Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Unlovely   Listen
adjective
Unlovely  adj.  Not lovely; not amiable; possessing qualities that excite dislike; disagreeable; displeasing; unpleasant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Unlovely" Quotes from Famous Books



... a cold, unlovely truth-a sad, heart-sickening fact-but it must be told by the conscientious novelist. William repaid all this affectionate solicitude-all this womanly devotion, all this trust, confidence, and abnegation in a manner that needs not ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile

... likeness to the slovenly, wasteful, and improvident processes of man. The unrecorded land-slip disintegrating a whole hillside will not only lay bare the delicate framework of strata and deposit to the vulgar eye, but hurl into the valley a debris so monstrous and unlovely as to shame even the hideous ruins left by dynamite, hydraulic, or pick and shovel; an overflown and forgotten woodland torrent will leave in some remote hollow a disturbed and ungraceful chaos of inextricable logs, branches, rock, and soil that will rival the unsavory details of some wrecked ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... starry thrones Ineffable, nor any heaven-wrought dream Of sculptor or of poet; we prefer Such nightmare visions as in morbid brains Take shape and substance, thoughts that taint the air And make all life unlovely. Will it last? Beauty alone endures from age to age, From age to age endures, handmaid of God. Poets who walk with her on earth go hence Bearing a talisman. You bury one, With his hushed music, in some Potter's Field; ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... Bazaar that evening, when Charlie and grandma and the crowd were gone, Flora handled the unlovely curiosity. She and Irby had seen Hilary and Anna and the Hyde & Goodrich man on guard just there draw near the glass case where it lay "like a snake on a log," as Charlie had said, take it in their hands ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... real world, has taken two different lines in the desperate effort to amuse us somehow. The virtuous line is the phonographic reproduction of everyday life in ordinary situations. The disreputable line is Zolaesque bestiality, and forced, unreal, unlovely, and hysterical sensationalism. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... least twenty-three, Marguerite," she said once, quite in a horrified way. She never called her friend Meg, pronouncing that name to be "too domestic and altogether unlovely." ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner

... new meney for the new abode of Goldilind; amongst whom was a goodly band of men-at-arms, led by an old lord pinched and peevish of face, who kneeled to Goldilind as the new burgreve of Greenharbour; and a chaplain, a black canon, young, broad-cheeked and fresh-looking, but hard-faced and unlovely; three new damsels withal were come for the young Queen, not young maids, but stalworth women, well-grown, and two of them hard-featured; the third, tall, black-haired, and ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris

... glad to escape from Shellal, pursued by the shriek of an engine announcing its departure from the station, glad to be on the quiet water, to put it between me and that crowd of busy workers. Before me I saw a vast lake, not unlovely, where once the Nile flowed swiftly, far off a grey smudge—the very damnable dam. All around me was a grim and cruel world of rocks, and of hills that look almost like heaps of rubbish, some of them grey, some of them in color so dark that they resemble ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... said these things, all the beauty seemed to fall away from her friend, all the sweetness from their love, and all her faith in the little dream which had made her so happy. Mermaids became treacherous, unlovely, unreal creatures; and Lorelei seemed like a naughty, selfish child, who deceived her, and made her do wrong things. Her uncle had been very kind to her all her life; and she loved him, was grateful, and wanted to show that she was, by pleasing ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott

... younger son. Victoria bent forward with a hasty gesture of greeting. But they never turned to look at the motor. They passed out of the darkness, and into the darkness again, their frowning, unlovely faces, their ragged clothes and stooping ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could! But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in one of the 'Essays in Criticism')—"Coleridge had no morals"—is no less just than pitiless. As we gather information about him from numerous quarters, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... to the centre for the stately and wise Aspasia"—the central figure wore her draperies hanging straight to her feet, hence the "advance" and consequent concealment of the unlovely limbs. It was quickly and kindly done, for the girl was not only spared mortification, but in the word "advance" she saw a compliment and was happy accordingly. Then my turn came. My arms were placed about Aspasia, my head bent and turned ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... dirty torn shawl. On her feet was a pair of man's shoes, many sizes too large, which had evidently been cast away as useless by some former owner, himself squalid. These she managed to keep on by tying the tops with wrapping-cord. A more unlovely human being it would have been hard to find in all the great city. There she sat, crooning a ballad to herself in a high, cracked voice. It sounded like ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... had builded long ago to my defence) fell at my feet and lay there speechless, drawing his breath in great, sobbing gasps. But his pursuers had seen and came on amain with mighty halloo, and though (judging by what I could see of them at the distance) they were a wild, unlovely company, yet to me, so long bereft of all human fellowship, their hoarse shouts and cries were infinitely welcome and I determined to make them the means of my release, more especially as it seemed by their speech that some ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... glance around at these familiar and unlovely objects, Philip Romilly walked with his head a little thrown back, his eyes lifted as though with intent to the melancholy and watery skies. He was a young man well above medium height, slim, almost inclined to be angular, yet with a good carriage notwithstanding a ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... great stretch of unlovely sage and lava rock and sand for mile upon mile, to where the distant mountain ridges reached out and halted peremptorily the ugly sweep of it. The railroad gashed it boldly, after the manner of the iron trail of modern industry; but the trails of the desert dwellers wound ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower

... usual, was rather perfunctory, if one excepts a pas de deux which gave promise of a parody of the Russians and turned out to be just a series of contortionist feats, brilliant but unlovely. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various

... annihilation, where was one to turn to for hope, or for a motive for effort? How could one reconcile the marvellous beauty of the universe, the miracles of colour, form, and, above all, of music, with such a chaotic moral condition, and such unlovely laws in favour of dulness, cowardice, callousness, cruelty? One aspired to be an upholder and not a destroyer, but if it were a useless pain ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... with a strained white face. She looked like some of the beautiful carvings he had seen abroad. Not even anguish could make her unlovely. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... religion is itself pagan, and has in any broad view of it the pagan sadness. It does not at once, and for the majority, become the higher Hellenic religion. The country people, of course, cherish the unlovely idols of an earlier time, such as those which Pausanias found still devoutly preserved in Arcadia. Athenaeus tells the story of one who, coming to a temple of Latona, had expected to find some worthy presentment of the mother of Apollo, and laughed on seeing ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... an eye for the beautiful or the novel would call Australia either unlovely or dull. It is not, however, a land of sharp and sudden contrasts: ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... Jack, and he and Raffles on rainy afternoons snatched the fearful joys of hasty "hundreds up" or "fifties up," just as time allowed, Jack did not find the cue quite so sticky nor the charms of stale tobacco quite so unlovely as he had expected. The landlord, who marked for the two worthies, told our young gentleman that he had "a pretty 'and for the long jenny," and Jack felt he could not do less than order a little of his favourite beverage in ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson

... up as if he had heard a voice in his sleep. A strained unlovely light was on his face. His luck had turned. He was going to win. He could not speak. His whole soul was bent upon the next throw and with a cry of satisfaction he lifted the little roll of bills the croupier ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... Forest—the scene in a forgotten day of Robin Hood's adventurings—a section of these huddling homes of the submerged, together with a street of trams and some pathetic shops, constitute this town of Walthamstow. It is a sordid, unlovely place, but for some ten thousand wage-strugglers it is all of England. There are workshops hereabout in which one may mingle one's copious sweat with the grime of machinery and have fourteen shillings a week into the bargain—if one ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... the picture and awaken sympathy for the weakness of the woman, who, royal mistress though she was, could not command her love to be requited, the poetic measure of his lines roughens and hardens to the close, when the curtain falls on what is felt to be a tragic and unlovely life. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... taking it beyond the confines of the world of the living, suffering humanity. But as a matter of fact my imagination is not made of stuff so elastic as all that. I believe that if I attempted to put the strain of the Supernatural on it it would fail deplorably and exhibit an unlovely gap. But I could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... experience, so much above the common lot of the long dust-choked column was that of our small band of scouts. After July our brigade operated mainly in the region of the Big Black, endeavoring, with others, to make the enemy confine his overflow meetings to the Vicksburg side of that unlovely stream. How busy our small troop was kept; and what fame we won! On a certain day we came out of a dried swamp in column and ambled half across a field to see if a brigade going by us at right angles ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable

... the House of Commons papers for 1844 will be found some 350 printed pages of reports, memoranda, and letters, gathered by the standing committee appointed in regard to the treatment of aboriginals in the Australian colonies. All these have the same unlovely tale to tell of an absolute incapacity to form even a rudimentary notion of chastity. One worthy missionary, who had been for some years settled among tribes of New South Wales, as yet brought in contact with no other white men, writes with horror of what ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... unlovely phenomenon "the girl of the period," is also deeply to blame for the lowered traditions of English society, and consequently of English manhood, I have only too sorrowfully to acknowledge. I remember Mrs. Herbert of Vauxhall telling a very fashionable audience how on one occasion she had to rebuke ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... great passions, but that he does not like talking about them. He is too self-conscious to trust his tongue on such big themes. He might "make an exhibition of himself," and he dreads that above all things. This habit of reticence has its unlovely side; but it has great virtues too. It keeps the mind cool and practical and the atmosphere commonplace and good-humoured. It gives reserves of strength that people who live on their "top notes" have not got. It ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... gangway, descending without pause to the landing-stage. Kirkwood, hanging breathlessly over the guard-rail, could hear their footfalls ringing in hollow rhythm on the planks of the inclined way,—could even discern Calendar's unlovely profile in dim relief beneath one of the waterside lights; and he recognized unmistakably Mulready's deep ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... calm herself, succeeding but illy. "Antonia!" she called. "Antonia!" For once her voice was unlovely, ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... After some difficulty I found my way in, and wandered for a while among its white immensities. It is practically a church within a church, the region of services being isolated in the midst, in the unlovely Dutch way, within hideous wooden walls. It is very well worth while to climb the tower and see the great waterways of this country beneath you. The prospect is mingled wood and polder: to the east and south-east, shaggy hills; to the west, the moors of Brabant; to the north, Arnheim's ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... had known only the smoother side of life in it, and nobody could appreciate the ease and luxury it could offer some of its inhabitants better than she did. Now, it seemed, she must leave it, and go out to struggle for a mere living in some unlovely town in what she supposed must be a wild and semi-barbarous country. She felt bitter against the man who, as she thought of it, had dragged her down, but she hid ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... windows were nearly leafless; and the dead leaves scudding and whirling along the dusty, airless streets, under a light wind, gave the last dreary touch to the scene that Nelly Sarratt was looking at. She was standing at a window, listlessly staring at some houses opposite, and the unlovely strip of garden which lay between her and the houses. Bridget Cookson was sitting at a table a little way behind her, mending ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Yankee, as he proudly told Bob, "born and raised in New Hampshire," and his shrewd common sense and dry humor stood him in good stead in the rather lawless environment of Chassada. He was well acquainted with the unlovely characteristics of the five who had chased Bob, and when he heard the whole story he promised to look up the Chinaman and see what he could do ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson

... Fuller; and her childhood, though outwardly fortunate and well placed, was one of labor and repression, and far from happy, if we may judge by her own account of it. The theology of the people was gloomy. They made everything connected with religion unlovely, and this austerity was particularly distasteful to one of Margaret's imaginative temperament and heroic disposition. Her ungratified imagination brought her early into conflict with the circumstances and surroundings ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul. In such cases, the painter's deep conception of his subject's inward traits has wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the superficial coloring has been rubbed ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... nation or the individual concerned. To offer opposition, if necessary by force, may in certain circumstances be a plain duty. That which we are to love, in those whose immediate aspect and character is both unlovely and unlovable, is not what they are, but what they are capable of becoming. We are to love that element in them which is capable of redemption, the true spiritual image of GOD in man, which can never be totally effaced. We are ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... were plain; but it does not matter, for the subtle influence of spiritualized-intelligence has the power of transforming plainness into the beauty of old age. Physical beauty is doubtless a great advantage, and it is never lost if mind shines through it (there is nothing so unlovely as a frivolous old woman fighting to keep the skin-deep beauty of her youth); the eyes, if the life has not been one of physical suffering, usually retain their power of moving appeal; the lines of the face, if changed, may be refined by a certain spirituality; the gray hair gives dignity ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... more general, and the restraint slackened more and more, until sewing and reading were both forgotten and the fun became fast and furious, culminating in the sudden appearance of Jake Dexter dressed up as an ancient and altogether unlovely old woman, whom Dick Hardcastle presented in a stage whisper as "Baroness Bunsen in the closing chapter," and who forthwith proceeded to act out in dumb show the various events of that admirable woman's life, as judiciously ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield

... then talked Roland much and grandly of the duties men owed,—even if they threw off all love to their father, still to their father's name; and then his pride, always so lively, grew irritable and harsh, and seemed, no doubt, to the perverted ears of the son, unlovely and unloving. And that pride, without serving one purpose of good, did yet more mischief; for the youth caught the disease, but in a wrong way. And he said ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... looked distinctly homely to him, and yet such was the honor of the man that he did not in the least realize that the homeliness was an exterior thing. It seemed to him that he saw her encompassed with the stiffness of her New England antecedents, as with an armor, and that he got a new and unlovely view of her character. On the contrary, Evelyn's charming, half-smiling, half-piteous face turned towards him seemed to afford glimpses of sweetest affections and womanly gentleness and devotion. Evelyn wished to say that she was sorry that they were obliged to refuse his invitation, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... the door brought to a sudden end this little touch of moralizing, and a wrinkled old porter thrust out a very withered and unlovely face. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming

... in my memory with Thackeray because of her visit to the author of Vanity Fair and its humorous and pathetic features. She went to London from her lonely Yorkshire home, and the great world, with its many selfish and unlovely features, made a painful impression on her. Even Thackeray, her idol, was found to have feet of clay. But this "little Puritan," as the great man called her, was endowed with the divine genius which was forced to seek expression in fiction, and nowhere in all literature ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... taught that old age must be respected, no matter how unlovely, and as Mrs. Perkins counted her aches and pains in a weak, whining voice, pity got the better of Lloyd's disgust. She began to feel sorry for this poor old creature, for whom no one else seemed to have any sympathy. ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston

... and three times over, and a hundred thousand times, and cram it, burning, flaming, melting into your bursting heart—then you would know a tenth of what I have known. Love, indeed! Who can have known love but me? I stand alone. Since the dull, unlovely world first jarred and trembled and began to move, there has not been another of my kind, nor has man suffered as I have suffered, and been crushed and torn and thrown aside to die, without even ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... marble shapes that set men dreaming, Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming Showed not unlovely to her ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... at her with his head hanging down, his swollen face all creased and purple, his hair sticking up rough and unkempt. He laughed, sitting there a degraded, debauched ruin, looking down from the height of his memories upon the gaunt, unlovely child of the slums who was rendered even more unlovely by the very courage that kept her waiting ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... death Mr. MacColl's lectures, knew all about 'masses' and 'tones' in architecture, and wished particular stress to be laid on 'the general outline as seen from a good distance.' This is greeted by some of the papers as particularly side-splitting and eccentric. Looking at the unlovely streets of London, never one of the more beautiful cities of Europe, where each new building seems contrived to go one better in sheer uglitude (especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views about ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... finally rooting out, the wickedness? Could there be true love in any other kind of forgiveness than this? A passing-by of the offence might spring from a poor human kindness, but never from divine love. It would not be remission. Forgiveness can never be indifference. Forgiveness is love towards the unlovely. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... came on very rough, the wind veering to the south and blowing half a gale, a very favourable wind, as it happened, to take us across this unlovely "Silver Sea," as the poets of the Plata insist on calling it, with its villainous, brick-red, chopping waves, so disagreeable to bad sailors. Paquita and Demetria suffered agonies, so that I was obliged to keep with them a good deal. ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... shaken beauty from that first unlovely "by- the-day"? Seamstress after seamstress had come and gone in that impossibly selfish household, the meek ones enduring it until they could endure no more, the proud ones hurrying angrily away; competent or incompetent, not one of them had ever been able to please ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... young woman in her disreputable attire—I have never seen a broken black feather waggle more shamelessly—was a sight indeed to strike wonderment into the cockney mind. And perhaps her association with myself added to the incongruity. I am long and lean and unlovely, I know; but it is my consolation that I look irreproachably respectable. Of the two I was infinitely the more disturbed by the public attention. "Calm and unembarrassed as a fate" she returned the popular gaze, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... to Sydney to welcome his bride. He stepped on the Grimaldi's deck within five minutes of her arrival, and asked if a Miss Ormiston were on board. There advanced a middle-aged woman, gaunt, wrinkled and unlovely—not the woman he had chosen, but the woman ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... a hand to guide me, an eye to cheer me, a bosom to repose on; all which I shall never have, but shall stagger into my grave, old before my time, unloved and unlovely, unless S. L. keeps her faith ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt

... directed, it may be, yet of no mean order) and a fatal desire for power sparkle in them; while the disappointment, the terrible self-accusing sadness that must belong to the closing of such a life as comes of such a temperament as his, lingers round his mouth. He is meagre, shrunken,—altogether unlovely. ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... eyes and blushed, knowing that, do what she would to prevent it, it was reflected in her own. She remembered all that this stranger had done for her, how he had risked his life a hundred times, how she would now have been dead and unlovely were it not for his intrepid deeds, and remembering, something ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard

... large and unlovely water, inhabited by plain men in severe boats, who endure cold, exposure, wet, and monotony almost as heavy as their responsibilities. Charge them with heroism—but that needs heroism, indeed! Accuse them of patriotism, they become ribald. Examine ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... in the education of girls these quite unlovely things should be insisted upon more than was absolutely necessary. But one would wish that the educators of the rising generation of women should, basing themselves upon these foundations, point out to every girl how great is woman's debt to civilisation; in other words, how much is under civilisation ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... that there shall be no mistake as to who wins the battle? The answer may very easily be so given as to make what is really a token of His love become an unlovely and repellent trait in His character. It is not eagerness for praise that moves Him, but longing that men may have the blessedness of recognising His hand fighting for them. It is for Israel's sake that He is so solicitous to deliver them from the delusion of their having won the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... and then, on this or that devious green, even when optimism shall have withered for ever from the land. Nor will any man mock at the survival. The dance will have lost nothing of its old grace, and will have gathered that quality of pathos which makes even unlovely relics dear to us—that piteousness which Time gives ever to things robbed of their meaning and their use. Spectators will love it for its melancholy not less than for its beauty. And I hope no mere spectator will be so foolish ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... spake by rage impelled, And then the queen deep silence held. He heard her speech full fraught with ill, But spoke no word bewildered still, Gazed on his love once held so dear Who spoke unlovely rede to hear; Then as he slowly pondered o'er The queen's resolve and oath she swore. Once sighing forth, Ah Rama! he Fell prone as falls a smitten tree. His senses lost like one insane, Faint as a sick man weak with pain, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... look as the float over us, silent as souls that have slipped from some ash heap in Hades, grey with the greyness that grows on the wolf's hide; their feathers hang upon them in ridges, unkempt, unlovely, soiled with blood and offal. They float above our heads, they ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... distant roar of waters. Oh, wonderful! wonderful! so lonely and so solemn, with the sad grey clouds above, and no sound save a lost lamb bleating upon the mountain side, as though its little heart were breaking. Then there comes some lean and withered old ewe, with deep gruff voice and unlovely aspect, trotting back from the seductive pasture; now she examines this gully, and now that, and now she stands listening with uplifted head, that she may hear the distant wailing and obey it. Aha! they see, and rush towards each other. Alas! they are both ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... betimes we may meet the trouble half way, and thus avert, perhaps, the danger that the fever will be checked only by the overturning of all law, sane or insane. The following chapters are designed to help in defeating a catastrophe so unlovely. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... you!" She turned toward him, trying to be affectionate. But his eyes were pink and unlovely in the flare of the match with which he lighted his dead and malodorous cigar. His head drooped, and a ridge of flesh scattered with pale small bristles bulged out ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... in Munich, and one at St. Petersburg, belong to the same class; but these may be considered exceptions to the rule. The general statement holds true, that the real motif of Murillo's beggar-boy pictures is the simple, natural enjoyment which may render attractive, and even beautiful, the most unlovely surroundings. ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... As unlovely as he appeared, Croaker had endurance, steady nerves, and a most un-mulelike willingness to obey orders. He was far from the ideal cavalry mount, but he took his rider there and back, safely. He was sure-footed, with a cat's ability to move at night, and in scout circles he had already ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... the naked, repelling, unlovely earth rose the Stockade, in hideous ugliness. At the gate the two men continued at their monotonous labor of tossing the dead of the previous day into the wagon-heaving into that rude hearse the inanimate remains ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... prosperity and pleasure which embalm old memories and keep a centennial on the shrines where the youth and chivalry of a century ago lived, loved and have left the subtle odor of past adventure to add a mysterious but not unlovely fragrance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... dungeons, subject to studied tortures, in abject and shifty poverty, after consummate shame, upon tremendous change of fortune, in the profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship with all that is unlovely and uncongenial—men, persevering nobly, live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes through all states, till it shall be united to what it is ever seeking. The very loneliness of man here is the greatest proof, to ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... thought of the sacerdotal deception that she felt had been so lately practised upon herself that caused her to put in the reserving words "in the matter of daily life"; but when she remembered the malice that had instigated report, the unlovely lives of the malicious fault-finders, the evil stains that lie even upon the best lives, she burst out, "There is not one in our community, Ephraim, who would stoop to a cruel act either in word or deed. There is not one of us, even among those who have recently repented from very ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... Mr. Pound's output, discuss the adequacy of the following: "When content has become for an artist merely something to inflate and display form with, then the petty serves as well as the great, the ignoble equally with the lofty, the unlovely like the beautiful, the sordid as the clean.... Real feeling consequently becomes rarer, and the artist descends to trivialities of observation, vagaries of assertion, or mere bravado of standards ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert

... the sound of his own voice his anger grew. His lip thrust itself out when he had spoken, and his whole face wore its hardest, most unlovely look. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner

... something, to be found in words of troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased sensitiveness of mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness—she was emotional at last! She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits in her: one pitiless as of old; the other human, anxious, not unlovely. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... questions raised by the great world war now raging, and who have applauded our abject failure to live up to the obligations imposed upon us as a signatory power of The Hague Convention, are, at best, an unlovely body of men, and taken as a whole are probably the most undesirable citizens that ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... found that in this capital article he had been grievously imposed upon. The uncourteous comparison by which he expressed his dislike of her large and clumsy person is well known. Bitterly did he lament to Cromwel the hard fortune which had allotted him so unlovely a partner, and he returned to London very melancholy. But the evil appeared to be now past remedy; it was contrary to all policy to affront the German princes by sending back their countrywoman after matters had gone so far, and Henry magnanimously resolved to sacrifice his own ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... 'good nights' commendatory of our hostess and our evening greeted me as I sought my tent and made ready for sleep. I was very happy, no memory of our talk was sullied by coarse or unlovely thought; pure as herself had been our enjoyment of Mrs. Fanning's society, and I ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... at the other side of the desk might have been fifty-five. He was of middle height, and was dressed in a somewhat violent check suit, the fit of which advertised the skill of the great tailor who had ably fashioned so fine a creation from so unlovely ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... of every great industrial undertaking is hung a chain of unlovely parasites, who fatten on the interruptions to its progress and the fluctuations in its success. These men create nothing—contribute nothing. Playing on the fears and hopes and untempered weakness of the public, they reap where they do not ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... unlovely disposition and no one could guess what she at any time might do. If Princess Polly had urged her to come very soon to Sherwood Hall she would have waited a week at least ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks

... Scott first, perhaps, and to George Eliot most of all, we should find ourselves indebted for faithful studies of plain people,—studies made with an eye single to {3} the object, and leaving, therefore, no unlovely trait slurred over or excused, yet giving us that perfect understanding of every-day people which is the only true basis of sympathy with them. In America we are indebted to such conscientious artists as Miss Jewett and Octave Thanet for a similar enlargement of our sympathies ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond

... price!" says Leon. "And of so discouraging a quality. While, if we had but a few handfuls of good soil in some small boxes by the windows—— Come, I will show you. Here, and here, where the sun comes in the morning. I could secure them myself if you would not think them unlovely to have in view." ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... on with him by writing. Superficial observers inferred from this fact that the inability to hear his compositions must have reacted unfavorably upon them, and probably accounted for many passages which were unlike his early works, and unintelligible or unlovely to the critics aforesaid. It is true that between the early and the latest compositions of Beethoven there is a greater difference in intelligibility than between the early and the late compositions of any other master. But the difference is not one of judgment on his part, but purely one of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... account of her singing that beautiful hymn. It must have been divinely ordered that she should leave such a precious legacy behind her. And though her loveliness makes her loss the greater, the loss of an unlovely wayward child would ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... to church—the distance was too great—but Nathaniel, looming high and stern across the table in the bare kitchen, morning and night, set forth the rigid, unlovely creed of his belief. This fell upon Priscilla's unheeding ears, but the hours before the shrine were deeply, tenderly religious, although they were ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... cruel to me," said Lopez;—"but I will meet you in Coleman Street at eleven to-morrow." Then Mr. Wharton left the room, and Lopez was there alone amidst the gloom of the heavy curtains and the dark paper. A London dining-room at night is always dark, cavernous, and unlovely. The very pictures on the walls lack brightness, and the furniture is black and heavy. This room was large, but old-fashioned and very dark. Here Lopez walked up and down after Mr. Wharton had left him, trying to think how far Fate and how far he himself were responsible ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... blankets at night, gazing at richly gilded mirrors over the mantelpieces and beautifully frescoed ceilings refurnishing our apartments in all their former splendor. Private Henry Morgan was not of this type. Henry came in one evening rather the worse for liquor and with clubbed musket assaulted his unlovely reflection in an expensive mirror. I believe he is still paying for his lack of restraint at the rate of a sixpence per day, and will have canceled his obligation by January, 1921, if the war continues until ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall

... in him, which was significant. Something had gone wrong, that was all. The young man who had looked out on the world, half challenging, half expectant, must have seen too suddenly that part of life which is unlovely. However, the thing may not be thus easily explained. The soul of a man, when bent or distorted under stress, is a weird and fearful growth. One may contemplate it in awe; but ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... unlovely Chinese cook, made the dawn hideous in the range house with his pots and pans and rattling stove lids. To him appeared Red Reckless, touseled and sleepy eyed looking to the astonished oriental's vision ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... we're on speaking terms once more.' Accepted? Thank you. Then let me thank you for those lovely flowers you've been sending me. You can't imagine how they brighten and sweeten my simple and unlovely van ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... and be torn by worms. Thus thou art laid, and leavest thy friends; Thou hast never a comrade who will come to thee, Who will hasten to look how thou likest thy house. 20 Or ever will undo thy door for thee. . . . . . . . . and after thee descend; For soon thou art loathsome and unlovely to see: From the crown of thy head shall the hair be lost; Thy locks shall fall and lose their freshness; 25 No longer is it fair ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various

... charged through to the head of the rout enjoyed themselves with utmost abandon. Such was, and is, the deduction from the new gospel (crude enough, doubtless, in many respects), which has finally petrified in the lordly egotism of Nietzche and in the unlovely outlines of one ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... mean cottages surrounding it, giving token of an industrial life totally opposite to that which is found beside the silver streams of the Tweed and its tributaries. When we passed near any of these spots, we were sure to catch the unlovely details, so frequently, though so unnecessarily attendant on factory-life—the paltry house, the unpaved, unscavengered street, the fry of dirty children. It was a beautiful tract of natural scenery in the process of being ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various

... war and disease, between them, had left very little of a husband to take under nursing when she got him again. An attack of scurvy had filled my mouth with sores, shaken every joint in my body and covered me all over with scars and livid spots, so that I was unlovely to look upon. A smart knock on the ankle joint from the splinter of a shell that burst in my face, in itself a mere bagatelle of a wound, had been of necessity neglected under the pressing and insistent calls upon me, and had ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton

... matter everything in this most intimate sphere of life, and naught else matters at all. When the girl marries so as to become possessed of any and every kind of external advantage, but there is that in the man which is unlovely or which she, at any rate, cannot love, her marriage will assuredly be a failure. As we have occasion to observe every day, she will be glad to jump at any chance of sacrificing all externals, where ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... "master" who believes that to lift the sluices of spiritual feeling is to quicken into ever-increasing activity its hidden springs; and neither the teachers nor the children have yet forgotten their lesson. The children are poor, pale, thin, unkempt, ill-clad, unlovely; but I am told that when they sing their faces are transfigured, and they all ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... doubted—he certainly had no recollection of her or her surroundings. To be sure the women about the "Home" in far-off England were kind and good, but this slim Canadian girl was so different. She looked like a flower, and he had never heard her speak a harsh, unlovely word in all those two years. Once as he stood at the carriage door, the rug over his arm, waiting for Miss Connie to descend the steps for her afternoon drive, an impudent little "Canuck" jeered at ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson

... Mrs. Campbell, that there are some trials that cannot do us any good. They only call out all there is in us that is unlovely and severe." ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss

... lifted, and I caught sight of beckoning hands. I saw before me a great, grim building, storey after storey rising in unbroken line, the dusty windows staring into the windows of a twin building across the road, just as tall, just as unlovely, just as desolate. I saw a bare entrance hall, in which pale-faced men and women came and went. I passed with them into so-called "homes" where electric light burned day and night, and little children ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... eastward in search of the home of Ethel Dent. Moreover, in all those three days, he had given scarcely a thought to the companion of his voyage. Notwithstanding his first impressions, Weldon had found much to interest him in Cape Town. The streets, albeit unlovely, were full of novel sights and the patter of novel tongues. Cape carts and Kaffirs, traction engines and troopers, khaki everywhere and yet more khaki, and, rising grimly behind it all, the naked ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... to him to find that the inmost substance of that indescribable womanliness was nothing but the fear of consequences. But supposing he had married the doctor's daughter, or the gardener's little girl? Then to be alone with her would be bliss, while to be alone with his wife was depressing and unlovely; then the coarse desire to satisfy a curiosity and a want would be transformed into an ecstasy ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... the little lines of the doings of men; unnamed adventurers whose deeds were virile deeds; rough men, from whose contaminating touch society gathers up her silken skirts and passes by upon the other side; unlovely men, rolled-sleeved and open-throated, deep-seamed of face, and richly weather-tanned of arm, who tread roughshod the laws of little right and wrong; who drink red liquor and swear lurid oaths and loud; but who, shoulder to shoulder, redden the ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth! Age is dark and unlovely; it is like the glimmering light of the moon when it shines through broken clouds, and the mist is on the hills: the blast of the north is on the plain; the traveller shrinks in the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Carrousel, and look towards the Cite when the tall buildings, the spire of the Sainte Chapelle and the massive grey towers of Notre Dame are ruddy with the setting sun, he will enjoy a scene of beauty not easily surpassed in Europe. Across the picture, somewhat marred by the unlovely Pont des Arts, stride the arches of the Pont Neuf with their graceful curves; below is the little green patch of garden and the cascade of the weir; in the centre of the bridge the bronze horse with Henry IV., its royal rider, almost hidden by ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... persecuted to save from what she believed eternal death. Her cruelty was prompted by sincere fanaticism, mingled with the desire to please the Catholic Philip, whose love she craved and could not win. Disappointed in his aim to reign jointly with her, as he had hoped, he withdrew to Spain. Unlovely and unloved, she is almost an object of pity, as with dungeon, rack and fagot she strives to restore the Religion she loves, and to win the husband she adores. But Philip remained obdurately in Spain, and ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele

... The gentlewoman in attendance had recently come from a canteen near the front where soup is made and often eight thousand bowls of it served in a day. The skin of her arms and hands is, I fear, permanently unlovely from the steam of the great kettles—or perhaps I should say permanently lovely now that one knows the cause of the branding. I offered to pour in her ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... actresses of the older generation, who attempted to recall for one performance the triumphs of their youth. Joseph Surface is a hypocrite and a villain; but the youthful grace of Mr. Irving so charmed a lady in the stalls that she said she "could not bear to see those old unlovely people trying to get the better of that charming young man, Mr. Joseph." Something must have been wrong with the economy of ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... floor with crimson, they wrapped her in eiderdown; They hung the windows with cloth of gold, lest her eyes look down; (Lest the highway show an unlovely thing And her eyes ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison

... man who can devise truly available means of supplying this grand want in our Work-World! It is plainly for want of some such device that the public-house thrives, and that human nature is seen in such unlovely forms amongst the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various

... to build before you've laid your foundations," said Mr. Paramor. "You let your feelings carry you away, Vigil. The state of the marriage laws is only a symptom. It's this disease, this grudging narrow spirit in men, that makes such laws necessary. Unlovely men, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... two days, with their excess of vital emotions, had worn Denas out. Never before had the life into which she was born looked so unlovely to her. She preferred the twitter and twaddle of Priscilla's workroom to the intense realities of an existence always verging on eternity. She dared to contrast those large, heroic fishers, with their immovable principles and their constant ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... narrative in chronological sequence; but I think it was in this year that we went to Manchester to see the exposition. The town itself was unlovely; but, as we had Italy in prospect, it was deemed expedient to accustom ourselves in some measure to the companionship of works of art, and the exhibition professed to contain an exceptionally fine and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... first a circle I was called, And was a curve around about Like lofty orbit of the sun Or rainbow arch among the clouds. A noble figure then was I— And lacking nothing but a start, And lacking nothing but an end. But now unlovely do I seem Polluted by some angles new. This thing Archytas hath not done Nor noble sire of Icarus Nor son of thine, Iapetus. What accident or god can ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... intellectual enlightenment, willingly done right. She knows with unerring instinct what is right, and does it joyously. She does not think of one wrong act as harmless, of another as of no consequence, and of another as not intended. To her pure soul all evil is equally unlovely. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... of the trainmen to bring the boxes of fruit to the office, Griffith led the way up the path formed by the bridge-service track. The rails had been kept shovelled clear from the February snowdrifts and ran straight out through the midst of the bleak unlovely buildings grouped near the edge of Michamac Strait, at the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... ways and steep, and the mountain girls so girded up, as from their armpits to their waist is but a handful. Of all the garbs I yet have seen, the most unlovely. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... braces off his shoulders he pulled up violently the venetian blind, and leaned his forehead against the cold window-pane—a fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad



Words linked to "Unlovely" :   ugly



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com