"Unnatural" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aloud like children, and neither of us attempting to offer consolation to the other. Such weakness can scarcely be conceived, and to those who have never been similarly situated will, no doubt, appear unnatural; but it must be remembered that our intellects were so entirely disordered by the long course of privation and terror to which we had been subjected, that we could not justly be considered, at that period, in the light of rational beings. In subsequent perils, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with Germany and Austria, although there was no greater hate before the war than that between Italians and Austrians; and the Great General Staff believed that Italy would remain in this unnatural alliance, would fight in order to give the Germans and the German-Austrians the domination of Europe. The victory of the Central Empires would have placed Italy under that Austrian influence from which in her struggle for freedom under the leadership of Cavour, Garibaldi and Victor Emanuel ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... of good sense and entertainment. The neglect of the readers will soon put an end to this sort of scribbling. There can be no pleasantry where there is no wit, no impression can be made where there is no truth for the foundation. To conclude: they are like the fruits of the earth in this unnatural season; the corn which held up its head is spoiled with rankness, but the greater part of the harvest is laid along, and little of good income and wholesome nourishment is received into the barns. This is almost a digression, I confess to your lordship; ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... unnatural in such feeling at your age. When you are older you will smile at such moods, and at the mishaps that gave rise ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... surreptitious glances in the mirror opposite.) Her eyes are bright blue with long dark lashes, and she has a mouth too pretty to describe, fitted up with a set of the loveliest natural teeth one could see in these days of the dentist; it is so perfect that it seems unnatural and a sad pity that it should sometimes be the outlet of censorious remarks about less beautiful sisters, but its owner is very young and not surrounded by the best of influences at present, and no doubt will have better sense as ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... all his attentions, he had previously excited; and what had been terror and dislike before, was now absolute aversion. Yes, aversion! His cruelty to such a charming woman made him odious to her. She had often read of such characters, characters which Mr. Allen had been used to call unnatural and overdrawn; but here was ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... we all cried, for we had not noticed before how unnatural his laugh was; there was no further thought of eating; and he, when he saw the general anxiety, mastered himself with an effort and said ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... more than half a century old cannot be entitled to denounce Englishmen as foreigners, or to complain that strangers usurp the rights of the country-born. A wise administration of local patronage, without distinctions which are unnatural and absurd, would strengthen the hands of the executive and satisfy the reason ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... exaggeration must be allowed.[1179] Besides, nations may be said—if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety,—which they have not. You are an exception, though. Come, gentlemen, let us candidly admit that there is one Scotchman who is cheerful.' BEAUCLERK. 'But he is a very unnatural Scotchman.' I, however, continued to think the compliment to Garrick hyperbolically untrue. His acting had ceased some time before his death; at any rate he had acted in Ireland but a short time, at an early period of his life[1180], and never in Scotland. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Unnatural mother to her child, This Venus all imperative! O thou, my bitter joy and wild,— Farewell ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... it, and Evelyn's mind at once turned to the supernatural. A silly maidservant at home had been accustomed to ply her with ghost stories, all of which now recurred to her memory. What was it, that unnatural, luminous halo on the opposite wall? It was moving nearer to her, and had almost reached the curtain of her cubicle, when, with a choking little gasp, she sprang out of bed, and darting into the corridor ran shrieking upstairs, her one idea being ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... that as there are two kinds of Sentiments, the Natural and the Sublime, which are always to be pursued in an Heroic Poem, there are also two kinds of Thoughts which are carefully to be avoided. The first are such as are affected and unnatural; the second such as are mean and vulgar. As for the first kind of Thoughts, we meet with little or nothing that is like them in Virgil: He has none of those [trifling [7]] Points and Puerilities that are so often to be met with in Ovid, none of the Epigrammatick ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... doubt about publishing Catherine at all, it was not unnatural. She might reasonably hesitate to put an immature work by the side of her most mature: she might (and we know that she did) feel that the social usages of sixteen years ago, which she was describing in this tale, were no longer those of the day; and it was ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... which has led to such a result, and cause us to look with some suspicion on the further extension of that system. It must be remembered too that our commerce is not a purely natural growth. It has been ever fostered by the legislature, and forced to an unnatural luxuriance by the protection of our fleets and armies. The wisdom and the justice of this policy have been already doubted. So soon, therefore, as it is seen that the further extension of our manufactures ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... a look of pain on the face of the Doctor,) "but I will be,—I am"; and with great effort she throws a most unnatural expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... effect' was very natural; for art goes after bread, and a high C with the chest voice often realizes an income of thousands to its fortunate possessor. Roger has made a laudable exception; his beautiful use of the falsetto certainly produces a more agreeable effect than the forced chest tones so unnatural to the organ of many a singer. How widespread is this mistaken notion, that the use of the falsetto is entirely contrary to art, we hear frequently enough in the expressions of individuals when some unlucky tenor happens to get caught on one of these tabooed falsetto tones. Thus ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... deleterious nature, and was constantly betrayed by the thirst for scientific experiment into practices incompatible with the public health. The good nature which my detractors have not denied me was a veritable snare. I felt for youth debarred from its enjoyments by the unnatural vitality of age, and sympathised with the blooming damsel whose parent alone stood between her and her lover. I thus lived in constant apprehension of being ordered back to the Netherlands, and yearned for the wings of a dove, that I might flee away and be out of mischief. At last I discovered ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... hold three hundred, four hundred, even eight hundred boarders, with immense dormitories, refectories and playgrounds, recitation-rooms full to overflowing, and, for eight or ten years, for one half of our children and youths, an anti-social unnatural system apart, strict confinement, no going out except to march in couples under the eyes of a sub-teacher who maintains order in the ranks, promiscuity and life in common, exact and minute regularity under equal discipline and constant constraint in order to eat, sleep, study, play, promenade ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... syllable of the apparition, so he imagined the whole to be an invention formed only to impose upon him, and that the fellow had in reality been bribed by Northerton to let him escape. And this he imagined the rather, as the fright appeared to him the more unnatural in one who had the character of as brave and bold a man as any in the regiment, having been in several actions, having received several wounds, and, in a word, having behaved himself always like a good ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the idea of our return. We have been leading such a semi-savage life for years past, such a wandering nomadic existence, that any other seems in a manner unnatural to me. Time was when I should have looked upon our return with unmixed joy; but so many new and strong ties have arisen to unite me with Sydney, that now when the anchor is getting up for England, I scarcely know whether to rejoice or to grieve. You must not be angry, my dear Mother; I have none ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... very well to love a husband, Colonel, but to be faithful to his corpse is unnatural, while men with beating hearts ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... "They shall sleep the perpetual sleep, and shall not awake." "Sleep on now and take your rest." The child was troublesome and the mother sung it to sleep, and it slept itself quiet. A lady took opium and slept herself to death. "Many persons sleep themselves into a kind of unnatural stupidity." Rip Van Winkle, according to the legend, slept away a large ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... the fact that in folk-lore Christmas is a quite peculiarly uncanny time. Not unnatural is it that at this midwinter season of darkness, howling winds, and raging storms, men should have thought to see and hear the mysterious shapes and voices of dread ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... singular man, an exotic result of the unnatural conditions we English have brought about in India. The word renegade describes him aptly, I think: he was born and bred a Brahmin, a Rajput, of the hottest and bluest blood in Rajputana; he died to all intents and purposes a European—with an English ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a total extraction of the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... sort of idea, or feeling that here the writer takes up his pen afresh after a certain interval. C4-6 are a reduplication, not unnatural indeed, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... not venture at first to give it. And yet if no crime had been committed, and I had said the day after, "Yesterday I went to see the priest at Brechy, and did not find him," who would have seen any thing unnatural ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... "Let one simple trait of the human heart, one expression of passion, genuine and true to nature," she wrote, "be introduced, and it will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, whilst the false and unnatural around it fades away upon every side, like the rising exhalations of the morning." The reception of these plays was sufficient to satisfy the utmost ambition of the author, and established the foundation of her fame. "Nothing to compare with them ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... time, M. Daburon did not venture to interrupt the count, to ask him briefly for the immediate facts of the case. He knew that fever alone gave him this unnatural energy, to which at any moment might succeed the most complete prostration. He feared, if he stopped him for an instant, that he would not have strength ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... will talk, and what she'll have to bear!" broke out Mary vehemently, as she sank back on a chair almost in tears. "And in my heart I believe that she loves him, too. And thou must believe that, too, and yet theere thou stands wi' that unnatural frown on thy face, and will do nowt at all, although in thy heart thou knows thou likes the missus as well as ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... do get down, young Monsieur," said the Pasteur, suddenly relapsing into a kind of unnatural calm. Indeed, at the door he turned and bowed politely to his adversary, wishing him bon voyage, to which the priest replied with a solemn benediction in the most ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Acciaudi's villa did not answer to you; by what I saw in Tuscany, and by the prints, their villas are strangely out of taste, and laboured by their unnatural regularity and art to destroy the romanticness of the situations. I wish you could see the villas and seats here! the country wears a new face; every body is improving their places, and as they don't fortify, their plantations with intrenchments of walls and high hedges, one has the benefit of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... of mud and grass, and lays a large number of oblong white eggs, but the little ones when hatched often serve as lunch for their unnatural papa, and this cannibalism, more than the rifle, prevents their numbers from increasing. The alligator is not particular as to diet. I once found the stomach of a ten-footer to be literally filled with pine chips from some tree which ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... they would shout,' he said. 'It is unnatural. They are like children. When there is noise there ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... how Hawthorne has imagined two women of natures so widely opposed as Hilda and Miriam under a similar pressure of questionable blood-guiltiness. With Miriam, it is a guilt which has for excuse that it was the only resort against an unnatural depravity in Father Antonio. But as if to emphasize the indelibleness of blood-stains, however justly inflicted, we have as a foil to Miriam the white sensitiveness of Hilda's conscience, which makes her—though perfectly free from even the indirect responsibility of Miriam—believe ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Lang, that great impostor, has been a great masterpiece of the devil: she has confessed unnatural lust, which is known to some of your number; she sat near the door where the charm of hair was found, which the girl declared did keep up her tongue; and upon burning thereof, it was loosed. The girl fell in fits upon her approach; she has notable marks; particularly one, which the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... knowledge of psychology enabled him to modify the statement that dreams are thoughts; dreams are fancies, he mused, creations of the imagination; but God has no regard for words! Logic taught him that there was something unnatural in his premature desires. He could not marry at the age of sixteen, since he was unable to support a wife; but why he was unable to support a wife, although he felt himself to be a man, was a problem which he could not solve. However anxious he might ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... derelict dead in its unnatural solitude and the men who inhabited the dug-out there was only a slender partition of earth, and I realize that the place in it where I lay my head corresponds to the spot buttressed ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... sun still lingered, but objects on both shores were getting to be confounded with the shapeless masses of the mountains. Here and there a pale star peeped out, though most of the vault that stretched across the confined horizon was shut in by dusky clouds. A streak of dull, unnatural light was seen in the quarter which lay above the meadows of the Rhone, and nearly in a direction with the peak of Mont Blanc, which, though not visible from this portion of the Leman, was known to lie behind the ramparts of Savoy, like a monarch of the hills entrenched in his citadel of ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... enjoyment, from being able to see and contribute to the education of the children she tenderly loved, unrestrained by the gothic etiquette with which all former royal mothers had been fettered, but which the kind indulgence of the Duchesse de Polignac broke through, as unnatural and unworthy of the enlightened and affectionate. The Duchess was herself an attentive, careful mother. She felt for the Queen, and encouraged her maternal sympathies, so doubly endeared by the long, long disappointment which ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... things went on. The air was sickly with the unnatural passion which all felt about them, and the nerves of the little household seemed to grow exasperated. Only Herr Sung remained unaffected; he was no less smiling, affable, and polite than he had been before: one could not tell whether his manner was a triumph of civilisation or an expression ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... moment that followed was almost painful. In that place it seemed the most unnatural of prodigies. Brokers, speculators and spectators were as surprised as I, and a long-drawn "Ah-h!" followed by a buzzing as of a great swarm of bees greeted his appearance. The stillness and the buzzing seemed to take an hour, but it could not have been as much as a minute when the voice ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... course. But Thibault's position was not altogether unnatural, nor unfamiliar. All over the world, for the past hundred years, people have been kicking against the sharpness of the pricks that drove them forward out of the old life, the wild life, the free life, grown dear to them because it was so ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... was proceeding to extremities; but, on the whole, I give him credit for great moderation. They will bite sometimes, however—me teste, who once in my proper person verified the old proverb, which I had always taken for a bit of unnatural history.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... together, having been translated into almost all civilised, and several primitive languages. It is generally recognised as having effected the greatest educational reform of the nineteenth century. It was certainly the most powerful of single agents in effecting the liberation of girlhood from its unnatural trammels. It placed the whole theory of education upon a sound biological basis in the nature of the child and the natural course of its evolution as a living creature. Spencer struck a fatal blow at the morbid asceticism by proxy which adults ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... one another as above, the "denouement" belongs to the class "unnatural;" which is used when the author wishes to show the intensity of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... in place of palmettos, clumps of marsh reeds, and rushes showed themselves here and there. An unearthly stillness prevailed, only broken now and then by the cry of a wild-goose; and even that appeared strange and unnatural ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... afflicted in his soul, and for the first time in his life fell into melancholy. But sadness was unnatural to one in his estate; for joy is ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... pale. "Taken or killed!" cried he. "Oh! sire, if you thought what you tell me, if you were sure you were telling me the truth, I should forget all that is just, all that is magnanimous in your words, to call you a barbarous king, and an unnatural man. But I pardon you these words," said he, smiling with pride; "I pardon them to a young prince who does not know, who cannot comprehend, what such men as M. d'Herblay, M. de Valon, and myself are. Taken or killed! Ah! ah! sire! tell me, if the news is true, how much it has cost ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... gay; for winter is here the season of flowers, and the heaths will cover the country with a vast Turkey carpet. Already the green is appearing where all was brown yesterday. To-day is Good Friday; and if Christmas seemed odd at Midsummer, Easter in autumn seems positively unnatural. Our Jewish party made their exodus to-day, by the little coasting steamer, to Algoa Bay. I rather condoled with the pretty little woman about her long rough journey, with three babies; but she laughed, and said they had had ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... to everyone—the man, the girl, both families, and all friends. It is an unnatural state, like that of waiting at the station for a train, and in a measure it is time wasted. The minds of the two most concerned are centered upon each other; to them life seems to consist in saying ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... same day or the next, I am not quite sure, but he went to his sister's at last, sadly under the influence of liquor. His weak state, the uncomfortable condition of his affairs, acting with the liquor upon his brain, caused him for a day or two to behave in a very inconsistent and unnatural manner. He seemed even to vary from his habitual truthfulness. Much disgusted, his sister rebuked him sharply, declared that she would tell me, and of course, the inference was that I should tell Mrs. Knowles. But that good woman knew about ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... shudder in the sour east, all June they rain canker-worms upon the roof, and then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tattered and hectic foliage. From the window the fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural liveliness of the summer streets through which the summer boarders are driving, or upon the death-white drifts of the intolerable winter. Their father, the captain, is dead; he died with the Calcutta trade, having survived ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the majority; but coaxing as a rule ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... several thousand majority, securing four of the seven senators, twelve of the twenty-four assemblymen, and twelve of the twenty-two aldermen. This left Tammany absolutely without patronage. It was not unnatural that many of Kelly's co-workers should doubt the possibility of longer working harmoniously under his leadership, and the great secession of prominent men from Tammany after the formation of the County Democracy created little surprise. But that the movement should include the rank and ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... original designation was to teach youth a graceful manner of walking, and a good address; but now we see them mount the stage, and perform ballets in the garb of comedians, capering, jumping, skipping, and making variety of strange unnatural motions. We shall see in the sequel, what opinion the wiser among the ancients had of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... of the Corporation elections, nine out of ten of which have gone for the Radicals, and in many places all the persons elected are of that persuasion. The constituency is certainly different, and a desire to make maison nette of these dens of corruption is not unnatural; but it affords a plausible subject for triumph on the Radical side, and has a ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... did what she could for her grandchildren, but it was a strange, unnatural life. They knew no other girls; they had never ben twenty miles from Knutsford. All girlish pleasures and enjoyments were a sealed book to them. They had never been to a party, a picnic, or a ball; no life was ever more simple, more quiet, more devoid of all amusement than theirs. ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... succeed. And since the storm of war is soon to subside into the calm of peace, let us do nothing now, that may throw a cloud over the coming sunshine. Let us not even talk of 'exterminating war'! that unnatural crime which would harrow up our souls with the pangs of remorse, and haunt our repose with the dread of retaliation — which would draw down upon our cause the curse of heaven, and make our very name the odium of all generations. But, far differently, let us act the generous part ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... had confidence in the virtue of his menaces, however, may be inferred from the tranquillity which immediately took possession of features that were never disturbed, without wearing an appearance of unnatural effort. The substantial burgher was a little turned of fifty: and an English wag, who had imported from the mother country a love for the humor of his nation, had once, in a conflict of wits before the city council, described him to be a man of alliterations. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... us far afield. It is enough that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the most verbal and unreal of all ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... will doubtless not fail here to ask himself the question, whether it is wise in man to create in himself an unnatural and totally unnecessary appetite, which may, and often does, entail hours—ay, sometimes months—of exceeding discomfort; but we would not for a moment presume to suggest such a question to him. We have a distinct objection to the ordinary ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... where he sat brooding over his rifle; and there was in his face an expression such as I had never before seen there—something unnatural that altered him altogether, as death alters the features, leaving them strangely unfamiliar. And even as I looked, the expression passed. He lifted his eyes to mine, and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... suspicion remained that the Amphib monarch had, in accordance with age-old procedure, given his unofficial official blessing and that he was preparing even more disgusting and outrageous and unnatural moves. Through his control of the populace by the Master Skin, he would be able to do as he ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... and he soon found means to obtain a dedimus as an acting justice of peace. He is not only a sordid miser in his disposition, but his avarice is mingled with a spirit of despotism, which is truly diabolical. — He is a brutal husband, an unnatural parent, a harsh master, an oppressive landlord, a litigious neighbour, and a partial magistrate. Friends he has none; and in point of hospitality and good breeding, our cousin Burdock is a prince in comparison of this ungracious miscreant, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... excited and alarmed exclamations came the solemn, portentous voice of the camel tolling out in the unnatural night the tocsin of the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... chapter. Mr. Rhys was a wonderful pleasant addition to the family. He was entirely at home, and not a person be trammelled by any ordinary considerations. He was silent when he felt like it; he kept alone when he was busy; he put no unnatural force upon himself when he was fatigued; but silent, or weary, or busy, there was always and at all times where he was, the feeling of the presence of one who was never absent from God. It was in the atmosphere about him; it was in the look ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... a fundamental part of their communistic plan. This, too, is an error. Of all the communes I am now considering, only the Perfectionists of Oneida and Wallingford have established what can be fairly called unnatural ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... his hand a short sword, he said to him aloud, 'Take Bardas, the enemy of God, and cut him in pieces before the vestibule.' As they were leading me to death, I saw that he said to the emperor, holding up his hand in a threatening manner, 'Wait, unnatural son!' after which I saw them ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Reginald, "it would be strange if they were still to know us. In fact, it would be unnatural. The skies above us and the earth underfoot are in perpetual motion. Each atom of our physical nature is vibrating with unimaginable rapidity. Change ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... father's death she had been sent for to Orley Farm, and had remained there till Sir Joseph died. She had always regarded Sir Joseph and Lady Mason as her best friends. She had known Sir Joseph all her life, and did not think it unnatural that he should provide for her. She had heard her father say more than once that Lady Mason would never rest till the old gentleman had settled Orley ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... raising his hands, "is there still justice in heaven, or is it also asleep! Is there no ear for our wails, no compassion for our disgrace? What is natural, grows unnatural; honor becomes dishonor; patriotism, rebellion—and Heaven seems ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... give, and the answering instinct would be one to take—not to give in return. It is probably not instinctive for the child to do for the parent, but is it not instinctive for the child to take from the parent, and to look to the parent for what he wants? It is not exactly "unnatural conduct" in a child to impose on his mother, as it would be in the mother to impose on the child; but would it not be unnatural in a child to take an unreceptive and ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... who have the jaundice. If one should say 102 that those who are not in a natural state have unusual ideas of objects, because of the intermingling of certain humors, then one must also say, that it may be that objects which are really what they seem to be to those who are in an unnatural condition, appear different to those who are in health, for even those who are in health have humors that are mixed with each other. For to 103 give to one kind of fluid a power to change objects, and not to another kind, is a fiction ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... fulfillment of it contrary to nature, and those very instincts given us by our Creator. And therefore, whoever thinks he fulfills, really fulfills this command, does in fact play the hypocrite unknown to himself; for though we can, and ought to do good to our enemy, yet to love him is as unnatural as ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... encounter and hazard we must now undergo. But let him hold his fealty. We have stout hearts and resolute hands enow to bring the matter to a successful issue." Thus spoke Caracalla, the unnatural ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... therefore, will bestow all his care on these wellsprings of life; how frail are the lungs of a new-born infant, how easily can an unnatural mother deprive him of air and so suffocate him! Yet what is this easily accomplished act, which nevertheless destroys a life, in comparison with the infinitely easier and more deadly act by which we may procure the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... of this device of contrast in the literature to which Verdi directed attention when he turned his thoughts to Victor Hugo, and composed "Ernani" and "Rigoletto." Hugo was the prince of those novelists and dramatists who utilized glaring contrasts and unnatural contradictions to give piquancy to their creations and compel sympathy for monsters by uniting monumental wickedness with the most amiable of moral qualities. The story of "La Gioconda" is drawn from "Angelo, Tyrane ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... rock, and the sucking of ice and snow increases thirst. We all suffered severely from the want of water, and the gasping for breath made our mouths and tongues so dry that articulation was difficult, and the speech of all unnatural. ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... my experiences are too real and tangible for me to deny, or even doubt that the loved, and so-called 'lost,' are with us still. To my mind, there is nothing unnatural about it. Every day my faith deepens, and not for all the glory of this life would I change my belief. Death has brought myself and Alice nearer together. But I can only state to you my faith in this, my experience cannot be imparted. Each must seek, and ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... outside what we call Nature is not to go outside Environment. Nature, the natural Environment, is only a part of Environment. There is another large part which, though some profess to have no correspondence with it, is not on that account unreal, or even unnatural. The mental and moral world is unknown to the plant. But it is real. It cannot be affirmed either that it is unnatural to the plant; although it might be said that from the point of view of the Vegetable Kingdom it was supernatural. Things are natural or supernatural ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... more of those fatal terminations of life, called suicides, than this. Many of these unnatural crimes arise from an unreasonable estimate of the evils of poverty. Their victims, it is true, may be called insane; but their insanity almost always arises from the dread of poverty. Not, indeed, from the dread of the want of means for sustaining life, or even ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Spartans, that of all Greek tribes they were the most facile and numerous delinquents under all varieties of foreign temptations to revolt from their hereditary allegiance—a fact which measures the degree of unnatural constraint and tension which the Spartan usages involved; but in this case we rather account for the public outrage to religion and universal usage, by a strong political jealousy lest the provisions of the treaty should transpire ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... zestfully climbing the poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by, the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to them unnatural or affected. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... It was because he had known that they had done away with him. His mind, working now with almost unnatural activity, flew ahead to the house in the Road of the Good Children, and to what might be enacting there. His eyes burned. Now at last he would thwart them, unless— Just before they turned into the street, a horseman had dashed out of it and ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... character of evidence was introduced by the defendants. Ours was also similar, though in addition to that introduced in Dayton, we proved that a novel and ingenious brace found on Tettman's premises in Dayton, which contained irregular and unnatural features, and which left the same impressions on the safe, was the only brace in existence that could have performed the work which the Chief of Police ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... son El-Adil II., who was reigning in Egypt, and his brother Ayyub, who occupied Damascus. Ayyub conquered Egypt, but, in his absence, his uncle Ismail, Prince of Balbek, seized upon Damascus and made a league with the Franks in Palestine and several of the Syrian princes. Through this unnatural league, Ismail, however, estranged not only the Moslem inhabitants of Syria, but also his own army. Part of the army deserted in consequence to Ayyub, who was thus enabled easily to subdue the allied army (1240). Another ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Crozier Cross resolved to try to bring two chickens back to the ship, and by giving up his sleeping jacket to keep them warm and tending them with the utmost care, he succeeded in his attempt. But eventually they died from unnatural feeding, and Wilson says: 'Had we even succeeded in bringing them to the age when they put on their feathers, I fear that the journey home through the tropics would have proved too much for them, as we had no means of making a cool place for them on ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... But people had not the Bible then, and did not know as much as we know. It was not unnatural to think the gods would care a little for the poor people that lived on the earth. Besides, there was a good deal of management and trickery about the answers of the oracle, that helped ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... by the faint light of the lantern, and noticing how unnatural father and Sheridan looked. They seemed to be blocked out in a rude kind of way, like some wooden ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... and mime abounded in topical allusions and spared not even the emperors. Allusion was made to the unnatural vices attributed to Tiberius,[91] to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina,[92] to the avarice of Galba,[93] to the divorce of Domitian,[94] and on more than one occasion heavy punishment was meted out ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... to a couple of worthy ladies, and once quite prosperous. It is no uncommon thing, it appears, for the same person to be put through the ceremony of swearing fidelity more than once, and at more than one place, with the not unnatural result, however, of diminishing the pressure of the oath upon his conscience or his fears, and also of alienating his affections, as he is expected to pay down two shillings on each occasion. Once a member, ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... &c. Besides, I have a Prison-Scene, which the Ladies always reckon charmingly pathetic. As to the Parts, I have observed such a nice Impartiality to our two Ladies, that it is impossible for either of them to take Offence. I hope I may be forgiven, that I have not made my Opera throughout unnatural, like those in vogue; for I have no Recitative; excepting this, as I have consented to have neither Prologue nor Epilogue, it must be allowed an Opera in all its Forms. The Piece indeed hath been heretofore frequently represented by ourselves in our Great Room at St. Giles's, ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... future by setting him to earn money to help the family when he should be in training for his adult life (remember the boy Dickens and the blacking factory), and of the girl's chances by making her a slave to sick or selfish parents, its unnatural packing into little brick boxes of little parcels of humanity of ill-assorted ages, with the old scolding or beating the young for behaving like young people, and the young hating and thwarting the old for behaving like old people, and all the other ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... philosophy and mine!) "The whole scheme of modern life was lopsided, she said, all the upper classes going to brains and no body and all the lower classes all to body and no brains. Conflict in the end was inevitable. The unnatural way of living was weakening the fiber of the governing powers the people of which intermarried and brought into the world children of weak muscular tissue. She doesn't believe in marriage unless both the man and the woman have passed rigid physical ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... proofs of the most unyielding—of a firmness which he himself can not exercise—of a power of self-denial and endurance of which he exhibits no example. If I weep, he smiles at my weakness. If I stifle my tears, he denounces my unnatural hardihood. If I am cold and unyielding, I am masculine and neglected—if I am gentle and pliant, my confidence is abused and my person dishonored. What can society, which is thus exacting, accord to me, then, as a mere woman? What shame will it not ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... make a very good circus man. I hate to have everybody looking at me as if I were some natural or unnatural curiosity. Wonder if I will know any of the show people when they are made up, as they call it, and performing in the ring? I shouldn't wonder if they didn't know me in my best ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... such a type of society are inconsistent with any but a low grade of civilisation—they are eunuchs, slavery, unnatural vice, and, more than all, a general debasement of the female sex. In Chinese society, woman occupies a shaded hemisphere—not inaptly represented by the dark portion in their national symbol the Yinyang-tse or Diagram of the Dual principles. So completely has she hitherto been excluded ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... her face there was a curious bewilderment that made me fear lest, for all my mask, for all my unnatural intonations, and for all the room's half-light, my worshipped mistress had come near to ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... has declared it: Ad majorem Dei gloriam—who works for the Society works for its Master. If our zeal has been sometimes misdirected, our blood has a thousand times witnessed to its sincerity. In the Indies, in America, in England during the great persecution, and lately on our own unnatural coasts, the Jesuits have died for Christ as joyfully as His first disciples died for Him. Yet these are but a small number in comparison with the countless servants of the order who, labouring in far countries among savage peoples, or surrounded by the heretical enemies of our ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the confirmed conviction of the Northern people, with certain unnatural exceptions, that it is our true policy to maintain the integrity of the Union at any cost, however great; the people of the South evidently take a different view of it; the political thinkers of Europe appear to be ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... old man fell; after which he disappeared, swiftly as a bird. The lady lowered her eyes to her book and tried to seem calm; but she could not prevent her face from blushing and her heart from beating with unnatural violence. The old lord saw the unusual crimson on the cheeks, forehead, even the eyelids of his wife. He looked about him cautiously, but seeing no one to distrust, ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... exalted sentiment were eagerly sought and read. She lacked incident and constructive power, but excelled in vivid portraits, subtle analysis, and fine conversations. She made no attempt at local color; her plots were strained and unnatural, her style heavy and involved. But her penetrating intellect was thoroughly tinged with the romantic spirit, and she had the art of throwing a certain glamour over everything she touched. Cousin, who has rescued the memory of Mlle. de Scudery from many unjust aspersions, ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason |
