"Unattractive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... course, the taste of that day, but it appears now an unattractive, incoherent volume. The pictures were absurdly bad, the sketches were of unequal merit. Many of them are amusing, some of them delightful, but most of them seem ephemeral. If we except "The Jumping Frog," and possibly "A True Story" (and the latter was altogether out of place in the collection), ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the moment when he should discover her, and there was in her eyes a look of wholesome womanly admiration for the man who swung his ax with such easy strength. In truth, Brian Kent at his woodman's labor made a picture not at all unattractive. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... in "Stories of Gods and Heroes" are derived from Ovid and Virgil. They are not literally translated, for, in the author's opinion, poetry translated into literal prose is very unattractive reading. Neither are they in verse, as well for other reasons as from a conviction that to translate faithfully under all the embarrassments of rhyme and measure is impossible. The attempt has been made ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... dare prosecute him, and, if she does, some Humanitarian Society will be sure to see that he is not legally punished. He thus finds safe scope for the indulgence of his crank, and when there is nothing left of his own wife, he turns his unattractive and pusillanimous attentions ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... office, unusually late, he saw her still at work—no doubt doing over again some bungled piece of copying. She had her normal and natural look and air—the atomic little typewriter, unattractive and uninteresting. With another smile for his romantic imaginings, he forgot her. But when he reached the street he remembered her again. The threatened blizzard had changed into a heavy rain. The swift and sudden currents of air, that have made of New York a cave ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... How agreeable everything could become—as if there were no Revolution, no Bolsheviki, no Emperor.... But no; Fate has to put a drop of tar in a barrel of honey. However, perhaps I would have hated to see a cook around here: as soon as a woman gets too domestic—she infallibly becomes unattractive. As for Lucie—enclosed in a cage as we are—I never saw her unwashed, uncombed, frivolous or unladylike. So let her be a plotter. I must be grateful as we never quarrel.... She sends ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... friend we entered a house on one of the strange streets. Like most of the old houses its front was plain and unattractive. We went through a court and on to a balcony overlooking an enclosed garden. Such a garden I had never seen! It seemed a picture transported from the 'Thousand and One Nights.' In the center was a fountain of extraordinary workmanship, so inlaid with gems that ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... of the value of a work, I have always felt an interest in the author's account of its origin and formation, and, willing to suppose that what thus affords a gratification to my own curiosity, may not be wholly unattractive to others, I shall thus continue from time to time to play the Showman to my own machinery, and explain the principle of the mainspring and the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the passengers were dirty-looking, handed by dirtier hands, coming out of filthy receptacles and weighed in equally unattractive scales. These were previously sampled by millions of flies. I asked some of the passengers who went in for these dainties to give their opinion. Many of them used choice expressions as to the quality but were satisfied to state that they were helpless in the matter; they had to ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... to be unattractive in features, your job is to transform your homeliness into a likable quality—not to try to make yourself appear handsome. If you are wholly inexperienced, that need not be a detriment to your success in the field you want to enter. When you have mastered the selling process, your very greenness ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... discordance with the fragrance of the summer night, which came in at the open window. Maria felt irritated by it, and she wondered why Mrs. Cone felt so badly about the loss of her baby. It had always seemed to Maria a most unattractive child, large-headed, flabby, and mottled, with ever an open mouth of resistance, and a loud wail of opposition to existence in general. Maria felt sure that she could never have loved such a baby. Even the unfrequent smiles of that baby had not been winning; they ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sensitive about her personal appearance, considering herself irredeemably ugly, and always thinking that people must be disgusted with her looks. She purposely made her heroine in "Jane Eyre" unattractive, as she felt it an injustice that a woman must always be judged by her looks, and she felt that novelists were somewhat to blame in the matter, as they always made their heroines beautiful in person, however unattractive in mind or character. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... look at the picture wrapper of The Financing of Fiona (ALLEN) to see that a repetition of the same agreeable mixture awaits you within. Fiona was a charming young woman (Irish, of course) with a rich uncle and a poor, very unattractive cousin, who loved her for her expectations. As Fiona had no conception about money beyond the spending of it, the uncle made a will, whose object was that she should have plenty. The suitor, however, knowing of this, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 10, 1917 • Various
... constantly to prevent the sauce from scorching. Sauce made according to this method does not require long cooking because the flour added to the hot fat cooks quickly. In fact, it is a very desirable method, for the browned butter and the flour lend flavor to the sauce. Many otherwise unattractive or rather tasteless foods can be made much more appetizing by the addition of white sauce ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... neither earned money nor created any of the objects which adorned her; nor was she capable of doing the one or the other. Yet she felt proud as well as happy, because she was young and superbly healthy, and not unattractive. These were her high virtues. And her attitude was so right that nobody would have ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... as long as I liked to look at him, and when I placed him on a low branch, as a hint that it was safer there, he declined to accept my advice, but flew off and came to the ground again. He was a scraggy looking, rusty black little fellow, the most unattractive young bird I ever saw. Shortly after this he clambered up on a pile of brush about a foot high, without so much as a leaf to screen him, and there he stayed all day, motionless, being fed at long intervals; and there I left him at night, never expecting to see him again. But in the morning ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... people. The result was that the monuments of the higher classes were more and more splendid in order to mark the differences of rank, and much grand effect was thus produced; but the merits of the sculpture was less than formerly, and the monuments of this age are wanting in spirit, stiff and unattractive. The costume of the time, too, was so ugly that it served to give a grotesque air to many figures, and thus added to the general appearance of decline which marked the English tomb-sculpture of the fourteenth century. It compares unfavorably with the German monuments of the same period, and the ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... law can be administered without barristers. I do not know; nor do I know how the roads can be swept without getting somebody to sweep them. But that would not disqualify me from saying that road- sweeping was an unattractive profession. So also I am entitled to my opinion about the Bar, which is this. That because it offers material victories only and never spiritual ones, that because there can be no standard by which its disciples are judged save the earthly standard, that because there is no place within its ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... sufficient to notice that in this metaphor the emphasis is laid upon the two attributes which I have named—beauty and purity. The figure teaches us that ugly Christianity is not Christ's Christianity. Some of us older people remember that it used to be a favourite phrase to describe unattractive saints that they had 'grace grafted on a crab stick.' There are a great many Christian people whom one would compare to any other plant rather than a lily. Thorns and thistles and briers are a good deal more ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... suggesting sea-air, splendid teeth in a humorously inclined mouth, and a nicely rounded chin. Very few people have beautiful noses; on the other hand, not the most beautiful nose will redeem an otherwise unattractive countenance, whereas an ordinary nondescript nose in a charming face simply becomes part of it. Marjorie's was nondescript, but did not turn up or droop excessively. Without being guilty of stoutness, she lacked the poorly nourished look of so many ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... inflammatory rheumatism by chaperoning her daughters' shore party and first wetting her lower half in clamming and then the upper via a thunder shower. The five "Barton girls" range from twenty-five to forty, and are so mentally and physically unattractive and maladroit that it would be impossible to regard them as in any danger if they went unattended to the uttermost parts of the earth. On this particular occasion the party consisted of two dozen people, ranging from twenty to fifty, which it ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... others, on a triumphant round of visits, did she show the vindicating sentence. Any soft young fool, she asserted, with the directness and not unattractive truculence of her generation, can get a commission and muddle through, but it took a man to enlist as a ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the dead are burnt; his plantations are ravaged, his coco-nut palms felled with the axe. The motive for this destruction of the property of the deceased is not mentioned, but the custom points to a fear of the ghost; the people probably make his old home as unattractive as possible in order to offer him no temptation to return and haunt them. The same fear of the ghost, or at all events of the infection of death, is revealed by the stringent seclusion and ceremonial pollution of the grave-diggers. They are two in number; no other persons may handle the corpse. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... three afternoons and four evenings a week. It was housed in an old dwelling, sufficient but unattractive. Carol caught herself picturing pleasanter reading-rooms, chairs for children, an art collection, a librarian young enough ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... the evening when at length Meriwether Lewis reined up in front of the somewhat unattractive Grinder homestead cabin, squatted down alongside the Natchez Trace; a place where sometimes hospitality of a sort was dispensed. It was an ordinary double cabin that he saw, two cob-house apartments with a covered space between such as might have been found anywhere ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work. To this fairly numerous class belonged Mr. J. Preston Peters, father of Freddie's Aline. And to this merit—or defect—is to be attributed his almost maniacal devotion to that rather unattractive species of ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... getting-together in every household and results in a clearing up of the entire stock of eligible daughters. But think of the unhappy lot of an adorable and much-coveted maiden who finds herself wedged in behind something unattractive and shelf-worn! Jeneka was thus pocketed. She could do nothing except fold her hands and patiently ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... window boxes or pots. It is not an extravagance to have on hand plenty of pepper sauce, Worcestershire sauce, kitchen bouquet, and condiments of various kinds. A little of these goes a long way in seasoning, and many a dish which would be very flat and unattractive, by their judicious use is made ...
— The Khaki Kook Book - A Collection of a Hundred Cheap and Practical Recipes - Mostly from Hindustan • Mary Kennedy Core
... wounded soldier because he is quartered in a "hut." The word sounds unattractive. But if it is the right kind of hut, he is in the soundest and most sanitary type of temporary hospital that the mind of man has yet devised. The rain-drops may rattle a shade noisily on the roof, the asbestos lining may be devoid of ornamentation, but as he lies ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... an infinite field yet unexplored—a very terra incognita to even those who pride themselves upon being learned in the mysteries of the soul. And to him who ventures upon this seemingly lowly path, so far from proving unattractive, it becomes a very Eden of thought. Unlooked-for beauties spring to light on every side; the very essence of music and poesy float around him as he advances; while above, around, and through all, sounds the magnificent diapason ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of unattractive bearing, yet the very soul of tenderness. Confessor of the pupils of the Lycee Henry IV., and of Agathe Bridau; for twenty-five years vicar of Saint-Sulpice at Paris; in 1818 confessor of Cesar Birotteau; became in 1819 cure of the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... of June 29th the lights of Suez came into view. Shortly before midnight the transport dropped anchor some distance from the town. Next morning a rather unattractive panorama was unveiled to view. On the west were the bare heights of Jebel Attaka; to the north Suez lay with its rambling and squalid-looking houses; to the north-east was Port Tewfik, and beyond that—running down east and south-east—were the desert sands of Sinai. The waters ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... on this leaflet. His finer senses were as shocked at the meeting as his taste was at the pamphlet. Mingled odors of tobacco-smoke, beer, human breath, and damp clothes filled the air; the people at the tables had an indescribably common stamp, unlovely manners, harsh, loud voices, and unattractive faces. They gossiped and laughed noisily, and coarse expressions were frequent. The earnest moral tone, the almost gloomy melancholy which Wilhelm had found so attractive in socialistic writings, was absent, and it seemed to him as if the new doctrine in its removal from ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... unattractive youth enough, that butcher boy. Suspicion began to close in around Sallie that she spent the evenings when Anna was away, in ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... General Jackson had been afflicted by the sudden death of his wife. "Aunt Rachel," as Mrs. Jackson was called by her husband's personal friends, had accompanied him to Washington when he was there as a Senator from Tennessee. She was a short, stout, unattractive, and uneducated woman, though greatly endeared to General Jackson. While he had been in the army she had carefully managed his plantation, his slaves, and his money matters, and her devotion to him knew no bounds. Her happiness was centered in his, and it was her chief desire to ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... boats, which are constantly at work inside the Great Barrier Reef. The money embarked in this enterprise had been advanced by a bank at Cooktown. Beche-de-mer commands a high price. We were shown the accumulated casks full of this unattractive edible, representing a value of many hundreds of pounds. Lee, the head of this establishment, was living in a shelter formed of tattered canvas and battered sheets of corrugated iron, but he evidently possessed the power of command and organisation, and was ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... leave school unacquainted with any history except that of the United States; which, dealing with less simple and primitive times than that of Greece, is apt to be so unattractive that the child never afterwards reads any historical works. It has been my intention to write a book which will give children pleasure to read, and will thus counteract the impression that ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... end of the island we saw a narrow beach at the foot of the cliffs. Outside lay a fringe of rocks heavily beaten by the surf but with a narrow channel showing as a break in the foaming water. I decided that we must face the hazards of this unattractive landing-place. Two days and nights without drink or hot food had played havoc with most of the men, and we could not assume that any safer haven lay within our reach. The 'Stancomb Wills' was the lighter and handier boat—and I called her alongside with the intention ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... figure, and, in his black uniform surrounded by his officers, certainly looked every inch a king. Although my predecessors, on occasions of this kind, had worn a sort of fancy diplomatic uniform designed by themselves, I decided to abandon this and return to the democratic, if unattractive and uncomfortable, dress-suit, simply because the newspapers of America and certain congressmen, while they have had no objection to the wearing of uniforms by the army and navy, police and postmen, and do not expect officers to lead their troops into battle ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... anemones was, in Katharine's opinion, the widow of a general living in the Cromwell Road. In default of the actually destitute and starving, whom she would much have preferred, Mrs. Hilbery was forced to acknowledge her claims, for though in comfortable circumstances, she was extremely dull, unattractive, connected in some oblique fashion with literature, and had been touched to the verge of tears, on one occasion, by ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the settlers there were unused to work, and averse from it; although, under the stimulus of Captain John Smith, they did learn how to chop down trees. After the colony became popular, and populous, the emigrants continued to be in a large measure of a social class to whom manual labor is unattractive. A country in which laborers are indispensable, and which is inhabited by persons disinclined to labor, would seem to stand no good chance of achieving prosperity. How, then, is the early prosperity of Virginia to be explained? The charter did not ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... of prettiness about the girl, and aside from her incongruous garments she was not unattractive—when her face was revealed. Mr. Hammond's interest increased. He approached the spot where the girl had been left by the ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... very much wrapped up in himself. At a local social function he took the prize one day for being the most unpopular man in the community; and this caused him to sit up nights, and study himself as others saw him flitting across his unattractive and uneventful stage. The winning of this prize spoke to him with greater accent than could the exploding of a sixteen-inch German gun, and it sent a quiver through his entire avoirdupois. It was not only an ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... the shapeless garment, which hung in loose folds from her shoulders, but which, with its muddy hue and clumsy drapery, was decidedly unattractive. Over it she put on a sort of tunic of green and orange damask, ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... one to send, sir," said Hephzibah, who, I am sure, felt annoyed. Two laborers happened to be passing in the road, and he got one of them to hold his horse, and so came in at last. He is unattractive when you see him in a room; he seemed blustering and yet ill at ease. But he did not thank us for keeping the suite clean! He was awfully friendly, and asked us to make use of his garden, and, in fact, anything we wanted. I hardly ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... sand which he had with such care spread back upon the little scar which he had made there in the earth. With trembling fingers she pushed back the yellow earth, and found—nothing but black rock, uncouth, and unattractive. ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... which, depressed towards the nose, sloped upwards towards the temples. These brows gave to the eyes beneath them, even to the whole face, a curiously distinctive look of open resolution, which was seizing, and attractive or unattractive according to the ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... has not sounded. Somewhere,—somewhere,—love is in store for them,—the universe must not be allowed to fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small, half-unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the time we reached Jerusalem friend Jeremy was ripe for almost anything except the plan we had agreed on. Having talked that over pretty steadily most of the way from Abu Kem, it seemed already about as stale and unattractive to him as some of his oldest tricks. And Jerusalem provided plenty of distraction. We hadn't been in Grim's quarters half an hour when Jeremy was up to his ears in a dispute that ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... develop such a ferocity of temper as all but drove the crew to the verge of mutiny. The thing had always seemed inexplicable to me: they had been married thirteen years; I had a glimpse of her once, and, honestly, I couldn't conceive a man abandoned enough to plunge into sin for the sake of such an unattractive person. I don't know whether I have not done wrong by refraining from putting that view before poor Selvin: the man made a little hell on earth for himself, and I also suffered indirectly, but some sort of, no doubt, false delicacy prevented me. The marital relations of seamen would make ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... influenza, as interfering in less degree with my comfort,—I have, of course, neglected no opportunity of finding out what we may reasonably look forward to. I fear the worst, Agatha. For I repeat, the girl's face is, to me, absolutely unattractive!" ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... thus treated. An entomologist[379] in Paris kept twenty-five specimens of Saturnia pyri, but did not succeed in getting a single fertile egg. A number of females of Orthosia munda and of Mamestra suasa reared in confinement were unattractive to the males.[380] Mr. Newport kept nearly a hundred individuals of two species of Vanessa, but not one paired; this, however, might have been due to their habit of coupling on the wing.[381] Mr. Atkinson could never succeed in India in making ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... call me that. Oh, I've almost forgotten my poor Angel! I must get to her, somehow." Clo looked around hastily, and realized that she was lying on a bed in a peculiarly unattractive room, and that O'Reilly was kneeling on the floor by the bedside. "How wicked of me to think ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... afflicted child was singularly unattractive. She had the air of having been perpetually washed with a blue bag, and hair like grey wool—dressed, too, in a pinafore so stiffly starched that she could only peer at us over the frill of it—a social barrier of a pinafore—and perhaps it was too much to expect a noble aunt to attend to the ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... midge in the sun! It is no good to me unless I do something with it! I would live for ever if I could!—here, on this dear little ball of Earth—I do not want a better heaven. The heaven which the clergy promise us is so remarkably unattractive! But I run no risk of losing my life or yours in our aerial adventures; we carry the very essence of vitality with us. Come!—I want to see my flying palace! When I was a small child I used to feed my fancy on the ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... recognize the dingy wall-paper of the dining-room, the well-worn furniture, the cracked water-pitcher, and the slight aroma of previous repasts; but we soon forget this unattractive background, for the scene is full of genuine human life. The men and women who congregate there appear for what they really are. They wear no mental masks and other disguises like the people we meet at fashionable entertainments; and each acts himself or herself. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... little credit to the school after which it was named, and it was a most unattractive crowd that usually ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... is the town fire-bell; the slaughter-house, similar to the abattoir at Paris, and excellent shambles, with poultry and potato market-places annexed. The church, which is an ancient one, has an unattractive exterior; but when you enter it, I think you will say it can compete with any church for ancient beauty and ornament. Amongst the tombs in the chancel are those of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, with the effigies of him and his lady, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... from Ephie, and a few pleasant words from Mrs. Cayhill, Maurice found himself standing beside Johanna, the truth of Dove's simile was obvious to him. This dark, unattractive girl had apparently no thought for anything but her tea-making; she moved the cups this way and that, filled the pot with water, blew out and lighted again the flame of the spirit-lamp, without paying the least heed to Maurice, making, indeed, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... the rest, convenience. So he puts his house close to the highway, in many cases even abutting upon it. He shows no taste in grouping his farm buildings. He plants few trees and his house stands bare and unattractive by the road side. The absence of trees near his dwelling is sometimes accounted for by the need, in earlier times, of clearing away everything that might offer a chance of ambush to his Indian enemies. If this is the true origin of the habit, an instinct survives ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... even in the off-season there are always enough English-speaking people in Paris to make it possible for L'Abbaye Theleme to keep open with profit: the inevitable assortment of respectable married couples with friends, the men chafing and wondering if possibly all this might seem less unattractive were they foot-loose and fancy-free, the women contriving to appear at ease with varying degrees of success, but one and all flushed with dubiety; the sprinkling of demi-mondaines not in the least concerned about their social status; the handful of people who, having brought ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... they shall be able to understand without difficulty, and at first thought, the characters the author seeks to present, making it necessary that these characters be depicted from their most salient sides—which are too often vulgar and unattractive. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... leave the arts and wiles of securing popular favor to the self-seeking. This results in a certain repellent manner, commonly regarded as the apparel of righteousness, and is further responsible for the fatal mistake of making the surroundings of "good influences" singularly unattractive; a mistake which really deserves a reprimand quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the surroundings of "evil influences" so beguiling. Both are akin to that state of mind which narrows ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... and for them would be to betray her agitation, while to decline their offers to dress her would prolong their banter and insistence. She flushed, her beautiful eyes grew dim, red blotches came on her face, and it took on the unattractive martyrlike expression it so often wore, as she submitted herself to Mademoiselle Bourienne and Lise. Both these women quite sincerely tried to make her look pretty. She was so plain that neither of them could think of her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and with ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the high individuality of his soul; but he could also always see that Aileen was not so acceptable. She was too rich in her entourage, too showy. Her glowing health and beauty was a species of affront to the paler, more sublimated souls of many who were not in themselves unattractive. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... it could spread beyond a few bushes. The crooked stems remain black as charcoal, too much burnt to recover, and in the centre a young birch scorched by the flames stands leafless. This barren birch, bare of foliage and apparently unattractive, is the favourite resort of yellow-hammers. Perching on a branch towards evening a yellow-hammer will often sit and sing by the hour together, as if preferring to be clear ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... Magnotte were for the most part of mature age and unattractive appearance—two or three lonely spinsters, eking out their pitiful little incomes as best they might, by the surreptitious sale of delicate embroideries, confectioned in their dismal leisure; and a fat elderly widow, popularly supposed to be enormously rich, but of miserly propensities. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... jubilant, alert robins have returned from the South, the purple trillium unfurls its unattractive, carrion-scented flower. In the variable colors found in different regions, one can almost trace its evolution from green, white, and red to purple, which, we are told, is the course all flowers must follow to attain to blue. The ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Cairnsmure and the circle of the eastern hills, cannot be good feeding for the least Epicurean of sheep, and sheep do not care for the lank and sour herbage by the sides of the "lanes," as the half-stagnant, black, deep, and weedy burns are called in this part of the country. The scenery is not unattractive, but tourists never wander to these wastes where no inns are, and even the angler seldom visits them. Indeed, the fishing is not to be called good, and the "lanes," which "seep," as the Scotch say, through marshes and beneath ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... commuter, as well as his wife. It is a continual proof of man's, and particularly woman's, innocency that such pictures as horticultural pedlers show when extolling their wares do not deter instead of encouraging purchasers. If the fruits and flowers were believable, as depicted, still they should be unattractive ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... for moderate amounts of methaqualone, small amounts of heroin, and cocaine bound for Southern Africa and possibly Europe; a poorly developed financial infrastructure coupled with a government commitment to combating money laundering make it an unattractive ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... different. This one took the little Hodge girl right up in her lap while she was telling them stories. This one did not pick out the pretty ones to talk to, as strangers generally did. It really seemed that the most neglected and unattractive of them received the ...
— Big Brother • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... insufficient staff of servants, to the village to the vicar and his wife, and the few far-distant neighbours who perhaps once a year drove miles to call or leave a card. She was an old woman sufficiently unattractive to find no difficulty in the way of limiting her acquaintances. The unprepossessing wardrobe she had gathered in the passing years was remade again and again by the village dressmaker. She wore dingy ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lead in the restoration of St. Paul's. It must be acknowledged that after the first outburst of zeal following the fire of 1561, St. Paul's was much neglected for many long years. The authorities were lukewarm, the services were dead and unattractive, and all manner of irreverence was seen there daily. Bishop Earle's Microcosmography (1628) often gets quoted, but his description of "Paule's Walke" ought to find place here. I take it from a contemporary MS. copy. Paul's Walk was the whole nave of the cathedral:—"Paule's ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... laughed at his vain endeavours, and putting some on the fire, showed him them open of themselves. I had no taste for oysters myself; but as they are everywhere accounted a delicacy, I advised my sons to try them. They all at first declined the unattractive repast, except Jack, who, with great courage, closed his eyes, and desperately swallowed one as if it had been medicine. The rest followed his example, and then all agreed with me that oysters were not good. The shells were soon plunged into the pot to bring out ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... steps, the door opened, and a plainly dressed, unattractive-looking man was let out. The servant who did the letting out saw Jack and let him in without closing the door between the egress of the one and the ingress of the other. So he entered without ringing, and, as he was very well known and intensely popular with all of Mrs. Rosscott's ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... unattractive man of fifty, short in his speech and manners, with a vine wood cudgel in his hand). How now? What is ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... critic, who had devoted his life to the study of Reynolds, while lecturing upon the achievement of that master, threw upon the screen a certain large subject-picture, not one of Reynold's happiest efforts, but a laboured and unattractive design which, we know, gave Reynolds ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... gloomy; and soon after it he entered the barber's shop with the air of one who has abandoned hope. Later he came out of it with his roving black eye full of tears of genuine feeling; his scraped chin was smarting cruelly and unattractive in patches—red patches. At the door the breathless, excited and triumphant maid of the inn accosted him with the news that she had just found his keys and his shaving-brush under the mattress of his bed. He looked round the village of Little Deeping blankly; it suddenly seemed ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... Fawn thought that she had done that herself. She had been invaluable during Clara Fawn's long illness. She knew every rule at croquet, and could play piquet. When the girls got up charades they had to acknowledge that everything depended on Miss Morris. They were good-natured, plain, unattractive girls, who spoke of her to her face as one who could easily do anything to which she might put her hand. Lady Fawn did really love her. Lord Fawn, the eldest son, a young man of about thirty-five, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... For dependency upon money is not something merely of the present, but a condition in the spiritual sphere that is largely a product of a long past. The really inexcusable thing is our willingness, in a day of greater light and knowledge, to close our eyes to the true nature of the unattractive, anaemic thing we call faith, which would be seen as powerless to achieve at all, if taken out of the soil of material means in which it ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... they assume she must be your wife, for how could it be supposed that you would have an unattractive sweetheart? A true woman may be ungraceful; but then, her ugliness implies a thousand disagreeable things for you. One supposes you must be a notary or a magistrate, as these two professions have a monopoly of grotesque and ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... is larger than that of the general population,[20] it is none the less a fact that many of the worst drunkards leave no or few offspring. They die of their own excesses at an early age; or their conduct makes them unattractive as mates; or they give so little care to their children that the latter die from neglect, exposure or accident. As these drunkards would tend to hand down their own inborn peculiarity, or weakness for alcohol, to their children, it must ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... myself. Of course I am more than proud that Faye is an aide-de-camp, and would not have things different from what they are, but the detail is for four years, and the thought of living in this unattractive place that length of time is crushing. But Faye will undoubtedly have his captaincy by the expiration of the four years, and the anticipation of that is comforting. It is the feeling of loneliness I mind here—of being lost and no one to search for me. I miss the cheery garrison ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... fastened together. The inside was lined with dried leaves, grass, and the coarser feathers of the ostrich. When they saw that we were encamped, the three hunters lighted a fire and sat themselves down before it to enjoy a sumptuous repast of ostrich flesh. Though unattractive in appearance, they were honest little fellows, and we slept in perfect security, knowing that they would give us timely notice of the ...
— Adventures in Africa - By an African Trader • W.H.G. Kingston
... too much stress on what you have been telling me," I observed quietly as we approached that unattractive building. "No man will believe a girl who has just accepted his suit to be ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... can be said. One reason for my belief that Mr. LUCAS's Thoughts will please is that he has put them into the brain of a definitely conceived and very well drawn character. They are told in the form of letters by this character to his old tutor. The writer is supposed to be the rather unattractive and self-conscious eldest son of a noble house, who suffers from the presence of a father and sister who think him a fool, and a brother whose charm is a continual and painful contrast to his own lack of it. The special skill of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... Asia Minor and finally in Constantinople. The narrative, which is purely one of action, the action being supplied by the efforts, finally successful, of the author and various brother-officers to escape from their most unattractive captivity, nevertheless offers a most vivid picture of the social fabric of the Near East and in particular of the attitude of the melange of Oriental peoples that comprised the Turkish Empire towards the War in which they found themselves taking part, most of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... Merton did not like. She was not unattractive in appearance, though her features were far off the screen-heroine model, her nose being too short, her mouth too large, her cheekbones too prominent, and her chin too square. Indeed, she resembled too closely her father, who, as a man, could carry such things more ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... single blessedness; affirming it impossible that the pale, retiring bookworm should ever summon courage to seek a wife, or be able to obtain one if he did, and equally impossible that the plain-looking, plain-dealing, unattractive, unconciliating Miss Millward should ever ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... But Frieda was looking the other way, and Margaret travelled on to town feeling solitary and old-maidish. How like an old maid to fancy that Mr. Wilcox was courting her! She had once visited a spinster—poor, silly, and unattractive—whose mania it was that every man who approached her fell in love. How Margaret's heart had bled for the deluded thing! How she had lectured, reasoned, and in despair acquiesced! "I may have been deceived by the curate, my dear, ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... on touching at Aden that he might hear something of the Empress, but not a word had been received there of her. Taking in coal at that sandy and most unattractive of England's possessions, the Bellona sailed for the Cape. She actually did sail, for the wind was fair, and Jack, in common with other officers, had received orders to consume as little coal as possible. A bright look-out was kept for slavers, and several suspicious-looking ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... a long, low building, unattractive in itself, but its gardens with every beautiful device of native art, fountains, bridges, shrines, fantastically trimmed trees, flowers, winding ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... and father does not find his way there after mass, trudging along that solitary way, between bare hedges or blooming, as faithfully as the day comes round. All those things were over a dozen years ago, and he is married again, to a spare, unattractive woman, who looks after his food and clothes, and makes him in her way a very excellent wife. She was long past middle age when he married her and took her out of service. But there was no pretence of love-making about it. She would be the first herself to tell you that her man's heart was in ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... Gwen deeply, even too deeply to see any faults, and so in her blind love, she of course, could never correct these defects that she could not see, and that made the pretty child exceedingly unattractive. ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... the north of Regent's Park, has a High Street of its own—a wide street with comparatively low buildings. The vista, on looking back from the top to the trees of the burial-ground and Regent's Park, is not unattractive. The shops which line either side of the road, though small, are clean and bright. St. John's Wood Terrace is a very wide thoroughfare. In it stands St. John's Wood Church, chiefly distinguished by a very heavy portico. The church is ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... volume to the table. "I asked you to come up here, Gilbert, because I have a proposition to make and I thought you wouldn't want anyone around." Harry seated himself, took one knee into his clasped hands and smiled at the visitor. It was a peculiarly unattractive smile, Don decided. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... full of delicate consideration for the convalescent Andrea was still very pale and thin, which made his eyes look extraordinarily large, the somewhat sensual expression of his mouth forming a singular and not unattractive contrast to the upper part of ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... as the cabin-boy who served aboard the old sailing brigs, schooners, and barques, and I must plead guilty to having a sentimental regret that the romance was destroyed through this attractive personality being superseded by another, with the somewhat unattractive title of "cook and steward." The story of how poor boys of the beginning and middle of the century and right up to the latter part of the 'sixties started sea-life is always romantic, often sensational, and ever pathetic. They were usually the sons of poor parents living for ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... is inclined to make sorry mysteries or unattractive secrets of the methods and supplies of the fresh and perennial means of life. A very dull secret is made of water, for example, and the plumber sets his seal upon the floods whereby we live. They are covered, they are carried, they are hushed, from the spring to the tap; and when their ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... movements, but with a kind of stateliness about him; he looked, and was, old for his years. He was a little short-sighted and wore glasses; without them his brow had that puzzled, slightly bothered look often seen in weak-sighted people. His face was not unattractive, though rather heavy; his hair was dark and curly—he let it grow somewhat long from indolence—and he had a drooping moustache. He was one of the men who, without the slightest idea of doing so, always ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... act upon the first impulse communicated to one of his friends, and forthwith retire from public life, he with this incident lost all zest for it. Occasionally he spoke, choosing the level, unattractive field of the Civil Service Estimates. It was a high tribute to his power and capacity that on the few occasions when he spoke the House filled up, not only with the contingent attracted by the prospect of anything spicy, but by grave, financial authorities, Ministers and ex-Ministers, who listened ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... much fear. The old man's too tough," responded Oscar, who had no sentimental love for his father. Indeed, it would have been surprising if he had shown any attachment to Nahum Sprague, who was about as unattractive in outward appearance as he was in ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... after the theatre is out. Of course Fanny could throw something over her, a piece of scenery, or a curtain, and go to her hotel, but how would she look? Miss Davenport always looked well with her wardrobe on, but it may have been all in the wardrobe. Without a wardrobe she may look very plain and unattractive. ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... him angrily. Without her veil she displayed features not in themselves unattractive, but a complexion somewhat impaired by the use of cosmetics. The powder upon her ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... face that was specially unattractive. It was a sallow, flat face, and the strange eyes did nothing to lighten it. They were dead, lustreless eyes. They had a coldness in them that reminded me of the icicle eyes of the crocodile, and, curiously, I associated that reptile's notions of fair warfare with Leith as ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... an ordinary commercial hotel, clean apparently but otherwise wholly unattractive. Henneford led the way up-stairs and with some pride threw open the door of a room on the first floor. "We've got you a sitting-room," he said. "Thought you might want to talk to these Press people, perhaps, or do a bit of ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... despised—in words—but inwardly he was himself aware that it would be a hard and difficult task for him to win love.... A hard and difficult task for him to win love, but easy and simple enough to wear a mask of indifference, of silent haughtiness. Avdey Ivanovitch was unattractive and no longer young; but on the other hand he enjoyed a terrible reputation—and consequently he had every right to pose. He was used to the bitter, unspoken enjoyment of grim loneliness. It was not the first time he had attracted the attention of women; some had even tried to get upon more friendly ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... become much simpler, and especially less expensive, for unmarried men than it used to be. Even if a hostess asks a favor in return for weeks of hospitality, the sacrifice she requires of a man is rarely greater than a cotillion with an unattractive debutante whom she is trying to launch; or the sitting through a particularly dull opera in order to see her to the carriage, her lord and master having slipped off early to his club and a quiet game of pool. Many people who read these lines are ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... valuable for young animals and milk cows, and the manure contains a high percentage of nitrogen. The difficulty in making the hay is a drawback, but this is over-rated. While rain discolors the vines and makes them unattractive in appearance, the hay remains more palatable and nutritious than good timothy, if the leaves are not lost in curing. When the first pods turn yellow, the crop should be harvested. The vines can be left in the swath until ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... beautiful, as seriously satisfying, as those which surrounded the Tuscans in their landscape. And it is in the extracting of such beauty of lines out of the bewildering confusion of huge frescoes, it is in the seeing as arrangements of such lines the sometimes unattractive men and women and children painted (and for that matter, often also sculptured) by the great Florentines of the fifteenth century, that consists the true appreciation and habitual enjoyment of Tuscan Renaissance painting. The outline of an ear ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... that she was in love with my uncle; and perhaps the sense that he was indifferent to her save after a brotherly fashion, combined with the fear of betraying herself and the consciousness of her unattractive appearance, to produce the contradiction between ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... afternoon, and the place seemed dull and gloomy. The Boston Music Hall is, at best, bare and vast, and by daylight is particularly unattractive. The great organ pipes appear cold and lustreless, and the light tints on the walls are not very comforting. The orchestra of the Harvard Musical Association were upon the stage, under the leadership of Carl Zerrahn, and a few privileged ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... which he attached such importance was observed. A woman (the younger of the two seen in the phaeton) drove up for Major Calvin Blake; a youngish rather than a young woman, slight, with an effect of stateliness, and not unattractive. Her husband, a tall and pleasant enough looking man, came down the stairs, and when he saw the woman his face lighted swiftly—and rather wonderfully, when one considers that she was not unexpected. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... intellectual promise whatever; he was a very lively and amusing companion and a keen debater; I think he wrote a little poetry; but he had no very pronounced tastes. I remember his pointing out to me the windows of an extremely unattractive set of ground-floor rooms in Whewell's Court as those which he had occupied till he migrated to the Bishop's Hostel, eventually moving to the Great Court. They look down Jesus Lane, and the long, sombre wall of Sidney Sussex ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Dabney. And it is most desirable for the Northerner to vivify his impression of the South by the knowledge of men like him. We are misled by general and geographical terms: "an Englishman" is a vague and perhaps unattractive term to an American until he knows, in books or in flesh and blood, a few Britons of the right stamp. And so South and North need mutual interpretation not alone through their historic heroes, but through the best of their everyday people. And of those best, surely Thomas Dabney was one,—a strong, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... his definition of taste—"Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection." This will not do; for taste will take material sources, unattractive in themselves, and by combination, or for their contrast, receive pleasure from them. All literature and all art show this. That taste, like life itself, is instinctive in its origin and first motion, we doubt not; but what it is by and in its cultivation, and in its application to art, is a thing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... bit of it. Here I am, and here I shall stay. I take comfort in the fact that no one connects Ian Verity with an elderly and unattractive spinster hidden in a hermitage on Bessmoor. You will not betray me, I know, and it is good of you to come and visit me in my solitude. I am growing old and you have all your life before you. I have crossed to the shady side of the road ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... repeated at least a dozen complimentary speeches, some of which she had really heard, while others were manufactured for the occasion. In this way the cloud was gradually lifted from her face, and erelong she was laughing merrily at the idea, that a girl "so wholly unattractive as Mary, should ever have ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... Noyon we turned off to the left and halted for half an hour at Landrimont, a little village full of big trees. We had omelettes and coffee at the inn, then basked in the sun and smoked. Noyon was unattractive. The people did not seem to care what happened to anybody. Perhaps we thought that, because we were very tired. Outside Noyon I dozed, then went ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... and that Lady Cheverel had desired her to be in the drawing-room early, she started up to dress, and was delighted to find herself feeling suddenly brave and strong. Curiosity to see Miss Assher—the thought that Anthony was in the house—the wish not to look unattractive, were feelings that brought some colour to her lips, and made it easy to attend to her toilette. They would ask her to sing this evening, and she would sing well. Miss Assher should not think her utterly insignificant. So she put on her grey silk gown and her cherry coloured ribbon ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us; that history of their social life which, prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Monteil patiently and steadily tried to write for the Middle Ages, but in an unattractive form. ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... not less true, is the unattractive aspect, at first sight, of the Gospel. Verily there is, until we become intimately acquainted with it, "no beauty that we should desire" it.—The style, (full of interest, to those who have tried to understand it a little,) is not, I suppose, what critics would call ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the last degree unattractive, except to a misanthropic disposition; or to that, perhaps, of a stern theological polemic, when tempted to be pleased with every superfluity of evidence for overwhelming the opposers of the doctrine which asserts the radical ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... so was that he could not induce himself to fit in. Statecraft was a remote and faded thing in the political life of the time; politics was a choice of two sides in a game, and either side he found equally unattractive. Since he had come down from Cambridge the Tariff Reform people had gone far to capture the Conservative party. There was little chance of a candidature for him without an adhesion to that. And he could find nothing ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... men—respectability, that English moral climate, with its neutral tint and temperate tone, so often sneered at in these days by its new German title of Philistinism, so often deserving of the bitterest scorn in some of its inexpressibly mean manifestations—respectability, the pre-eminently unattractive characteristic of British existence, but which, all deductions made for its vulgar alloys, is, in truth, only the general result of the individual self-respect of individual Englishmen; a wholesome, purifying, and preserving element ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... abridgement or designed change in the sense. But the two Tales in prose — Chaucer's Tale of Meliboeus, and the Parson's long Sermon on Penitence — have been contracted, so as to exclude thirty pages of unattractive prose, and to admit the same amount of interesting and characteristic poetry. The gaps thus made in the prose Tales, however, are supplied by careful outlines of the omitted matter, so that the reader need be at no loss to comprehend the whole ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... wait some time, though during that silence she gave no sign of distress or agitation. It was for her obviously a moment of reflection. Her lips were compressed a little in a characteristic, capable manner. I looked at her with a friendliness I really felt towards her slight, unattractive, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... say no place would have looked very attractive to me when I came out from that hospital; but London and my lodging in it did seem past all bearing unattractive. The Dorking lodging had been definitely relinquished, and in any case I had no wish now to see Dorking, Leith Hill, or ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... think about the boys. We could not stop that if we would, and we would not stop it if we could. The danger comes when a girl thinks of little else. The girl who begins by devoting all her thought to boys is apt to end by being a very unattractive and unpopular sort of woman. Every girl ought to get along well with the girls of her own age as well as with the boys. There is something wrong with the girl who cannot get along with her girl friends. And so ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... some time, but the occasional movements of her body, as she leaned against the panel, were audible to Orme. He found himself wondering about her—how she had happened to take up the career of fortune-telling. She must have been a handsome woman; even now she was not unattractive. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... better school results, but perhaps in work that is better adapted to them. Again, the success with which these pupils carry a schedule of five or six subjects, besides other work not recognized in the treatment of this study, and retrieve themselves in the unattractive subjects of failure pleads for a recognition of their ability and enterprise. Their difficulty is without doubt frequently more physiological than psychological, except as they are the victims of a false psychology, that either disregards ...
— The High School Failures - A Study of the School Records of Pupils Failing in Academic or - Commercial High School Subjects • Francis P. Obrien
... this tower was a remnant of a real castle that had once protected the village of Belton. The house itself was an ugly residence, three stories high, built in the time of George II, with low rooms and long passages, and an immense number of doors. It was a large unattractive house—unattractive that is, as regarded its own attributes but made interesting by the beauty of the small park in which it stood. Belton Park did not, perhaps, contain much above a hundred acres, but the land was so broken into knolls ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... into the unlighted street and began their search; but, seen close at hand, the cooking arrangements of Taboga proved most unattractive. Outside the sanitarium, it seemed, there was not a stove on the island. Charcoal braziers set upon the floors or in the dirt yards served all culinary purposes, and the process of preparing meals was conducted with an indifference that promised no savory ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... brilliant grey eyes, and were nearly reached by thick upward curled black eyelashes. If her mouth was large, it was well-shaped, and if her nose did not possess the classic severity of her brother's, its challenging tilt was not unattractive. To these charms must be added shining masses of dark hair, and a complexion of so vivid a tone, that it seemed sometimes as though a fog of carmine coloured the very atmosphere about her glowing face. She radiated vitality, the richness ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Harleston smiled, "to be relieved of looking down those unattractive muzzles. Ah! thank you!—The chairs, gentlemen!" with a fine ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... with a scornful but not unattractive conceit. 'He was a hard master to live with—that don't matter. But he is a fool! I don't mean to say he don't know a lot about some things—but he thinks he knows everything—and he don't. And he'll not let anyone tell him—not he! Once, if you'll ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to Chamberi. Remorse and that ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Ottawa, however, and the Wyandot and the Potawatomi, there was a striking divergence. If the Wyandot represented the highest order of intelligence among the savages of the northwest, the Potawatomi represented one of the lowest. He was dark, cruel, treacherous and unattractive, and proved a willing tool for murder and assassination in the hands of the English. There was no place on earth for the chivalrous Kentuckian and the treacherous Potawatomi to dwell in peace together, and the imparting ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... who take our money for learning English of us. But there is no such range of Italian and French and German restaurants in London as in New York, and of what there are none are at once so cheap and so good as ours. The cheaper restaurants are apt to be English, sincere in material, but heavy and unattractive in expression; in everything culinary the island touch seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far from home, when the lunch came prematurely, we found all the English eating-houses devoutly shut, and our wicked hope was ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... soft kind of paste, with a coating of the flour on the outside. These sweetmeats were nicely packed in straw baskets, of a different manufacture from those before-mentioned, and were very superior to the common sort which is brought from the coast in small coarse earthenware basins, exceedingly unattractive ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... Writing of England, Wiseman said: "There is still a scholastic hardness in our controversial theology, an unbendingness of outward forms in our explanations of Catholic principles, which renders our theologians dry and unattractive to the most catholicly inclined portion of our Protestants." The choice which these youths made, towards 1830, was, though they did not know it, the beginning of a ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... assumed the lead at Wittenberg with a passionate and ambitious, but undeterminate zeal. The other was the Augustine monk, Gabriel Zwilling, who had introduced himself to notice as a fiery preacher in the convent church, and in spite of his unattractive appearance and weak voice had drawn together a large congregation from the town and university, and fascinated them with his eloquence. A young Silesian wrote home from the university of Wittenberg ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... filed in about twenty-five of the most unattractive animal-looking females, dressed in ordinary hideous clothes, who all took their seats on a row of chairs at the farther end. They wore no national costume nor anything to attract the eye, but were simply garbed as concierges or shop-girls might have been; and some were old, gray-haired women, and ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... run till dark. This is not the kind of thing that keeps hunting alive, but it is the kind of day which occurs in most ordinary counties in February, and at which no one greatly grumbles. But if a slow woodland day is unattractive, the man who hunts in a modest way from London and wishes to be sure of a run has no lack of choice. Try, for instance, a day on the South Downs, five miles from the sea, on the vast uplands and among ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... unattainable. How much humble piety has bloomed in the by-paths of life far from the crowded highway of the world, amidst the recesses of privacy! How often has the beauty of holiness adorned the most misshapen, or otherwise unattractive exterior! How many great and pious individuals have occupied the vale of poverty, the objects of divine approbation and of angelic joy; who, under different circumstances, might have been ornaments of the political world, or lights in the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... while working near the Great London docks, I used often to look at the tall East Indiamen, thinking that I soon should be aboard just such a vessel in the North Sea. It was dark and raining when my train ran into Yarmouth, and a dripping, stout fisherman in a blue uniform met me at that then unattractive and ill-lighted terminus. He had brought a forlorn "growler" or four-wheeled cab. Climbing in we drove a mile or more along a deserted road, and drew up at last apparently ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... and Mr. Franklin took his seat at the fireside. Benjamin was reading, the unattractive tallow candle ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... godowns which line Makassar's water-front form an unattractive screen to a picturesque and charming town. Though, owing to its commercial importance as a half-way station on the road from Asia to Australia, Makassar promises to become a second Singapore, it has ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... on the evening of the second day that a chance remark from Peters turned her mind to the extensive possibilities of liquidation that lay close at hand. She was discussing her dinner dress with Peters, she wanted something very plain and high and unattractive, and Peters, who disapproved of this tendency and was all for female wiles and propitiations, fell into an admiration of the pearl necklace. She thought perhaps by so doing she might induce Lady Harman to ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... in at the old man plying his twine-shuttle in front of the door. The fact that he was Emmett's father and ignorant of the secret which Richard shared, made an object of intense interest out of an otherwise unattractive and commonplace old man. Now that interest grew vast and overshadowing as ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... labyrinth, you will find yourself entangled in intricate and perplexing business conditions, and your wife will make the home environment intolerable; children and sweethearts will prove ill-tempered and unattractive. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... scraggy plant, with unattractive, dark-green foliage and a profusion of buds standing out at all angles, is, in July, almost the only growing thing to be seen on the barren-looking mesa around Colorado Springs. Anything more unpromising can hardly be imagined; the ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... are much more interesting. Nothing is so unattractive as goodness, except, perhaps, a sane mind in a sane body. Even the children find the fairies monotonous, I believe. An eternal smile is much more wearisome than a perpetual frown. The one sweeps away all possibilities, the ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... undrawn and the little front rooms left unlighted, the firelight flickering within on shining bookcases and picture frames was no less pleasantly suggestive. Still, in every neighbourhood there will always be some houses whose exteriors are severely unattractive; without being poverty-stricken, they seem to belong to people indifferent to all but the absolutely essential, and incapable of surrounding themselves with any of the characteristic contrivances that most homes which are more than mere lodgings amass almost unconsciously. It was before a ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... Mrs. Wade, and, finding her at home, proceeded there at once, to "fix" matters; a thing by no means hard to accomplish, for Kitty Wade found the prospect of a lonesome vacation very unattractive, ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... and humiliating as publicly as possible, any white man that it does not gore. It seems to cherish a peculiar spite against all Europeans; for a buffalo, that is as mild as a lamb with the most unattractive native, cannot be brought to tolerate the proximity of the most refined, and least repulsive of white men. Which one is there amongst us, who does not bear a grudge against the water-buffalo as a class, and against some one ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... beautiful or picturesque, and yet there is much of both. Attention is rarely challenged by the sublime or the majestic, but is often arrested by some play of light and shade. Cuban villages, with few exceptions, are unattractive, although there is not infrequently some particular building, usually a church, that calls for a second look or a careful examination. Most of these little communities consist of a row of low and ungraceful ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... authoritativeness, be misunderstood or perverted to an inutile end, or, what is worse, swallowed in that oblivion where lies so much excellent thought, which, lacking either balance or timeliness, has become stranded, wrecked, and practically lost to view because of its unappropriate and unattractive presentation. ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... certain extent, the result of natural selection. Most of the officers had chosen their wives very carefully, and this had brought about a fine similarity in their views, a similarity which even found expression in the rather unattractive arrangement of their dwellings, in which the upholsterer's ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... which are adapted to be dispersed in any of these ways are of dull protective tints, so that when they fall on the ground they are almost indistinguishable; besides which, they are usually small, hard, and altogether unattractive, never having any soft, juicy pulp; while the edible seeds often bear such a small proportion to the hard, dry envelopes or appendages, that few animals would care to ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace |
