pope]. snug, domestic, stay-at-home. unsociable; unsocial, dissocial^; inhospitable, cynical, inconversable^, unclubbable, sauvage [Fr.], troglodytic. solitary; lonely, lonesome; isolated, single. estranged; unfrequented; uninhabitable, uninhabited; tenantless; abandoned; deserted, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... all persons, better able to explain the mystery than any one else. He had overheard in Ranger's study a general lamentation about the prospects for Saturday, and a wish expressed by his brother that Rollitt were not so unsociable and undependable. Everybody agreed it was utterly useless to ask him to play, and that they would have to get a second-rate man to fill the empty place, and so ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... Uninteresting, Unpresentable, and Ugly. She was Unpoetical, Unmusical, Unlearned, Uncultured, Unimproved, Uninformed, Unknowing, Unthinking, Unwitty and Unwise. She was Unlively, Undersized, Unwholesome and Unhealthy. She was Unlovely, Ungentle, Uncivil, Unsociable, Untameable, and altogether Unendurable. She was Unkind, Unfeeling, Unloving, Unthankful, Ungrateful, Unwilling, Unruly, Unreasonable, Unwomanly, Unworthy, Unmotherly, Undutious, Unmerciful, Untruthful, Unfair, Unjust and Unprincipled. She was Unpunctual, Unthrifty, Unskilful, Unready, Unsafe, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... voice trembled, and a tear fell like a dew-drop from her long eyelashes. These things still more amazed the soul of Mr. Fordyce. That anybody should shed a tear for a being so sordid and unsociable as Abel Graham struck him as one of the extraordinary things he had met with in his career; and to see this fair young creature, fitted by nature for a sphere and for companionship so different, sincerely grieving for the old man's distress, seemed the most extraordinary thing of all. Mr. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... why. He never talked of his private affairs, even with me, though we were friends, "Jack" and "Roddy" to each other still, and inhabited lodgings together in Jesus Lane. He owed money to no one. Unsociable habit, I used to call it; destructive of confidence between man ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... into the "best society." To appreciate the joke thoroughly you must understand that there is no society here at all—absolutely none. We are not proud, we Maritzburgians, nor are we inhospitable, nor exclusive, nor unsociable. Not a bit. We are as anxious as any community can be to have society or sociable gatherings, or whatever you like to call the way people manage to meet together; but circumstances are altogether too strong for us, and we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... received complaints that you are unsociable, and that you refuse all invitations to, ah, friendly gatherings and such ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... understand that there are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise well with such surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in its place upon these savage hills. Now, when I am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... susceptible of humane feelings. For this purpose, said Montesquieu, music, which influences the mind by means of the corporeal organs, was extremely proper. It is a kind of medium between manly exercises, which harden the body, and speculative sciences, which are apt to render us unsociable and sour. . . . Let us suppose, for example, a society of men so passionately devoted to hunting as to make it their sole employment; they would doubtless contract thereby a kind of rusticity and fierceness. But if they happened to imbibe a taste for music, we ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... with the men on the Kalahua Estate in the wild revelries with which they too often sought to break the monotony of their existence and celebrate a good season, he was by no means a morose or unsociable man; and Chard, the merry-hearted Belgian sugar-boiler, often declared that it was Prout alone who kept the estate going and the native labourers from turning on the white men and cutting their throats, out of sheer revenge for the brutal treatment they received from Sherard, the savage, ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... neighbourhood[149]. A man that is out of humour when an unexpected guest breaks in upon him, and does not care for sacrificing an afternoon to every chance-comer; that will be the master of his own time, and the pursuer of his own inclinations, makes but a very unsociable figure in this kind of life. I shall therefore retire into the town, if I may make use of that phrase, and get into the crowd again as fast as I can, in order to be alone. I can there raise what speculations I please upon others, without being observed myself, and ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... shade, but then, again, he might chance upon men who were looking for him and find himself very suddenly with a gunshot through him, or packed along with the cockroaches in the grimy hold of the Good Intent. Captain Penman was a singularly unsociable shipmate at the best of times for a man of Eben's profession, and might even go the length of throwing him overboard some dark night, merely, as it were, in order ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... Mr. Ottinger interrupted, "chop the trimmings. We're here for the stuff, ain't we?" He was immediately reprehended for his brusque, unsociable manner. ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... pleasure, I implore you. I can't blame you for being gruff and unsociable; were you otherwise you wouldn't reside at—at—" he turned his head to read the half legible sign on the station house, "at Chazy Junction. I'm familiar with most parts of the United States, but Chazy Junction gets my flutters. Why, oh, why in the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... was accounted unsociable; besides, he was ragged, uncouth, independent, and did not conform to the ways of society; so the select circle cast him out—more properly speaking, did ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... a small boy, destructive as a monkey, deft at hiding as a squirrel. He is unsociable and unamiable, disliking the society of other birds. His harsh screams, shrieks, and most aggressive and unmusical calls seem often intended maliciously to drown the songs of the ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... during her rather long and tedious journey. Various passengers got into her third-class compartment and got out again, but they were somewhat dull and commonplace folk, many of them being of that curiously unsociable type of human creature which apparently mistrusts its fellows. Contrary to her ingenuous expectation, no one seemed to think a journey to London was anything of a unique or thrilling experience. Once only, when she was nearing her destination, did she venture to ask a fellow-passenger, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... some agreeable acquaintances. An unsociable traveler misses many of the profitable results of his journey, besides finding time hang ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... have between theory and practice, I have simply followed a customary habit of thought that is on the whole misleading. For, in truth, it is as impossible for the man of affairs to avoid disinterested reflection, as it is for the commercial traveller to be unsociable. The activity of the one has to do with the organization of a wide range of {136} interests, as the activity of the other has to do ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the modest 'fiver' which a man would be thought unsociable if he did not risk on the horse that carries the country's colours. But he is very 'thick' with the racing-people on the Downs, and supplies the stable with oats, which is, I believe, not an unprofitable commission. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... as Plater notes, desides, taciturni, aegre impulsi, nec nisi coacti procedunt, &c. they will scarce be compelled to do that which concerns them, though it be for their good, so diffident, so dull, of small or no compliment, unsociable, hard to be acquainted with, especially of strangers; they had rather write their minds than speak, and above all things love solitariness. Ob voluptatem, an ob timorem soli sunt? Are they so solitary for pleasure (one asks,) or pain? for both; yet I rather ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to see how suddenly this abject Passion kills all the noble Sentiments and generous Ambitions that adorn Humane Nature; it renders the Man who is over-run with it a peevish and cruel Master, a severe Parent, an unsociable Husband, a distant and mistrustful Friend. But it is more to the present Purpose to consider it as an absurd Passion of the Heart, rather than as a vicious Affection of the Mind. As there are frequent Instances to be ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... has made a resolve to reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle. His moral triumph or failure literally consists in his finding the right name for the case. If he says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... what people are saying," her brother protested. "They call you unsociable and stuck-up, and it is hard for me ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... been quite a change in Mr. Drysdale during the last year," said Mrs. Richter. "My husband was speaking of it the other day. He said that Drysdale was becoming really unsociable. I hope he is not growing dissipated, for the sake of his wife, who ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... offended at a trifle. Do not be offish and unsociable. The Steamship Subsidy bill was a fraud on the government. You voted for it, Mr. Trollop, though you always opposed the measure until after you had an interview one evening with a certain Mrs. McCarter at her house. She was ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 5. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... We praise virtue, but we hate it, and shun it, and know very well that it freezes the marrow of our bones—and in this world one must have one's feet warm. And then all that would infallibly fill me with ill-humour; for why do we so constantly see religious people so harsh, so querulous, so unsociable? 'Tis because they have imposed a task upon themselves which is not natural to them. They suffer, and when people suffer, they make others suffer too. That is not my game, nor that of my protectors either; I have to be ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... before he had eaten it all. He preferred being beaten to going hungry, so they never caught him till he had fed full. But what troubled him most was the tramping, the long dusty stages afoot in country where the unsociable villages lay remote from each other, and the roads were hot and long. A man can outwalk any other animal. After thirty miles, a horse is nowhere and the man is still going, but even fifteen miles leaves the ordinary dog limp and sorry. And then, when ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... entered softly. It was a large room and seemed quite bare because of the absence of curtains, rugs, and cushions. The unsociable roommate was sitting beside the centre table, her elbows propped on its shiny surface that was innocent of any cover and ignorant of the duster. A green shade over her eyes connected a blur of nondescript hair with a rather long nose beneath which a pair of pale ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun into their hands; they watch these animals, they kill some; and thus by defending their property, they soon become professed hunters; this is the progress; once hunters, farewell to the plough. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable; a hunter wants no neighbour, he rather hates them, because he dreads the competition. In a little time their success in the woods makes them neglect their tillage. They trust to the natural fecundity of the earth, and therefore do little; carelessness in fencing often exposes ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... the public tranquillity, the most dangerous to sovereigns by its hierarchic order, its persecutions, its discipline; the most flat, the most dreary, the most Gothic, and the most gloomy in its ceremonies; the most puerile and unsociable in its morality, considered not in what is common to it with universal morality, but in what is peculiarly its own, and constitutes it evangelical, apostolical, and Christian morality, which is the most intolerant of all. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... with the least idea of living up to the character my friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my unsociable exterior I have always had secret yearnings for domesticity) that I took his hint one autumn afternoon and went to Kerfol. My friend was motoring over to Quimper on business: he dropped me on the ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... say it himself. He is now the person to say "Silence, boys;" and then to ask the blessing on the meal. It makes them gather round the table, instead of sitting down here and there in the comfortless, unsociable way they used to do. Tom and Dick go to school together now, and Dick is getting on famously, and will soon be able to help his next brother over his lessons, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... out glances of comparative alertness. Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding in the Row, couples cantering past harmoniously, others advancing sedately at a walk, loitering groups of three or four, solitary horsemen looking unsociable, and solitary women followed at a long distance by a groom with a cockade to his hat and a leather belt over his tight-fitting coat. Carriages went bowling by, mostly two-horse broughams, with here and there a victoria with the skin ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... him from. He was by nature and by practice one of the most generous and hospitable of men. He loved to entertain his friends from town, and to take them afterwards his favourite walks. But he disliked dinners and evening parties in London, not because he was unsociable, but because good dinners and long journeys 'took it out of him' and endangered the task of the following morning. The distance from town and the long hills made late hours inevitable. To listen to some new book ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... the door against cheerfulness, and surround ourselves with gloom. The habit gives a colouring to our life. We grow querulous, moody, and unsympathetic. Our conversation becomes full of regrets. We are harsh in our judgment of others. We are unsociable, and think everybody else is so. We make our breast a storehouse of pain, which we inflict upon ourselves as ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... His case is remarkable because it first set rolling the ball of reform, He was by trade a metal turner and fitter; he had the reputation of being an unsociable man because he went home every day after work and stayed there; he was unmarried and lived alone in a small, four-roomed cottage near Kilburn, one of a collection of Workmen's villages. Here it was known that he had a room which he ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... 'Don't think me unsociable,' she said to Lady Palliser, before going back to her room after a hasty breakfast; 'but I am too completely miserable to put on the faintest show of cheerfulness, and I should only make you wretched if I were with you. Go out for a drive, and pay a few visits, mamma. You have had a trying ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... betray myself, and abandon the care of my own preservation, in order to give way to the malice of a criminal, that he may act with impunity and with full liberty. On the contrary, since he shows himself unsociable towards me, and since he has placed himself in a position which does not permit me safely to practice towards him the duties of peace, I have only to think of preventing the danger which menaces me; so that ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... down, for there was no chair, and that in his own cold lobby on this freezing night! It fully explained his eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for health's sake - as John was now doing - was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau and finding his night things; and ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... over Lilac Lane and the words Mr. Richmond had given her, that Maria charged her with being unsociable. Much Matilda wished that she could have talked with her sister about those same words; but ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... strangers to distrust, because they have little to lose, we shall not solve the difficulty; since the people of New Holland, under the influence of a similar climate and soil, and in a more wretched situation than the inhabitants of New Caledonia, are savage and unsociable. The different characters of nations seem therefore to depend upon a multitude of different causes, which have acted together during a series of many ages. The inhabitants of New Caledonia do not owe their kind disposition to a total ignorance of wars and disputes; the variety of their offensive ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... religion from the start met popular disapproval. The early Christians, who tried to keep themselves free from idolatry, were regarded as very unsociable persons. They never appeared at public feasts and entertainments. They would not join in the amusements of the circus or the amphitheater. They refused to send their children to the schools. The ordinary citizen could not understand such people. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... live together in union and friendship, and which we cannot separate like man and wife when they happen to disagree. The profound silence that is enjoined upon the monks of La Trappe is a singular circumstance of their unsociable and unnatural discipline, and were this injunction never to be dispensed with, it would be needless to visit them in any other character than as a collection of statues; but the superior of the convent suspended in our favour that rigorous ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... to the grocery boy, hunted up the station master, an elderly fellow who was well known for his unsociable disposition. ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield
... say no more!" De Morbihan protested. "Rest assured the Chief of the Surete has laid his plans: his web is spun, and so artfully that I think our unsociable outlaw will soon be making friends in the Prison of the Sante.... But now we must adjourn. One is sorry. It has ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary but unequal laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... useful to the sportsman. The only fault which can be laid to their charge, and this perhaps only extends to a few, is, that they are apt to love strangers as well as friends. As an instance to the contrary, was a beautiful little red and white Blenheim, who was most unsociable, and whose affections were most difficult to win. I, however, succeeded, when on a visit to her mistress; and two years after, when I repeated my visit, expected to have the same difficulty. She, however, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... uninvited in his rooms, invited him to supper at his restaurant, which Wilhelm twice declined, the third time, however, he had not the courage to refuse. In spite of this Barinskoi would not see that his invitation was only accepted out of politeness. There were many things reserved and unsociable about Barinskoi; for example, he never invited any one to his rooms. He called for his letters at the post office. The address he gave, and under which he was entered at the University office, described him as a newspaper correspondent, which ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... somewhere observed),** it can only be explained in the same way. He was at an intolerant age, and if his schoolfellows struck him as more backward or more stupid than they need be, he is not likely to have taken pains to conceal the impression. It is difficult, at all events, to think of him as unsociable, and his talents certainly had their amusing side. Miss Browning tells me that he made his schoolfellows act plays, some of which he had written for them; and he delighted his friends, not long ago, by mimicking his own solemn appearance on some breaking-up or commemorative ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... exactly a swell house like the "Royal Hotel" or the "Plough," nor yet a commercial one, but something betwixt and between. The coffee-room is very small, consequently all the frequenters are drawn together, and if a conversation is started a man must be deuced unsociable that does not ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... bitterness in her heart. She could never forgive Mrs. Whittredge. Few guessed the intensity hidden beneath Celia's gentle manner. Only now and then a spark from her dark blue eyes revealed it. The general construction put upon her proud reserve was that she was unsociable. ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's nature. Speech imprisoned frets ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... on the other side of the terrace, and I knew by the expression of his face just how he had been feeling about these distinguished abodes. He had made up his mind that their proprietors were a dusky, narrow-minded, unsociable company; plunging their roots into a superfluous past. I endeavoured, therefore, as I sat down beside him, to suggest something ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... stove, smoking pipe after pipe of cheap tobacco. Sometimes he joined in the poker games. He had learned poker when a boy at the mine, and after a few deals his knowledge returned to him; but for the most part he was taciturn and unsociable, and rarely spoke to the others unless spoken to first. The crew recognized the type, and the impression gained ground among them that he had "done for" a livery-stable keeper at Truckee and was trying to get ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... is more or less a shamefaced thing to speak of one's feelings before others; and yet here am I talking like this to you, and am not a bit ashamed or shy. I am an unsociable sort of fellow and shall very likely not come to see you again for some time; but don't think the worse of me for that. It is not that I do not value your society; and you must never suppose that I have ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... ornamented with tarnished silver lace and large metal buttons, who sat apart from the regular frequenters of the house, and wearing a hat flapped over his face, which was still further shaded by the hand on which his forehead rested, looked unsociable enough. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... stairs, guiding himself with a hand on the rail, his eyes as abstracted as a sleep walker's. The sounds were issuing from the back parlour of course. The door was partly open—so she was not as unsociable as Charley had feared, or perhaps it was only that it was hot. The room was dark inside. Evan leaned against the banisters with bent head, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of breaking the ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... Countess improved. She talked. Mme. de Listomere no longer despaired of fathoming the new-made wife, whom yesterday she had set down as a dull, unsociable creature, and discoursed on the delights of the country, of dances, of houses where they could visit. All that day the Marquise's questions were so many snares; it was the old habit of the old Court, she could ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... certain little town a solitary, plain, elderly gentleman called Thomson or Wilson—but that does not matter; the surname is not the point. He followed an honorable profession: he was a doctor. He was always morose and unsociable, and only spoke when required by his profession. He never visited anyone, never extended his acquaintance beyond a silent bow, and lived as humbly as a hermit. The fact was, he was a learned man, and in those days learned men were not like other people. They spent their days and nights in contemplation, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... great outlying portions of mankind which are not, perhaps never have been, included in this Human Society; still they are outlying portions and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary, and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the grand central formation of which I am speaking, but not uniting with each other into a second whole. I am not denying of course the civilization of the Chinese, for instance, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Street The Little Red House The Pieman The Triantiwontigongolope The Circus You and I Going to School Hist! Bird Song The Music of Your Voice The Boy who Rode into the Sunset The Tram-man The Axe-man The Drovers The Long Road Home The Band Bessie and the Bunyip Good Enough The Porter Growing Up The Unsociable Wallaby The Song of the Sulky Stockman Our Cow The Teacher The Spotted Heifers Tea Talk The Looking Glass Woolloomooloo The Barber Farmer Jack Old Black Jacko Bird Song The Sailor The Famine The Feast Upon the Road ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... the Zoo the Leopard to see, But found him an unsociable fellow. He would not look at us or say where he bought His polka-dot ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... positively nowhere for me to go now but the cemetery," she said to me with a laugh. "The town has become disgustingly dull. At the Azhogins' they are still reciting, singing, lisping. I have grown to detest them of late; your sister is an unsociable creature; Mademoiselle Blagovo hates me for some reason. I don't care for the theatre. Tell me ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very still for a minute or two. Then she got up. "I don't see," she remarked, "why Rule No. I. should make us unsociable each with the other. The very object of our club is that we should have no secrets, but should be quite open and above-board. Now, Martha West, look me straight ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... remotest hem of her trailing robe at the imminent risk of having his brains dashed out on the cobble-stones as she swept along her royal way, rather than sit comfortably upon velvet-cushioned thrones in a place unknown to her regal presence. Simms came back to his native city with her "unsociable houses which rose behind walls, shutting in beautiful gardens that it would have been a sacrilege to let the ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... expected to show "good will to all men" after a previous night's debauch on turkey, plum-pudding, and sweet champagne. Nobody comes down to breakfast on New Year's morning and weeps because "Dear Uncle John" was alive (and an unsociable old bore) "this time last year." Nobody adds to the day's joy by wondering if they will be "alive next New Year's Day," nor become quite "huffy" if you cheerfully remark that they very probably ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... course you have to wear it in, on account o' your conscience. It's conscience cotton, Thomas Jefferson. I've explained before, but I don't know's you understood. It seems a little unpolite to wear it in my ears, with you here keeping me comp'ny. I s'pose you think it's un—unsociable. But Aunt Olivia doesn't allow me to 'sociate with the Tony Trumbullses. Oh, Thomas Jefferson, I wish ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... Megalopolitans, and of those of the Thebans in the Third Olynthiac (Sec. 15). The early orations against Philip also show some misunderstanding of his character. And if, in fact, Demosthenes lived his early years largely in solitary studiousness and was unsociable by disposition, this lack of a quick grasp of human nature and motives is quite intelligible. But this defect grew less conspicuous as his experience increased; and though even to the end there remained something of the sophist about him, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... failed to engross him. He grew moodier, more exacting. If Myra arrived home late, he wanted to know where she had been, whom she had seen. Were they dining out, he muttered unsociable objections; were people coming to the house, he complained of the lack of privacy. What a whirl they lived in! So they did, but what was the remedy? Myra herself felt helpless in a tangle of engagements. They overpowered her. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... said he, "what made you take such particular notice of such a wretched little hovel. It is inhabited by an old man with his wife, who have the character of being very morose and unsociable. They rarely leave the house—see nobody, and nobody goes to see them; but they are quiet enough, and I never heard any thing against them beyond this. Of late, their very existence seems to have been forgotten; and I believe, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Unsociable as well as savage, with a heart harder than the ball which drills the ghastly hole in his side, loving only himself and his dark solitudes, the wolf never associates with its own kind; and when, by accident, it ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... content to lay before us the scenes of everyday life. We are introduced to men who, in times of trouble, lose first their incomes and then their places; to others who, in trying to get two appointments, miss both; to unsociable misers who carry about their money sewn into their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to others, who accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a melancholy longing for their lost freedom. We read how some died young of a plague or fever, and how the writings which ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... morning I was in much too unsociable a mind for paying friendly calls. Still, something in the aspect of the place harmonised with my humour, and I worked my way round to the back, where the ground, after affording level enough for a kitchen-garden, broke steeply away. Both the word Gothic and the ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... impatiently too often the query, "Didn't you have a dog!" with, "I and the dog wouldn't have been very long in the same boat, in any sense." A cat would have been a harmless animal, I dare say, but there was nothing for puss to do on board, and she is an unsociable animal at best. True, a rat got into my vessel at the Keeling Cocos Islands, and another at Rodriguez, along with a centiped stowed away in the hold; but one of them I drove out of the ship, and the other I caught. ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... and cocoa with me to-night, Miss Peel," said Miss Day. "You're so dreadfully unsociable, not a bit like an ordinary St. Benet's girl. If you go on in this fashion, you'll be moped to death before ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... distractions, dissipations, divisions, and dissolutions in commonwealths amongst themselves and between nations, so that all men may be represented as lions, tigers, wolves, serpents, and such like unsociable creatures, till the gospel come to tame them and subdue them, as it is often holden out in the prophets, Isa. ii. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... more of a sociable place there," Miss Mela broke in again. "I never saw such an unsociable place as New York. We've been in this house three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed three years any of the neighbors ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... (who would probably be glad to dispense with the sight of her countenance), inspire in this fairy such a lofty idea of herself and such a profound contempt for her neighbor, that they make her positively unsociable. She remains forever absorbed in the latrian worship which she believes due to herself. She deigns to speak but to God, and He must indeed be a kind and merciful God ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... Such a grace could, indeed, seem merely invidious, ungracious, and unreasonable in the eyes of both parties; he retreated without listening to the persuasions of his opponents, or asking the consent of his friends. The origin of all lay in his unsociable, supercilious, and self-willed disposition, which, in all cases, is offensive to most people; and when combined with a passion for distinction passes into absolute savageness and mercilessness. Men decline to ask ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Lee rarely smiled, and one may say never laughed outright. Yet he was neither sad nor unsociable. But there was that about him which made it wellnigh impossible to believe that he could ever have given completely away to feelings of mirth and indulged in a real fit of cachinnation. Such, however, was the fact, and it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... anybody away from the house. Upon this point there was never the least doubt. We might just as well have lived on a desert island while we had him. People went around the next block to avoid our house. It was not because Mac was unsociable; quite the contrary. He took to the town from the first, especially to the other dogs. These he generally took by the throat, to the great distress of their owners. I have never heard that bulldogs as a class have theories, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... had wings like yours, or that you clung to earth!' sighed the tender-hearted Honeysuckle, who, from having been so long in close companionship with the dark, unsociable Chrysalis had actually grown ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... education, very unusual in a girl of fifteen. She never lost a moment of time, and seemed almost to grudge the necessary leisure for relaxation and play-hours, which might be partly accounted for by the awkwardness in all games occasioned by her shortness of sight. Yet, in spite of these unsociable habits, she was a great favourite with her school-fellows. She was always ready to try and do what they wished, though not sorry when they called her awkward, and left her out of their sports. Then, at night, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... white dog, of mixed breed, that ever seemed to consider a guide a nuisance, when once he had got into his big head an idea of what I wanted him to do. Outside of his harness Old Voyager, as we called him, was a morose, sullen, unsociable brute. So hard to approach was he that generally a rope about sixty feet long, with one end fastened around his neck, trailed out behind him. When we wanted to catch him, we generally had to start ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... home," he said. "You can see what a sulky, unsociable fellow he is. No interest in nothing—thinks everybody hates him, and won't make up to anybody. He says he'll run away if I put him in school. If he does, I certainly will put him in the ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... first to a private school, and after a year or two to Eton, but at neither was he happy. And although he had been so merry at home, at school he was looked upon as a strange unsociable creature. He refused to fag for the bigger boys. He never joined in the ordinary school games, and would wander about by himself reading, or watching the clouds and the birds. He read all kinds of books, liking ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... "Evening dress not required," if one must descend to the vernacular. Well, I sat persistently and patiently through I am afraid to say how many operations, and the operator described me as being surrounded by spirits—I always am according to Mediums, but my spirits must be eminently unsociable ones, for they seldom give me a word, and on this occasion refused to be "taken" as resolutely as the bashful gentleman in the Graphic who resisted the operations of the prison officials to obtain a sun-picture ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies |
