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More "Repellent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... countenance became convulsed with the most unparalleled, and for that reason indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but something, I cannot explain, has always ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... his ways, which for strangeness were quite beyond imagination, admiration for his knowledge, which was amazing for its accuracy and comprehensiveness, respect for his honesty, which feared no conclusion, however repellent to flesh and blood, but chiefly of love for the unaffected and shining goodness of a man in whose virgin soul neither self nor this world had any part. For years the youngsters of the Presbytery knew not how to address the minister of Kilbogie, since any ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... southwest. A visit of inspection which I made to Salisbury gave me the opportunity of examining the site of the recent prison camp there. The treatment of our prisoners by the Confederate authorities is a repellent subject, and I would gladly pass it by and say nothing discordant with the tone of high honor and respectful good-will which marked the conduct of the leading officers of the Confederate forces in the field. We ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... in the least revealed herself to him in the hall as she indicated the depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before he entered ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... moderate compromise is desirable between the harshness which results from separating what belongs together, and the jingling concatenations—one may almost call them— which are so common; one extreme is a definite vice, and the other repellent. ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... surprised if we find men of genius generally unsociable and repellent. It is not their want of sociability that is to blame. Their path through the world is like that of a man who goes for a walk on a bright summer morning. He gazes with delight on the beauty and freshness of nature, but he ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... that made his own look coarse and stubby. The face and each feature, the high-bridged, haughty nose, the eyes cold and indolent under their long lids, the thin, close line of the mouth—separately and in combination—struck him as objectionable and repellent. He bowed stiffly, not extending his hand, substituting for the Westerner's "Pleased to meet you," a gruff ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... shooting. They were stalwart men, all five of them, long of limb, broad-chested, with faces tanned by sun and wind. And all five displayed, planted on an enormous neck and shoulders, the same small head with the low forehead, thin lips, beaked nose and hard and repellent cast of countenance. They were feared and disliked by all around them. They were a money-grubbing, crafty family; and their word ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... old, for the most part, and they led in no particular direction, nowhere uniting into anything like a trail. She wondered, if she could bring herself to drink the blood of a jack-rabbit, and if it would quench her thirst. But the thought was repellent, and, besides, she was not a good shot with a revolver. Nor did the cactus offer any relief, since it was only just coming into bloom, and as yet bore ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... and from that moment, every hostile sentiment at once subsides, and the sundered sections, 'like kindred drops,' again 'mingle into one.' A free community will gravitate to the central orb of liberty; one that is repellent to freedom will fly off on its erratic course to the regions of outer darkness, and will never return until, having completed the cycle of its destiny of ruin, it shall be brought back to be regenerated at the fountain of light, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... in the aisles. It was a cold, drizzling day of closing autumn, and the capital looked sodden and gloomy. Cameron, the Secretary of War, came to see them off and to make the customary prediction concerning their valor and victory to come. But he was a cold man, and he was repellent to Dick, used to more warmth ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... off the other. Love without righteousness is flaccid, a mere gush of good-natured sentiment, impotent to confer blessing, powerless to evoke reverence. Righteousness without love is as white as snow, and as cold as ice; repellent, howsoever it may excite the sentiment of awe-struck distance. But we need that the righteousness shall be loving, and that the love shall be righteous, in order that the one may be apprehended in its tenderest tenderness and the other may be adored ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... she said, throwing out her hand with a repellent gesture. "I have gone through much, and I am not strong. If you have any mercy, any kindness, leave me to myself. It is not proper, perhaps, that I should ask any favor of you, but I do. I beg you not to speak or write to me again until I have done what must be done here, and gone away from this ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... a repellent which will save you. We will apply to your loins the great defensive composed of cerate, Armenian bole, white of egg, oil, and vinegar. You will continue your ptisan and we ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... the faintest degree what West was enduring at that time, his heart must have warmed to the man, despite his repellent exterior. But he had no means ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Ago.—Rural life, as it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the country ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... feet. He heard her shake out his dinner coat, try the pockets, heard the stealthy opening and closing of the drawers in his wardrobe. Presently the footsteps drew near to his bed. For a moment he was obliged to set his teeth. A little waft of peculiar, unanalysable perfume, half-fascinating, half-repellent, came to him with a sense of disturbing familiarity. She paused by his bedside. He felt her hand steal under the pillow, which his head scarcely touched; search the pockets of his dressing gown, search even the bed. He listened to her soft breathing. The consciousness of her close and intimate ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... observance is undeniable. Movement was restricted, many acts were forbidden which were not in themselves laborious. The Sabbath was hedged in by a formidable array of enactments. To an outside critic it is not wonderful that the Jewish Sabbath has a repellent look. But to the insider things wear another aspect. The Sabbath was and is a day of delight. On it the Jew had a foretaste of the happiness of the world to come. The reader who wishes to have a spirited, and absolutely true, picture of the Jewish Sabbath cannot do better than turn to ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... No artist has yet dared to paint the picture of the gloating female inquisitors grouped around their naked and trembling victim, a scene that was to be enacted in many a witch trial. And it is well, for the scene would be too repellent and brutal for reproduction. In the use of these specially instituted juries there was no care to get unbiassed decisions. One of the inquisitors appointed to examine Cystley Celles had already served as ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... hardly have been more repellent to him, but he got out an acceptance somehow. She nodded lightly to him and passed on, and he went downstairs, his head in a whirl. Where had the crude pretty child of yester-year departed to—impulsive, conceited, readily ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sculptures Major Amberson had set up in opening the Addition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon the folds of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... first time we saw them walk!" Clara said. Her face twisted with the expression of a past loathing. "How it disgusted us! It seemed to me the most hideous motion I had ever seen—so unnatural, so ungraceful, so repellent. It took me a long time to get used to that. And as ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... uplift of our masses. Let us be done with sowing the seed of bitterness; we can only reap the whirlwind of destruction. Because an inflamed sentiment drove black miners from Pana, Illinois, every community is not repellent. Because a man rose in the Christian Endeavor meetings in Detroit and tried to cast bad reflections on our race, every Christian Endeavorer is not our enemy. We shall be wise when we find our friends of whatever locality, of whatever faith, of whatever rank, or of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... sufficiency of external acts rather than the necessity of inward disposition. At the same time, in the Psalter and prophecy inward purity is recognised.[20] Further, the character of Jehovah is sometimes presented in a repellent aspect; as in the threatenings of the second commandment; the treatment of the children of Achan and the Sons of Korah; the seeming injustice of God, implied in the complaint of Moses, and the protests of Abraham and David. But again there ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... most opposite characters. It would be difficult to conceive a more complete contrast than that which William Romaine (1714-1795) presented to the two worthies last mentioned. Grave, severe, self-restrained, and, except to those who knew him intimately, somewhat repellent in manners. Romaine would have been quite unfitted for the work which Grimshaw and Berridge, in spite—or, shall we say, in consequence?—of their boisterous bonhomie and occasionally ill-timed jocularity were able to do. The farmers and working men of Haworth ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... eating his dinner hurriedly, staring at his plate in a moodiness which he did not take the trouble to conceal. With all the youthful beauty of his face, there was a boorishness in his ill-humour which in a less commanding figure would have been repellent—an evident pride in the sincerity of the scowl upon his brow. When his meal was over he rose with a muttered excuse and went out into the yard, where a few minutes afterward Carraway was bold ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... they are, these balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base. The top is fairly level, forming an irregular triangle, of which the greatest length ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... maintaining, indeed, that to be spoken of at all was proof sufficient of undesirable conduct; but she would never investigate a charge, preferring rather to accept it in its vile integrity than to soil her hands by attempting to unweave its dirty threads; hence she would be pitiless, repellent, but she would never make herself the focus of gossip. She was a human being if you will, a Christian in creed and name assuredly; but beyond and above all things she was a well-mannered, well-conducted English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... that voracious and implacably relentless enemy, but against that lethal green emanation even that ravening Jovian jungle could not prevail, but fell back, impotent. Writhing and crawling, loathesomely palpitant with an unspeakable exuberance of foul and repellent vigor, possible only to such meteorological conditions as obtained there, it threw its most hideously prolific growths against that radiant ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... was to be hoped for from either Governor Hutchinson or Samuel Adams in their dealings with each other. Unfortunately, they HAD dealings with each other: in the performance of official functions, their incommensurable and repellent minds were necessarily brought to bear upon the same matters of public concern. Both, unfortunately, lived in Boston and were likely any day to come face to face round the corner of some or other narrow street of that small town. That reciprocal exasperation engendered by reasonable propinquity, ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... be this Garment of Protection. You must wear it underneath your clothing. It has power to accumulate and exercise electrical repellent force. Perhaps you do not know what that means, so I will explain more fully. When any missile, such as a bullet, sword or lance, approaches your person, its rush through the air will arouse the repellent force of which I speak, and this force, ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... matter he is well defended against profane curiosity. It needs courage and perseverance to penetrate into this labyrinth of text, all bristling with theology and exegesis and metaphysics. But only cross the threshold of the repellent enclosure, grow used to the order and shape of the building, and it will not be long ere you are overcome by a warm sympathy, and then by a steadily increasing admiration for the host who dwells there. The hieratic face of the old bishop lights up, becomes strangely living, almost ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... aid to attractiveness is order and division, simply and sensibly managed. Nothing is much more repellent, at least to modern hearers, than an excess of arrangement; headings and subdivisions overdone. But nothing is more helpful to attention than a simple, natural, luminous division, present in the ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... fascination of a serpent's. I knew instinctively that he would have the power, and use it, of probing every wound he might suspect in me to the quick. Yet he interested me; and there was something not entirely repellent to me about him. Above all for Olivia's sake, should we find her still living, I was anxious to study his character. It might happen, as it does sometimes, that my honor and straight-forwardness might prove a match for his ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... money from the men who attended on them. We entered; it was the hour of dinner. The place sparkled with gems, and the naked backs of the women gleamed in the electric light. Course followed upon course; champagne flowed, a fine band played, everything was costly; everything was, in a sense, repellent. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... about them as if they had thrust their hard hands into their wealthy pockets forever, with a character of arctic reserve, and portly dignity, and a well-dressed, full-fed, self-satisfied, opulent, stony, repellent aspect to each, which says plainly, "I belong to a rich family, of the ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... involves the trouble of hauling it in for examination now and then; but it is better to be at that trouble than be fishing with, mayhap, a mangled lure, or one that has got out of spinning order, and more likely to act as a repellent than an attraction to any fish in the neighbourhood. In trolling any likely ground, the proper way is to tell your man to zigzag it, not pulling the boat in a straight line, but going over the ground diagonally, and thus covering as much of it as it is possible to do with a couple score yards ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... Europe, had never come within ten leagues of gentility, and who, one and all, were absorbedly and unabashedly bent on the object which had suddenly assembled them at this one favored spot—the pushing of their individual fortunes. A hauptstadt-to-be, perhaps; but, so far, an immensely inchoate and repellent miscellany. ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... Momaya came within sight of the cave of Bukawai, the unclean. The old witch-doctor had rigged a framework of interlaced boughs to close the mouth of the cave from predatory beasts. This was now set to one side, and the black cavern beyond yawned mysterious and repellent. Momaya shivered as from a cold wind of the rainy season. No sign of life appeared about the cave, yet Momaya experienced that uncanny sensation as of unseen eyes regarding her malevolently. Again she shuddered. ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Epictetus, as originally published by Arrian, contained eight books, of which only four have come down to us. They are in many respects the most valuable expression of his views. There is something slightly repellent in the stern concision, the "imperious brevity," of the Manual. In the Manual, says M. Martha,[66] "the reason of the Stoic proclaims its laws with an impassibility which is little human; it imposes silence on all the passions, even the most respectable; it glories in waging ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... scene is sufficiently repulsive, even terrifying, to come upon suddenly from the silent heart of the dark, repellent forest. But there is yet another setting to the picture, which shall render it complete in every hideous and horrifying detail. For the principal gate itself is decorated with a complete archway ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... passes over a high viaduct above the city and the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. But far more repulsive are the cottages and cellar dwellings of the working-class, which stretch in long rows through all parts of the town from the valley bottom to the crest of the hill. I do not remember to have seen so many cellars used ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... azalea something was undoubtedly moving, and as they stood and watched, a strange figure slowly detached itself from the shadows and crept towards them. It was clad in native garments and shuffled along in a bent attitude as if deformed. Stella stiffened as she stood. There was something unspeakably repellent to her in ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... are, sir," her tone no longer repellent, "you are amusing. Pray, tell us whom we ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... turned to face him they saw an unclean, tousled man, very tall, with stooping shoulders, protruding black eyes, spiky hair, and a generally repellent appearance. ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... you frank, kindly, cordial, respectful, courteous in word and actions? Do you look people frankly in the eye? Are your inflections natural, courteous, modest, musical, or aggressive, conceited, pessimistic, repellent? What are your powers of attention, observation, memory, reason, imagination, inventiveness, thoughtfulness, receptiveness, quickness, analytical power, constructiveness, breadth, grasp? Can you manage people well? Do you know a fine picture when you see ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... been eloquent; and now driven to bay, had been unequivocal enough in his declarations, his determinations, and his promises. The Diva had shown herself a Diva at every point. She had wept, she had smiled, she had been scornful, she had been suppliant, she had been repellent, she had been loving! And in every mood she had seemed to the fascinated eyes of the Marchese more lovely than in that which preceded it. Finally, she had conquered. Instead of coming away from her, never to see her again, he came away leaving ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the unsparing realism of the portrait. Heartless, utterly egotistical, without conscience or scruple or a single redeeming feature beyond the one consuming purpose of his art, Strickland is alive as few figures in recent fiction have been; a genuinely great though repellent personality—a man whom it would have been at once an event to have met and a pleasure to have kicked. Mr. MAUGHAM has certainly done nothing better than this book about him; the drily sardonic humour of his method makes the picture not only credible but compelling. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... by a southern window that looks out on a wide-spreading and ancient elm, my glory and pride. Not one bird had I seen on it that cold, repellent middle of March. But Mrs. Miller looked up, and said: "Your robins have come!" Sure enough I ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... I said, "why the morality, the high austerity of some persons, who are indubitably high-minded and pure-hearted, is so utterly discouraging and even repellent?" ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... chase, dispel; retrude^; abduce^, abduct; send away; repulse. keep at arm's length, turn one's back upon, give the cold shoulder; send off, send away with a flea in one's ear. Adj. repelling &c v.; repellent, repulsive; abducent^, abductive^. centripetal Phr. like charges repel; opposite charges attract; like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... source of all my discomfort, the parent of every distasteful obligation, the ground on which all chosen pleasures were refused. It was ever "Kings can not do this," or "Kings must do that," and the "this" was always sweet, the "that" repellent; in Krak's hands monarchy became a cross between a treadmill and a strait-waistcoat. "What's the use of being a king?" I dared ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... They are silent mostly, looking out of their eyes ferociously, as though murder were in their thoughts, and rapine. But they never slouch, or cringe in their bodies, or shuffle in their gait. Dirty, fierce-looking, uncouth, repellent as they are, there is always about them a something of personal dignity which is not compatible with an ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... and repellent, concerning which Fan had spoken in her letter, still had possession of Constance. But it was not the quietude experienced by the overwrought spirit when the struggle is over, and the reaction comes—the healing apathy which nature sometimes gives to the afflicted. It was not that, nor anything ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... strife engendered by Christian dogma in those times. No sooner had the Franciscans and the Dominicans arrived in Japan than a fierce quarrel broke out between them and the Jesuits—a quarrel which even community of suffering could not compose. "Not less repellent was an attempt on the part of the Spaniards to dictate to Ieyasu the expulsion of all Hollanders from Japan, and an attempt on the part of the Jesuits to dictate the expulsion of the Spaniards. The former proposal, couched almost in the form of a demand, was twice formulated, and accompanied ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Enderby's attitude was the exact reverse of Horace Vanney's. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... jealous of an interloper," thought Mr. Danforth, noticing the repellent manner of young Dawkins. "Never mind, they will ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... could never be friends, though they may be quite capable of friendship, and have friends of their own. A man's presence and his views and emotions must be in some sort of tune with your own. There are certain people, not in the least repellent, genial, kindly, handsome, excellent in every way, with whom you simply are not comfortable. On the other hand, there are people of no great obvious attractiveness with whom you feel instantaneously at ease. There is something mysterious about it, some currents that don't mix, and some that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... repellent spectacle, but Rolfe, who had seen unpleasant sights of various kinds in his career, bent over the body with keen interest, noting these details, with all his professional instincts aroused. For though Rolfe had not yet risen very high in the police force, he had many ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... upon the whole exceedingly ugly landscape. The hedges, blackened with smuts from the colliery on the other side of the slope, were dripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour, was greasy with repellent-looking mud—there were puddles even in the asphalt-covered pathway which he trod. On either side of him stretched the shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood. The town-village ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... make her mistress at Halford Castle? Ought she not to feel flattered in having a noble lord for a lover? The thought did not stir her blood. Why was she averse to receiving his attentions? What was there about him that made the thought repellent? Was he not a gentleman? Was he not polite? Did he not show proper respect not only to herself but to everybody? Why not make an effort to overcome her repugnance to him? Would any other girl in Boston or anywhere else hesitate a moment over such an opportunity as ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... triviality of rhythm it is hardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as in The Snake Charmer when, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is so studiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as to be almost pedantic in infelicity, almost repellent by sheer force of superfluous and elaborate suggestiveness. Last of all, in an epoch trained upon the passionate and subtle cadences of the Laureate and the large-moulded, ample, irresistible melodies of Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Hake chooses to deal in rhythms of the ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... the familiar "Respice finem"; the peace of its self- denial shines out in Christ's "Not my will but thine," and in Dante's "In His will is our peace." Meager and cold and repellent as this ideal in its extreme expressions often seems, it appeals to us as the softer and irresponsible ideal of the Epicureans cannot. But obviously our way lies between the extremes. And after all that has now been said, our summary of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... as he went to the Bon Ton. They remembered a whale of a melon they had seen there, and said they would bet he never had enough money to buy that one. Maybe he could buy a medium-sized one, but not that. All of them kept a repellent manner for any passing boy who might be selfishly moved to join them. The spendthrift let them babble, preserving a rather grim silence. The whale of a melon was indeed a noble growth, and its price was thirty-five ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... merry-go-round with him. "If that's a specimen of the bridegroom cometh," said he to himself, "I've got no more use for matrimony than I have for the catechism." And doubtless to this gay and nonchalant spirit the deeply religious temperament of the Parson seemed a sombre and repellent thing,—a thing to be lamented, yet indulged as something too ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... is to be no roseate fiction, no gainful pretense, but a living reality. The United States of the future will be no constrained alliance of discordant and mutually repellent commonwealths, but a true exemplification of 'many in one'—many stars blended in one common flag—many States combined in one homogeneous Nation. Our Union will be one of bodies not merely, but of souls. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... profoundest and most instructive sort. If we could see our way clearly through it, little in ethics would remain obscure. The common mode of meeting it is to leave it thus paradoxical. Self-sacrifice banishes rationality and is a glorious madness. But such a conclusion is a repellent one. How can it be? Reason is man's distinctive characteristic. While brutes act blindly, while the punctual physical universe minutely obeys laws of which it knows nothing, usually it is open to man to judge the path he will pursue. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... no other worship than his "creator." This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—not always in good taste. He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days when he came ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... gain of what is thus pleasant, and our shirking of what is thus painful. But if we examine life as it actually exists about us, we shall see that this classification has been traversed by another. Many things naturally repellent have received a supernatural blessing; many things naturally pleasant have received a supernatural curse; and thus our highest happiness is often composed of pain, and our profoundest misery is nearly always based on pleasure. ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Talbot's eyes, that an observer might discern anything but the most careless gayety. To Talbot, however, there was something beneath all this, which was very plainly visible; and to her, with her profound insight into Brooke's deeper nature, all this nonsense offered nothing that was repellent; on the contrary, she found it most touching and most sad. It seemed to her like the effort of a strong man to rid himself of an overmastering feeling—a feeling deep within him that struggled forever upward and would not be repressed. It rose up constantly, seeking to break through all bounds; ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... eyes, there was the possibility of rare charm and fascination, and beauty of a very unusual kind; but at the present moment, as she looked carelessly and almost sullenly at her visitor, there was something repellent. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... a noble part in the history of the world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulae and organization wax old like a garment. Their moral austerity—that touch of contempt for the unsubstantial aesthetic, which has always distinguished Protestantism—is naturally repellent to the irresponsible rich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face of Protestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against the self-indulgent, the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... not spoken of my Aunt Agnes; but up to this time there was little to be said of her. She kept up the even tenor of her ways, which included a repellent air toward me for long after my father's death. She might have forgotten and forgiven the past, but in my choice of Aunt Helen as a companion I had added insult to injury. There was no open breach of course, but our relations were not cordial. I tried ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... his madness, the girl's hard challenging gaze, as if by some miracle of his ministering angels, had suddenly wavered and broken. Her eyes flitted from his face, rested fixedly on a hideous sprawling pile on the corner ahead, an abode of trade exceptionally repellent to all the senses. However, she was unaware of the detestable object, so confused was she by the odd frustrating weakness that suddenly possessed her, staying her hand in the act of delivering the mace-blow. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. Indeed, she hardly considered it that. The sex side of her was being repressed with the artist side. Most men found her curt, brisk, businesslike manner a little repellent, though interesting. They never made love to her, in spite of her undeniable attractiveness. Fascinating Facts drove her about in his smart little roadster and one night he established himself in her memory forever ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... front of me, at the outer edge of the terrace of a cafe, clad in his eternal silk hat, frock coat, and yellow gloves, sat Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos in earnest conversation with a seedy stranger of repellent mien. The latter was clean-shaven and had a broken nose, and wore a little round, soft felt hat. The dwarf was facing me. As he caught sight of me a smile of welcome overspread his Napoleonic features. He rose, awaited my approach, and, bareheaded, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... hours.' 'But it will be dark then,' objected the caller. 'Well, my good {106} sir,' was the retort, 'we can walk in the dark, I suppose'—which Blake would naturally much prefer. Edward Blake's outward bearing was cold and unsympathetic. He was often repellent to those desiring to be his friends. Intimates he appeared to have none: he would not allow people to be intimate with him. He would hardly even, when leader of the Opposition, accept the co-operation of his supporters or allow them a share in his labours. So exacting was ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... pleasant and even joking terms with the waitresses. But with Daisy he never joked. He called the other girls by their first names, as became a social superior, but Daisy was always Miss Obloski to him. With Linnevitch alone he made no headway. Linnevitch maintained a pointedly surly and repellent attitude, as if he really wished to turn away a profitable patronage. And Barstow learned to leave the ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... "I have been finding out my mistake, and I have wanted to tell you so; but you have always been so cold and repellent that I dared not. You are rough and stern, Roger, not a bit ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... Things urged become repellent; and Charles was groping around for an excuse when a letter came from Professor Henslow, saying, among other things, that the Government was about to send a ship around the world on a scientific surveying tour, especially to map the coast of Patagonia and other parts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the sheer joy of love, the child would come at her in a tumultuous rush, cast himself in her arms, and cover her face with kisses—the face that had at first so terrified him, that was so typical of cruelty and craft and repellent pride. Then as they nestled together they would repeat in concert—poor woman! perhaps she thought it a mystic invocation charged with some potent power of prayer or magic—"Ding-dong-bell!" and the comparative biographies of little Johnny Green and little Johnny Stout, and the vicissitudes ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... dissipated than the positive. But, so far as we at present know, this question enters into the discussion scarcely, if at all. Our knowledge seems rather to point to the substances upon which the charges are collected. The self-repellent nature of electricity compels it to manifest itself at the more prominent parts of the surface, the level being forsaken for the point. The tension of the charge, or its tendency to fly off, is proportionately increased. And if at a given moment the tension attains a certain intensity, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... of New England been matched in training as they were matched in endowment, and had they then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to differ so greatly in power. Their natures were electrically repellent, but from which did the greater force radiate? Their education differed so radically that it is impossible to compare them, but if you translate the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics, you have something stronger than Webster,—something that recalls Chatham; and Emerson ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Thornton was considered by most of his acquaintances (he could boast of scarcely any friends) as a reserved and almost repellent person, but now, as his eyes rested on his young daughter, something seemed to soften their expression; he took her slight hand and drew it affectionately through ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... was naturally of a jolly, sociable disposition, felt a little depressed at Mrs Brown's repellent manner; so he changed ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the U.C. boats, for at least one trip before I go to the periscope school and train for a command of my own. The idea of being bottled up in an elongated cigar and under the command of one of those nautical plough-boys is repellent. However, the Von Schenks have never been too proud to obey in order to ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent & awful. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where he had been sent for trying to organize the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation. His ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... river very sinuous, and the momentum of current consequently lessened. For example, striking in an arm of the river, by the inertia of the moving volume, the water is thrown, and with less velocity, upon the opposite bank, which it pursues until it meets another repellent obstacle, from which it refracts, taking direction again for the other side. Above the Missouri, the river is principally directed by the natural trough of the valley. Below this, however, the channel is purely the work of the river itself, shaped according to the necessities of sudden changes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Charles, on the other hand, owed his advantages to his position and not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none of the physical or intellectual graces of Francis I. and Henry VIII. He excelled in (p. 101) no sport, was unpleasant in features and repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity or chivalry lightened his character, no deeds in war or statecraft yet sounded his fame. He was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations had worn the imperial crown; as such, too, he was a German prince, and the Germanic constitution ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... night;—these, and three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... an aggressive way, which at first was repulsed violently, and then submitted to with a sudden and still more repellent indifference, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... perfectly honestly—to detect some reminder of some face seen and hitherto forgotten, in the hard cold eyes and thick-set jaw, the mouth-disfiguring twist which flawed features, which, handsome enough in themselves, would have otherwise gone near to compensate a repellent countenance. The effort was the more hopeless from the fact that it was a face that, once seen, might have been hard to forget. After complying to the full with his suggestion of a thorough examination, she was forced to acknowledge ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... difference in this mere setting things to rights. It can be done so that every chair has a stiffly repellent look, and the conspicuous absence of dust makes one painfully conscious that it has not always been thus, while the fingers inadvertently stray over one's attire, plucking a shred here and a thread there. Even flowers can be arranged in a vase so as to look thoroughly and reproachfully uncomfortable, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... from hauteur and softened by modesty. But the magisterial wording in which its decisions were couched, the abruptness with which they were notified, and the threats that accompanied their imposition would have been repellent even were the authors endowed ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a large number of lodging-seekers; and though he hastened to withdraw his pipe, and to compose his features to an air of invitation, he was never rewarded by so much as an inquiry. "Can there," he thought, "be anything repellent in myself?" But a candid examination in one of the pier-glasses of the drawing-room led him to dismiss ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... illustrations from the facts of life even when they were repellent to him. Here he holds up the joyless life of a Syrian agricultural laborer. After plodding all day in the field, this man comes home, tired and hungry. Is he promptly cared for? No, he must first cook and serve his master's meal. Then he can eat what's left. Does he get any thanks ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... do was keep the air in here purified. That is a simple chemical operation. By using this attractive and repellent force she allowed the earth's gravity and the repelling power of the sun and Mercury to ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... Strangford, our envoy at Lisbon. But, fortunately for us, Napoleon committed the blunder which so often marred his plans: he pushed them too far: he required the Prince Regent to adopt a course of conduct repellent to an honourable man, namely, to confiscate the merchandise and property of British merchants who had long trusted the good faith of the House of Braganza. To this last demand the prince opposed a dignified ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... constraint in his domestic relations. But at the best of times she was not demonstrative; and perhaps that very coldness was part of her charm in the placid Davidson's eyes. Women are loved for all sorts of reasons and even for characteristics which one would think repellent. She was watching ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... back in his chair and looked vacantly at the ring of smoke which floated in the still air. A smile played on his lips, but his eyes were grave. Then he looked at the captain. There was in his gross obesity something extraordinarily repellent. He had the plethoric self-satisfaction of the very fat. It was an outrage. It set Neilson's nerves on edge. But the contrast between the man before him and the man he had ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... not follow that such study, to be scientific, shall be made repellent by the use of technical terms the significance of which the reader is left to guess at, but finds unexplained. I fear such treatment of vocal physiology has brought it into disrepute. The aim of the writer will be to give a clear scientific treatment of the ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... formality in the man's tone. How could any woman see past that glacial front and glimpse the big, aching heart beyond? Austin was harsh and repellent when the least bit self-conscious, and now he was striving deliberately ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... improve. I'll tell you what I mean. My wife is a modest, intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It is this sort ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Apocryphal Gospels did their best to fill the gap by inventing or developing stories, pretty, silly, or repellent, which only show how little they understood the original Gospels or the character ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... that barren honour a human being dyed his hands with murder and risked momentary assassination for the remainder of his lifetime? Well, we have heard of the Man who would be King, and empty titles still are sought by political services equally repellent. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... pleasant, among other reasons, because of the rhythmic charm of language. We shall come back to this fact in our chapter on "The Problem of Evil in Aesthetics." There is no contradiction between the fair form of a work of art and its content, however repellent. For if we value the sympathetic knowledge of life, we shall be glad of any means impelling us to undertake what alone can give this—a friendly dwelling with life itself. Thus the decorative and the expressive functions of art are ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... and gentlemen, for obtruding my repellent personality on this joyful assemblage, but our dear guest will not, I am sure, object to answering a simple question. I have no civic pride myself, but do you mind, sir, telling me the object of your visit to this lovely ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... And here are glass cupboards with a host of bottles and jars, filled with all manner of chemicals. The labels apprise me of their contents: molybdenite of ammonia, chloride of antimony, permanganate of potash and ever so many other strange terms. Never, in all my reading, have I met with such repellent language. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... tweeds, the folding crease strongly marked down the front of the trousers and the coat sleeves rather too long. His face bore a strong impress of vulgarity, but at the same time had a certain ingenuousness, a self-absorbed energy and simplicity, which saved it from being wholly repellent; the brow was narrow, the eyes small and bright, and the coarse lips half hid themselves under a struggling reddish growth. In these lineaments lurked a family resemblance to Godwin Peak, sufficient to support a claim of kindred which at this moment might have seemed improbable. At the summons of ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... every human being should mate and produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not, once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind, and can control such ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... mourned his recent death as that of a personal acquaintance. On the other hand, even though a man or woman possess regular features, the lack of animated expression, of vivacity, causes the person to be regarded as "cold" and "repellent." Speaking in the vernacular, it puts you in the class of the "dead ones." One may say that magnetism and all the desirable qualities that draw others to us are closely associated with the supreme development of the forces of life. ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel's, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Auerbach; or trite, 'The Convict's Return,' Harben; or newspapery, 'Rescued by a Child;' or highly fantastic, 'The Egyptian Fire Eater,' Baumbach; or anecdotal, 'A Fishing Trip;' or sentimental, 'Hope,' Bremer; or repellent, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... probably in the archives of Spain or Mexico, and its discovery would throw needed light on the location of Tusayan and the course Cardenas followed.*** The distance of this whole region from a convenient base of supplies, and its repellent character, prevented further operations at this period, and when these explorers traced their disappointed way homeward, the Colorado was not seen again by white men for over half a century; and it was ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... a traffic control note stating that a Devagas missionary shop had checked in and berthed at the spaceport when the G C Center's management called in to report, with some nervousness, that the Center's much advertised meteor-repellent roof had just flipped several dozen tons of falling Moon Belt material into the spaceport area. Most of it, unfortunately, had dropped around and upon ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... scarce noticed whether they noticed me or not. I felt and behaved coldly toward them! to the women because their voices never had the ring of genuine liking in speaking to me; to the men because I found them as a rule shallow, ignorant, and pretentious; repellent to me, as I dare say I, with my inability to understand them, was to them. I saw most men and things through a distorting glass; that of contrast, conscious or unconscious, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... incorporated with the fibers as these revolve or flow around the engine. This sizing renders the paper more nearly impervious to moisture. The difference between a paper that is sized and that has a repellent surface which prevents the ink from settling into it when it is written upon, and an ordinary blotting-paper with its absorbent surface, is due entirely to the fact that the former is most carefully treated with sizing both ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... conscious of deserving: no person took any notice of her entrance, and all appearance of the good meal she wanted was removed. There was a certain something in the usually-smiling faces of the heads of the mansion that acted as a repellent to her, and she sat for some time silent; but at length she spoke to Ellen, who, from her gentle meekness, was ever easy of access, and whom, intending to mortify, she accosted thus—"Nelly, did you ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... hair. She looked what she felt— a very stiff and unformed specimen of girlhood. There was a great lump in her throat, brought there by mingled nervousness and home-sickness, but that very fact only made her manner icy and repellent. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... (Mentha pulegium) with small lilac-blue flowers that yield an aromatic oil. Aromatic plant (Hedeoma pulegioides) of eastern North America, having purple-blue flowers that yields an oil used as an insect repellent ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the hall as she indicated the depository for his hat and stick and opened the door of the sitting-room. She had barely smiled. Indeed she had not smiled. She had not mentioned the weather. On the other hand, she had not been prim or repellent. She had revealed nothing of herself. Her one feat had been to stimulate mightily his curiosity and his imagination concerning her—rampant enough even before ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... county-town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who "conceive and meditate of ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... evergreen tree, Dacrydium franklinii, Hook, N.O. Coniferae. The timber is prized in cabinet-work, being repellent to insects, durable, and fairly easy to work; certain pieces are beautifully marked, and resemble bird's-eye maple. The Huon is a river in the south of Tasmania, called after a French ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... friend, Franz Liszt has been to me. I must enter a little more deeply into the character of this friendship, which to many has seemed paradoxical; indeed, I have been compelled to appear repellent and hostile on so many sides, that I almost feel the want of disclosing all that relates to this ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... parcellaire division and the service of machinery? How shall the man who, by the effect of his labor, has become a slave,—that is, a chattel, a thing,— again become a person by the same labor, or in continuing the same exercise? Why is it not seen that these ideas are mutually repellent, and that, if, by some impossibility, the proletaire could reach a certain degree of intelligence, he would make use of it in the first place to revolutionize society and change all civil and industrial relations? And what I say is no vain exaggeration. The working class, in Paris and the large ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... manuscripts bring even the most philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every disagreeable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... junk-yard back of the house and beside it and around it too, a big one, but it was everywhere poisoned and polluted with roses. The very Horses and Dogs had the wrong smells; the whole country round was a repellent desert of lifeless, disgusting gardens and hay-fields, without a single tenement or smoke-stack in sight. How she did hate it all! There was only one sweet-smelling shrub in the whole horrible place, and ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... after the liner Atlantic had docked at Southampton, Sam Marlowe might have been observed—and was observed by various of the residents—sitting on a bench on the esplanade of that repellent watering-place, Bingley-on-the-Sea, in Sussex. All watering-places on the South Coast of England are blots on the landscape, but, though I am aware that by saying it I shall offend the civic pride of some of the others, ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... flesh palpitate, and hear the bones crack and crash under the rude embrace of sorrow. All savage wildness was repulsive to him. In music, in literature, in the conduct of life, all that approached the melodramatic was painful to him The frantic and despairing aspects of exaggerated romanticism were repellent to him, he could not endure the struggling for wonderful effects, for delicious excesses. "He loved Shakspeare only under many conditions. He thought his characters were drawn too closely to the life, and spoke ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... already were in town and were "tanking up." Harley found this to be true, and the red men failed to arouse in him either respect or admiration. If they had ever had any nobility of the wilderness, it was gone now, and they seemed to him a sodden, depressed, and repellent race. A half-dozen or so, in various stages of drunkenness, through whiskey surreptitiously obtained, increased the feeling ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Bukawai, the unclean. The old witch-doctor had rigged a framework of interlaced boughs to close the mouth of the cave from predatory beasts. This was now set to one side, and the black cavern beyond yawned mysterious and repellent. Momaya shivered as from a cold wind of the rainy season. No sign of life appeared about the cave, yet Momaya experienced that uncanny sensation as of unseen eyes regarding her malevolently. Again she shuddered. She tried to force her unwilling feet onward toward the ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... three weeks Charnock occupied himself with his duties and everything went smoothly at the store and hotel. He was popular in the neighborhood, since his weaknesses were rather attractive than repellent to people who did not suffer from them. Men who drove long distances from their lonely farms liked a cheerful talk and to hear the latest joke; others enjoyed a game of cards in the back office when Mrs. Charnock was not ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife's easy withdrawal ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... him—of the passion that dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... character, the revealed glory, of Jesus in such a few simple words,—"full of grace and truth." Not grace without truth. That would be a sort of weakly, sickly sentimentalism. And not truth without grace. That would be a cold stern repellent insistence on certain high standards. But grace and truth ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... that deception—and of the awakening which would await the girl-wife on the very morrow of her wedding-day mayhap, was terribly repellent to Clyffurde's straightforward, loyal nature, and bitter was the contention within his soul as he found himself at the cross-roads of a divided duty. Every instinct of chivalry towards the woman loudly demanded that he should warn her—now—at once—before ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... people, and it ought to be a lesson to them to leave the Notus alone in future, although there is little doubt that the Notus themselves make cannibalistic raids on some of their weaker neighbours. I did not like the looks of the Notus, and they, as well as the Doboduras, have a most repellent type of features, and look capable of any kind of cruelty and treachery. They are very different ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... to hide, by effrontery, the chagrin she is conscious of deserving: no person took any notice of her entrance, and all appearance of the good meal she wanted was removed. There was a certain something in the usually-smiling faces of the heads of the mansion that acted as a repellent to her, and she sat for some time silent; but at length she spoke to Ellen, who, from her gentle meekness, was ever easy of access, and whom, intending to mortify, she accosted thus—"Nelly, ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... posts still farther toward the southwest. A visit of inspection which I made to Salisbury gave me the opportunity of examining the site of the recent prison camp there. The treatment of our prisoners by the Confederate authorities is a repellent subject, and I would gladly pass it by and say nothing discordant with the tone of high honor and respectful good-will which marked the conduct of the leading officers of the Confederate forces in the field. We may fairly admit that the resources of the Confederacy had ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... brain; one whose pleasures lay manifestly on the intellectual side. One thing Gifford quickly noted, as he looked at the man with a painful curiosity, was that the face before him lacked much of the suggestion of evil which in the brother he had found so repellent. This man could surely be hard enough on occasion, the strong jaw and a certain hardness in the eyes told that, but except perhaps for an uncomfortable excess of sharpness, there was none of his brother's rather brutally scoffing ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... molecules, and its south poles the south-seeking poles. (The north-seeking pole of a magnet is marked N., though it is in reality the south pole; for unlike poles are mutually attractive, and like poles repellent.) ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... me the other day, and his grievance from the rain was the swarms of gnats. I said, I supposed I have very bad blood, for gnats never bite me. He replied, "I believe I have bad blood, too, for dull people, who would tire me to death, never Come Dear me." Shall I beg a pallet-full of that repellent for you, to set in your window as ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... without being absolutely repellent, was far from encouraging. I found myself in the embarrassing position of having nothing left to say. I gave up ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beamed. He was not a particularly successful beamer, being hampered by a cast in one eye which gave him a truculent and sinister look; but those who knew him knew that he had a heart of gold and were not intimidated by his repellent face. Between Sam and himself there had always existed terms of great cordiality, starting from the time when the former was a small boy and it had been John Peters' mission to take him now to the Zoo, now to the train ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... about it. Its ascent is very dangerous, they say. Accidents have occurred there; a strange ill omen, it is believed, invests those ghostly snows; the death-clutch of the Balaitous holds many a brave mountaineer. As seen from here, it has an indefinably spectral, repellent look; there seems something almost hideous in its white and ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the initiative lay with the lady, but Rallywood had once or twice been distinctly wrought upon by the appeals to his sympathy and pity. Now, however, looked at from a fresh standpoint, the one in fact from which Valerie viewed it, the subject became suddenly repellent, and he slid away from ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... were similar to those in New England; but there were greater contrasts in table appointments. There was more silver, and richer food; but the negro servants were so squalid, clumsy, and uncouth that the incongruity made the meals very surprising and, at times, repellent. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... of earth, Of each new horror which each hour gives birth, Of sins that scar and cruelties that blight Life's little season, meant for man's delight, Methought those monstrous and repellent crimes Which hate engenders in war-heated times, To God's great heart bring not so much despair As other sins which flourish everywhere And in all times—bold sins, bare-faced and proud, Unchecked by college, and by Church allowed, Lifting their lusty heads like ugly weeds Above wise ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... worship than his "creator." This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—not always in good taste. He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days when he came to Acredale aspired to political ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... nature something that revolted instinctively from the singular person who stood at his shoulder. Their organisations and appetites were different, I suppose, and repellent. Cold and glittering was the 'gelidus anguis in herba'—the churchyard grass—who had lifted his baleful crest ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... were together somewhere, golfing, walking or riding. Sometimes I accompanied them, sometimes Herbert Bayliss made one of the party. Frances' behavior to the young doctor was tantalizingly contradictory. At times she was very cordial and kind, at others almost cold and repellent. She kept the young fellow in a state of uncertainty most of the time. She treated Heathcroft much the same, but there was this difference between them—Heathcroft didn't seem to mind; her whims appeared to amuse rather than to annoy him. Bayliss, on the contrary, was either in the seventh heaven ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... well known to those who have made the phenomena of Spiritualism the subject of prolonged and careful inquiry, in the spirit of exact and unimpassioned scientific research, that beneath a repellent mass of imposture and delusion there remain certain inexplicable and startling facts which science can neither explain away nor deny."—"Automatic, or Spirit, Writing," ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... since it secretes no nectar; and one would naturally infer either that it can fertilize itself without insect aid—a theory which closer study of its organs goes far to disprove—or that the carrion-scent, so repellent to us, is in itself an attraction to certain insects needful for cross-pollination. Which are they? Beetles have been observed crawling over the flower, but without effecting any methodical result. One inclines to accept Mr. Clarence M. Weed's theory of special adaptation ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... heap to say," answered the girl with a scowl. Her manner was still fierce and repellent, and she gave Betty a certain jealous regard out of her black eyes which the latter was at a loss to explain. "Where's ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... those remaining in the five chambers of the pistol taken from his hand, that he was not only the owner of this pistol but was in the habit of sleeping with it under his pillow; but, beyond that, nothing; and this reticence, as well as her manner which was cold and repellent, ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Vimpany, for no such person was known in the house. She was not engaged with the doctor, for the doctor had gone out. Mountjoy looked at the hat-stand in the passage, and discovered a man's hat and a man's greatcoat. To whom did they belong? Certainly not to Mr. Vimpany, who had gone out. Repellent as it was, Mr. Henley's idea that the explanation of his daughter's conduct was to be found in the renewed influence over her of the Irish lord, now presented itself to Hugh's mind under a new point of view. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... live there, what if the cause be that there are no souls in it making it comfortable to the spiritual sense? That the knowledge of such presence would make most people uneasy, is no argument against the fancy: truth itself, its intrinsic, essential, necessary trueness unrecognised, must be repellent. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... flea-beetles riddle the leaves with holes and cause the foliage to die. Bordeaux mixture as applied for potato blight protects the plants by making them repellent to the beetles. ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... effect, incommoded me now: I would cast it aside and be myself—silent and sullen as my barbarous host. If any malignant purpose was taking form in his mind, let it, and let him do his worst; for when failure first stares a man in the face, it has so dark and repellent a look that not anything that can be added can make him more miserable; nor has he any apprehension. For weeks I had been searching with eager, feverish eyes in every village, in every rocky crevice, in every noisy mountain streamlet, for the glittering yellow dust I had travelled so far to find. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... directed against Lady Emily; and she it was who saw, in a faint stream of moonlight, a female arm uplifted towards her, from under a table, with a threatening motion. It was bare to the elbow, and draped above. It showed first a clenched fist, and next an open hand, palm outwards, making a repellent gesture. Then the back of the hand was turned, and it motioned her away, as if she had been an importunate beggar. But at this moment, one of the doors opened, and a dark figure passed through the room towards the opposite door. Everything that could be called ghostly, ceased instantaneously. ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... He does not represent—though seeming to do so—a nation apart. To understand this multitude, you must get below its insufferable manners, and learn that very fine civic qualities can consist with a personal bearing almost wholly repellent. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... remarked, too, that as a consequence of this unattractiveness, the accounts given in standard works of the general features of this religion are rather chilling and repellent. More than fifty years ago, in the first book of his Roman History, Mommsen so treated of it—not indeed without some reservation,—and in this matter, as in so many others, his view remained for ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... of Horace Vanney's. For himself, he unaffectedly disliked and despised publicity; for the interests which he represented, he delegated it to others. He would rarely be interviewed; his attitude toward the newspapers was consistently repellent. Consequently his infrequent utterances were treasured as pearls, and given a prominence far above those of the too eager and over-friendly Mr. Vanney, who, incidentally, was his associate on the directorate of ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... discursion because, for a period, the paths of the two composers were parallel. Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus—in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture—I found more "operatic" than Boris Godounow. The Old Believers become as much ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... broad, with dark hair and eyes, and a sensual and cruel face. He seemed, however, to be quite enslaved by the woman by his side, whom I hardly even now like to think of, there was something to me so repellent ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the shapes metamorphosed from the vapour of the fisherman's vase. As he afterward told me, his ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... the lost soldier, she loved her father with that old-fashioned veneration which made her see all that he did with the moral indistinctness, without which there could not be the perfect filial devotion that makes the family a union in good report and evil. She had not even that, by no means repellent, secondary egoism which upholds us in doing ungrateful things that abstract good may follow. Opposition, which becomes delightful when we can call it persecution, had no charm for her. If her father had suddenly ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... faces covered with short, grisly, fierce beards. They are silent mostly, looking out of their eyes ferociously, as though murder were in their thoughts, and rapine. But they never slouch, or cringe in their bodies, or shuffle in their gait. Dirty, fierce-looking, uncouth, repellent as they are, there is always about them a something of personal dignity which is not compatible with an Englishman's ordinary ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... and a young man of about his own age entered. Without being in the least ill-looking, there was something repellent about the new comer. His eyes were shifty and too close together to be trustworthy. Otherwise no fault could ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... by many a long and minutely corrected despatch to Viscount Strangford, our envoy at Lisbon. But, fortunately for us, Napoleon committed the blunder which so often marred his plans: he pushed them too far: he required the Prince Regent to adopt a course of conduct repellent to an honourable man, namely, to confiscate the merchandise and property of British merchants who had long trusted the good faith of the House of Braganza. To this last demand the prince opposed a dignified resistance, though on all other points he gave way. This will appear from Lord Strangford's ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... his daughter in common with others. It was not that he did not want to be loved, or that he was indifferent to the feelings and opinion of others concerning him. On the contrary, he, of all men, was most anxious that others should think well of him. But his manner was stern, harsh and repellent, and he did not seem to have the capacity to gain the confidence or sympathy of those around him. Although generous even to extravagance where it gratified his vanity, of broad-minded charity in its higher and nobler sense the man knew nothing. He gave not because he loved, but because his charities ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... of grace and power, Which, to their sight who in ignorant sin abide, Are now as e'er incognizable. Obey Thy genius, for a minister it is Unto the throne of Fate. Draw towards thy soul, And centralize, the rays which are around Of the divinity. Keep thy spirit pure From worldly taint, by the repellent strength Of virtue. Think on noble thoughts and deeds, Ever. Count o'er the rosary of truth; And practice precepts which are proven wise, It matters not then what thou fearest. Walk Boldly and wisely in that light thou hast;— There is a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... ragged surface of the beard, could hide the square massiveness of the jaws and the curve of the hard yet sensuous lips. There was strength in the nose, strength and cruelty, and the straight black band that formed the heavy brow added to the repellent expression. Such a face it was that, looking at it, one understood the man turning with an oath upon those who sought to aid him in his misery, much as one can understand the fury of an imprisoned snake which turns back upon itself and plunges ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... assigned the duty of assembling the members of the band; (10) and to others (11) that of teaching and applying force to those who come behindhand in their duties. There, then, you have the principle at once: The gracious and agreeable devolves on him who rules, the archon; the repellent counterpart (12) on others. What is there to prevent the application of the principle to ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... incongruous, we do well to pause upon that fact, and to endeavour to understand it. For if this doctrine contained nothing more than is seen in it by its assailants inside and outside the churches, if it were in its true meaning as repellent to the conscience and the intellect as it is found to be by many thoughtful Christians, then it could not possibly have exercised over the minds and hearts of men a compelling fascination, nor could it have been the root of heroic self-surrenders, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... her emphasis, the extreme figure of speech she had used, were repellent to Mr. Withers over and above his amazement at her words. As he had not been observing her, he was totally unprepared for such ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... herself to remember that respect is, in some sort, due to everything—however unbeautiful, however even vile or repugnant—which is a constant quantity in human affairs and human character, due to everything in the realm of Nature also, however repellent, if it is ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... thick, short hair is iron gray and his beard many shades whiter. Short of stature, with very high shoulders, that suggest physical deformity, squarely built and stout, a square, rugged face, with light, steely eyes and overhanging brows. It is a repellent face and form, and ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... her straight, light brown hair. She looked what she felt— a very stiff and unformed specimen of girlhood. There was a great lump in her throat, brought there by mingled nervousness and home-sickness, but that very fact only made her manner icy and repellent. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... 1898 Dr Bullock Workman and his wife marched along it across the Shyok river, up the valley of the Nubra, and over the Sasser-la to the Karakoram pass. The scenery is an exaggeration of that described by Dr Neve as seen on the road from the Zoji-la to Leh. There is a powerful picture of its weird repellent grandeur in the Workmans' book entitled In the Ice World of Himalaya (pp. 28-29, 30-32). The poet who had found ideas for a new Paradiso in the Vale of Kashmir might here get suggestions for ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... with all her independence, Rachel would not have been so ready to repel one whose advances, however unwarrantable in themselves, were yet marked by so many evidences of sympathy and consideration. She had not always been suspicious and repellent; and she sighed to think how sadly she must have changed, even before the nightmare of the last ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... attractiveness is order and division, simply and sensibly managed. Nothing is much more repellent, at least to modern hearers, than an excess of arrangement; headings and subdivisions overdone. But nothing is more helpful to attention than a simple, natural, luminous division, present in the preacher's mind, announced to the audience, and ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... and Stefan stepped over to the depot and opened the door. Madge looked up, startled and again afraid. It was a relief to her to see Stefan's friendly face. She had feared.... She didn't know what she dreaded so much—perhaps a face repellent—a man who would look at her and in whose eyes she ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... husband well by reputation, and had, before our marriage, asked him to her house, but had not been fortunate enough to possess sufficient attraction. Percivale was much taken with her, notwithstanding a certain coldness, almost sternness of manner, which was considerably repellent,—but only for the first few moments, for, when her eyes lighted up, the whole thing vanished. She was much pleased with some of his pictures, criticising freely, and with evident understanding. The immediate result was, that she bought both the pauper picture ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... can associate work and play, study and entertainment, is much more likely to register successes than the frigid dominie who will hear of nothing but a rigid attention to the tasks of the day. In the one case the lessons are presented in their most repellent form, in the other they are made part and parcel of each day's pleasant round ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... his nature is essentially that of a child, and, childlike, he craves for human love as the first necessity of his life. To those who set up an idol of their own fancy and worship that as his image, he will be cold and repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return their love with all the warmth and purity of his childlike nature. Two things are intolerable to a healthy-minded child—rough brutality and mawkish caressing; Wagner was fated to endure a full share of both. It is ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... improbable that he had been bowled over by shell-shock, like many thousands more of equally splendid specimens of young manhood. Any other conclusion to account for the strange condition of a young man like him seemed unworthy and repellent. ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... high wall the carriage had stopped. A huge, repellent Ethiopian was standing before an opened doorway, through which a rich ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... on their cheeks, noses and foreheads, so that their appearance was repellent. Besides this, their teeth were black, their noses large and flat, and their mouths wider than there was any necessity for. Their heads were bare, and, indeed, were furnished by nature with all the covering they could need. The hair was very long, but frizzly, so that as it curled up about their ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... frigid influence he exercises on those about him, the distrustful look of the nurse as she brings baby Paul into his presence, the shrinking form of little Florence as the frightened child cowers with folded hands behind her repellent father's chair, are finely depicted in the etching of The Dombey Family. In Mrs. Dombey at Home, the proud, haughty beauty chafing under the consciousness that she has been sacrificed to the wealth of the heartless merchant, takes no pains to veil the contempt she feels for the admiring men ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept him?" ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... and turned back to flow up stream. There was but one way for him to cross the river, and that was to swim. And the best time to swim was when the tide brimmed over the current and trembled at its turn, a broad and limpid expanse of water, cold, dangerous, repellent to the chilled plunging body; but safer and more easily paddled through than when the current, angular as a skeleton, sought the ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and also from a wish to spare the girl's feelings, she had declined to be introduced, at the suggestion of another blundering hostess, to Glenwilliam's daughter. And all the time—all the time—the handsome, repellent creature was holding Arthur's life and Arthur's career in the hollow ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are the things, or gorgeous or delicate, Imposing, intime, dazzling or repellent, That sing—better than music's self, Better than rhyme— The praise and liberty of blue: The turquoise and the peacock's neck, The blood of kings, the deeps Of Southern lakes, the sky That bends over the Azores, The language of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... be so hard, so repellent, to believe a lover guilty even of a trivial error, we may readily suppose that Lucy never for a moment admitted the supposition that Clifford had been really guilty of gross error or wilful crime. True that expressions ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life, tightly hooked up in black silk as to her body, and as to her soul by the prescribed boundaries of her position in life. Anderson, returning rather earlier than usual, found her with his mother, and retreated with actual rudeness, the woman became all at once so repellent to him. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... existence, be better than formal incorporation? May there not be a unity of spirit and bond of peace between those whose views differ, without either party giving up the iota to which he may attach importance? Forms devoutly prized and helpful to one man may be repellent and a hindrance ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... liberal magnificence, by Irving, and met with considerable success. "The Promise of May" is another play which was staged, in 1882, by Mrs. Bernard Beere, but met with failure by the critics, owing, in some degree, to its supposed caricature of modern agnostics, and to the repellent portrayal of one of the characters in the piece, the sensualist, Philip Edgar. Later, in (1892) appeared "The Foresters," a pretty pastoral play, on the theme of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, which was produced ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... mean. My wife is a modest, intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It is this sort ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... original partly cloaked: for by transferring Eastern thoughts into Western moulds, things that are like nails in the hands of soft sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear to the steel-clad West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which may be repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is studied the more convinced must the political student be that in this affair of the 18th January we have an international coup destined to become classic in the new text-books of political science. All the way through the twenty-one articles ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... artificial ones, see that the bait is intact and spinning properly. This involves the trouble of hauling it in for examination now and then; but it is better to be at that trouble than be fishing with, mayhap, a mangled lure, or one that has got out of spinning order, and more likely to act as a repellent than an attraction to any fish in the neighbourhood. In trolling any likely ground, the proper way is to tell your man to zigzag it, not pulling the boat in a straight line, but going over the ground ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... you are hurt." No wonder that these two captains became fast friends. It is because sea warfare abounds in such manly incidents as these that the modern naval code of Germany, as exemplified in the acts of her submarine commanders, was so peculiarly barbarous and repellent. ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... act of unfolding his napkin. The prepared explanation trembled on his lips; but its falsehood, repellent to ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... DURING COURTSHIP KILL LOVE.—Any improper liberties which are permitted by young ladies, whether engaged or not, will change love into sensuality, and her affections will become obnoxious, if not repellent. Men by nature love virtue, and for a life companion naturally shun an amorous woman. Young folks, as you love moral purity and virtue, never reciprocate love until you have required the right of betrothal. Remember ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... did all he could through his ambassador to frustrate their efforts and bring on a catastrophe. The States-General and Maurice were now on as confidential terms with Carleton as they were cold and repellent to Boississe ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had seemed so fine and beautiful to him suddenly became ghastly and repellent, but his second thought told him that they had nothing to fear at present. It was not inhabited. The warriors merely came here for the burnings, and then it was quite likely that they ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manner was gross and materialistic, so repellent that Dick would have turned away, but at that moment Bright Sun himself approached. Dick regarded him, as always, with the keenest interest and curiosity mixed with some suspicion. Yet almost anyone would have been reassured by the appearance of Bright Sun. He was a splendid ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... heard of at that time. They were at once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... when he first saw her, that the idea of associating any want of refinement and good breeding with such a charming creature never entered his mind. The disenchantment to him was already so complete that he was even disagreeably affected by the tone of her voice: it was almost as repellent to him as the exhibition of unrestrained bad temper which she ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... accepted, in silence, at a time when his trouble absorbed her, touched and humiliated him; and yet, try as he did to consider only Kathryn, he could not disregard Mary-Clare. He could not picture her in a coarse rage; the idea was repellent, but he acknowledged that the dramatic moment, lived through by two stranger-women with much at stake, was beyond his powers of imagination. The great thing that mattered now was that his duty, since a choice must ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... The sofas and chairs were upholstered in dark green leather, the chimney-piece was of carved marble, a few ancient and rather dismal pictures hung almost out of sight on the walls; and generally, the room would have produced an impression of a repellent and ungenial kind of pomp, if it had not been for the extremely human note struck by ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... comfort, but at that moment anything warmer or brighter would have been unreal and utterly repellent to me. I hardly took in the meaning of his words, but it was as if a hand had been stretched out to me, struggling in the deep mire, by one who himself felt solid ground beneath him. Where he stood I also might some day stand, and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... to stay, if you'll let me," said Susan. Mrs. Wylie's suspicion, so plain in those repellent eyes, took all the courage out of her. The great adventure seemed rapidly to be losing its charms. She could not think of herself as content or anything but sad and depressed in such surroundings as these. How much better it would be if she could live out in the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... holding out his hand in token of amity; but he quickly withdrew his hand and retreated out of sight, for a cold, repellent look from Kahle's eyes had met his. From some short distance in the rear, out of the reach of those severe eyes, he attentively viewed his prostrate foe; then he turned on his heels and made off through the ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... spiritual matters. Charles, on the other hand, owed his advantages to his position and not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none of the physical or intellectual graces of Francis I. and Henry VIII. He excelled in (p. 101) no sport, was unpleasant in features and repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity or chivalry lightened his character, no deeds in war or statecraft yet sounded his fame. He was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations had worn the imperial crown; as such, too, he ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... full and very red. As a woman he might have been considered handsome—even beautiful; in a man this beauty was unnatural and repellent. He wore Oriental slippers, fur-lined, and his feet rested on a small ottoman. One long, slender hand lay upon a cushion placed on the chair arm, and a pretty girl was busily engaged in manicuring his excellency's nails. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... great ice river with a sapphire blue, while its higher reaches glistened as though studded with gigantic diamonds. Near at hand, where the Orlegna rushed noisily from thraldom, the broken surface was somber and repellent. In color a dull gray, owing to the accumulation of winter debris and summer dust, it had the aspect of decay and death; it was jagged and gaunt and haggard; the far flung piles of the white moraine imposed a stony barrier against its farther progress. But ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... Browning, emphasized, in this earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in clear phrases had always been a grief to him. ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... there and had entered by the wooden gate, the semicircular carriage-drive, lit by two solitary lamps, and the front of the house itself, half-hidden among the black trees, seemed somewhat sombre and repellent at this silent hour of the morning; but they found a more cheerful radiance streaming out from the hall-door, which had been left open for them; and when they went into the large dining-room, where the ladies had already assembled, there was no lack of either light or color ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... we have found time to know each other very intimately. So you will forgive me if I tell you that the more a friend loves you the more he must be saddened by the terrible iron in your nature. Only the great strength of your passions has saved you from hardening into an ugly and repellent woman. You are a mother; forgive your child; remember that she, too, is about to be ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... may be called unknown. Of what the end will be it is hard to say. Shall we find it bear out the gloomy predictions of Warburton and Giles? or the more hopeful one of Forest? One thing we do know—that, year after year, use is being found for the most repellent country. When we look back at the verdict pronounced against the interior of Australia by the early explorers, and how it has been falsified by time there is ground for hoping that even the most despised portions of our continent ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... advantages to his position and not to his person. Cold, reserved and formal, he possessed none of the physical or intellectual graces of Francis I. and Henry VIII. He excelled in (p. 101) no sport, was unpleasant in features and repellent in manners. No gleam of magnanimity or chivalry lightened his character, no deeds in war or statecraft yet sounded his fame. He was none the less heir of the Austrian House, which for generations had worn ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... respect for their handling of the narrative. By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme. In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother's life. The central fact of Shakespeare's play is Isabella's inflexible and unconditional chastity. Other of Shakespeare's alterations, like the Duke's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... had barely closed behind her, when Krafft broke into the loud, repellent laugh that had so jarred on Maurice at their former meeting. He had risen at once, and now said he must go. But Krafft would not hear of it; he pressed him into his seat again, with ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... to that girl's perfections. She, poor child, herself has seen it and felt it, but never, in her blameless innocence and purity, suspecting the cause, 'There is,' she said to me last night, confidentially, 'something strangely antagonistic and repellent in our natures, some undefined and nameless barrier between our ever understanding each other.' You comprehend, Mr. Hathaway, she does full justice to your intentions and your unquestioned abilities. 'I am not blind,' she said, 'to Mr. Hathaway's gifts, and it is very ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... attended on them. We entered; it was the hour of dinner. The place sparkled with gems, and the naked backs of the women gleamed in the electric light. Course followed upon course; champagne flowed, a fine band played, everything was costly; everything was, in a sense, repellent. ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... not in the least fatigued, but she was too well brought up to remonstrate in any way. The maid was hovering in the background; an elderly woman with a capable face and slightly repellent manner. It was plain to Kate that her relatives would not receive her till they had learned more of the details of her banishment from home from her father, and had made up their minds how to treat her. She felt that even the serving woman ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... first time the woman's face showed some signs of feeling. Her dark eyebrows contracted a little. Her expression was coldly repellent. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... being trifled with, even by one of the Cornelia gens, and yet too lowly to dare to hope that a man like you should ever stoop from your height to desire her for a wife. She has vexed you, of that there can be no doubt; how, I can only guess. If, however, it has been through her repellent pride, that ought not to hurt you, for a woman is like a soldier, who only puts on his armor when he is threatened by an opponent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with sandbags, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... eyes that never seemed to look you quite fully in the face. She had also an obsequious manner. At times it was fairly repellent. ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... generous in me to undertake her defence," Thorn went on, "for she bestows as little of her fair countenance upon me as she can well help. But try as she will, she cannot be so repellent as ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... meadows to the village he was seeking. It was a good six miles, and he had neither time nor inclination to pause and look at the scenery around him, so full of charm to those who live among it, so repellent at first to the stranger's eye, which has not been educated to notice the various tints and colours which sweep over the soft rounded outlines of those purple downs, but is at once caught by the grey hollows of the hills and the patches of white chalk which peep out ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. On November 13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London. From two o'clock till half-past two on that day ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... into Annie's face. To this young woman, whose one idea of matrimony was steadfast loyalty to the man whose life she shared and whose name she bore, there was something repellent and nauseating in a woman permitting herself to be talked ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... happened to be also her husband's way made the case less interesting for some observers. On the other hand, her obvious wifely devotion attracted simple souls to whom the meddling of women in politics would have been nothing but repellent had it not been recommended to them by the facts that Marcella Maxwell was held to be good as well as beautiful; that she loved her husband; and was the excellent mother of ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Wood." Can it be that for that barren honour a human being dyed his hands with murder and risked momentary assassination for the remainder of his lifetime? Well, we have heard of the Man who would be King, and empty titles still are sought by political services equally repellent. ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... in the soldier's voice; it had grown harsh and repellent. "Monsieur, I proceed from Rouen to Rochelle; are ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... influence men of the most opposite characters. It would be difficult to conceive a more complete contrast than that which William Romaine (1714-1795) presented to the two worthies last mentioned. Grave, severe, self-restrained, and, except to those who knew him intimately, somewhat repellent in manners. Romaine would have been quite unfitted for the work which Grimshaw and Berridge, in spite—or, shall we say, in consequence?—of their boisterous bonhomie and occasionally ill-timed jocularity were able to do. The farmers ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... unintelligible muttering in the throat. Of a sudden, darkening, ominous, fateful, the shadow within the entrance had silently advanced until it stood beside them, paused so with folded arms. Simultaneously the wife and the invader saw, realised. Instantly, instinctively, like similar repellent poles, they sprang apart. Enveloped in a maze of surging divergent passions, the two guilty humans stood silent so, staring at the intruder in breathless ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... or gorgeous or delicate, Imposing, intime, dazzling or repellent, That sing—better than music's self, Better than rhyme— The praise and liberty of blue: The turquoise and the peacock's neck, The blood of kings, the deeps Of Southern lakes, the sky That bends over the Azores, The language of the links, the eyes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... influences, Bert was, as a natural consequence, entirely free from those strange misconceptions of the true character of religion which keep so many of the young out of the kingdom. He saw nothing gloomy or repellent in religion. That he should love and serve God seemed as natural to him as that he should love and serve his parents. Of their love and care he had a thousand tokens daily. Of the Divine love and care he learned from them, and that they ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... all the young people of to-day. The study now is how to make our houses more comfortable, and to furnish them most luxuriously. Then, perhaps, there was but one sofa in the house, and that was repellent rather than attractive. Easy-chairs were few and far between. Lounging of any kind was out of the question. In the drawing-room, the furniture was of the same uncomfortable description, and there were none of the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... said Bentham with repellent frankness, "nothing but self- regarding affection will serve." Benevolence he considered a valuable addition "for a dessert." He had in mind the individual, and he did injustice to individuals in certain of their relations. But ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... mischievous cast in the mould of the face, though individually the features were not amiss except for their thinness, and in fact the unpleasantness of the expression had insensibly been softened during this last month, and there was nothing repellent, though much that was quaint, in the slight figure, with the indescribably one-sided air, and stature more befitting ten than fourteen years. What would the visitor think of him? The Doctor called to him, "Come, Peregrine, your uncle, Sir Peregrine Oakshott, has been good ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the stiff formality in the man's tone. How could any woman see past that glacial front and glimpse the big, aching heart beyond? Austin was harsh and repellent when the least bit self-conscious, and now he was striving deliberately ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... only so long as he was alive to bind the antagonistic forces of Naples and Milan together by the link of his own personal influence. He, in a word, was the subtle acid holding in chemical combination many mutually repellent substances. When his influence was withdrawn by death, within a few months they had all fallen apart, the triple alliance was forgotten and Italy was doomed. Even by those with whom he was nominally at war he was resorted to for advice. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... but this only once in three weeks or a month, with "two gentlemen of Gray's Inn." He had, therefore, known what it was to be sociable. But the general tenour of his life was other; proud, reserved, self-contained, repellent; brooding over his own ideas, not easily admitting into his mind the ideas of others. It is indeed an erroneous estimate of Milton to attribute to him a hard or austere nature. He had all the quick sensibility which belongs to the poetic temperament, and longed to be loved that he might love ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... into my eyes, and the shudder to my spine. I gazed at the room inquiringly, and of course I found no answer. It was one of those rooms whose spacious and consistent ugliness grows old into a sort of beauty, formidable and repellent, but impressive; an early Victorian room, large and stately and symmetrical, full—but not too full—of twisted and tortured mahogany, green rep, lustres, valances, fringes, gilt tassels. The green and gold drapery of the two high windows, and here and there a fine curve in a piece of furniture, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... How cold and repellent he seemed: so different to his manner upon the previous night, when the boy had felt drawn towards him. The effect was to make Tom feel more disposed than ever to carry out his plan, and he was longing for the breakfast to be over, so that he could make his start ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... subject of that momentous occasion were left unexplained. A significant look in David's face caused the speaker to break off and turn toward the door, through which came two men, the foremost a hulking, shambling fellow, with an expression of repellent sullenness. He came forward to within about ten feet of David's desk, while his companion halted near the door. David eyed ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... seem to be nothing more than our gain of what is thus pleasant, and our shirking of what is thus painful. But if we examine life as it actually exists about us, we shall see that this classification has been traversed by another. Many things naturally repellent have received a supernatural blessing; many things naturally pleasant have received a supernatural curse; and thus our highest happiness is often composed of pain, and our profoundest misery is nearly always based on pleasure. Accordingly, whereas happiness naturally would seem the test ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... to eye with him in these matters, things were done properly at the castle, with the correct solemnity. To Mr. Beach and Mrs. Twemlow the suggestion that they and their peers should gather together in the same room in which they were to dine would have been as repellent as an announcement from Lady Ann Warblington, the chatelaine, that the house party would ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... with the doctor, for the doctor had gone out. Mountjoy looked at the hat-stand in the passage, and discovered a man's hat and a man's greatcoat. To whom did they belong? Certainly not to Mr. Vimpany, who had gone out. Repellent as it was, Mr. Henley's idea that the explanation of his daughter's conduct was to be found in the renewed influence over her of the Irish lord, now presented itself to Hugh's mind under a new point of view. He tried in vain ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... for him there was one school and no other, one college and no other, one regiment, club, restaurant, music-hall, tailor, hairdresser and no other. Eric was always meeting John Gaymers and never penetrating below the sleek, well-bred and uninterested exterior; they were politely repellent, as though an intrusion from outside would disturb their serenity and the advantageous bargain which they had struck with life; it might cause them to think, and thought was a synonym of death. The Flying Corps, at first sight, was an unassimilating ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... into the beautiful face of the young girl who was talking in this repellent fashion. Then he took her gently by the hand and said ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... of horror, produce their effect through the imagination; and the abundant short interludes are addressed solely to that faculty. All such things pass before us fittingly and easily in reading, whereas they are a drag in representation and appear as disturbing, even as repellent elements. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the reading of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... cinematograph; but some were of the strangest possible types. Mary said to herself that they must be infinitely more interesting in their own secret selves than lookers on could ever know. The hidden realities in all these passionately egotistic selves came to her as she sat watching, in attractive or repellent flashes of light. Then she lost the secret again, and they became mere puppets in a moving show. The only real thing was the Casino, and she began to study the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... feeling in which the lyrical mood may easily come to its own, based and reinforced as it is by the larger poetical structure. The isolated magazine lyric, on the other hand, is like one swallow trying to make a summer. Even the lyrics collected in anthologies are often "mutually repellent particles," requiring through their very brevity and lack of relation with one another, a perpetual re-focussing of the attention, a constant re-creation of lyric atmosphere. These conditions have ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... community life, Congressman Chet Holifield told the Secretary of Defense, and he passed on a warning from his California constituents that "any attempt to forestall this ambition by treating them as a group apart is extremely repellent to them and gives rise to demoralization and hostility."[15-4] If the Department of Defense considered racial information essential, Holifield continued, why not make the determination in a less objectionable manner? ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... that she might be going to cry. I therefore made a point of saying that the butter was better than we had been having lately, and that it looked like being a fine day after all. Anything like weakness is repellent to me, but still, when one sees that one's words have gone home, one is justified in not pressing ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, and had done, was doing, and would continue to do, all in his power to promote it; but that while the Americans were cordially meeting Germany half way, the British were cold, suspicious, and repellent. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... She, in self-defence, was repellent, breathlessly saying with galloping haste: "No—I will not sit: you sit, and I will stand here: do as I say, Hogarth—or I repent and go: I know you, and you know me—or you should. Our talk must be short. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... really annoyed, she noticed it in the impatient tone of his voice, and then she suddenly lost courage. Oh, if he looked at her like that, so coldly, and if his voice sounded so repellent, how difficult it was to find the right word. But it must be done, he looked so pale and was so thin, his round face had positively become long. What had struck her before struck her with double force now, ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... the back of the tent had to be removed in order to let out those who no longer had possession of themselves, and to let in those—to a ten-fold degree—who strove for admission on the rumour spreading that something exceptionally repellent ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... room. Susy is gone, George is gone, Libby Hamersley, Ned Bunce, Henry Robinson. The friends are passing, one by one; our house, where such warm blood and such dear blood flowed so freely, is become a cemetery. But not in any repellent sense. Our dead are welcome there; their life made it beautiful, their death has hallowed it, we shall have them with us always, and there will be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... about it until I saw the girl today. She certainly seems to be a very superior person; she will find the Cove very lonely, I am sure. It is not probable she will stay there long. I must see what I can do for her, but her manner seemed rather repellent, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... encourage it by her presence, has excused herself on the plea that it would bore her to listen. If the work bores the mother it is not surprising that the child attacks it with mind fixed on metal more attractive and eyes seeking the clock. Occupations which are repellent in early life leave behind them a memory calculated to render them forever distasteful. It is therefore a grave mistake not to make music study from the outset throb with vital interest. An appeal to the intellect will quicken the aesthetic instincts, be they never so slender, and almost ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... of disapproval sent a guilty feeling through Lorraine, until she remembered that a slow horse might save her from this man who was all bad,—except, perhaps, just on the surface which was not altogether repellent. She looked around at the tiny basin set like a saucer among the pines. Already the dusk was painting deep shadows in the woods across the opening, and turning the sky a darker blue. Skinner rolled over twice, got ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the Roman spirit. The Roman Republic is internally characterized by the constitutional struggle between the patricians and the plebeians, and externally by the policy of world conquest. Out of the repellent relations between the universal and the individual, which oppose one another as the abstract state and abstract personality, the unhappy imperial period develops. In the Roman Empire and Judaism the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... a courteously deferential manner, but a steady, questioning eye; very neat in his dress and precise in his habits, a gentleman to the tips of his trim finger-nails. In his Anglo-Saxon dislike to effusiveness he had cultivated a self-contained manner which was apt at first acquaintance to be repellent, and he seemed to those who really knew him to be at some pains to conceal the kind heart and human emotions which influenced his actions. It was respect rather than affection which he inspired among his fellow-travellers, for ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thankless heart; the second.... Ah, if you had only given me news of yourself without sending me anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me; instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25] Rude and repellent as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of friendship, with ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... caught it to a greater or less degree. After a few years atrophy of the opinions invariably supervened, and the sufferer became stone dead to everything except the more superficial aspects of those material objects with which he came most in contact. The expression on the faces of these people was repellent; they did not, however, seem particularly unhappy, for they none of them had the faintest idea that they were in reality more dead than alive. No cure for this disgusting fear-of-giving-themselves-away disease has yet ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... had presented me with an expensively repellent gift in the form of a brown earthenware jug, a cross between a Mexican idol and a pitcher. A hideous thing, calculated to frighten children or sober drunken men. I know I should have nearly died of thirst before I could have forced myself ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... passion, she had shaken her head mournfully, and had fled from him to some upper region, absolutely refusing his proffered embrace. But on the same night, before his head had found its pillow, a note had come to him, half repentant, half affectionate, half repellent,—"If, indeed, he would swear to her that his love was honest and manly, then, indeed, she might even yet,—see him through the chink of the doorway with the purport of telling him that he was forgiven." Whereupon, a perfidious pencil being near to his hand, he had written ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... dexterity as extraordinary as it is monotonous. The resulting artificiality is almost incredible. It appears in its most extravagant form in the Thyestes.[187] Scarcely less strained, though from the nature of the subject the extravagance is less repellent, is a passage in the Troades. Achilles' ghost has demanded the sacrifice of Polyxena. Agamemnon hesitates to give orders for the sacrifice. Pyrrhus, Achilles' son, enumerates the great deeds of his father, and asks, indignantly, if such glory is to ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... they passed over the strange towers of Moak and Nolach and the other kings of the swarms that inhabited this weird and terrible land. Within each enclosure surrounding the towers grovelled the rykors, repellent, headless things, beautiful ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was a striking one. The glow of the flame showed the countenance of the Comanche plainly. His features were repellent, the nose being Roman in form, while the cheek-bones were protuberant and the chin retreating. His long black hair dangled about his shoulders, and was parted, as is the custom among his people, in the middle. The face was rendered more repulsive by the stripes and splashes ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... become so unpopular that their political careers ended with their terms. Protect him I must, though the task would be neither easy nor pleasant. It involved a collision with my clients,—a square test of strength between us. What was to me far more repellent, it involved my personally taking a hand in that part of my political work which I had hitherto left to Woodruff ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... eyes wide with a curious conviction that there was a cat in the room, and then all in a moment she met the cool, repellent stare of the black-browed doctor whom ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... Nubra, and over the Sasser-la to the Karakoram pass. The scenery is an exaggeration of that described by Dr Neve as seen on the road from the Zoji-la to Leh. There is a powerful picture of its weird repellent grandeur in the Workmans' book entitled In the Ice World of Himalaya (pp. 28-29, 30-32). The poet who had found ideas for a new Paradiso in the Vale of Kashmir might here get suggestions ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... the park with its automobiles and trucks bearing a red cross. A war hospital was going to be established in the castle. The doctors were dressed in grayish green and armed the same as the officers; they also imitated their freezing hauteur and repellent unapproachableness. There came out of the drays hundreds of folding cots, which were placed in rows in the different rooms. The furniture that still remained was thrown out in a heap under the trees. Squads of ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... though not with the repellent manner usual with him towards Mr. Ashford, 'I must be there, or that boy will be in the thickest of it. Wherever is mischief, there is he. I only wonder he has not broken his neck ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been insisting, you sustain the interest by ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You can give the truth only by giving the whole truth. In treating a common didactic theme you may ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... that the greatest hazard to direct seeding in or near forests would be rodents. Accordingly, in the spring of 1939 and 1940, 400 nuts and 600 nuts, respectively, were coated with a strychnine-alkaloid rodent repellent, and a comparable number of seeds, for both years, were left untreated to serve as checks. The checks were held in sphagnum moss at Beltsville, Md., and the nuts to be treated were packed in sphagnum moss and expressed to Denver for treatment by the Division of Wildlife ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... on a country call. It was cool but Carol huddled on the porch, rocking, meditating, rocking. The house was lonely and repellent, and though she sighed, "I ought to go in and read—so many things to read—ought to go in," she remained. Suddenly Erik was coming, turning in, swinging open the screen ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... when Novalis, in his Todessehnsucht, exclaims, "Death is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little for Scott. We are told that Scott read the Zeitung fuer Einsiedler, but we are not ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and with such good effect, incommoded me now: I would cast it aside and be myself—silent and sullen as my barbarous host. If any malignant purpose was taking form in his mind, let it, and let him do his worst; for when failure first stares a man in the face, it has so dark and repellent a look that not anything that can be added can make him more miserable; nor has he any apprehension. For weeks I had been searching with eager, feverish eyes in every village, in every rocky crevice, in ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... regards himself as a Grand Seigneur with a paramount "Jus Primis Noctis." True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock of that all-important ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... there was, of course, much wild emotionalism and sheer hysteria; and there were always people to whom it was repellent. Backsliders were numerous, and the person who "fell from grace" was more than likely to revert to his earlier wickedness in its grossest forms. None the less, in a rough, unlearned, and materialistic society such spiritual shakings-up were bound to yield much permanent good. Most western ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... thinking the appearance of the headless statue uncanny, popped a stray antique occiput (of which a goodly number, more or less mutilated, are constantly brought to light by the peasants) upon Lollianus' vacant shoulders. Anything more comical and at the same time more repellent than this hybrid statue it would be impossible to imagine, yet Lollianus of the unknown head remains a favourite with the people of Pozzuoli. Leaving the Largo del Municipio, with its weird senator and its dusty palms, we ascend by a zigzag lane between tall featureless ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... nature is the expression of joy, and it is a revelation to us that the Creator's holiness is not repellent and severe. God tries to win you by his Spirit, which clothes the world with beauty, to trust him, to give up your evil that you may find deeper communion with him, and to recognize the charm of goodness which alone is harmony with the cheer and the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... properly. This involves the trouble of hauling it in for examination now and then; but it is better to be at that trouble than be fishing with, mayhap, a mangled lure, or one that has got out of spinning order, and more likely to act as a repellent than an attraction to any fish in the neighbourhood. In trolling any likely ground, the proper way is to tell your man to zigzag it, not pulling the boat in a straight line, but going over the ground diagonally, and thus covering ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... every writer remains silent about the ugly and repellent side of Frederick. The son of a mad father, he was subjected to a terrorism which would have predestined a less strong nature to the lunatic asylum. The terrorism only hardened Frederick into an incurable cynic. It only killed ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... noticed that the voice was rich, with low throaty tones and also he noticed that it held a repellent note. There was veiled hostility—even contempt in the peculiar emphasis of the "you." He swept the Stetson from his head: "I'm afoot," he answered, simply, "I'd like to borrow ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... learned much English, and he knew himself able to converse with Englishmen. He cut his long hair, put away his swords, and went to Yokohama that he might continue his study of the language under more favorable conditions. At Yokohama everything at first seemed to him both unfamiliar and repellent. Even the Japanese of the port had been changed by foreign contact: they were rude and rough; they acted and spoke as common people would not have dared to do in his native town. The foreigners themselves impressed him still ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... sometimes found the practical equality of life in Londongrove a little repellent they were now gratefully moved by the delicate and refined ways in which the sympathy of the people sought to express itself. The better qualities of human nature always develop a temporary good-breeding. Wherever any of the family went, they saw the reflection ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... watched Billy Byrne forging his way through the swift rapids. What a mighty engine of strength and endurance he was! What a man! Yes, brute! And strange to relate Barbara Harding found herself admiring the very brutality that once had been repellent to her. She saw him leap lightly to the opposite bank, and then she saw a quick movement in a bush close at his side. She did not know what manner of thing had caused it, but her intuition warned her that behind that concealing screen lay mortal danger ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the emission of heat from a polished metallic surface is very slight, but from a surface of porcelain, paper, or charcoal, heat is discharged profusely. Even many of the best non-conductors are powerful radiators, and throw off heat with a repellent energy difficult ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... posturing. Moreover, his imperfect left arm—a misfortune which has been a source of great distress to him ever since his birth—is but another one of those physical troubles which his pride makes him anxious to conceal, this only adding to his stilted and repellent attitude. In spite of all these drawbacks, the emperor fences exceedingly well, rides with pluck, and even skill, managing to hold his reins with his poor withered left hand when in uniform, in order to keep his sword-arm ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... ulterior motive in his eulogies, and the priest seemed to suspect the congregation of a frivolous desire to waste his time. He had begun to speculate openly as to why they were there at all. Once, when a particularly repellent statuette of a nude female with an unwholesome green skin had been offered at two dollars and had found no bidders—the congregation appearing silently grateful for his statement that it was the only specimen of its kind ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... was eating his dinner hurriedly, staring at his plate in a moodiness which he did not take the trouble to conceal. With all the youthful beauty of his face, there was a boorishness in his ill-humour which in a less commanding figure would have been repellent—an evident pride in the sincerity of the scowl upon his brow. When his meal was over he rose with a muttered excuse and went out into the yard, where a few minutes afterward Carraway was ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... sympathy. He could give us the erotic fervour with which Romeo looks death in the eyes, but the mood preceding and indeed leading up to that fervour he could not give us—the mood which finds the world barren, ugly, and so repellent that death itself appears beautiful by comparison, the mood to which Christianity makes its strongest appeal. But it was not the subject which led to Gounod's failure in "Romeo and Juliet." He failed in every opera excepting "Faust," and he failed because, lacking perfect sincerity and perfect ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... God, love a woman, or find a real friendship, to make life endurable. God was too dim, too nebulous, for Hollister's need. Friendship was almost unattainable. How could a man with a face so mutilated that it was grotesque, repellent, cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could see, she would cease to love. And there would be nothing left for him—nothing. He would live on, obedient to the law of his being, a sentient organism, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... where grave-looking John Willows stood looking like a patriarch amongst his people, beside his friend the gray-headed Vicar, a short, almost dwarfed, thick-set, large-headed man, with a shiny bald head fringed by grisly, harsh-looking hair,—and whose dark, wrinkled face was made almost repellent by the shaggy brows that overhung his fierce, piercing, black eyes—took a step forward menacingly, and holding out his left hand, palm upwards, began beating it with his right fist, fiercely shouting ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... subjects, even the most repellent, when the circumstances of life thrust them before us, can thus be observed with curiosity and treated with art. The calling forth of these aesthetic functions softens the violence of our sympathetic reaction. If death, for instance, did not exist and did not thrust itself upon our thoughts ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... called, and a young man of about his own age entered. Without being in the least ill-looking, there was something repellent about the new comer. His eyes were shifty and too close together to be trustworthy. Otherwise no fault could ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... going to spring upon the audience, a long, skinny finger would be shaken before their faces, or pointed as if to drive his words into their hearts. His speech was a torrent of epigram, sarcasm, invective. He was bitter; if you knew nothing about the man or his cause, you would find this repellent and shocking. You had to know what his life had been—an unceasing conflict with oppression; he had got his Socialist education in jail, where he had been sent for trying to organize the wage-slaves of a gigantic corporation. His rage was the rage of a tender-hearted poet, a ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... despatch to Viscount Strangford, our envoy at Lisbon. But, fortunately for us, Napoleon committed the blunder which so often marred his plans: he pushed them too far: he required the Prince Regent to adopt a course of conduct repellent to an honourable man, namely, to confiscate the merchandise and property of British merchants who had long trusted the good faith of the House of Braganza. To this last demand the prince opposed a dignified resistance, though on all other points ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... movements, made the laces and gauzes and silks swirl about their graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the card-players at every unexpected coup, the jingle of gold, mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing touch to the vertigo of that multitude, intoxicated by all the ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... it was time to be moved, and Webster was a man of his size. Had these two great men of New England been matched in training as they were matched in endowment, and had they then faced each other in debate, they would not have been found to differ so greatly in power. Their natures were electrically repellent, but from which did the greater force radiate? Their education differed so radically that it is impossible to compare them, but if you translate the Phi Beta Kappa address into politics, you have something stronger than Webster,—something that recalls Chatham; ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... electro-magnetic energy that holds worlds in their orbits, and neutralizes the power of gravitation, is but one of those powers that awaits the growing genius of man to utilize. The magnetic force is the attractive or centripetal power; the electric force is the repellent or centrifugal power. A machine will be invented, in the near future, that will combine these into a single electro-magnetic force, and with this force the power of gravitation will be neutralized. Then the world's traffic will be as readily carried in the air ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... aloof. Of late years John Barton had had a repellent power about him, felt by all, except to the few who had either known him in his better and happier days, or those to whom he had given his sympathy and his confidence. People did not care to enter the doors of one whose very ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a southern window that looks out on a wide-spreading and ancient elm, my glory and pride. Not one bird had I seen on it that cold, repellent middle of March. But Mrs. Miller looked up, and said: "Your robins have come!" Sure enough I could ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the literature of the imagination composed for them, a radiant literature made of numberless romaunts, songs, and love-tales. They had no taste for the doleful tunes of the Anglo-Saxon poet; his sadness was repellent to them, his despairs they abhorred; they turned the page and shut the book with great alacrity. They were happy men; everything went well with them; they wanted a literature meant ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... moves slowly; but, after analyzing the book, it may be claimed for this "Francesca da Rimini," that it reflects the age in which the tragedy occurred. Much artistic construction is shown in the contrast of the Polenta and Malatesta families, and, repellent as he is at times, D'Annunzio has moments of great poetic fervour; his fire swings forth in many of Francesca's speeches, that alternate with the languor ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... edited by Mai (see Fragment I) seems to make him say that he has read every available book upon the subject; and, like Thukydides, he is critical, he is eclectic, and often supports his statements by the citation or introduction of documentary testimony. His superstition is debasing and repellent, but works harm only in limited spheres, and it is counterbalanced by the fact that he had been a part of many events recounted and had held high governmental offices, enjoying a career which furnished him with standards by which to judge the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... difficult," replied Crevel. "Valerie is a masterpiece in her way. My good mother, twenty-five years of virtue are always repellent, like a badly treated disease. And your virtue has grown very mouldy, my dear child. But you shall see how much I love you. I will manage to get you your ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes, whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... devotions, for there was no doubt that he admired her as the antithesis of all to which he had been accustomed from birth; unquestionably she must take her part in his redemption. The thought thrilled her, and she paused a moment looking out over the water. Faded, even repellent, as that husk was, not only was his genius so far unimpaired, but she believed that she had caught a glimpse of a great soul dwelling apart in that polluted tenement. From the latter she shrank with all the aversion of uncontaminated girlhood, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... read the signs correctly. The tracks she found were old, for the most part, and they led in no particular direction, nowhere uniting into anything like a trail. She wondered, if she could bring herself to drink the blood of a jack-rabbit, and if it would quench her thirst. But the thought was repellent, and, besides, she was not a good shot with a revolver. Nor did the cactus offer any relief, since it was only just coming into bloom, and as ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... from a county town. Yet what of that? Five miles of irregular upland, during the long, inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who "conceive and ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... form and in literary English of the old Irish legends, preserving the atmosphere of the original tales as much as possible, but clearing them from repetitions, redundant expressions, idioms interesting in Irish but repellent in English, and, above all, from absurdities, such as the sensational fancy of the later editors and bards added to the simplicities of ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... eyes were fastened upon me with something of the fabled fascination of a serpent's. I knew instinctively that he would have the power, and use it, of probing every wound he might suspect in me to the quick. Yet he interested me; and there was something not entirely repellent to me about him. Above all for Olivia's sake, should we find her still living, I was anxious to study his character. It might happen, as it does sometimes, that my honor and straight-forwardness might prove a match ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... however, was her perfect ease. Her slightest movement was grace itself. Her entire self-possession was indicated by the manner in which she greeted the men who sought her attention, and many there were. She could be perfectly polite, yet as repellent as ice, or she could smile with a fascination that even Madge felt would be hard to resist. This girl, who was such an immense contrast to herself, wholly fixed her attention as she stood for a few moments, like a queen, surrounded by ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... scuddering over the fields. His voice, the very roughened bitterness of it; his eyes, with their peremptory challenge, their sore accusingness; the very contradictions of the man's personality, now delightful, now repellent, and, breathing through them all, the passion she must needs divine—of these various impressions, small and great, she was the struggling captive. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from the box an old silver crucifix. It must have been the work of some craftsman whose art was pure and fine as the silver he had wrought in. But that was not what Anne saw. She had always found something painful and repellent in those crucifixes of wood which distort and deepen the lines of ivory, or in those of ivory which gives again the very pallor of human death. But the precious metal had somehow eternalised the symbol of the crucified body. She saw more than the torture, the exhaustion, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... open, his tongue swelled, his whole countenance became convulsed with the most unparalleled, and for that reason indescribable, expression of agony, whilst the yellowness of his complexion deepened to a livid, lurid black, that was so inconceivably repellent and hellish that I sprang away from the bed—appalled. There was then a gasping, rasping noise, and a voice that, despite its unnatural hollowness, I identified as that of Ralph, broke forth: 'I have been wanting to speak to you for ages, but ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... going dead white. She hadn't yet met Naka Machi, but his name told her enough. The thought of a Japanese, however, was far less repellent than the cold, calm way in which Barter spoke of using the offspring of ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... constitute with me a never-failing source of interest and amusement. They are composed of Dutch and Irish, often located on adjoining townships, but keeping their borders as clearly defined as though the wall of China were drawn between them. No two bodies exist in nature more repellent; neither time, nor the necessities of traffic, which daily arise amongst a growing population, can induce a repeal of their tacit non-intercourse system, or render them even tolerant of each other. I have understood that Pat has on occasions of high festivity been known to extend his ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... irritation of the nerves, such as you will first learn to comprehend (its how and its why) some stage or two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record, which for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our human being, and which immediately I will show you, is but too repellent of laughter; or, even if laughter had been possible, it would have been such laughter as often times is thrown off from the fields of ocean[10]—laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric radiance for one moment round the eddies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... These facts, repellent as they are, must be remembered when we call to mind what happened in the next five years. The horror of that night could not be obliterated by splendid ceremonies, by studious attention, or by all the pomp and gaiety of the court. Napoleon was ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... and law and justice? And this stranger,—this wretched, haggard-faced, drunken creature, who had been brought by the mysterious currents of life to her door,—what was there in him that so compelled her protecting interest? What was it within him, deeply hidden under the repellent exterior of his being, that had so awakened in her that ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... correct information, and a pharisaical contempt for people who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... set up in opening the Addition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... hospital looked bare and grim, the smell of iodoform was more repellent than ever, after the sweet scents of the country. Claire knew her way by this time, and ascended by lift to the women's ward, where Sophie lay. Beside almost every bed one or two visitors were seated, but Sophie was alone. Down the length of the ward Claire caught a glimpse of ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... careers ended with their terms. Protect him I must, though the task would be neither easy nor pleasant. It involved a collision with my clients,—a square test of strength between us. What was to me far more repellent, it involved my personally taking a hand in that part of my political work which I had hitherto left to Woodruff ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... honestly; and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to be true to it, that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a year to see her, and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital, was the repellent ghost. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... consider what such an appearance can portend, and who the man is who is thus presented. I cannot explain to you why this appearance inspires me with so great a revulsion. I can only say that in its presence I seem to be brought face to face with some abysmal and repellent wickedness. It is not that the form he wears is hideous. Last night I saw him exactly as I saw him at Oxford—his face waxen pale, with a sneering mouth, the same lofty forehead, and hair brushed straight up so as almost to appear standing on end. ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... opposite characters. It would be difficult to conceive a more complete contrast than that which William Romaine (1714-1795) presented to the two worthies last mentioned. Grave, severe, self-restrained, and, except to those who knew him intimately, somewhat repellent in manners. Romaine would have been quite unfitted for the work which Grimshaw and Berridge, in spite—or, shall we say, in consequence?—of their boisterous bonhomie and occasionally ill-timed jocularity were able to do. The farmers and working men of Haworth or Everton would assuredly have gone ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... life. In "The Minister's Black Veil," for example, a clergyman startles his congregation by appearing with a dark veil over his face. The veil itself is a familiar object; on a woman or a bonnet it would pass unnoticed; but on the minister it becomes a portentous thing, at once fascinating and repellent. Yesterday they knew the man as a familiar friend; to-day he is a stranger, and they fear him with a vague, nameless fear. Forty years he wears the mysterious thing, dies and is buried with it, and in all that time they never have a glimpse of his ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... license, that is, of departing from the strict literal forms of the original writer, whether as to expressions, images, or even as to the secondary thoughts, for the sake of reproducing them in some shape less repellent to a modern ear, and therefore virtually sustaining the harmony of the composition by preventing the attention from settling in a disproportionate degree upon what might have a startling effect to a taste trained under modern discipline—this question has always been pending as a question ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, of fanciful imagination, of simple, neighbourly kindliness. ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy. In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in clear phrases had always been a grief to ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... cast-iron sculptures Major Amberson had set up in opening the Addition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent dinge upon the folds of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Instead of that, her little sister used to frequent it, for Andy was very ingenious in making chairs, tables, and other furniture for doll houses, and little Sophy thought him the nicest man in the world. Maggie was very cool and repellent to him, with little spells of relenting. Sometimes Andy felt himself so much snubbed that he would leave after a five minutes' call, in which event Maggie Byrne was sure to relax a little at the door, and Sylvia or Sophy was almost certain to ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... individual animal form, and then an individual higher animal form, and so on until now they are the particular individual human form contemplating the subject. This idea, which has been taught by many teachers, is repellent to the average mind, for obvious reasons, and naturally so, for it has no foundation ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Bath, we are led, however reluctantly in the case of ladies now evangelical, to conclude, their attention has formerly been directed to gentility-mongering at these places of fashionable resort; the tanyard acting as a repellent to husbands of a social position superior to their own, and their great fortunes operating in deterring worthy persons of their own station from addressing them; or being the means of inducing them to be too prompt with refusals, these amiable middle-aged young ladies are now "on hands," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... animal magnetism (although we have no doubt that it belongs to that mysterious science) experience has taught us all, that there are some natures that possess certain repellent qualities, which never can be brought into affinity with our own—persons, whom we like or dislike at first sight, with a strong predilection for the one almost amounting to love, with a decided aversion to the other, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... noble part in the history of the world, their spirit will live for ever, but their formulae and organization wax old like a garment. Their moral austerity—that touch of contempt for the unsubstantial aesthetic, which has always distinguished Protestantism—is naturally repellent to the irresponsible rich and to artistic people of the weaker type, and the face of Protestantism has ever been firm even to hardness against the self-indulgent, the idler, and the prolific, useless poor. The rich ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... rood of Waltham!" he roared, "if any knave among you lays a finger-end upon the edge of my gown, I will crush his skull like a filbert!" With his thick knotted arms, his thundering voice, and his bristle of red hair, there was something so repellent in the man that the three brothers flew back at the very glare of him; and the two rows of white monks strained away from him like poplars in a tempest. The Abbot only sprang forward with shining eyes; but the chancellor and the master hung ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ideals of virtue and good taste—that particular mental atmosphere mysteriously, inevitably woven round the soul by the conditions of special breeding and special life. If, then, this affair were real it was sordid, and if it were sordid it was repellent to suppose that her family could be mixed up in it; but her people were mixed up in it, therefore ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... feels no longing to climb them, as one would long to climb a picturesque mountain in Europe, because one knows that upon their scorching sides there is no verdure and no fountain breaks from beneath their crags. Beautiful as they are, they are repellent; they invite no familiarity; they speak of the hardness, the grimness, the silent aloofness of nature. It is only when they form the distant background of a view, and especially when the waning light of evening clothes ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... found a difficulty in explaining why. In trying to account to myself for my own sensations, I could only put it that one felt in the man a complete absence of the sympathetic faculty. There was nothing outwardly repellent about him. He was not ill-mannered, or vicious, or dull—indeed, he could be remarkably interesting. But I received the impression that there could be no human creature whom he would not sacrifice in the ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... of this kind of life, he began to want some more fierce excitement. He had tried making downright love to Elsie, with no great success as yet, in his own opinion. The girl was capricious in her treatment of him, sometimes scowling and repellent, sometimes familiar, very often, as she used to be of old, teasing and malicious. All this, perhaps, made her more interesting to a young man who was tired of easy conquests. There was a strange fascination in her eyes, too, which at times was quite irresistible, so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... to say," answered the girl with a scowl. Her manner was still fierce and repellent, and she gave Betty a certain jealous regard out of her black eyes which the latter was at a loss to explain. "Where's Mr. Tom?" ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... painted white, were now also stained and splotched with great blotches of green and russet dampness. The only light that lit the place came in through a small, narrow, slatted window close to the ceiling, and opposite the doorway which he had entered. It was all gloomy, ugly, repellent. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... charming dancer, by-the- by, and so am I: you can't think how well I did—I was astonished at myself. My lord was very complimentary too—rather too much so in fact—and I thought proper to be a little haughty and repellent; but I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty, cross wife ready to perish ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... the same, the question would stand affirmatively answered, for that woman who had been a sinner was forgiven. We are dealing with the scriptural record as a history, and nothing said therein warrants the really repellent though common imputation of unchastity to the devoted soul of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... of that? Five miles of irregular upland, during the long, inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who "conceive ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... born have been determined by his own thoughts, desires, and affections in anterior existences, and that instant by instant all are determining their future births. The reader to whom the idea of reincarnation is repellent or unfamiliar may not be prepared to go this length, but he must at least grant that in the span of a single lifetime thought and desire determine action, and consequently, position in space. The ambitious man goes from the village to the city; the lover of nature seeks the wilds; the misanthrope ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... to insist on this is not to ignore the unmeasured advance of the Greeks in development of society and art. On that head the Hymns, like all Greek poetry, bear their own free testimony. But, none the less, Greek religion and myth present features repellent to us, which derive their origin, not from savagery, but from the more crude horrors of the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... but a lovely fortress. Yet there was a coldness, an angularity, that told me these Zervs, as Nokomee had called her race, lacked true sympathy for life forms, lacked emotion as we know it in art. Yet it was beautiful, if repellent because so alien, so pure in design, so lacking in the sympathetic understanding of man's nature. This was a city no earthman could ever call home. It lacked something. There were no dogs, no strolling women or running children, it lay ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... that prompts him to be sober and temperate, then his phantasm resembles a man; but on the other hand, if he has given way to his carnal and bestial cravings, then his phantasm is earthbound, in the guise of some terrifying and repellent animal—maybe a wolf, bear, dog, or cat—all of which shapes are far ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... continued I can only surmise. All my ideas were confused. It seemed an age before any rational sense was felt. During these terrible hours there was frequent recurrence of those harsh, grating accents and repellent looks from sinister faces. Of these experiences I can give no clearer account. The brain-pressure caused by the temple blow produced queer sensations ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... of my life, he had not gone out of my memory. Often, as I walked my rounds, would the picture of that dimly-lit room rise unbidden. Often would I find myself looking once more into that ghastly face, so worn, so wasted and haggard, and yet so far from repellent. All the incidents of that last night would reconstitute themselves with a vividness that showed the intensity of the impression that they had made at the time. I would have gladly forgotten the whole affair, for every incident of it was fraught with discomfort. But ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... over dead ashes, had its functions superseded by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his wife's easy withdrawal ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... not endure that. We must find another use for that room. Susy is gone, George is gone, Libby Hamersley, Ned Bunce, Henry Robinson. The friends are passing, one by one; our house, where such warm blood and such dear blood flowed so freely, is become a cemetery. But not in any repellent sense. Our dead are welcome there; their life made it beautiful, their death has hallowed it, we shall have them with us always, and there will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... impossible. It was God's intent that every plant should blossom and bear fruit, and that every human being should mate and produce offspring. The plant that fails in any of its functions is usually blighted in some way, and the woman who fails of life's full experiences seems to show some repellent peculiarity. But she need not, once she sets a watch upon herself; she has a conscious soul and mind, and can control such tendencies if ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... doubtless his recklessness was washed into him on the high seas, where in his time men made a crony of death, and drank merrily over dodging it for another night. To me his roars of laughter without cause were as repellent as a boy's drum; yet many faces that were long in my company brightened at his coming, and women, with whom, despite my yearning, I was in no wise a favorite, ran to their doors to listen to him as readily as to the bell-man. Children scurried from him if his mood was savage, but to him ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... pride of authorship, as we may feel and enjoy it, there was none, when beyond the walls of a convent or those of a native town their names were unknown, their personality unrecognised. Except to the theologian or ritualist how repellent and illegible this mass of printed and manuscript matter must ever seem! How deficient in human sympathy and pertinence! These treatises, so erudite, so prolix, and so multifarious, were composed by men (Universal, Irrefragable, or Seraphic Doctors), and after a certain date by women too ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... to get into the car, but Rick stopped him. "Let's go to the drugstore. I want to get a spray can of insect repellent." ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... but there is also much homely sagacity evinced in viewing what may be called the practical aspects of the subject, and answering from experience the objections which experience may raise. The writer is so deeply in earnest, has meditated so intensely on the subject, and is so free from the repellent qualities which are apt to embitter theological controversies, that even when his ideas come into conflict with the most obstinate prejudices and rooted convictions, there is nothing in his mode of stating or enforcing them to give ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... can improve. I'll tell you what I mean. My wife is a modest, intelligent woman, of good manners, and she is always neat, and tastefully dressed. Now, if she goes to take the cars, she is not permitted to go into a clean car with decent people, but is ordered into one that is repellent, and is forced into company that any refined woman would shrink from. But along comes a flauntingly dressed woman, of known disreputable character, whom my wife would be disgraced to know, and she takes any place that money will buy. It ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... some of his finest book etchings. The pompous London merchant, the frigid influence he exercises on those about him, the distrustful look of the nurse as she brings baby Paul into his presence, the shrinking form of little Florence as the frightened child cowers with folded hands behind her repellent father's chair, are finely depicted in the etching of The Dombey Family. In Mrs. Dombey at Home, the proud, haughty beauty chafing under the consciousness that she has been sacrificed to the wealth ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... tell, though his thick, short hair is iron gray and his beard many shades whiter. Short of stature, with very high shoulders, that suggest physical deformity, squarely built and stout, a square, rugged face, with light, steely eyes and overhanging brows. It is a repellent face and form, and ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... went on, "I have been finding out my mistake, and I have wanted to tell you so; but you have always been so cold and repellent that I dared not. You are rough and stern, Roger, not a bit ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... have expected Christ, who opened His arms wide for publicans and harlots, to have welcomed this fair, ingenuous seeker with some kindly word. But He has none for him. We adopt the reading of the Revised Version, in which our Lord's first word is repellent. It is in effect—'There is no need for your question, which answers itself. There is one good Being, the source and type of every good thing, and therefore the good, which you ask about, can only be conformity to His will. You need ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... disapproval sent a guilty feeling through Lorraine, until she remembered that a slow horse might save her from this man who was all bad,—except, perhaps, just on the surface which was not altogether repellent. She looked around at the tiny basin set like a saucer among the pines. Already the dusk was painting deep shadows in the woods across the opening, and turning the sky a darker blue. Skinner rolled over twice, got up and shook himself with a satisfied snort and went away to feed. She might, ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel's, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... required, or in any other way assist me, so far as she could. And here I could not avoid being impressed afresh with the extraordinary change that misfortune had wrought in this girl; for whereas while on board the City of Cawnpore she had maintained a demeanour of haughty and repellent reserve that was almost insolent, she now exhibited a gentle submissiveness and amiability of manner, with a quiet, steadfast courage under circumstances, of peculiar and terrible hardship and privation for a gently-nurtured ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... that of a younger woman, slender, firm, and supple. The copper in this bronze is largely intermixed with gold, thus producing a chastened lustre which is admirably suited to the richness of the embroidered garment. The kneeling genius of Gizeh is as rude and repellent as the Lady Takushet is delicate and harmonious. He has a hawk's head, and he worships the sun, as is the duty of the Heliopolitan genii. His right arm is uplifted, his left is pressed to his breast. The style of ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... mind seemed bred without restraint in the caldron of his diseased brain. His was a vital sturdiness which, for ten years, refused death, but during the last of these he was physically and morally repellent. Sentiment, that too-often fear of unkind gossip, or ignorant falsifying of consequences, stood between this family and the proper institutional and professional care, which could have given him more than any family's love, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... she couldn't help it, she didn't know why she became at once so taciturn and repellent. "Oh, she'll come again," she said in self-excuse, and with vague ideas of atonement, after Lois had gone away. Besides, the things that Lois had said in the way of solicitude, sympathy, and God made no appeal to her. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... turbulent history of the past, and, indeed, few things could be more incompatible than turbulence and modern warfare. It demands on the part of the masses of combatants an obedience and a disregard of life which are repellent to human nature, and the Belgians are above all things human. Germany is governed by soldiers, and France by officials. Unlike the frogs in the fable, the Belgians are content to ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... slam the door of heaven in anybody's face; it stands wide open. But there is a mystic barrier, unseen, but most real, more repellent than cherub and flaming sword, which makes it impossible for any foot to cross that threshold except the foot of the man whose heart and nature have been made Christlike, and fitted for heaven by simple ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father's Will and Scheme; ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... from the stormy North, This modern Cyclops marched repellent forth, To slake his thirst for blood and plundered wealth, Not as the soldier, but by fraud and stealth; To waft the gales of death with horror rife On helpless age, and wage with women strife: To leave at Baltimore and New Orleans The drunkard's name, ...
— The American Cyclops, the Hero of New Orleans, and Spoiler of Silver Spoons • James Fairfax McLaughlin
... fastened upon me with something of the fabled fascination of a serpent's. I knew instinctively that he would have the power, and use it, of probing every wound he might suspect in me to the quick. Yet he interested me; and there was something not entirely repellent to me about him. Above all for Olivia's sake, should we find her still living, I was anxious to study his character. It might happen, as it does sometimes, that my honor and straight-forwardness might prove a match ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... this exhibition of feeling would probably not have affected the casual spectator to quite the same degree. He would have seen merely a very faulty and amateurish portrait of a singularly repellent little boy of about eleven, who stared out from the canvas with an expression half stolid, half querulous; a bulgy, overfed little boy; a little boy who looked exactly what he was, the spoiled child of parents who had far more money than ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... in causing men to move generally presents one of two aspects, viz., attractive and repellent. "Men are either drawn or driven to break the ties which bind them to their native locality." Again, the causes of migration are classified as positive advantages and satisfactions, and negative discomforts ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... to books of travel, my father asked me to parse Kane's "Arctic Voyages." I found the volumes cold and repellent. They gave me a rooted prejudice against the North Pole which even the adventure of Doctor Cook has never enabled ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... contained, the reading of those pages was to be a repellent task to him; it was a task to which he could not bring himself at the moment; to-night, in the privacy of his own chamber, he would sift Mr. Taggett's baleful fancies. Thus temporizing, Mr. Slocum dropped the volume into his pocket, locked ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... belief in immortality is not found deeply rooted, positive, unquestioning. The belief is implanted in man by the wish; it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be, is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is inevitable; and all human beings that ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... coarse grass and weeds, and the poor horses were hard put to get enough, even though they grazed all night. The country, which was more broken and seamed with gullies and rivers of sand, Sha Ho, had taken on a hard, sunbaked, repellent look, brightened only by splendid crimson and blue thistles. The wells were farther apart, and sometimes they were dry, and there were anxious hours when we were not sure of water for ourselves, still less for the horses. One well near a salt lake was rather ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... such study, to be scientific, shall be made repellent by the use of technical terms the significance of which the reader is left to guess at, but finds unexplained. I fear such treatment of vocal physiology has brought it into disrepute. The aim of the writer will be to give a clear scientific treatment of the subject, which shall not be ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... democratic surely men of less importance should be able to do the same? The snob is about as offensive a person as could be described. He is usually a hypocrite or an ignoramus—sometimes both. His pomposity is naturally repellent. We easily become accustomed to dodging such characters. The detriment is theirs—not ours. They are left by the wayside and sooner or later wake up to the fact that they stand alone in ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... but at that moment anything warmer or brighter would have been unreal and utterly repellent to me. I hardly took in the meaning of his words, but it was as if a hand had been stretched out to me, struggling in the deep mire, by one who himself felt solid ground beneath him. Where he stood I also might some day stand, and that thought ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... hundred thousand coloured men were already serving, as combatants or as labourers, on military work in about equal number. They were needed, for volunteering was getting slack, and the work of guarding and repairing railway lines was specially repellent to Northern volunteers. The coloured regiments fought well; they behaved well in every way. Atrocious threats of vengeance on them and their white officers were officially uttered by Jefferson Davis, but, except for one hideous massacre wrought in the hottest of hot blood, only a ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... fascination, every move that the stranger made. Once her eyes met his and she shuddered slightly, there was a world of refined cruelty in their depths. She looked out of the window as the train rushed on through the darkness, then almost against her will turned her eyes again in the direction of the repellent stranger. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... more calmly. "You have sought to wrong me in my own home. Your words and manner have ever been an insult to the cause for which my father may die—O God!" she exclaimed, with a cry of agony—"for which he may now be dead! Go, go," she added, with a strong repellent gesture. "We have nothing in common: you measure everything ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... this discursion because, for a period, the paths of the two composers were parallel. Tschaikovsky did not admire Moussorgsky, spoke slightingly of his abilities, though he conceded that with all his roughness he had power of a repellent order. Turgenieff did not understand him. The opera La Khovanchtchina, notwithstanding the preponderance of the chorus—in Russia choral singing is the foundation of musical culture—I found more "operatic" ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... interest and amusement. They are composed of Dutch and Irish, often located on adjoining townships, but keeping their borders as clearly defined as though the wall of China were drawn between them. No two bodies exist in nature more repellent; neither time, nor the necessities of traffic, which daily arise amongst a growing population, can induce a repeal of their tacit non-intercourse system, or render them even tolerant of each other. I have understood that Pat has on occasions of high ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... was the repellent, truculent countenance of the Captain-General Urquiza, who was the Dictator's right-hand man, a ferocious cut-throat if ever there was one, who had upheld his authority for many years in the rebellious upper provinces, but who had just now raised the standard of revolt against him and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... alluring, engaging, enticing, magnetic, prepossessing, personable, winning, mesmeric, taking, seductive, bewitching. Antonyms: unattractive, repellent, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... shooting at an Indian was strikingly different from boyish dreams of doing it. He had acted so swiftly that it seemed it must have been instinctive. Yet thinking back, slowly realizing the nature of the repellent feeling within him, he remembered a bursting gush of hot blood, a pantherish desire to leap, to strike—and then cool, stern watchfulness. The whole business had ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... successful as an instructor of the higher mathematics. Although the theories of light and motion were doubtless a branch of learning which the cadets particularly detested, his methods of teaching made it even more repellent. A thorough master of his subject, he lacked altogether the power of aiding others to master it. No flashes of humour relieved the tedium of his long and closely-reasoned demonstrations. He never descended to the level of his pupils' understanding, nor did he appreciate ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... incognizable. Obey Thy genius, for a minister it is Unto the throne of Fate. Draw towards thy soul, And centralize, the rays which are around Of the divinity. Keep thy spirit pure From worldly taint, by the repellent strength Of virtue. Think on noble thoughts and deeds, Ever. Count o'er the rosary of truth; And practice precepts which are proven wise, It matters not then what thou fearest. Walk Boldly and wisely in that light thou hast;— ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... didactic poetry, as we have just been insisting, you sustain the interest by ignoring all the parts which will not bear a steady gaze. Whatever fascinates the eye, or agitates the heart by mimicry of life is selected and emphasized, and what is felt to be intractable or repellent is authoritatively set aside. The poet has an unlimited discretion. But on a theme so great as man he has no discretion at all. This resource is denied. You can give the truth only by giving the whole ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... rare and positive beauty, had now shut down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls. "And what has this little girl to do with ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... their root in a common fallacy. Both spring from taking stages of a growth or movement as something cut off and fixed. The first fails to see the promise contained in feelings and deeds which, taken by themselves, are uncompromising and repellent; the second fails to see that even the most pleasing and beautiful exhibitions are but signs, and that they begin to spoil and rot the moment they are ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey
... trepidation nor embarrassment. Her manner was haughty and repellent, as though designed to rebuke impertinence. Next morning, when informed of the peculiar circumstances attending Gen'l Darrington's death, I felt it incumbent upon me to communicate to the magistrate the facts which ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... himself into a more comfortable position and began to count stars.... Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven.... What was the use of stressing the affair, anyhow? She was only a half-breed. In ten years she would be fat, shapeless, dirty, and repellent. Her conversation would be reduced to grunts. The glance he had had at ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... of the great attracting powers of the surfaces of the poles. He mentions the probability of a succession of decompositions and recompositions throughout the fluid,—agreeing in that respect with Grotthuss[A]; and supposes that the attractive and repellent agencies may be communicated from the metallic surfaces throughout the whole of the menstruum[B], being communicated from one particle to another particle of the same kind[C], and diminishing in strength from the place of the poles to the middle ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... the sacrifice of a thousand possible sympathies, of things only to be enjoyed through sympathy, from which they detached themselves, in intellectual pride, in loyalty to a mere theory that would take nothing for granted, and assent to no approximate or hypothetical truths. In their unfriendly, repellent attitude towards the Greek religion, and the old Greek morality, surely, they had been but faulty economists. The Greek religion was then alive: then, still more than in its later day of dissolution, the higher view of it was possible, even for the philosopher. Its story ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... the diffusion of these things among children involves serious dangers alike to their morals and to their health. Speaking generally, upon adults pornographic objects have rather a repellent than a sexually exciting effect. In the case of children in whom no sexual sensibility has as yet developed, they exercise no sexual stimulation, but may later give rise to ill effects. But it is to ripening children and ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Press, and pulpit it was suggested that General Botha's administration was too pro-English and needed overhauling. The Dutch peasants along the countryside were inflamed by hearing that their gallant leader desired to Anglicize the country. Nothing was more repellent to the ideas of the backveld Dutch, and so at small meetings in the country districts resolutions were passed stating that the Botha administration had outlived its usefulness. These resolutions reaching the Press from day to day had the effect ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... its intense eyes, there was the possibility of rare charm and fascination, and beauty of a very unusual kind; but at the present moment, as she looked carelessly and almost sullenly at her visitor, there was something repellent. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... position, then, for a man is to be God's slave. The harsh, repellent features of that wicked institution assume an altogether different character when they become the features of my relation to Him. Absolute submission, unconditional obedience, on the slave's part; and on the part of the Master complete ownership, the right of life and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... wall the carriage had stopped. A huge, repellent Ethiopian was standing before an opened doorway, through which a ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... when the Holy Spirit is heeded and honoured, the night passes, the shadows flee away, the day dawns, "the Sun of Righteousness arises with healing in His wings," and, saved and sanctified, men walk in His light in safety and joy. Doctrines which before were repellent to the carnal mind, and but foolishness, or a stumbling-block to the heart of unbelief, now become precious and satisfying to the soul; and truths which before were hid in impenetrable darkness, or seen only as through ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... nature is essentially that of a child, and, childlike, he craves for human love as the first necessity of his life. To those who set up an idol of their own fancy and worship that as his image, he will be cold and repellent, but to those who know him as he really is he will return their love with all the warmth and purity of his childlike nature. Two things are intolerable to a healthy-minded child—rough brutality and mawkish caressing; ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... striking one. The glow of the flame showed the countenance of the Comanche plainly. His features were repellent, the nose being Roman in form, while the cheek-bones were protuberant and the chin retreating. His long black hair dangled about his shoulders, and was parted, as is the custom among his people, in the middle. The face was rendered more repulsive by the ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... physical and mental force; force of events, chance, FORTUNE; force of accumulated property, &c. In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence. This damaging equation is repellent to the conscience, and causes merit to complain; for, although it may be the duty of the strong to aid the weak, they prefer to do it out of generosity,—they never will endure a comparison. Give them equal opportunities of labor, and equal wages, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... and Frances were together somewhere, golfing, walking or riding. Sometimes I accompanied them, sometimes Herbert Bayliss made one of the party. Frances' behavior to the young doctor was tantalizingly contradictory. At times she was very cordial and kind, at others almost cold and repellent. She kept the young fellow in a state of uncertainty most of the time. She treated Heathcroft much the same, but there was this difference between them—Heathcroft didn't seem to mind; her whims appeared to amuse rather than to annoy him. Bayliss, on ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... paused, and she leaned forward to meet his challenging gaze. "Just in from camp?" she inquired, in a voice hoarse, repellent, conciliatory, and with a mechanical grimace which he identified as a smile. He stopped at the invitation in her tones, and nodded. "And looking for a good time," he further informed her; ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... street. And there's the house,—his house," and Captain Slingsby pointed his whip at a high, flat-fronted house. It was a repellent-looking place with an iron railing before it, and beyond this railing a deep and narrow area, where a flight of damp steps led down to a gloomy door. The street was seemingly a quiet one, and, at this hour, deserted save for themselves ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... sensuousness of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic faith—remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... soul by the prescribed boundaries of her position in life. Anderson, returning rather earlier than usual, found her with his mother, and retreated with actual rudeness, the woman became all at once so repellent to him. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... around. On a mound a little distance away in the park, Rachael Unthank was standing. In her rusty black clothes, unrelieved by any trace of colour, her white cheeks and strange eyes, even in the morning light she was a repellent figure. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the peace of 1783. His speeches showed, as his deeds had already shown, in a high degree, that loftiness of courage, and stern, uncomplaining acceptance of the decrees of a hostile fate, which so often ennobled the otherwise gloomy and repellent traits of the Indian character. He raised no plaint over what had befallen his race; "the Great Spirit above directs us so that whatever hath been said or done must be good and right," he said in a spirit of strange fatalism well known to certain creeds, both Christian and heathen. He was careful ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style; our very dress makes us grotesque. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. On November 13th, 1895, ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... stepped over to the depot and opened the door. Madge looked up, startled and again afraid. It was a relief to her to see Stefan's friendly face. She had feared.... She didn't know what she dreaded so much—perhaps a face repellent—a man who would look at her and in whose eyes she might discern ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... men; some are fashionable and some outrageously not; peculiarities of all kinds abound without conflicting. Some talk, frankly audible, and others are frankly silent, but a deep, wide purr, tacit or explicit, close upon a muted hymn of thanksgiving, in that assemblage of mutually repellent personalities, for the nonce united, would ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Hamiltonian, and Jefferson's views of the Constitution may repel you, or even bore you. No matter. Go on. Scholarship requires persistence in study of matter that repels or even bores the student. You may be a devout believer and Herbert Spencer repellent. Nevertheless, if you are studying you may need to master Herbert Spencer. But if you are reading, read what interests you. If Scott does not interest you and Dickens does, drop Scott and read Dickens. You need not ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... train wreckings, which cost the British during this campaign the lives and limbs of many brave soldiers who were worthy of some less ignoble fate. It is true that the laws of war sanction such enterprises, but there is something indiscriminate in the results which is repellent to humanity, and which appears to justify the most energetic measures to prevent them. Women, children, and sick must all travel by these trains and are exposed to a common danger, while the assailants enjoy a safety which renders their exploit a peculiarly inglorious ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strength. He had been Lincoln's friend; he was rich, honest, and popular. He had watched politics from the Supreme Bench with judicial equipoise and partisan instincts, and by many discerning men was regarded as a highly eligible candidate. Mr. Adams was austere, cold, even repellent in his manner; but it was urged that the traditions of his name and his distinguished diplomatic services would appeal to the judgment of the people and take from the Republican party some of its best elements. He was earnestly supported by many ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... that seemed to be times of question and of struggle with her, when she vacillated between the old cordiality and the later alienation; when she went beyond the former, or lapsed into moods colder and more repellent than the latter. It would have been difficult to mark the moment when these struggles ceased altogether, and an evening passed in unbroken kindness between them. But afterwards Colville could remember an emotion of grateful surprise at a subtle word or action of hers in which she appeared to ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... Bast was still in the garden; the husband and Helen had left her there to finish her meal while they went to engage rooms. Margaret found this woman repellent. She had felt, when shaking her hand, an overpowering shame. She remembered the motive of her call at Wickham Place, and smelt again odours from the abyss—odours the more disturbing because they were involuntary. For there ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... The repellent look was still on John's face as he replied more ungraciously than before: "Nay, I can think o' nowt. I can tell thee, though, that the maister's told me to have the carriage ready to catch the train that goes east at nine" (he turned and looked at the clock on ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... about their graceful figures. Sparkling glances here and there eclipsed the lights and the blaze of the diamonds, and fanned the flame of hearts already burning too brightly. I detected also significant nods of the head for lovers and repellent attitudes for husbands. The exclamation of the card-players at every unexpected coup, the jingle of gold, mingled with music and the murmur of conversation; and to put the finishing touch to the vertigo of that multitude, intoxicated by all the seductions the world can offer, ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... Avenue D, stood an old and battered timepiece of which Stepfather Time had heard the voice but never seen the face. Each of three attempts to investigate with a view to negotiations had been frustrated by a crabbed and violent-looking man with a repellent club. Nevertheless, the voice alone had ensnared the connoisseur; it was, by the test of the pipe which he carried on all his quests, D in alt, and would thus complete the major chord of a chime which he had long been building up. (She had loved, best of ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... known to those who have made the phenomena of Spiritualism the subject of prolonged and careful inquiry, in the spirit of exact and unimpassioned scientific research, that beneath a repellent mass of imposture and delusion there remain certain inexplicable and startling facts which science can neither explain away nor deny."—"Automatic, or Spirit, Writing," p. ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... disposed to deny. Over and above this general testimony, we have the actual letters of those who were mainly instrumental in carrying it into effect, and it is difficult to read those of Lord Cornwallis without perceiving that he at least regarded the task as a repellent one, and one which as an honourable man he would gladly have evaded had evasion been possible. It is true that Lord Castlereagh, who was associated intimately with him in the enterprise, shows no such reluctance, but then the relative characters of the two men prevent ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... driveway was a tall man with short, scrupulously brushed iron-gray hair, and sweeping mustache. The lines under his eyes were heavy, his glance was cold. His presence was dignified, commanding, repellent. ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... and his grievance from the rain was the swarms of gnats. I said, I supposed I have very bad blood, for gnats never bite me. He replied, "I believe I have bad blood, too, for dull people, who would tire me to death, never Come Dear me." Shall I beg a pallet-full of that repellent for you, to set in your ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... stairs that awakened them. The door was quickly unlocked, it was thrown open, and the hairy face of O'Sullivan Og, who held it wide, looked in. Behind him were two of the boys with pikes—frowsy, savage, repellent figures, with drugget coats tied by the sleeves about ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... extremely large, oddly-shaped head. His ugliness, which, however, has a dash of piquancy, is aggravated by smallpox marks, which seam his face. His forehead is very prominent, and the shaggy eyebrows meet, giving a repellent air of harshness. There is a frowning, plaintive look on his face, reminding one of a sickly child, which owes its life to superhuman care, as Sister Marthe did. As my father observed, his features are a shrunken reproduction of those ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... beard, could hide the square massiveness of the jaws and the curve of the hard yet sensuous lips. There was strength in the nose, strength and cruelty, and the straight black band that formed the heavy brow added to the repellent expression. Such a face it was that, looking at it, one understood the man turning with an oath upon those who sought to aid him in his misery, much as one can understand the fury of an imprisoned snake which turns back upon itself and plunges its fangs into its own flesh until ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread upon his path that he may enter the house as befits a conqueror. After a show of resistance, Agamemnon yields the point, and the contrast at which the dramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an eastern monarch, always repellent to the Greek mind, the King steps across the threshold, steps, as the audience knows, to his death. The higher the reach of his power and pride the more terrible and swift is the nemesis; and Clytemnestra follows in triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips: "Zeus who art god of fulfilment, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... There is more sexual desire during pregnancy, especially toward the end, than at any other time. She never refused normal intercourse to her husband, but any abnormal or perverted method of sexual gratification is repellent. She was awakened one night about the third month of pregnancy by her husband inserting his penis in ore; the child was born with palate defect and she is herself inclined to believe that this incident was the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... realm of the fantastic. There, a few yards in front of me, at the outer edge of the terrace of a cafe, clad in his eternal silk hat, frock coat, and yellow gloves, sat Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos in earnest conversation with a seedy stranger of repellent mien. The latter was clean-shaven and had a broken nose, and wore a little round, soft felt hat. The dwarf was facing me. As he caught sight of me a smile of welcome overspread his Napoleonic features. He rose, awaited my approach, and, bareheaded, made ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... testimonials relating to Lucy's descent and birth, from the Irish lawyers, and from Mr. Gisborne. The latter gentleman had written from abroad (he was again serving in the Austrian army), a letter alternately passionately self-reproachful and stoically repellent. It was evident that when he thought of Mary—her short life—how he had wronged her, and of her violent death, he could hardly find words severe enough for his own conduct; and from this point of view, the curse that Bridget had laid upon him and his was regarded ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... his face disgustedly. It was hard to communicate with the district leader by means of a headband. There was a repellent characteristic about the man's mental emanations, and he seemed to fail to comprehend nuances of meaning. Similes, he ignored completely. Thoughts had to be completely and clearly detailed, then phrased into normal, basic ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... not wish to turn back. There was something fascinating as well as repellent about the woods. Down there was a grave. At the head of the grave was a stone. On that stone ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... a delicacy, squid are esteemed, and even the devilfish is on the tables, hideous, repellent, slimy, horned, and tentacled; not mighty enough to crush out the life of the fisher, as was the horrific creature in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea," whom his hero fought, yet menacing even when dead. It is a frightful figure ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... complexion was peculiarly soft and white, the red in his cheeks was too bright and clear, his teeth were like pearls, and his lips like coral—one would have thought that he must be a paragon of beauty, yet at the same time there seemed something repellent about him. It was said that his face suggested a mask; so much was said though, among other things they talked of his extraordinary physical strength. He was rather tall. Varvara Petrovna looked at him with pride, yet with continual ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... by accident on the word I need to compare Mary Ann Cotton with Jegado. The Bretonne, creeping about her native province leaving death in her track, with her piety, her hypocrisy, her enjoyment of her own cruelty, is sinister and repellent. But Mary Ann, moving from mate to mate and farrowing from each, then savaging both them and the litter, has a musty sowishness that the Bretonne misses. Both foul, yes. But we needn't, we islanders, do any Jingo business in setting Mary Ann ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... me to detain you for a moment. This matter may prove to be one of vital importance to Lord Bracknell and myself. Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... told Henrietta that she was not to have a comfortable day. "Well, it's my last one here," she thought, and had occasion, as the hours wore on, to repeat the assurance to herself many times, for comfort's sake. Doubly repellent though her service under him had become since that sad day of her sister's disaster, Henrietta had felt, nevertheless, that justice demanded of her to continue in it until the time for which she had given notice should expire. So, loyal to her sense of fairness, she ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... universal commerce. The Phoenician traded already in remote antiquity with the extremes of the Aryan race, from India in the East to Britain in the West, including the whole intervening line of Aryan migration, Persia, Greece, Italy, Gaul. The Aryan race is indeed a separative, self-repellent, distracted race, always on the move out of itself, without returning into itself. The Phoenician, on the contrary, in his farthest voyages, came back home with news and merchandise; the remotest Phoenician settlements kept up their connection with the mother ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... number of rooms all well and comfortably furnished, but although my imagination may have been responsible for the idea, they all seemed to possess a chilly and repellent atmosphere. I felt that to essay sleep in any one of them would be the merest farce, that the place to all intents and purposes was uninhabitable, that something incalculably ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... prisoners fell at last into silence. They sat in the dim, yellow-gray dusk and stared gloomily at the stove, growing each moment more repellent to one another. They met one another's eyes at intervals with surprise and horror. The world without seemed utterly lost. Wailing voices sobbed in the pipe and at the windows. Sudden agonized shrieks came out of the blur of sound. The hours ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... her weakness by sympathizing reflections on the hidden troubles which must have thronged the past years of the solitary lady, to keep her, though so rich and courted, in a mood so repellent and gloomy as that in which Cytherea found her; and then the young girl marvelled again and again, as she had marvelled before, at the strange confluence of circumstances which had brought herself into contact with the one woman in the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... horse brought from the livery around to the rear door of the hotel, and left for Mink Run by the back streets. He did not return to town for a week, and when he made his next appearance there, upon strictly a business visit, did not go near the Treadwells', and wore such a repellent look that no one ventured to speak to him about his encounter with Fetters and McRae. He was humiliated and ashamed, and angry with himself and all the world. He had lost Graciella already; any possibility that might have remained of regaining her ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... rhymes where they are peculiar are often repellent, and so far from adding charm to the verse that they appear as obstacles. This must not blind one from recognizing that Gerard Hopkins, where he is simple and straightforward in his rhyme is a master of it—there are many instances,—but when he indulges in freaks, his childishness ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... himself as a Grand Seigneur with a paramount "Jus Primis Noctis." True, the majority of men are abashed in the presence of innocence and deal gently with it,—but others follow in a repellent way their instinct of possession. Any neurologist of experience has cases where sexual frigidity and neurasthenia in a woman can be traced back to the shock of that all-important ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... lived in, perpetually and intimately used. There was nothing in it that was very handsome or very valuable, except a fine Steinway grand pianoforte; but there was nothing ugly or vulgar. And there were quantities of books, not covered with repellent glass. They were ranged in dark cases, which furnished the walls, and lay everywhere on tables, among magazines and papers, scores and volumes of songs and loose manuscript music. The piano was open, and there was more music on it. The armchairs ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... had the memory of another who had not been servile, even to his dearest hope. There were more personal contrasts of memory, too; subtler, more poignant, that flushed in her blood and made the mere presence of her lover repellent to her. The status became unbearable. Esme ended it. In plain English, she jilted the highly eligible Mr. William Douglas. To herself she made the defense that he was not what she had thought, that he had changed. This was ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the monks of this period study and the search for truth through reason were repellent. In their view the way to spiritual truth was through retirement from the world, and the observance of religious exercises. This is the burden of a letter to John of Salisbury by Peter de la Celle, abbot of a monastery near Rheims, in 1164. Incidentally it gives ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... him say that he has read every available book upon the subject; and, like Thukydides, he is critical, he is eclectic, and often supports his statements by the citation or introduction of documentary testimony. His superstition is debasing and repellent, but works harm only in limited spheres, and it is counterbalanced by the fact that he had been a part of many events recounted and had held high governmental offices, enjoying a career which furnished him with standards by which to judge the likelihood ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... it existed a quarter of a century or more ago, was extremely severe and indeed to our mind quite repellent. In those days—and no doubt they are so even yet in many places—the conditions were too often forbidding and deterrent. Otherwise how can we explain the very general tendency among the younger people to move from the ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... Tree Court and his studies of criminology. But his body and mind thrilled with the experiences of the afternoon; and the musty records in works of repellent binding and close, unsympathetic print of nineteenth century forgery, poisoning, assaults-on-the-person, and cruelty-to-children cases for once failed to hold his close attention. He sat all through the evening after a supper of bread and cheese and ginger beer in his snug, small room, furnished ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... lives, and languishes with following generations, so is it with poems that embrace with ardour the Present. When the Present has become the Past, they are, or at least their liveliest edge is, past too. No commentary can restore the fiery hates of Dante—nor the repellent scorn of Hudibras—nor the glow of laughter to MAC-FLECNOE and the DUNCIAD. Eternal things are eternal—transitory things are transitory. The transitory have lost their zest—the eternal have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... the purpose of this paper to show that Socialism is not a scheme for the betterment of humanity to be accomplished by a sufficiently zealous and intelligent propaganda, but that it is, on the contrary, a consistent, (though to many repellent) monistic philosophy of the cosmos; that it is from its Alpha to its Omega so closely and inextricably interlocked that its component parts cannot be disassociated, save by an act of intellectual suicide; that, in a word, the Nihilism[8] of Socialism ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... of the vigil, Meredith knew Captain Dalton no better than before. He was still the silent, repellent being, with eyes of a thought-reader and a baffling smile which might have meant contempt or ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... the revealed glory, of Jesus in such a few simple words,—"full of grace and truth." Not grace without truth. That would be a sort of weakly, sickly sentimentalism. And not truth without grace. That would be a cold stern repellent insistence on certain high standards. But grace and ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... from &c 276; chase, dispel; retrude^; abduce^, abduct; send away; repulse. keep at arm's length, turn one's back upon, give the cold shoulder; send off, send away with a flea in one's ear. Adj. repelling &c v.; repellent, repulsive; abducent^, abductive^. centripetal Phr. like charges repel; opposite charges attract; like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... so repellent, to believe a lover guilty even of a trivial error, we may readily suppose that Lucy never for a moment admitted the supposition that Clifford had been really guilty of gross error or wilful crime. True that expressions in his letter were more than suspicious; ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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