"Ugliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Stryker. "There is a vast deal of prettiness, and very little repulsive ugliness among the women in this country. But it strikes me they are inclining a little too much to the idea, just now, that all the beauty in the world is collected in these United States, which, as we all know ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... old woman, raising her voice, "a scoundrel of a howling dervish robbed me at Scutari of all I had for my subsistence, and of my daughter's portion, seven hundred sequins, in a goat-skin bag!"—and then she began to curse. May the dogs of the city howl at her ugliness! How she did curse! She cursed my father and mother—she cursed their graves—flung dirt upon my brother and sisters, and filth upon the whole generation. She gave me up to Jehanum, and to every species of defilement. It was a dreadful thing to hear that old woman curse. ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Market is a series of covered arcades with a square in the middle of it, and in the middle of the square a little church with some doll-like trees. These arcades are Western in their hideous covering of glass and the ugliness of the exterior of the wooden shops that line them, but the crowd that throngs them is Eastern, so that in the strange eyes and voices, the wild gestures, the laughs, the cries, the singing, and the dancing that meets one here it is as ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... quite so bad as Derrick thought him, but just at that time everything seemed to go wrong with him, and he was like some savage animal suffering from a pain for which it can find no relief. He began to repent of his ugliness to Derrick almost as soon as the latter had left him, saying to himself, "Maybe de lad ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... the enemy's country. Presently three of the Ma'azah came in and explained, with their barking voices, that their people had been practicing at the Nishan ("target"); which meant "We have powder in abundance." One of them, at once dubbed El-Nasnas ("the Satyr") from his exceeding monstrous ugliness—a baboon's muzzle with a scatter of beard—kindly volunteered to guide us, with the intention of losing the way. The dialogue that took ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... patiently, but nothing more happened. After all, why should he trouble about these people's actions? Why this stupid concern for the preliminaries, since, when the issue was joined, it would find him disarmed and shrinking from the ugliness and degradation ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... cronies," or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of ugliness; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker's pigs; now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of Master Brow the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog; now filching the skim-milk of Dame Wheeler's cat:—spit at by the cat; worried ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... come from the weakness or faithlessness of one of the lovers? No, ah no, I wanted it without ugliness, pure beautiful sorrow, to fit that dark shadow of the pines ... the lovers must ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... climbed down to the foot of the rocks. She was sitting in her favourite spot, a spur of rock overhanging a green nook in the broken ugliness of the cliffs, sheltered from the sea by an encircling arm of rock, and reached by a steep path down the cliff. Around her towered an amphitheatre of vast cliffs in which the sea sang loud music to the spirit of solitude. In the moaning waters in front of the cove a jagged ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... the baron, without even a smile at the ingenious and truly Greek manner in which Randal had contrived to denote his meaning, and conceal the ugliness of it—"true, we must think of that. If we could manage to conceal the real name of the purchaser for a year or so, it might be easy,—you may be supposed to have speculated in the Funds; or Egerton may die, and people may believe that he had secured to you something handsome from ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... everything that amused, interested, excited, all fine pictures, great poems, lovely scenes, intrepid thoughts, exercise, work, jests, laughter, perceptions, fancies—they were all one now; only sorrow and weariness and dulness and ugliness and greediness were gone. The thought was fresh, pure, delicate, full of a great and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... poor fellow was absurdly ashamed of it; he blushed at the pitying glances that people threw at him in passing—like a penny that you give, turning away your head at the same time from the unpleasant sight. For in his sensitiveness he exaggerated his ugliness and was disgusted by his deformity. He dwelt on his lost joys and ruined youth; when he saw couples in the street, he could not help feeling jealous; the tears ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... matter of appearance,—whether the building may as well be ugly as beautiful. By no means; what I have said is in the interest of beauty, as far as it is possible to us. Positive beauty it may be often necessary to forego, but bad taste is never necessary. Ugliness is not mere absence of beauty, but absence of it where it ought to be present. It comes always from a disappointed expectation,—as where the lineaments that do not disgust in the potato meet us in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... She felt cold, slightly sick, though she replied that now he summed up his creed in such a distinct, lucid way, it was much more comfortable—one knew with what one was dealing; a declaration much at variance with the fact, for Verena had never felt less gratified in her life. The ugliness of her companion's profession of faith made her shiver; it would have been difficult to her to imagine anything more crudely profane. She was determined, however, not to betray any shudder that could suggest weakness, and the best way she could ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... the most hopeless kind of ugliness," say I, with an admirable dispassionateness, as if I were talking of some one else, as, armed in full panoply, I stand staring at my white reflection in a long mirror let into the wall—staring at myself from top to toe—from ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... except when his indignation was kindled, he was abnormally reluctant to say "no,"—he once shuddered to think what would have happened to him if he had been a woman, but was consoled by the thought that his ugliness would have been a shield; and his private secretaries accuse him of carrying out his principle with needless and even ridiculous care. In appointments to which the party principle did not apply, but in which an ordinary man would have felt party prejudice, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... He swam on the surface of the water, he plunged beneath, but all animals passed him by, on account of his ugliness. And the autumn came, the leaves turned yellow and brown, the wind caught them and danced them about, the air was very cold, the clouds were heavy with hail or snow, and the Raven sat on the hedge and croaked. The poor Duckling ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... than I, how much stronger his body, that he could do anything with me if he liked. He asked me, very politely, whether I'd mind blowing out the candle and I did it at once. He watched me as I walked across the floor and I felt ashamed of my thinness and my ugliness and I know that he knew that I was ashamed. After the light was blown out I heard him settle into his bed with a great heavy plop. I couldn't sleep for a long time, and at every movement that he made I felt as though he were laughing at me. And yet with all this ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... Kitmudgar, that there is one beauty of women, and another beauty of scorpions; and if the beauty of scorpions be to thee as the ugliness of women, the fault is in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... with black socks and straw slippers. His hat, something like a reversed bowl, shone with lacquer and ornaments of gold. I must say, however, that Europeans have no right to quiz the head covering of any nation in the world, as ours far surpass all others in ugliness, and in the want of adaptation ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... could not dim, and old age itself was powerless to destroy. This indescribable something shone out in the eye, spoke in the voice, made the plainest features pleasing, and imparted an irresistible charm to the manner. It was as far superior to mere external beauty as the latter is to revolting ugliness. Nothing could destroy it: once gained, it was a lasting heritage. But on the other hand, if this rose were possessed by the false-hearted, the sensual, and the selfish, it sickened and paled day by day, giving forth a fainter fragrance continually, ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... From time to time there came into our midst Vera Marcel, the Red Virgin of the barricades, the heroine of the Commune of Paris—a woman of blood and smoke and of infinite mercies towards men and beasts. I can see her still, almost beautiful in her rugged ugliness, her eyes full of the fire of faith and insane fanaticism, her hair dishevelled, her clothes uncared for. I can hear the wonderful ring of her tragic voice as she pleaded the misery of the poor and suffering, of the oppressed, the outcast, the criminal, the rejected, and as it rose higher and ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... Floyer, was about thirty years of age; his face was neither remarkable for its beauty nor its ugliness, but sufficiently distinguished by its expression of invincible assurance; his person, too, though neither striking for its grace nor its deformity, attracted notice from the insolence of his deportment. His ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now be ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... strong line, in a twinkle he had tied one fore and one leg together, so that the bear, when he got again, could do little but hobble along. Then another pocket he drew a leather muzzle, which he buckled over the beast's head. But bear had had all of the ugliness knocked out him and was once ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... one who knows and who looks beyond the mere external form for that hidden something in both man and horse which bespeaks strength and reserve force, there was seen through the blindness and the ugliness and the sleepy, ambling, shuffling gait a clean-cut form, with deep chest and closely ribbed; with well drawn flanks, a fine, flat steel-turned bone, and a powerful muscle, above hock and forearms, that clung to the leg as the Bishop ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... strange perverted pride in this mournful sameness of attire,—delight in wearing a hat like every other man's hat, are content that it should be a perfected miracle of ugliness, that it should be hot, that it should be heavy, that it should be disfiguring, if only they can make sure of seeing fifty, or a hundred and fifty, other hats exactly like it on their way downtown. So absolute is this uniformity that the late Marquess of Ailesbury bore all ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the house, in spite of the clearing up of the matter of Sue's ugliness at the Grovers, a subtle change had taken place in the relationship of the two. Although they were together facing the first of the events that were to be like ports-of-call in the great voyage of their lives, they were not facing it with the same mutual understanding and kindly ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... sisters, named Luceta and Troccola, who had two daughters, Marziella and Puccia. Marziella was as fair to look upon as she was good at heart; whilst, on the contrary, Puccia by the same rule had a face of ugliness and a heart of pestilence, but the girl resembled her parent, for Troccola was a harpy within and a ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... the devil is a cause of many errors such as the one mentioned in the following miracle: "In Trayguerra, a simple lad hearing San Vicente preach on the ugliness of the demon, prayed God that a devil be shown him in order to fight. It happened that a poor, old woman was passing who was dumb from birth, was very ugly and poorly dressed, and had sickle in her hand. The lad, thinking that she was the devil, furiously assailed ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... own breakfast without the clatter of a dish, putting the coffee aside to be reheated for him when he awakened. Now she was sitting by the window, panting in the noon heat, and looking down upon a dazzle of dust and ugliness and smothering hotness. She was thinking, as it chanced, of the big forest at home, and of a certain day—just one of their happy days!—only a year ago, when she had lain for a dreamy hour on the soft forest floor, staring ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... part of his belief that treachery is generally caused by blindness, blindness generally by some obsession of passion. In this play he treats of the removal of an obsession by making plain to the obsessed, by pitiless judicial logic, the ugliness ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... A dirk gleamed in his extended hand. His eyes blazed like coals. Fury distorted his features which were craned forward in hideous ugliness parallel ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... his nature. And the writer has no other mission than faithfully to reproduce this illusion, with all the elaborations of art which he may have learnt and have at his command. The illusion of beauty—which is merely a conventional term invented by man! The illusion of ugliness—which is a matter of varying opinion! The illusion of truth—never immutable! The illusion of depravity—which fascinates so many minds! All the great artists are those who can make other men see their own ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... in The Sleeping Beauty: but not seldom the charming person finds herself by some fatal enchantment hidden under a mask. Hence that touching trilogy, that admirable crescendo of Riquet with the Tuft, Ass's Skin, and Beauty and the Beast. Love will not be discouraged. Through all that ugliness it follows after and gains the hidden beauty. In the last of these tales that feeling touches the sublime, and I think that no one has ever ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... may make a bad face and figure pass very tolerably, and more than tolerably. Ugliness without tact is horrible. It ought to be lawful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... be as mercenary as himself, with this only difference: Where he was frankly so, they pretended otherwise. They bothered him with their dinky deals, with their scrimping and scratching, and their sneaky attempts to hide their ugliness by the observance of one set day of sanctuary. Because they seemed to him so two-faced, so trifling, so cowardly, he liked to "stick" them every time he had a fair chance and could do it within the law. It was his favorite game. They worked so blindly and went ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... which was of the nature of the Tussaud Museum or a masquerade, positively frightened Amedee. He had recently been to his first communion, and was still burning with the mystical fever, but so much ugliness offended his already fastidious taste and threw him ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... doorway, that you were going to church. And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most minute details. But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he couldn't build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie's carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it was no longer fashionable to consider ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... children the potential influence of kindness to dumb animals and to birds. By it they will conquer what of viciousness, ugliness, or wildness is often the character of their beasts of burden; and they will find, by the almost total eradication of the destructive flies and insects which are the scourge of their crops, the value of the lives of birds and toads to their farms. Setting aside for the present the consideration ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... destination with a rude awakening. We had left Paradise for very earthly quarters. There was no beauty about the spot, which, placed on a hill, was bleak, bare, and exposed. The inn was the incarnation of ugliness, and everything about it was rough and rude. In the kitchen two women were at work. The one was brewing coffee, which sent forth a delicious aroma, the other, with weeping eyes, was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... the Water Baby, Steals the candy from the cabinet; Becomes prickly and ugly from sin; Confesses to Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid; Goes to school to rid himself of his ugliness; Is taught by the beautiful little girl; Gains his own smooth, clean skin; Recognizes the little white lady, Ellie; Learns how to join Ellie in the beautiful place; Loses her by being unkind; Hears the history ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... the figures of the two smartly dressed women started up before her again, with every detail of their fresh and wholesome finery as cruelly distinct as had been her own shapeless ugliness in the mirror of the spring. "No! NO!" she broke out vehemently ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... flinging back his head. "Look now upon this blemished face—here where the cruel sun may shew thee all my ugliness, every scar—behold! How may one so beautiful as thou learn love for one so lowly and with face thus hatefully marred? I have watched thee shrink from me ere now! I mind how, beside the lily-pool within ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... ugliness was as much a subject for pity as degradation or misery. Compare the following passage from Les Contemplations: Ce que dit la ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... sitting-room, a comfortable apartment with two long windows opening on to a trellised verandah and balcony—a room which, as he had furnished and decorated it himself to suit his own tastes, had none of the depressing ugliness of typical lodgings. ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... the company; insomuch that the ladies cried out, "We must give our bride to this handsome young gentleman, and not to this ugly humpback." Nor did they rest here, but uttered imprecations against the sultan, who, abusing his absolute power, would unite ugliness and beauty together. They also mocked the bridegroom, so as to put him out of countenance, to the great satisfaction of the spectators, whose shouts for some time put a stop to the concert of music in the hall. At last the musicians ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Mr. Rede, there was a gentleman who inspired us with confidence. His amiable countenance is of the cast that commands respect, not fear. The ugliness of his eyes prejudices you against him at first; let him, however, turn them upon you in his own benevolent way, you are sure they mean no harm: within a pair of splendid whiskers, of the finest blond, there is such a genteel nose and mouth, such a fine semi-serious ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... of the goods there was eloquence, and not a drollery in the scene, not even an ugliness, but was touched, was rife, with the woe of a war whose burning walls were falling in on us. And outward, too, upon others; a few up-ended cottonbales leaned against each other ragged and idle, while women and babes starved for want ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... happened this afternoon has killed my love. A smear of ugliness has been drawn across a thing of beauty, and I can never feel ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... horn was not more than half a foot long, while the front horn, which inclined forward, was nearly four feet in length. She carried her strange, wrinkled head low down to the ground. In spite of her ugliness she seemed to be ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... these grotesque objects exist in real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest—to recall—the perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... was regarded as a very intense -disciple of Herbert Spencer and Henry George a singular combination, as I see it now. On my way westward, that summer day in 1887, rural life presented itself from an entirely new angle. The ugliness, the endless drudgery, and the loneliness of the farmer's lot smote me with stern insistence. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... black darkness of the passage between the house and the wings. A short flight of damp steps surmounted, one of the strangest of all spectacles opened out before the provincial poet's eyes. The height of the roof, the slenderness of the props, the ladders hung with Argand lamps, the atrocious ugliness of scenery beheld at close quarters, the thick paint on the actors' faces, and their outlandish costumes, made of such coarse materials, the stage carpenters in greasy jackets, the firemen, the stage manager strutting about with his hat on his head, the supernumeraries sitting among the hanging ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... bidden them to it. The sons sat in their places like chidden schoolboys, furtively studying their father's ravaged visage, looking at each other and muttering requests or replies. They were all aware of the ugliness of their several offences. Creed's strange disappearance, Blatch's failure to return, the utter collapse of their errand, these had ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... of opinion that the Marquis might have retracted his gift. After this Mr. Fenwick found no ground whatever on which he could fight his battle. He could only stand at his gateway, and look at the thing as it rose above the ground, fascinated by its ugliness. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... said, and he came to her. She looked at him and she felt the red blood of youth come back into her cheeks. She put her hands with their sharp nails over her breast, and she felt the nails drive into her flesh. "Save me from all this ugliness," she cried. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... he declared that he wanted man in his nakedness; and he rubbed his hands when an instance came before him of meanness, cruelty, selfishness, or lust: that was the real thing. In Paris he had learned that there was neither ugliness nor beauty, but only truth: the search after beauty was sentimental. Had he not painted an advertisement of chocolat Menier in a landscape in order to escape ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... of the chapters about Njal's death, is the result of a harmony between two extremes of sentiment, each of which by itself was dangerous, and both of which have here been brought to terms with each other and with the whole design of the work. The ugliness of Skarphedinn's demeanour might have turned out to be as excessive as the brutalities of Svarfdla or Ljsvetninga Saga; the gentleness of Njal has some affinities with the gentleness of the martyrs. Some ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Bulwer, in his Zanoni,) that most of the principal actors of the French Revolution were singularly hideous in appearance—from the colossal ugliness of Mirabeau and Danton, or the villanous ferocity in the countenances of David and Simon, to the filthy squalor of Marat, and the sinister and bilious meanness of the Dictator's features. But Robespierre, who was said to resemble a cat, and ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... lad of thirteen, or thereabout, lean, small, and short, yet strong and active. His face is of an extraordinary ugliness, colourless, withered, haggard, with a look of extreme age, much increased by hair so light that it might rather pass for white than flaxen. He is constantly arrayed in the blue cap and old-fashioned coat, the costume of an endowed school to ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Melos; and she, as I have already asserted, in the 'Queen of the Air,' has nothing notable in feature except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three vases of the best time to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was, in popular art, not ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... creature like the Lady of the Lake should be the progenitor of an extraordinary offspring. Elsewhere we have seen her sisters the totems of clans, the goddesses of nations, the parents of great families and renowned personages. Melusina gave birth to monsters of ugliness and evil,[234] and through them to a long line of nobles. So the heroine of the Llanberis legend had two sons and two daughters, all of whom were remarkable. The elder son became a great physician, and all his descendants were celebrated for their proficiency in medicine. The second son was a Welsh ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... contemporaries, who were already on the high road to the coming ideal of universal ugliness, Antinous Lebeau was remarkable for his ugliness, and one might have said that he positively threw zeal, too much zeal, into the matter, though he was not hideous like Mirabeau, who made the people exclaim: "Oh! the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... design can surpass in all. Modern type is cleaner-cut than the old, but it may be questioned whether this is a real gain. William Morris held that all types should avoid hair-lines, fussiness, and ugliness. Legibility should have the right of way for most printed matter, especially children's books and newspapers. If the latter desire compactness, they should condense their style, ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... who did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age. A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been young—astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from the Bernardines to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... ragged clumps of reeds and water-grasses, the sombre and silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down out of the jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching sunlight heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you will understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and why Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... had found a paradise, and forthwith threw down their loads as the villagers came to offer them grain for sale; so that, had I not had the Wanguana a little under control, we should not have completed our distance that day, and so reached Manyonge, which reminded me, by its ugliness, of the sterile Somali land. Proceeding through the semi-desert rolling table-land—in one place occupied by men who build their villages in large open squares of flat-topped mud huts, which, when I have ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... because perfect, might: and say—There; these are tokens to you, and to all generations yet unborn, of what man could be once; of what he can be again if he will obey those laws of nature which are the voice of God. I would make them discontented with the ugliness and closeness of their dwellings; I would make the men discontented with the fashion of their garments, and still more just now the women, of all ranks, with the fashion of theirs; and with everything around ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Dost thou not know the story of the Rheingold? Come, bathe in its glow and maybe it will take away a little of thy ugliness," one of ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, though courteous, manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... her right was looking at her intently. He was a big man with rough, wiry hair and a humorous mouth. His age appeared to be somewhere in the middle twenties. Jill, in the brief moment in which their eyes met, decided that he was ugly, but with an ugliness that was rather attractive. He reminded her of one of those large, loose, shaggy dogs that break things in drawing-rooms but make admirable companions for the open road. She had a feeling that he would look better in tweeds in a field than in evening dress in a theatre. He had ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... had none, with the exception of two brilliant eyes, the lustre of which, to men of delicate taste, seemed fierce and unfeminine. Her form was lean, her countenance haggard. Charles, though he liked her conversation, laughed at her ugliness, and said that the priests must have recommended her to his brother by way of penance. She well knew that she was not handsome, and jested freely on her own homeliness. Yet, with strange inconsistency, she loved to adorn herself magnificently, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... express it "But the fact is that through the Forum, and everywhere out of the commonest foot-track and roadway, you must look well to your steps.... Perhaps there is something in the minds of the people of these countries that enables them to dissever small ugliness from great sublimity and beauty. They spit upon the glorious pavement of St. Peter's, and wherever else they like; they place paltry-looking wooden confessionals beneath its sublime arches, and ornament ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... especially concerned with a fair lady, of uncertain age, who had long, brilliantly fair hair, eyes of an unnatural size, and bare feet. The monstrous improbabilities of the setting did not shock him. His keen, childish eyes did not perceive the grotesque ugliness of the actors, large and fleshy, and the deformed chorus of all sizes in two lines, nor the pointlessness of their gestures, nor their faces bloated by their shrieks, nor the full wigs, nor the high heels of the tenor, nor the make-up of his lady-love, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... not be denied that Miss MARTINEAU is one of the cleverest women of our time; deafness and ugliness have induced her to cultivate to the utmost degree her intellectual faculties, and several of her books are illustrations of a mind even masculine in its power and activity; but the constitutional feebleness, waywardness, and wilfulness of woman is nevertheless not unfrequently ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... it is never known to play or frolic like lambs or colts, or like most young creatures of the earth, in fact; but that in its babyhood it is as grave and melancholy as in its old age, born apparently with a deep sense of its own ugliness, and a mournful resignation to ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to poetry, to the land where one can live in a world unknown by these struggling hordes. You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are banished because we alone have found the key ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... any place like it to me, my lady. I know it is not very beautiful, but I love it none the less for that. I sometimes think I love it the more for its ruggedness—ugliness, if you please to call it so. If my mother had not been beautiful, I should love her all the same."—"and think there wasn't anybody like her," he was going to add, but checked himself, remembering that of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... streams of fertilizing gore Flow from her bosom's hideous rent, Which this unfailing dagger gave.... I dread that blood!—no more—this day Is ours, though her eternal ray Must shine upon our grave. Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given To thee the robe I stole from heaven, Thy shape of ugliness and fear Had ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... is not flattering; but all women cannot be equally beautiful. A kind heart is often better than a pretty face; and as for me, ugliness has always inspired ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... Shall we preserve these few bands of them, untouched, to succeed us, ultimately, when the grasp of our 'civilisation' weakens, and our transient anarchy in these wilder lands recedes once more before the older anarchy of Nature? Or will they be entirely swallowed by that ugliness of shops and trousers with which we enchain the earth, and become a memory and less than a memory? They are that already. The Indians have passed. They left no arts, no tradition, no buildings or roads or laws; only a story ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... has not seen the slave and the poor white man of the South, as he actually is, should deem my picture overdrawn, I will say that 'the half has not been told!' If the whole were related—if the Southern system, in all its naked ugliness, were fully exposed—the truth would read like fiction, and the baldest relation of fact like ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the end. He was a child ... he always would be one ... and childhood might be cowed, but it was never really conquered. He was gentle, too, like a child, and sensitive. Yet the horrors which surrounded him seemed to leave him untroubled. It could not be that he was insensible to ugliness, but he rose above it on the wings of some inner beauty... Once Fred Starratt would have felt some of the father's scorn for Felix Monet—the patronizing scorn most men bring to an estimate of the incomprehensible. What could one expect of a fiddler? Yes, he would have felt ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... 2930, they told me that the gentle Creator gave each of us a consciousness that we might find Eternal Happiness when we left the scroll and joined Him. Happiness here, and happiness there with Him. The quest for Eternal Happiness, which was always His Own Divine Thought. Why, then, did He create ugliness and evil? Why write those upon the scroll? Ah, this perhaps is the Eternal Riddle! But, in 2930, they told me that there could be no beauty without ugliness with which to compare it; no truth without a lie; ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... of it, but with no mercy in my heart, yet as De Artigny spoke I felt the ugliness of my threat more acutely, and, for an instant, stood before him white-lipped, and ashamed. Then before me arose Cassion's face, sarcastic, supercilious, hateful, and I laughed in scorn of ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... anxious to see you," said he, addressing the lady with the roses, "so I have brought her across to give you a pleasure!" What an honest, good face! but oh! how ugly! And yet I liked his ugliness better than most persons' beauty. There was a look of pathetic acknowledgment of his ugliness, and a deprecation of your too hasty judgment, in his countenance that was positively winning. The soft, white lady kept glancing at my neighbour the chasseur, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... proportion of blizzard days. The musical roar of the primus and the welcome smell of the cooking pemmican whetted our appetites deliciously, and as the three of us sat around the cooker on our rolled up fur bags, the contented expression on our dirty brown faces made our bearded ugliness almost handsome. We built wonderful castles in the air as to what luxuries Lashly, who was a famous cook, should prepare on our return to winter quarters. There we had still some of the New Zealand ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... gives them plenty of time. The place makes a little vignette, leaves an impression, - the quiet white house in its garden on the road by the wide, clear river, without the smoke, the bustle, the ugliness, of so much of our modern industry. It ought to gratify ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... appearance of a living skeleton. His narrow shoulders were so rounded, his form was so stooped, that the young man's first thought was to wonder how tall he would really be if he could stand erect. His long, thin face, seamed and lined, was striking in its grotesque ugliness. From under his craggy, scowling brows, his sharp green-gray eyes peered with a curious expression of baffling, quizzing, half pathetic, and wholly cynical, interrogation. He was smoking a straight, much-used brier pipe. At his feet, lay ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... this little seducer: 'tis shameful in such a lovely woman to have understanding too; yet even this I could forgive, had she not that enchanting softness in her manner, which steals upon the soul, and would almost make ugliness itself charm; were she but vain, one had some chance, but she will take upon her to have no consciousness, at least no apparent consciousness, of her perfections, which is really intolerable. I told her so last night, when she put on such a malicious smile—I believe the ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... crucified in blood and fire." Now the priest had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white, but his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they are right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all those earthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us point to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails so long as they all point to heaven. The ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... supremacy at sea. Then, with many variations and several intermediate types, there are the two main distinctive kinds of inland vessels: the long, low, grimy, cargo-carrying whale-back, tankship, barge, or other useful form of ugliness, simply meant to nose her way through quite safe waters with the utmost bulk her huge stuffed maw will hold; and, at the opposite end of the scale, the high, white, gaily decorated 'palace' steamer, with tier upon tier of decks, and ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... of Lotys,—and that prettiness becomes like a cheap advertisement on a hoarding or a match- box! Contrast the perfect features, eyes and hair of the newest social 'beauty,'—with the magical expression, the glamour in the eyes of Lotys,—and perfection of feature becomes the rankest ugliness! Once in a hundred centuries a woman is born like Lotys, to drive men mad with desire for the unattainable—to fire them with such ambition as should make them emperors of the world, if they had but sufficient courage to snatch their thrones—and yet,—to fill them with ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... They have probably laboured in their vocation as sedulously as though they had striven to be correct, and have achieved at the best but a short-lived success;—as is the case also with the unconventional female. The charm of the disorderly soon loses itself in the ugliness of disorder. And there are others rebellious from grammar, who are, however, hardly to be called rebels, because the laws which they break have never been altogether known to them. Among those very dear to me in English literature, ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... concludes, "I for one have small care about liberty." But first in eminence among the exponents of the positive aspect of liberty stands Thomas Hill Green, of Oxford. In his works he contends that liberty is more than absence of restraint, just as beauty is more than absence of ugliness.[38] He holds that it includes also "a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying." He agrees with Mazzini that complete freedom is "found only in that satisfying fulfilment of civic duties ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... good fortune in being set to immortal music. The plot is poor and intricate, but the dialogue is uniformly sparkling, and two of the characters will live as typical. In Cherubin we have the dissolute boy whose vice has not yet wrinkled into ugliness, best known to English readers under the name of Don Juan, but fresher and more ingenuous than Byron's young rake. Figaro, the hero of the play, is the comic servant, familiar to the stage from the time of Plautus, impudent, daring, plausible; likely to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Laplander; the wild Feejeeian, and docile Guinea Negro; the stolid Indian, and ant-like plodder of teeming India,—are but the outward symbols of that contrariety of moral, or rather immoral existence which is the fate of barbarism. They have no equality of beauty nor ugliness, leanness nor obesity, vice nor virtue, but varying differences, such as the spontaneous growth of uncultured nature in different climes exhibits in the vegetable and lower orders of the animal creation. What a contrast is this to that ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... is a country in my mind, Lovelier than a poet blind Could dream of, who had never known This world of drought and dust and stone In all its ugliness: a place Full of an all but human grace; Whose dells retain the printed form Of heavenly sleep, and seem yet warm From some pure body newly risen; Where matter is no more a prison, But freedom for the soul to know Its native beauty. For ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hands of the builder—or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvellous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade; and all that glorious harmony into which the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... prefixed to a common Edition of 1730. But even this is a delightful serio-comic Drama. I see that H. Heine says the French are all born Actors: which always makes me wonder why they care so for the Theatre. Heine too, I find, speaks of V. Hugo's Worship of Ugliness; of which I find so much in —- and other modern Artists, Literary, Musical, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... ugly, too, with that peculiar genius for ugliness which must have inspired the familiar saying current among plantation folk, "He's ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... no gifts, no power, Am only one of millions, mostly silent; One who came with lips and hands and a heart, Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it. Say that the fates of time and space obscured me, Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me, Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders Dispatched me at their leisure.... Well, what then? Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust, The horns of ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... which, like the mounded bones, are known to their Creator only. They are like little pale smiles, and their odor scents of the tomb. Grass and climbing plants fill the corners, cover the walls, adorning this otherwise bare ugliness; they even penetrate the tombs, through earthquake fissures, ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in the same strait, as far as a small island, which received the name of Smith's Island. There the English found two women, of whom they took one with her child, but left the other on account of her extreme ugliness. Suspecting, so much did superstition and ignorance flourish at this time, that this woman had cloven feet, they made her take the coverings off her feet, to satisfy themselves that they really were made like their own. Frobisher, now perceiving that the cold was increasing, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... myself an indifferent poet, as you know by this time if you have not known it before. But I knew that Messer Simone had no thought of me when he spoke, for indeed I do not think he thought of me at all, and for my part I thought of him as little as I could help, for I have no love for ugliness. Messer Guido Cavalcanti, who was also there, he, too, was a poet, and a great poet, but it was not of him that Messer Simone spoke, and if it had been it would not have mattered, for Messer Guido would have cared no whit for what Messer Simone said of him or thought of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... you have had the sense and sagacity to marry a homely wife—or one comely at the best—nay, even that you have sought to secure your peace by admitted ugliness—or wedded a woman whom all tongues call—plain; then may an insurance-ticket, indeed, flame like the sun in miniature on the front of your house—but what Joint-Stock Company can undertake to repay the loss incurred by the perpetual singeing ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... regarded the pecuniary considerations of the affair she left them altogether to her husband, feeling that in this way she could relieve herself from misgivings which might otherwise make her unhappy. "And after all I don't know that his ugliness signifies," she said to herself. And so she made up her mind that she would be loving and affectionate to him, and sat up till she heard his footsteps in the passage, in order that she might speak to him, and make him welcome to the privileges ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... the exterior is of varied hue—particularly in green country, when it is made to look verdant and covered with boughs to give it an arboreal aspect, and render its shape less observable. But the ugliness and inconvenience of the train are nothing to the dangers it may have to encounter. The occupant may find himself surrounded by a party of the enemy before he has been a mile out from his base; he may find the rail cut behind him; he may steam straight into an ambush at any moment, ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... had we taken of ourselves to perceive those monsters which had most of ugliness and horror to commend them; for, thereby did we stand to have won the game of watching, until such time as a more fearsome Brute be discovered. And so went the play; yet with ever, it doth seem to me now, something of a half-known shudder to the heart, and a child's rejoicing unknowingly in ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... With a step as whispering as his tone, the man who had been kneeling by the tomb, had unobserved joined his associate and Egremont. He hardly reached the middle height; his form slender, but well proportioned; his pale countenance, slightly marked with the small pox, was redeemed from absolute ugliness by a highly-intellectual brow, and large dark eyes that indicated deep sensibility and great quickness of apprehension. Though young, he was already a little bald; he was dressed entirely in black; the fairness of his linen, the neatness of his beard, his gloves much ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... volcano's vat and at different spots saw the treacly sulphur pouring out, brilliant yellow with red streaks. The man to whom there first came the idea of hell and a prisoned revengeful power must surely have looked into a crater. In the throat of this crater there seethed and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there was ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... now always hastening to him with a frightened air at the sound of his voice, or the ringing of his bell. That was all that was left to him who had commanded dozens of men of such ugliness of temper that they struck terror to all beholders when they went ashore in the ports. Nobody consulted him now, while on the sea everybody was seeking his counsel and many times had to interrupt his sleep. The ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom another's folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... same oval face, the same nose, the same intelligent gray eyes, and the same thick, overhanging eyebrows. The only difference between his face and my father's was defined by the fact that in those distant days, when my father cared for his personal appearance, he was always worrying about his ugliness, while Uncle Seryozha was considered, and really was, ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... a man, tall and lean, his robes, undimmed by the years, blazed in crimson and gold. But the face above! Garry shivered in spite of himself at the devilish ugliness the artist had copied. It was dead black in color, with slitted eyes that had been touched up artfully to bring out their venomous stare. The head itself rose up to a rounded point that added to the inhuman brutality of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... possession of the few, and the envy of the multitude. In a round dozen that will fetch over L100 apiece there are not more than one or two that can lay any claim to be considered works of art; indeed, they are mostly distinguished by their surpassing ugliness. Nevertheless, they are the gems that give tone and rank to the finest collections. Some ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... outward show may be. There is a beauty common to us all, neither greater nor less in any of us, which these childish hearts discover. Looking upon us, they are blind or of transcendent vision, as you will: the same in issue—so what matter?—since they find no ugliness anywhere. 'Tis the way, it may be, that God looks upon His world: either in the blindness of love forgiving us or in His greater wisdom knowing that the sins of men do serve His purpose and are like virtue ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... has introduced Pegasus into his composition, but has been forced to reduce him to miniature size. The goddess Athena, the protectress of Perseus, occupies what remains of the field. There is no need of dwelling in words on the ugliness of this relief, an ugliness only in part accounted for by the subject. The student should note that the body of each of the three figures is seen from the front, while the legs are in profile. The same distortion occurs ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... their coming to the ranch, a cactus fence round the house enclosure; and seeing the dry ugliness of the long, straight sticks placed close together, Annesley disliked and wondered at it. At last she questioned Knight, and complained that the bristly barrier was an eyesore. She wished it might be ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... gladly have reason to be proud. But what is passing on in me is well suited to keep me humble. Can you deliver me from all this lowness and ugliness? You yourself have aroused it ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... there. Her hair escaped redness by only a little. But that little was just the difference between ugliness and beauty. For, whether Sally were beautiful or not—about which we might contend a bit—her hair was, and perhaps that is the reason why it was nearly always uncovered—or, possibly, again, because it was so much uncovered was the reason it was beautiful. It seemed to catch some of the glory ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... with toothache—in my father's arms to catch the first sight of English shores as we neared the mouth of the Thames; and then the dismal inn by the docks where we first took shelter. The dreary room where we children slept the first night, its dingy ugliness and its barred windows, still come back to me as a vision of horror. Next day, like angels of rescue, came an aunt and uncle, who took us away to other and cheerful quarters, and presently saw us off to Westmorland. The aunt ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stiller waters, enclosed, all save the head and legs, in a tube of sand or pebbles, shells or sticks, green or dead weeds, often arranged with quaint symmetry, or of very graceful shape. Their aspect in this state may be somewhat uninviting, but they compensate for their youthful ugliness by the strangeness of their transformations, and often by the delicate beauty of the perfect insects, as the "caddises," rising to the surface, become flying Phryganeae (caperers and sand- flies), generally of various shades of fawn-colour; and the ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... I think, here aims a blow at Gibbon. He says (post, under March 19, 1781), that 'Johnson had talked with some disgust of Mr. Gibbon's ugliness.' He wrote to Temple on May 8, 1779:—'Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me.' He had before classed him among 'infidel wasps and venomous insects.' Letters of Boswell, pp. 233, 242. The younger Coleman describes Gibbon as dressed ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... clearly could not mean that sort of thing. It would be a useful lake, but devoid of the changeless tone of the Potomac as it flows there now. The reservoir's proper functioning would require fluctuations in its level, with occasional ugliness at the shoreline, and if it would permit a great deal of happy water-skiing and flat-water fishing, the same opportunities are going to be available to Washingtonians in the nearby estuary when it is suitably cleaned up, even though the section immediately adjacent to the metropolis may ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... subdominant, and so on. The double chant will give opportunities for more than one modulation being introduced at a time. This work will prepare the way for figured basses, and more formal harmony. The children will learn to avoid consecutive fifths and eighths because they gradually notice the ugliness of them, which seems a better plan than to learn to avoid them ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... If the glass or crystal model could reflect all the lustre of the original, it would be of equal utility; but it cannot. Now the reprint does impart all the intelligence and intrinsic worth of the original (for "the ugliness of the types" cannot be thought worthy of aiding the argument one way or another) therefore the reprint of Roy's poetical tract is not illustrated by the model of the Pigot diamond: which latter cannot impart the intrinsic value of the original. Let us now say a word about the Reprints ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... On the second night the captain was restless, and the two men played cards. On the third day the captain's physique reached the bottom of its stock of patience, and protested indignantly at the withdrawal of its customary stimulus; and it acted with more consistency, though no less ugliness, than the human mind does when under excitement and destitute of control. The captain grew terribly despondent, and Fred found ample use for all the good stories he knew. Some of these amused the captain greatly, but after one of them ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... misfortune, and ugliness seemed to the Emperor to be most wisely regarded under a threefold aspect, namely, if considered in reference to the gods, as being due to laws beyond their control; if considered with reference to the nature of things, as being subservient and necessary; and if considered ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... as they imagined it, and drawing her progress from her cradle upwards: now engaged with her doll, then with her dancing master; now marching in her backboard; now crying over her German lessons; and dressed for her first ball finally, and bestowing her hand upon a dandy of preternatural ugliness, who was kneeling at her feet as the happy man. This picture was the delight of the laughing, happy girls; except, perhaps, the little cousins from Brianstone Square, who were invited to Ethel's party, but were so overpowered by the prodigious new dresses in which their ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... for having obstructed her plans by exerting himself to the utmost to entertain the children as far as decorum allowed. He encouraged them to sing, he who felt every ugliness in sound like a blow; he urged them to recite for prizes of sixpences, he on whose soul Casabianca and Excelsior had much the effect of scourges on a tender skin; he led them out into a field between tea and supper and made them run races, himself ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... instinctive means, it seemed persistent; and she was forced at last, just as her party was going in to dinner, to acknowledge that this traveler's misery had befallen her, and to make up her mind to the pain and wretchedness and ugliness of it for hours, if not even for days. Her face was quite disfigured already; the afflicted eye was bloodshot, and the whole cheek was red with tears and rubbing; she could only follow blindly along, her handkerchief up, and, half groping into the seat offered ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Francis is queer. I believe he actually hates Kiki." She lifted the dog against her face, permitting it to loll its pink tongue against her carefully rouged cheek. "Pwecious ... Was it muvver's own pwecious ikkle Kiki? Francis," she addressed her son sharply, "you'll have to get over your nasty ugliness to poor little Kiki. It's a shame, the ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... hopeless domestic struggle, just as her husband's little talent has long been wasted and used up in wretched pot-boilers for mere bread; think of poverty, debt, and degradation, and all the miserable ugliness of life—the truest, tritest, and oldest story in the world! Love soon flies out of the window when these wolves ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier |
