"Pretentious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at this time to minimise and dispraise Tennyson's work. We have passed from Victorian certainties, and so he is apt when he writes in the mood of Locksley Hall and the rest, to appear to us a little shallow, a little empty, and a little pretentious. ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Michael's Bay. Out beyond the little wooded promontory that protects the mouth of the See, lies Mont St Michel, a fretted silhouette of flat pearly grey, and a little to the north is Tombelaine, a less pretentious islet in this fairyland sea. Framed by the stems and foliage of the trees, this view is one of the most fascinating in Normandy. One would be content to stay here all through the sultry hours of a summer day, to listen to the distant hum of ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... blocks were passed, and they stopped at a pretentious, many-windowed, Queen Anne house. Ruth ran lightly up the steps, her cousin ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... think, worth your while to look at Dean Stanley's Volume of Bishop Thirlwall's Letters; nay, even Dean Perowne's earlier volume, if but to show how the pedantic Boy grew into the large-hearted Man, and even Bishop: but, from the first, always sincere, just, and not pretentious. I remember him at Cambridge: he, Fellow and Tutor, and I undergraduate: and he took a little fancy to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... be acquired at the cost of stinting necessaries, often make one wonder whether it is possible for a man to go through a medical training and retain a spark of common sense. This sort of inconsiderateness gets cured only in the classes where poverty, pretentious as it is even at its worst, cannot pitch its pretences high enough to make it possible for the doctor (himself often no better off than the patient) to assume that the average income of an English family is about 2,000 pounds a year, and that it is quite easy to break ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... biggest and most pretentious building in Freekirk Head. It was of two stories height, and on its gray-painted front bore the three great gilt links of the society. To one side of it stood a wreck of a former factory, and behind it was the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... shown in the pretentious titles which he assumed and in the gorgeous pomp with which he was accompanied on public and even on private occasions. On August 15th, after bathing in the porphyry font in which the emperor Constantine had been baptized, he was crowned with seven crowns ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... to avoid feeling a little envious. Beevor had work to do in the world: even if it chiefly consisted in profaning sylvan retreats by smug or pretentious villas, it was still work which entitled him to consideration and respect in the ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... biographical notes appended to selections, there are not a few more pretentious sketches that have been given prominent titles in the body of the books. These have been prepared expressly for this work, either by the editor or by some one fully acquainted with the subject and accustomed ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... noon, Spargo found himself in one of those pretentious yet dismal Bayswater squares, which are almost entirely given up to the trade, calling, or occupation of the lodging and boarding-house keeper. They are very pretentious, those squares, with their many-storied houses, their stuccoed frontages, ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... court-suit, had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband, imprinted "Corsica Boswell," round his hat; and in short, if you will, lived no day of his life without doing and saying more than one pretentious inaptitude; all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... worthless thing, worn only for show: but an umbrella is no such confession; because it is not the office of the hat or bonnet to shelter the whole person from sun or rain.] But the brooch and the button must fasten, the chain suspend, the ring bear a device, or they sink into pretentious, vulgar shams. And there must be keeping between these articles and their offices. To use, for instance, a massive golden, or, worse, gilded chain to support a cheap silver watch is to reverse the order of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... pretentious, so he set up two distinct firms. One was the "Randall's Theatrical Bureau, Charles Frohman and W. W. Randall, Managers," which was under Randall's direction and which booked attractions for theaters throughout the country ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Detective and Confidential Inquiry Agent, appeared on the books of the Bolt Buildings management as lessee of one of these single rooms. The appearance of his quarters as presented to the visitor had, however, a more pretentious aspect. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... STRUCTURE IS BUILT UP.—It should be observed that each structure, however small, is usually built from the base up. Just the same as the more pretentious buildings are erected: First, the sill, then the floor supports, then the posts and top plates, with their connecting ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... of this one-time notorious rendezvous of freebooters might not be out of place. It consisted of a little settlement of those wattled and mud-smeared houses such as you find through the West Indies. There were only three houses of a more pretentious sort, built of wood. One of these was a storehouse, another was a rum shop, and a third a house in which dwelt a mulatto woman, who was reputed to be a sort of left-handed wife of Captain Scarfield's. The population was almost entirely black and brown. One or two Jews and a ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... other structure, either tent, cabin, or more pretentious framed house, was either a saloon or gambling-hell, or both combined. And all these seemed full. The gulches, sinks, and claims that had been the scene of busy labor all the day were now deserted, and the gold just wrenched from the bowels of the earth was scattered on the gambling table, ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... statement made by the ordinary standards, apart from their claimed exalted origin. If rational, beautiful, and spiritually helpful and enlightening, they are worth having on their own merits; but if they are unreasonable, wild or dogmatic, or pretentious and flattering, they should be discarded; and, unless you change their character after repeated experiments, your attention should be turned in some ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... curiosity. It was clear that he knew a great deal about art. And yet, if he were an artist, she would certainly be familiar with his name. Whatever his calling, he was sure to be distinguished. Those judicial eyes would be severe with any work more pretentious than that of a mere student; that firm, discriminating hand,—she had been struck with the way he handled her sketches,—would never have signed a poor performance. Perhaps it was Elihu Vedder in disguise,—or Sargent, or Abbey! Since the descent of the fairy-godmother upon the class ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... road through a homely New England district several hundred yards west of the pretentious mansions of Stockbridge, pass through a breezy open patch of pines, and one comes to a characteristic hillside New England orchard, the branches of whose trees just now are bright with ripening red apples. On the hillslope in the middle of the orchard and overlooking the famous 'Stockbridge ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... much from the pretty, clean, thriving country-town, to something that aped a grand city; unfinished streets, small farms laid waste, rows of pretentious houses or florid cottages that had never been thoroughly completed, nearly every one adorned with the ominous placard, "For Sale." They needed painting and tidying: vines were left about, dahlia-stalks hung to poles, steps were ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... jovially in the rough-and-ready revels that contrast not disagreeably with the social amenities left behind in the city. I spent some very pleasant hours of sunshine and twilight at the "Colonel's"; (he has as good a right to the title as many more pretentious dignitaries), though the "flying" was indifferent on both my visits. On the first occasion, though several varieties of fowl were bagged, we only secured one canvas-back, which was courteous enough to tumble to the stranger's ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... to peace was the mutual distrust with which each of the three parties regarded the others. Korea hated the Japanese with a perfect and justifiable hatred; she also feared and despised the pompous and pretentious pride of China. But in the negotiations which ensued the country which had suffered most had least to say. It remained for the two greater powers to come to some agreement which should be satisfactory to ...
— Japan • David Murray
... it is far better to live in less pretentious dwellings, dress more soberly and eat more sparingly than to owe any man anything. Pay what thou owest, and then you may walk ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... wheeled conveyance in California as late as 1840. Other Indians did the woodwork in buildings, made fences, etc. Some were carvers, and there are not a few specimens of their work that will bear comparison with the work of far more pretentious artisans. ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... border of the highroad, separated from it by high iron gates, through which one sees long winding alleys with stone benches and vases with red geraniums planted in them, a sun-dial and stiff formal rows of trees—some less pretentious with merely an ordinary wooden gate, generally open, and always flowers of the simplest kind, geraniums, sunflowers, pinks, dahlias, and chrysanthemums—what we call a jardin de cure, (curate's garden)—but in great abundance. With very rare exceptions the lawns ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... probably tell us when he has his plans perfected," Alice returned. "You know, though, that he promised if this 'A False Count' play should be a success he'd give us a chance in a more pretentious ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... afternoon Lord Curryfin was entreated to deliver in the theatre his lecture on Fish; he readily complied, and succeeded in amusing his audience more, and instructing them as much, as any of his more pretentious brother lecturers could have done. We shall not report the lecture, but we refer those who may be curious on the subject to the next meeting of the Pantopragmatic Society, under the presidency of Lord Facing-both-ways, and the ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... made to give a pretentious bibliography of the literature pertaining to the various aspects of artificial lighting, for there are many articles widely scattered through many journals. The Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society afford the most fruitful source of ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... stories to laughter, and mystery stories to curiosity. Cynical stories, showing the "pillars of society" in an ignoble light, appeal to the self-assertive impulse of the reader, in that he is led to apply their teaching to pretentious people whom he knows about, and set them down a peg, to his own relative advancement. But here again we have to insist, as under the head of sports and daydreams, that interests of a more objective kind are also gratified by a good work of fiction. A story ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... runs to the Hut at Wisley, to the Burford Bridge Hotel, where the genial Mr. Hunt—one of the last remaining Bohemians of the days of the Junior Garrick Club—welcomed them; to the Wooton Hatch, or up to those more pretentious and ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished, keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer of dovecots—with its method of manual training for example—keeping up ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself and every one about him, keeping ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... medical authorities, this does not form a necessary appendage to the hot-air bath, it is yet a feature that must be provided in the least pretentious of public establishments. Ever since, and long before, Cicero observed, in a letter to his brother Quintus, "Latiorem piscinam voluissem ubi jactata brachia non offenderentur," men who have taken the hot-air bath have loved the ample plunge. But although it should be sufficiently ...
— The Turkish Bath - Its Design and Construction • Robert Owen Allsop
... Boy Scouts, they had helped erect towers, hastily constructed of saplings. Their recalled knowledge, together with the natural adaptability and skill of the cowboys, finally succeeded in there being evolved, and erected, on the aide of the valley rather a pretentious tower. "It must look like an oil well derrick from a distance," observed Nort, when it was ...
— The Boy Ranchers on the Trail • Willard F. Baker
... observed that Ernest placed his men according to a certain plan, thought he would do the same. He, therefore, with not a small amount of pretentious formality, ordered the boys on his side to look out in different directions, and to follow a certain course. Some went where they were told, but others proceeded to where they themselves considered that they should be better ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... part of the road Harry saw approaching him an open buggy of rather a pretentious character, driven by a schoolmate, Philip Ross, the son of Colonel Ross, a wealthy resident ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... servants had always a comb about them to arrange the wigs of their masters, whilst the latter thought it fashionable to comb and arrange their hair in public (see The Pretentious Young Ladies).] ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... wood was abundant, and a saw-pit had been erected, a more pretentious one-floored cottage residence was planned to join on to the first building, which before long was entirely devoted to the servants; and we soon had a very charming little home with shingle roof, over which beautiful creepers literally ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... automobile into a somber avenue of locusts recalled him to the present, and he looked about him curiously. Mr. Bangs had not been satisfied to build his habitation far from town; he had taken, the added precaution to place it a mile back from the road. It was a somewhat pretentious modern house, half hidden by a high hedge. The window-shades were drawn, the doors were closed. The only signs of life about the place were a porch chair, still rocking as if from recent occupation, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... down on her with chill disapproval as she entered; the elevator-man stared at her with black, hostile eyes until she had made herself known; and even the superintendent—in a less pretentious structure than the Elegancia, he would have been the janitor—now that "Number Six" was rented, did not extend even a perfunctory welcome as he delivered the keys. On the contrary, he made known the exclusive character of the house in such a pointed ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... that rolls past our view under the direction of the aristocrat of literature made my late life seem poor and mean. How low we were! The darkened costers are interesting as studies in animal life; but the more pretentious persons whose humour reaches its highest flight in an indecent story, and whose wit consists in calling someone else a liar—how petty they are, and how fruitless is their friendship! I began to feel like a patrician who surveys the mob from his ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... original proprietor. Here one can get the finest Italian peasant meal in the city, and many of the Italian merchants and bankers still go there for their luncheons every day, preferring it to the more pretentious establishments. ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... fall into the hands of a logical old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly informed you that in his opinion you were nothing more than a very empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman—perhaps even, after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a regular ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... bag hanging conspicuously from his belt. He did not come into the dining room or take regular meals, claiming to be sufficiently nourished by the raw wheat he masticated so industriously. We had not noticed him especially—no one took much notice of pretentious faddists—but on going around to the back door for the chicken-feed one evening Bonico and I recognized the wheat-muncher bending over the salver eagerly picking up whatever bits and pieces he could find to eat. He was so engaged in this employ that we did not disturb ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... confines, it curved round one side of the park bordered by a grand row of elms. Here the houses were mansions, set back in fine old gardens that had smiled there many a summer before the boarding-houses were built. The last house in the row, Crescent Court, was of a newer date. It was a pretentious apartment house, set up on the corner commanding a view of the campus and the park. Just far enough removed from the boarding-house region was Crescent Court to be quite beyond the noise of the street-cars and the shoppers, and consequently its inmates felt themselves ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... XIV., drawing still nearer to Mazarin, under the pretext of gaining a better point of view, "look at that simple white dress by the side of those antiquated specimens of finery, and those pretentious coiffures. She is probably one of my mother's maids of honor, though I ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... intentional mixture of tonalities (the sustained B in the flute and oboe being answered by a C on the horns and harp, while beneath are heard fragments of the March theme in the main key on the pizzicato double basses).[238] Berlioz's most pretentious orchestral composition is that called in the full title "Romeo and Juliet, dramatic symphony, with choruses, vocal solos, and a prologue in choral recitative, composed after Shakespeare's tragedy." Notwithstanding many touches of genius, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... a glimpse, too, of large—even too large—Government buildings, brick-built, pretentious, without beauty of form. But, however ugly in itself a building may be in Trinidad, it is certain, at least after a few years, to look beautiful, because embowered among noble flowering timber trees, like those ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... standing upon the banks of the rivers which they were to defend—Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, Pittsburg, St. Louis. They, with the Benton, formed the backbone of the river fleet throughout the war. Other more pretentious, and apparently more formidable, vessels, were built; but from thorough bad workmanship, or appearing too late on the scene, they bore no proportionate share in the fighting. The eight may be fairly called the ships of the line of battle on the ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... of lines, some of which on every page, and many on some pages, have—contrary to all good usage—the superfluous eleventh syllable. Milton never allows himself this liberty, nor Mr. Tennyson in epic verse so little pretentious as "Idyls of the King." Nor do good blank-verse translators give in to it. Cowper does not in his Iliad, nor Lord Derby, nor Mr. Bryant in his version of the fifth book of the Odyssey, nor Mr. Carey in his Dante. Permissible at times in dramatic blank verse, it is in epic rejected ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... with two young children and a number of debts. She sold all her property excepting the farm of Toucques and the farm of Geffosses, the income of which barely amounted to 5,000 francs; then she left her house in Saint-Melaine, and moved into a less pretentious one which had belonged to her ancestors and stood back of the market-place. This house, with its slate-covered roof, was built between a passage-way and a narrow street that led to the river. The interior was so unevenly graded that it caused people ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... time at the Hotel de Rambouillet would include the most noted names of the century, besides many which were famous in their day, but at present are little more than historical shadows. The conversations were often learned, doubtless sometimes pretentious. One is inclined to wonder if these noble cavaliers and high-born woman did not yawn occasionally over the scholarly discourse of Corneille and Balzac upon the Romans, the endless disputes about rival sonnets, and the long discussions on the value of a word. "Doubtless it is a very beautiful ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... lift their voices to proclaim Him near, the first to warn the people to prepare for His coming. But they were at ease, dreaming of peace and safety, while the people were asleep in their sins. Jesus saw His church, like the barren fig-tree, covered with pretentious leaves, yet destitute of precious fruit. There was a boastful observance of the forms of religion, while the spirit of true humility, penitence, and faith—which alone could render the service acceptable to God—was ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... France and Italy: he had discovered what were left of the old-fashioned inns of England where cider or beer are drunk by the sort of Englishmen he had come to love best—the poor. In his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that he most hated in the middle classes he had come to feel that the life of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it when they were free men, was the ideal. And that ideal included moderate drinking, drinking to express joy in life and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... two-roomed wooden shed, sparingly furnished with a couple of tin pails. Humanity forbidding the incarceration of Captain Satterlee in such a hovel, the little consul passed on to Mulinuu, where the general Samoan Government held sway. The jail here was on a more pretentious scale. It consisted of a rectangular inclosure, perhaps sixty feet by forty, formed by four eight-foot walls of galvanized iron, and containing within five or six small huts of the kind that shipwrecked seamen might build on a desert island. In fact that was just about what they were, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... streets lead through the town of Coucy into a great green space which commands the castle. It is approached from the new and rather pretentious lodge in which the keeper of the castle now resides, through one of the finest and loftiest avenues in France. But the tallest trees are dwarfed by the gigantic donjon tower. This rises to a height still of at least ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... symmetrically arranged; the aisles are wide; the working space is ample; there is no fear to haunt machine tenders that a mis- step or a moment of forgetfulness will entangle them in a neighboring machine. The factory buildings themselves, without being pretentious, have pleasing, simple lines and unobtrusive ornamentation. They look like, and are, when the human equation does not interfere, *pleasant places to ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... to say that, as usual, you make yourself pretentious and disagreeable; people sing as they can sing; all voices ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... the meritorious ones. Counterfeit currency does not diminish the value of the true coin; it is very sure to find its own just level at last; and so the wretched or the sensational periodical, however pretentious, will fall into inevitable neglect and failure in ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... evening. Mr. Sutherland Bangs cherishes a comfortable vision of himself as a handsome, engaging fellow, with a gift for talk, a breezy manner, a stylish presence, and an elegant accent. And seated beside himself at dinner he would discover that he was a pretentious bore, that his talk was windy commonplace, his breezy manner an offence, his fine accent an unpleasant affectation. He would say that he would never want to see that fellow again. And, realising that that ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... going in for popularity. Look here! Suppose that's what I was meant for? What if it's the best I have in me to do? Shouldn't I be a jackass if I scorned to make money by what, for me, was good work, and preferred to starve whilst I turned out pretentious stuff that was worth nothing from my ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... taverne, or wine shop, which had a sign over its door—a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx. And through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a table. We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from the workshop that the white cambric lining was hardly soiled. The figure 18 was on the collar; we decided that ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... motor, she drove near the address and then proceeded on foot. The street was a prominent one, the block one of the best, the house almost pretentious. She glanced at her memorandum again to see if she was mistaken. Perhaps the woman was a domestic; probably she was, for the name on the door was Stillings. It occurred to her that she had heard that name before—but ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... really true!" he exclaimed. "The girl had told me something of this, weeping, when I asked her the motive of the senor's visit. I could not believe her at first. Girls are so pretentious! They imagine that every man is running mad after them; so it is ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... appreciated the charm of the old-fashioned, and seemed to dovetail perfectly into the plain grooves of her people and his with their quaint old dress and houses and manners. A woman, too, who had an intense love for the great outdoors. Not the shallow, pretentious love that would call forth gushing rhapsodies about moonlight or sunsets or the spectacular alone in nature, but a sincere, deep-rooted love that shone in her eyes as she stooped to see more plainly the tracery of veins in a fallen leaf ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... comfortably finished. In the backyard were the dwellings of the workmen. At the corner of the western side was a platform, upon which four cannon were placed, and at the eastern corner a palisade was constructed in the shape of a platform. There was nothing pretentious or elegant about these buildings, but ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... very rich; suppose he did make very much money—much more than he had ever had even in the past—what good would it do her here? In Philadelphia, before his failure, before she had been suspected of the secret liaison with him, he had been beginning (at least) to entertain in a very pretentious way. If she had been his wife then she might have stepped smartly into Philadelphia society. Out here, good gracious! She turned up her pretty nose in disgust. "What an awful place!" was her one comment at this most stirring of ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... very few he recognized, yet it was comparatively easy to classify the majority—officers' wives; the frontier helpmates of the more prominent merchants of the town; women from the surrounding ranches, who had deserted their homes until the Indian scare ceased; a scattered few from pretentious small cities to the eastward, and, here and there, younger faces, representing ranchmen's daughters, with a school-teacher or two. Altogether they made rather a brave show, occasionally exhibiting toilets worthy ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... bird, stamping furiously on the seat of the chair; "I hate 'em—nasty, showy, pretentious, ill-bred creatures; regular shrieking hypocrites, that's ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... possessed it. But he can talk with glib superficiality and imposing confidence about every conceivable subject, from a play or a picture to a sermon or a metaphysical essay. It is the utter indifference to subject-matter, joined with the vulgar unscrupulousness of pretentious ignorance, that strikes the keynote of our existing criticism. Men write without taking the trouble ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... particular group of adventurous miners. In Indian file, lantern-led, we traverse the narrow, beaten path that leads to one of the openings of the mine. These are covered by a rough-plank house,—too much like a shed to merit that pretentious term, which implies something fit to live in; in the centre of this shelter is an open space, perhaps a yard square, and similar in appearance to a trap-door in a roof. Here we wait a few moments, while the Captain of the Mine and the Agent ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... Haydn, have written wonderful pages; often indeed they have been uplifted by the mystic effluence, the very emanation of the Middle Ages, for ever lost; and yet their works have retained a certain pomp, and in spite of all are pretentious, as opposed to the humble magnificence, the sober splendour of the Gregorian chant—with them the whole thing came to an end, for composers no ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... is larger and more pretentious than that at Riverhead. It is better built, and has a second storey and a balcony above the verandah. It is furnished, too, in a style that would do credit to Auckland—we particularly noticing some capital cabinet-work in the beautiful ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... questionable exercise of private judgment. On the whole, he was right, no doubt, in being as indulgent as he dared to the publicans and sinners like Scoutbush; and in being as severe as he dared on all Pharisees, and pretentious persons whatsoever: but he was too much inclined to draw between the two classes one of those strong lines of demarcation which exist only in the fancies of the human brain; for sins, like all diseased matters, are complicated and confused ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... ladies and gentlemen—-and they are! They are all three of them too shiftless to do any work. They take the old man's money, but they won't live with him. They are too busy in 'society' to bother with the old man. On what he is able to turn over to his children every month they keep a rather pretentious home in Fenton, though they live a full mile away from their father. They never go near him, except for more money. If they meet him on his wagon, or when he is walking in his old clothes, they refuse to recognize him. ...
— The High School Boys' Training Hike • H. Irving Hancock
... good-sized though low-pitched parlour with a glazed door, now wide open, as were all the latticed windows, looking into a small garden, rich in those straggling old English flowers which are nowadays banished from gardens more pretentious and; infinitely less fragrant. At one corner was an arbour covered with honeysuckle, and opposite to it a row of beehives. The room itself had an air of comfort, and that sort of elegance which indicates the presiding genius ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... d'Or," a historical novel of rare Merit, thus recalls this house—"The family mansion of the des Meloises was a tall and rather pretentious edifice overlooking the fashionable rue St Louis where it still stands, old and melancholy as if mourning over its departed splendors. Few eyes look up now-a-days to its broad facade. It was otherwise when the beautiful Angelique de Meloises sat of summer evenings on ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... attained the highest, pretended that obscurity was the equivalent of profundity. When writing this, I was thinking of the obscure final speech about God in Heaven in Bjoernson's Mary Stuart, which I still regard as quite vague, pretentious though it be as it stands there; however, it was an exaggeration to generalise the grievance, as I had done, and Bjoernson was right to reply. He considered that I had accused him of insincerity, though in this he was wrong; but for that matter, with hot-tempered eloquence, he also denied ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... go fishing was made at the little golf club of our summer town on the veranda where we sit in the evening. Oh, it's just a little place, nothing pretentious: the links are not much good for golf; in fact we don't play much golf there, so far as golf goes, and of course, we don't serve meals at the club, it's not like that—and no, we've nothing to drink there because of prohibition. But we go and sit there. It ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... the one foolish thing she ever did. Oh, what a glorious riddance!" And, after a little thought, he negotiated the slope into Windy Corner, light of heart. The house was again as it ought to be—cut off forever from Cecil's pretentious world. ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... Church, Oxford! The eye of the vulgar is entranced, the eye of the artist bewildered. That the imagination which inspired that decorative scheme was powerful, original, and noble, will not be denied; but this does not save us from the desolating conviction that the scheme itself is a specious and pretentious mask, devised to hide a hideous ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... little knots and coteries. Our last snowball riot read us a plain lesson on our condition. There was no party spirit—no unity of interests. A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they reached their destination the feeble inspiration had died out in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others slunk back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors. The same is visible in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mahomet or Mohammed (for Muhammad), the modern form is adopted because the more familiar. But I see no advantage in retaining,, simply because they are the mistakes of a past generation, such words as "Roc" (for Rikh),), Khalif (a pretentious blunder for Kalifah and better written Caliph) and "genie" ( Jinn) a mere Gallic corruption not so terrible, however, as "a Bedouin" ( Badawi).). As little too would I follow Mr. Lane in foisting upon the public such Arabisms as "Khuff" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... "gentleman"—how my gorge does rise at that word! So he put his great mind on it only for a few hours now and then; he reserved the rest of his time for what he regarded as the proper concerns of a gentleman—attending to social "duties," reading pretentious books, looking at the pictures and listening to the music ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... uttered, had touched Genet's sensibilities; while the severe simplicity and dignity of manner, and the absence of that effervescent enthusiasm in the midst of which he had been cast since his arrival, administered rebuke alike to the adulators in public places, and his own pretentious aspirations. He had come with secret instructions to foment war between the United States and England for the benefit of France, but that single interview with Washington made him feel, for the time, that his efforts must result ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... the restaurants, cafes, and tables d'hote within the gates, and I had also found that outside, and especially within easy reach from the northern or Fifty-seventh Street gate, were to be found a number of most cleanly and inviting little places, more or less pretentious, and under various names, but all ready, willing, and able to serve one a breakfast, dinner, or luncheon such as would tempt even chronic grumblers to smile, ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... of all classes and kinds, dignified and undignified, humble and pretentious, scattered all over this broad land. But these do not take on the sturdy growth of permanency and prosperity that usually attaches to the affairs of others. On the contrary we are surprised if they exhibit undue vitality and ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... highest degree ever known on earth. They were expressed in their temples, their statues, and their pictures. They did not live for utilities. When art became a utility, it degenerated. It became more pretentious, artificial, complicated, elaborate, ornamental even, but it lacked genius, the simplicity of power, the glory of originality. The horses of the sun cannot be made to go round in a mill. The spiritual must keep within its own seclusion, in its inner temple of mystery ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... custom bordering native barbarism and dirt was what I anticipated; for, as I looked upon the naked rocks,—which there, as in other Greenland ports, afforded room for a few straggling huts of native fishermen and hunters, with only now and then a more pretentious white man's lodge,—I could hardly imagine that much would be found seductive to the fancy or inviting to the eye. A country where there is no soil to yield any part of man's subsistence seemed to offer such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... town most of the piety is knocked out of a man. You stare at the houses, and they stare back at you dumbly. There is nothing pretentious or rakish about any of them; no matter how riotous a man's imagination might be, he could never conjure up a "wink" from a Boer house, though I have seen houses in other parts of the world that seemed to ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... individuals, for example. The desire for recognition is a permanent and universal trait of human nature, but in the case of an egocentric personality, this wish may take the form of an excessive humility or a pretentious boasting. The wish is the same but the attitudes in which it finds ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Pretentious gardens are now gayly decorated with glowing masses of pelargoniums and vincas, belts of rich coleuses and fiery alternantheras, patchwork of feverfew and mesembryanthemum, and scroll-work of house leeks, but amid this gay checkering it is wonderful how few flowers there are for cutting for bouquets. ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... is always a depressing spectacle. Some of the other poems are so simple and modest that we hope Mr. Ross will not carry out his threat of issuing a 'more pretentious volume.' Pretentious volumes of poetry are very common ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... again muses: "Doubtless, Valerie is pretty and I shall be happy to have her as my wife. But she is young, pretentious; she will demand lots of new clothes, she will want to go out a lot, in fact, so much that I'll not be able to lay anything aside. Moreover, she'll not look after the kitchen, I'll have poor food, and the cook will rob us." Anguish seizes him. He ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... powers were so limited by the conditions under which he had to act that to a large extent public interests had to drift along without direction and management. In some degree, the situation resembled that which existed in the Holy Roman Empire when a complicated legalism kept grinding away and pretentious forms of authority were maintained, although, meanwhile, there was actual administrative impotence. Striking evidence of the existence of such a situation is found in President ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... big and pretentious programme here suggested, the first to be decided by breaks with the old principle of non-interference in state affairs. But the times are so exceptional that extraordinary measures cannot be shunned. If one sees two lads fight each other with their fists or even sticks one may ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... open and permanently warped with long sagging. There was a hitch-rail outside the gate, and Bud took the hint and left his horses there. From the wisps of fresh hay strewn along the road, Bud knew that haying had begun at Little Lost. There were at least four cabins and a somewhat pretentious, story-and-a-half log house with vines reaching vainly to the high window sills, and coarse lace curtains. One of these curtains moved slightly, and Bud's sharp eyes detected the movement and knew that his arrival was observed in spite of the ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... tower in the meadow, from which a windmill pumped water to the house. The iron frame was not wholly covered with stone, but material for the remainder of the work lay scattered at the base. I went on through the wood to the lake and inspected the boat-house. It was far more pretentious than I had imagined from my visit in the dark. It was of two stories, the upper half being a cozy lounging-room, with wide windows and a fine outlook over the water. The unplastered walls were hung with Indian blankets; lounging-chairs and a broad seat under the windows, colored matting on the floor ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... impelled successively the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians to cover Western Asia with architectural monuments, proofs at once of the wealth, and the grand ideas, of those who raised them. Parthia, compared to these pretentious empires, was retiring and modest. The monarchs, however rich they may have been, affected something of primitive rudeness and simplicity in their habits and style of life, their dwellings and temples, their palaces and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... fearsome discord?" he asked. "It makes me think of an epitaph I once saw carved on a pretentious headstone in a little ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... palace of over-ornate architecture, as pretentious and as showy as the mansion of a millionaire parvenu, Rafael was condemned to spend his lifetime, foregoing the blue sky and the flowering fields and orchards of Alcira that a family ambition might ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the course which we must follow to attain this goal, there may be various opinions. I proposed the establishment of a union of Central European States. The conservative press characterized that as "utterly pretentious."... ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... is pretentious, vulgar. Nature wants me to admire her—I will not. I'll wait—the sylphs of the evening will soon come and sprinkle the thirsty flowers with their vapors ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie—the Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs purporting ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... emphatic promise, the old bear-hunter separates from the less pretentious votary of the chase; as he does so giving the latter a squeeze of the hand, which tells him he may go back in confidence to the negro quarter, and sit, or sleep, by the side of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... the ordinary run of novels because it is more amusing, less pretentious and not so long. About as long as the ordinary novel might be if only novelists would omit superfluities. Just the right length."—N. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... exclusiveness must mark all our matin,es and soir,es; they would fail of the chief element of diversion if we invited everybody. Let us, therefore, make sure of the aesthetic and intellectual, the sympathetic and the genial, and sift out the pretentious and the impure. The rogues, the pretenders, the adventurers who push into the penetralia of our social circles are many, and it is to the exclusion of such that a hostess ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... the possibilities—a fat, pretentious medium whom Annette's mind transformed by the alchemy of old affection into a presentable personage; a masculine and severe old woman with the "spook" look in her eyes; a fluttering, affected precieuse, ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... summer day fills the narrow valley, softening the rough goings-on of life into harmony with the gentleness of sea and shore, field and sky. No doubt the suburbs are as unsightly as mere boxes of brick and lime can be, with an ugliness mean because pretentious, an altogether modern ugliness; but even this cannot touch the essential beauty of ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... House looks like that," Bab said, after half a moment's pause. "I was so afraid it would be pretentious. But it is just big and simple and dignified as our President's home ought to be. It makes me feel so glad to be an American," Barbara ended with a flush. She was afraid the other girls were ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... tongue, so far as grammar and the verse will bear, written chiefly for the use of schools, to be used according to the directions in the preface to the painfull schoolmaster, and more fully in the book called, 'Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar school, chap. 8.'" Notwithstanding a title so pretentious, it contains a translation of no more than the first 567 lines of the first Book, executed in a fanciful and pedantic manner; and its rarity is now the only merit of the volume. A literal interlinear translation of the first Book "on the plan recommended by Mr. Locke," was published in 1839, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... volume, noting the careful engrossing. Then he paused as he came to the pages he was searching for. He examined the ornate script closely, then looked at the intricate stamp. It was the signature stamp of the old king. Beside it was his queen's less pretentious stamp. ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... the bench on which he sate. Mr. Schloss, who had been appointed as a correspondent by Mr. Mundella, has a name which shows a German origin. Jimmy insisted on speaking of him accordingly as "Herr Schloss." And there, not a yard from Jimmy, sate the Baron de Worms, one of the most portentous and pretentious of English patriots, who bears not only a German name, but a German title. I don't know whether "Herr" Goschen was in the House at the same time; if so, his feelings must have been very poignant. Mr. Mundella ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... pen-knife, on the trails of raiding Apaches (where "scientific expeditions" ten years later, when the Apache was eliminated, needed armed convoys and pack-trains enough for a punitive expedition, and wrote pretentious books about what every scholar has known for three hundred years) I deeply wonder at the dual quality of his intellect. Among them all, I have never known such student and such explorer lodged in ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... been asked and answered, the more pretentious gentleman laid a hand affectionately on the other's ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... hands, are seen winding their steps towards some hamlet after the day's labor. Arched stone bridges, old and moss-grown, come into view, spanning small watercourses on their way from the mountains to join more pretentious streams. Elevated spots show us the ruins of old stone towers, once a part of some feudal stronghold, but the eye seeks in vain for well-wooded slopes, thrifty groves, or cultivated fields with promising crops. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... pale Little Scout—whose simple touch would then have instantly revived and soothed him, whose tender love was his comfort, his sanctuary from pursuing evils; the scene of his old home, far cosier, far more beloved, far more cheerful for all its homeliness, for all its poverty, than the more pretentious one of Emanuel Griffin; the scene of lowly pleasures it had cherished; of the bitter trials it had assuaged; and, finally, of the bright, laughing group he had left there, oh! so little prepared, so little conscious of the blight ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... the most extravagant compliments; her senseless chatting I described as unrestraint tempered by finesse, her pretentious exaggerations as a natural desire to please; was it her fault that she was poor? At least she thought of nothing but pleasure and confessed it freely; she did not preach sermons herself, nor did she listen to them from others; I went so far ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... they breathe and which colors them—dyes them in the wool. However skilless, they cannot help reproducing, any more than water poured from an old ink-bottle can help coming out more or less black; although, if sufficiently pretentious, they can monstrously caricature, especially if they begin with the modest time-worn admission that they are more familiar with the marling-spike than with the pen. But even the caricature born of pretentiousness will not prevent the unpremeditated betrayal of conditions, facts, and incidents, ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... a time, despatched a pretentious octavo, in the Edinburgh, with a critique, one paragraph in length; that achievement is matched by the disposal of a work in the Courier and Enquirer, as follows, by ingeniously employing the opening sentence of ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... entirely fled, leaving a shell that was artificial to the point of being false. The sanction of olden time that used to haunt with beauty was deceived by a mockery I found almost hideous. The ancient inns, for instance, adapted to week-end motor traffic, were pretentious and uncomfortable, their "menus" of inferior food written elaborately in French. The courtliness had vanished, and the cost had come. Telephones everywhere not only destroyed privacy, but brought dismay ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... long ride nor a long walk, though the sun was insufferable. The capital of Paraguay is not large. It is a sleepy, somnolent little town in which the most pretentious building was begun as the Presidential Palace and wound up as the home of a bank. But there are bullet marks on the facade of the Museo Nacional, and there is still an empty pedestal here and there throughout the city where the heroes of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... other romantic attractions besides its scenery. In the early 'sixties Ben Holladay, one of the founders of the great Overland Stage system that reached from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri River, built a pretentious house at the head of the Bay. Naturally it was occupied by the family only part of the time, and in 1879, a tramp, finding it unoccupied, took up his lodgings therein, and, as a mark of his royal departure, the structure burned down the next morning. The site was ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James |
