"Repulsive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... familiar, the repulsiveness is constantly diminishing, and such claims as it may be able to put forth on the affections are daily becoming stronger, while in what is submitted to us of new or strange, that which may be repulsive is felt in its full force, while no hold is as yet laid on the affections, there is a very strong preference induced in most minds for that to which they are not accustomed over that they know not, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... shuddered with horror. His earthy colour—his features, at once vulgar and imposing, presented the true expression of the canaille. He had dark pimples spread over his face like patches of dirt, and his eyes beamed with a repulsive light. His countenance was more horrid, perhaps, than it might otherwise have been, from his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... through the shrapnel-littered streets, between houses of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and glassless windows, cheerful, serene, helpful, bringing comfort to the dying, and assistance to the sick, oblivious of whistling bullets and bursting shells. And the most arduous duties, the most repulsive tasks, the most danger-fraught errands, were hers, always by right, and claim, and choice. What a woman it was! A very Judith in Israel. He knew that Judith did not like him, but unconcealed admiration was in his blue eyes as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... wish of mine never came to utterance; but not the less they were aware, by my manner of salutation, that one person at least, amongst those who might be considered strangers, did not find any thing repulsive about them; and the pleasure they felt was expressed ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... more sought than herself—distracting her mind and feelings, and keeping her constantly miserable. Since my school-days I have been companionless. If I have gone into society, I have been under the guard of one or the other of my sisters. These are cold, austere, and repulsive, and especially toward those who would most likely seek my society, and with whom I would most naturally be pleased. I must be retired, cold, and never to seem pleased, but always remarkably silent and dignified. I ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... careful observer of human nature. Without imputing to him any attempt at imitating Ibsen, "The Slave for Life" certainly exhibits that pessimistic view of existence which is at once attractive to many and repulsive to not a few of Ibsen's readers. "The Family of Gilge,"—"Familjen paa Gilge"—is of a somewhat similar character. Ethical objections to these stories are, perhaps, superfluous; it must be admitted that both are popular and ...
— The Visionary - Pictures From Nordland • Jonas Lie
... pleasing of the astral tints, by the way. Descending in the scale, we find the crimson shade becoming darker and duller, until we descend to the plane of impure, sensual, coarse passion, which is manifested by an ugly, dull, muddy crimson of a repulsive appearance, suggesting blood mixed with dirty earth or ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... policy would not be due to its wisdom, and events were to show that the British Government misjudged the Russian situation in 1919 as much as European monarchies did that of the French Republic in 1793. The crimes and follies committed by the Soviet and the Jacobin governments were equally repulsive, but they did not make foreign intervention in either case a sound or successful policy; and the Allies would have been wiser to confine their military action to the defence of the nascent States which had asserted their independence of Russia and claimed the right of self-determination. ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... ideas of beauty appear to us very crude, and even repulsive. The adornment of person with bright though rudely colored garments, the free use of paint on the person, and the promiscuous use of jewelry, as {38} practised by the primitive peoples, present a great contrast to modern usage. Yet it is easy to trace the changes in custom and, moreover, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... and just now men were scarce and women would work cheaper. The women were coarse and rough, rather the scum of the city—perhaps some might have fallen; but the place was noisome and grimy, with a sickening smell of oil everywhere, repulsive enough to be fit for ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... dreaded by all the honest tradesmen of the city; the curse of the orphan and the widow, whom he unfeelingly drove into the streets, followed in his path; the children stopped their games and hid until he passed. That repulsive character which haunts the evil-doers of society marked the aged banker as an object of dread and scorn ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... face was pock-pitted to an incredible degree, so that what with this deformity, emphasized by the pouting of her prodigious and shapeless lips, and the rolling of a pair of eyes as yellow as saffron, Jonathan Rugg thought that he had never beheld a figure at once so extraordinary and so repulsive. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... brought the odious incident, the visit of the undertaker—the carpentery, upholstery, and millinery of death. Why has not civilisation abolished these repulsive and shocking formalities? What has the poor corpse to do with frills, and pillows, and napkins, and all the equipage in which it rides on its last journey? There is no intrusion so jarring to the decent grief ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... misery all around. Arrived at the scene of her unnatural labors, she applies herself to them with an energy which despair alone could engender, and which ends in completely unsexing her. She becomes weatherbeaten, coarse and repulsive. Her hands are like knots of wood; she is covered with dirt; her bones have grown large; her step is ungainly; she speaks in husky tones; she swears, drinks and fights. Meanwhile the corn ripens. After gigantic efforts she succeeds in harvesting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Teuton ways of trade competition in their everyday guise, and without the glamour of political ideals to distract our attention, we are confronted with phenomena of a repulsive character. For the German's keen practical sense, his sustained concentration of effort on the furtherance of material interests, and his scorn of ethical restraints render him a formidable competitor in pacific pursuits and a dangerous enemy in war. His moral sense is not so much dulled by experience ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... dwelling-place. She had arrived in the hamlet no one knew for what purpose, and was held by some to be a witch, by others a zealous Protestant, and by others again a Catholic devotee. Her language was mysterious, and her manners repulsive; and all that could be collected from her conversation seemed to imply that she was under the influence either of a spell or of a vow,—there was no saying which, since she talked as one who acted under a powerful and ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... in middle age, except the deeper nature should meantime come into play, would be worse than common-place—would be mingled with the trail of more or less guilty sensuality. Many a woman at forty is repulsive, whom common men found at twenty irresistibly attractive; and many a woman at seventy is lovely to the eyes of the man who would have been compelled to allow that she was decidedly ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... moral perceptions. The peculiarities in manner and deportment, which proceed from the selfishness of the great world, when stripped of the illusory influence of their apparent refinement, become grossly offensive. A cold repulsive manner, such as is commonly assumed by persons in high life, is sometimes a necessary shield against the pushing familiarity of underbred persons. Their tasteless imitations of habits and manners which do not belong to their station or character, deserve the ridicule they meet with. The most offensive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... good for artisans, too small and too silent to be the abode of various lodgers, and too mean for clerks who live on salaries. They are as dull-looking as Lethe itself, dull and silent, dingy and repulsive. But they are not discreditable in appearance, and never have that Mohawk look which by some unknown sympathy in bricks and mortar attaches itself to the residences of ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... of surprising symmetry, just voluptuous enough. But, after all, her great power lay in her freedom from all affectation and conventionality,—in her spontaneity, her free, sparkling, and vivacious manners. She was the most daring and dazzling of women, without ever appearing immodest or repulsive. She walked with such proud, secure steps over the commonly accepted barriers of social intercourse, that even those who blamed her and pretended to be shocked were compelled to admire. She was the belle, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... colorless, and a sneer curled the corners of his mouth, which had a thick, hanging underlip, and his eyes had an expression in them of revolting cynicism. His dress was tattered and dirty, and he had rolled up the sleeve of his right arm, exhibiting a deformed limb, sufficiently repulsive to excite the pity of the passers by. He was repeating a monotonous whine, in which the words "poor workman, arm destroyed by machinery, aged mother to support," ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... she gave me the opportunity. Nothing in my married state has brought me pleasure and I often wish my wife would cease to love me so that we might separate. But she would be heart-broken at the suggestion and I feel driven to attempt to relieve my feelings even in a way that has previously seemed repulsive to me,—I mean by use ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of all else, continued to gaze upon the brilliant with repulsive fascination, a peculiar change transformed the face of ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... had been dispersed, he observed, under the place where the iron box had stood, a number of skeletons of rats, as dry as mummies. He selected one of these,* [footnote... I was so much impressed with the events of the day, and also with the fact of the young artist having taken with him so repulsive a memento as a rat's skeleton, that I never forgot it. More than half century later, when I was at a private view of the Royal Academy, I saw sitting on one of the sofas a remarkable and venerable-looking old gentleman. On inquiring ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... imagination, and great knowledge of the world; and, in addition to their high artistic value, his lines glow with poetic fervor, with impassioned eloquence. His musical criticisms are refined and acute, but without repulsive technicalities or scientific terms, ever sparkling with the poetic ardor of the generous soul through which the discriminating, yet appreciative awards were poured. Ah! in these days of degenerate rivalries and bitter jealousies, let ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... Adventures are so generally repulsive to people of meditative minds? It is for the same reason that any other want of law, that any other anarchy is repulsive. Floating passively from action to action, as helplessly as a withered leaf surrendered to the breath ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... German paper was not ashamed to print. Repulsive though it is, I must analyze some of its details. An enemy's abuse reveals his own character. So this German denied the fifty-three victories of Guynemer, all controlled, and with such severity that in his case, as in that of Dorme, he was not credited with fully ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... slavery. I do not care what term you use to describe the feeling of the North in relation to slavery. One gentleman says that the North abhors it, and the use of the term has excited much comment. I may be still more unfortunate, but it is my duty to say that you cannot present an idea more repulsive to the northern mind or the northern conscience, than that of making the North responsible for the existence, expansion, growth, extension, or any thing else relating to slavery. Right or wrong, this sentiment has taken a firm hold of ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... it is by treating the first part of the play in such a manner that the sympathies excited are predominantly pleasant and therefore not exhausting. The scene in the Council Chamber, and the scene of the reunion at Cyprus, give almost unmixed happiness to the audience; however repulsive Iago may be, the humour of his gulling of Roderigo is agreeable; even the scene of Cassio's intoxication is not, on the whole, painful. Hence we come to the great temptation-scene, where the conflict emerges into life (III. iii.), with nerves unshaken and feelings much fresher ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... all of us, so happy, will give some happiness to her. 'Touched of God,' some people call these 'naturals.' She's a human being, she was once a girl like me, and she's simply—not finished! She isn't a bit repulsive and I'm sure it's right to have her with ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... such a theme as Lear, to treat it as Shakespeare has treated it, to leave it, as it were, bleeding from a thousand wounds, in mute and helpless entreaty for the healing that is never to be vouchsafed—this would have been repulsive, if not impossible, to a Greek tragedian. Without ever descending from concrete art to the abstractions of mere moralising, without ever attempting to substitute a verbal formula for the full and complex perception that grows out ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... junior both talked to her with the familiar recognition of her understanding which was a compliment without the gross corporeal phrase. But now she made another discovery, that should have been infinitely more of a compliment, and it was bewildering, if not repulsive to her:—could it be credited? Mr. Austin was a firm believer in new and higher destinies for women. He went farther than she could concede the right of human speculation to go; he was, in fact, as Radical there as Nevil Beauchamp politically; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a dead bough from a scrub oak he approached the snake cautiously while the rest sat in their saddles silently anxious, and Charley edged his restive pony a little closer to the repulsive reptile. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... or rather copy, be so close as to trench on deception, the effect will be far different; for, the condition of relation being thus virtually lost, the copy becomes as the original,—circumscribed by its own qualities, repulsive or attractive, as the case may be. I remember a striking instance of this in a celebrated actress, whose copies of actual suffering were so painfully accurate, that I was forced to turn away from the scene, unable to endure it; her scream of agony in Belvidera seemed to ring in my ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... tenacious and ambitious race of men issued from among the burgesses, who equally hated the naughtiness of the lords and what they called the lawlessness of the peasants. The very forms of the village community, unknown to their code, the very principles of federalism were repulsive to them as "barbarian" inheritances. Caesarism, supported by the fiction of popular consent and by the force of arms, was their ideal, and they worked hard for those who promised to ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... real beauty both in sentiment and expression than most prose and more than many a charming poem. There is little of ugliness in the story, and what there is, is so softened in the way in which it is presented that the impression is neither repulsive nor lasting. Kingsley's work is highly artistic and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... youthful face grows as old as it ought to be—a vindictive curve round the mouth makes that usually charming feature almost repulsive. ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... Common Life of equality and brotherhood; and then that of St. Francis, who, "in the midst of a Church endowed with all that art and learning and wealth and power could give, reasserted the love of God to the poorest, the meanest, the most repulsive of His children, and placed again the simple Cross above all the treasures of the world." Even "the unparalleled achievements, the matchless energy, of the Jesuits" were duly recognized as triumphs of faith and discipline; and the sermon ended with a passionate appeal to the Harrow ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... happily followed Hamilton's example, for though at first inclined to be on Trevannion's side, he could not help pitying his evident distress, and, touched by the emotion he exhibited, he exerted himself to smooth all down. Had all been as cold and repulsive as Trevannion and his advocates, Ferrers would have been dogged and proud, but now the sense of gratitude and humility was predominant, and at last so overpowered him, that he was glad to get away in the playground by himself. As he closed the door, ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... repulsive public character, tolerated but despised and loathed, was the last living creature in or about Rome who would ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... of the free and rational element of the soul must, of course, appear strange and even repulsive to those who are unacquainted with the Platonic notion of eternity as a fixed state out of time, which has no past, present, or future, and is simply that which "always is"—an everlasting now. The soul, in its elements of rationality ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... effect, by means of the repulsive force exerted between its particles; it causes the gasses, disengaged at the moment of deflagration, to expand with a degree of force proportioned to ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... at the moment that the world must be made for the poor: they had so much more done for them to enable them to inherit it than the rich had.—To these people at the Hall, I did not seem acceptable. I might in time do something with Judy, but the old lady was still so dreadfully repulsive to me that it troubled my conscience to feel how I disliked her. Mr Stoddart seemed nothing more than a dilettante in religion, as well as in the arts and sciences—music always excepted; while for Miss Oldcastle, I ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... or misery of three or four millions of stupid, brutish negroes, that it should be allowed to weigh down the greatness and glory of the Model Republic? Must there not always be a foundation to every grand and towering structure? Must not some grovel that others may soar? Is not all drudgery repulsive? Yet must it not be performed? Are not negroes habitually enslaved by each other in Africa? Does not their enslavement here secure an aggregate of labor and production that would else be unattainable? Are we not enabled by it to supply the world ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the Kents, at this time, two years. Alan and Babs didn't like him, nor did I. He must have been a clever, skillful chemist. No doubt he was. But he was, to us, repulsive. A hunchback, with a short, thick body; dangling arms that suggested a gorilla; barrel chest; a lump set askew on his left shoulder, and his massive head planted down with almost no neck. His face was rugged in feature; a wide mouth, a high-bridged ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... remarkable for vulgarity and ignorance, and who are perpetually inflamed by that meddling spirit which tempts them from the quiet path of duty into scenes of political strife and enmity, in which they seem to be peculiarly at home. Such scenes are repulsive to the educated priest, and to all who, from superior minds and information, are perfectly aware that no earthly or other good, but, on the contrary, much bitterness, strife, and ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... people from far and near; every man declared that Jacinta was created to delight the eyes; even the women said as much, though they were less enthusiastic. But the poor child persisted in her conviction that she was a repulsive object, and when Valentin pressed her to name their wedding-day—"I, your wife!" cried she. "Never! I love you too dearly to burden you with a being so hideous as I am." You can fancy the despair of the poor fellow so sincerely in love. He threw himself on his knees; he prayed; he supplicated; she ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... treated in intentionally clumsy and almost wild fashion. The figures are outlined in firm strokes and painted in broad, flat tints on canvas which has the texture almost of tapestry. Many of these works are made repulsive by their aspect of multi-coloured, crude and barbarous imagery. Yet one cannot but acknowledge the fundamental qualities, the beautiful values, the ornamental taste, and the impression of primitive animalism. On the whole, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... exact degree in which the legless beggar was repulsive to her sense of perfection the secret-service agent was attractive. She had never seen a man so agreeable to her eyes. And yet, as a marine artist might see fame in painting a wreck upon a sea-shore, rather ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... people write or speak upon this theme they are apt to cover it up with the graces of belles-lettres, so that the crime is made attractive instead of repulsive. Lord Byron in "Don Juan" adorns this crime until it smiles like a May queen. Michelet, the great French writer, covers it up with bewitching rhetoric until it glows like the rising sun, when it ought to be made loathsome as a small-pox hospital. There ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... watch. And the purse? There can be no doubt about it. Oh!" she laughed as she took the coffee from me. "Now I understand why I am always losing my handkerchiefs and gloves. Whatever you say, I shall dismiss the magpie to-morrow and send Stepan for my Sofya. She is not a thief and has not got such a repulsive appearance." ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and other passions still more enlivening, took place of that uncomfortable gloominess which so lately possessed me: I returned to my companions, and by every winning art in my power, strove to make them forget my former repulsive ways. In this I was not unsuccessful; I recovered their good will, and by degrees grew to be somewhat of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... proud mansion, a quarter of a century since, was here erected, dedicated to hospitality, where a priestess, in the person of an elegant and refined lady, shed an influence around that attracted to its portal the stranger from every country. In looking at a scene, now desolate and repulsive, he can scarcely credit the fact, that, within that period, the same place was embellished by gardens, groves, and arbors, upon which taste was exhausted, and which cost a fortune to realize. The villa of Blennerhasset was really a beacon-light in the ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... father, her own exile, the peril in which she stood of the governor's reconsidering his order and sending to make her prisoner, the seeming necessity of exchanging my guidance for that of a stranger who had been painted to her in repulsive colors, and the other ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... moment draws near which should assure her highest happiness. Olga speaks to her, herself without faith. During the long journey they have both had time to recall the whole circumstances; the first exultation had given place to reflection. The gloomy silence and the repulsive glances of the guards who surround the tent serve still further to augment ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of this man and his repulsive and savage countenance had already alarmed the good woman, whose fears and prejudices had previously been roused by the public rumors on the subject of poisoning; but when she saw Goliath place his hand over the mouth of one of her pots, she cried out in dismay: "Oh! my ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... away the same evening. After that she avoided Lawrence; there was something abhorrent to all her instincts in meeting him now with that repulsive understanding between them. And, for his part, that detestable suggestion of Cora's put upon Enfield a kindred restraint and at the same time gave him the key to Stella's feeling, so that her influence upon him was rather strengthened than otherwise by the reserve ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... is the chief relic of her barbaric origin, and despite the desire which she always manifests to exhibit her personal charms at their best, she has no qualms in converting herself into a hideous, repulsive squaw, with this covering. If she be of a shy nature, she will cover her head with this garment when a stranger enters her abode; and many a curious visitor who has heard of the bright eyes and olive cheeks ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... In certain social environments it may also be wise for a man to become a total abstainer, not in his own interests, but for the sake of others with whom he is brought into immediate contact. There can be no question but that drunkenness, which is a vice both degrading and repulsive in itself, is in many strata of English social life still far too ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... dressed, eager to act, ready for what might chance. I had seen little of the fellow lately, calling on him for necessary services only, and ridding myself of his sombre company as quickly as I could. Yet I looked on him to-day with more consideration; his was a repulsive form of righteousness, grim and gloomy, but it was righteousness, or seemed such to me against the background of iniquity which threw it up in strong relief. I spoke to him kindly, but taking no heed of my advances he came straight up to me and said brusquely: ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... the unknown and fearful creature who had allowed herself to be boxed up and carried, God knows, how many fearful miles, just for the purpose of assuming a position which she seemingly might have obtained in ways much less repulsive and dangerous! Was it in human nature to go through such an ordeal, and if it were, what could the circumstances have been that would drive even the most insensible nature into such an adventure! I question, and try to answer my own inquiries, but my imagination falters ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... a Robot in a Time-traveling cage! We tried to fathom it. And why had she been captured? Had she some enemy? She could only think of a fellow called Tugh. He was a hideously repulsive cripple who had dared make love to her and had threatened vengeance against her and ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... a sound business career in after life. After having fulfilled his engagement with his employer, he spent some three years of mercantile life at the South, but the customs of the country, and the barbarous system of slavery were so repulsive to his feelings that he abandoned that field for the more congenial and prospectively profitable activities of the West, and in December, 1842, landed at Medina, in this State. In the Spring of 1845, ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... turned into a shrill whine, but also at rare intervals could change into a soft, heart-winning purr. His clothing was poorer and coarser than that of any other person seen by Keith. Once or twice it seemed to the boy like a repulsive uniform, and he heard his parents speak with mingled disgust and relief of some house or institution that ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... But the work suffers also from a tendency to exaggeration. The name of Hagburn is unpleasantly realistic, and Doctor Portsoaken, with his canopy of spider-webs hanging in noisome festoons above his head, is closely akin to the repulsive. The amateur critic who averred that he could not read Hawthorne without feeling a sensation as if cobwebs were drawn across his face, must have had "Septimius Felton" in mind. Yet there are refreshing passages in it, and the youthful English officer who kisses ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... boy, his hands clutching a stout stick with which he was beating the air around him as though fighting some imaginary foe, in desperation for his life. The sand around his feet was spotted, as though with gouts of blood, by the ruddy land-crabs, and, from every direction, these repulsive carrion eaters ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... like Uriah Heep, begging everybody's pardon for taking the liberty of being in the world. There is nothing attractive in timidity, nothing lovable in fear. Both are deformities and are repulsive. Manly courage is dignified and graceful. The worst manners in the world are those of persons conscious "of being beneath their position, and trying to conceal it or make up for it ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... childlike as to be almost silly in expression. Father Ignatius loved the silent smile, and a word from him was always sure to bring it; but it angered Father Francis Xavier more than many a more repulsive thing would have done. It seemed so utterly imbecile and babyish to him, he had got so far away from innocence and smiles and childhood himself, that the sight of them irritated him. The young Indian girl had a long and almost unpronounceable name. ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the sciences do not and cannot supply and perhaps deny to be possible, some steadiness and firmness of assurance other and beyond the confidence of religious faith, is not yet extinct, is perhaps inextinguishable, and though it often takes extravagant and even morbid and repulsive forms, still haunts and tantalizes many, nor these the least wise or sane of our kind, so that they count all the labour they spend upon its search worth all the pains. Not for themselves alone do they seek it; they view themselves as not alone in the quest, but ...
— Progress and History • Various
... not according to his expectations he will most likely repent of his bargain and wish to come back. For that reason they make a great noise to frighten him away, and dismantle his former habitation of everything that is attractive, and clothe it with everything that to their ideas seems repulsive."[671] ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the dusty windows into the dark room, and in the centre of the yellow splash lay the dead man, with his one eye wide open, staring at the ceiling, while perched on his wooden leg, which was sticking straight out, sat the parrot, swearing. It was a most repulsive sight, and Barty, with a shudder of disgust, tried to drag his companion away, but M. Vandeloup refused to go, and searched his pockets for a match to see more clearly ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... nothing could be more repulsive than the tenement in which Madame Paul had installed herself. It was but one story high, and built of clay, and it had fallen to ruin to such an extent that it had been found necessary to prop it up with timber, and to nail some old boards over the ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... enlightened days, but at that time it made all right-thinking people despise them, so the fashion of going without ears did not spread among us. If it had, then how differently we should all think of the matter now! If we were all accustomed to neat, round heads at drawing-rooms, levees and balls, how repulsive it Would be to see a well-dressed man with two ridiculous, wrinkled appendages sticking out from ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... follow in the wake of a conqueror, and gorge upon that which is already overthrown. In the succeeding stanza, 29, two other epithetal similes are bestowed upon the monsters—they become 'reptiles' and 'ephemeral insects.' All these repulsive images are of course here applied to critics of wilfully obtuse or malignant mind, such as Shelley accounted the Quarterly ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... building of the temple already cast long shadows. Determined to force herself to look out, she walked quickly to the eastern window and gazed below. But it was some moments before she had the fortitude to distinguish one form from another; they melted before her reluctant eyes into one repulsive mass. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wage slavery," answered Schliemann, "it matters not in the least how debasing and repulsive a task may be, it is easy to find people to perform it. But just as soon as labor is set free, then the price of such work will begin to rise. So one by one the old, dingy, and unsanitary factories will come down—it will be cheaper to ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... companions, that the plan proposed by them was attended with little danger, but when a scheme was in that shape it lost all attraction for him. To escape the Iroquois by dodging or running was attended, in his estimation, with a certain ignominy that made it repulsive to him. He was naturally elated in reflecting how neatly he had just outwitted them, and that fact was not calculated to lessen his confidence in ...
— The Wilderness Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... passing like a hurricane over the immense assemblage of human beings. The heavens showed above their heads, a livid, dark-edged cloud from the west. Horrible monsters and deformities were swarming in spirals above the furious horde, like a repulsive escort. Poor Humanity, crazed with fear, was fleeing in all directions on hearing the thundering pace of the Plague, War, Hunger and Death. Men and women, young and old, were knocking each other down and falling to the ground ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... literature. Henry Hallywell published an octavo in London, in 1681, in which, while the main doctrines of witchcraft as then almost universally received are enforced, an attempt was made to divest it of some of its most repulsive and terrible features. He gives the following account of the means by which a person may place himself beyond the reach of the power ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... Make her act, work, play: assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learn the domestic arts in their perfection. Let us even artificially set her to spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to prevent her reading and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as soon as possible to the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell of death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the very things of the home. Then keep the girls apart from any familiarity or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... but when you come back you must do something worth while.... I'm sorry about the Fact; I think you might have stayed on and saved it. But it's your show. Go and explore Central Europe, then, and learn all about it. Then come back and write a book on political science which will be repulsive to all but learned minds. But remember we're getting married in June; don't be late, will you. And write to me from Russia. Letters that will do for me to send to the newspapers, telling me not to spend my money on hats and theatres but on distributing anti-Bolshevist ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... executed, one only was a woman: "Lucy, slave of John T. Barrow": that is all her epitaph, shorter even than that of Wordsworth's more famous Lucy;—but whether this one was old or young, pure or wicked, lovely or repulsive, octroon or negro, a Cassy, an Emily, or a Topsy, no information appears; she was a woman, she was a slave, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... shrewd in discerning what things and what persons were most worthy of his notice, and showing no deficiency of judgment in the observations which he made upon them. The grand duchess, however, was generally regarded as greatly superior to her husband in every respect. He was almost repulsive in his ugliness. She was extremely handsome in feature, though disfigured by a stoutness extraordinary in one so young. She had also a high reputation for accomplishments and general ability, though that too was disguised ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... will be found numerous attempts at Allegorical Odes: they are almost all nauseous failures—without originality or distinctness of conception; bald in their language, lame in their numbers, and repulsive from their ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... letter somehow gone astray, because I know, of course, you would write. Yesterday we were both out of our senses with mingled pity and indignation at that dreadful stick of a Casaubon,—and think of poor Dorothea dashing like a warm, sunny wave against so cold and repulsive a rock! He is a little too dreadful for anything: there does not seem to be a drop of warm blood in him, and so, as it is his misfortune and not his fault, to be cold-blooded, one must not get angry with him. It is the scene in the garden, after the interview with the doctor, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... matter of habit," Amuba replied. "To us, when we first came here, the sight of all the poorer people going about with their heads shaven was quite repulsive—and as for comfort, surely one's own hair must be more comfortable than the great wigs that all of the ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Behmen first announced the three working properties of nature, which Newton stole, as described in the Gentleman's Magazine, July, 1782, p. 329. These laws are illustrated in the whizgig. There is the harsh astringent, attractive compression; the bitter compunction, repulsive expansion; and the stinging anguish, duplex motion. The author hints that he has written other works, to which he gives no clue. I have heard that Behmen was pillaged by Newton, and Swedenborg[583] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Those which appear as long, straight rays; (2) Those which have the form of curved plumes or scimitars; (3) Those which are short, brushy, and curved sharply backward along the comet's path. In the first type he calculates the repulsive force at from twelve to fifteen times the force of gravity; in the second at from two to four times; and in the third at about one and a half times. The straight tails he ascribes to hydrogen because the hydrogen atom is the lightest known; the sword-shaped tails to hydro-carbons; and the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... the other hand, it was decidedly repulsive to tell a lie—especially to her who seemed by her magnetic gaze to challenge the truth right out of a fellow. But conscience is, after all, only a name for our hidden prosecutor, judge and jury, and our sentences are light or heavy depending upon how many witnesses we can persuade ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... of the lamp in the niche, she hastily examined the countenance of the nun; but its expression was cold—repulsive—stern: and Flora knew that it was useless to seek to ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... communion, called Communichino, the conversa of my aunt rang the bell for the priest to come with the pyx.[2] He was a man of about fifty years of age, very corpulent, with a rubicund face, and a type of physiognomy as vulgar as it was repulsive. ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... Newfoundland dog, ran out from behind the point of the island, and galloped leisurely over the sand not half a stone's throw distant. I could plainly see his red eyes and the bristles about his snout; he was an ugly scoundrel, with a bushy tail, large head, and a most repulsive countenance. Having neither rifle to shoot nor stone to pelt him with, I was looking eagerly after some missile for his benefit, when the report of a gun came from the camp, and the ball threw up the sand just beyond him; at this he gave a slight jump, and stretched away so swiftly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... fell upon him the great temptation that was to torment him for many days. In the presence of these powerful and repulsive men, who were the princes of anarchy, he had almost forgotten the frail and fanciful figure of the poet Gregory, the mere aesthete of anarchism. He even thought of him now with an old kindness, as if they had played together when children. But he remembered that he was still tied to Gregory by a ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... at the right moment, I am not much afraid of it. One thing bothers me; what with hammering at this J. K., and writing necessary letters, and taking necessary exercise (that even not enough, the weather is so repulsive to me, cold and windy), I find I have no time for reading except times of fatigue, when I wish merely to relax myself. O—and I read over again for this purpose Flaubert's Tentation de St. Antoine; it struck me a good deal at first, but this second time ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... splendid courage of Tyr at the time of the chaining up of the terrible Fenris wolf has always been one of the favorite Norse tales. The three repulsive giant monsters in whom the forces of evil are embodied are well imagined to suggest to us powers that may finally be stronger than the gods themselves. The failures to find a chain strong enough, and the final success with the magic bond made in Dwarfland, form a series of powerfully ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... attitude is still appreciative. The evil is apprehended as part of a dramatic whole having positive moral or aesthetic value. Moral ideas may appear in both poetry and life as the inspiration and justification of struggle. Where there is no conception of its moral significance, the repulsive possesses for the poet's consciousness the aesthetic value of diversity and contrast. Even where the evil and ugly is isolated, as in certain of Browning's dramatic monologues, it forms, both for the poet and the reader, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... learned to look life full in the face without a quiver of the lid should find nothing repulsive. Everything that is is the ordered and calculable result of environment. Nothing can be abhorrent, nothing blameworthy, nothing contrary to nature. Can we exceed nature? In the presence of the primeval and ever-continuing forces of nature, can we maintain our fantastic conceptions ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... some of the topics on which Mr Mill has thrown a new light, or which he has at least invested with a novel interest by the view he has given of them. And as, in this selection of topics, we are not bound to choose those which are most austere and repulsive, we hope that such of our readers as are not deterred by the very name of logic, will follow us with some interest through the several points of view, and the various extracts we shall present ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... Fridays, Wednesdays and Tuesdays. But Sundays did sort of burrow a little further under my tough hide. And you know that's quite an admission for anybody that was brought up by Aunt Mirabelle." He smiled in reminiscence. "She used to make virtue so darned scaly and repulsive that it's a wonder I've got a moral left. As it is, my conscience may be all corrugated like a raisin, but I'm almost glad we can't run Sundays. That is, I would be if my last remaining moral weren't going to be ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... injury to the head of the Church in his spiritual as well as in his temporal capacity. But bad as were the compositions of Valla, they were harmless when compared with the books and pamphlets of Beccadelli, the Panormite, who devoted himself almost exclusively to what was indecent and repulsive. Poggio Bracciolini in his work, /Facetiae/, and Filelfo, though not equally bad, belong to the same category. In the hands of these men the Renaissance had become, to a great extent, a glorification of Pagan immorality. Their books were condemned by many of the religious orders, but ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... minor canon of Saint Paul's, named Thomas Quatremain,—was a grave, sallow-complexioned man, with a morose and repulsive physiognomy. He was habited in the cassock of a churchman of the period, and his black velvet cap lay beside him on the table. Like Booker, he was buried in calculations, and though he looked up for a moment as the others entered the room, he instantly resumed ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... another's houses without ceremony or invitation; and this frequent contact with Spanish women, generally pretty, but almost always amiable and graceful, naturally produces intimate relations, and not unfrequently reciprocal attachments. One may conceive of such a thing as a cold, repulsive resistance to such attractions in the dreariness of a desert, or even within the four walls of a cell; but when such influences are not merely occasionally, but unceasingly brought to bear upon the senses, they too often ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... holes closed by a shutter in place of windows; an unkempt matron, lean with hard work, and a brood of children with bare heads and tattered garments eked out by deer-skin,—such was the home of the pioneer in the remoter and wilder districts. The scene around bore witness to his labors. It was the repulsive transition from savagery to civilization, from the forest to the farm. The victims of his axe lay strewn about the dismal "clearing" in a chaos of prostrate trunks, tangled boughs, and withered leaves, waiting for the fire that was to be the next agent in the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... repulsive the artificial bloom, the cosmetics and hair-dyes which make old age a horror, compared with her natural beauty! God bless ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... his person, like that which might have proceeded from great and recent exertion, which he had not yet found leisure to repair. The colors of the war-paint had blended in dark confusion about his fierce countenance, and rendered his swarthy lineaments still more savage and repulsive than if art had attempted an effect which had been thus produced by chance. His eye, alone, which glistened like a fiery star amid lowering clouds, was to be seen in its state of native wildness. For a single instant his searching and yet wary glance met the wondering look of the other, and then ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... stars have been seen shining through their densest parts without any perceptible diminution of their light. The nucleus is believed to be composed of a congeries of meteoric fragments, and these, when exposed to the Sun's heat, throw off luminous nebulous particles that are swept by some repulsive force into space and form the appendage known as the tail. Comets may be regarded as celestial objects that are perfectly innocuous. Neither fear nor dread need be apprehended from their visits; they come to please and instruct, not ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... gold-piece here," she returned, as she took it from her purse and deposited it also upon the counter; for she shrank from coming in contact with that repulsive, unwashed hand. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... general groups—the ones who are having children against their wills, and those who, to escape this evil, find refuge in abortion. Being given their choice by society—to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist. One group goes on bringing children to birth, hoping that they will be born dead or die. The women of the other group ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... small group: His mother is removing with a light, tender touch a thorn which is still piercing the cold brow. The whole picture is in the same spirit, and I never could look at it with dry eyes. Yet in Rubens's hands this and all kindred subjects are generally repulsive. The very early masters are prone to fix the attention upon some revolting detail of torture or too material and agonizing exhibition of physical suffering, but their stiff, hard outlines, absence of perspective and childishness of composition, with the element of the grotesque which is seldom ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the lines of her face took place. She became sinister, mocking, and pitiless. An exultant cruelty croaked in her voice. Minute, repulsive remodellings of her neck and cheeks changed her to a harpy, and seeing these evidences of her great genius Douglass grew bitterly resentful, and when she laughed, with the action of a vulture thrusting her head forward from the shoulders, he sickened and ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the moment when the Vicomtesse entered her husband's room, where he was lying on the couch. He signed to her to close the door. The Marquis was the living image of his mother, except that her beautiful regular features became in his face bony and repulsive. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... time Gabrielle remained the same indefinitely tragic figure. There was nothing physically repulsive in Considine, but even if there had been, I do not suppose that she would have felt it acutely. She had become passive. The abruptness of the first tragedy had numbed her so completely that nothing less ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... painter went on painting; he saw nothing, thought of nothing, save his "Alcestis." He was indeed an enthusiast. Olive watched how, beneath the coarse, ill-formed hand, grew images of perfect beauty; how, within the body, almost repulsive in its ugliness, dwelt a brain which could produce the grandest ideal loveliness; and there dawned in the girl's spirit a stronger conviction than ever of the majesty of the ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our common mental food has become distasteful, and what would have been intellectual luxuries at other times are now absolutely repulsive. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... force and felicity of his most original images and analogies; but these passages are little oases in a dry and thirsty land. The 'Life and Death of Mr. Badman' vividly presents certain aspects of English provincial life in that day; but they are repulsive, and the entire work is marred by flat moralizings and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Scotland Yard officer whom I called William Dawson, and was not at all anxious to make his official acquaintance. To me he then seemed an inhuman, icy-blooded "sleuth," a being of great national importance, but repulsive and dangerous as an associate. Yet by a turn of Fortune's wheel I came not only to know William Dawson, but to work with him, and almost to like him. His penetrative efficiency compelled one's admiration, and his unconcealed vanity showed that he did not stand wholly outside ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... two or three hundred on the spot by way of instalment. And, with these hard views, he drew near to Hernshaw; but the nearer he got, the slower he went; for what at a distance had seemed tolerably easy began to get more and more difficult and repulsive. Moreover, his heart, which he thought he had steeled, began now to flutter a little, and somehow to shudder at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... with authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive as the twilight of the "ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism, and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their own feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined. The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few. Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... myself to do it, without once hesitating or looking back. My low knock at her chamber-door was unanswered. I paused but a few moments before opening it. There stood my friend, with a pale yet firm countenance, and as I advanced she looked me steadily in the face with a cold, repulsive expression. ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... by the still water I saw the reflection of myself, and the sight made me more hopeless than ever. I saw in the water a tall, wild-looking youth, with bare head, save for a mass of unkempt hair; a face all scratched and bruised, and made to look savage and repulsive by vindictiveness; the clothes were dirty, bedraggled and torn, while the riding boots were ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... so," went on Humpy Dee, whose countenance looked repulsive now from a patch of strips of sticking-plaster upon his forehead; "and he says I don't know what ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... use, occupied with books and a small collection of national relics. Some long ranges of that peculiar calf binding, with its red label, declared at once the contents to be law and by the dry formal cut of the exterior gave little invitation to reading. The very outside of a law library is repulsive; the continuity of that eternal buff leather gives one a surfeit by anticipation, and makes one mentally exclaim in despair, "Heavens! how can any one hope to get all that into his head?" The only plain honest thing about law is the outside of the books where it is laid down—there ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... Baxter's, as I said before. He is the noblest man I have ever known,—so good, so clever, so pure in heart! His Cousin Marmaduke, who was there at the same time, paid me great attention, but I never liked him; there was always something repulsive to me in his black eyes; I never trusted him; and beside Arthur,—oh, it seemed like the contrast between night and day! I don't know why it was, Madame, but I never felt that he loved Arthur really, though Arthur had done a great deal for him, got him his commission in the army, and paid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... bare prairie thirty years before. As we stood in the yard I spoke of the silver wedding which took place there. The yard was attractive but the house (infested by the family of a poor renter) was repulsive. The upstairs chamber in which I had slept for so many years presented a filthy clutter of chicken feathers, cast-off furniture and musty clothing. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... short, I have thought myself into a settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it.' It is obvious that this description is largely coloured by passing depression. 'His features,' says one contemporary, 'were plain, but not repulsive,—certainly not so when lighted up by conversation.' Another witness—the 'Jessamy Bride'—declares that 'his benevolence was unquestionable, and his countenance bore every trace of it.' His true likeness ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... haunches. They stared up at her in wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... bloody foot. Like this damned planet of a star he'd never heard of until they'd landed him there. And now it was sacred ground because the aliens were there too. The aliens, the only other intelligent race in the Galaxy ... cruel, hideous and repulsive monsters. ...
— Two Timer • Fredric Brown
... individual, can possibly make a beautiful picture out of an ugly man; while the art which deals only with such visible peculiarities as are inherent in the individual, has no kind of outlet, is cornered, and can make of a repulsive original only a repulsive picture. The analogy to this we have already noticed in sculpture: antique sculpture, considering only the linear bosses which existed equally in the living man and in the statue, could not afford to represent plain people; while Renaissance sculpture, extracting a ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... one of the most repulsive features of the Japanese method of government of Korea is the wholesale torture of untried prisoners, particularly political prisoners. Were this torture an isolated occurrence, I would not mention it. There are always occasional men who, invested ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. To Browning such a repulsive story as that of Red Cotton Night-Cap Country served now as well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its grandeur or its grace. Here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption—sensuality and superstition, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Horror, and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the top of a Bosjesman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning being dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands. In either case it is a repulsive thing to have, eating into one's time when one might be living; and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way, put end to end, would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown away! However, "Thorns and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... with a leering, repulsive face, with her feet planted firmly on her mattress, her knees elevated, her long, ape-like arms closely embracing these—her fingers, strung with brass and silver rings, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... ardent, passionate protest impregnates his work. There is a purpose to it. He writes because he has something to say which the world should hear. From that clenched fist of his, light and airy romances, pretty and sweet and beguiling, do not flow, but realities—yes, big and brutal and repulsive, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... harpoon some half-dozen of these ill-featured denizens of the deep, and with their flesh replenish the stores of the Catamaran; for repulsive as the brutes may appear to the eye, and repugnant to the thoughts, they nevertheless,—that is, certain species of them, and certain parts of these species,—afford excellent food: such as an epicure,—to say nothing of a man half-famished,—may ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... unflattering description, Saint-Simon adds the fact that his "large, pasty face was so covered by pimples that it looked like one large abscess.'" Such, then, was the repulsive lover who found favour in the eyes of the Regent's daughter, and for whom she was ready to discard all her legion ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... divinity," at which she became highly offended; and ever after, there was a perpetual war of words waging between the two. My grandmother was a small, dark-complexioned woman, with an exceedingly haughty, and very repulsive expression. She received all her daughter-in-law's endeavors to make her feel at home as a natural right; and appeared to consider other people intended only for her sole use and benefit. As I glanced from her ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... trouble with Brown; be pleasant to Jones, but look out for Robinson, the fellow with a Kappa Iota Omega pin. He had hardly warned me against Robinson, before that young man was addressing me with great cheerfulness. I saw nothing whatever repulsive about him; but to Boller I was ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... doing her hair which, as a writer says, "alone would have proved impeccable virtue in the face of incriminating circumstantial evidence." For all their "Kultur" Germans are gross, and to the last degree inartistic. Their "nouveau art" is repulsive; their dressing outrageously ugly, and their cooking atrocious. I have watched them here year after year tramping up and down the shady walks stolidly drinking, wearing garments of ingeniously devised ugliness and blind to "l'inutile beaute." There is no variety of type nor individuality ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... long, which was bearded and had a large snout, was cut off with part of the neck and carried to one of the camps, with a piece of the liver, which is considered the best part. I had declined it, as the meat of the wild pig is very poor and to my taste repulsive; this old male being also unusually tough, the soldiers complained. The following morning I saw the head and jaws almost entirely untouched, too tough even ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... to have read the depths of her heart, for his face grew even milder, and his smile more fascinating. "Your majesty has hated me intensely, I suppose?" he asked, in a low voice. "Oh, do not deny it; I have been portrayed to you in very repulsive colors?" ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... view seems to have become the official theory, at least in Italy, in classical days. In the gloomy, horrible Etruscan religion, the shades were supposed to be in charge of the Conductor of the Dead—a repulsive figure, always represented with wings and long, matted hair and a hammer, whose appearance was afterwards imitated in the dress of the man who removed the dead from the arena. Surely something may be said for Gaston Boissier's suggestion that Dante's Tuscan blood may account to some extent ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... man, and there is little about his primitiveness that is repulsive. He is of a kindly disposition, is not servile, and is generally trustworthy. He has a strong sense of humor. He is decidedly friendly to the American, whose superiority he recognizes and whose ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... metropolitan examinations. It was the custom that the Emperor should give with his own hand a rose of gold to the fortunate candidate. This scholar, whose name was Chung K'uei, presented himself according to custom to receive the reward which by right was due to him. At the sight of his repulsive face the Emperor refused the golden rose. In despair the miserable rejected one went and threw himself into the sea. At the moment when he was being choked by the waters a mysterious fish or monster called ao raised him on its back and brought him to the surface. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... Tertullian—"Fierce and repulsive in its aspect; for he was laden with all the crimes, all the sorrows, and all the ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... floating to the breeze from the Hall of Independence, at Philadelphia. Nor sordid avarice, nor vulgar ambition, could point his footsteps to the pathway leading to that banner. To the love of ease or pleasure nothing could be more repulsive. Something may be allowed to the beatings of the youthful breast, which make ambition virtue, and something to the spirit of military adventure, imbibed from his profession, and which he felt in common with many others. France, Germany, Poland, furnished to the armies of this ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear of social and even legal penalty. Not to travel far for instances, one finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as inherently degrading and repulsive. Yet no shadow of the sense of sin seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns, seem so intensely desirable and ennobling. In ages, too, when life was ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... other manifests an habitual air of abstraction and absence of mind. The one is not an upstart with all the self-important airs of the founder of his own fortune; nor the other a self-taught man, with the repulsive self-sufficiency which arises from an ignorance of what hundreds have known before him. We must excuse perhaps a little conscious family-pride in the one, and a little harmless pedantry in the other.—As there is a class of the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to make you let go of this pore devil!" Bob's powerful figure came forward into the full light of the huge fireplace. One-half the face above the comely form was hideously repulsive. It had been literally torn away and what remained was so scarred and seamed that it scarcely bore any ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... hand he caught her scarf and drew it tightly around her shoulders so that the centipede could not fall inside her bodice. With the other hand—the right—he reached into her hair, caught the repulsive abomination as near as he was able by the nape of the neck, and held it tightly between thumb and forefinger as he withdrew it from her hair. It was as horrible and heroic a sight as man could wish to see. It made ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... old habits. Not because I asked him to, for I never dared do that. But of course he saw how repulsive they were to me; and so he ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... deep of this beauty long before we enter upon life itself; and when afterwards we come to see the works of Nature for ourselves, the varnish is gone: the artists have used it up and we have enjoyed it in advance. Thus it is that the world so often appears harsh and devoid of charm, nay, actually repulsive. It were better to leave us to discover the varnish for ourselves. This would mean that we should not enjoy it all at once and in large quantities; we should have no finished pictures, no perfect poems; but we should look at all things in that genial and pleasing light ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the splendid insects into which they were ultimately developed were the very tyrants of the lower air. It was strange to see the beautiful winged creature that sprang out of the pupa into which the repulsive-looking pirate had been transformed, launch forth into its new element, changed in everything save its nature, but still unchanged in that, and rendering itself as formidable to the moth and the butterfly as it had been before ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the Burmese have peopled their trees and rivers with; will show what sort of religion it is that underlies, without influencing, the creed of the Buddha that they follow. It is of the very poetry of superstition, free from brutality, from baseness, from anything repulsive, springing, as I have said, from their innate sympathy with Nature and recognition of the life that works in all things. It always seems to me that beliefs such as these are a great key to the nature of a people, are, apart from ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... out with a colleague before the public. The conceited presumption of the author, who in the play itself assumes the part of Horace, seriously proclaiming himself as the poet of poets, as the worthiest of the worthy, is not less enormous and repulsive than the way in which ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... fixed in such a way that he could not have forgotten the scene if he had lived to be a hundred years old,—went to each man, but could discover no indications of vitality in them. He was thinking of saving his own life, but it was awful, and terribly repulsive to his sense of humanity to consider the idea of abandoning the vessel while these men, who might be only stunned by the shock lay ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... discreditable as the gigantic and repulsive swindles that traders and bankers had carried on during the dark years of the Civil War. The very traders and financiers who beslimed Gould for his "gold conspiracy" were those who had built their fortunes on blood-soaked ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer— Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features—The hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals—Are there other examples of such survival in Greek life and institutions?—Greek opinion was constant that the race had been savage—Illustrations of savage survival ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... went on, "the thought of marriage was repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that seemed to waver and dance"—she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment— "'McChesney—Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... words are inaudible in the noise of the train, but for a long time he goes on muttering, sighing and clearing his throat.... The cold air in the railway van grows thicker and more stifling The pungent odor of fresh dung and smoldering candle makes it so repulsive and acrid that it irritates Yasha's throat and chest as he falls asleep. He coughs and sneezes, while the old man, being accustomed to it, breathes with his whole chest as though nothing were amiss, and merely ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
