"Repellant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nor hamper you now in your brave acceptance of the task that has come to you, because of wrong done before. It is distasteful to me, of course; it would be to any right-minded mother, to have her daughter in a position so repellant; but, strange as it may seem I'd rather you went with the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... grim against the smiling morning. Its shuttered windows giving an expression of blindness or the repellant mask of death. A dead house, that was what it was. Its doors and windows closed on the tragedy that had been enacted within its massive stone walls. It seemed more like a fortress than a house where warm human faces had once looked forth, and where ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... and manufacturers reached far more comprehensive and permeating proportions. In periods of peace these fraudulent methods were nauseating enough, but in times of war they were inexpressibly repellant and ghastly. During the Mexican War the Northern shoe manufacturers dumped upon the army shoes which were of so inferior a make that they could not be sold in the private market, and these shoes were found to be so absolutely worthless ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellant. I saw the big ships lying in the stream, the Alert, the California, the Rosa, with her Italians; then the handsome Ayacucho, my favorite; the poor dear old Pilgrim, the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... this shrinking from the encounter of our eyes. I said he was kind as usual. He was even more so. But there was this new sign of our silently repellant natures. Dislike it could not be. He knew I longed to serve him. Was it shame? Was there not a shade ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... down to dinner feeling that she had made some new and extraordinary discoveries. She noticed that her father and her aunt made several allusions which would have seemed mysterious and repellant to her the day before, but which now possessed an almost tragic interest. When before had she heard her aunt speak casually of a Mothers' Meeting and a Lending Library? These were common-place matters to the ordinary English ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... never been a witness at a death scene. I have seen thousands hurried out of life since then; and though even now I should find an execution ugly and repellant, I recall with some astonishment the agony of horror which this commission cost me. I had an introduction to the sub-sheriff and another to the governor of the gaol; and I presented these at the gaol itself on a night ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... force, as he had won all life's battles. He would not, could not, let this prize escape him now. A wave of desire surged through his being. He took a step toward her, his trembling arms open to seize her lithe, seductive body. But she, retreating, held him away with repellant palms. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... immortal pictures. He who writes literature does not select scenes of life which are beautiful in themselves, scenes which we would have liked to live through, full of radiant happiness and joy; he does not eliminate from his picture of life that which is disturbing to the peace of the soul, repellant and ugly and immoral. On the contrary, all the great works of literature have shown us dark shades of life beside the light ones. They have spoken of unhappiness and pain as often as of joy. We have suffered ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... mosquitoes were not the least, but they did us some good. We had no fences to keep our cattle, and the mosquitoes drove the oxen and cow up to the smoke which we kept near the house in order to keep those little pests away. The cattle soon learned, as well as we, that smoke was a very powerful repellant of those little warriors. Many times, in walking those logs and going through the woods there would be a perfect cloud of mosquitoes around me. Sometimes I would run to get away from them, then stop and look behind me and there ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... read Crabbe to-day in his entirety, you must become possessed of a huge and clumsy volume of sombre appearance, small type and repellant double columns. For fully seventy years it has not paid a publisher to reprint Crabbe's poems properly. {98} When this was achieved in 1834, the edition in eight volumes was comparatively a failure, and the promised two volumes ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... had looked a friendly world in the eye. She was that sort. He saw that she was troubled now at not being able to do this in the case of the trader of Katleean. Probably he himself was not attractive to her—perhaps he was even fascinatingly repellant with that electric and disturbing and promising quality that drew almost irresistibly. There were women who, under that impulsion, had been moved to come close and gaze into his pale, black-lashed eyes. It was an impulse akin to that which urges people ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... imminent peril from their captors, though, on the other hand, he was very far from feeling safe against harm. With a coolness that must have awakened admiration among the barbarians, the youth, standing in the middle of the group, folded his arms, and smilingly looked in the repellant faces, none of which were at a ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... place. The poor girl's first impulse was to spring towards her new protectress and pour out her troubles to her, but in spite of herself she felt the impulse checked, and her overflowing heart chilled by the cold and supercilious look that made still more repellant a face ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... political speaker or the society small-talk of a young man in the presence of ladies, he is never shy, and his flow of language and gesture is as natural to him as reserve and brevity to the Englishman. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon, especially the Briton, seems repellant in comparison with the Spanish-American, and to cultivate selfishness rather than ceremony in his ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... to insignificance by a disciplined arrangement of her thoughts and emotions. Much can be done if one will be firm with would-be vagrants of the mind. The pleasant may be given prominence; the disagreeable relegated to obscurity; the attractive installed in the living apartments; the repellant locked in a distant cellar, whence their ill-conditioned cries are audible occasionally only and in the distance. What might have been is sternly transformed from a beautiful vision into a revolting peril, and in this new shape is invoked to applaud the actual and vilify what is impossible. This ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... I am not surprised that his people should still keep on seeking information; for Thomas Glahn was in many ways an uncommon and likable man. I admit this, for fairness' sake, and despite the fact that Glahn is still repellant to my soul, so that the bare memory of him arouses hatred. He was a splendidly handsome man, full of youth, and with an irresistible manner. When he looked at you with his hot animal eyes, you could not but feel his power; even I felt ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... thunder-storm. For the sake of illustration, and nothing more, we will suppose the existence, throughout all otherwise void space, of three interflowing ethers, the atoms of each of which are, in regard to each other, repellant, negative, or the reverse of ponderable, and that these ethers differ in a series by vast intervals as to size and distance of atoms, that each neither repels nor attracts the other, that only the rarest is everywhere, and that the denser ones, while self-repellant, have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... separation are more nearly balanced. But even here, the wife who has hazarded least, suffers the most by the dissolution of the partnership; she loses a great part of her fortune, and of the conveniences and luxuries of life. She loses her home, her rank in society. She loses both the repellant and the attractive power of a mistress of a family. "Her occupation is gone." She becomes a wanderer. Whilst her youth and beauty last, she may enjoy that species of delirium, caused by public admiration; fortunate if habit does not destroy the power of this ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... lover as to conceal the recreancy he had fostered in his own heart, Harry did not notice the coolness of this greeting. Then, too, his self-satisfaction had always done him the invaluable service of preventing a ready perception of the repellant attitudes of others. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... was not a castle, you may as well be told, but only the name of a town, nearly contiguous to which was their residence, a small estate. Lord Mount Severn welcomed Isabel; Lady Mount Severn also, after a fashion; but her manner was so repellant, so insolently patronizing, that it brought the indignant crimson to the cheeks of Lady Isabel. And if this was the case at the first meeting, what do you suppose it must have been as time went on? Galling slights, petty vexations, chilling annoyances were put ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... dear?" said the old lady. I believe that she meant to be gracious, but there was something in her manner, or, perhaps, rather in her voice, so repellant, that Alice felt that they could hardly become true friends. "If ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness and genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard him with the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring and lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps did not desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always the red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them in the days of his abolition ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... in the United States. It is said that this oatmeal porridge was introduced to the British prisons by the Scotch influence, and we think that none but hogs and Scotchmen ought to eat it. A mess more repellant to a Yankee's stomach could not well be contrived. It is said, however, that the highlanders are very fond of it, and that the Scotch physicians extol it as a very wholesome and nutritious food, and very nicely calculated for the sedentary life of a prisoner: but by what ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... again, and I will be good as new. It is you who are killing yourself. You must change your arrangements or you will take typhoid fever, and after such a strain, recovery will be hopeless. I take nobody's disease—am too repellant; but you will catch contagion very readily. Keep away from fever cases and rest; you are in imminent peril." She hurried away, laughing at the idea of one in her perfect health being injured by hard work; ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... deep compassion for this lonely, joyless, loveless existence, felt a regard which was almost affection for this strange old man, whose very name was unknown to her. True that there was much in his countenance and manner which was sinister and repellant. He was a being calculated to inspire fear rather than love; but the fact that he had courted her presence and looked to her for consolation had touched Mary's heart, and she had become reconciled to all that was forbidding and disagreeable in the lunatic physiognomy. Was he not the victim ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... which he had broken. He became primitive, literal in his conception; the ramifications were, for the nonce, fairly relegated to limbo. He could not kiss Ruth because the acquired conscience—struggling on its way to limbo—made the idea repellant. Analysis would come later, when the primitive conscience, satisfied, would cease to dominate his ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... knowledge and interest in naval affairs derived from a sailor brother, Miles's chief friend and messmate in his training and earlier voyages. There was something in Joanna Bowater's manner that always unlocked hearts, and Anne was soon speaking without her fence of repellant stiffness and reserve. Certainly Miles was loved by his mother and brothers more than he could be by an old playfellow and sisterly friend, and yet there was something in Joanna's tone that gave Anne a sense of fellow-feeling, as if she had met a countrywoman ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge |
