"Undesired" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Undesired and wholly irrelevant there flashed into his mind that walk with Mary, a short ten days ago, when he had reproached her with her limitations, her power to grasp only the obvious. And it was suddenly revealed to Mr Ffolliot that certain ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... blushing all the time, like a full-blown poppy,' and off she went on a fresh score—but Phoebe, though disconcerted for a moment, was not to be put out of countenance when she understood her ground, and she continued with earnestness, undesired by her companion—'Very likely I managed badly, but I know you do not really think it improper to see Robert alone, and it is very important that you should do so. Indeed it is, Lucy,' she added—the youthful candour and seriousness ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the house, will you, father?" whispered Rose; for the man had opened a back door leading into the shed and was regarding his undesired guests with ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... unutterable masculine selfishness of this "jealousy," which, while indifferent to chastity and fidelity, per se, punishes by proxy, leaving the real culprit untouched and happy at having not only had his intrigue but a chance to get rid of an undesired wife! ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... fair, yet by me so undesired; and beholding her so merry, while my heart was amazed with the worst sorrow, and considering, too, that but for her all this would never have been, but I sitting happy by my lady's side,—thinking on all this, I say, I ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... elders, and heads of families in general. He might, perhaps, help to collect the ministerial rate, though his principal duty was by no means the collecting of tithes. He "worned peple out of ye towne." This warning was not at all because the new-comers were objectionable or undesired, but was simply a legal form of precaution, so that the parish would never be liable for the keeping of the "worned" ones in case they thereafter became paupers. He administered the "oath of fidelity" to new inhabitants. The tithingman also watched to see that "no young people ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure. Unsought for, undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made him known in the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which he had dwelt so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of cities, came from far to see and converse ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... an Englishman's respect for the law. At times this automatic power, which has been thus created Faust-like, by reason of the impossibility of pre-adapting its mechanism to the exigences of every case, works to unforseen and undesired ends—sometimes even to absurd ones. And, with thinkers of a certain phase of modern thought, it has been a favourite taunt against the average British mind, that it rather delights in the contemplation of such abnormal workings of the great automatic law ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... notebook and drew a plan of streets indicating the way to the place of the wood merchant. In spite of his remark and the undesired intrusion of business upon his dejeuner, the Major's manner was as friendly as could be expected from a Town Major. We left on ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... the learned of those days toward every new discovery seems stupid and almost insane. They had a crystallized system of truth, perfect, symmetrical; it wanted no novelty, no additions; every addition or growth was an imperfection, an excrescence, a deformity. Progress was unnecessary and undesired. The Church had a rigid system of dogma which must be accepted in its entirety on pain of being treated as a heretic. Philosophers had a cast-iron system of truth to match—a system founded upon Aristotle—and so interwoven with the great theological dogmas that to question one was almost equivalent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... pier yearns towards the merchantman lying along-side, with the colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell the near approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a sense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... bodily visions are those which are most doubtful, and should in no wise be desired, and if they come undesired still they should be shunned as much as possible, yet not by treating them with contempt, unless it be certain that they come from an evil spirit; indeed, I was filled with horror, and greatly distressed, when I ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youth cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy, or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in Agnes Grey. She was cheated ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... deprived of this stimulant, there is nothing that life can bestow, not a blessing that man can receive, which would not come to him unheeded, undesired, and be a curse to him. There is but one all-absorbing want, one engrossing desire—his whole being has but one tongue—that tongue syllables but one word—morphia. And oh! the vain, vain attempt to break this bondage, the labor worse than useless—a ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... continue the acquaintance he will not return the call in person, but simply send his card by post. This distant rejoinder practically ends the brief acquaintance without any discourteous rebuff. It is one of the mistakes of the vulgar to be rude and gruff in order to repel an undesired acquaintance. In reality, nothing freezes out a bore more effectually than the icy calm of dignified courtesy. There are exquisitely polite ways of sending every undesirable person to limbo. The perfect self-command of the well-bred man ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... she said, frowning, 'that you should still press an undesired interest in me and my acquaintances, in me and my affairs, Mr Clennam. I ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... speed after him. The same causes operated in the same way with Sweeting. Thus it chanced on that afternoon that Caroline's ears were three times tortured with the ringing of the bell and the advent of undesired guests; for Donne followed Malone, and Sweeting followed Donne; and more wine was ordered up from the cellar into the dining-room (for though old Helstone chid the inferior priesthood when he found them "carousing," as he called it, in their own tents, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Hoddan found that he and Thal had ridden into a very tiny courtyard. Twenty feet above them, an inner battlemented wall offered excellent opportunities for the inhabitants of the castle to throw things down at visitors who after admission turned out to be undesired. ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... his own purposes. At least he would keep in touch with them and make sure that Baynes did not get her. His other reason was based on his knowledge of an event that had transpired at his camp the previous night—an event which he had not mentioned at the bungalow for fear of drawing undesired attention to his movements and bringing the blacks of the big Bwana into dangerous intercourse with his own boys. He had told at the bungalow that half his men had deserted. That story might be quickly disproved should his boys and ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... advocates of the League, that they were as eager to set on foot subscriptions for themselves, as the public were for those who had really earned them. One individual, who hung about "the League rooms," and made speeches often undesired by the committee, and when inconvenient to their arrangements, was very indignant that a subscription was not raised for him. Without eloquence in speech, temperance in council, or discretion in action, he became prominent only ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... justice to speak for the absent who is. I assure you, therefore, most solemnly, that your interest in Miss Beverley I never heard but by common report, that our being alone together was by both of us undesigned and undesired, that the honour she did our house in calling at it, was merely to acquaint my mother with my sister's removal to Mrs Harrel's, and that the part which I had myself in her condescension, was simply to be consulted upon a journey which she has in contemplation to the South of France. ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Fossick of the Flat Hat Hunt, who declined—Mr. Crane of Crane Hall; Captain Guano, late of that noble corps the Spotted Horse Marines; and others who accepted. Mr. Spraggon was a sort of volunteer, at all events an undesired guest, unless his lordship accompanied him. It so happened that the least wanted guest was the first to arrive on ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... the last analysis but the production of motion in undesired forms, the allowing valuable energy to do useless work? In that amazing case of long distance transmission, common sunshine, a solar beam arrives at the earth from the sun not one whit the weaker for its excursion of 92,000,000 miles. It is highly probable that we are surrounded by similar ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... will create the desired conditions and receive help in many unlooked-for ways that will lift you out of the undesired environment. Life will then seem very different to you, for you will have found happiness through awakening within yourself the power to become the master of circumstances instead ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... discontent which were sure to overthrow it. In 1848, and still more in 1871, the people of France at large turned instinctively to those natural leaders whom at all other times they had so persistently ostracized. Alarmed in the first case by an unexpected and undesired triumph of the Parisian populace—in the second, chastened by a great national disaster, without definite views or objects of their own—they deliberately trusted their interests to the larger landowners, whose interests must coincide with theirs; to the men of hereditary culture, of thoughtful ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... shouldn't respect him much if he did forgive me," she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange, unpremeditated terms of endearment. Beyond these, no words at all were exchanged between them; they were undesired. Adelaide did not know whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his opinion and intentions in regard to her. All that she cared about was that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... him was all insincere? Let the matter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, which, you will remember, you entered unsummoned and undesired." ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... for ceremonials, truly, Mr. Dunmore; yet, had family concurrence been perfect, it seems to me that her brother might have undertaken this mission. I have no wish to thrust myself undesired into any household ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... with her hands, and fell fainting to the ground. The next Monday, July 10, the royal barges came down the Thames from Richmond, and at three in the afternoon Lady Jane landed at the broad staircase of the Tower, as queen, in undesired splendour. But that same evening messages came saying that Mary had declared herself queen. She had sent addresses to the peers, commanding them on their allegiance ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... clergy producing such an outstanding medical man as the Reverend John Clayton; and with the laymen acquiring enough information, perhaps from a few medical books, in order to practice, themselves, in case a doctor were unavailable or undesired. ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... those who say that friendship excludes love, and there is a kind of friendship which can only exist where love is impossible and undesired. On the other hand we know that sometimes the boy and girl who have grown up side by side, who have shared each other's pranks and penalties, do wake up one day to find a new element asserting itself in their intercourse. ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... by nature far less warlike than that of the savage and intrepid natives in the regions of the coast. These Guarani Indians, nevertheless, made some show of aggression, and would doubtless have been glad to scare away these undesired strangers. Owing to this, a collision between the two forces occurred; but so crushing was the defeat of the Indians that they resigned themselves submissively to the Spaniards, and henceforth became a vassal tribe, lending assistance to their ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... homage and affection of children, the prattle and playful sports of children's children—homeless, wifeless, childless he stood at the border of the boundless sea, soldier duty pointing the way to far distant, unknown and undesired regions, content to follow that flag to the end of the world, if need be, and owning no higher hope or ambition than to uphold it to ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... the Highlanders, who gravely passed on the dish to their mistress. If she refused a plat favoured by them, instead of carrying it away, the giants in kilts silently but firmly pressed it upon her acceptance, until in self-defence she seized some of the undesired food, and ate it ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... often told, the majority of human beings belong either to the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so, we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the cities—whichever they may be—wherein dwell the highest products of our civilisation. In ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... set a high value upon). The women are generally of the middle height, with Turkish eyes, straight hair, and clear olive complexion, but are not nearly so amorous as the Spanish belles, whom I have described to you in former letters. I have some feats to boast of when I return, which is undesired and undesirable—I always except you from my complaints, and hope you will expect me with the same delight that I anticipate meeting you. You can have no conception of Lord S.'s ecstasy when I informed him of my probable movements. The ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Violet, quite timidly. "Since you press me thus gravely, I must admit that I have been obliged to repel the affection of a certain man. Yet, please don't infer, sir, that he has ever been ungentlemanly. He even has done me the honor, if one can so term an undesired proposal, to protest that he wished to ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... dazzlingly to permit of the smallest corner of darkness. Remote, no doubt, in time that day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and men shall live together in peace and gentleness; when the inner life shall be admitted as the Reality, strife, gain, and loss unknown because possessions undesired, and petty selfhood merged in the larger life—remote, of course, yet surely not impossible. He had seen the Face of Nature, heard her Call, tasted her joy and peace; and the rest of the tired world might do the same. It only waited to be shown the way. The truth he now saw so dazzling was that ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... light. She found him in the parlor, curled up in a big chair by the window, looking at a picture-book. He climbed down immediately, and came and took her hand in his, a demonstration of affection so unusual that she caught him in her arms and might have cuddled him with the undesired "forty kisses," if he had not gently moved his head aside. But her eyes were so blurred with tears of fatigue and Fright she did ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... job is to get the patient to be patient, to wait until the body corrects itself and stops manifesting the undesired symptom. Thus comes the prime rule of all humane medicine: first of all, do no harm! If the doctor simply refrains from making the body worse, it will probably get better by itself. But the patient, rarely resigned to quiet ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... uncertainly between two emotions—elation and distress. He had achieved two kinds of success—the desired and the undesired. It was but natural that he should feel proud of the distinction the venture had brought to him on one hand, but there was reason for despair over the acquisition of $50,000. It made it necessary for him to undertake an almost superhuman feat—increase the number of ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... better they hastily re-armed themselves. Some one had once aptly described her as a hedgehog with the protective mimicry of a puffball. If there was an awkward remark to be made at an inconvenient moment before undesired listeners, Joan invariably made it, and when the occasion did not present itself she was usually capable of creating it. She was not without a certain popularity, the sort of popularity that a dashing highwayman sometimes achieved among those who were not in the habit of travelling ...
— When William Came • Saki
... The undesired witnesses took the hint and quitted the store. Thereupon the long-limbed clerk verified the taunt of "counter-jumper" by clearing it at a bound. "Will you engage not to repeat that rowdy (blackguard) talk in the store while I am the master, and ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... will he kept his hand on the throttle of his emotions. One look, one false move, would ruin it all. He knew, without any doubts that she did not love him. He even told himself she loved Jocelyn. He knew that he must make himself a valuable friend and not an undesired lover, but his want of her was great, and his fury at Jarvis's indifference white hot. ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... consideration will not come amiss. An experienced Berlin lawyer has recently emphasised this danger.[120] He shows that it is a regular practice to utilise the existence of certain punishments as a means of getting undesired persons out of the way, by bringing false accusations against them. Immediately after the Franco-German War, these accusations dealt with offences against the laws providing for the safety of the Empire ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... you are! It moves in a vicious circle. Because material success is what the majority want, the majority'll go on wanting it. Hardy says somewhere that it's innate in human nature not to desire the undesired of others." ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... them their tea. It was obvious that, for some reason unknown to him, their presence there was undesired by all the company present, including Clare herself. He also knew instinctively that their coming there had been some act of daring bravery, undertaken perhaps with the hope that, after all, it might not ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... execution, any small hopes which remained of our ever winning the war would inevitably be blotted out for good and all. As for Mr. Lloyd George in drab days before he became First Minister of the Crown in spite of his superhuman efforts to avoid that undesired consummation, he always loved to make his voice heard, and he always succeeded—just as a canary will in a roomful ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... And, unpremeditated, undesired, out of the accumulations of his tilling came civilisation. Civilisation was the agricultural surplus. It appeared as trade and tracks and roads, it pushed boats out upon the rivers and presently invaded ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... the buck, and merely told the Duke of Lennox, Mar, and others that he was riding to Perth to speak with Gowrie, and would return before evening. Some of the Court went to Falkland for fresh horses, other followed slowly with weary steeds. They followed 'undesired by him,' because a report rose that the King had some purpose to apprehend the oppressive Master of Oliphant. Ruthven implored James not to bring Lennox and Mar, but only three or four servants, to which the ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the voice within we are prepared for general starvation; whether we are prepared for the starvation of our individual selves we cannot, of course, say until we experience it. But we hope for the best, and believe that we shall go through with it to death, in the undesired company of all who do not agree with us.' And it is certain, sir, that some of them were capable of this; for there is, as you know, a type of man who will die rather than admit that his views are too extreme to keep himself and ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... TRUE to your husbands on the subject of maternity, and the relation that leads to it. Interchange thoughts and feelings with them as to what nature allows or demands in regard to these. Can maternity be natural when it is undesigned by the father or undesired by the mother? Can a maternity be natural, healthful, ennobling to the mother, to the child, to the father, and to the home, when no loving, tender, anxious forethought presides over thee relation in which it originated?—when the mother's nature loathed ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... slowed up she stepped to the right to let them pass, and then walked on, thus placing the cart between herself and her undesired companion. The youth looked disconcerted by these tactics, and for a few moments could find nothing to say. Then, dropping his long white lashes sheepishly, ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sought to deceive—and of course the man of the world thought such women compact of deception—would try to increase her attraction by representing herself as courted, desired, feted, run after by men. Such women always did that. Never would she wish it to be known that she was undesired, that she was abandoned. Men want what other men want. But who wants the unwanted? The fact that Mrs. Chepstow allowed him to see and to realize her solitude, so simply and so completely, proved to Nigel her almost unwise unworldliness. The man of the world, so sceptical, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... charmingly situated between Montreux Vevey, complete sanitary accommodations vicinity boat, seabaths, golf-grounds excursions receives PAYING GUEST moderate terms, Prussians and Austro-Germans, alcoholists undesired."— Swiss Paper. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... the petition, as does Aida, and though the priests warn and protest, Radames asks the boon of their lives and freedom, and the King grants it. Also, without the asking, he bestows the hand of his daughter upon the victorious general, who receives the undesired honor with consternation. ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to explain just what Miss Hester's position was among the denizens of the poorer quarter. She was liked and disliked, admired and feared. She would descend upon her victims with unasked counsel and undesired tracts. Her voice was a trumpet of scathing invective against their shiftlessness, their untidiness, and their immorality, but her hand was as a horn of plenty in straitened times, and her presence in sickness was a comfort. She made no pretence to being good-hearted; ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... on the memory. Not by the power of meditation are the long-ago vanished thoughts or emotions restored to us, in which we found delight or disturbance; but of themselves do they seem to arise, not undesired indeed, but unbidden, like sea-birds that come unexpectedly floating up into some inland vale, because, unknown to us who wonder at them, the tide is flowing and the breezes blow from the main. Bright as the living image stands now before us the ghost—for what else is it than the ghost—of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... and was tired, Chid her visits as too few; Crownless now and undesired, She to seek me is inspired Oftener than ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... his father. He had challenged every interest in Worthington from which there was anything to expect commercially. He had peremptorily banished Esme Elliot from his heart and his hopes, though she still forced entrance to his thoughts and would not be denied, there, the precarious rights of an undesired guest. He was now simply and solely a journalist with a mind single to his purpose, to go down fighting the best fight there was in him. Defeat, he believed, was practically certain. He would make it a defeat of which ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... dream of the actual misery which filled the heart of the graceful, dignified young man by her side. She considered herself in the position of a mother, who forces an undesired, but nevertheless, delectable sweet upon a child, who gazes at her with adoration when the savour has reached his palate. She did not expect Von Rosen to be much edified by Miss Bessy Dicky's report. ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... estimated by Bennie to be about eight hundred or a thousand feet in height. Although the entanglement was by no means impassable, it was a distinct obstacle and one they preferred to tackle by daylight. Moreover, it indicated that their company was undesired. They were in the presence of an unknown quantity, the master of the Flying Ring. Whether he was a malign or a benevolent influence, this Father of the Marionettes, ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... of Michigan was opened to settlement; the northwestern quarter of Ohio was freed; in Indiana and Illinois (more than half of which had been Indian country prior to 1816) all but a comparatively small region of undesired prairie lands south of Lake Michigan was ceded; almost the whole state of Missouri was freed from its Indian title; and, in the Gulf region, at the close of the decade, the Indians held but two isolated islands of territory, one in western Georgia ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... promise constancy in love is promising to continue in a state of mind over which your will has no control. It's never an honest promise; it can be only an honest hope. Love comes and goes and no man can stay it, and no man is its prophet. Coming unasked, sometimes undesired, often unwelcome, it goes unbidden, without reason, without logic, as inexorably as it came, governed by laws that no man ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the seat offered her by her undesired visitor, now rose to put an end to the interview; and then a sudden thought struck her. These people had motored from the south, and perhaps had come far that day—at any rate from the nearest town, a good many miles off—and she had not even offered them a cup of tea, and her ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin |
