"Amateurish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... labours he had the help of a friendly digger—a carpenter by trade—who one evening, pipe in mouth, had stood to watch his amateurish efforts with the jack-plane. Otherwise, the Lord alone knew how the house would ever have been made shipshape. Long Jim was equal to none but the simplest jobs; and Hempel, the assistant, had his hands full with ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... tends to deaden the spirit of offence. This is a truth so vital that some authorities in their eagerness to enforce it have travestied it into the misleading maxim, "That attack is the best defence." Hence again an amateurish notion that defence is always stupid or pusillanimous, leading always to defeat, and that what is called "the military spirit" means nothing but taking the offensive. Nothing is further from the teaching or the practice of the best masters. Like Wellington at Torres Vedras, ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... her in the main salon. Cleigh, senior, stood before the phonograph listening to Caruso. The roll of the yacht in nowise disturbed the mechanism of the instrument. There was no sudden sluing of the needle, due to an amateurish device which Cleigh himself had constructed. The son, stooping, was searching the titles of a row of new novels. The width of the salon stretched ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... right; they shall have their proper places. But here is a point: suppose one of them is gold, and heavy at that, but not finely finished, quite amateurish and ill proportioned, in fact—is he to take precedence of Myron's and Polyclitus's bronze, or Phidias's and Alcamenes's marble? or ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... I hope, been perfectly frank about its intentions. It is not a book upon Kriegspiel. It gives merely a game that may be played by two or four or six amateurish persons in an afternoon and evening with toy soldiers. But it has a very distinct relation to Kriegspiel; and since the main portion of it was written and published in a magazine, I have had quite a considerable correspondence with military ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... to her quickly and systematically. But she did not appreciate how profoundly right he was until she was "learning scales." Then she understood why most so called "professional" performances are amateurish, haphazard, without any precision. She was learning to posture, and to utter every emotion so accurately that any spectator would recognize it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Ives, alias "the Dancing Girl "—though as to where she dances, how she dances, and when she dances, we are left pretty well in the dark, as she only gives so slight a taste of her quality that it seemed like a very amateurish imitation of Miss KATE VAUGHAN in her best day,—Drusilla Ives is the mistress, neither pure nor simple, of the Duke of Guisebury,—a title which is evidently artfully intended by the, at present, "Only JONES" to be a compound of the French ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... alone—entirely alone—for a year, and then I will write you another": it was with these words she handed him the little strip of paper that meant so much, feeling, as she did so, that surely Mrs. Farrinder herself could not be less amateurish than that. Selah looked at the cheque, at Miss Chancellor, at the cheque again, at the ceiling, at the floor, at the clock, and once more at his hostess; then the document disappeared beneath the folds ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... were to say that the: composition is bad, the colour crude, the whole work amateurish, the modelling thin and ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... rather lamely it seemed, however. The editor said that it read amateurish, and he felt he would have to make a change. Carl made for some files where all the daily papers were kept, and read and re-read the yellowest of the yellow. As luck would have it, that very night a ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... well-trained psychotherapist will make the blunder of arguing with the insane. To dispute by argument with the paranoiac and to try to convince him would not be only without success, but easily irritating. This does not mean that the not less amateurish way ought to be taken of accepting his delusions and appearing to be in full agreement with him. A tactful middle way, preferably a disciplinary ignoring attitude, ought to be taken. But it is entirely different with the mental states ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... let her pupils use those, though," said Netta. "She calls it an amateurish dodge. I should think we shall have to hold each other up ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... the men and to show them his model farm. They spent the forenoon in going over this expensive place. Bond gave vent to all the "oh's" and "ah's" that indicate the perfect visitor. Abner took their host's various amateurish doings in glum silence. It was all very well to indulge in these costly contraptions as a pastime, but if the man had to get his actual living from the soil where would he be? Almost anybody could stand on two legs. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... to do for it, what she would do if she could, what she thought it possible to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish. But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had constantly done—that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was talking about; that not ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... skillful Miss Briggs, was equal to that of any metropolitan journal; the first page cartoon, referring to the outbreak of a rebellion in China, was clever and humorous enough to delight anyone; but the local news and "literary page" were woefully amateurish and smacked of the schoolgirl editors who had prepared them. Perhaps the Chazy County people did not recognize these deficiencies, for the new paper certainly created a vast amount of excitement and won the praise of ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... to term this design amateurish, presumably because of the conservative character of the stresses used and because of its cost; at the same time, he sets up the design to which he makes reference as a good one simply because of its cheapness. He will find the "enormous discrepancy," to which he calls ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 - A Concrete Water Tower, Paper No. 1173 • A. Kempkey
... be amateurish at its best, for where could she possibly have learned to dance? What instruction could she, living in this out-of-the-way corner of the world, have received in the art? As for local enthusiasm, it counted for little—amateurs were always so popular ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... lesson in Champagne, but they were surprised to find how much the British had still to learn in July, 1916. The British officers excuse themselves because, they plead, they are still amateurs. "That is no reason," says the Frenchman, "why they should be amateurish." ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... deal of amateurish talking is done, in Gafsa, in regard to the profits that would be gained were the oasis to be given over to Sicilian cultivators. Apart from the fact that the wealthy Kaid of Gafsa, who is the chief owner of it, would have something to say on the subject, these advantages would ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... draughtsmanship and power. I am a funny man, a caricaturist, by force of circumstances; an artist, a satirist, and a cartoonist by nature and training. The one requires technical knowledge—in the other, "drawing doesn't count." The more amateurish the work, the funnier the public consider it. The serious confession I have to make is that I have been mistaken for a caricaturist in the accepted and limited meaning ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... and the day has come. I owed you more gratitude than a woman ever owed a man before, I think, and I would have died to pay a part of it. I set every gossip's tongue in Rouen clacking at the very start, in the merest amateurish preparation for the work Mr. Macauley gave me. That was nothing. And the rest has been the happiest time in my life. I have only pleased myself, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... photographic apparatus. Yet it is entirely obvious that she must first have regarded it in the ordinary way to judge of its photographic merits. Anyhow it is true that quite a good deal of her time was spent beneath the folds of a black cloth (she never condescended to anything so amateurish as a mere kodak), or in the seclusion ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... any longer. The Chief Factor went to Mr. Archibald Clavering Gunter and the Home Publishing Company, and they made a very large sale of it. I never cared for the book however; it seemed stilted and amateurish, though some of its descriptions and some of its dialogues were, I think, as good as I can do; so, eventually, in the middle nineties, I asked Mr. Gunter to sell me back the rights in the book and give ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... young and terrible conqueror, who judiciously dominated every will in the process of his achievements, he who defiantly told his masters that he would not suffer his "feet to be entangled" by their amateurish absurdities, was entangled for a time by a rapturous infatuation and allowed a giddy woman with seductive habits and a silken voice to cajole, dominate, ridicule, and ignore him. His imploring theatrical appeals to her to come to him are piteously pathetic. ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... beside it was something which caused Robert Fairchild to almost forget, for the moment, the horrors of the ordeal which he was undergoing. It was a paragraph leading the "personal" column of the small, amateurish sheet, announcing the engagement of Miss Anita Natalie Richmond to Mr. Maurice Rodaine, the wedding to come "probably ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of words set in capitals, as in head-lines and running-heads, should be avoided by the young compositor; there are places where it may be unobjectionable but it will require good judgment and some experience to prevent such lines making the page look freakish or amateurish. ...
— Capitals - A Primer of Information about Capitalization with some - Practical Typographic Hints as to the Use of Capitals • Frederick W. Hamilton
... amateurish enthusiasm that they begin the cruise on the little schooner—with her limited crew and close quarters—at once, and use the Buccaneer as her tender. The moment they struck the swell outside Sandy Hook the financier went ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... have left smooth surface. Smooth as a razor edge. This is like a saw. Amateurish work. Can't say for certain, but ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... daylight, but a dull, cloudy night is best, when they may be caught from the beach or river bank in shallow water. Very stout lines and heavy hooks are used, for a 90-lb. or 100-lb. Jew-fish is very common. Baiting with a whole mullet or whiting, or one of the arms of an octopus, the most amateurish fisherman cannot fail to hook two or three Jew-fish in a night. (Even in Sydney Harbour I have seen some very large ones caught by people fishing from ferry wharves.) They are very powerful, and also very game, and ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the macabre Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... perplexed, exultant and depressed by turns. Here was an opening—the first. And because it was the first its success or failure meant future engagements or consignments to the street, perhaps as a white-wing. There must be no faltering now, no bungling, no mistakes, no amateurish hesitation. It is the empty- headed who most strenuously demand intelligence in others. One yawn from such an audience meant his professional damnation—he knew that; every second must break like froth in a wine glass; ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... We knew very well that, though the miniatures showed promise of talent, they were amateurish and imperfect, and the reserve which we had placed upon them was quite out of all proportion to their merit. It must surely be a mistake! We followed Isobel across the room. A little elderly gentleman was sitting before a desk, engaged in the leisurely contemplation ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cover, open like a pamphlet. There must be some recognised professional way of doing it, and I should think one's more likely to get it taken if one sends it in the regular professional fashion, than if one makes it look too amateurish. I shall go in for the long envelope; at any rate, if not journalistic, it's at ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... not much solace to remember that every Benedictine community was an independent congregation. One could not imagine the most independent community's being placed in charge of a novice of twenty-five. It made Mark's proposed monastic life appear amateurish; and when he was back in the matchboarded guest-room the impulse to abandon his project was revised. Yet he felt it would be wrong to return to Wych-on-the-Wold. The impulse to come here, though sudden, had been very strong, and to give it up without trial might mean the loss of an ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... that age he became a train-boy on the Grand Trunk railroad for the purpose of earning his living; only another way of pioneering and getting what was to be got by personal endeavor. While in that business he edited and printed a little newspaper; not to please an amateurish love of the beautiful art of printing, but for profit. He was selling papers, and he wanted one of his own to sell because then he would get more out of it in a small way. He never afterwards showed ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... Coffee had been served. Cigarettes were being lighted. Again and again he was referred to. Did he think this and didn't he agree to that? Wasn't this true of the way in which men regarded women? Their differences of opinion seemed so trivial. Their views so immature and amateurish. He watched them with curious, brooding attention. They were so nobly tender in their outward forms. He appreciated the grace of their gestures, the fine-boned smallness of their bodies, the delicacy of their ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Bryce, smiling. "To finish anybody with that stuff is easy enough—but no poison is more easily detected. It's an amateurish way of poisoning anybody—unless you can do it in such a fashion that no suspicion can attach you to. And in this case it's here—whoever administered that poison to Collishaw must have been certain—absolutely ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... wonder as to God's sensations at having such amateurish works come out under his name. But this sort of humility is really a protean manifestation of egotism, as is clear in the religious states that bear resemblance to the poet's. This the Methodist "experience meeting" abundantly illustrates, where endless loquacity ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Ours is an amateurish hotel, especially since the war. Any one who happens to have the time or inclination runs it: or if no one has time it runs itself. Consequently mistakes are made. But what can you expect for eight ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... schools, on the plan indicated under the first head, are extremely costly; and, so far as the teaching of artisans is concerned, it is very commonly objected to them that, as the learners do not work under trade conditions, they are apt to fall into amateurish habits, which prove of more hindrance than service in the actual business of life. When such schools are attached to factories under the direction of an employer who desires to train up a supply of intelligent workmen, of course this objection does not apply; ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... doctor did not say much. He quieted the raving with his hypodermic needle, removed the amateurish bandage from the hand and the arm, looked at the wound, applied a cooling lotion, and dexterously wound on a fresh bandage. It seemed very little, Mary Hope thought dully, for a doctor to come all the ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... turned to Betty with a reassuring smile. "You don't have to pay anything to be out of doors," she said. "That much is free, even here; it's perfectly delightful country, and when the weather improves a bit we have picnics and walks and even do a little fishing in an amateurish sort of way. It all helps to pass ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... enough to make any man feel lucky all his life. It's such fun to awaken in the morning with all your legs and arms and eyes and ears about you, waiting to be used again! So strong was this thought in me when we cast off, that even the memory of Bill's amateurish pancakes couldn't ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... "I am a fairly good navigator, and not a bad seaman, in an amateurish sort of way, you know. But do not trouble about the position of the island. I have here," producing his watch, "an excellent chronometer, showing Greenwich time, and books and instruments among my luggage which, with the aid ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... out of Ashencombe station, leaving Magda, Gillian, and Coppertop, together with sundry trunks and suitcases, in undisputed possession of the extremely amateurish-looking platform. Magda ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... can correct leads to missing (in my writing, not in my reading) a thousand fine things that I could never imitate. It is lucky for me that you are not very often a book-reviewer, when I bring out my own shapeless and amateurish books. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... inspired 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
... These amateurish speculations on maritime books are of no value except for the fact that they elicited an interesting letter from an expert on these matters. William McFee wrote us ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... very irritable, and seemed especially to resent her music lessons, alluding to them with a sort of sneering impatience. She felt that he despised them as amateurish, and secretly resented it. He was often impatient, too, of the time she gave to the baby. His own conduct with the little creature was like all the rest of him. He would go to the nursery, much to Betty's alarm, and take up the baby; be charming with it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the labor movement in general and the movement, erstwhile devoted primarily to organization of trade unions, entered, urged on by the Lassalleans, into a series of political campaigns somewhat successful at first but soon succumbing to the inevitable fate of all amateurish attempts. Upon men of Strasser's practical mental grasp these petty tempests in the melting pot could only produce an impression of sheer futility, and he turned to trade unionism as the only activity worth his while. Strasser had been elected president ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... the rod, besides being an emblem of authority, is also an instrument of the supernatural. An indispensable instrument, one may say; for was ever a magician depicted in book, in picture, or in the mind's eye, without a wand? Does even the most amateurish of prestidigitateurs attempt to emulate the performances of the once famous Wizard of the North, without the aid of the magic staff? The magician, necromancer, soothsayer, or conjurer, is as useless without his wand as a Newcastle pitman ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... held the people of the United States in high esteem: they had not, as a rule, so favourably regarded the Government at Washington, especially in its conduct of foreign relations. They had long regarded our Government as ignorant of European affairs and amateurish in its cockiness. When I first got to London I found evidence of this feeling, even in the most friendly atmosphere that surrounded us. Mr. Bryan was looked on as a joke. They forgot him—rather, they never took serious notice of him. ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... rowing, billiards, tennis and golf prove that here also the same contrast is generally to be found. Hence it has come about that the term "amateur,'' and more especially the adjectival derivative "amateurish,'' has acquired a secondary meaning, usually employed somewhat contemptuously, signifying inefficiency, unskilfulness, superficial ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... memory which had resulted in the play. It was obviously a personal experience, and as she was rich enough to share the risk of producing it, he was more than ready to put it on. It was full of faults; it was melodramatic, it was amateurish, but it was passionately alive. The pit and the gallery would love it; and if the stalls found it a little cheap, what of that? He had considerable flair. He ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... cliff (or any cliff for the matter of that), really, as an artist—" He laughed. "It's so damned amateurish." ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... But it involved a frightful loss of men and a disorder that, after they had once been unleashed, did not permit of the rallying and reemployment that day of the troops engaged. This was a barbaric method, according to the Romans, amateurish, if we may say such a thing of such a man; a method which could not be used against experienced and well trained troops such as d'Erlon's corps at ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... (HUTCHINSON) was largely due to the mild, dull way in which the story developed. And yet I think I could have forgiven the absence of lurid sensationalism if the book had been a good book of its kind. It is not. It is so crude and amateurish that it is difficult to believe that a professional writer could have written it. Mr. JEPSON, like most other authors, has had the idea of modernising the story of the Prodigal Son. He adheres to the original story closely in one respect, for Roland Penny's first meal in his old home ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... Wally was held in great reputation by the Nimrods of the village, because he hunted partridges, not with "scatter-gun" and dog,—such amateurish bungling he disdained and swore against,—but in the good old-fashioned way of stalking with a rifle. And when he brought his bunch of birds to market, his admirers pointed with pride to the marks of his wondrous skill. Here was a bird with the head hanging by a thread of skin; there one with its ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... lack of any organized means for focussing opinion. It responds to that interest, and would supply that want.[30] There is no doubt that public opinion is altogether at sea in these matters, and its futility is betrayed and encouraged by the amateurish discussions and obiter dicta that are constantly appearing and reappearing in the newspapers. Our belief is that if facts and principles were clearly stated and thoroughly handled by experts, it would then be possible not only to ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... semi-canonicals, worn "to keep up his position," or some such folly, nervous about the adjustment of his hat and his eyeglasses. He approaches the pitch, smiling the while to show his purely genial import and to anticipate and explain any amateurish touches. He reaches the wicket and poses himself, as the convenient book he has studied directs. "You'll be caught, Muster Shackleforth, if you keep your shoulder up like that," says the umpire. "Ya-a-ps! that's worse!"—forgetting himself in his zeal for attitude. And ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Societies." Such was, for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members were Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard, and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hillard, a graceful lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat amateurish kind; and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, a lover of books and a writer ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence. Which way we turn there is a big interrogation-point, often not for information but for negation. Of the good resulting from the inquisitive spirit, we all know; of the baneful influence of inquisitiveness that has become a mere intellectual pastime or amateurish agnosticism, we likewise have some knowledge; but the evil side of this tendency has seldom been put more forcibly, I think, than in this stanza from Lanier's 'Acknowledgment': "O Age that half believ'st thou half believ'st, Half doubt'st the substance of thine own half doubt, And, half perceiving ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... rapidity of action, Mr. Shirley, for a mere interested friend! It is queer how wonderfully your mind has connected this work, and the various accidental happenings, to evolve this clever ruse in which I am to assist. It doesn't seem so amateurish as you would make it. You seem mysterious ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... not surprised that many persons are becoming rather disgusted with our little amateurish attempts at Winter. Thousands now go to Switzerland, and Sir ERNEST SHACKLETON is going even further afield. Meanwhile the Government does nothing ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... mere hackwork, does it worse than the professed man of letters. Work, taken up at odd hours to satisfy editorial importunity or add a few pounds to a narrow income, is apt to show the characteristic defects of all amateur performances. A very large part of the early numbers is amateurish in this objectionable sense. It is mere hand-to-mouth information, and is written, so to speak, with the left hand. A clever man has turned over the last new book of travels or poetry, or made a sudden incursion into foreign literature or into some passage of history entirely ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Butler. "But," he continued, "I do not like your plan at all; I do not approve of it; it is amateurish and theoretical, and I won't have it. A much simpler and more practical way will be for you to go down the quebrada at the end of a ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... marked really—if the question be of noting the exact point—a turn of the tide in Nick Dormer's personal situation. He was destined to remember the accent with which Nash exclaimed, on his drawing forth sundry specimens of amateurish earnestness: ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... to say that my story began a long time ago, but I do not intend to be subtle. I am not clever and my lying is unpolished, almost amateurish. So I certainly could not be subtle, which requires both cleverness and an ability to tell the truth and a lie in ...
— Lonesome Hearts • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... regard him as a genius sent down from heaven on purpose for me. Nothing could, therefore, equal my amazement at the unbounded impudence of the man; for on the evening of the concert he executed his task with the most amateurish timidity; he did not enunciate a single note of the song clearly, and nothing but astonishment at so unprecedented a performance appeared to restrain the audience from breaking out into marked disapproval. Yet, in spite of this, Lindau, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... he asked, and received the honest answer, "No, sir; I don't think I do." He met Herbert in high spirits in the quadrangle during the interval. But Herbert thought his enthusiasm rather amateurish, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... "Very amateurish work," Alec protested, pleased nevertheless at Knight's praise. "The steer thought I looked so harmless that he took a big chance—that's how ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... panicked at the last and destroyed wholesale, but without intelligence. True, they put an explosive charge into the cylinders of all their big engines and left us to get new cylinders cast in Scotland. They blew out the grease boxes of the trucks; but their performance, on the whole, was amateurish. For they blew up, with dynamite, the masonry of many bridges and contented themselves that the girders lay in the river below. But this was child's play to our Sappers and Miners. With hand jacks ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... need hardly say that I sing as I do everything else—remarkably well. Another sympathized with my sketching propensities. We rambled in the woods together with boxes and colors. I found it charming. "Nothing amateurish" about my style, Miss Pinklake said. A third sympathized with my taste for horses: my restive Nero was the "sweetest pet" she ever saw. (My groom says, "He's the divvil hisself, Muster Charley.") With her I rode in the afternoon. She told me—Miss Vernon, you know her? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... her powers of resistance, she felt, should this impulse return again. For, as she walked along the street to her office, the force of all her customary objections to being in love with any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or the taxation ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... hands greeted her words and then the audience became silent as the littlest scholar of the school rose and delivered the address of welcome. There followed music and more recitations, all amateurish, but they brought feelings of pride to many mothers and fathers who listened, smiling, to "Our John" or "Our Mary" do his ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... the gas, got down a volume of Graetz's history of the Jews, which she had latterly taken to reading, and turned over its wonderful pages. Then she wandered restlessly back to the great dim drawing-room and played amateurish fantasias on the melancholy Polish melodies of her childhood till Mr. and Mrs. Henry Goldsmith returned. They had captured the Rev. Joseph Strelitski and brought him back to dinner, Esther would have excused herself from the meal, but Mrs. Goldsmith insisted ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... counter a little Sekhet boat, carved in wood and highly colored, and glanced up with a start. Truly my methods were amateurish; I had learnt nothing; I was unlikely to learn anything. I wondered how Nayland Smith would have conducted such an inquiry, and I racked my brains for some means of penetrating into the recesses of the establishment. Indeed, ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... they answered their purpose only too well. The great and still religious bourgeois class was securely hooked; and then the name of "Middle Class Halls" was dropped, and the programme provided in these garish palaces became simply an inexpensive and rather amateurish imitation of those of the older halls, plus a kind of prudish, sentimental, and even quasi-religious lubricity, which made them ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... ardent, wealthy—the typical "poor pretty thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read verse and thought she understood—at any rate, loved the Great, the Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully amateurish—him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her "twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had chanced to meet. It was strange ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... said Sanders. "The police said it seemed to be a rather amateurish job, although whoever did it certainly succeeded in ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Apart from circus performances there seemed no money to be made in aviation and consequently practically none was invested in it. What little manufacturing was done was by zealots and inventors. Workmanship was entirely by hand, slow, amateurish, and unreliable. ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... impudently, "Venice called them bravi; here in America we brutally call them gun-men, but honestly, Kronberg, in all respect and confidence, you really haven't brains and originality enough for a clever professional murderer. Amateurish killing is a sickly sort of sport. And the danger of it! Take for instance that night when you fancied you were a motor bandit and waylaid me on the way to the farm. I was very drunk and driving madly and ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... shall press you no further. But I also have been studying the problem in a purely amateurish way, of course. You will perhaps express no disinclination to learn whether or not my deductions ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... 1915. My experiences since that date were very interesting; but I found that much of the romance had left the trenches. The old days, from the beginning to July, 1915, were all so delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life, which to my mind gave this war what it sadly needs—a touch ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... was colouring like a boy. Lady Carey's thin lips curled. She had no sympathy with such amateurish love-making. Nevertheless, his embarrassment was a great relief ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... As with all the earlier poets of Spanish America, literature was only a side-play to Pardo, although it probably took his time and attention even more than the law, which was his profession. A younger brother, Jose (1820-1873), wrote a few short poems, but his verses are relatively limited and amateurish. Manuel Ascension Segura (1805-1871) wrote clever farces filled with descriptions of local customs, somewhat after the type of the modern genero chico (Articulos, poesias y ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... horses finished hauling the trees to that part of the farm where holes had been dug for them. I had told my tenant to dig large holes and large holes he had certainly dug! Most of them were big enough to bury one of the horses in. Such was my amateurish first endeavor. ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... things, of English prose fiction of something like the later modern type. First appeared a series of collections of short tales chiefly translated from Italian authors, to which tales the Italian name 'novella' (novel) was applied. Most of the separate tales are crude or amateurish and have only historical interest, though as a class they furnished the plots for many Elizabethan dramas, including several of Shakspere's. The most important collection was Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' in 1566. The earliest original, or partly original, English prose fictions ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... a development of recent days,—the Social Service agencies. Out of the old-time charity has come a fine successor, social service; out of the amateurish, self-consciously gracious and sweet Lady Bountiful has come the social worker. Unfortunately social service has not yet dropped the name "Charity", perhaps has not been able to do so, largely because the well-to-do from whom the money must come like to think of themselves ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered. She scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which moments she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness. That was her final judgment on the story as a whole—amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he had done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... obvious and even trite; his letters may lack any flavour of personality; but these dispatches are literature. Like his hero Napoleon, like Caesar and Wellington, Sir John French has forged a literary style for himself. There is nothing amateurish or journalistic about his communications from the front. The dispatch from Mons, for instance, is a masterpiece of lucid and incisive English. It might well be printed in our school-histories, not merely as a vivid historic document, but as ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... remain," said Betty, not unpleasantly at all, and still with her gentle air of mere unprejudiced speculation, "is that, if a man or woman is properly ill-treated—PROPERLY—not in any amateurish way—they reach the point of not caring in the least—nothing matters, but that they must get away from the horror of the unbearable thing —never to see or hear of it again is heaven enough to make anything else a thing to smile at. But one could settle ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... appeared the original bricks; and as my architectural knowledge had led me rightly, the space I had cleared was directly over a vertical joint between firm, workmanlike masonry on one hand, and rough amateurish work on the other, bricks laid anyway, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... of any kind sound amateurish in the business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me, therefore, to become more technical. The great claim of the philosophy ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... early experiments have, I admit, been amateurish. But I shall acquire skill, and the appetite shall learn refinements, to keep it in health. I don't think it was bad sport, on the whole, to open with low comedy. It tickled me, anyhow, to watch Farrell emerge from a sort of bathing-machine upon the plage, moderately ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was to the point. At length during a discussion of various forms of entertainment Mrs. Noxon said she was afraid that the show would be deadly dull with only amateurs in it. Mrs. Dyckman thought that professionals would make the amateurs look more amateurish than ever. The debate swayed from side to side, but finally inclined toward the belief that a few professional bits would ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... her companion to that side of the Plaza, when I saw a group of Columbian Guards, evidently off duty, place themselves against the wall quite near me. They were strolling gaily, and after a little, as the singers began a national anthem, some of them joined in the chorus or refrain. It was amateurish singing enough, until suddenly a new voice lifted itself among them—a tenor voice—sweet, strong, high, and thoroughly cultured. I turned to look closer, and saw that the singer was my friend, the handsome guard. He was standing slightly aloof from the others, and when he saw ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... out of Hazebrouck towards St Omer. It was a clear dawn in splashes of pure colour. All the villages were peaceful, untouched by war. When we came to St Omer it was quite light. All the soldiers in the town looked amateurish. We could not make out what was the matter with them, until somebody noticed that their buttons shone. We drew up in the square, the happiest crew imaginable, but with a dignity such as befitted chosen N.C.O.'s ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... advanced when Beeching and Harry started in to clear the muddle of their amateurish night's camp, with all its preposterous litter of bedding, utensils (always unclean), and other wasteful truck such as no men can afford to carry in the northland. But the day would be half done by the time their muddled preparations were ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... of Dick of Devonshire, now first printed (from Eg. MS., 1994[1]), is distinctly a well-written piece, the work of a practised hand. There is nothing amateurish in the workmanship; the reader is not doomed to soar into extravagances at one moment, and sink into flatnesses at another. Ample opportunities were offered for displays of boisterous riot, but the playwright's even-balanced mind was not to be disturbed. Everywhere there are traces of studious ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... he said, "that something must have been known about the place and caused this amateurish kind ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... obscurity and seeming misery, little or nothing is known. He left several manuscript plays, of which the present at least, dated 1603[321] at 'Wolves Hill, my Parnassus,' possesses neither interest nor merit. It is an amateurish performance, partly in prose, partly in verse, either blank or rimed in couplets. Where the author adopts verse as a vehicle, his language becomes crabbed and ungrammatical in its endeavour to accommodate itself to the unwonted ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... pencil; most of them bearing evidence in their execution that they are the productions of amateurs, although here and there the eye detects work strong enough to suggest the hand and eye of the veteran professional painter. But, although so much of the work is amateurish, it is nevertheless thoroughly good, no picture being permitted to be hung upon the walls until it has been subjected to the scrutiny, and received the approval, of a Hanging Committee of artistic members. Looking more closely at these pictures, we note that—with the exception ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... out a microscopic bit of handkerchief and was dabbing at the blood in an amateurish way. Jeems moaned and turned his head as if to ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... Rachael had almost as much satisfaction from her morning's reading as Magsie did. The three most influential papers did not comment upon Miss Clay's acting at all. In two more, little Miss Elsie Eaton and Bryan Masters shared the honors. The Sun remarked frankly that Miss Clay's amateurish acting, her baby lisp, her utter unacquaintance with whatever made for dramatic art, would undoubtedly insure the play a long run. Rachael knew that Warren would see all these papers, but she cut out all the pleasanter reviews and put them on ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... say we live in blinkers, that we've no intellectual pursuits, no interest in 'this wonderful country.' I confess, to some of us, India and its people are holy terrors. As for art and music and theatres—where are they, except what we make for ourselves, in our indefatigable, amateurish way. Can't you see—you, with your imaginative insight—that we have virtually nothing but each other? If we spent our days bowing and scraping and dining and dancing with due decorum, there'd be a boom in suicides and the people in clover at Home ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... picturesque style of handling the point; and in the "Elements of Drawing" he had taught his readers to take Rembrandt's etchings as exemplary. But now he felt that this "evasive" manner, as he called it, had its dangers. And so these papers attempted to supersede the amateurish object lesson of the earlier work by stricter rules for a severer style; prematurely, as it proved, for the chapters came to an end before the promised code was formulated. The same work was taken up again in "The Laws of Fesole"; but the use of the pure line, which Ruskin's ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... shopkeepers! What an extraordinary characterization! I thought he was a most amateurish shopkeeper. He didn't even know the name of his own batiste, much less where it ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... glance discovered on the block did not strengthen Will's confidence in Rosamund's claim to be a serious artist. He had always taken for granted that her work was amateurish, and that she had little chance of living by it. On the whole, he felt glad to be confirmed in this view; Rosamund as an incompetent was more interesting to him than if she had given proof of ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of ensemble and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses couldn't remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt, but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they went out to dinner with the Sessionses, it seemed to Una that Mr. Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with the waiters, too hesitating ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Grieg could not endure "amateurish mediocrity," and made war upon it, thus drawing jealous attacks upon himself. His great friend and ally, Nordraak, passed away in 1868, and the next year his baby daughter, aged thirteen months, the only child he ever had, ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... of 1915 seems almost amateurish to that of 1916, a fact hardly revealed to the public by its reading of bulletins and of such a quantity of miscellaneous information that the significance of it becomes obscure. At the start of the war the Germans had ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... is, as a rule, a shockingly amateurish affair. Now and then, it is true, we find beginners forging with the accuracy of old hands, or breaking into houses with the finish of experts. But these are isolated cases. The average tyro lacks generalship altogether. Spennie Dreever may be ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... making back for Wellington, down through the wide and rather dreary-looking Hutt Valley. They were broke. They carried their few remaining belongings in two skimpy, amateurish-looking swags. Steelman had fourpence left. They were very tired and very thirsty—at least Steelman was, and he answered for both. It was Smith's policy to feel and think just exactly ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... may be served. If the actors are friends they join in the supper. But sometimes these private theatricals are not amateurish, but given by professionals, in which case the etiquette is somewhat different, and the performers may or may not be invited, ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... advance of invention, new branches of activity, that change in their nature and methods all too rapidly for the establishment of rote and routine workers of the old type, call together fresh levies of amateurish workers and learners who must surely presently develop into, or give place to, bodies of qualified and capable men. And the point I would particularly insist upon here is, that throughout all its ranks and ramifications, from the organizing heads ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... "That's only amateurish and besides reprehensible," said the Tennessee Shad. "No, the highest principle in finance, the real cream de la creme, is to make others pay you for what ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... too professional; we concern ourselves with methods and details; we swallow blindly the elaborate tradition under which we have ourselves been educated; we continue to respect the erudite mind, and to decry the appreciative spirit as amateurish and dilettante. We continue to think that a boy is well trained in history if he has a minute knowledge of the sequence of events—that is, of course, a necessary part of the equipment of a professor or a teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies of our system—that we train ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... gridiron and was a revelation to him. Even by the end of the first week the first team was in what seemed to Clint end-of-season form, although in that Clint was vastly mistaken, and his own efforts appeared to him pretty weak and amateurish. But he held on hard, did his best and hoped to at least retain a place on the third squad until the final cut came. And it might just be, he told himself in optimistic moments, that he'd make the second! Meanwhile he was enjoying it. It's remarkable what a lot of extremely hard ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... tenderfeet they were, and their lack of foresight might well shock an oldtimer like Murphy. But he would have been still more shocked had he seen what poor amateurish preparations for the coming winter another young tenderfoot had been making. If he had seen the place which Jack Corey had chosen for his winter hide-out I think he would have taken a fit; and if he had seen the little pile of food which Jack ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... hotel list did not think "Mr. French of Nowhere" a subject worthy of dissection, so for a few days I thought I should enjoy perfect peace with profit. A "stocky little Englishman" taking notes en passant with an amateurish fervency was probably what most people would think who cared to think at all of the stranger in ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... "You are always doing for others. It is hardly kind to ask you; but we have some months to spare; there need be no haste." Charley hastened to relieve the Cure's anxiety. "Do not apologise," he said. "I will do what I can when I can. But as for drawing, Monsieur, it will be but amateurish." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ascertain a new fact about a familiar species. I would applaud and echo that sentiment, for by all means let us have bird news that really is news, instead of revamping the familiar facts again and again, as some amateurish writers do. While I am not able to add any new species to science, I have made note of many pleasing incidents in the bird realm, and these, I venture to hope, may be of ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... rest was amateurish. We milled badly. Grim away in front had halted to let the line close, and we swarmed around him like a herd of steers that smell wolves, and nobody seemed to know which way to look, ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy |
