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More "Distasteful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... show an eager anticipation for the future as planned for him. A life devoted to business was to him a selfish one. Something within him was insistently calling him to a higher vocation; although apparently acquiescing to his father's plans, the prospect daily became more and more distasteful to him. ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... keen psychologist, and he perceived clearly enough that Phil Abingdon was one of those women in whom a certain latent perversity is fanned to life by opposition. Whether she was really attracted by Ormuz Khan or whether she suffered his attentions merely because she knew them to be distasteful to others, he ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... by one Power, must be submitted to the Congress if the examination was not to prove illusory. This was a just line of argument. Nevertheless it was natural to suppose that some parts of the Treaty must be more distasteful than others to Great Britain; and Count Schouvaloff, who was sincerely desirous of peace, applied himself to the task of discovering with what concessions Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet would be satisfied. He found that if Russia would consent to modifications of the Treaty in Congress excluding ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... to fashionable congregations, are distasteful to most readers, and in no very high favor with us. A deep interest in the welfare of South Carolina, and the high esteem in which we held the better, and more sensible class of her citizens, prompted us to sit down ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... company. Because of the prominence of the Shippens, it was thought that the gallant young French Officers, would be assigned to them. Marjorie rejoiced at this although the Shippen girls evinced no such sentiment. Whether it was because the French alliance was distasteful to them or because their Tory leanings took precedence, they preferred other guests for partners. But as the matter was to be decided by lot, ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... Woodward would have willingly postponed the reading of Charley's story so as to enable Katie to go to bed after the accident, had she been able to do so. But she was not able to do so without an exercise of a species of authority which was distasteful to her, and which was very seldom heard, seen, or felt within the limits of Surbiton Cottage. It would moreover have been very ungracious to snub Charley's manuscript, just when Charley had made himself such ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... severely from American privateers, and she would be forced to help the South, at least to the extent of keeping Southern ports open. Finally, Lyons concluded, all of this letter and advice were extremely distasteful to him, yet he felt compelled to write it by the seriousness of the situation. Nevertheless, he would exert every effort and use ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... peculiarly distasteful to Harry under the circumstances, and I would not give him pain for the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... is extremely distasteful to the employers because it is efficient; because it means a new order, a new system in the labor world in this country. The meaning of this can be gathered, in some measure, from the recent experiences in the steel strike of this country, where they acted as ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... young. Of late I've made deliberate effort to remain a fool; but a man has got to be a fool or a coward down to the very hard-pan of his soul if the logic of recent events has no effect on him. I don't think I am exactly a coward, but the restraint of army-life, and especially roughing it, is very distasteful. I kept thinking it would all soon be over, that more men were in now than were needed, and that it was a confounded disagreeable business, and all that. But my mind wasn't at rest; I wasn't satisfied with the ambitions of my callow youth; and, as usual when one is in trouble ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... written nothing, nor had he prepared or collected any material for future use. No thought of taking up authorship as a profession had entered his mind. Even the physical labor involved in the mere act of writing was itself distasteful. Unexpectedly, however, he now began a course of literary production that was to continue without abatement during the little more than thirty years which constituted ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... but not every teacher can make him learn. He will not work joyously unless he feels that liberty is his, whether he is busy or at rest; he must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way bravely through a dull routine ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... taste. The hunting farmer of the old school generally rides in a chimney-pot hat; but, in this particular, the younger brethren of the plough are leaving their old habits, and running into caps, net hats, and other innovations which, I own, are somewhat distasteful to me. And there is, too, the ostentatious farmer, who rides in scarlet, signifying thereby that he subscribes his ten or fifteen guineas to the hunt fund. But here, in this paper, it is not of him I speak. He is a man who is so much less the farmer, in that he is the more ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... and he found it hard to distract his mind even for a moment from the thought of his misfortunes. Nothing but a strong mental effort in another direction could any longer fix his attention, and though any kind of work was for the present distasteful to him, it was at least a temporary relief from the ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... "Pen," he called across the room, "what about that drink?" The girl by him reached over and touched a bell. As she did so, Peter saw the curls that clustered on her neck and caught the perfume of her hair. It was penetrating and peculiar, but not distasteful, and it did all that it was meant to do. He bent, and kissed the back of her neck, ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... or in the influence of the French. There can be no doubt, however, that the rapid increase of duelling at this time was due to the fact that conditions were ripe for its reception. A spirit had been fostered by the life upon the plantation which made it distasteful to gentlemen to turn to law for redress for personal insults. The sense of dignity, of self reliance there engendered, made them feel that the only proper retaliation against an equal was to be found ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... to divine the other's inquiring disposition, though it had different effects on the elder and younger character. Jane Mohun suspected that she had on her ferret look, and guessed that Gillian's disgusted air meant that the idea of her turning over Lady Merrifield's drawers was almost as distasteful as that of the ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... uninviting to him as yet. The two lines of trestle-beds, with their unkempt occupants, were suggestive of—well, anything but congenial sleeping companions. The atmosphere was close and stuffy, and the yellow glimmer of the two oil-lamps, one stationed at each end of the room, gave the place a distasteful suggestion ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... not distasteful to me. It reminded me of days out hunting, when I have come suddenly upon him at the edge of the watercourse, and have shared his melons and his conversation. I anticipate for him some not unagreeable ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... moment. It would sound very absurd to the captain for him to say that there was a passenger on the ship whom he desired very much not to meet, and yet, after all, that was what made the thought of the voyage so distasteful to him. ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... decently sympathetic with the Reform movements in the Canadas. At the same time, Melbourne and his ministers were only too glad to ship him out of the country. There was no question of his great ability and statesmanlike outlook. But his advanced Radical views were distasteful to many of his former colleagues; and his arrogant manners, his lack of tact, and his love of pomp and circumstance made him unpopular even in his own party. The truth is that he was an excellent ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... the period embraced by the preceding chapter; except perhaps the marriage of Catharine, the young queen of Navarre, with Jean d'Albret, a French nobleman, whose extensive hereditary domains, in the southwest corner of France, lay adjacent to her kingdom. This connection was extremely distasteful to the Spanish sovereigns, and indeed to many of the Navarrese, who were desirous of the alliance with Castile. This was ultimately defeated by the queen-mother, an artful woman, who, being of the blood royal of France, was naturally disposed ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... sentiments except the tyrannical one which suddenly usurped the empire of her heart. She yielded to its influence, and the too natural consequence in a mind unattuned to soft emotions was, that the attentions of Adrian became distasteful to her. She grew capricious; her gentle conduct towards him was exchanged for asperity and repulsive coldness. When she perceived the wild or pathetic appeal of his expressive countenance, she would relent, and for a while resume her ancient kindness. But these fluctuations shook ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... husband found these observations distasteful. He waited till Sunday, and then told his wife to get dressed ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... Francis' son, Charles, who had caught the infection of plague while sleeping at Abbeville. Later the misalliance of the princess was cautiously touched upon. That lady, said Francis gravely, to whom the gaieties of the court at the present time could not fail to be distasteful, had left the chateau immediately upon her return. Ever of a devout mind, she had repaired to a convent and announced her intention of devoting herself, and her not inconsiderable fortune, to a higher and more spiritual life. Charles, who at ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... to Elsie's cheek, and her eyes beamed with pleasure. Mr. Dinsmore, too, looked very much gratified, and the old gentleman could not fail to perceive that the difference he made between the children was quite distasteful to both parents. ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... Chevalier, picking up his hat and thrusting his sword into its scabbard; "I dare say this moment is distasteful to us all." ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... her old friends, in possession of her old income. As regarded money, they would all be sufficiently well provided for. For himself, his fellowship and his prescribed stipend would be more than enough. But there was something in the proposition that was very distasteful to him. He did not begrudge the money to his mother; but he did begrudge her the right of having it from any one ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... run Cheery-looking apathy—not far removed perhaps from despair Contrivances that hold even the best of women together Could not cry! Detached, and perhaps sarcastic face Electors, who, finding uncertainty distasteful Excellent manners that have no mannerisms Faculty of not being bored with his own society Feeling of irritation which so rapidly attacks the old Few things that matter, but they matter very much Having that passion for work requiring ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger
... by leaving her name out of the discussion then," I interposed coldly. "Even her presence on board is distasteful under ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... ill-fitting uniform, Heaven knows how long she went on. I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the outside of the ring of listening women and children, and looking, I chose to think, somewhat sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him, on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and respectability his own ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... St. George, edging his way toward the steps of the club as he spoke. He was now entirely through with Harding; his financial forebodings were as distasteful to him as his comments on his clothes ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... acquaintance, he got his prints, too, if he could. He believed that one's character was revealed in one's finger-prints, and he studied them very carefully. It was a sort of hobby; but it was, for some reason, distasteful to Senor Silva. He not only refused to allow prints to be made of his fingers, but he pooh-poohed my father's theories, and they used to have some terrific arguments about it. One night, after a particularly hot argument, Senor Silva made the assertion ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... the Alps would be greasy with being climbed. I think it is clear what he meant. To one who loves Nature for himself, has his own discovering eyes for her multiform and many-mooded beauty, it is distasteful to have some excursionist effect of spectacular scenery labelled and thrust upon him with a showman's raptures; and, in revulsion from the hypocritical admiration of the vulgar, he turns to the less obvious ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... doctor. But still he hesitated. His law practice, writing, lecturing, claimed part of him; his Sunday School work and lay preaching, a second and evergrowing stronger part. His law practice became more and more distasteful, his service to the soul needs of others, ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and not enough to offend him—as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home the argument, but not enough ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... 'Sieur Matta,' he cried, 'do you suppose it can be any amusement to Monsieur le Comte to be plagued with your ill-timed jests? For my part, I am so weary of the game, that I swear by Jupiter I can scarcely play any more.' Nothing is more distasteful to a losing gamester than a hint of leaving off; so the Count entreated the Chevalier to continue, and assured him that 'Monsieur Matta might say what he pleased, for it did not give him the least uneasiness ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... in this volume of the progressive steps of his clerical education, beyond the intimation that it was wearisome and distasteful. Talleyrand disliked references to his ecclesiastical career. It had not been a respectable one; and if M. Colmache really got from him the stories which he tells in his book, we need not be surprised ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... her grave Dombey resolved to cast Mrs. Trotter off forever, and send her away from the city. He accordingly arranged with her to take an annual allowance and go to New York with her family, vowing that he could no longer endure her presence, which was grown distasteful to him. ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... mind of Berselius that Tirard was not talking to him. Tirard was talking to the man who was dead—the other Berselius. The new rifle for the army, which filled Tirard's conversation, would have been an interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was absolutely distasteful to the new. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... were ever distasteful; she had but one philosophy, which was 'to bear up well,' and when, not that, 'as well as you could.' She saw scores of things around her to be remedied, or, at least, bettered, by a little exertion, and not one which could be helped by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... said. "You may be subpoenaed. If you know nothing, you can tell nothing. If you know about the business, you might tell something which would ruin us." The mere presence of a stranger has always been distasteful to him. The custom of espionage has made him suspect that others are as watchful as himself. He has been described erroneously as a master of complicated villainy. He is, for evil or for good, the most single-minded ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... principles of his favorite arts. This new pursuit proved so congenial to his taste, that from thenceforward his medical books were entirely neglected. The elder Galilei, a man of liberal acquirements and enlarged mind, did not require the devotion of his son's life to a distasteful pursuit. Fortunately the young man's talents attracted notice, and in 1589 he was appointed mathematical lecturer in the University of Pisa. There is reason to believe that, at an early period of his studentship, he embraced, upon inquiry and conviction, the doctrines ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... unintelligent recruit is transmuted into the precious metal of the soldier who wins battles seems to be somewhat as follows: Of his own volition he has taken on a certain job and his dogged pride or obstinacy will not allow him to be beaten by it, however little enthusiasm it may arouse in him and however distasteful it may be to him at first. He offers no "ca' canny" service, but plods on and does his best in his own way. The lack of the enthusiastic temperament does not seriously retard the progress of his military education, and without much ado he ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... of thinking about Knox which may be called platonically Puritan. Sweet enthusiasts glide swiftly over all in the Reformer that is specially distasteful to us. I find myself more in harmony with the outspoken Hallam, Dr. Joseph Robertson, David Hume, and the Edinburgh reviewer of 1816, than with several ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... of that," I replied. "But it is a woman's privilege to repel those attentions if distasteful to her. You seem disinclined to accord ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... to make science pleasant and attractive, and every lesson which he gives in the use of pure, correct English, free from exaggeration, from slang, and from mannerism, goes far to render such miserable and pernicious trash distasteful even to ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible, partly from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the Irishman. I have seen him slink off with backward looks of terror and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had been professing hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot. These utterances ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the two others, impatient and curious. It was easy to see how distasteful the conversation was to the Marchese Loria. He answered Sir Roger's questions only by an effort; and as for her cousin, even he was moved out of the imperturbable sang-froid which sometimes pleased, sometimes irritated Virginia, according ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... house, however. There are a few European ones, scattered about the Tartar City, looking so out of place, so insignificant and ugly! The foreigners who live here a long time seem to like them, however. They tell us that after a time China gets on one's nerves. Chinese things become utterly distasteful, and one becomes so sick of Chinese art and architecture and furniture that one must approximate a home like those of one's own country. Therefore there are a certain number of these "foreign-style" houses to be found, furnished with golden oak furniture, ugly and commonplace to a degree. ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... ghosts are often represented as "all loath to leave the body that they love," they are generally quite as loath to return to it, when once they have left it, though whether it is the process of returning or the continuance of a life which they have left that is distasteful to them is not very clear. The painfulness of the process of restoration to life after drowning seems to favour the ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... had no absolute authority which could enforce obedience on a creature at once so stubborn and so volatile. So she made no further opposition, fearing that anything like violent measures might prove distasteful to ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... was drawing on Mark Waring to talk about his daily life—sympathizing with him about his hard, distasteful work, and pitying his loneliness, she never guessed how her words were being branded, one by one, on the earnest, steadfast heart, that her own lofty nature was not worthy to understand. In a week after their first ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... of the Telegraph alien and distasteful. There all was different; the men had little joy in their work, little interest in it, save perhaps the newspaper man's inborn love of a good story or a beat. They were all cynical, without loyalty or faith; they secretly made fun of the Telegraph, of its ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... flowers, and I saw a great and horrible black gulf underneath, and that one false step should cast me down therein. Nor will any thing comfort me, at those times, but to talk with my Protection, that can alway dispel the gloom. But the things around, that I have been bred up in, do grow more and more distasteful unto me ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... the followers of individual branches of study. The Divinity, for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus. Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is cold, haughty, and formal; and this attitude is repaid, with interest, in scorn and hatred. There is no concealing the fact that to the mild Gentoo the Eurasian is a very distasteful object. ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers. There was a good-tempered Irish laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman from New Haven, suddenly sobered by this uncanny duty, and a furtive, gaol-bleached thief who feared a trap and ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... missionary may not be able to see it for a long time, but if he everlastingly keeps at it, he will surely find that, after a few years, familiarity has made the difficult easy. Most people will find, as well, that it has even made the distasteful pleasant! ...
— Have We No Rights? - A frank discussion of the "rights" of missionaries • Mabel Williamson
... their zeal for the established faith with all the warmth of persecution. To the Germans national freedom was of wholly minor moment, in comparison with the freedom of the soul; the orthodoxy of England was as distasteful to the disciples of Luther as the orthodoxy of Rome—and the interests of Europe were sacrificed on both sides to this foolish and fatal disunion. Circumstances indeed would not permit the division to remain in its first intensity, and their common ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... aunt, of course, is a Frenchwoman; she has different ideas. But you, I can't believe that you care for this society, for people like Kronopolski and—and Rainham. Oh, it hurts me, and I imagine how distasteful it must be to you, that you must suffer these people. I want to take you away from ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... and destroy their unworthy efforts. For this reason Blucher, with his heroic soul, is as much an eyesore to them as Stein, with his plans of liberation and his energetic action for constitutional reform. One wishes to create a new Prussia, the other a new state, and both these ideas are utterly distasteful to some, for they cling to the rotten old system, and new ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... States. He couldn't kill the man in cold blood, justly as he may have deserved the fate, and the thought of causing his arrest and dragging his own name into the publicity of court proceedings was little less distasteful to him. ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... breakfast in good spirits. He saw a way out of his difficulties. Though he had no false pride, he felt that a blacksmith's life would be distasteful to him. He was fond of study, and had looked forward to a college course. Now this was out of the question. It seemed that he was as poor as his friend, Dan Clark, with his own way to make in the world. When he left school, at the beginning ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... the rehearsals as well. Yet these educative impressions tended to make me feel ever more and more dissatisfied with my work at the theatre. On the one hand, the members of the company became gradually more distasteful to me, and on the other I was growing discontented with the management. With regard to the staff of the theatre, I very soon found out the hollowness, vanity, and the impudent selfishness of this uncultured and undisciplined class of people, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... to her mother about the Prince to avoid talking to me. Her face was burning, and, in order to conceal her agitation, she bent over the table as if she were short-sighted and made a show of reading the newspaper. My presence was distasteful to her. I took my ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... down the grocery bill, though I insisted on feeding the horses even better than before. It is never economy to stint one's working cattle, especially when one demands the utmost from them, besides being a procedure which is distasteful to any merciful man. However, though we had to hire more horses, wondering how we would ever pay for them when the contract was finished, the track crept on along the treacherous slope, where we ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... of the counting-house in comparison with the sea was so distasteful to him that I was anxious whenever he went out alone, or even with Griffith, who despised the notion of, as he said, sitting on a high stool, dealing in tea, so much that he was quite capable of aiding ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... scorched prairie. The round of unrelieved, monotonous labour. Farming; can mind of man conceive a life more deadly? No—no! I want to get away from it all; back to the life in which I was my own master, unfettered by duties and distasteful labours for which I am responsible to others. From the beginning my life has been a failure. But that was not originally my fault. I worked hard, and my ideals were sound and good. Then I met with misfortune. My life was my own to make or mar after that; what I chose to do with it was my own ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... written between 1766 and 1780; but they are the letters of an old woman, and they bear upon every page of them the traces of a mind to which the whole movement of contemporary life was profoundly distasteful. The new forces to which the eighteenth century gave birth in thought, in art, in sentiment, in action—which for us form its peculiar interest and its peculiar glory—were anathema to Madame du Deffand. In her ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... I had gone through these books, what was my state of mind? I had derived entertainment from their perusal, but they left me more listless and unsettled than before, and I really knew not what to do to pass my time. My philological studies had become distasteful, and I had never taken any pleasure in the duties of my profession. I sat behind my desk in a state of torpor, my mind almost as blank as the paper before me, on which I rarely traced a line. It was ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Dominique You, and his rabble of Baratarians, caused New Orleans a great deal of annoyance, but like many other doubtful characters, they have, since their death, become entirely picturesque, and the very idea that Lafitte was not a first-class blood-and-thunder pirate is as distasteful to the people of New Orleans to-day, as his being any kind of a near-pirate at all, used to be to their ancestors. Nevertheless Frank R. Stockton, who made a great specialty of pirates, says of Lafitte: "He never committed an act of piracy in his life; he was ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... first sense of injury had passed away, Fred felt as if he had been at fault to allow himself to be so easily overcome, and, distasteful as was the work in the breaker, he had fully resolved to remain and assert his ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... this most distasteful of subjects roused her to fury. A purple flush suffused her face, and her cheeks puffed in and ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... how close a parallel to classical training could be made out of that palaeontology to which I refer. In the first place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, so pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to the youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production of the head-masters out of the field in all these excellences. Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring out all their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in the application of my osteo-grammatical ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... address me thus? I have answered your questions, be kind enough to leave me now, your presence is growing distasteful." ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... to follow up the strong traditions of his race. At the beginning of his reign, the Ulema was resolved, if possible, to prevent the new Sultan from carrying on those reforms which had ever been so distasteful to the Turks, grating at once against their religious associations and their pride of race, and which recent events had certainly proved not to be productive of those good results anticipated by Sultan Mamoud. To attain this object, the Muftis adopted the expedient of working on the religious ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... In this distasteful period of inaction, he applied himself diligently to the study of native languages, and was able to report to his mother ere long that he had passed the interpreter's examination. What also eased the irksomeness of his situation ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... he drew nigh the house. They were then passing from the ball to the supper-room, and he found the tumult so distasteful to his mood of still ecstasy that he would not have entered had he not remembered that he had in his pocket a note ready if needful to slip into her hand, containing only the words, "Meet me for one long ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... into Lowestoft, less than two miles distant. At this time, be it remembered, Dr. MacOubrey was eighty-one years of age. Now, as to the general untidiness of Borrow's home at the time of his death—the point is a distasteful one, but it had better be faced. Henrietta was twenty-three years of age when her mother married Borrow. She was sixty-four at the time of his death, and her husband, as I have said, was eighty-one years of age at that time, being three years older than Borrow. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... is the be-all and end-all of Miss Martin's presence. It would be cruel, and unfair, if a girl of her age were forced into a distasteful prominence in connection with a crime with which she is no more related than ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster; but the real bar was the fact that he had once adversely criticised one ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... man lifted above earthly things, even by simplicity and purity. Simplicity ought to be in the intention, purity in the affection. Simplicity reacheth towards God, purity apprehendeth Him and tasteth Him. No good action will be distasteful to thee if thou be free within from inordinate affection. If thou reachest after and seekest, nothing but the will of God and the benefit of thy neighbour, thou wilt entirely enjoy inward liberty. If thine heart were right, then should every creature be a mirror of life and ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... breast. During the night the nondescript lidded article was brought into requisition. When the cell doors were opened at six o'clock in the morning every prisoner put out his "slops," which were emptied by the cleaners. This scavenger's work must be very distasteful, but so anxious are the prisoners to get out of their cells that there are always plenty of candidates for the office. The tins are kept clean by means of brick and whitening, which are passed into the cells every evening in little cotton bags. My dust-pan, at least, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... unconscious centre of her ambitions wore a perplexed frown. Mahony was much exercised just now over the question of medical attendance for Polly. The thought of coming into personal contact with a member of the fraternity was distasteful to him; none of them had an inkling who or what he was. And, though piqued by their unsuspectingness, he at the same time feared lest it should not be absolute, and he have the ill-luck to hit on a practitioner who had heard of his stray spurts of doctoring and written ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... thought the matter over, and perhaps I should have been induced even to go so far as to survey the lady from a distance, and argue the point with my mother pro and con. But the fact is, the thing was distasteful, and wouldn't bear thinking about, much less arguing. I was too lazy to go and explain the matter, and writing was not my forte. Besides, I didn't want to thwart my mother in her plans, or hurt her feelings; and so the long and the short of it is, I solved the difficulty and cut the knot ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... Beret," said Alice; "that is one novel I have found wholly distasteful to me. I tried to read it, but could not do it, I flung it aside in utter disgust. You and mother Roussillon are welcome to hide it deep as a well, for all I care. I don't enjoy reading about low, vile people and hopeless unfortunates; ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... his argument a little, but, as far as he was concerned, he was through. The whole situation was distasteful to him. The longer he stayed here, the less it seemed to ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... I had rather we didn't put it in that way," Mallard resumed, with a curious doggedness, as if her tone were distasteful to him. "My own part in the business is accidental. Please tell me: is it, or not, your own belief that a delay ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... me with any attentions, which he perceived would be at that moment distasteful, but exhibited the most marked desire to cultivate the acquaintance of Auguste, to whom he showed a degree of deference, though himself somewhat the senior, as to a military man, that flattered his esprit de corps, mingled with ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... has brought to me. The interest taken in an author is fragile: his next book, or your next year of culture, might see the interest frosted or outgrown; and himself, in spite of all, you might probably find the most distasteful person upon earth. My case is different. I have bad health, am often condemned to silence for days together - was so once for six weeks, so that my voice was awful to hear when I first used it, like the whisper of a shadow - have outlived all my chief pleasures, which were active ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difference between them the philosopher may find, perhaps, some explanation of the difference in the character and results of the revolutions which came so near together in the two countries. Nothing, moreover, could well be conceived more distasteful to Washington than the Frenchman's conduct except the Frenchman himself. There was about the man and his performances everything most calculated to bring one of those gusts of passionate contempt which now and again had made things unpleasant for some one who had ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... week after their birth Isabella fell slightly ill. Her mother and grandmother undertook the nursing, and as the husband found them both with the twins whenever he came to see the infants and their mother, the sick-room grew distasteful to him. Again, as before their birth, he sought compensation outside of the house for the annoyance caused by the women at home; but the memory of the little boys haunted him, and when he met his companions at the tavern he invited them to drink the children's health ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... another's blighted heart, and of still another's darkened life, awaited me beyond these turbid waters! My way was dark, and my path obscure before me. Chart and compass were blurred and numb. To remain in New Jedboro, and to remove to Charleston, seemed equally distasteful. ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... the risen Christ will also lead to patient persistence in duty. If we have Him before us, the distasteful duty which He sets us will not be distasteful, and the small tasks, in which great faithfulness may be manifested, will cease to be small. If we have Him before us we have in that risen Christ the great and lasting Example of how patient continuance in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... well aware. Soon these would leap on him, and that with an ugly clamour which he consciously turned from in repulsion and weary disgust. For he was very tired, as he now realized. The anxiety endured during his tedious cross-country journey, the distasteful tragic-comedy of the scene de seduction so artlessly made him by unlucky Theresa Bilsen, followed by this prolonged vigil; lastly the very real tragedy—for such it in great measure remained and must remain—of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... however, especial reasons why this alliance should be distasteful, both to Philip of Spain upon one side, and to the Landgrave Philip of Hesse on the other. The bride was the daughter of the elector Maurice. In that one name were concentrated nearly all the disasters, disgrace, and disappointment of the Emperor's reign. It was Maurice who had ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... undecided whether chants or marches were Miss Keith's passion, and, perhaps, which propensity would render the young lady the most distasteful to herself. Ermine thought it merciful to divert the attack by mentioning Mr. Clare's love of music, and hoping his curate could gratify it. "No," Mr. Keith said, "it was very unlucky that Mr. Lifford ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... need hardly say, gave inexpressible pleasure to Ruby, and was not altogether distasteful to Minnie, although she felt anxious about Mrs Brand, who would naturally be much alarmed at the prolonged absence of herself and the captain. However, "there was no help for it"; and it was wonderful the resignation which she ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... of every sort swarming through the city, many were luxurious and some were criminal. On these last, the Venetian Senate determined to lay its hands, and in the first years of the seventeenth century all these questions, and various other matters distasteful to the Vatican, culminated in the seizure and imprisonment of two ecclesiastics charged with various high crimes,—among ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... to certain minds an ambiguous and even distasteful association; but I think it will only do so to such minds as are reluctant to analyse, to the furthest limit, their own capacity for the kind of "love" I have attempted to describe; and possibly also such minds as are debarred, by some sub-conscious ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... princes, much as he esteemed a few. Frequent and just were his complaints about their incapacity, their lawlessness, and their vices. He also liked to treat the nobility with irony; the coarseness of most of them was highly distasteful to him. He felt a democratic displeasure toward the hard and selfish jurists who managed the affairs of the princes, worked for favor, and harassed the poor; for the best of them he admitted only a very doubtful prospect of the mercy of God. His whole heart, on the other ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... found in their voluminous systems. Their pretentiousness, their omniscience, their large fortunes, their impatience of argument, their indifference to first principles, their stupidity, their progresses through Hellas accompanied by a troop of their disciples—these things were very distasteful to Plato, who esteemed genius far above art, and was quite sensible of the interval which separated them (Phaedrus). It is the interval which separates Sophists and rhetoricians from ancient famous men and women such as Homer ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... the swift, twenty-four cylinder launch—a racing model—sat Captain Alden and Rrisa. The captain wore his aviator's helmet and his goggles, despite the warmth of the night. To appear in only his celluloid mask, even at a time like this when darkness would have hidden him, seemed distasteful to the man. He seemed to want to hide his misfortune as fully as possible; and, since this did no harm, the Master let him have ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the public-house parlour, would have called for his grog, and would have laughed and talked with the company assembled as familiarly as if he had known them all his life. But the very thought of whiling away the time in this manner was distasteful to him. The new situation in which he was placed seemed to have altered him to himself already. Thus far, his life had been the common, trifling, prosaic, surface-life of a prosperous young man, with no troubles to conquer, and no trials to face. ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... first and last conversation with him that the influence of his powerful protection was so strong that all active criticisms of Johnny ceased, and only a respectful surveillance of his movements lingered in the settlement. I do not know that this was altogether distasteful to the child; it would have been strange, indeed, if he had not felt at times exalted by this mysterious influence that he seemed to have acquired over his fellow creatures. If he were merely hunting ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... he respected sincere religious feelings, equally did he detest that hypocrisy which despises in secret the idol it adores in public. Even at the transition period of what has been called his skepticism, it was extremely distasteful to him to speak against religion, to despise and mock even the hollow worship practiced outwardly from human motives and personal interest. In Livadia at this time he met with a Greek bishop, whose actions were quite at variance ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... by no means uncommon, and might last for an indefinite period. Meanwhile the young man was now, by slow and painful application, doing his utmost to recover his lost power and skill. Naturally, the subject was distasteful to him, and he shrank from discussing it. Here the voice again spoke to me through the tube, telling me to observe the young man, and especially his face. On this I scanned his countenance with attention, and remarked that it wore a singularly odd look,—the look of a man advanced in years ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Richier, he was employed as translator in the scandalous Hirschel lawsuit, so dramatically set forth by Carlyle in his Life of Frederick, though Lessing's share in it seems to have been unknown to him. The service could hardly have been other than distasteful to him; but it must have been with some thrill of the anche io! kind that the poor youth, just fleshing his maiden pen in criticism, stood face to face with the famous author, with whose name all Europe rang from side to side. This was in February, 1751. ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... hotel, and drug store had been visited. This work was continued daily, and during the week union prayer-meetings were held every night. One drug store responded to the appeal; one hotel closed its bar; the visits became distasteful to one dealer, and ...
— Two Decades - A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York • Frances W. Graham and Georgeanna M. Gardenier
... distasteful levity, but anon made a noble amend by abruptly offering me his foot as if he had no longer use for it, and I knew by intuition that he expected me to take off his boots. I took them off with all the coolness ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... chapter of existence. This is what we all like to think of as the condition of mind and circumstances in which age is best met. But we are grieved to say that this was not in the least Lady Randolph's pose. Anything more distasteful to her than this quiet could not be. It was her principle and philosophy to live in the present. She drew many experiences from the past, and a vast knowledge of the constitutions and changes of society; but personally it did not amuse her to think of it, and the ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... there! Even Boardman and Warner seemed averse to any conversation upon the subject," soberly said Atwater. "I judge that the memory of Ferris is a most distasteful topic to them all. I presume that the papers of old Hugh probably have revived matters, which might as well be buried in Ferris' lonely grave out there on the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... cold to Ramon, and he, I believe, is suspicious of my intentions toward his father. Therefore, the situation is strained. It is very hard to know what is right in a case of this sort. The young are impressionable and reckless. Often what seems to them distasteful is in reality a blessing. It is not every love-match that turns out so happily as yours, my dear friends. Well, I suppose I am weak. With Gertrudis I cannot be severe; but unless it becomes necessary to make conditions with my old friend Alfarez, I should ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... else for Tarzan of the Apes, it had to some extent taught him to crave the society of his own kind, and to feel with genuine pleasure the congenial warmth of companionship. And in the same ratio had it made any other life distasteful to him. It was difficult to imagine a world without a friend—without a living thing who spoke the new tongues which Tarzan had learned to love so well. And so it was that Tarzan looked with little relish upon the future he had mapped out ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... which is like a superstition, that the pursuit is not interfered with, however unsportsmanlike it may be, and when illegal, and when practised by only a very few persons in any district, where to others it may be secretly distasteful or even prejudicial. ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... reason for mixing with people who were certainly as a rule utterly distasteful and repugnant to me, was because I could not bear to leave Adelaide alone. I pitied her in her lonely and alienated misery; and I knew that it was some small solace to her to have me ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... thought me narrow, Jerry, because I laid my life and yours along pleasant byways and ignored the beaten track. I've never told you why the world had grown distasteful to me. I think you ought to know. It may be worth something to you. The old story, always new—a girl, pretty, insincere. I was just out of the University, with a good education, some prospects, but no money. We became engaged. She was going to wait ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... to vent itself in hastening the realization of his schemes of improvement, for he was well aware they would be worse than distasteful to the Macruadh. Their first requirement was the removal of every peasant within his power capable of violating the sanctity of the deer forest into which he and his next neighbour had agreed to turn the whole of their property. While the settlement of his daughter was pending, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... of humanity to Ireland was not more distasteful to the electors of Bristol than a small instalment of toleration to Roman Catholics in England. A measure was passed (1778) repealing certain iniquitous penalties created by an Act of William the Third. It is needless to say ...
— Burke • John Morley
... September 10, 1775. From previous experience it was well understood that such agreements as these, far more drastic than any which had yet been tried, would prove ineffective if they remained purely voluntary associations; and what made the non-intercourse policy of the First Congress distasteful to conservative men were the measures taken to enforce it. To this end it was provided that there should be appointed in "every county, city, and town" a committee of inspection "whose business it shall be to observe the conduct ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... aware that the conclusions arrived at in the work before us—namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form—would be highly distasteful to many. The very persons, however, who regard the conclusions with distaste admit without hesitation that they are descended from barbarians. Darwin recalls the astonishment which he himself felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... adventure was very distasteful. He recollected the smell of the place, and the memory brought with it a sense of nausea. He thought of Lala Huang, and his ideas became grotesque and chaotic. Yet the solution of the mystery lay at last within his grasp, and ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... motions of the Past, I thank benignant nature most for this,— 570 A force of sympathy, or call it lack Of character firm-planted, loosing me From the pent chamber of habitual self To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought, Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that, And through imagination to possess, As they were mine, the lives of other men. This growth original of virgin soil, By fascination felt in opposites, Pleases and shocks, entices and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... regulations were irksome, and the native police, who were often employed to bring in the labourers, seem to have abused their powers. To the genuine Matabili, who lived only for war and plunder, and had been accustomed to despise the other tribes, work, and especially mine work, was not only distasteful, but degrading. They had never been really subdued. In 1893 they hid away most of the firearms they possessed, hoping to use them again. Now, when their discontent had increased, two events hastened an outbreak. One was ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... sight of the fourth Flavia's face fell. Luke Asgill of Batterstown was the nearest Justice, and of necessity he was a Protestant. But it was not this fact, nor the certainty that Augustin was pouring his wrongs into his ears, that affected Flavia. Asgill was distasteful to her, because her brother affected him. For why should her brother have relations with a Protestant? Why should he, a man of the oldest blood, stoop to intimacy with the son of a "middleman," the son of one of those ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... use beginning to dispute with such indulged, unreasoning creatures: so I held my peace. I was accustomed, now, to keeping silence when things distasteful to my ear were uttered; and now, too, I was used to wearing a placid smiling countenance when my heart was bitter within me. Only those who have felt the like can imagine my feelings, as I sat with an assumption of smiling indifference, listening to the accounts of those meetings ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... mention one of his lifelong traits, which revealed itself at times. Watt was no man of affairs. Business was distasteful to him. As he once wrote his partner, Boulton, he "would rather face a loaded cannon than settle a disputed account or make a bargain." Monetary matters were his special aversion. For any other form of annoyance, danger ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... 26-27, 1849) was followed by the dissolution of the Kremsier assembly, and a proclamation in which the emperor announced his intention of granting a constitution to the whole monarchy "one and indivisible." On the 4th of March the constitution was published; but it proved all but as distasteful to Czechs and Croats as to the Magyars, and the speedy successes of the Hungarian arms made it, for the while, a dead letter. It needed the intervention of the emperor Nicholas, in the loftiest spirit of the Holy Alliance, before even an experimental unity of the Habsburg ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... denouncing England and all its works. Hatred of the "Island Kingdom" was apparently the consuming passion of his existence. On the whole, Von Tirpitz thus made no attempt to conceal his feeling that the purpose of the House mission was extremely distasteful to him. The other members of the Government, while not so tactlessly hostile, were not particularly encouraging. The usual objections to disarmament were urged—the fear of other Powers, the walled-in state of Germany, the vigilant ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... This may be exaggeration, but it is certain that the ample concessions proposed by the minister—concessions far outstripping those which had been brought forward by Mr. Burke and Lord Chatham, and which were opposed by government—were highly distasteful to the country gentlemen, and to the whole Tory party. Expressions of loud disapprobation were heard on their side of the house, and some bitterly complained that deception had been practised against them relative to American taxation. On the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... to his feet, his face suffusing. "You sit there," he exclaimed, "and tell me that a member of my company finds the association so distasteful that she ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... mindful though we be of these ancient words of wisdom, how rarely do we apply them to our everyday reading! If we be in the mood for reading we pick up any book at random; if it please us at the moment, we continue to read it. If it be distasteful to us, we put it aside immediately. Possibly we recollect, next time that our eyes light upon a volume so discarded, that it was once displeasing, and we never take it up again. So, it may be urged, our mind exercises the power of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... as was supposed, been sown on stony ground, though it took long in growing up. Adversity caused Pomare to think. He had been told that Jehovah is a God of purity and holiness, and he began to reflect that the life he and his people led must be very distasteful to such a God, and might be the cause of the sufferings he was enduring. The Holy Spirit seemed to apply the truth, so that he at length comprehended the nature of sin, and especially felt his own great sinfulness. He, therefore, wrote letter after letter, entreating ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... for any particular nominee. His son-in-law, Mr. William G. McAdoo, was highly thought of in connection with the nomination, and therefore the President felt that he must be more than ordinarily strict in insisting that we keep hands off, for anything that savoured of nepotism was distasteful to him and, therefore, he "leaned backward" in his efforts to maintain a neutral position in the Presidential contest and to take no part directly or indirectly that might seem to give aid and comfort to the friends of his son-in-law. While Mr. McAdoo's political ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... faint was over; the toddy had sent the blood tingling through the young girl's veins. The role of the invalid was an unaccustomed one for her to play, and the thought of supping in bed was peculiarly distasteful to her self-helping Northern training. It was not long before she began to ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... being distasteful to the Bretons, they continually rebelled against it; though, as far as can be known, the English were no hard task-masters, forcing them, as the Egyptians did the Israelites, to ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... which went on wherever the praetorian system was applied to the cases of foreign litigants. Probably no colour of ethical meaning belonged at first to the expression; nor is there any reason to believe that the process which it indicated was otherwise than extremely distasteful ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... seer made him say to her with the naive austerity of a convert awed by the touch of a new creed, "You haven't the gift." He turned his back on her, leaving her completely mystified. And she went upstairs slowly, struggling with a distasteful suspicion of having been confronted by something more subtle than herself—more profound than the misunderstood and tragic ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the marriage itself,—the proposed marriage with the breeches-maker's daughter,—the more Sir Thomas thought of it the more distasteful did it become to him. He knew that Ralph was unaware of all the evil that would follow such a marriage;—relatives whose every thought and action and word would be distasteful to him; children whose mother would not be a lady, and whose blood would be polluted ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... most celebrated engineers offered no opinion on the subject. They did not believe in the locomotive, and would scarcely take the trouble to examine it. The ridicule with which George Stephenson had been assailed by the barristers before the Parliamentary Committee had not been altogether distasteful to them. Perhaps they did not relish the idea of a man who had picked up his experience in Newcastle coal-pits appearing in the capacity of a leading engineer before Parliament, and attempting to establish a new system of internal communication in the country. The directors could not disregard ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... require them to serve as slaves. The best course to pursue, it seems to me, is to call for such as are willing to come with the consent of their owners. Impressment or draft would not be likely to bring out the best class, and the use of coercion would make the measure distasteful to them and to their owners. I have no doubt if Congress would authorize their reception into service, and empower the President to call upon individuals or States for such as they are willing to contribute with the condition of emancipation to all enrolled, a sufficient number would be ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... thought it mean, and my whole life has grown distasteful since I met you," he said, turning suddenly and ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... real answer to prayer is the increase of the joyful emotions, the decrease of the painful ones."[126-1] It would seem a simpler plan to make this directly the purport of our petitions; but to the modern mind this naked simplicity would be distasteful. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... enabled her to struggle along in Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath Freddy's dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... children, some hot-headed, imaginative youth, some independent nature rebellious in advance, in short, a refractory spirit, unwilling or incapable of being disciplined; a regular life, mediocrity, even the certainty of getting ahead, were distasteful to him; he would abandon the hereditary homestead or purchased office to the docile elder brother, son-in-law or nephew, by which the domain or the post remained in the family; as for himself, tempted by illimitable prospects, he would leave France and go abroad; Voltaire says[3317] that ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... ask Harriet if she were happy, if she had forgotten; but she dreaded reviving a distasteful subject. She would be glad never to hear it ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... I fancied I understood that he was afraid of appearing comical in my eyes, with his face smothered in lather; but he was wrong. I felt myself all in a quiver at being beside a man—the word man is rather distasteful to me, but I can not find another, for husband would not express my thoughts—at being beside a man in the making of his toilette. I should have liked him to go on without troubling himself; I should have liked to see how he managed ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... hope was still reserved for him, and that was Charlie's visit. But to Tom that prospect was becoming day by day mere distasteful. As the days wore on, and Tom sunk deeper and deeper into the snare prepared for him, the thought of a week in the society of one so upright and pure as Charlie became positively odious. The effort ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... genial humor, at once commanded the respect and secured the attachment of his men; who was watchful against danger and cool in the midst of it; who knew his duty as a soldier and loyally discharged it, however distasteful it might sometimes be to ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... grapes are on equal footing as to adaptability, Niagara and Concord rank the same. In hardiness of root and vine, Niagara falls short of Concord; it cannot be relied on without winter protection where the thermometer falls below zero. Niagara has much of the foxiness of the wild Labrusca, distasteful to many palates. Both bunches and berries of Niagara are larger than those of Concord and are better formed, making a handsomer fruit if the colors are liked equally well. The fruit shells as badly as that of Concord and does not keep longer. Both vine and fruit of Niagara are ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... the whole staff. At times Penton was absurdly pompous and uncommunicative before the boys; at other times he entered into a mysterious intimacy with them, a relationship distasteful to them. They preferred his professional tactics ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... dangerous person that Mr. E. accepted this task, proffered to him by private friends, on the assurance that the audience would be composed of his usual circle of private friends, and that he should be protected from any report; that a report is so distasteful to him that it would seriously embarrass and perhaps cripple or silence much that he proposes to communicate; and if the individual has bought tickets, these shall gladly be refunded, and with thanks and great honor of ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... demand for information regarding the origin of this outbreak, Rawlinson wrote him some home truths which were very distasteful. Rawlinson warned his chief earnestly of the danger which threatened the false position of the British in Afghanistan. He pointed out how cruel must be the revenue exactions which enabled Prince Timour's courtiers to absorb great sums. He expressed his suspicion that Shah Soojah ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... completely peptonized milk distasteful? Not so in the case of young infants; older infants will take a few feedings without objection, but it cannot be used for children much ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... this arrangement so distasteful as to Quipsome Hal, who felt himself in some sort the occasion of the intrusion, and yet was quite unable to prevent it, while everything he said was treated as a joke by his unwelcome father-in-law. It was a coarse time, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... money from the French Consul-General, and to promise restitution of the captured vessel and cargo. As soon as he was at liberty, the Commodore, accompanied by Eaton, went to the palace to protest against this breach of national hospitality and insult to the flag. Eaton's remarks were so distasteful to the Bey that he ordered him again to quit his court,—this time peremptorily,—adding, that the United States must send him a Consul "with a disposition more congenial ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... things are expected from a mountain constructionist and elicit no comment from headquarters, but the matter at the Spider was one that could hardly pass unnoticed. For a year Glover had been begging for a stenographer. Writing, to him, was as distasteful as soda-water, and one morning soon after his return from the valley flood a letter came with the news that a competent stenographer had been assigned to him and would report at once for duty ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... American teachers by his judicious selections from Rousseau's Emile. For the three-volume novel of a hundred years ago, with its long disquisitions and digressions, so dear to the heart of our patient ancestors, is now distasteful to all but lovers of the curious ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... than could have been expected, with such a distasteful enterprise before them, they resumed their way. It was disagreeable under foot and they presented an odd appearance, each one with a light. Mrs. Adams, old campaigner that she was, led the way for the ladies, elastic ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the 'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!" And—of Fouque's romances—"But our age turns away from all fairy pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, this continual praise of the nobility, this ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... combat are distasteful to him the pure Cerebral does not go out and fight for reform as often as the Muscular nor die for causes as often ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... caused injury to accrue to cattle; that he has used bad language. Here is a conflict of class against class—feeling against feeling. The point in dispute has, of course, to be decided by evidence, but whichever way evidence leads the magistrates to pronounce their verdict, it is distasteful. If the labourer is victorious, he and his friends 'crow' over the farmers; and the farmer himself grumbles that the landlords are afraid of the men, and will never pronounce against them. If the reverse, the labourers cry out upon ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... relished these stories almost as much as the boys and girls for whom they were written. They were really refreshing, even to us. There is much in them which is calculated to inspire a generous, healthy ambition, and to make distasteful all reading tending ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... marriage was celebrated. No one could tell, I am sure, so much of the magnificence and the food, of the pleasure and entertainment, at this wedding without falling short of the truth. Inasmuch as it would be distasteful to some, I do not care to waste further words upon the matter, but am anxious ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... failed to reflect with what a heavy heart the duke might now be entering upon his third sterile nuptials. Alfonso was childless, brotherless, with no legitimate heir to defend his duchy from the Church in case of his decease. The irritable poet forgot how distasteful at such a moment of forced gayety and hollow parade his reappearance, with the old complaining murmurs, the old suspicions, the old restless eyes, might be to the master who had certainly borne much and long with him. He only felt himself neglected, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... it would be no distasteful task to play upon his susceptibilities. He was not only personally attractive ("magnetic" was the catch-word of the period), but if half that Lady Diantha had hinted concerning him were true, to make a conquest ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... course of which two facts were clearly established, the first of which was that, by the law of succession, Myrra was now the Queen of Ulua; and the second, that the idea of being governed by a woman was utterly distasteful to the members of the Council of Nobles. Finally, it was decided that, since by immemorial custom, the Uluan wife was the subject of her husband, the only thing to be done was to request the queen to marry, when her husband would become virtually king. This ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... entered into the contest because he could not help it. Had he reached the village at the same time with his friends, he would have sternly forbidden any reference to his brilliant physical powers, and thus prevented the tournament that was so distasteful to him; but, as I have shown, the mischief was done before he came upon the scene. His reputation had been proclaimed, and naught remained but to prove that only the simple truth had been told ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... plan," said Mrs. Mayfield. "We are going to be married among the vines, and if such a temple is distasteful to you, sir—" ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... station in some not too prominent place, Bleak would mount the wheelbarrow and play Coming Through the Rye on a jew's-harp. This, his sole musical accomplishment, was exceedingly distasteful to him: all his training had been in the anonymity of a newspaper office, and he ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... restored to his parents—but with his adventures cut short. He was fond of his home, but it was always there, and he was keen for variety: his life had been very uneventful. On the other hand, if that advancing army conquered the Indians, might not his and Adan's captivity be far more distasteful than it was at present? He sprang up and called Anastacio. In a second that warrior was on his feet and had leaped over his ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... accompaniments. Compelled to recognize this change of sentiment and taste, the best troupes now frequently give, instead of the "act" just mentioned, some other one, which, while comical enough, is yet free from features distasteful to ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... say, gave inexpressible pleasure to Ruby, and was not altogether distasteful to Minnie, although she felt anxious about Mrs Brand, who would naturally be much alarmed at the prolonged absence of herself and the captain. However, "there was no help for it"; and it was wonderful the resignation which she displayed ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... and Russia, instead of becoming enemies, "will consolidate and perpetuate their friendly relations by the same just and pacific policy which has regulated their intercourse in times past." This article was very distasteful to the Democratic readers of the Union, and the editor denounced it. Mr. Pryor came back at him in the Intelligencer, declaring that he was not the eulogist of the Russian Empire, but setting forth at great ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... silence. The idea of remaining a mere spectator all day was distasteful to his active mind and body. He had almost made up his mind to ask one of the natives to lend him a kayak and change places, when a puff of wind sent a few cats-paws over ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... and did not distress his darling by admitting that it was still distasteful, then rose, slung his basket of frames over his shoulder, took Bo'sn's leading-string, and passed out to his afternoon's peddling and singing. But, though he had kissed her good-bye, Glory dashed after him, begging still another and another caress, and feeling the greatest reluctance to letting ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... school in his native village, and they were engaged to be married; but after coming to the city and forming new associations, visions of wealth dazzled his brain, and unsettled his mind, till the idea of love in a cottage grew distasteful to him. He had seen men with no more ability than himself who had come to the city almost pennyless, and who had grown rich in a few years, and he made up his mind that if possible he would do two things, ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... while it chilled him, and helped to make it nearly impossible for him to keep away from the theatre. In the beginning his attendance had not interfered with his social duties or pleasures; but now he came to find it distasteful after dinner to do anything but read, or walk the streets aimlessly, until it was time to go to the play. When that was over, he was in no mood to go anywhere but to his rooms. So he dropped away by insensible degrees from his habitual haunts, was missed, and began ...
— Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... then you wouldn't have her at all," he retorted. "Get it through your head that this whole thing is distasteful to Miss Burton. It's bad enough as it is, without asking her ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... asked to speak at the Forum! It was the most distasteful bit of information that had come Mrs. Salisbury's way in a long, long time! She felt in her heart a stinging resentment against Mrs. Sargent, with her mad notions of equality, and against Justine, ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... battles seems to be somewhat as follows: Of his own volition he has taken on a certain job and his dogged pride or obstinacy will not allow him to be beaten by it, however little enthusiasm it may arouse in him and however distasteful it may be to him at first. He offers no "ca' canny" service, but plods on and does his best in his own way. The lack of the enthusiastic temperament does not seriously retard the progress of his military education, and without much ado he becomes ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... these. The analogy between the characters and circumstances of the two men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's chief material dependence was the Huguenot party, whose doctrines sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King only in name over the greater part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet gradually became clear to the more far-seeing ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... system of monarchy, introduced by Diocletian, was distasteful to the philosophic mind of Julian; he refused the title of lord and master, and attempted to restore in all its pristine simplicity the ancient government of the republic. In a campaign against the Persians he received a mortal wound, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... succeeding the birth, the mother must follow a very strict set of rules. Each day she is bathed with water in which certain herbs and leaves, distasteful to evil spirits, are boiled. [64] Beginning with the second day and until the tenth she must add one bath each day, at least one of which is in cold water. From the tenth to the twenty-fourth day she takes one hot ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... thing in a regular life that habit reconciles us to what was at first very distasteful. As the months went on Elizabeth's business difficulties lessened. The tenants got accustomed to her, and realized that she was neither going to impose upon them, nor yet suffer herself to be imposed upon. The women found her sympathizing and helpful in ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... Professor Whitney considers permissible, Ineed hardly say more; but having been cited by him before a tribunal which hardly knows me, to substantiate what I had asserted in my "Answer to Mr. Darwin," it may be better to go manfully through a most distasteful task, to answer seriatim point after point, and thus to leave on record one of the most extraordinary cases of what I can only ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... to the sofa in the parlor, and Hannah's expression was distasteful; but she slowly followed Calvin into ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... years and more since the friends had met; and each secretly wondered how they had ever come to be friends. Sylvia had a country, raw, spiritless look to Mrs. Brunton's eye; Molly was loud and talkative, and altogether distasteful to Sylvia, trained in daily companionship with Hester to appreciate soft slow speech, ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... knew the members of that class, as he said, "experimentally." He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life. Thus he judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it eminently distasteful and defective. From 1832 to 1867 the Middle Class had governed England, manipulating the Aristocracy through the medium of the House of Commons; and the Aristocracy, though still occupying the place of visible dignity, had its eye nervously fixed on the movement, actual and impending, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... distracting sounds and made me feel as if my head were in a maelstrom. The bugler was so amiable a person that he always made it a point of standing close to my tent when launching forth to the world his shrieking calls. Happily I became acclimatised to my distasteful surroundings, or I fear I should have soon graduated as a patient for ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... was the supreme military authority in the country, and its resolutions were the law, all its infractions being punishable by fines. The minority of a Krijgsraad was obliged to assist in executing the plans of the majority, however impracticable or distasteful they might have been to those whose opinions did not prevail. There were innumerable instances where generals and commandants attended a Krijgsraad and afterward acted quite contrary to the resolution adopted by the council. In any other army such action would have been called disobedience ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... influence over him to nothing. Do you think I am exaggerating? Hear how it has ended. My husband absolutely refuses to leave this place. He cares no longer even to try for the prize. The idea of medical practice has become distasteful to him, and he has decided on devoting his life to discovery ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... to "hang around Dorothy," but she was too busy to notice the attention. Tavia, however, did not miss observing the young man's attempts to attract Dorothy, and she also noted that the same matter seemed distasteful to Ned. ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... registered the edict of Charles's majority, notwithstanding some unpalatable provisions. Not so the Parliament of Paris. The counsellors of the capital were even more indignant at the slight put upon their claim to precedence, than at the proposed disarming of the Roman Catholics—a measure particularly distasteful to the riotous population of Paris.[294] The details of their opposition need not, however, find a record here. In the end the firmness of the king, or of his advisers, triumphed. At Mantes[295] Charles received ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... acknowledge that this provision is controversial. It is as distasteful to me as I suspect it is to you. In its defence, let me treat the Greek letter and math formula cases separately. Using LaTeX encoding for Greek letters is purely a stopgap until Unicode comes into common use on enough computers so that we ...
— People of Africa • Edith A. How
... afterward, at discretion; and an initial account of the Barons' War, among other superfluities, I amputate as more remarkable for veracity than interest. The result, we will agree at outset, is that to the Norman cleric appertains whatever these tales may have of merit, whereas what you find distasteful in them you must impute to my delinquencies in skill rather than ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... he and the playmate of his childhood were not really suited to each other. It was the case. The conventionalities of English society in his own rank were part of D'Arcy's very life, but to Amabel they had been made so distasteful in the hands of Lady Craikshaw that her energetic, straight-forward spirit was in continual revolt; and it was not the least of Jan's merits in her eyes that his life had been what it was, that he was so different from the rest of the people amongst whom she ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... vision of the risen Christ will also lead to patient persistence in duty. If we have Him before us, the distasteful duty which He sets us will not be distasteful, and the small tasks, in which great faithfulness may be manifested, will cease to be small. If we have Him before us we have in that risen Christ the great and lasting Example of how patient ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... in church accommodation was soon felt, for the old church had before been but just sufficient for the inhabitants. Various proposals were made—to fill up the arches with galleries, and to choke the centre aisle with narrow pews; but all were equally distasteful to Mr. Woodbourne, who, placing some benches in the aisle for the temporary accommodation of his new parishioners, made every effort to raise funds to build and endow an additional church. He succeeded, as we have heard; and it was the tall white spire of the now Church of St. Austin's, which greeted ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him, trying to recollect where he was and what had brought him here. During the last two years, in which he had been forced to lead the roving life of an adventurer—common enough in those days, and by no means entirely distasteful to one of his temperament and training—he had slept in many strange places, and had known quarters far ruder than the unceiled, raftered ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... shoulders. He was amazed, bewildered, and afraid. He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to love her. When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her. Nay, this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honour. It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet—and yet—he had not ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... had great difficulty in conveying himself, his horse and his servant across the swollen stream. The old man's age and misery aroused the Count's compassion, so that he asked him why he continued thus to perform a task at once so arduous and so distasteful. "Sir," replied the boatman, "I would gladly be excused, but that my master compels me to undertake this work." "And who, pray, is this tyrant of a master of yours?" indignantly enquired the Count. "Sir, it is my ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... not marry against her father's wishes, but she could leave the home now so distasteful to her. She had saved only a small sum from her mother's fortune, amounting to about one hundred dollars per year. With this, she retired to the Convent of the Congregation, and shut herself up with her books, and received only her ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... a fine collation, pitied our poor father who would not partake of it, and pressed our mother to call him in; but she, more prudent than we, well knew how distasteful such gifts would be to him. In the mean time she had prepared some supper, and would readily have sent a portion up to his room; but he never tolerated such an irregularity, even in the most extreme cases: and, after ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the Princess's power," said Mrs. Bhaer, after he had watched Mrs. Jo sew on a button with an air of scorn for the whole system of fashionable education. "Jack is so unwilling to be classed with Stuffy and Ned, as distasteful to Bess, that he came to me a little while ago, and asked me to touch his warts with caustic. I have often proposed it, and he never would consent; but now he bore the smart manfully, and consoles his present discomfort by hopes of future favor, when he can ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... seven, before you had put off the white mantle of innocence and assumed the cloak of depravity. It has been my unhappy lot to be frequently in your company ever since, and, speaking from a long and distasteful experience of you and your ways, I am quite satisfied that, if you did meet with some slight contretemps, you made no whole-hearted effort to rejoin us in time to degrade your intellect by discussing the sort of topics which appeal to that ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... verandas, and plantations round Rockburg completely changed the character of the residence, which, on account of the heat and want of vegetation, had in former days been so distasteful to my wife. Flowering creepers overhung the balconies and pillars; while shrubs and trees, both native and European, grew luxuriantly in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the world, however, would she question her lover, to whom the subject of the trip was evidently distasteful. Still less would she ask the Countess behind ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... with contributions direct and indirect that famine was always imminent with them as well. Under whatever name the tax was known, license (octroi), bridge and ferry toll, road-work, salt-tax, or whatever it may have been, it was chiefly distasteful not because of its form but because it was oppressive. Some of it was paid to the proprietors, some to the state. The former was more hateful because the gainer was near and more tangible; the hatred of the country people for the feudal privileges and those ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... men, with but few exceptions, had undergone their baptism in German fire and had found the experience not distasteful. The division had esprit which made the members of every regiment and brigade in it vie with the members of any other regiment and brigade. If you had asked any enlisted man in the division, he would have told you that his company, battery, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... random. "Pen," he called across the room, "what about that drink?" The girl by him reached over and touched a bell. As she did so, Peter saw the curls that clustered on her neck and caught the perfume of her hair. It was penetrating and peculiar, but not distasteful, and it did all that it was meant to do. He bent, and kissed the back of her neck, still marvelling ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... however, kept pace with the increase in population. The number of freeholders qualified to vote for senator and governor, was, relatively, no larger; the power of the Council of Appointment had become odious; the veto of the Council of Revision distasteful; and the sittings of the Supreme Court infrequent. It was said that the members of the Council of Revision, secure from removal, had resisted the creation of additional judges, until the speedy administration of justice was a lost art. Gradually, the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... Baronet. 'I am honoured indeed. But the sketch is most imperfect. I shall now have much to add. I can say that the Prince, whom I had accused of idleness, is zealous in the department of police, taking upon himself those duties that are most distasteful. I shall be able to relate the burlesque incident of my arrest, and the singular interview with which you honour me at present. For the rest, I have already communicated with my Ambassador at Vienna; and unless you ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... left Camp Chase, where every one had been uniformly polite and respectful in demeanor, and I had enjoyed privileges which amounted almost to liberty, the gloom of the penitentiary and the surly, ban-dog manner of the keepers were doubly distasteful, and the feeling was as if I were being buried alive. I found that, during my absence, the prisoners had been removed from the hall, which they had all the time previously occupied, to another in which the negro convicts had formerly slept, and this latter was ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the Chevalier, picking up his hat and thrusting his sword into its scabbard; "I dare say this moment is distasteful to ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... could not taste the stinging lash as the crystals melted on her tongue.[N] An ocean rolled between. She always endeavored to protect the slave by legislation; but the Custom of Paris, when it was gentle, was doubly distasteful to the men who knew how impracticable it was. Louis XIII. would not admit that a single slave lived in his dominions, till the priests convinced him that it was possible through the slave-trade to baptize the Ethiopian again. Louis XIV. issued the famous Code Noir in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... sickliness or irritability. He was sensitive to beauty in all its forms, but was never made unhappy or annoyed by the shadows in the picture of life. He had a happy power of escaping from everything that was distasteful, uncomfortable, and unlovely, and dwelling in regions of sunshine and bloom. His temperament was not impassioned; and this, though it may have impaired somewhat the force of his genius, contributed much to his enjoyment of life. Considering that he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... woodcutter and his wife, and although she cried a good deal they were both forced to recognise that they had no right to interfere with the child's good fortune. Moreover, the gift of a purse full of gold (which the nobleman gave them) did not make the matter more distasteful. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... between two masses diminishes more rapidly than would result from the inverse square law. In this way it is possible for the mean density of matter to be constant everywhere, even to infinity, without infinitely large gravitational fields being produced. We thus free ourselves from the distasteful conception that the material universe ought to possess something of the nature of a centre. Of course we purchase our emancipation from the fundamental difficulties mentioned, at the cost of a modification and complication of Newton's ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... dwellings; teach them to keep flocks.... Endeavour to develop the social qualities which nature has implanted in them.... Make them begin to practise the duties of humanity.... Cause the pleasures of the passions to become distasteful to them by punishments, and you will see these barbarians, with every plan of your legislation, lose a ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... we didn't put it in that way," Mallard resumed, with a curious doggedness, as if her tone were distasteful to him. "My own part in the business is accidental. Please tell me: is it, or not, your own belief that a ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... imitative capacity of the magpie, he pays no higher tribute to the merits of the cat than that she is as capable of being amused as himself, and like himself, too, has her periods of gravity when recreative sports are distasteful. Her social qualities he does not allude to, though he, so eminently social himself, could scarcely have failed to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... our friendship greatly, Dr. Christobal," she said, speaking with a calm deliberateness that rang hollow in her own ears, "so greatly that I am compelled to utter this protest. Now, to end a distasteful controversy, let me tell you what I know to be true. When the ship was stranded, and we all thought our only chance of safety was to take to the boats, by a fluke, the accident of the moment, I was left alone in the captain's cabin. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... tracts would never have been contested, even though the requisite number of settlers had not been upon the lands to complete the grants at the specified period; and it is also probable there would have been, in proper time, the required number. But this transfer of dominion was exceedingly distasteful ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... a teacher in his father's school. He chose the lesser evil and qualified at once to become his father's assistant, which would also assure him a certain amount of leisure. We can imagine him installed as teacher of the infant class, and realize how distasteful was the daily round of school work, and how he longed to have it over, that he might put on paper all the lovely themes that had come to him through the school day. Other bright spots were the happy hours ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... invariable attitude towards a distasteful duty; and he decided not to let slip a second opportunity. Weak and unaided, he made what shift he could to deal with the intricacies of breakfast, choking back his irritability when he found himself grasping empty air in place of the teapot ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... evidently undecided whether chants or marches were Miss Keith's passion, and, perhaps, which propensity would render the young lady the most distasteful to herself. Ermine thought it merciful to divert the attack by mentioning Mr. Clare's love of music, and hoping his curate could gratify it. "No," Mr. Keith said, "it was very unlucky that Mr. Lifford did not know one note from another; so that his vicar could ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bid. Then I turned toward the distasteful work that lay before me. This was no time for fine compunctions, nor for a chivalry that these cruel demons would ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... termination. U75 is no longer in a state of efficiency, either for offence or flight. It therefore remains for us to save our lives by surrendering to the first English ship of war that we fall in with. It is a humiliating and distasteful step to take, but there is ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... Babel in the rising sun. And then it was such an emotion to find the serene calm of an European place of worship in the midst of the distasteful turmoil of the Chinese country. Under the high white arch, where I stood alone with my sailors, the "Dies Iroe," chanted by a missionary priest, sounded like a soft magical incantation. Through the open doors we could see sights that resembled enchanted gardens, exquisite ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... uncompromising dislike of convention. He had no success at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Unlike Rodin, he entered those precincts and worked long within them, but never sympathetically or felicitously. The rigor of academic precept was from the first excessively distasteful to his essentially and eminently romantic nature. He chafed incessantly. The training doubtless stood him in good stead when he found himself driven by hard necessity into commercial sculpture, into that class of work which is on a very high plane for its kind in Paris, but for ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster; but the real bar was the fact that he had once adversely ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... military service compelling citizens by law to devote no matter how small a portion of their own time to military training, such proposals would at once be looked upon as simply an insidious way of creating conscription, a compulsory system of service—a form of service absolutely distasteful and foreign to us British, and even more so to British colonists. It was therefore necessary for me to take the greatest care very gradually to prepare and school the public mind so that the term "National Service," ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... swallowing something distasteful. "He was the last straw! But tell me, Palla, what are you doing these jolly ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... notion that their prestige value is in any degree conditioned by the material circumstances and the popular imagination of the underlying nation is distasteful to many of these vicars of the national honour. They will incline rather to the persuasion that this prestige value is a distinctive attribute, of a unique order, intrinsic to their own persons. But, plainly, any such detached line of magnates, notables, kings and mandarins, resting their ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... facts—the distasteful behaviour of our earliest visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon the cushions—which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan manners. The great majority of Polynesians are excellently mannered; but the Marquesan ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Uncle Noah," the Colonel laid a gentle hand on the negro's shoulder, "that she doesn't know of our—er—financial crisis"—his halting utterance showed how distasteful the words were to him—"save, of course, that we must live with economy, as we have for years. Of the catastrophe of last fall she is ignorant, and a Fairfax Christmas without a turkey would—she must ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... all this sounded, and deep (Charlotte felt it to her soul) as was the moral significance which lay below it, expressions of this kind, on Ottilie's account, were most distasteful to her. She knew very well that nothing was more dangerous than the licentious conversation which treats culpable or semi-culpable actions as if they were common, ordinary, and even laudable, and of such undesirable kind assuredly were all which touched on the sacredness of marriage. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... curses which had been heaped upon us for disobedience were about to bear fruit. Now, strange, rough-looking men came to see my husband—persons whom I had not seen before. They seemed familiar with him; it was evident, however, that their presence was distasteful to him; he tried to keep them at a distance, he shrank from them. I said I did not like these acquaintances; he replied that they were commercial friends, and must be treated with respect. They had long and mysterious conversations together. They would go to the other ...
— Nick Baba's Last Drink and Other Sketches • George P. Goff
... however, still continued, and they planned a division of the empire, a measure which was then distasteful to all the Romans, and which was only prevented from taking place by the tears and entreaties of their mother, Julia Domna. Geta, the younger son, who was of a gentle disposition, soon after, in A.D. 212, February 27th, was murdered by the cruel and relentless Caracalla. Twenty thousand of his ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... not a little ingratiate him with the people; who were much pleased to see him after his triumph take his place again among the Roman knights. On the other side, it was no less distasteful to Sylla to see how fast he came on, and to what a height of glory and power he was advancing; yet being ashamed to hinder him, he kept quiet. But when, against his direct wishes, Pompey got Lepidus made consul, having openly joined in the canvass and, by the good-will the people felt ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... on the 6th June. 'Think of the difference it makes, the enormous difference!' she gasped, jumping up again and standing in the middle of the room. She was so full of this idea that she did not spare a thought to the dead man or to anything which might strike us as peculiar or distasteful in her own attitude and the way in which she received the news. 'We shall be married directly,' she continued with that strange absence of shame or pretence which always marked her, 'and then it'll be all right, and nobody'll be able to say a ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... her mind she promptly retired, and did not show her face in the eagles' nest again for some time. But when she did return, the eaglet had eaten the fish, and when she dropped another in front of him he swallowed it at once, although it was plain that he found it very distasteful. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... no! your questions are so easily answered. I never encouraged the doctor to speak of my brother and his wife. The subject was too distasteful to me—and I don't doubt that Doctor Benjulia felt ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... be-all and end-all of Miss Martin's presence. It would be cruel, and unfair, if a girl of her age were forced into a distasteful prominence in connection with a crime with which she is no more related than with ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... into a different but equally distasteful channel,—the great distinction and antiquity of her own family. It really seemed as though she had a dread of Mr. Heathcote's leaving the country with some wrong impression on this important subject and was determined that he should be put in possession of all the information she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... detest red stockings; and I really cannot see why I should be compelled to wear any thing that is so distasteful ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... safety of action that he found in Switzerland, were the necessary qualifications. The need for a Bible was at first met by the version of Lefevre, printed in 1532. But the Catholic spirit of this work, based on the Vulgate, was distasteful to the evangelicals. Farel asked Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new version, which was completed by February 1535. Calvin wrote the preface for it. It was dedicated to "the poor little church of God." In doctrine it was thoroughly evangelical, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... accompanying the dark color, which rendered what was poisonous to the white colored animals quite innocuous to the black. Dr. Ogle, however, observes that there is no proof that the black pigs eat the root, and he believes the more probable explanation to be that it is distasteful to them, while the white pigs, being deficient in smell and taste, eat it, and are killed. Analogous facts occur in several distinct families. White sheep are killed in the Tarentino by eating hypericum criscum, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... the only chance of any amelioration from this hard labour was by a course of good conduct; and they saw before them their own countrymen, who had once been similarly circumstanced, occupying better positions and employed on less distasteful work. They also heard from their fellows that several had attained to a ticket of leave, and were earning for themselves an honest livelihood in the place of their banishment. This, then, was their encouragement; but not a few at first, however, though carefully treated in hospital, ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... first a growing uneasiness hardened into distasteful certainty upon Stella. It had become her firm resolve to get what money was due her when Charlie marketed his logs and try another field of labor. That camp on Roaring Lake was becoming a nightmare to her. She had no inherent dislike for work. She was too vibrantly alive to be lazy. But she had had ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... heart, and wantonly adds to the store, already too great, of painful sensations."[218] In general Scott minimizes the effect of any moral that may be expressed in the novel, but occasionally he seems inconsistent, when he is talking of sentiments that are peculiarly distasteful to him.[219] But his thesis is that "the direct and obvious moral to be deduced from a fictitious narrative is of much less consequence to the public than the mode in which the story is treated in the course of its details."[220] In the Life of Fielding ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... appeared there at his worst—caustic, silent, and unsympathetic. It seemed to him that the simple country life was unbearably insipid; he found there neither wit nor affairs: to see day after day the same faces, to listen to the same talk either on country subjects that were distasteful to him, or, out of compliment to himself, political subjects that were unfamiliar to the conversationalists, was a very hard burden, and he counted such things as the price he must pay for his occasional duty visits to his parents. He could not ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... women; but these men had other wives; and, according to a saying in the country, "the tongues of women can not be governed," they made her miserable by their remarks. One man whom she chose was even called her wife, and her son the child of Mamochisane's wife; but the arrangement was so distasteful to Mamochisane herself that, as soon as Sebituane died, she said she never would consent to govern the Makololo so long as she had a brother living. Sekeletu, being afraid of another member of the family, Mpepe, who had pretensions to the chieftainship, urged ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... conceded that the circumstances from which it all proceeded were comparatively trivial in the extreme. Don Pacifico was a Maltese Jew and a British subject, dwelling at Athens. He had made himself distasteful to the people of Athens, and consequently his house was destroyed and robbed by a mob, April 4, 1847. He appealed to the government at Athens for redress, demanding over $150,000 indemnity for the loss of his property, among which "a peculiarly sumptuous bedstead figured ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... years old when he went first to Paris and he remained there, with occasional visits to Gruchy and Cherbourg, for the next thirteen years. Paris was, from the first, more than distasteful to him. He was thoroughly unhappy there. Outside the Louvre and the studios of a few artist-friends, he found nothing that appealed to what was deepest in him. His first experiences were unusually bitter. The struggle with poverty was hard to bear, but perhaps a more serious drawback ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... it cannot be wrought into life. This lack of balance between knowledge and achievement is the main element in a form of ineffectiveness which with various others has been uncritically called Degeneration. As the common pleasures which arise from active life become impossible or distasteful, the desire for more intense and novel joys comes in, and with the goading of the thirst for these ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... mind. He saw that there was something in real religion into which he had not yet penetrated. He sought the society of these humble instructors, and learned from them much that he had not known before. He began to read the Bible with new avidity; and that portion which had formerly been most distasteful, the Epistles of Paul, now became the subject of his special study. A sect of Antinomians, who boasted that they could do whatsoever they pleased without sinning, now fell in his way. Professors of religion were rapidly embracing their opinions, and ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... illegal candidature for the consulship; but, having fortified himself by such alliances, he proceeded to carry out the main design of Drusus, namely, the complete enfranchisement of the Italians. [Sidenote: Pro-Italian measure of Sulpicius.] This, perhaps, would be especially distasteful to the Julii, as superseding the Lex Julia and the Lex Plautia Papiria, which to them, no doubt, seemed ample and more than ample concessions. Sulpicius, on the other hand, and the minority of the Senate which sided with him, saw that under the cover ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... us," he once said. "You may be subpoenaed. If you know nothing, you can tell nothing. If you know about the business, you might tell something which would ruin us." The mere presence of a stranger has always been distasteful to him. The custom of espionage has made him suspect that others are as watchful as himself. He has been described erroneously as a master of complicated villainy. He is, for evil or for good, the most single-minded man alive. He looks for a profit in all things. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... be her comrades at toil, with a friendly interest and curiosity. Some of her new mates regarded her with equal curiosity, though few with so kindly an interest as her own. The unconscious ease of Amy's bearing they esteemed "boldness," or even "cheek," and her air of superior breeding was distasteful to them. ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... motive was so distasteful that she made no reply, and left him to his conjectures, in which he did not appear unhappy. "How do you find ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... prey on the spirits; bring one's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; add a nail to one's coffin. Adj. causing pain, hurting &c v.; hurtful &c (bad) 649; painful; dolorific^, dolorous; unpleasant; unpleasing, displeasing; disagreeable, unpalatable, bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... life distasteful? My life did and does smack sweet. Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? Mine I saved, and hold complete. Do your joys with age diminish? When mine fail me I'll complain. Must in death your daylight ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... perhaps months, until she gets her next engagement, more unpaid rehearsals, and perhaps another short run. There is always wearing anxiety, and the unpleasing, thankless, humiliating searching for work, under the most distasteful conditions possible. ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... knew where the interview with Dino was taking place. Mrs. Luttrell had lately been growing somewhat infirm: a slight stroke of paralysis, dangerous only in that it was probably the precursor of other attacks, had rendered locomotion particularly distasteful to her. She did not like to feel that she was dependent upon others for aid, and, therefore, sat usually in a wheeled chair in her dressing-room, and it was the most easily accessible room from her sleeping apartment. She was in her dressing-room now, and ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... by it became common town's-talk, and many a neighbor visited her with the purpose of gossiping about poor Mrs, Chantrey. But they found her averse to dwell upon the subject, as if gossip had suddenly grown distasteful to her. Many an hour when she was waiting for her drunken brother to come in from the Upton Arms, she pondered over what she could do to save the wife of her beloved Mr. Chantrey. She knew better than Mr. Warden, who had never ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... that these years of absence should have endeared to John Caldigate a place which, while it was his home, had always been distasteful to him, I cannot perhaps explain to those readers who have never strayed far from their original nests;—and to those who have been wanderers I certainly need not explain it. As soon as he felt that he could base the expression of his desires as to Folking on the foundation of substantial remittances, ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most have discreetly refrained from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," the combination in him of very strong physical passions with the deepest sense of the moral and religious duty of abstinence. It is perhaps impossible to imagine anything more distasteful to a man so buffeted, than the extreme indulgence with which Fielding regards, and the easy freedom, not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb to similar temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some subtle influence of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so capricious ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... its power."). For example, in Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), the Supreme Court reversed defendant's conviction for wearing, in a municipal courthouse, a jacket bearing the inscription "Fuck the Draft." The Court noted that "much has been made of the claim that Cohen's distasteful mode of expression was thrust upon unwilling or unsuspecting viewers, and that the State might therefore legitimately act as it did in order to protect the sensitive from otherwise unavoidable exposure to appellant's crude form of protest." Id. at 21. This justification ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... yielding it somewhat more than its just share of power in Congress. Indeed, it was mainly on the ground of the undue advantage which the South would gain, politically, that the admission of Missouri was distasteful to ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... be a practicing physician," Beason declared, "just for that reason. That sort of business would be very distasteful ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... 'learned Greek, Latin, and French (Spanish was his mother-tongue), and had also got well on with Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic'; but in 1833, the East India Company having lost their Charter, his father removed him from the school and took him into his business. Office-work proving distasteful to him, he travelled for some years on the Continent and in America, rejoining his father's firm as partner in 1849. From his early years Mr. Henry Huth had been a collector of books, and on his return home he set energetically ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
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