"Obtrusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Father and mother, and to his wife adhere; And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul. She heard me thus; and though divinely brought, Yet innocence, and virgin modesty, Her virtue, and the conscience of her worth, That would be wooed, and not unsought be won, Not obvious, not obtrusive, but, retired, The more desirable; or, to say all, Nature herself, though pure of sinful thought, Wrought in her so, that, seeing me, she turned: I followed her; she what was honour knew, And with obsequious majesty approved My pleaded reason. To the nuptial bower I led her blushing like the morn: ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... circlets ran, From all that teaches brotherhood to Man Far, far removed! from want, from hope, from fear! Enchanting music lulled your infant ear, 10 Obeisance, praises soothed your infant heart: Emblazonments and old ancestral crests, With many a bright obtrusive form of art, Detained your eye from Nature: stately vests, That veiling strove to deck your charms divine, 15 Rich viands, and the pleasurable wine, Were yours unearned by toil; nor could you see The unenjoying toiler's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... experiment and investigation necessary for the procuring of the real substance; and Hippocrates, not knowing how to advance to a theory by rational experiment, and too honest to invent one, assumes the traditional theories, founded on the vaguest and most obtrusive generalizations. Those which his experience taught him to reject, were adopted and maintained by Galen and all who followed him for centuries, the chief instance of progress being only the substitution ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... earth! The generations beneath him had been disciplined by the cold, and had learned to content themselves with bare necessities; a lesson which they handed down to him, simply and directly, with no inheritance of frivolity. In his world, cause and effect were in a direct line; an obtrusive odor did not translate itself into a spectral chattering of the teeth. The result was in a direct line with the cause —but their relation was often that of the match and the bonfire. Herein lay the strength of his imagination; this ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... plays in which the theme, in all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr. Galsworthy's Strife and Justice. The French plays, in my judgment, suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme—that is to say, the abstract element—over the human and concrete factors in the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art eludes this danger, at any rate in ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... she would have cared to be to one who had more claims upon her, necessarily placed her in embarrassment which was very likely to produce the opposite effect. The young Virginian girl could not do otherwise than receive those attentions with gratitude, and yet her very desire not to be obtrusive and not to seem to demand more attention than was necessary, placed her in an equally anomalous position. The two girls consequently became much less intimately acquainted within the first few days, than they might have done if thrown ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... King had succeeded in carrying off a thousand dozen bottles of this wine out of the royal cellars when he fled from his subjects in Megalia. The bottles in which Vino Regalis was sold had yards of gold foil wrapped round their necks. They were in their way quite as splendid and obtrusive as Madame Corinne was in hers. I always think that Gorman must have had the lady before his eyes when he arranged ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... And the Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more obtrusive, because he also, the virtuous Adams, might have sat in that gallery. For the wily Hutchinson had offered him the lucrative post of solicitor-general—the open road to power; but he had declined it; he could not be bought by the man "whose ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... making one of them feel cross or contrary. You only showed them something better than they had, and did it without being obtrusive. Every one wants what is better than he has;—if he is allowed to take it of his own accord, and doesn't have ...
— By the Roadside • Katherine M. Yates
... excellences of materials, design, and decoration, internal as well as external, has been universally considered the most perfect which human genius ever planned and executed. Its dimensions were sufficiently large to produce an impression of grandeur and sublimity, which was not disturbed by any obtrusive subdivision of parts; and, whether viewed at a small or greater distance, there was nothing to divert the mind of the spectator from contemplating the unity as well as majesty of mass and outline; circumstances which form the first and most remarkable characteristic of every Greek temple erected ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... immediately; but the obligation was there all the same, and to Jacob Boehm's influence we must attribute the evolution of the distinctive doctrine of the Muggletonians, which just about this time comes into obtrusive prominence. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... first Sabbath of the new year Phyllis was left at the little Methodist chapel. Her profession had always been free from that obtrusive demonstration of religious opinion which is seldom united with true piety. While she dwelt under her uncle's roof it had seemed generally the wisest and kindest thing to worship with his family. It involved ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... evidence enough that he had not been long at large. The paroquet was a splendid creature, with a brilliant orange throat darkly spotted. He flew from tree to tree, chattering gayly, and had a really pretty song. Evidently he was in the best of spirits, notwithstanding the rather obtrusive attentions of a crowd of house sparrows, who appeared to look upon such a wearer of the green as badly out of place in this new England of theirs. But for all his vivacity, I feared he would not ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... inn, are very natural and tender—as most of his compositions are, when he was at all in earnest. For our own part, we cannot complain of ever meeting any other welcome than a warm one, go where we may; for we are not obtrusive, and where we are not either liked, or loved, or esteemed, or admired (that last is a strong word, yet we all have our admirers), we are exceeding chary of the light of our countenance. But at an inn, the only kind of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... young at the date of her marriage, and her fortune was moderate enough, for the moneyed strength of her grandfather and father had gone to found a family and support a baronetage. Still, she had been accustomed to carry herself, after she became Mrs. Carey, not in an obtrusive and offensive manner, but in a quiet, well-bred way, as one who had been undeniably better born and bred than her neighbours. Indeed, under any circumstances she would have been a reserved woman, who would, in homely parlance, have kept ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... all this time, but I had observed that his more controlled excitement was even greater than the obtrusive emotion of the clergyman. He sat with a pale, drawn face, his anxious gaze fixed upon Holmes, and his thin hands clasped convulsively together. His pale lips quivered as he listened to the dreadful experience which had befallen his family, and his dark eyes ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... surface—say, either side of a bright spoon. Of this phenomenon I first became aware in rather a ludicrous way. My host's daughter was a very pleasant pretty girl, who made herself more agreeable to me than most of those about me. For some days my companion-shadow had been less obtrusive than usual; and such was the reaction of spirits occasioned by the simple mitigation of torment, that, although I had cause enough besides to be gloomy, I felt light and comparatively happy. My impression is, that she was quite aware of the law of appearances ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... M. Emanuel's likewise), and to dine with them at the Hotel Crecy. He declined dinner, for he was a man always somewhat shy at meeting the advances of the wealthy: there was a strength of sturdy independence in the stringing of his sinews—not obtrusive, but pleasant enough to discover as one advanced in knowledge of his character; he promised, however, to step in with his friend, M. A——, a French Academician, in the ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... bunch of Greens first made their appearance in the world; but these dates we withhold, from a delicate regard to personal feelings, which will be duly appreciated by those who have felt the sacredness of their domestic hearth to be tampered with by the obtrusive impertinences of ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... form an appropriate accompaniment or preparation for its direct indulgence or display. The former of those methods has perhaps been most frequently employed, and certainly has most attracted attention. But the latter, though less obtrusive, and perhaps less frequently resorted to of set purpose, is, we are inclined to think, the most natural and efficacious of the two; and it is often adopted, we believe unconsciously, by poets of the highest order;—the predominant emotion of their ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... actually poniarded his apprentice. He was of course tried, condemned, and executed; but an existing monument to his memory attests the humanity of the monks in giving him Christian interment.[54] On the whole, it is the absence of all obtrusive and unappropriate ornament which gives to the interior of this building that light, unencumbered, and faery-like effect which so peculiarly belongs to it, and which creates a sensation that I never remember to have felt within any ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... windmills, I suppose there must have been, as every picture has to have its background; but backgrounds are seldom obtrusive in Holland, as Mr. Starr says; and here the two lines of toy dwellings were so astonishing that we noted ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... The feasters resembled Wordsworth's cows, "forty feeding like one:" in the left hand they held the meat to their teeth, and cut off the slice in possession with long daggers perilously close, were their noses longer and their mouths less obtrusive. During the dinner I escaped from the place of flies, and retired to a favourite tree. Here the End of Time, seeing me still in pain, insisted upon trying a Somali medicine. He cut two pieces of dry wood, scooped a hole in the shorter, and sharpened the longer, applied point ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... largest—there were fresh flowers in a vase, evidently gathered that morning; and, what seemed still more remarkable, the pitchers and ewers were freshly filled with water. This obliged Miss Milly to notice another singular fact, namely, that the house was free from dust, the one most obtrusive and penetrating visitor of Five Forks. The floors and carpets had been recently swept, the chairs and furniture carefully wiped and dusted. If the house WAS haunted, it was possessed by a spirit who had none of the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... aristocratic splendour where none of us dreamed of seeking him—and he did not seek us. We hated and despised the bloated aristocracy, just as he hated and despised foreigners without knowing much about them; and the aristocracy, to do it justice, did not pester us with its obtrusive advances. But I never heard Leech spoken of otherwise in bohemia than with affectionate admiration, although many of us seemed to think that his best work was done. Indeed, his work was becoming somewhat fitful in quality, and ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... difficulty in concealing her curiosity. But his face betrayed nothing. It always seemed to her that his very dark and straight eyebrows, so obtrusive and unusual as compared with the delicacy of the features, of the fair skin and light brown curls, made it easy for him to wear any mask he pleased. By their mere physical emphasis they drew attention away from the subtler and more revealing ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to all the elements of the Republican party, free from any suspicion of intrigue with foe or faction. The causes of his Senatorial defeat thus gave him a certain party authority and leadership, which were felt if not openly acknowledged. On his part, while never officious or obtrusive, he was always ready with seasonable and judicious suggestions, generous in spirit and comprehensive in scope, and which looked ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... you will do it so beautifully, dearest!" Cecil bit her lip, and colored angrily. Nothing annoyed her like Mrs. Danvers' obtrusive partisanship and ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... him one of her quick glances as he reached her, and noted with distaste the extreme fieriness of his red hair in the light of the sinking sun. His hair had always been an offence to her. It was so obtrusive. But she could have borne with that alone. It was the green eyes that mocked at everything from under shaggy red brows that had originally given rise to her very decided antipathy, and these Olga found it impossible to condone. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... employed to decorate, it had been sawn short off at the waist. Even in this state it reached from floor to ceiling; and thrusting itself forward, with that excessively wide-awake aspect, and air of somewhat obtrusive politeness, by which figure-heads are usually characterised, seemed to reduce everything else to mere ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... texture call solely for a scenic setting which should convey effective suggestion. The machinery to be employed for the purpose of effective suggestion should be simple and unobtrusive. If it be complex and obtrusive, it defeats "the purpose of playing" by exaggerating for the spectator the inevitable interval between the visionary and indeterminate limits of the scene which the poet imagines, and the cramped and narrow bounds, which the stage renders practicable. That perilous interval ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... these considerations in my Ethics; the other is as follows:—Politeness is a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not made the subject of reproach; and since these defects are thus rendered somewhat less obtrusive, the result is ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... parades the flag of France went by. This was a picturesque and semi-exotic event; it stirred some memories of early days abroad, and Raymond, with an effort, did, stiffly and with an obvious (even an obtrusive) self-consciousness, manage to get off his hat. A highly vocal young man alongside looked at this cold and creaking ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... such importance, a gesture or a word at the outset is enough to ruin a newcomer. It is the principal merit of fine manners and the highest breeding that they produce the effect of a harmonious whole, in which every element is so blended that nothing is startling or obtrusive. Even those who break the laws of this science, either through ignorance or carried away by some impulse, must comprehend that it is with social intercourse as with music, a single discordant note is a complete negation of the art itself, for the harmony exists only when all its conditions ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... moral retrocession had already begun. She was gay and chatty, and her countenance fresh and blooming. But I missed something—something the absence of which awakened a sigh of regret. Ralph was very lover-like in his deportment, fluttering about Delia, complimenting her, and showing her many obtrusive attentions. But eyes that were in the habit of looking below the surface of things, saw no heart in ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... maintain or develop the projecting chin, increase its perpendicular height till the jaw is deepest and strongest at its extremity, evolve a side flange, and enlarge the upper jaw-bone to form part of a more prominent nose, while drawing back the savagely obtrusive teeth and lips to a more pleasing and subdued position of retirement and of humanized beauty. If human preference and natural selection caused some of these differences, why are they incompetent to effect changes in the ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... prodding the near ox lightly in the ribs. And the team lurched to the right to avoid a markedly obtrusive boulder. "Haw, Bright!" he ejaculated a minute later, flicking with his whip the off shoulder of the farther ox. And with sprawling legs and swaying of hind-quarters the team swerved obediently to the left, shunning a mire-hole that would have taken in the wheel to the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the forenoon that we arrived with Borland and Lathrop. I could not help noticing the cordial manner with which Borland greeted Miss Winslow. There was something obtrusive even in his sympathy. Strong, whom we met now for the first time, seemed rather suspicious of the presence of Borland and his chemist, but made an effort to talk freely without ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... fear of this that had kept Sir Felix away from the club. Grasslough, as he had told himself, was just the fellow to ask such a question,—ill-natured, insolent, and obtrusive. But the question demanded an answer of some kind. 'Yes,' said he; 'a fellow attacked me in the street, coming behind me when I had a girl with me. He didn't get much the best of ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... she appeared brilliant and vivacious, with gleams of her former great beauty, the gracious and agreeable hostess; again, her condition was that of sheer indifference and semi-torpor. And who was the officious and familiar ayah, her attendant and shadow, an obtrusive creature with bold black eyes and a resolute mouth? Why did she speak so authoritatively to her mistress? Why did she wear such handsome jewellery and expensive silk saris, heavily fringed with gold, and strut about with such ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... silent, until they came to the end of their journey at number forty in the Krumerweg. It was a house of hanging gables, almost as old as the town itself, solid and grim and taciturn. There are some houses which talk like gossips, noisy, obtrusive and provocative. Number forty was like an old warrior, gone to his chair by the fireside, who listens to the small-talk of his neighbors saturninely. What was it all about? Had he not seen battles and storms, revolutions and bloodshed? The prattle ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... rapid passage from a street of stately edifices, into a maze of the vilest squalor, steaming with unwholesome stenches, and swarming with half-naked children and whole worlds of dirty people—make up, altogether, such a scene of wonder: so lively, and yet so dead: so noisy, and yet so quiet: so obtrusive, and yet so shy and lowering: so wide awake, and yet so fast asleep: that it is a sort of intoxication to a stranger to walk on, and on, and on, and look about him. A bewildering phantasmagoria, with all the inconsistency of a dream, and all the pain and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... shall meet this want must have theory; yet the theory must not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. The theory must be deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commend itself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by its ability to comprehend in a rational and intelligible order the ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... seem obtrusive, I fear, to enter into this sort of personal details; but, without some few words of explanation, such passages as the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... He wasn't obtrusive about his heart. You wouldn't have known he had one. He only left it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for the benefit of science, since he considered it to be quite an extraordinary kind of heart. And the ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... spectacles more firmly upon his nose, and ran his gaze calculatingly over the assembled voters. No one of those patriotic citizens seemed to desire to be obtrusive at ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Him back. The discipline and education of the disciples are recorded with a plain revelation of their mistakes and their spiritual dulness. When they had settled in Capernaum Christ shows them that He must find a wider sphere of work (i. 38); He meets with a significant silence their obtrusive remonstrance when the woman with the issue of blood caused Him to ask, "Who touched My clothes?" (v. 30, 31); He tells them with affectionate care "to rest a while," when they had been too busy even to eat (vi. 31); He rebukes them gravely when they put ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... accepted till the girl was gone, taking my book to the window-seat very quietly. Even when we were alone I was slow to disturb her. To sit with her in sight was happiness, and the proper happiness, for early morning—serene, incomplete, but progressive. Had I been obtrusive, I knew I should have encountered rebuff. 'Not at home to suitors' was written on her brow. Therefore I read on, stole now and then a look, watched her countenance soften and open as she felt I respected her mood, and enjoyed the ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... therefore, at the obtrusive impertinence of these two fellows, and when next he passed them, he surveyed them from head to foot with a haughty and indignant stare. The moment after he heard them burst into a laugh, and ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... had in the way of looks and not to envy the insolent radiance of the fair beauties, or the tragic splendour of the dark ones. Besides, great beauty has disadvantages; it attracts attention at the wrong moment, it makes travelling troublesome, it is obtrusive and hinders a woman from doing exactly what she pleases. It is celebrity, and therefore a target for every photographing ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... straight upright, with her hands clasped behind her, before the deal table. She gazed, under lowered brows, straight out of window; and following that gaze, I saw across the coombe a mean mud hut, with a wall around it, that looked on Sheba Farm with the obtrusive ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... against the slope of the mountain, so that, from one side, you may step upon the roof. That is the chalet. When well grouped, running along a slope of mountain side, these huts produce a very pleasing effect, being never obtrusive (owing to the prevailing grayness of their tone), uniting well with surrounding objects, and bestowing at once animation ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... happiness do not depend entirely on a sufficiency of the necessaries of life. Some of our neighbours were far from being agreeable to us. Being fresh from England, it could hardly be expected that we could at once accommodate ourselves to the obtrusive familiarity of persons who had no conception of any differences in taste or manners arising from education and habits acquired in a more refined state of society. I allude more particularly to some rude and demoralised American farmers from the United ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... prolixity incident to that form by its regular plan, by the intercommunion of the adventures of the several knights (none of whom disappears after having achieved his own quest), and by the constant presence of a not too obtrusive allegory. This last characteristic attaches it on the other side to the poems of the Roman de la Rose order, which succeeded the Romans d'Aventures as objects of literary interest and practice, not merely in France, but throughout Europe. This allegory has been variously estimated ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... you doing that. I don't think you could. You're generally more obtrusive than any one else I've ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... critic who attempts to speak of Titian. To seize the salient characteristics of an artist whose glory it is to offer nothing over-prominent, and who keeps the middle path of perfection, is impossible. As complete health may be termed the absence of obtrusive sensation, as virtue has been called the just proportion between two opposite extravagances, so is Titian's art a golden mean of joy unbroken by brusque movements of the passions—a well-tempered harmony in ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... arrived on their visit only the day before: they had taken a long holiday, and had been visiting many friends. It was now about two months since their marriage, and the gowns in Minnie's trousseau began to lose their obtrusive newness: nor can it be said that her sentiments were new. They were only modified a little by her present milieu. "I suppose," she said, after an interval, "that Lady Markland will come to see me as soon as she knows I am here. ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... discordant church bells and rattling of vicious drums, Marseilles, a fact to be strongly smelt and tasted, lay broiling in the sun one day. In Marseilles that day there was a villainous prison. In one of its chambers, so repulsive a place that even the obtrusive stare blinked at it, and left it to such refuse of reflected light as it could find for itself, were two men. Besides the two men, a notched and disfigured bench, immovable from the wall, with a draught-board rudely ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... too common, and which few have strength of mind to resist or sufficient pride to overcome. The intuitive watchfulness of affection, however, led Adelheid to a different conclusion; she saw that he never affected to conceal, while with equal good taste he abstained from obtrusive allusions to the humble nature of his origin, but she also perceived that there were points of his previous history on which he was acutely sensitive, and which at first she feared must be attributed to the consciousness of acts that his clear perception of moral truth condemned, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... spreading the butter a quarter of an inch thick upon her toast and restrained with difficulty the impulse to take it away from her. And her clothes! Joan had seen guys carried through the streets on the fifth of November that were less obtrusive. ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... which modified society so extensively, scarcely modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under the Code Napoleon and still less anywhere else. Interwoven with all the new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old tradition still continues among us. Since, also, the husband is, conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the home,—the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions brought ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... bringing himself to sudden stops; now, eliciting a shriek from Tilly Slowboy, in the low nursing-chair near the fire, by the unexpected application of his moist nose to her countenance; now, exhibiting an obtrusive interest in the baby; now, going round and round upon the hearth, and lying down as if he had established himself for the night; now, getting up again, and taking that nothing of a fag-end of a tail of his, out into the weather, as if he had just remembered ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... South African storm-fiend (an unusually large though not frequently obtrusive one) laughed in a voice of thunder and nearly dashed in the windows with a tempest of wind and rain! As if his voice had called up spirits from the "vasty deep," two horsemen suddenly appeared approaching at full speed. One of them was ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... affected by their condition are not private, but public interests. There are legal means for abating nuisances; and there is no reason why houses which affect the health of whole districts should not be treated in the same way as nuisances which are more obtrusive, though less pernicious. In some of the cities of Europe, in Nuremberg, for instance, there is a public architect, to whom all plans for new buildings are submitted for approval or rejection according as they correspond or not with the style of building suitable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... state that my cousin was not a severe critic; in point of fact the opinions he expressed would have done splendidly as advertisements. None the less, when in any of my poetry my childishness became too obtrusive, he could not restrain his hearty ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... now propose to the consideration of our readers. Since the days of Smith and Montesquieu, no more valuable addition has been made to moral science; and though the good taste and modesty of its author, has induced her to put, in the least obtrusive form, the wisdom and erudition—the least fragment of which would have furnished forth a host of modern Sciolists with the most ostentatious paragraphs—the deep thought and nervous eloquence by which almost every page of the volume before us is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... absence and bloody shirt, and granted with all alacrity his three demands of a supper, a surgeon, and a bed. I stood back, ill at ease, aching at the mention of supper, and wondering whether I were to be driven off like an obtrusive puppy. But when M. le Comte, without glancing at me, said to the drawer, "Take care of my serving-man," I knew my stomach ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... lamented to her friends; for Dredge, at that time—they kept him all summer at the bungalow—had one of the most encumbering personalities you can imagine. He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... she said, resignedly. She did not want to listen just then. She wanted to be quiet and think out the very obtrusive financial and moral problem of getting away. She felt like Lot when he knew of the destruction to come upon the cities of the Plain. But she felt one couldn't walk out of things as Lot had walked. Only—she had to do her worrying with placid face, giving lip-service ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... The fine qualities which might so easily have deteriorated remained unscathed. His keen sense of justice and honor, his inborn candor and generosity, his fervent love of virtue and goodness in their simplest and least obtrusive exhibitions, his cordial admiration of true greatness,—these and kindred traits never lost their freshness or force. Above all, he retained throughout life that deep and exquisite tenderness of feeling which formed the supreme charm ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... seasons are less obtrusive on spots of this kind than amid woodland scenery. Still, to a close observer, they are just as perceptible; the difference is that their media of manifestation are less trite and familiar than such well-known ones as ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... attraction of a well-lined couch. The obsequious demeanour of message-bearers, charioteers, and the club-armed keepers of peace. The explosion of innumerable fire-crackers round the convivial shines, The gathering together of relations who at all other times shun each other markedly. The obtrusive recollection of a great many things contrary to a spoken vow, and the inflexible purpose to be more resolute in future. These in turn ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... into the tiny harbor the inhabitants come down to see it, and the skippers of small craft pop up from their cabins and yell out to know where it's coming to. Even when they see it bound and guided by many hawsers they are not satisfied, but dangling fenders in an obtrusive fashion over the sides of their ships, prepare for ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... Clarence was possessed of an invincible loyalty of principle, and that, asking no sentimental affection, and indeed yielding none, he was, without presuming on his relationship, devoted to his cousin's interest. It seemed that from being a glancing ray of sunshine in the house, evasive but never obtrusive, he had become a daily necessity of comfort and security to ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the great blemish of insolence. They are wanting in geniality, and apparently wanting in reflectiveness. They contain too little thought and more than enough of gall. Perhaps their cleverness is too obtrusive. His hearers are pleased, but they suspect a trick, and levy a discount on his argument. The faults of his speeches are his faults as a politician. He is headstrong and impulsive. He borrows his ideas from his passions, and fancies ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... an enemy; while every muscle was so soft and feeble that not one of the little animals was as yet able to roll itself into the shape of a ball. The spines, however, served a useful purpose: they kept the tender skin beneath from being irritated by the chance touch of the mother hedgehog's obtrusive quills. ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... incorruptible objectivity were not lacking and the whole did not, therefore, ultimately turn into pleading for a cause. But when satire fails to amuse for bitterness, and humor fails to conciliate, the pictures become almost too gloomy and the moral purpose too obtrusive. Thus it is in the novel The Widower (1911). The folly of a lustful old peasant who in the toils of a scheming hussy supinely looks on while his property goes to wrack and ruin and his son becomes a murderer, is here treated with too harsh a naturalism. The same may be said of the drama ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... form of words she used. Whatever the phrase she wanted to employ she turned it into verse on the instant and chanted it forth in perfect melody. So spontaneous was every expression that her very thoughts seemed to be framed in harmony. Her voice was not obtrusive nor monotonous and generally not loud, but was always well adapted to the sense of what she was singing. The tones mostly used in conversation were low and sweet, like rippling water, but these were constantly varied by the introduction of notes of ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... literary men, and to do a great deal of good among young and neglected people of that class. He is considered one of the best conversationists at present in society: it may very well be so; his style of talking being very simple and natural, anything but obtrusive, so that you might enjoy its agreeableness without suspecting it. He introduced me to his wife (a daughter of Lord Crewe), with whom and himself I had a good deal of talk. Mr. Milnes told me that he owns the land in ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... subject. There is, however, one part of your public conduct which our feelings will not permit us to pass in silence: our gratitude must trespass on your modesty; we mean, worthy Sir, your whole behaviour to the Scots Distillers.—In evil hours, when obtrusive recollection presses bitterly on the sense, let that, Sir, come like an healing angel, and speak the peace to your soul which the world can neither give ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... blank verse when some emotion sings itself to him, and prose as the ordinary language of life, the language of surprise, laughter, strife, and of all the commoner feelings. During these twelve or fourteen years the lyric note is not obtrusive; it is usually subordinated to ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... visitor with a taste for natural history became obtrusive and sought close investigation. It was part of Nickie's duty to fill such visitors with a proper respect for Missing Links, but ninety-nine out of every hundred accepted Mahdi in good faith. It is an axiom in the show business ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... everywhere as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers, Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits his delicate health in anticipation of the time when he will be able ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... brother's studied respectability of costume and bearing. His clothes were of a loose sporting cut, and always odorous with stale tobacco. He wore a good deal of finery in the shape of studs and pins and dangling lockets and fusee-boxes; his whiskers were more obtrusive than his brother's, and he wore a moustache in addition—a thick ragged black moustache, which would have become a guerilla chieftain rather than a dweller amidst the quiet courts and squares of Gray's Inn. His position as a lawyer was not much better than that of Philip as a dentist; ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... have reason to think the Whigs of that State hold us responsible, to some extent, for the appointments which may be made of our citizens. We do not know you personally, and our efforts to see you have, so far, been unavailing. I therefore hope I am not obtrusive in saying in this way, for him and myself, that when a citizen of Illinois is to be appointed, in your department, to an office, either in or out of the State, we most respectfully ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D——, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyper-obtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived—these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... longer be in sympathy with this crude, thin-skinned, impulsive girl. And then—four or five children! Decidedly, I will give her a wide berth. And Courtney himself, with his big beard, small brain, and obtrusive laugh! I shall step across to California for a ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... pewter ink-pot, and tried nervously to blacken the letters with the tip of a quill, to make them, if possible, rather less obtrusive than they were. All in vain; they only stood out with more startling vividness when picked out in black upon the brown-stained deal. He felt very like a conscience-stricken murderer trying to hide a corpse that wouldn't be buried. He gave it up at last, having only made a terrible ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... himself. I will not say that he did not continue ignorant and bigoted, but he was no longer conceited and malicious. I will not say that he never showed himself dogmatic and ill-informed, but he was no longer obtrusive and uncharitable. His life was better than his dogmas, and the sincerity of his good intentions counteracted and nullified the ill effects of a narrow and unwholesome creed. There were no farther inconsistencies in his conduct, and he showed firmly, yet modestly, the line he meant ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... had noticed him, and, what was more, had shown herself evidently pleased to see him, and had greeted him with that look of indescribable meaning which had charmed him that other evening on the Corso. He could not continue gazing at her without making himself obtrusive or attracting attention; and, feeling the incense-laden gloom of the cathedral atmosphere intolerable, he had come outside into the free, fresh air, where his thoughts could wander in undisturbed harmony with the beauty of his surroundings. ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... of a shrewd strong personality. A woman of about medium height, still young but rather over-developed, artificial and overdressed, with a full bust and thick red lips and lustrous eyes of greenish grey—her beauty was of the obtrusive type that is made to catch the eye on the street and in noisy crowded rooms. When Fanny kissed her, Ethel shrank. "I mustn't do that!" she exclaimed to herself. But the other woman had noticed it and shot ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... "reason." And so, disillusioned, he had rebounded to "human study," setting off on a pilgrimage in the depth of winter to borrow out-of-date books on optics and physics, and making more enemies by his obtrusive knowledge of how dew came and how lightning. It was not till—on the strength of a volume of Anatomical tables and a Medical dictionary—he undertook cures, that he had discovered the depths of his own ignorance, achieving only the cure of his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... this interesting feature of the scene was gone. To the owner of the place I could not but regret that the beauty of this retired part of the grounds had not tempted him to make it more accessible, by a path, not broad or obtrusive, but sufficient for persons who love such scenes to creep along ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... in that, while others had turned their attention to the more attractive fields of exploration, the discovery of new worlds or of novel celestial phenomena, he had incessantly devoted himself to the less interesting, less obtrusive, but more valuable walks of practical astronomy. And he instanced as the special grounds of the honour conferred, the compilation of nautical tables of extraordinary accuracy, the improvement of chronometers, ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... was of a kind I now experienced for the first time, and might have become of great importance had I been favoured with more frequent and intimate intercourse. But it was less her position as wife of the general director than her constant ill-health and my own peculiar unwillingness to appear obtrusive, that hindered our meeting, except at rare intervals. My recollections of her merge somewhat, in my memory, with those of my own sister Rosalie. I remember the tender ambition which inspired me to win the encouraging sympathy of this sensitive woman, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... intellectual strength, made her the champion of the suffering and oppressed wherever she found them. Her gift was essentially lyrical, though much of her work was not so in form. Her weak points are the lack of compression, an occasional somewhat obtrusive mannerism, and frequent failure both in metre and rhyme. Though not nearly the equal of her husband in force of intellect and the higher qualities of the poet, her works had, as might be expected on a comparison of their respective subjects and styles, a much earlier ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... case into consideration; that I regretted his violent antipathy to Englishmen, as I feared that, in consequence of it, my presence could never be otherwise than exceedingly disagreeable to him, but that during my enforced sojourn aboard La Mouette I would strive to render my nationality as little obtrusive as possible, and that I trusted we might very soon be fortunate enough to fall in with a craft of some sort into which he could transfer me. To which he replied that he fervently hoped so too, for both our sakes; then directing my attention to a case of books attached ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... fared with the Spaniards in Florida? The good-will of the Indians had vanished. The French had been obtrusive and vexatious guests; but their worst trespasses had been mercy and tenderness, to the daily outrage of the new-comers. Friendship had changed to aversion, aversion to hatred, hatred to open war. The forest-paths were beset; stragglers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... feelings for us all, so am I certain of his feelings for myself. Those who were most pliant to his touch loomed, of course, largest in his thoughts: and my mother's letter, giving him the proof of my affection, which, since it was less obtrusive than Doe's, had been probably less clear to him, brought me in the foreground of his view. Be it right or wrong, this man with the hard chin and kind eyes had his favourites; and I date from this moment my usurping ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... so obtrusive—he'd always want you to do exactly what he liked, just when he liked, and never when he didn't, or when you ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... it was not until she had passed him and flung herself into a chair, that I thought to look in his direction. Then it was too late, for he had turned his face aside and was gazing with rather an obtrusive curiosity at the old-fashioned room, murmuring, as he did so, some such commonplaces to his ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... well, That guard the claims of books which never sell." The British maiden bowed a pleased assent, Her two long ringlets swinging as she bent; The glistening eyes her eager soul looked through Betrayed her lineage in their Saxon blue. Backward she flung each too obtrusive curl And thus began,—the rose-lipped ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which must ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "fluchtig." In fact, the entire composition, with its murmuring, meandering, chromatic character, is a forerunner to the whispering, weaving, moonlit effects in some of his later studies. The technical purpose is clear, but not obtrusive. It is intended for the fourth and fifth finger of the right hand, but given in unison with both hands it becomes a veritable but laudable torture for the thumb of the left. With the repeat of the first at bar 36 Von Bulow gives a variation in fingering. Kullak's ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... entirely right in reporting Mr.—." What is the conduct of this cadet himself afterwards? If different at all from what it was before, it is, in my presence at least, more cordial, more friendly, more kind. Still there is no ill-treatment, assuming of course that my own conduct is proper, and not obtrusive or overbearing. And so in a multitude of ways this fact is proved. I have noticed many things, little things perhaps they were, but still proofs, in the conduct of all the cadets which remove all doubt from ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... of establishing a permanent international tribunal, the delegation of the United States was not unmindful of the inconveniences which might arise from an obtrusive exercise of mediation, and in signing the convention carefully guarded the historic position of the United States by the ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... she was out of sight. Then with a sort of wrench he turned once more to observe the actions of the legless man. This one, however, having said cheerful good-bys to the sulky and heartsick Wilmot, and having at the same time noted the obtrusive nearness of the secret-service agent, had made swift use of his crutches and stumps and was at the moment climbing into ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... armor," Cargill explained, "and on horseback. My intellectual bowleggedness, so to say, and my moral squint are less obtrusive at an altitude." ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... will meet and not be foes, E'en as the rue may stand beside the rose And not affront it,—as a lonely tree May guard a shrine and not upon the lea Be deem'd obtrusive,—as an errant knight May serve the sovereign of his soul's delight And not, thereby, be deem'd of less account Than he who keeps her ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... insupportable than his futile attempts. But, nevertheless, something must be done. It could not be that Colonel Osborne should have gone down to the close neighbourhood of Nuncombe Putney without the intention of seeing the lady whom his obtrusive pertinacity had driven to that seclusion. It was terrible to Trevelyan that Colonel Osborne should be there, and not the less terrible because such a one as Mr. Bozzle was watching the Colonel on his behalf. Should he go to Nuncombe Putney himself? And if so, when he got to Nuncombe ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... fulness of strength with my life before me I do not know that I would not be a Social reformer—I would profess myself a Social agnostic, and prosecute my mission by the methods of the opportunist. I would endeavor to direct the Social ax to the most obvious and obtrusive roots of the Social evil, and having removed them and watched the result, would then determine what to do next. Possibly I would endeavor to begin with the abolition of wills and collateral inheritance, and so limiting direct inheritance that no man able ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... of Odd-Fellowship be for quieter and less obtrusive methods, pray who shall fairly ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... really a fair-sized salmon fly—turkey wing, orange body, and claret hackles, with the gold tip of the Professor. The collar was of picked medium gut stained black, many of the American anglers contending that this is the colour least obtrusive to fish. The line was strong, but not large. The rod was just as small as described, and certainly a ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... and then there rose in the stillness the unearthly howling of the baron's hounds, a cheerful sound which only their owner's somewhat loud converse of the evening had kept from becoming excessively obtrusive. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... towards her in tender concern, I could just distinguish the murmuring of a prayer that it was easy to understand was a petition offered up in behalf of Rupert. This done, she asked, herself, to have the curtain drawn again, to shut out the obtrusive thought ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... servitude ended. As soon as a bend in the road hid us from the house I opened my portmanteau, got out my own clothes, and, sub there, changed my raiment, putting on a quiet suit of blue, and presenting George Sampson's rather obtrusive garments (which I took the liberty of regarding as a perquisite) to Jean, who received them gladly. I felt at once a different being—so true it is that the tailor makes ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... who is obtrusive with his eyes as a discerner, how can he ever see more of anything ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... need this knowledge; it never forces itself on you. The hundreds, and almost thousands, of persons who form the company of the Comedie—their frequently recurring parts adjusted with extraordinary, though by no means obtrusive or offensive, consistency to the enormous world of detail and scenery and general "surroundings" in which their parts are played—are never interfered with by the pointing-stick or the prompter. They are there; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... a good. The remote, indirect and unrealised consequences of our acts are often far more important than those which are manifest and direct, and it continually happens that in extirpating some concentrated and obtrusive evil, men increase or engender a diffused malady which operates over a far wider area. How few, for example, who share the prevailing tendency to deal with every evil that appears in Society by coercive legislation adequately realise the danger of weakening the robust, self-reliant, resourceful ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... almost as long at his window. The Irish yew came to his mind again as he was on the point of drawing his curtains: but either he had been misled by a shadow the night before, or else the shrub was not really so obtrusive as he had fancied. Anyhow, he saw no reason for interfering with it. What he would do away with, however, was a clump of dark growth which had usurped a place against the house wall, and was threatening to obscure one of the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... principal wish was that he should be looked upon and addressed as a gentleman, and for that purpose she encouraged him to associate with those only whose rank and position in life rendered any assumption of equality on his part equally arrogant and obtrusive. In his own family his bearing towards his parents was, in point of fact, the reverse of what it ought to have been. He not only treated his father with something bordering on contempt, but joined his mother in all that ignorant pride which kept her perpetually bewailing the fate by ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... owl, one of those splendid brown creatures which have the crafty physiognomy of a cat, and the sharp grey ears of a mouse, made the forest echo with its obtrusive cry. A bird of this species I once encountered among the defile's crags, and as the creature sailed over my head it startled me with the glassy eyes which, as round as buttons, seemed to be lit from within with menacing fire. Indeed, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly-expressed aversion, nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... liberty which she does not possess, in order to clear you of the wrong which you have done in denying that liberty. The deafening rattle which your wife shakes will follow you everywhere with its obtrusive din. Your darling will stun you, will torture you, meanwhile arming herself by making you feel only the thorns of married life. She will greet you with a radiant smile in public, and will be sullen at home. She will be dull when you are merry, and will make you detest her merriment ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... onward road, which I was already following. And I told myself that in a few minutes' walking, Bow-street runner or not, I should have him at my mercy. And then reflection came to me in time. Of all things, one was out of the question. Upon no account must this obtrusive fellow see the cart. Until I had killed or shook him off, I was quite divorced from my companions—alone, in the midst of England, on a frosty by-way leading whither I knew not, with a sleuth-hound at my heels, and never a friend but ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as, for example, where there is only a faint difference in depth of tint between the pattern and its background; in applique work it is necessary to mask the joins; and it is by itself a delightful means of diapering a surface with not too obtrusive pattern. ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... into action. We "dream," not "do" the "noble things." The kindergarten does not fence off a half hour each day for moral culture, but keeps it in view every moment of every day. Yet it is never obtrusive; for the mental faculties are being addressed at the same time, and the body strengthened ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... dangerous tendency of character, you may expect only wretchedness and humiliation in coming years. I am sincerely sorry for you, but I tell you unhesitatingly, that I find it difficult to tolerate your grave and obtrusive faults." ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... observed that she laid aside nearly half for the succeeding day, doubts of her having the means of supporting her parent until the handkerchief was completed beginning to beset her mind. It was these painful and obtrusive doubts that most distressed the dear girl, now, for the expectation of reaping a reward comparatively brilliant, from the ingenious device to repair her means on which she had fallen, was strong within her. Poor child! her misgivings were the overflowings of a tender heart, while ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the custom, even with those who have no business, give an air of restless anxiety to every pedestrian. The exceptions to this rule are apt to go to the other extreme, and wear a defiant, obtrusive kind of indolence which suggests quite as much inward disquiet and unrest. The shiftless lassitude of a gambler can never be mistaken for the lounge of a gentleman. Even the brokers who loiter upon Montgomery Street at high noon are not loungers. Look ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... given us an amusing picture of the behaviour of gallants on the Elizabethan stage, in his "Cynthia's Revels." In this scene a child thus mimics the obtrusive beau: "Now, sir, suppose I am one of your genteel auditors, that am come in (having paid my money at the door, with much ado), and here I take my place, and sit downe. I have my three sorts of tobacco in my pocket, my light by me, and thus I begin. 'By this light, ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... compelled to study its judgments, as if they were making history. Whilst inoffensive people were suffering obscurely, the enemies of the tyrant were plotting to save themselves from the dreadful fate they saw so near them. Nothing bound them together but fear and a common hatred for the obtrusive dogmatist at the head of affairs; and it was not evident to each that they were acting in the same cause. But there was a man among them, still somewhat in the background, but gifted with an incredible dexterity, who hurled Napoleon from power in ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... consciousness that he had of late neglected them, possibly because Rupert's lofty scorn of the "silly" sex was not as amusing to him as formerly, and possibly because Johnny's curiosity had been at times obtrusive. He however quickened his pace and joined Rupert, laying his hand familiarly as of old on his shoulder. To his surprise the boy received his advances with some constraint and awkwardness, glancing uneasily in the direction of Johnny. A sudden idea ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... me, while I reluctantly directed my steps towards the college, which now appeared unwelcome and obtrusive. She was so different to everything I had hitherto experienced!—so gentle and kind—so unassuming, and yet so lovely—and now to be torn away and severed from such a person! That night I attempted to console myself in the following effusion; and as they are the first and ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... cheeks were sunken, and the heavy stubble of beard that filled the hollows was a dirty white. One would have guessed this apparition of Tom Braddock to be sixty years of age, at least. His hair, still rather closely cropped, was no longer black, but a defiant, obtrusive gray. The heavy neck was now thin and corded; the broad shoulders drooped as if deprived of all their youthful power. His aggressive mustache of the old days was gone, laying bare a broad, firmly set lip. The cheap jeans clothing that fell to him when he ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... the men was remarkable. Never obtrusive or professional in her treatment of religious subjects, she exhibited rare tact and ability in bringing those who were in the possession of their reason and consciousness to converse on their spiritual condition, and in pointing them ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... pretty and too womanly to be quarrelled with for the sake of a subject that did not in the least interest him. Beside, he meant to come in; so he opened the gate for her, and followed in a well-bred, gentlemanly way, that had nothing obtrusive in it. Miss Barry welcomed him with the quaint formality, the subtile air of education, refinement, and morality, so much a part of herself. It pleased him extremely, and settled him ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... efforts to conduct the performances. He was partly paralysed, and his baton, I believe, had to be fastened to his hand because he could not grasp it. Further, he was becoming deaf, and the result was that the loud brass instruments were allowed to become too blatant and obtrusive. Costa was a good man in his day, and he did good work. He was very autocratic, even despotic, but he introduced two good things into the orchestra—order and punctuality. With all his ability, tact, and nerve, it must, however, be admitted that his style of conducting was rough and ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of The Dial—a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory of his critic—to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable of slightly erring ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... compatible with confinement at the public expence. But though Monthault took on himself the merit of this lenient treatment, the prejudices of the whole family against him formed an insuperable bar to his designs. His change of conduct was too pointedly obtrusive; his piety and penance too ostentatious to pass on a man who was thoroughly conversant with the marks of genuine repentance. Dr. Beaumont did not approve of an elaborate and unnecessary disclosure of the secret enormities of his early life, which seemed to him more like the wantonness of a ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the very quintessence of perception,—the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... at this point that Marget gave way and scandalized Drumtochty, which held that obtrusive prosperity was an irresistible provocation to the higher powers, and that a skilful depreciation of our children was a policy ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... like a Turk dervise, But, unable to pay proper duty where owing it, Was reduced to that pitiful method of showing it: For though the moment I began setting His saddle on my own nag of Berold's begetting, 755 (Not that I meant to be obtrusive) She stopped me, while his rug was shifting, By a single rapid finger's lifting, And, with a gesture kind but conclusive, And a little shake of the head, refused me— 760 I say, although she never used me, Yet when she was mounted, the gypsy behind her, And I ventured to remind ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... to start up and interrupt the preacher. This behavior evidently annoyed his neighbors who kept signing to him to be quiet and hushing him down, while he took no notice of their demonstrations but kept clearing his throat with obtrusive emphasis and at last scraped and shuffled his feet on the floor, though not very noisily. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by her with much cordiality, and I had an opportunity to survey the whole concourse and continue my observations. Brought up as I had been for the last few years, I found my own people markedly foreign,—not so much in any obtrusive respect as in that general atmosphere to which we ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... Ben Sansome. His attitude was in some sense detached. He was quietly, deeply sympathetic in his manner, never obtrusive, never even hinting in words at his knowledge of the state of affairs, but managing in some subtle manner to convey the impression that he alone fully understood. Nan found that, without her realization, almost in spite of herself, ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Malcolm was always more or less annoyed by the obtrusive presence of his arms and legs, accompanied by a vague feeling that, at any moment, and no warning given, they might, with some insane and irrepressible flourish, break the Sabbath on their own account, and degrade him ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... back on the form, and while seeming to be busy with my sum, had held my slate in such a manner as to conceal my face: I might have escaped notice, had not my treacherous slate somehow happened to slip from my hand, and falling with an obtrusive crash, directly drawn every eye upon me; I knew it was all over now, and, as I stooped to pick up the two fragments of slate, I rallied my forces for the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... unsophisticated sister by making no special effort to seek Mildred's society. After one or two rather futile attempts he saw that he would alienate the sad-hearted girl by obtrusive advances, and he contented himself by trying to understand her, in the hope that at some future time he might learn to approach her more acceptably. The thought that she would soon leave the farmhouse depressed him greatly. She had suggested to him a new ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... high titles of nobility, dwelling on the peculiar pleasure he experienced from our visit; another, an old man of a very venerable appearance, called our attention to a dirty stone which he held in his hand, affirming it to be a piece of Henri Quatre's identical foot: but none were troublesome or obtrusive, and most appeared to be deriving as much enjoyment from their own little vagaries as their melancholy state would admit of.[30] Their apartments, built round the square, are neat and airy, each furnished with a bed, dressing table, and a few plain utensils. In ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... humble daughter of St. Benedict or St. Dominic leaves her cell to sing the praises of the Lord, and offer Him the day with its duties consecrated without reserve to His glory. When heavy curtains screen her restless slumber from the sun's obtrusive light, the pious daughter of St. Vincent de Paul descends into the folds of her own heart in meditation, and enkindles in the fire of divine love the charity with which she must cheer the poor or sick whom she is destined to ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi |
