"Repulsion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... old friend of the whole family from the renewal of their acquaintance, and Mrs. Kenton was now made aware of his being her peculiar favorite, in spite of the instant repulsion she felt, she was not averse to what he proposed. Her fear was that Ellen would be so, or that she could keep from influencing her to this test of her real feeling for Bittridge. "I will ask her, Mr. Bittridge," she said, with a severity which was a preliminary ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... profession with which he does not seem familiar. So far as scientific knowledge is concerned, he is obviously better equipped than any contemporary writer of fiction. Yet one rises from his books with a feeling of repulsion, or at least with the glad conviction that his ignoble views of life are as untrue as the characters who illustrate them. Here is a melancholy case of a novelist, not only clever but sincere, undone by want of sympathy.... The author's want of sympathy prevents 'Mehalah's' rising to the highest ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... her heart against the fate that was closing her in; for she had as yet scarcely confessed to herself that her whole being turned towards Gethin as the flower to the sun, and that in her breast, so long calm and unruffled as the pools in the boggy moor, was growing as strong a repulsion for one brother as love for the other. And as she lay quietly on her pillow, endeavouring not to disturb her companion's rest, a tide of sorrowful regrets swept over her, even as outside, under the shifting moonlight, the bay, yesterday ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... distance from his eyes, holding it as he did so daintily between finger and thumb. Its subtle appeal to his senses as a man failed to reach him. It simply aroused an old feeling of reserve toward the sex it represented. His face altered slightly and he dropped it suddenly with an odd repulsion, as he might have dropped a snake, on a ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... time after the death of Maimonides, which took place in 1204, Jewish thought found in the "Guide" a strong attraction or a violent repulsion. Commentaries on the Moreh, or "Guide," multiplied apace. Among the most original of the philosophical successors of Maimonides there were few Jews but were greatly influenced by him. Even the famous author of "The Wars of the Lord," Ralbag, Levi, the son of Gershon (Gersonides), ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... eyes away with a little shudder of repulsion, and gave her attention to an inspection of the room. There was no window, except a small one high up in the right-hand partition wall. She quite understood what that meant. It was common enough, and all too unsanitary enough, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... creature Hazel tried to draw herself away, and finding herself held fast her quick anger rose and she lifted the hand which held the whip and blindly slashed the air about her; her eyes closed, her heart swelling with horror and fear. A great repulsion for the man whom hitherto she had regarded with deep respect surged over her. To get away from him at once was her greatest desire. She lashed out again with her whip, blindly, not seeing what she struck, almost beside herself ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... it. His ideas concerning the matter, he wrote, were a "chaos;" but it was a "chaos" into which his interest in public questions soon compelled him to bring order. In so doing he for the first time fairly exposes his intense repulsion for slavery, his full appreciation of the irrepressible character of the conflict between the slave and the free populations, and the sure tendency of that conflict to a dissolution of the Union. Few men at that day read the future so clearly. While dissolution was generally regarded as a threat ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... recoils: Philip and Dolly are disagreeably shocked; all three start at her, revolted as she continues)—struck you purposely, deliberately, with the intention of hurting you, with a whip bought for the purpose! Would you remember that, do you think? (Gloria utters an exclamation of indignant repulsion.) That would have been your last recollection of your father, Gloria, if I had not taken you away from him. I have kept him out of your life: keep him now out of mine by never mentioning him to me again. (Gloria, with a shudder, covers her face with ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... title—crossed the path when near the solitary figure, so as to have a full view of her face. At that moment Miss Lafitte raised her eyes, and their expression when they rested on Mrs. Felton was hard to interpret. It seemed a mixture of repulsion and dread. She drew back as they went ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... a comet is always directed away from the sun as if it were repelled. To this rule there is no exception. It is suggested, and held as most probable, that the tail and sun are similarly electrified, and that the repulsion of the tail is electrical repulsion. Some great force is obviously at work to account for the enormous distance to which the tail is shot in a few hours. The pressure of the sun's light can do something, and is a force that must not be ignored ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... you are right, mamma. It seems as if I ought to laugh at the whole affair and good-naturedly show him his folly, but for some reason I can't. He affects me very strangely. While I feel a strong repulsion, I am beginning to fear him—to become conscious of his intensity and the tenacity and power of his will. I didn't understand him at first, and I don't now, but if he were an ordinary, impulsive young fellow he would not ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... Celtic races, were we not to study them under what is perhaps the most singular aspect of their development—that is to say, their ecclesiastical antiquities and their saints. Leaving on one side the temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to conquer in the classes of society which saw their influence diminished by the new order of things, it can be truly said, that the gentleness of manners and the exquisite sensibility of the Celtic races, in conjunction with the absence of a ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... greater and nobler pain: "I can't bear it if he has done anything wrong! But if he has, it's some wicked woman's fault." As she said that, anger at an injury done to Maurice made her almost forget that first virginal repulsion—and made her entirely forget that fleeting pain of knowing that she had not meant as much to him as he meant to her! "But he hasn't done anything wrong," she insisted; "he wouldn't ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... repulsion. Instinctively he foresaw what was coming, and there was no task which he would not have preferred in its place. And he was expected, too, at such a moment, to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery, they were unable to evacuate their bowels within the stream or along its banks, and the excrements were deposited at the very doors of their tents. The vast majority appeared to lose all repulsion to filth, and both sick and well disregarded all the laws of hygiene and personal cleanliness. The accommodations for the sick were imperfect and insufficient. From the organization of the prison, February 24, 1864, to May 22, the sick ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... blue light of the dawn Salazar was gesticulating in the doorway. I felt a sudden repulsion; a feeling of intense disgust. O'Brien lying there, I almost wished alive again—I wanted to have him again, rather than that I should have been relieved of him by that atrocious murder. I sat ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... taught us by bright examples and illustrious actions. Had the same hand that wrote the Annals written the History, we should have had in the latter work a very different treatment. The record would have been dark and dismal, even to repulsion, the opportunities being ample for an historian of gloomy disposition to indulge his humour, when the character of the History is thus described with truth in the Preface to Sir Henry Saville's translation of it:—"In these four books ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... him just then that Mrs. Spruce was unconsciously rendering in her own particular fashion the text he had chosen for the next day's sermon. Never in all his life before had he experienced such strongly mingled sensations of repulsion and interest as at that moment. With a kind of inward indignation, he asked himself what business he had to be there looking curiously into a woman's room, littered with all the fripperies and expensive ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... tree, or a stick, &c., would attract them; but care would be required in making the experiment, from the readiness with which these threads would move upon disturbance of the air. If electric, then it would be important to know whether they were positive or negative; which their attraction, or repulsion, by a stick of sealing-wax, rubbed on the sleeve of a coat, would at once determine. It is well known that these threads are almost perfect insulators of electricity, and would retain a charged state for a long time in a dry sunny ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... a feeling of involuntary repulsion, at first drew back slightly, instead of taking the hand offered by the Slasher; then, recollecting that, after all, he owed his life to this man, he wished to make amends for this first movement of repugnance. But the Slasher had perceived it; a gloom spread over ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... footsteps out of the gate and down the narrow straight road. There was still not a soul in sight. I drew nearer and nearer to the spot. Once more I essayed to move him. It was utterly in vain. Such nerve as I possessed had left me wholly and altogether. A sense of repulsion, nauseating, invincible, made a child of me. I stood up and looked around wildly. It was then for the first time I saw what my right foot had ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... discords with the subtle concords. Not by contrast, or as reciprocal foils do these elements act, which is the feeble conception of many, but by union. They are the sexual forces in music: "male and female created he them;" and these mighty antagonists do not put forth their hostilities by repulsion, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... doubt in its original meaning,—anointed, ordained, chosen. As such we, whose boys have gone to the Front, think of them. For they have gone, most of them, from a simple, high sense of duty, and in many cases under direst feeling of personal repulsion against the whole ghastly business. They have sacrificed everything, knowing full well that many of them will ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... a complex of mere relations. Substance in space we are cognizant of only through forces operative in it, either drawing others towards itself (attraction), or preventing others from forcing into itself (repulsion and impenetrability). We know no other properties that make up the conception of substance phenomenal in space, and which we term matter. On the other hand, as an object of the pure understanding, every substance must have internal determination and forces. But what other internal attributes ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... big eyes and become in a way magnificent, so that Godfrey forgot her ugliness and the repulsion with which ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... however, little sympathy among those whom he sought to conciliate; and on addressing himself to the President, whom he entreated to inform him of the details of the accusation made against himself, that magistrate, without any effort to disguise his feeling of repulsion towards the applicant, coldly replied, "I am, Sir, not your prosecutor, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... fragment, of this romance, Doctor Dolliver, followed by Pansie, goes out into the garden one frosty October morning, and while the apothecary is digging at his herbs, the imitative child, with an instinctive repulsion for everything strange and morbid, pulls up the fatal plant from which the elixir of life was distilled, and frightened at her grandfather's chiding, runs with it into the cemetery where it is lost among the graves and never seen again. This account stands by itself, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... upon any hypothesis, we are driven to suppose—and compelled to suppose—a miraculous state as introductory to the earliest state of nature. The planet, indeed, might form itself by mechanical laws of motion, repulsion, attraction, and central forces. But man could not. Life could not. Organization, even animal organization, might perhaps be explained out of mechanical causes. But life could not. Life is itself a great miracle. Suppose the nostrils formed by mechanic agency; still the breath ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... with a gesture, which, had he interpreted it rightly, was one of repulsion. "Please stop, Professor Parkhill," she gasped in a tone ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... presses hard against it, because it presses upon him, at least in imagination. Let it crumble under his grasp, and the motive to resistance is gone. He then requires some other grievance to set his face against. His principle is repulsion, his nature contradiction: he is made up of mere antipathies, an Ishmaelite indeed without a fellow. He is always playing at hunt-the-slipper in politics. He turns round upon whoever is next him. The way to wean him from any opinion, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... shoulders, stooping and caressing her and catching her neck with his fingers in order to bring her cheek the more submissively to his own. His lips were ever encroaching, and his fevered clasp was so incessant and so vibrant with overstrung excitement as to create a sense of repulsion. It was a tyranny, to which Sally listlessly yielded because she had not the spirit to resist. She also knew that resistance would make him ill again; and however much she chafed at his kisses she chafed still more at the constant attention demanded by Gaga's state of health, ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... forget that when young men and women of sensitive and refined natures come to this knowledge all at once, when already adults, it may at first create a sense of repulsion. It does not do so for those who have learnt the facts bit by bit as they were ready for them. In that case they are accepted easily and naturally. But with the others it may well be that just because they have clean and delicate minds, ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... but in cities that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... everything; his bride shrank from everything. There was a mutual shock amounting almost to repulsion. She, on her side, probably thought she had found in him only the brute which lurks in man. He, on the other, repelled and checked, at once grasped the belief that his wife cared nothing for him because she would ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the eyes were sinking into purple hollows, the attitude was listless, the whole air full of suffering. Phoebe was dismayed and conscience-stricken, and would fain have offered inquiries and sympathy, but no one had more thoroughly than Lucy the power of repulsion. 'No, nothing was amiss—of course she felt the frost. She would not speak to Honor—there was nothing to speak about;' and she went up to her ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eminently mysterious. She had known Paul Patoff as one knows people in the midst of a small family party in a country house, and he had at first repelled her, as he repelled many people; but soon, very soon, she thought, the feeling of repulsion had grown to be a curiosity to know the man's history, the secret of his coldness towards his mother, and of his hard and cynical expression. From such interest as she felt for him, it was but a step to love, and the step ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the formation of new and the subdivision of old capitals. Accumulation, therefore, presents itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production and of the command over labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... ink tends to flow downwards to the writing-tablet. The only avenue of escape for it is by the fine glass siphon, and through this it rushes accordingly and discharges itself in a rain upon the paper. The natural repulsion between its like electrified particles causes the shower to issue in spray. As the paper moves over the pulleys a delicate hair line is marked, straight when the siphon is stationary, but curved when the siphon is pulled from side to side by ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... herself considering Drake's words as a light thrown upon the man who spoke them, rather than as the description of an actual incident. The humiliation which she experienced made her shrink with a certain repulsion from her recollections of Gorley and dwell instead upon the contrasting tones in Drake's voice, the contrasting expressions upon his face when he spoke to her and when he merely narrated his story. In the first instance gentleness ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... sighed, but shook her head. She had not yet got the air of the prison out of her lungs, nor the figure of her robber out of her eyes, nor the sense of horror and repulsion ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... assertive chin deeply cleft in the centre—affected Beryl very unpleasantly, as a perplexing disagreeable memory; an uncanny resemblance hovering just beyond the grasp of identification. A feeling of unaccountable repulsion made her shiver, and she breathed more freely, when he hewed slightly, and walked on toward his horse. Upon the attorney her extraordinary appearance produced a profound impression, and in his brief scrutiny, no detail of her face, figure, or apparel ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... womanhood must rebel at the very shame of it. He believed that here and there, behind the rouge and forced hilarity, he could detect signs of an aching heart, a woman secretly filled with anguish. It gave him a sickening feeling of repulsion. Others saw only the outward gaiety of the scene; but he saw still deeper. He realized its tragic significance and it filled him with ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... case with her, this moral repulsion found a physical outlet in a quickened distaste for her surroundings. She revolted from the complacent ugliness of Mrs. Peniston's black walnut, from the slippery gloss of the vestibule tiles, and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... something—but they didn't do this! With incalculable rapidity a force was gathering within her, a tremendous, assimilative force, drawing from every sense, every corner of her brain, and as it surged up inside her she felt an enormous terrified repulsion. She drew her arms in close to her side ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... I held it from me with a swift movement of repulsion. It stirred again, it was warm. In a moment the truth flashed upon me. It was ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... to ignore the natural repulsion he felt at the last words of his one-time friend, "suppose you take lunch with me to-morrow at twelve. Then we can talk over things and get back old times. I will tell you all about my college life and you must tell me ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... this man? Sixty probably, and yet his face was unwrinkled although his hair was perfectly white. His eyes were gray. He inspired at first sight a certain repulsion. There were indications of vices, but they were of vices that had burned themselves out, of passions that had crumbled to ashes. Now, as he stood with his arms folded on his breast, his face expressed something more than the interest of a servant in his mistress. In his faded eyes ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... secured my attention, and awakened my curiosity, he asked me if I would permit him to relate his story. Recovering in a measure from my astonishment, and subduing the extreme repulsion, almost horror, I felt for the man, I signified my assent; at which he drew from his pocket a memorandum-book from which he read in ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... forms of a Niobe, of the Apollo Belvedere, in the winged Genius of the Borghese, and in the Muse of the Barberini palace. There, where grace and dignity are united, we experience by turns attraction and repulsion; attraction as spiritual creatures, and repulsion as ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... are not practical, we are nothing. Now, the one main fault in the Christian Church is separation, repulsion, recoil between the component particles of the Lord's body. I will not, I do not care to inquire who is more to blame than another in the evil fact. I only care to insist that it is the duty of every individual man to be ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... born in Briancon; his works have contributed much to elucidate the history of the invasion and repulsion of the Hyksos in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... will, in that sudden clasp, which made her feel—was it anger? No not anger, though her cheeks glowed and her breast heaved. Why was it, that as Nathanael walked onward towards the house, his wife looked after him with such a mingling of attraction and repulsion? What could it be, this strange power which gave him the preeminence over her—which taught her, without her knowing it, the mystery that causes man to rule and woman to obey; Very thoughtful—even unmoved by Harrie's ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... She stared at him, and shock and then faint repulsion showed in her face. "But of course, you come from the old time of ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... was his attitude faultless; and I, relinquishing to a tyrant conscience all hopes of profiting by my blunder in angering him, and giving up all hopes of a duel and consequently of freedom from my hateful business in New York, swallowed pride and repulsion at a single gulp, and crossed the room to where he stood alone, quite at his ease amid the conversation ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... magnetic needle suspended over it rapidly to rest; and that on causing the disk to rotate the magnetic needle rotated along with it. When both were quiescent, there was not the slightest measurable attraction or repulsion exerted between the needle and the disk; still when in motion the disk was competent to drag after it, not only a light needle, but a heavy magnet. The question had been probed and investigated with admirable skill both by Arago and Ampere, and Poisson had published a theoretic ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... come to link Silas Marner once more with the whole world. The disposition to hoard had utterly gone, and there was no longer any repulsion around to him. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... shouldn't have minded. She was finicky and squeamish. A girl had to have some privacy in the place she entertained her company. But Maida—and the cook! The thought of that flat, pasty, sullen face stirred in her a sudden repulsion. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... hospitality was so free, and he thus was able to see his brother and Tibble; besides that, it prevented him from burthening Mistress Randall, whom he really liked, though he could not see her husband, either in his motley or his plain garments, without a shudder of repulsion. ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I know to the contrary, this abandoned young man may have grown up to become a virtuous member of society; possibly even an exemplary husband and father. I have never been able to trace his history; probably the moral repulsion was too great. ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... Bill knew it all with an intimacy that robbed it of any charm. He had only repulsion, but repulsion that failed to deny a certain attraction. His hot words broke through the noisy strumming ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... of that which will later be love, holy and beautiful, between man and woman characterize these years. At first there is a mutual repulsion between the sexes. The boys are "so rough and horrid," and as for the girls—the masculine sentiment concerning them was voiced by one young cavalier in the words, "Oh, mush!" when his Sunday School class was asked if they would like to invite their "lady ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... link between Manuel and Bizco, Bizco hated Manuel, who in turn, not only felt enmity and repugnance for Bizco, but showed this repulsion plainly. Bizco was a brute,—an animal deserving of extermination. As lascivious as a monkey, he had violated several of the little girls of the Casa del Cabrero, beating them into submission; he used to rob his father, a ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... that Evangelicalism had wrought a change for the better in Rebecca Linnet's person—not even Miss Pratt, the thin stiff lady in spectacles, seated opposite to her, who always had a peculiar repulsion for 'females with a gross habit of body'. Miss Pratt was an old maid; but that is a no more definite description than if I had said she was in the autumn of life. Was it autumn when the orchards are fragrant with apples, or autumn when the oaks are brown, or autumn when ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... that, besides the general gregariousness which many animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem to recognise dogs by smell. So with cats, which also respond instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs. Horses seem to be guided by sight. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... Page 27. Capillary attraction or repulsion is the cause which determines the ascent or descent of a fluid in a capillary tube. If a piece of thermometer tubing, open at each end, be plunged into water, the latter will instantly rise in ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... by the military when requisite, were employed to enforce the proclamation. Mr. Anstey, the magistrate, directed the operations in the centre of the island, and volunteers not unfrequently joined in the repulsion or pursuit ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... Pavlovna, when she uttered these last words, cold and at the same time soft, her hypocritical smile, the action of her hands, and her shoulders, her very dress, her whole being aroused such a feeling of repulsion in Lisa that she could make no reply to her, and only held out her hand with an effort. "This young lady disdains me," thought Varvara Pavlovna, warmly pressing Lisa's cold fingers, and turning to Marya Dmitrievna, she observed in an undertone, "mais elle est ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... actively; force driving apart.] Repulsion — N. repulsion; driving from &c v.; repulse, abduction. magnetic repulsion, magnetic levitation; antigravity. V. repel, push from, drive apart, drive from &c 276; chase, dispel; retrude^; abduce^, abduct; send away; repulse. keep at arm's length, turn one's back upon, give the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the Doctor; "if your conscience were good, Bultitude, you could have no object in preventing me from hearing Chawner. Chawner, in spite of some obvious defects in his character," he went on, with a gulp (he never could quite overcome a repulsion to the boy), "is, on the whole, a right-minded and, ah, conscientious ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... developments as his primary aim; often he not only does not know, but does not in the least care whether his researches will ever lead to any beneficial result. In some minds this passive ignoring of the practical goes so far as to become active repulsion; so that some singularly biased minds will not engage in anything which seems likely to lead to practical use. I regard this as an error, and as the sign of a warped judgment, for after all man is to us the most important part of nature; but the system works well nevertheless, and the division ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various
... be bad friends," Clara protested; "only the moment I saw him a strange repulsion and ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... so far from arguing hauteur, it was the high civil condition of the English servant, which, by forcing respect from his master, first widened the interval between the two ranks, and founded a wholesome repulsion between them. In our own times, we have read descriptions of West India planters admitting the infant children of their slaves to play and sprawl about their saloons: but now, since the slave has acquired the station of a free man, and (from the fact of not having won this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Marimonda has always awakened in Selkirk a sentiment of repulsion; she not only reminds him of Stradling, but with her withered cheeks, projecting jaw, and especially her dancing motion, he now imagines that she resembles him; and yet, pausing before her, he contemplates her not without a lively emotion of ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... did not suffice, the weariness of inventing lies that no one believed to account for my lateness and neglected homework, and the monotonous lessons that held me from my dreams without ever for a single instant capturing my interest—all these things made me ill with repulsion. Worst of all was the society of my cheerful, contented comrades, to avoid which I was compelled to mope in deserted corridors, the prey of a sorrow that could not be enjoyed, a hatred that was in no way stimulating. At the best of times the atmosphere of the place ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... impression he made, either of attraction or repulsion, his personality was a serious proposition. No man looked once only. And no man ever attempted undue familiarity or ridicule. His life to this time had been a series of tragic failures in everything he had undertaken. A study of his intense Puritan face revealed at once ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... must suffice: any attempt to draw the lines more sharply would only falsify the picture. The manifold play of mutual attraction and repulsion among those earliest political atoms, the cantons, passed away in Latium without witnesses competent to tell the tale. We must now be content to realise the one great abiding fact that they possessed a common ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Falconers, stationary at one end of the room, seemed to have adopted manners diametrically opposite to those of their mother: attraction being the principle of the mother, repulsion of the daughters. Encircled amongst a party of young female friends, Miss Falconers, with high-bred airs, confined to their ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... recognized it as the ordinary fanciful appendage of a gentleman rider, used for tethering his horse on lonely plains, and always made the object of the most lavish expenditure of decoration and artistic skill. But he was as suddenly filled with a blind, unreasoning sense of repulsion and fury, and lifted his eyes to the man as he approached. What the stranger saw in Clarence's blazing eyes no one but himself knew, for his own became fixed and staring; his sallow cheeks grew lanker and livid; his careless, jaunty bearing stiffened into rigidity, and swerving his horse to ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... so steady as it might have been, as he swaggered into his mother's presence. His handsome face was deeply flushed. He was laughing boisterously; but there was that in his aspect which made his sister turn away with a look of repulsion, though his mother's glance rested on him with a look of admiring pride that savoured of adoration. In her fond and foolish eyes he was perfection, and the more he copied the vices and the follies of the gallants about the person of the King, the prouder did his vain and weak ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... yet Philip found himself distrusting her from the outset. He said to himself that it was because he was prejudiced, that he doubted; but he yet felt that her manner would in any case have begotten repulsion. She had that air of insistence, of determination to be believed, which belongs to the speaker who is absorbed rather in the desire to prevail than in the wish to be true. He felt that her air of conviction was no ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... with fear and with repulsion. She neither yielded to his embrace nor shook it off. She simply stood, her round smooth body hard though corsetless. He kissed her on the throat, kissed the lace over her bosom, crying out inarticulately. In the frenzy of ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... that he showed himself much impressed toward Minha. But these attentions, although they were displeasing to Manoel, were not sufficiently marked for him to interfere. On the other hand, Minha felt for him an instinctive repulsion which she was at ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... it was doubly to be noted now. It was blood against blood as they faced each other. And it came to me that it was more than a personal duel. No wrong is so unforgivable as one from our own family whose secret weaknesses we know and share, and I felt that the repulsion in the woman's eyes was part for herself and part for her pride of race. Yet I was uncertain of the issue. The tie of blood is strong, and after a few minutes I thought that Starling was gaining ground. His great personality ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... hope, and to hope much. Already, forgetting his carnivorous instincts, the stranger accepted a less bestial nourishment than that on which he fed on the islet, and cooked meat did not produce in him the same sentiment of repulsion which he had showed on board the "Bonadventure." Cyrus Harding had profited by a moment when he was sleeping, to cut his hair and matted beard, which formed a sort of mane and gave him such a savage aspect. He had also been clothed ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... gloom, its stillness, its naked crags and peaks, its dark depths that seem to cleave to the very vitals of the earth, become so oppressive, that after a few days spent amongst them, the traveler is filled with repulsion and almost horror. Few living things have their home here. You might meet an occasional "klipspringer" (an antelope in habits and appearance somewhat like the chamois), a wandering troop of baboons, and now and then a herd of eland in the more grassy areas. There are said to be a few Bushmen still ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... forbearance, however, which such a mode of proceeding with the aborigines would require was not to be found in my master. Fierce repulsion and retaliation were the only means he would have recourse to in his mode of treating them; and the consequence was, his inspiring the natives with a hatred of him, and a desire of vengeance for his manifold cruelties towards them, which was sure, sooner or later, to end ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... enough to give under circumstances so favourable to their well-being—herself. But she never liked him, he had always repelled her, and she was not a woman to marry a man whom she did not like. Also, during the last week this dislike and repulsion had hardened and strengthened. Vaguely, as he pleaded with her, Beatrice wondered why, and as she did so her eye fell upon the pattern she was automatically pricking in the sand. It had taken the form of letters, and the letters were G E O F F R E—Great heaven! Could that be the ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... only the inevitable consequence of the wide intellectual gulf that yawned between those two men, both of positive character, and with tastes and sympathies the most radically opposite. But despite this unavoidable repulsion, Hawthorne's keen, resistless insight did not fail to penetrate the wonderful purity and simplicity of Lincoln's character. In a final word he ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... how fixed was this noble originality of type in Holbein's conception of "the beloved apostle." But it is in Judas that the patient student will find, perhaps, most of Holbein's peculiar cast of thought, when once the initial repulsion is overcome. ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... now. His voice, his eyes actually caressed her. She was at pains to repress a shiver of physical repulsion. But she remembered his letter very clearly. It had expressed no mere wish to see her. It had claimed a right with a vague threat of making trouble if the right were not conceded. She had recognised the right, not out of ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... published at the beginning of this century, to further,—nay, allow,—even among quiet, peaceable people like the Welsh, the publication of the documents of their ancient literature, the monuments of the Cymric genius; such was the sense of repulsion, the sense of incompatibilty, of radical antagonism, making it seem dangerous to us to let such opposites to ourselves have speech and utterance. Certainly the Jew,—the Jew of ancient times, at least,—then seemed a thousand ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... brought against this country. Perhaps they might pardon her life, taking into account her voluntary action in giving herself up. But the prison, the seclusion with shaved head, dressed in some coarse serge frock, condemned to silence, perhaps suffering hunger and cold, filled her with invincible repulsion.... No, death before that! ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to his throat while he shrank from the white fury in her face. Suddenly her arms dropped to her sides. Such a feeling of physical repulsion swept over her that she could not touch him even in ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... the news spread in Ireland the move to America, which at the first seemed hopeless exile, presented itself as a highly desirable step towards social betterment. Emigration is now the result of attraction from America rather than of repulsion from Ireland, a fact which explains the failure of more than one well-meant attempt to check the movement by action on this side of ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... immediately the hideous kaldane crawled out upon the floor and approached the table. A-Kor drew back with a half-stifled ejaculation of repulsion. "Do not fear," Turan reassured him. "It is my friend—he whom I told you held O-Tar ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... morning, when he came in, he found the patient lying as ever, in a sort of heap in the bed. Nurse had had to lift him up and hold him up again. And now Aaron lay in a sort of semi-stupor of fear, frustrated anger, misery and self-repulsion: a sort of ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... in the gentleman's jaunty air, in the smile of the sleepy tortoise-shell eyes, in the play of a self-conscious dimple round the fat double chin? Eleanor had not passed from her own apartment to the big living room before a repulsion that she could not define swept over her in a physical shudder; and Mr. Bat Brydges' report to the Senator of that interview had been fairly accurate. She did not know that she had not greeted him with the common courtesy due ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... to be what the philosophers call the attraction of repulsion between the parties last introduced, for the tall gentlemanly-looking Mr. Sharp eyed the officer with a supercilious coldness, neither party deeming much ceremony on the occasion necessary. Mr. Grab now summoned ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Bertram so deftly employed. But, alas for poor Matty she had no conversational powers; she was only great at interjections, at ceaseless giggling, and at violent and uncontrollable fits of blushing. Even Beatrice felt a sense of repulsion at the very open way in which Matty played her innocent cards. Matty was in love, and she showed it by voice, look and gesture. Beatrice tried to shield her, she was mortified for her, and felt a burning sense ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world they are not interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had found it repulsive. Prima facie, it must suggest some presumption against a book, that it has failed to gain public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... monotony of dingy blue, labeled on the back with their disgrace, stepping lightly or shuffling hastily to and fro, heads bent and eyes downcast, performing various offices, menial, clerical or industrial, with a certain obsequiousness and ostensible zeal that was yet inwardly repulsion and protest—these were men born under the great flag, Americans, my countrymen, and now my companions! What a change, what a degradation from the free American citizen of the streets and boundless expanses! Not men, now, but slaves, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... I caught a glimpse of Audrey's face, cold and hard, and shifted my eyes quickly. Mr Abney gulped. His face wore the reproachful expression of a cod-fish when jerked out of the water on the end of a line. He stared at me with pained repulsion. That scoundrelly old buccaneer Sam did the same. He looked like a ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... or expect: for are not the laws of the mind also laws of Nature? And can we explain them any more than we can explain physical laws? A psychologist can formulate the mental law of association, but he can no more explain it than Newton could explain the laws of attraction and repulsion which pervade the world of matter. We do not know, we cannot know, what the conditions of our spiritual being are. The state of mind induced by prayer may, in accordance with some mental law, be essential to certain modes of spiritual energy, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Chevalier exclaimed: 'Ah! It is my son! I knew he would come to meet me.' And, simultaneously, father and son leapt from their horses, and rushed into each other's arms. Berenger felt it only courteous to dismount and exchange embraces with his cousin, but with a certain sense of repulsion at the cloud of perfume that seemed to surround the younger Chevalier de Ribaumont; the ear-rings in his ears; the general air of delicate research about his riding-dress, and the elaborate attention paid to a small, dark, sallow ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Spirit, and sanctify this water. Give also to it the grace of ransom, the blessing of Jordan: make it a fountain of incorruption; a gift of sanctification; a washing away of sins; a warding off of diseases; destruction to demons; repulsion to the hostile powers; filled with angelic strength; that all who take and receive of it may have it for purification of souls and bodies, for healing of sicknesses, for sanctification of houses, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... man who is worthy of much admiration; a man for whom I have infinite respect and esteem, notwithstanding the charges you make against him, and the things of which you deem him guilty." She made a gesture of repulsion, but I took no notice of it, and went on. "I find now, Zara, in the light of what has occurred here between us, and in the glory of our great love, that I must tell you who and what I am, and how it happens that ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... with Suzee, and I looked at her, with an immense sense of disgust and repulsion swelling up ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the eternal laws upon which the cosmos is founded. They constitute the inseparable affinities, attraction and repulsion, of everything within the realm of manifested being. In this mystic constellation, we see the first ideas of maternal instinct arise. This is a necessary result of the impulsive action of the heart in Leo—the reaction ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... contact. At the sight of the deep, circular folds of skin on the forehead, the sodden, fish-like eyes, and the head, with its short, coarse, scantily-growing hair—a head utterly divested of all the faculties of the senses—who would not have experienced, as Genestas did, an instinctive feeling of repulsion for a being that had neither the physical beauty of an animal nor the mental endowments of man, who was possessed of neither instinct nor reason, and who had never heard nor spoken any kind of articulate speech? It seemed difficult to expend any regrets over the poor wretch now visibly drawing ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Vows matrimonial to break, With our Oneguine doth aspire Acquaintance instantly to make. They met. Earth, water, prose and verse, Or ice and flame, are not diverse If they were similar in aught. At first such contradictions wrought Mutual repulsion and ennui, But grown familiar side by side On horseback every day they ride— Inseparable soon they be. Thus oft—this I myself confess— Men become ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... Aside from repulsion at the violence of the French revolution and fear of its contagion, England had a concrete motive for war in the French occupation of the Austrian Netherlands and the Scheldt, the possession of which by an ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... heard it all before; it was full of spleen and rancour, unnecessarily violent, and, conceivably, unjust. But what he could not help recognising, in spite of his repulsion, was a certain nobility and singleness in the man, ruin as he was. Virtue came out of him; he had the saving quality of genius, and it was a veritable burning passion of perfection, which masqueraded ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... and looked at him, and in spite of the veil he felt the full intensity of a gaze which seemed to be seeking his very soul. How long they stood there watching each other in breathless silence Travers did not know. Nor did he know why this strange, powerless figure filled him with a sickening repulsion and held him paralyzed so that he could only wait in passive, motionless expectation. Suddenly the hand sank to her side and he shook himself as though he had ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... I have said, and was the worse tempered; and, besides, it is a peculiarity of witches, that what works in others to sympathy, works in them to repulsion. Also, Watho had a poor, helpless, rudimentary spleen of a conscience left, just enough to make her uncomfortable, and therefore more wicked. So, when she heard that Photogen was ill, she was angry. Ill, indeed! after all she ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... quivering, did she implore him not to be what he was, and to have pity on her. Sated with wine, his breath blew around her nearer and nearer, and his face was there near her face. He was no longer the former kind Vinicius, almost dear to her soul; he was a drunken, wicked satyr, who filled her with repulsion and terror. But her strength deserted her more and more. In vain did she bend and turn away her face to escape his kisses. He rose to his feet, caught her in both arms, and drawing her head to his breast, began, panting, to press ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... it, of course. Te Kop himself was probably no favourite, for he scarce appealed to my judgment as a type of industry. And there must be many others whom the king (to adhere to the formula) does not like. Do these unfortunates like the king? Or is not rather the repulsion mutual? and the conscientious Tembinok', like the conscientious Braxfield before him, and many other conscientious rulers and judges before either, surrounded by a considerable body of "grumbletonians"? Take the cook, for instance, when he passed us by, blue with rage and terror. He was very wroth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he back again?" exclaimed the girl. Ned felt her hand clutch him nervously. A sudden repulsion to this Geisner shot through him. He pulled his arm from ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... gone to do her bidding, but she could not be sure. No faith in angelic vision, no spell of psychic warfare, relieved the situation for her. The external evidences of some crisis which he had undergone only produced in her repulsion. Now, as ever since the temporary delusion that accompanied her baptism, Susannah endeavoured to possess her soul free from that sense of touch with mysterious powers which had worked such havoc with the sanity of the ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... carried his point with the men he had been talking to. To see them coming down together, smiling to all those people at the doors who disturbed the gentle mind of Miss Wodehouse with mingled sentiments of sympathy and repulsion, bestowing nods of greeting here and there, pausing even to say a word to a few favoured clients, was a wonderful sight to the timid maiden lady at the corner of the street. Twenty years ago some such companion might have been by ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... that his face was stern, and became sensible of a faint and perplexing repulsion from him. His languid gracefulness had vanished, and he was no longer gay or amusing. A rugged elemental forcefulness had come uppermost in him, and this was a thing she did not understand. Involuntarily she shrank from this grave, serious man. There was a disfiguring newly healed ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... every which way, with a din of bells, and wheels and hoofs that was as if crushed to one clangerous mass by the superior uproar of the railroad trains coming and going on a sort of street-roof overhead. A sickening odor came from the mud of the gutters and the horses and people, and as if a wave of repulsion had struck against every sense in her, the girl turned and fled from the sight and sound and smell of it all into the ladies' ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... were hidden. John knew, too, that it was covering the many dead in their front with a blanket of white and that the wounded who were unable to crawl back would probably lie frozen beneath it in the morning. Once more that shiver of horror and utter repulsion seized him. Despite himself, he could not control it, and he merely remained quiet until his nerves became ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... quickly, shook hands, and left in silence, with a feeling of repulsion for myself ...
— The Shield • Various
... twenty-eight perhaps, thick set and powerful, tanned to the brownness of an Indian by sun, wind and rain, but the features obviously were those of the white race. It was an evil face, but a strong one. Henry felt a shiver of repulsion. He felt that something demoniac had entered the lodge, because he knew that this was Simon Girty, the terrible renegade, now fully launched upon the career that made his name infamous throughout the ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Tavistock. One midnight, as she was getting into bed, this good woman was summoned by a strange, squint-eyed, little, ugly old fellow to follow him straightway, and attend upon his wife. In spite of her instinctive repulsion she could not resist the command; and in a moment the little man whisked her, with himself, upon a large coal-black horse with eyes of fire, which stood waiting at the door. Ere long she found herself at the door of a neat cottage; the patient was a decent-looking ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... spread over the stones, and this moss, ever kept damp by the cloud-banks which wreathe the Citadel continually is moistly red, like newly shed blood. In cracks and corners, fungi of poisonous hues adds another touch of wickedness. Manuel shivered with repulsion. Probably not in all the world, certainly not in the Western Hemisphere, is there a ruin of such historic terror as the Citadel of the Black Emperor on the summit ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... saw sitting erect in one of the motors the man for whom he had felt at first sight an invincible repulsion. Prince Karl of Auersperg. Young von Arnheim had represented the good prince to him, but here was the medieval type, the believer in divine right, and in his own superiority, decreed even before birth. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... singular an apparition; she seemed likelier to find her sisterhood in poetry and picture than in real life. Let us turn away from her, lest a touch too apt should compel her stately and cold and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon my page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in the very spell that made her beautiful. At her side, and familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only a hard outline of the nose and forehead, and such a monstrous portent of a beard that you could discover ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
